Connexion
Democratic strategist James Carville said Wednesday on MSNBC's "The Beat" that racism in the United States "just slaps you right in the face."
The post Carville: ‘The Racism in this Country Just Slaps You Right in the Face’ appeared first on Breitbart.
LSU star Angel Reese whispered words to Caitlin Clark in the moments after their March Madness thriller that won't sit well with many on the left.
The post The Wokes Will Not Like What Angel Reese Told Caitlin Clark After March Madness Thriller appeared first on Breitbart.
French lawmakers are debating a bill that would ban discrimination over the texture, length, color or style of someone's hair.
The post France Considers Law to Ban ‘Hair Discrimination’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Rep. John Curtis (R-UT), who is running for Senate to replace retiring Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), said in 2017 that former President Donald Trump's border wall carries "pent-up racism."
The post Utah Senate Republican Candidate John Curtis Says Border Wall Carries ‘Pent-Up Racism’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Boston, Massachusetts, Christian leaders are calling on "white churches" to dole out millions of dollars in reparations to black people to rectify their history with slavery.
The post Boston Christian Leaders Call on ‘White Churches’ to Pay Millions in Slavery Reparations appeared first on Breitbart.
Russia has already shown that Western ostracism is not necessarily fatal.
Vladimir Putin’s resounding victory in Russia’s presidential elections will act as a mandate to the Kremlin for fighting the Ukraine war to completion. At the same time, attacks on Russian territory have expectedly increased over the past several weeks as Kiev’s strategic position has steadily deteriorated. In addition to targeting civilian population centers with missile and drone strikes, forces of the pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) have also unsuccessfully attempted to invade and consolidate territory in the direction of Belgorod; such attacks were meant to coincide with the elections and intended to demoralize Russian citizens, thereby increasing pressure on the Putin regime by sending the message that the current administration does not have things under control.
All of this is and was predictable. What is less clear, however, is how the Western world will respond to the increasingly poor prospects for the Ukrainian war effort moving forward. In a March 15 meeting with the highest-ranking members of the Russian security and defense services, Putin specifically referred to the involvement of “foreign mercenaries” and Western-backed Ukrainian forces in the attacks on Belgorod and Kursk. In his initial remarks to the country upon winning reelection, the Russian president again referred to troops from NATO countries operating in Ukraine, and warned of the potential for escalation to “full-scale World War III.” These statements were made only several days after Putin declared in an interview that he would not rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons, should certain “redlines” be crossed in Ukraine.
But such heightened rhetoric is hardly surprising in response to recent statements by Western leaders. Most notably, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has doubled down on his insistence that the possibility of eventually involving foreign troops in Ukraine is indeed possible, if not likely. Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski—husband of Atlantic columnist and prominent spokeswomen of the neoliberal order, Anne Applebaum—lauded Macron’s statements, and reiterated the latter’s evaluation that NATO troop deployments may eventually be called for.
At the same time, the pressure campaign to punish Russia has failed to result in Moscow’s international ostracization, and instead served to accelerate the geopolitical reorientation of the non-transatlantic world. Russia may be just one (and by no means the strongest) of multiple centers of power in this emerging alternative to the “rules-based order”; it has nonetheless illustrated the conditions that must be established in order to successfully break with that previous order, as well as the characteristics of the developing new one.
For one, the Russian economy has largely been able to weather the massive sanctions regime launched against it. A large part of this has been due to its massive capacity for military production. Per the Wall Street Journal, the percent of federal expenditures devoted to defense related industries has jumped by 14 percent since 2020; tank production is 5.6 times greater than it was before the war, and ammunition and drone production are both 17 times greater. NATO intelligence likewise estimates that Russia is currently producing about 250,000 artillery shells per month, which is three times greater than U.S. and European production levels combined.
The broader economic effect of having the country on the war footing has been to stabilize GDP and soften the effect of the sanctions for the Russian population. Russia’s economy beat expectations by growing at 3.6 percent in 2023, higher than all other G7 countries. The IMF predicts growth levels of 2.6 percent this year, twice as much as its previous forecasts; this looks particularly favorable when compared to the 0.9 percent growth level predicted for Europe. And while inflation remains rather high, its effects have been somewhat mitigated by an all-time low unemployment rate of 2.9 percent.
