Was Charles Manson Right? By J.L. Reiter
For decades, our fearless editor John has noted the annual period in which Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Bobby Kennedy in June 1968, and Charles Manson, the cult leader and head of the murderous Manson Family, came up for parole. Manson and Sirhan always stood little chance of getting out, even in California. That said, if Sirhan plays his cards right and California keeps electing criminal advocates in the place of functional prosecutors, he may get lucky.
Manson was a lunatic, but the Ted Kaczynski kind, with the ability to communicate and some kind of plan, as opposed to the push-random-strangers-on-the-subway-tracks nutjob we’re used to seeing on social media these days. Manson’s plan was to pin the horrific murders of Sharon Tate, a young actress married to director Roman Polanski and her friends, on black people and thus start a race war. There’s a little more to it than that, like that it was foretold in the Beatles’ song Helter Skelter, but you can read all about it in the book of the same name.
Of course, Manson’s plan was as insane as he was. Still, anyone observing the current American scene might think that his plan lived on, albeit instead of smearing victims’ blood on the walls of a Hollywood mansion, its proponents are doing everything they can short of that to drive a wedge between black and white Americans, with Asians and Hispanics as collateral damage.
The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon recently wrote that “today’s [civil rights] movement is fighting systemic racism.” From the point of view of people like Bacon, Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and all the other believers in Critical Race Theory and its kindred religions, this “systemic racism” doesn’t have to be proven, it just is. Perry appears to endorse the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) which holds that “racism, sexism, homophobia and capitalism reinforce one another to prevent Black progress and therefore all must be combatted.”
He also seems to support “abolition,” which now means “an end to policing, prisons, and other modern institutions they view as problematic.” BLM founders Patrice Cullors and Alicia Garza both admit to being anti-capitalist, and indeed trained Marxists, though BLM’s founders didn’t let that stop them using donated money to buy property for their use and to steer contracts towards friends and relatives. M4BL wants “an end to all jails, prisons, immigration detention, youth detention and civil commitment facilities as we know them.” It is hard to imagine anything that would more negatively affect the lives of black Americans, particularly young ones, than this. Murder is the number one cause of death for young black males, and nearly all are killed by other young black males.
Bacon asserts that “Black people on average get lower pay compared with other Americans” and “are more likely to be killed by police officers.” However, when variables like age, occupation, education, and location are accounted for, this is a problematic claim, as researchers like Heather McDonald and Wilfred Reilly have proven. Bacon says that guaranteed incomes, the assumption of medical and college debt by the federal government, and “the election of prosecutors who don’t prosecute crime “were pushed by BLM activists and benefit Black people in particular.” Except that black people who live in high-crime neighbourhoods are not benefitting from Soros-elected prosecutors who let out recidivist criminals. They want more, albeit fair and professional, policing, not less. They are horrified at seeing the ‘baby’ of security thrown out with the ‘bathwater’ of a few terrible cops.
Reduced police enforcement, either as a result of political ‘de-fund’ efforts or from the Ferguson Effect of reluctance to risk life and career, simply result in more such injury and death.
It is a fact that crime is committed disproportionately among races. In a functioning justice system, that will lead to disproportionate arrests, sentences, and jail populations. But an Ibram Kendian universe tells us that any disparity in outcomes between racial groups can only be due to racism. Therefore, George Soros spends millions to elect woke prosecutors who let recidivist criminals, violent felons, and repeat shoplifters off the hook.
The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah writes of that country’s welcome of black Americans, and of the “sense of relief and belonging that Ghana provides.” (Were an Englishman to say the same of returning home to a small town in Cornwall, imagine the uproar).
Ghanaians, along with Nigerians and other people from Africa, are highly successful immigrants and earn more than the average white American. One reason for this is that they often arrive free of the social pathologies endemic in their American cousins. They value education, have a much higher rate of children born to married parents, and uphold other traditional values that, like for many Asians, are predictors of success.
As a lawsuit by Asian students alleging discrimination on the basis of race nears a decision at the Supreme Court, America’s elite colleges, medical schools, and law schools are getting rid of standardised tests, grades, and any other objective criteria for admission, so they can continue to discriminate against Asian and white applicants but won’t be so easy to catch doing it. The state of Delaware recently lowered the necessary grade cutoff on its bar exam so they can continue to admit more black lawyers who otherwise would not have qualified. And on it goes.
Scott Adams’ frustration with the state of America’s race relations boiled over into an online rant that has cost him the cancellation of Dilbert from newspapers. One thing Adams cited was the endless stream of social media videos of black-on-white violence, which contrasts with the media narrative. Kentucky State professor Wilfred Reilly writes that most violence is within racial groups. Inter-racial violence is only 3% of the total, and of that, 88% is black-on-white instead of the other way around. Research by Zach Goldberg at the Manhattan Institute shows that the media will generate 21 times the number of articles to cover the shooting of blacks by police than whites. He also concludes that “news media content covering black victims is about 9x greater than or white victims.” Most media-literate Americans can rattle off the names of several blacks shot by police: George Floyd, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, and so on. How many can name one white, Asian, or Hispanic?
Mainstream media coverage of crimes against Asians would have you believe that they are all committed by white supremacists inspired by Trump’s assertion that Covid came from China, but people watching the endless social media stream of crime videos like this one from Houston, this from New York, or this from Oakland are able to judge for themselves who the perpetrators are. The campaign to “stop AAPI hate” wants to blame violence against Asians on political motivations, but rational observers would conclude that inter-racial crime is mostly driven by criminal intent or mental illness rather than animosity alone.
The way crime stories are covered by the mainstream media further compounds the false impression that there is a one-side war by police on black people in America. In their haste to enforce the leftist ideology of oppressor vs. oppressed, the media obscure or obfuscate inconvenient facts that could help a reader understand these tragic, unique, but rare situations. For example, facts like Michael Brown did not have his hands in the air and did not say “don’t shoot,” Breonna Taylor was used as a human shield by her drug-dealer boyfriend, and Tyre Nichols was murdered by five black cops in a majority black city with a black police chief and black mayor.
This leftist slant by today’s media is no accident: it is brought about purposefully by supposed journalists who are little more than propagandists. Nicole Hannah Jones’ 1619 Project is based on several underlying factual premises that are wrong, but she is still taken seriously enough to win a Pulitzer Prize. Trymaine Lee of NBC News is hosting a session at South by Southwest called “building an antiracist newsroom” that will discuss “the fallacy of objective journalism” according to the Washington Free Beacon. This is news as political activism, from a reporter on one America’s three main television networks. The New York Times and Washington Post long since abandoned objective reporting for activism, the opinion page being indistinguishable from the front page.
In a staff meeting with editor Dean Baquet in 2019, a New York Times staffer summed up the New Journalism: “I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.” Here’s the Transcript of the New York Times Town-Hall Meeting
I’m afraid the cause of the odious, evil Charles Manson is being furthered by all these determined efforts at racial division. Building a multi-racial society is the most difficult social experiment in history. Absent goodwill and partnership from all sides, it is impossible. Things looked good for a few decades, but the future is increasingly bleak.