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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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What gives, I believe, is twofold. First, Fryer and Macdonald are obviously correct: what do you expect to happen when you implement the infernal woke idea of defunding and demoralizing the police -- and who do you expect it to happen to? Second, I submit that their silence on this issue demonstrates that woke progressives do not actually care about the health and safety of black people -- any more than Lenin cared about the health and safety of Russian proletariat. What they care about is the power-gathering narrative that white supremacy is the root of all evil. Black-on-black crime doesn't do much to advance that narrative, and so it is not of much interest to them, no matter how many black lives it takes, or how rapidly the problem grows.

Two thoughts/questions:

First, how much of this is just venality at play? You're not going to disarm the US population by taking action on a municipal level in blue states. However, you can break apart an institution and redistribute the goods it claims for itself. Taking money from cops - who the progressive laptop class have reasons to disdain, especially in an environment where their value is taken for granted - and giving it to some "security ambassador" scheme. Who gets the money? Not some entrenched police union, who are probably very good at extracting their toll at this point, but someone of your own choosing. Anything you save is a bonus. This is, if I recall correctly, explicitly the point of #Defund, just put in less flattering terms: give it to the social workers (how do they vote?).

Also, how many woke people are just utterly detached from the lives of black people who need police? I certainly was/am. Just as many people are baffled by the white working class (and their abandonment of Democrats) and mainly interact with it through articles and JD Vance books, many see blacks through a lens of ideology and/or allow some black intellectual to tell them how it is. They simply have no skin in the game and, in their spaces, it's dangerous to go the wrong way on this.

You mentioned Roland Fryer. Well, it's been noted many times that Roland Fryer actually grew up in a situation related to his research, which was one motivation for doing and publishing it despite being warned it would hurt him professionally. And who was it that allegedly tried to take him down? Claudine Gay, a child of well-off Haitian migrants who jumped straight into the US black intellectual elite. The exact sort of person for whom "black on black crime" is an embarrassing little inconvenience for her position and goals that would be best ignored. Or, allegedly, put aside to focus on the real roots of Black problems: white supremacy.

Stories I thought were funny...

My own family background was pretty different, but shit happens to everybody, and I can easily think of a personal story that's kinda funny in a black humor way now, but was nightmare fuel at the time and to most audiences.

...select company (Nurses, EMS workers, and lawyers...

Yeah, that's fair.

That last detail is quite the perfect cherry on top of a shit sundae; well (?) played, dramatic irony!

The absolutely fascinating intersection here is so interestingly captured by the reddit /r/stupidpol, who see the same setup and conclude that current racial thinking is manipulated by the wealthy to distract from the true issue, which is the struggle of the poor vs the elite. The solution? Marxism.

I guess what it comes down to is if you think the "progressive laptop class" have been gaslit and co-opted, or if it's accidental, or it's deliberate by the "true" elite, or it's the Jews all along, or any number of boogeymen. Personally, I think a lot of the movement, if we can speak of it like that, being naive but well-meaning.