Following Up: Gun Sense Still Lacking in the Crime/Violence/African Americans Debate

Tags

African Americans, Arionne Nettles, Barack Obama, Chicago, crime, Following Up, gun violence, guns, homicides, law enforcement, police reform, policing, poverty, racism, The New York Times

Everyone (like me) worried about the metastasizing influence of race-panderers can give thanks that so many are so completely, and indeed stupefyingly, incompetent. Otherwise, merchants of division like Northwestern University journalism faculty member Arionne Nettles and her enablers at The New York Times might be overwhelming favorites to tear the country apart for good. All the same, the more they push claims (I’m getting fed up with the pseudo-sophisticated term “narrative”) that are not only flagrantly phony but transparently contradictory, the more they obscure genuine and important failures and inequities that need fixing.

Nettles and The Times editors who considered her piece on African American victims of “gun violence” worthy of publication in this form took only a paragraph and a half to blow up their own case that big cities across the United States have seen a recent “rise in gun violence – perpetrated both by civilians and police officers” that’s taken an especially heavy toll on black children and teenagers.

They’re of course right about these tragedies and their scale. But the obvious insinuation that “civilians and police officers” share even remotely comparable blame is demolished by the observation that

“In one especially alarming spree last summer, Chicago police officers shot five people in just two months. And shootings and murders in the city were up more than 50 percent overall in 2020 compared with 2019; 875 people died from gun violence – a record high. A majority of the city’s victims (78 percent) were Black.”

Let’s assume that every one of the five Chicago police shootings mentioned here was totally unjustified. Let’s also state categorically that unjustified shootings by police are way more disturbing than other types of shootings because law enforcement must be held to a much higher standard. Are Nettles and The Times still seriously contending that the two categories of violence are on anything like a par, even as threats to African American lives?

More important, these and similar passages – along with Nettles’ interviews with African American mothers who have lost children to such violence – add powerfully to the evidence that, as I’ve argued before, the overwhelming problem here isn’t “gun violence” at all. Instead, it’s a culture of violence and broader irresponsibility that’s gained a strong foothold in too many Black neighborhoods, and whose importance keeps being ignored by supposed champions of American minorities.

A handful of data points from recent (2018) national (FBI) law enforcement statistics clinch this case. First, of the 328.24 million total U.S. population estimated by the Census Bureau that year, 76.3 percent were white and 13.4 percent African American. That’s a ratio of nearly six-to-one. Yet that year, reported Black homicide offenders in one-on-one incidents actually slightly outnumbered their white counterparts in absolute terms (3,177 to 3,011).

Almost as stunning: Of the 2,925 Black homicide victims that year, nearly 89 percent were killed by other Blacks. Nearly 81 percent of the 3,315 white homicide victims in 2018 were killed by whites, so it’s clear that American killers principally go after members of their own race. But relatively speaking these figures – combined with Nettles’ accurate observation that Blacks are much likelier to die in firearms incidents than Whites – reveal not a gun violence crisis afflicting so many African American communities. They reveal an African American violence problem.

No one can reasonably doubt that racism’s legacy and the resulting lack of economic opportunity and poverty play a big underlying role. As I (and many others) have written, the racial wealth gap alone is yawning, owes much to discrimination, and generates affects that have lasted generations. It should be just as hard reasonably to doubt, however, that something other than poverty is responsible.

Look at Chicago. In 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, its Black poverty rate was 26.3 percent – that’s much higher than the overall poverty rate for the city (16.4 percent), or the national African American poverty rate (18.8 percent). So even though there seems to be a Chicago-specific problem on top of a poverty problem, even in Chicago nearly three fourths of the Black population lives above the poverty line. That hardly means affluence, but it’s hardly destitution, either.

Moreover, the Chicago Black poverty rate is down considerably from 2010’s 33.6 percent (although the city’s overall poverty rate fell faster during this period). Yet the city’s numbers of homicides and its homicide rate have roughly doubled during the subsequent nine data years, and in Chicago, the vast majority of the killers (as with the victims) are African American.

As suggested above, moreover, Nettles’ ham-handed treatment of the “gun violence” and homicide issue is all the more inexcusable because the author’s interview subjects do a decent job of reinforcing the case that there does exist a serious race-based policing problem in this country. Not that the African American women with which the author spoke are entirely free of denialism about what’s plaguing their neighborhoods. There’s Shanice Steenholdt, who seems to believe that Australia-like gun control laws would turn her city of Houston into a replica of the small Australian town in which she lived for a time where she “didn’t feel like [she] had to worry about gun violence.” There’s Chicago’s Diane Lasiker, w appears to think that the big problem in her city is that it seems “to want to keep the Police Department separate from the community.” Her fellow Chicagoan Chez Smith and Flint, Michigan’s Marcia McQueen put much stock in “offering conflict resolution techniques” to their communities’ youth.

But the story told by Atlanta’s Cora Miller of her husband’s arrest (in Minnesota) reinforces the case that it’s much too common for completely innocent African Americans to be mistreated by police. As I’d written last August, I’ve heard first-hand accounts of such episodes from Black friends who have experienced it first hand – on top of South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott’s experiences with Capitol police. If these individuals – who are all highly successful by any reasonable definition – can be harassed for no good reason, imagine how often everyday folks just trying to get by face these indignities and indeed dangers.

So let’s by all means get policing up to snuff. Let’s by all means identify the most effective ways in which government and business can help foster opportunity in needy Black (and other) communities. But let’s also never forget a voice who has passionately argued that

“no matter how much money we invest in our communities, or how many 10-point plans we propose or how many government programs we launch — none of it will make a difference, at least not enough of a difference, if we don’t seize more responsibility in our own lives.”

In case you’re wondering, his name is Barack Obama.