The Russian rouble has likewise proved to be more resilient than expected. The percent of Russian export settlements being conducted in the U.S. dollar or the euro has plummeted from around 90 percent at the beginning of 2022 to less than 30 percent today; meanwhile, those in the rouble have increased from about 10 to more than 30 percent, with the share of transactions being conducted in other currencies—mostly the Chinese renminbi—higher than 40 percent. Despite Western boasting of its campaign to destroy the rouble, the currency has remained relatively stable despite temporary fluctuations, disproving the promises of its impending demise thanks in large part to capital controls (and perhaps an element of loyalty on the part of Russia’s exporting firms).
There is of course legitimate criticism that an economy built upon weapons production inevitably siphons investment from other sectors; Russia’s inflation level may also be representative of the more widespread systemic dangers of relying on massive state spending to keep things running hot. Still, as long as Moscow is able to keep revenue coming in, its deficit should remain manageable.
No single factor in keeping that revenue flowing and subsequently fortifying the Russian economy is more significant than that of its energy trade. At the same time, no single example stands as a better representation of Moscow’s defiance to the West’s punitive measures than the circumvention of Washington’s $60 price cap. Instituted around the beginning of 2023, the intention was to punish Russia by decreasing its revenue from the oil trade; the mechanism through which these caps are enforceable is that Russian ships transporting oil use Western maritime insurance and financial services.
Expectedly, enforcement was largely ineffective at the outset, although the United States has since attempted to crack down. For instance, Washington pledged to increase its enforcement of the oil caps at the end of 2023, with sanctions placed on two tankers due to their flouting of the regulations last October. Most recently, oil shipments headed to India were rerouted to China due to New Delhi’s apprehension of tougher enforcement.
Almost exactly one year since the sanctions really started to bite, and Russian seaborne crude shipments remain high. Even with its massive budget amid the significant defense spending mentioned earlier, Moscow’s current deficit remains manageable at somewhere between 1 and to 2 percent, and the massive windfall from oil revenues will certainly keep the state coffers buoyed for the foreseeable future. Despite temporarily falling below $60/barrel for its Ural crude blend at various points over the past year, the average price has stayed above the price cap; and after starting off 2024 at around $60, the price per barrel at present stands close to $80.
The politics around the oil trade further demonstrates Russia’s hardly isolated position in the international economy. Increased revenue based on such prices as those listed above can be expected for at least the next several months—if not beyond—as OPEC and its partners initiate coordinated oil cuts that will drive up prices. Cuts will take place over the next several months, with Russia choosing to focus on decreasing production rather than exports. One factor in the latter decision is that Ukraine and its Western backers recognize the independence and geopolitical maneuverability that the oil trade gives to Moscow, and have therefore specifically targeted refining facilities with drone and missile strikes as part of their attacks on Russian territory. The cuts to production could provide the needed space to implement repairs.
Of course, the U.S.-led West still exerts enormous influence on the world stage, as represented by India’s denial of the shipments of Russian crude in the face of mounting pressure. Yet Russia at present remains near the top of India’s oil imports, specifically due to the discounted prices since the start of the Ukraine war; New Delhi started off the year with a 41 percent year on year increase of shipments from Russia. It is hard to believe that India will permanently shun Moscow at the behest of Washington, rather than figure out a way to circumnavigate the sanctions regime.
India may look to the United States in helping to balance China, but Russia’s growing relationship with both of the two Asian heavyweights has provided leverage in its geopolitical maneuvering. (Xi and Modi were both among the first to call and congratulate Putin on his electoral victory, as was Mohamed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.) The diverted Sokol oil shipments from India ending up in China is likewise no coincidence; Beijing subsequently set a record for the amount of Russian oil imports for a single month in March. A major meeting between Xi and Putin has also been scheduled for May; it is to be the Russian president’s first trip abroad since winning reelection. Putin reaffirmed that the two leaders share a similar outlook in international relations, ensuring that bilateral cooperation between the two nations will continue to expand in the coming years.