Im-Politic: Why Democrats’ Latino Problem is Much Bigger Than They Think

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conservatives, David Shor, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2016, election 2020, Equis Research, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latino men, Latinos, New York magazine, Populism, progressives, racism, Republicans, Ruy Teixeira, sexism, The New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, xenophobia

You know that “Wow!” emoji, with the wide open mouth and eyes? Here’s some political news genuinely deserving that reaction. Remember how all the presidential election exit polls last November showed significant gains by Donald Trump among Latino voters? And how so many analysts attributed this progress to the former President’s “macho” appeal to Latino men – an appeal that was so strong that it overrode Trump’s supposedly obvious anti-Latino racism and xenophobia?

Well, at the beginning of this month, a major survey of Latino voters found that, actually, the Trump Latino vote was driven by women.

“Big deal,” you scoff? Absolutely. Because the results indicate that these voters’ backing for Trump didn’t stem mainly from his personality traits, which are not only pretty peculiar to him, but which repel at least as many voters of all kinds as they attract. Instead, the findings suggest that Latinos’ growing Trump-ism owes more to support for his economic message and record (including on immigration) – which signals big opportunities for other Republican/conservative populists not saddled with Trump’s often -putting character, but who focus on issues that will remain crucial to much of the Latino and overall electorate long into the future.

Examples of the “macho” theory include this piece from the New York Times and a later article in the Washington Post Magazine. And they nicely illustrate how it also reenforced the impression of Trump voters generally as “deplorables” that’s been spread relentlessly by the former President’s opponents of all stripes, and that conveniently strengthens the case for seeking to ignore and marginalize them.

It’s true that both these analyses recognized that Trump’s own business experience and the state of the economy for most of his presidency also attracted many Latino males. But their greater emphasis was on how these voters liked the fact that, as the Times piece put it, Trump is “forceful, wealthy and, most important, unapologetic. In a world where at any moment someone might be attacked for saying the wrong thing, he says the wrong thing all the time and does not bother with self-flagellation.”

The Post Magazine article was much more nuanced and even-handed, but the author nonetheless described a not-trivial number of Latino men (using his own father as an example) as “archconservatives” and “conservative talk radio” fans. He also presented plenty of analyses from supposed experts likening them to low-status males desperately clinging to any patriarchical life-saver to preserve their remaining self-esteem, and consequently as prime suckers for any “self-made man” and any other bootstraps-type myths contributing to the brand Trump cultivated.

The Post Magazine piece also contrasted these Latino male views with

“the experiences of Latinas, many of whom are running their households, managing child care or employed as front-line and domestic workers — nurses or caretakers for the elderly. ‘They are making sure their kids are prepared for Zoom school,’ [one expert] explains. ‘I think there’s a fundamentally different experience that Hispanic men and women have in both what they experience day to day and what information they consume.’”

In other words, Latino men: kind of neanderthal and delusional. Latino women: nose-to-the-grindstone essential workers and heroines who are not only staffing the front lines at work, but keeping ther households together. Therefore, even if you were willing to hold your nose and wanted any opponents of conservative populists to reach out more effectively to Latino men, you’d have to admit that many are too unhinged to be reachable.

Significantly, the new findings – by a data firm called Equis Research – don’t dispute that Trump did better among Latino men than among Latino women. Equis did, however, generate data showing that, between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the Trump Latino male vote grew by three net percentage points, but his Latina vote grew by eight percentage points. That’s what’s called “statistically significant.” And poll skeptics should note that Equis interviewed 41,000 Latino voters in battleground states, and studied voter file data, precinct returns, and focus groups.

Equis didn’t endorse any explanations for this Latina shift, although a Democratic analyst named David Shor believes that “the concentration of Trump’s gains among Latinas is consistent with his hypothesis that ‘defund the police’ influenced Hispanic voting behavior since, in his polling, women rank crime as a more important issue than men do.”

But to me, the new findings matter most for a more fundamental reason:  They further debunk claims from Never Trumpers in both parties that Trump’s Latino gains resulted from appeals to some Americans’ worst (i.e., most sexist) instincts (as mentioned above), or from simple misinformation, or from the Democrats’ alleged failure to court Latino voters ardently enough – that is, from problems that either shouldn’t be fixed, or that can easily be solved without compromising the party’s strong shift to the hard Left on issues across the board.

Instead, Equis’ report adds to the case that  a huge part of the problem is the shift itself – and with Americans of all races, colors, and creeds.

Special thanks to old friend Ruy Teixeira, a distinguished opinion analyst in his own right, for calling this news to my attention. And for a very good summary and analysis of the findings, see this piece from New York magazine (in which you’ll find David Shor’s arguments).

Im-Politic: Race-Mongering and the Hell of No Intentions

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Asian-Americans, Biden, Capitol riots, critical race theory, Donald McNeil, hate crimes, Im-Politic, Jay Caspian Kang, Kamala Harris, race relations, racism, The New York Times, white privilege

It’s bad enough when self-appointed – and then government- and/or business- and university-endorsed – experts on racism spread the claim that intentions don’t matter at all when it comes to identifying the forms of bigotry that have harmed various American minorities throughout the country’s history, and that continue holding them back today.

It’s that much worse when they and the nation’s leaders casually throw around terms like “white privilege” – which insist, inter alia, that the very denial of bigoted beliefs is proof of their existence – and even turn them into firing offenses. And it’s worse still when the President and Vice President explicitly agree that actions should be treated as proof of racism in the absent any evidence of racial motivation.

That’s why the weekend comments on the recent Atlanta spa killings by President Biden and Vice President Harris are so dangerously divisive for a country that isn’t exactly short of dangerous divisions these days. I’m talking about the former’s statement that

“Whatever the motivation [for the Atlanta killings], we know this: Too many Asian Americans have been walking up and down the streets worrying. They’ve been attacked, blamed, scapegoated and harassed”;

and the latter’s more detailed declaration that

“Whatever the killer’s motive, these facts are clear. Six out of the eight people killed on Tuesday night were of Asian descent. Seven were women. The shootings took place in business owned by Asian-Americans. The shootings took place as violent hate crimes and discrimination against Asian-Americans has risen dramatically over the last year or more.”

The only possible silver lining could be their prompting of some serious national attention to the real relationship between intentions and events before the situation gets completely out of hand. So here’s an initial effort.

Let’s start off with what’s presumably still common ground. I trust that every thinking person understands that good intentions alone don’t guarantee results that would widely be recognized as positive, either in terms of public policy or private behavior. Well-meaning words or deeds can easily overreach or backfire in all sorts of ways, especially if not well-informed or carefully thought through. They can also easily – and often rightly – be deemed offensive, especially when the well-intentioned hold more power than the the objects of their supposed largesse. And let’s not forget that good intentions per se can be difficult to distinguish from cynical, narcissistic, or simply hollow virtue-signalling.

Every thinking person surely also agrees on condemning well-meaning words that clash with deeds – that is, hypocrisy. When public officials are guilty, that’s legitimate news and they should pay a price. In both the public and private sectors, the same goes for deeds that violate the law, whether they’re inconsistent with any words spoken or written by the perpetrator or not. And when public and influential private sector individuals may be involved, certainly journalistic or other investigation and presentation of any relevant information is warranted.

Nor should it be overly difficult to recognize what’s right and wrong in more complicated circumstances – like those involving insistence that significant and/or official racism has vanished in America because segregation laws have been eliminated, or because affirmative action programs have been in place for decades, or because an African-American has been elected President, and that ignore the lingering effects of government-produced or government-tolerated discrimination. (Basing public school funding heavily on property taxes is a glaring example of the former; housing red-lining is an example of the former turning into the latter.)

Whether such ignorance is willful or genuine, it’s certainly never admirable. At the same time, should such holding beliefs result in careers being damaged, or personal reputations being trashed in public – with innocent family members being victimized in the process? That strikes me as opening the door to the totalitarian practice of prosecuting thought crimes – which all too easily lead to conviction because by definition no tangible or visible evidence would be required to establish guilt. And who actually wants America to turn into a society that would, therefore, inevitably be dominated and psychologically paralyzed or worse by fear of indictment? And who actually wants to hand unscrupulous individuals such extraordinary power to intimidate and injure, an outcome that also seems entirely plausible. Unless you believe that all men and women are angels?

The Biden and Harris Atlanta comments go even further toward severing the link between words and thoughts on the one hand, and deeds and results on the other. And don’t underestimate the impact of presidential versions of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. In particular, they threaten to boost the likelihood that evidence-free claims will suffice to produce actionable findings of racism or other forms of bigotry, to make the sensibilities of even the most fragile personality or prejudice-mongering individual the determinant of guilt, and to trigger all the aforementioned consequences and increased fear and self-censorship.

If you’re skeptical, check out what happened to a veteran New York Times reporter who was forced to leave his job because students that he led on a Times-organized educational tour of Peru complained that he used both the N-word and other racially insensitive language in their presence. The reporter, Donald McNeil, claimed that the context of these comments revealed no bigoted tendencies whatever, and according to his detailed account of the episode – which hasn’t been challenged – he has the facts on his side.

But what’s most important is that when the paper announced McNeil’s departure to the staff, it specificied that these facts – including the context – didn’t matter. “We do not,” the Times said, “tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”  (See here for the full story.)

Such troubling disregard for the facts themselves – as opposed to how they bear on issues of intent – is also clear from the Biden and Harris remarks. In the first place, despite all the press coverage they’ve received, it’s far from clear that any surge in hate crimes against Asian-Americans has even taken place. As pointed out by – Asian-American writer – Jay Caspian Kang, an at-large contributor to the magazine section of that same New York Times, these claims

“largely rely on self-reported data from organizations like Stop AAPI Hate that popped up after the start of the pandemic. These resources are valuable, but they also use as their comparison point spotty and famously unreliable official hate crime statistics from law enforcement. If we cannot really tell how many hate crimes took place before, can we really argue that there has been a surge?

“There have also been reports that suggest that these attacks be placed within the context of rising crime nationwide, especially in large cities. What initially appears to be a crime wave targeting Asians might just be a few data points in a more raceless story.”

So it’s entirely reasonable to worry that the slighting of intent issues by the nation’s two top elected leaders could also encourage the rapid proliferation of all encompassing and never-ending searches for racial or other bigotry-related dimensions of any events involving different categories of people – even normal, every day life interactions.

I can’t imagine a more effective formula for encouraging much of the nation to walk on eggshells in understandable fear of retaliation from all manner of racial justice vigilantes armed with the unprecedented naming and shaming power of social media – and for stoking countervailing variants similar to those that reared their own ugly head on January 6. 

Im-Politic: Unwitting Evidence that Criminal Justice Racism Hasn’t Been Systemic Lately

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criminal justice, Ekow Yankah, Im-Politic, incarceration, Keith Humphreys, police, police brutality, policing, prison reform, racism, systemic racism, Washington Post

It’s hard to imagine anything more ordinary in the national media these days than an item making or reporting the claim that the American criminal justice system is plagued with systemic racism. Much harder to imagine: such an article containing evidence powerfully refuting that charge. But that’s exactly what appeared in the Washington Post Outlook section today.

Authors Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University narcotics policy specialist and Ekow N. Yankah, a law professor at New York City’s Yeshiva University tell readers near the beginning of their essay that “the criminal justice system is suffused with racial biases that harm African Americans and Hispanics while favoring Whites.”

They go on to deplore “continuing, pervasive discrimination against African Americans in the criminal justice system and huge disparities in incarceration.” They note that “Blacks…are five times more likely to be imprisoned than Whites.” And they insist that “Race-based critiques of mass incarceration remain essential….”

But weirdly, what the authors themselves recognize as new and important in the national debate about race relations and law enforcement is the official research they report that in jails, which are operated mainly by local governments, “since 2000, the rate of being jailed increased 41 percent among Whites while declining 22 percent among African Americans.”

Further, “Beginning in 2017, the White rate of being jailed surpassed that of Hispanics for the first time in living memory. And in 2018, Whites became 50 percent of the jail population, particularly notable because Whites represent a lower proportion of the U.S. population than they have in centuries.”

As for prisons, which are operated by the states and the federal government, “parallel racial dynamics are evident. The White rate of imprisonment is down only 12 percent in this century, whereas the Hispanic rate has fallen 18 percent and the Black rate is down a remarkable 40 percent. The trend of African Americans leaving prison is accelerating, dropping Black imprisonment rates to levels not seen in 30 years.”