Meanwhile in Europe, Ukraine’s Energy Minister German Galushchenko announced this past Sunday that his country will refuse to prolong a five-year deal on the transport of Russian gas through pipelines in its territory. The agreement expires on December 31, and besides attempting to harm Moscow’s revenue flows further, the halt in gas transits is undoubtedly intended to leverage Ukraine’s position between Russia and energy-hungry NATO members.
The hardball tactics are logical, as Kiev needs to do all it can to tip the scales in favor of greater Western intervention. Over the past several decades, the United States has continually placed Moscow in a position either to accept the fait accompli of NATO expansion at the expense of Russian security interests, or to escalate with force and suffer the consequences of increased economic and political ostracization. This disincentive to avoid escalation has been effectively removed. Explicating the altered state of international relations is not cheerleading for the Russian position—although it may be treated as such by those who disingenuously present any realistic assessment of the situation as “appeasement”—but rather illustrating how Moscow has insulated itself from Western ostracization, thus changing the entire balance of power in not only Europe, but the world.
Now, it is Russia that has the West on the horns of a dilemma: It can either watch the Kremlin achieve its strategic objectives, guaranteed in a one-sided negotiated settlement or through the continued attrition of Ukrainian forces, or it can escalate with force. Putin’s statement regarding nuclear weapons was not mere rhetoric—it was the Russian president defining the limits of the current conflict from a position of authority.
Anything short of total Ukrainian victory is therefore an implicit admission that the “rules-based” economic and political order has been irreversibly altered. Despite getting the premises right, Putin may have subsequently erred in his conclusion that Western leaders understand the Ukraine war as a mere matter of improving their tactical position. With the likelihood of official NATO deployments increasing by the day, the world stands on edge to see where things go next.
The post The ‘Rules-Based Order’ Is Already Over appeared first on The American Conservative.
An American Airlines passenger was arrested after launching a racist rant against fellow travelers and threatening to take the plane down.
The post ‘Blue-Eyed White Devils’: Florida Man Arrested After Racist Rant on American Airlines Flight appeared first on Breitbart.
Unsurprisingly, “anti-racist” teaching methods are not helping students learn in the classroom.
When I founded the 1776 Project, a national super PAC dedicated to electing conservatives who opposed critical theory in the K-12 classrooms, the mainstream media, the teacher’s union, and Democrat politicians insisted that I was peddling unfounded fear to concerned parents. In the three years since I began my mission to flip school boards, it is not only evident that critical theory is alive and well in our nation’s primary and secondary schools, but also becoming a billion-dollar business funded by tax dollars.
The Hayward Unified School District, located in San Francisco’s Bay Area, is host to the failing Glassbrook Elementary, where 474 predominantly Latino children spend a decade barely learning to read, write, or do math. As of last spring, less than 4 percent of students were proficient in math and 12 percent in English.
With the blessing of parents and educators, the school board approved a $250,000 contract with the for-profit company Woke Kindergarten, which specializes in addressing “anti-racism” training for students and teachers through a federal program to improve failing schools. School officials believed that if they could confront the legacy of racism and white supremacy, students’ grades and attendance would improve. The opposite happened.
After two years of using Woke Kindergarten, math and English scores hit new lows despite the district telling the San Francisco Chronicle that attendance had improved and suspension rates were down, allowing the school to get off the state watchlist for failing schools. In fact, not only was Glassbrook still on the watchlist, but their ranking had declined since using the “anti-racism” program.
The massive public outcry from the exposé by the San Francisco Chronicle forced the district to quietly end its contract with Woke Kindergarten. “The controversy was becoming a distraction,” Hayward officials said.
It’s important to note that the district didn’t apologize for wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on a program that didn’t work and was not only openly hostile to the cornerstones of America, but also deeply antisemitic. They didn’t even bother pretending to be ignorant of the program’s intentions or the beliefs of its founder.