These statistics, remarkable – and neglected – as they are, by no means prove conclusively that racism isn’t too common in American law enforcement, at every level. Indeed, as I wrote last August:

“My own personal conversations with black friends have helped convince me (despite my deep mistrust of the evidentiary value of anecdotes) that there is a tendency on the part of a non-negligible number of police officers across the country to view African American men in particular with special suspicion, and to act on these suspicions. South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott’s alleged experiences in this respect carry weight with me, too.”

There’s also no shortage of statistical evidence pointing to discriminatory policing and sentencing.

But at or close to the heart of the systemic criminal justice racism charges is the insistence that America’s police and prosecutors and courts consistently and on a national level, all else equal, go after and actually lock up more blacks (and other minorities) than whites. And authors Humphreys and Yankah have made clear – unwittingly, it seems – that

>the exact opposite has been happening;

>that it’s been happening for at least two decades; and

>it continued even after the election as President of one Donald J. Trump, who has not only often been called one of America’s most racist chief executives (including by no less than current President Biden), but whose bigotry is widely supposed to have inspired ever more brazen and terrible brutality by racist cops.

In other words, the data that’s arguably most important show that whatever racism has stained American law enforcement is fading away. If true, hopefully reports describing and amplifying that encouraging trend will become commonplace in the national media, too.

Im-Politic: Most of the Flip Vote Stayed with Trump

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Barack Obama, battleground states, election 2016, election 2020, forgotten Americans, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Populism, racism, Trump, Trump flip voters, xenophobia

Since I haven’t yet come across any reason to suppose that the Election 2020 exit polls are any more accurate than most of the surveys throughout the campaign, and especially during the general election, worthwhile post-mortems are going to be really difficult to produce.

One exception: It’s clear what happened with the hundreds of counties across the country that voted twice for Barack Obama for President, and then flipped for Donald Trump in 2016. I’ve written repeatedly (most recently here) that these mainly lower-income counties are especially important because they clearly contain lots of Trump voters who couldn’t possibly be the racists who are so often viewed as the majority of the President’s base.

Moreover, they not only look like a representative sample of voters who bought Mr. Trump’s promise that he would champion their economic interests. They also look like voters who made a smart bet in this regard, as the majority of these counties saw their annual pay grow faster under Trump pre-CCP Virus than during the most comparable Obama administration time frame.

And how did they vote earlier this month? Recounts and challenges could change some of the numbers we have already, but as of this writing, an overwhelming majority of these so-called “forgotten Americans” stuck with the President a second time around. So did nearly all of those whose economic fortunes – at least by that wage measure – improved faster under Mr. Trump than under his predecessor.

First the overall numbers. In 2016, 194 counties for which the aforementioned wage data are available from the Labor Department supported the Trump candidacy after voting Obama in 2008 and 2012. Three other counties for which no such data have been kept followed this pattern.

Of the 194, 173 (89.17 percent) stuck with the President this time around, along with two of the data-less counties. Just as important, of the 194, 116 (59.79 percent) saw faster pay growth under Mr. Trump than under Obama, and 102 of them (87.93 percent) pulled the lever for the President in 2020. To me, that adds up to a pretty powerful case that a great deal of the President’s appeal stemmed from his economic populist pitch.

These outcomes can’t possibly be either-or. That is, just because a flip county prospered more under Mr. Trump than under Obama doesn’t necessarily mean that this performance was foremost in every voter’s mind. And it can’t be assumed that counties that have supported the President despite worse relative economic performance were filled with racists and xenophobes and other deplorables.

Nonetheless, a strong relationship between greater prosperity for these flip counties and their support for the President held up well through Election 2020.

Of course, the presidential vote this time around was awfully close, especially in the six key battleground states where the talleys seem certain to decide the final outcome: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Yet it doesn’t seem that the Trump flippers relatively few flops back to his Democratic opponent made much of a difference in any of these states.

Of the total 49 Trump flip counties in these states, only five flopped back last week. Moreover, the 49 were highly concentrated – 23 in Wisconsin alone, and 12 in Michigan. Arizona had none and Pennsylvania only three. Interestingly, two of the Wisconsin flippers supported Biden in 2020, as did two of their Pennsylvania counterparts. But even given the closeness of the statewide totals, their populations appear too small to have made a difference.

A stronger argument can be made for the floppers’ importance in three states that were not as close as expected. Iowa, for example, was long thought to be up for grabs despite the handy margin it gave candidate Trump four years ago. It’s arguable that his repeat performance in 2020 stemmed in part from the decision of all 27 Trump flip counties to remain in the Republican column.

Minnesota was considered a Trump possibility this year, since Mr. Trump came within five percentage points of victory in this traditional Democratic stronghold. But President Trump actually lost some ground this month, and the decision of four of the state’s 19 Trump flippers to support Joe Biden clearly didn’t help.

Finally, New Hampshire looked like another possible Trump pickup. But two of its three flip counties (including Coos, for which there’s no economic data), opted for Biden.

All told, the numbers represented by these shifts were pretty small, too. But they could have reflected changes in sentiment elsewhere in these states that accounted for the somewhat surprising outcomes. A similar argument can be made for the six high-profile battlegrounds, but in my view the number of floppers returning to the Democratic camp was so small that it’s much weaker.

Again, some or even many of these results could change in the near future. But if they don’t, then no doubt many of the Americans who agree with President Trump that they’d been forgotten before are hoping that they’re remembered better over the next four years.

Im-Politic: Final Grades on the Final Debate

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battleground states, climate change, crime, crime bills, election 2020, energy, fossil fuels, fracking, green energy, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, marijuana, narcotics, natural gas, oil, presidential debates, progressives, racism, systemic racism, Trump

I got something massively wrong about the second (and final) presidential debate of 2020. I thought that my frantic live-tweeting covered every important aspect of the Thursday night event. Upon reading the transcript, I realized there was lots more to say.

Let’s start with the 30,000-foot picture. There’s no question that President Trump performed more effectively than in the first debate. Even his most uncritical admirers, like Fox News talker Sean Hannity, have conceded as much (Check out the video of his post-debate show, in which he acknowledges that long-time Republican political operative Ari Fleischer was right in faulting Mr. Trump’s first debate performance as too overheated.)

But there are plenty of questions left unanswered about the second debate’s impact on the Presidential race. For the record, I’m sticking with the assessment I offered after the first debate: Given his lead even in most battleground state polls, because the Trump campaign and other Trumpers (including Hannity) had set the bar so low for “Sleepy Joe,” all Biden needed to do was show up and not screw up massively in order to win.

Those battleground polls have tightened somewhat, Biden’s perfectly fine first debate performance raised the bar for the second debate, and I’m far from thinking that the race is over. But I’d still rather be in Biden’s shoes than in Mr. Trump’s. And time keeps running out for the President. All the same, it’s important to remember that we haven’t seen any major post-debate nationwide or battleground polls come out yet, so there’s simply no hard evidence to go on at this point.

The time-is-not-the-President’s-friend point, though, brings up my first new debate-related point: Mr. Trump’s improved performance alone (whether he “won” or not either on points or according to the public), indicates that he erred in rejecting the Commission on Presidential Debate’s offer to hold the second debate virtually, due ostensibly to CCP Virus-related reasons.

Especially if Mr. Trump had by that time begun heeding the advice of supporters urging him to dial it down (which isn’t at all clear), he lost an opportunity to square off again against Biden in real time. And although there’s no adequate on-line substitute for the atmosphere and resulting pressures of in-person encounters, the President did lose a valuable opportunity to reassure voters unnerved – rightly or wrongly – by his first debate tactics.

Getting down to specific points, on Thursday night, two issues really do demand further discussion. First, I might have been mistaken in my tweeted view that the Biden comments on natural gas fracking and energy (and related climate change) policy wouldn’t be terribly important.

I did agree that the former Vice President did nothing to help himself in key energy states like Pennsylvania, where voters might worry that his various positions – and the prominence of staunch fossil fuels opponents in Democratic ranks now – would guarantee relatively rapid closures of the coal mines and gas and oil fields that created so much employment in their regions. But I stated that, because these subjects had been aired so thoroughly already, few energy voters’ minds would be changed.

What I clearly underestimated was the impact of an extended discussion of energy and climate subjects before a nation-wide audience. If I’d been right, why would the Trump campaign have almost immediately put out an ad spotlighting Biden’s assorted statements on these topics. And why would the Biden campaign have spent so much time trying to explain the Biden position?

Looking at the transcript helped me understand why energy- and climate-related anxieties in the energy states might have been elevated by the Biden debate remarks. For on the one hand, the Democratic challenger insisted that he was “ruling out” “banning fracking” and claimed that

“What I will do with fracking over time is make sure that we can capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas. We can do that and we can do that by investing money in doing it, but it’s a transition to that.”

And whereas previously, Biden had responded to a primary debate question about whether fossil fuels would have any place in his prospective administration by declaring “We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those. Any fossil fuel,” on Thursday night, the former Vice President referred to transitioning from “the old oil industry”–presumably to some (undefined) new kind of oil industry.

Nonetheless, it would be reasonable for energy states residents to question these assurances of gradualness and transformation instead of elimination given Biden’s continued contention that “global warming is an existential threat to humanity,” that “we’re going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to ten years,” and that the energy sector in toto needs “to get to ultimately a complete zero emissions by 2025.” Last time I checked, that’s only five years from now.

Moreover, given the notable split within the Democratic party on climate change and energy issues between progressives and centrists, the Biden statements suggesting that major fossil fuel industries will survive during his administration in some form could depress turnout in their ranks for a candidate who clearly needs to stoke their enthusiasm.

The second set of issues I should have tweeted more about entails crime and race relations. I think Biden deserves a great deal of credit for calling “a mistake” his support for crime bills of the 1980s and 1990s that, in the words of moderator Kristen Welker “contributed to the incarceration of tens of thousands of young Black men who had small amounts of drugs in their possession, they are sons, they are brothers, they are fathers, they are uncles, whose families are still to this day, some of them suffering the consequences.”

He was also correct in pointing out that President Trump – who quite properly pointed to some noteworthy achievements of his administration on behalf of African Americans – took a sweepingly harsh line on crime himself in previous decades.

But two positions taken by Biden should disturb even supporters. First, his argument that “It took too long [during the Obama administration] to get it right. Took too long to get it right. I’ll be President of the United States, not Vice President of the United States,” clearly throws his former boss under the bus. In fact, he also implicitly blamed Obama for the failure to resolve the problem created by children living the United States born to illegal immigrant parents.

The second such position was Biden’s argument that “No one should be going to jail because they have a drug problem. They should be going to rehabilitation, not to jail.”

I personally can support this view when it comes to hard drugs. But marijuana? For whose use so many American blacks have been jailed – and so many more than white Americans? (I’m not a big fan of the American Civil Liberties Union these days, but the data in this study are tough to refute.) Mandatory (government-funded?) therapy for potheads? That could use some rethinking.

But like I said at the outset, I expressed views on many other debate-related subjects on my Twitter feed (@AlanTonelson). So there’s no substitute for following there, as well as checking in with RealityChek, for the most up-to-date thinking on the election — as well as everything else under the sun.

Im-Politic: VP Debate Questions That Should be Asked

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1619 Project, African Americans, Barack Obama, Biden, budget deficits, CCP Virus, censorship, China, Confederate monuments, Constitution, coronavirus, COVID 19, education, election 2020, Electoral College, filibuster, Founding Fathers, free speech, healthcare, history, history wars, Im-Politic, inequality, investment, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, national security, Obamacare, police killings, propaganda, protests, racism, riots, semiconductors, slavery, spending, Supreme Court, systemic racism, Taiwan, tariffs, tax cuts, taxes, Trade, trade war, Trump, Vice Presidential debate, Wuhan virus

Since I don’t want to set a record for longest RealityChek post ever, I’ll do my best to limit this list of questions I’d like to see asked at tonight’s Vice Presidential debate to some subjects that I believe deserve the very highest priority, and/or that have been thoroughly neglected so far during this campaign.

>For Vice President Mike Pence: If for whatever reason, President Trump couldn’t keep the CCP Virus under control within his own White House, why should Americans have any faith that any of his policies will bring it under control in the nation as a whole?

>For Democratic candidate Senator Kamala Harris: What exactly should be the near-term goal of U.S. virus policy? Eliminate it almost completely (as was done with polio)? Stop its spread? Slow its spread? Reduce deaths? Reduce hospitalizations? And for goals short of complete elimination, define “slow” and “reduce” in terms of numerical targets.

>For Pence: Given that the administration’s tax cuts and spending levels were greatly ballooning the federal budget deficit even before the virus struck, isn’t it ridiculous for Congressional Republicans to insist that total spending in the stimulus package remain below certain levels?

For Harris: Last month, the bipartisan Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus unveiled a compromise stimulus framework. President Trump has spoken favorably about it, while stopping short of a full endorsement. Does Vice President Biden endorse it? If so, has he asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to sign on? If he doesn’t endorse it, why not?

For Pence: The nation is in the middle of a major pandemic. Whatever faults the administration sees in Obamacare, is this really the time to be asking the Supreme Court to rule it un-Constitutional, and throw the entire national health care system into mass confusion?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration offer free taxpayer-financed healthcare to illegal aliens? Wouldn’t this move strongly encourage unmanageable numbers of migrants to swamp U.S. borders?

For Pence: President Trump has imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese exports headed to U.S. markets. But U.S. investors – including government workers’ pension funds – still keep sending equally large sums into Chinese government coffers. When is the Trump administration finally going to plug this enormous hole?

For Harris: Will a Biden administration lift or reduce any of the Trump China or metals tariffs. Will it do so unconditionally? If not, what will it be seeking in return?

For both: Taiwan now manufactures the world’s most advanced semiconductors, and seems sure to maintain the lead for the foreseeable future. Does the United States now need to promise to protect Taiwan militarily in order to keep this vital defense and economic knowhow out of China’s hands?

For Pence: Since the administration has complained so loudly about activist judges over-ruling elected legislators and making laws themselves, will Mr. Trump support checking this power by proposing term limits or mandatory retirement ages for Supreme Court Justices? If not, why not?

For Harris: Don’t voters deserve to know the Biden Supreme Court-packing position before Election Day? Ditto for his position on abolishing the filibuster in the Senate.

>For Pence: The Electoral College seems to violate the maxim that each votes should count equally. Does the Trump administration favor reform? If not, why not?

>For Harris: Many Democrats argue that the Electoral College gives lightly populated, conservative and Republican-leaning states outsized political power. But why, then, was Barack Obama able to win the White House not once but twice?

>For Pence: Charges that America’s police are killing unarmed African Americans at the drop of a hat are clearly wild exaggerations. But don’t you agree that police stop African-American pedestrians and drivers much more often than whites without probable cause – a problem that has victimized even South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott?

For Harris: Will Biden insist that mayors and governors in cities and states like Oregon and Washington, which have been victimized by chronic antifa violence, investigate, arrest and prosecute its members and leaders immediately? And if they don’t, will he either withhold federal law enforcement aid, or launch such investigations at the federal level?

For Pence: Why should any public places in America honor Confederate figures – who were traitors to the United States? Can’t we easily avoid the “erasing history” danger by putting these monuments in museums with appropriate background material?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration support even peacefully removing from public places statues and monuments to historic figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because their backgrounds included slave-holding?

For both: Shouldn’t voters know much more about the Durham Justice Department investigation of official surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2015 and 2016 before Election Day?

For both: Should the Big Tech companies be broken up on antitrust grounds?

For both: Should internet and social media platforms be permitted to censor any form of Constitutionally permitted speech?

For Pence: Doesn’t the current system of using property taxes to fund most primary and secondary public education guarantee that low-income school children will lack adequate resources?

For Harris: Aren’t such low-income students often held back educationally by non-economic factors like generations of broken families and counter-productive student behavior, as well as by inadequate school funding – as leading figures like Jesse Jackson (at least for one period) and former President Obama have claimed?

For Pence: What’s the difference between the kind of “patriotic education” the President says he supports and official propaganda?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration oppose local school districts using propagandistic material like The New York Times‘ U.S. history-focused 1619 Project for their curricula? Should federal aid to districts that keep using such materials be cut off or reduced?

Now it’s your turn, RealityChek readers! What questions would you add? And which of mine would you deep six?

Im-Politic: Trump’s Decidedly Non-Racist Economic Record

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African Americans, Barack Obama, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, election 2020, families, family income, Federal Reserve, Hispanics, Im-Politic, inquality, Joe Biden, median income, racism, Survey of Consumer Finances, Trump, wealth gap, whites, Wuhan virus, xenophobia

Some pre-debate advice for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden: Don’t rush to trot out your charge that Donald Trump is the first racist President in American history. Because if Mr. Trump has been briefed with any competence, two recent official economic reports have just come out making clear that when it comes to African Americans and Hispanic Americans, – at least before the outbreak of the CCP Virus that has hit minorities especially hard for longstanding structural reasons – the incumbent’s economic record compares quite favorably to that of the Obama administration for which Biden rode shotgun.

The evidence we’ll look at today drawn from the latest edition of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, contains arguably the most important finding of all: The wealth gap separating African Americans and Hispanic Americans on the one hand from white Americans on the other narrowed more during Mr. Trump’s first three years in office than during the final three years of the Obama administration. (RealityChek regulars know that such time frames provide the best apples-to-apples data needed for comparisons, since they came right next to each other in the same economic cycle – in this case, the post-2009 expansion.)

This racial wealth gap is often described as the most damning indictment of the nation’s longstanding failure to generate equal economic opportunity, since the wealth created by one generation can be passed down to future generations, and thereby boost the odds that beneficiaries are cushioned against major economic and financial stress, and foster all the self-reinforcing social as well as economic advantages flowing from such achievement of the American Dream.

The numbers come both from the Fed’s new survey, which covers the 2016-2019 period, and its previous survey, which covered the 2013-2016 period, and here they are, starting with the growth in median family net worth (the Fed’s preferred measure of wealth) for all American families, for non-Hispanic white families, for non-Hispanic black families, and for Hispanic families.

During the final three Obama years, in pre-inflation dollars, this net worth increased as follows for the aforementioned three groups pre-tax

for all U.S. families: +16.25 percent

for white non-Hispanics: +16.80 percent

for black non-Hispanics: +29.41 percent

for Hispanics: +45.77 percent

As a result, median wealth for black non-Hispanic and Hispanic families as a share of median family wealth for their white counterparts rose as follows:

                                                                   2013                    2016

black non-Hispanic families:              9.29 percent        10.29 percent

Hispanic families:                               9.70 percent        12.11 percent

Alternatively put, black non-Hispanic families closed the wealth gap with white non-Hispanic families by 10.76 percent, and Hispanic families by 24.85 percent. No denying that’s progress.

And the Trump record through 2019 in comparison? We’ll start again with the increases in pre-tax median family net worth from 2016 until then:

for all U.S. families: +17.58 percent

for white non-Hispanics: +3.46 percent

for black non-Hispanics : +32.42 percent

for Hispanics: +65.30 percent

So during the first three Trump years, median family wealth overall grew faster than during the final three Obama years, and minority families far outgained white families in this regard. Moreover, this was especially true for Hispanic families, who belong to an ethnic group Mr. Trump is often accused of despising.

That this minority family outperformance bettered that achieved during the most analogous Obama period comes through even more clearly from the following table, which shows how minority families’ net worth grew as a share of white family net worth between 2016 and 2019:

                                                                    2016                    2019

black non-Hispanic families:              10.01 percent       12.81 percent

Hispanic families:                               12.04 percent       19.23 percent

Again, alternatively put, during the Trump years, these results mean that black non-Hispanic families closed the wealth gap with white families by 27.97 percent, and Hispanic families by 59.72 percent. So both groups made much more relative progress during the Trump supposedly racist and xenophobic Trump administration (pre-CCP Virus) than during the supposedly racially enlightened Obama administration.

The Trump record isn’t as good when it comes to another measure of economic peformance – pre-tax family incomes and their growth. But any fair-minded observer would have to agree that it’s more than respectable, especially considering the President’s reputation among so many of his opponents.

Once more, let’s start with the Obama record on this score between 2013 and 2016. (These results aren’t adjusted for inflation, either. During these years, median family income grew as follows for the groups in question:

for all U.S. families: +9.56 percent

for white non-Hispanics: +6.44 percent

for black non-Hispanics: +9.94 percent

for Hispanics: +14.93 percent

As a result, median incomes for black non-Hispanic and Hispanic families as a share of median income for their white counterparts rose as follows:

                                                                    2013                    2016

black non-Hispanic families:               56.00 percent       57.84 percent

Hispanic families:                                58.26 percent       62.91 percent

So the income gap with white non-Hispanic families shrank by 1.13 percent for black families and by 7.98 percent for Hispanic families. These relative gains generally were far smaller than those registered for wealth, but they were gains all the same

At first glance, it’s clear that the Trump record between 2016 and 2019 lagged the Obama era progress. Here’s how family incomes rose then for the groups concerned:

for all U.S. families: +4.64 percent

for white non-Hispanics: +6.00 percent

for black non-Hispanics: +7.00 percent

for Hispanics: -0.49 percent

The same conclusion flows from examining the changes in minority groups’ family income as a share of non-white Hispanic families’ income:

                                                                    2016                    2019

black non-Hispanic families:               57.76 percent      58.41 percent

Hispanic families:                                62.83 percent      58.99 percent

In fact, Hispanic families actually lost ground on this front.

And not surprisingly, the income gap between Hispanic families and white non-Hispanic families widened by 6.11 percent during these Trump years, while that between black and white non-Hispanic families narrowed by much less than during the final three Obama years (1.13 percent versus 3.29 percent).

These Fed figures hardly show that President Trump, as he likes to claim, has done more for African Americans than any President in history Lincoln aside, or that Hispanic Americans have been special beneficiaries of his policies. But they do show impressive progress for minority groups and, perhaps more important, progress that compares well with such achievements under the nation’s first African American President.

Therefore, Biden (and other Trump opponents) could well be right about the President’s racism and xenophobia when all considerations are taken into account. But if so, he’s clearly the strangest racist and xenophobe in U.S. history – a conclusion that will be supported when RealityChek turns next to the new poverty statistics and another set of income figures just issued by the Census Bureau. .

Im-Politic: A Chinese Link to Black Lives Matter?

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Alicia Garza, Black Futures Lab, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter Too, BLM, China, Chinese Progressive Association, election interference, Heritage Foundation, Im-Politic, race relations, racism, reparations, structural racism, systemic racism, The Federalist, wealth gap, white fragility

Our times are so racially fraught that even I (someone who rarely feels defensive about my views) feel the need to start out this post by specifying that I am not a systemic or structural racist or even an unwitting example of white fragility. Indeed, I’m so woke on the issue of continuing racial discrimination in America that I’ve come out for reparations to remedy what I see as one recent example of open-and-shut racial injustice whose victims would be relatively easy to identify and compensate. And I’ve called attention to the still yawning racial wealth gap. 

I don’t even have significant problems with the phrase “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) – although I like “Black Lives Matter, Too” because it avoids the possibility of either-or interpretations while making clear that there’s a still a racial gap that must be eliminated.

But the various organizations and coalitions invoking this phrase that have sprung up lately? I’m not so sure about many of them, especially since their proclaimed agendas often go far beyond securing racial justice. (See, e.g., here.) And just yesterday I found out about another potential problem with these groups that seems to support a point I made in a recent article about the massive and under-reported scale of Chinese interference in American public life – signs of close connections between a key BLM organization the Chinese government.

As reported in The Federalist, a conservative publication, based on research by the equally conservative Heritage Foundation, an outfit called Black Futures Lab (BFL) is funded mainly by an organization called the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA). The Lab’s own website, moreover, confirms this finding.

It’s true that BFL is only one group in the BLM constellation. But it’s no ordinary group. Its “Principal” is Alicia Garza, who describes herself, and is credited in news reports, as a founder of the BLM movement.

It’s also true that the CPA isn’t officially affiliated with the Chinese government. But Beijing is certainly a fan of what’s been described as its Boston chapter, as this article (cited in the Heritage Foundation report) from its official mouthpiece demonstrates. One charge I could not independently corroborate – the claim that the Chinese flag-raising event the article mentions was “hosted by the Consulate General of China in New York.”

Consulate officials clearly attended the other event – a flag-raiser – and spoke. But unike the aforementioned Boston passport-focused event, I was unable to find evidence that they played any organizing role.

So maybe the cooperation doesn’t go any further than attending (and sometimes organizing) the kinds of celebrations that might simply be ethnic solidarity events. But according to this study (an undergraduate thesis, but one from Stanford University by a student with clearly progressive sympathies), the admiration between CPA and the Chinese government is decidedly mutual:

“The CPA began as a Leftist, pro-People’s Republic of China [PRC] organization, promoting awareness of mainland China’s revolutionary thought and workers rights, and dedicated to self-determination, community control, and ‘serving the people’.

Further, although “Its activities were independent of the Communist Party of China or the US,” it “worked with other pro-PRC groups within the US and San Francisco Bay Area.”

Again, the prospect can’t be ruled out that Beijing is content simply to admire CPA’s efforts to improve social services for Chinese Americans or even help organize Chinese American events with the group. But given the influence I thoroughly documented in the aforementioned magazine article that China has gained over major American institutions; and given the unusual interest displayed by a group like CPA, which is exclusively focused on Chinese Americans (as it makes clear) in an organization that says it’s exclusively focused on African Americans (especially since serious problem of poverty and discrimination still clearly dog Chinese Americans, according to CPA), grounds for further investigation don’t exactly seem to be lacking.

Indeed, as known by anyone with legal or law enforcement experience, or most fans of detective stories, showing that defendants have had “motive, opportunity and means” is a venerable framework for investigating and determining wrongdoing. When it comes to fomenting racial tensions in the United States, the Chinese government surely has all three. So let’s hope that the federal government (both the Exective and Congress), as well as the supposed watchdogs of our democracy, the news media, look into China’s involvement with the Black Lives Matter movement as aggressively as it’s looked into other charges of improper foreign interference in America’s politics.

Im-Politic: You Bet the Mainstream Media Has Become Troublingly Woke – & It Matters

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FredBauerBlog, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, media bias, MSM, race relations, racism, Tablet, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, wokeness, Zach Goldberg

As RealityChek regulars know, I’ve long been strongly critical of the American Mainstream Media (MSM), and presented any number of examples of its brazen bias – including, and in fact especially, in ostensible straight news reports. My main focus has the pronounced slant of these big, influential news organizations’ in favor of interventionist U.S. foreign policy globalism, supportive of Open Borders-like immigration policies, against any departures from jobs- and growth-killing trade agreements, and unremittingly hostile to anything said or done by President Trump.

But I’ve also paid attention to media bias on largely domestic issues, and in particular on the adoption (notably by The New York Times) of a clear perspective endorsing – and often embodying – the emergence of a highly intolerant strain of progressivism and in American life, and a view of the country’s society, politics, and history stressing the central role of what’s called systemic racism.

At the same time, even though I’ve cited numerous examples of all the above developments, there still aren’t enough to prove a trend. Recently, however, exhaustive evidence has emerged on the systemic racism front, and we can thank a political science student named Zach Goldberg who’s conducted wide-ranging research on the subject for his Ph.D. and just published in the on-line magazine Tablet.

Goldberg has performed the kind of content analysis that’s only become possible with new information technology tools, literally counting the number of times The Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal in particular have used words describing what he calls “wokeness”: “a prevailing new political morality on questions of race and justice that has taken power at The Times and Post—a worldview sometimes abbreviated as “wokeness” that combines the sensibilities of highly educated and hyperliberal white professionals with elements of Black nationalism and academic critical race theory.”

His main finding: this racial wokeness’ takeover of The Times and the Post in particular preceded the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police by several years; that it’s completely unrelated to any change in levels of racism in the United States; and that it at the very least correlates – and may have played a big role in triggering – a significant rise in the numbers of Americans who agree with the woke/systemic racism claims.

This graphic shows the skyrocketing increase in the use of wokeist race relations terms by these publications. The absolute percentages are of course tiny. But keep in mind that they represent shares of all the words in these publications, and that recent years haven’t exactly been devoid of major developments in countless other fields.

This graphic, when combined with the first, indicates how robustly American perceptions of racism’s pervasiveness has risen in tandem with the Mainstream Media’s treatment of the phenonemon. And the strongest effect has been among white liberals.

Indeed, although the graphic below covers a somewhat different timeframe, it makes clear that not only did white Democrats’ views on the power of American racism increase as the Mainstream Media became much more racially woke, but minority Democrats’ views of this subject actually decreased during the December, 2006-June, 2015 period. That’s compelling evidence that these news organizations became woke racially even though the racism-in-America situation might actually have improved.

Although I clearly disagree with most of what I see as the fundamentals of woke thinking, like Voltaire, I would resolutely defend anyone’s right to express them. And that includes Mainstream Media reporters and pundits and editorial writers alike. All I (and others like me) would insist upon is that news writing clearly be labeled newswriting, and opinion clearly be labeled opinion. Goldberg’s research makes a powerful case that way too much of what Americans have always regarded as reporting of the facts that at least tries to be objective has turned into propagandizing, and that the nation is a much more polarized and angrier place as a result.

P.S. Thanks to Fred Bauer, whose FredBauerBlog always makes excellent, important reading, for calling my attention to Goldberg’s work.