“I believe the United States has no right to exist. I believe every settler colony who has committed genocide against native peoples, against Indigenous people, has no right to exist,” Woke Kindergarten founder Akiea Gross said in a recent Instagram post. “Y’all the demons. Y’all are the villains. We’ve been trying to end y’all. Get free of y’all.”
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement, “anti-racism” became popularized by author Ibram X. Kendi with his best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist. The ideology centers around the false notion that racism is the single cause of all racial inequities, from incarceration rates to salaries to educational achievement. Thus, the only way to remedy racism is to be an “anti-racism” activist who looks to promote “anti-racism” discrimination that seeks to remedy all inequities in the world. In other words, race-based discrimination must be used to overturn the systemic problems built in our white colonizer capitalist society. Per Kendi’s own explanation,
The only remedy to negative racist discrimination that produces inequity is positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to past negative racist discrimination that has produced inequity is present positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to present negative racist discrimination toward inequity is future positive antiracist discrimination towards equity.
“Anti-racist” consultants in K-12 education seek to bring this aggressive racialist ideology to the classroom. Even though Gross got booted from Hayward, plenty of other “anti-racist” professionals are making a small fortune peddling this pedagogy to students, teachers, and administrators.
According to Parents Defending Education, consultants have earned over $22 million from public and private funds over the last few years promoting “anti-racism” and DEI trainings—and not just in blue states.
Shockingly enough, tax dollars aren’t the only revenue stream where DEI consultants are making a small fortune. Walmart funded a five-year equity plan for Fayetteville and Bentonville, Arkansas, schools. The Washington Free Beacon reported that the nation’s largest retailer is spending private funds to have a top-down transformation of public schools in its hometown. They hired a North Carolina–based firm known as the Racial Equity Institute to hold teacher training where educators learned that “perfectionism” is “white supremacy” and that “all our systems, institutions, and outcomes emanate from the racial hierarchy on which the United States was built.”
One parent sent the 1776 Project a hidden recording from her son’s class in which his English teacher explicitly told students about the benefits of critical race theory and how to dispel attacks on the theory. The teacher insisted that “CRT can be useful to help us become a better society” and has very little to do with Marxism, neither of which is true.
Professional trainings and equity audits aside, these for-profit “anti-racism” businesses are looking to fundamentally alter curriculum, including the hard sciences.
Rochelle Gutierrez has been working as an education professor at the College of Education within the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne since 1996, helping educators understand how they can reimagine math education to include intersectionality, power dynamics, and social activism. She calls it “rehumanizing math.”
This may seem ridiculous, but Gutierrez has been celebrated in the education community, receiving the “Outstanding Mathematics Teacher Educator Award for Excellence in Scholarship” from the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators in 2011.
Born to an activist Chicano mother, she learned about political activism in her childhood and brought it to math education as an adult.
“Math is dehumanizing students because they ask students to leave their identity at the door and focus on the math process,” Gutierrez said in one speech, deriding the notion that being good at math is a proxy for intelligence. “Mathematics has an unearned privilege in society just like whiteness, a measure to which we judge others, and which becomes normal. Viewing being proficient in math cannot be decoupled from this white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society that we live in,” she continued.
Gutierrez’s decade-long vision is making its way into K-12 education when it was announced that the Pittsburgh Public Schools approved a $50,000 contract with Quetzal Education to provide educators with a new “anti-racist” approach to teaching math.
The recommendation came from Assistant Superintendent Shawn McNeil, who emphasized that “anti-racism” would improve the district’s 11.6 percent proficiency in math among black students.
Quetzal also has contracts with K-12 school districts in Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Hayward, New Haven, and San Mateo, as well as several universities.
There’s no evidence that “anti-racism” training will improve educational achievement among students or reduce racial inequities between Hispanic and black students compared to their white and Asian peers, but that’s not the ultimate goal. “Anti-racism” activists are using education to create a generation of social justice activists who hope to continue their efforts to strip capitalism, “colonization,” and merit from society—and to get wealthy in the process.
The post San Francisco: The Big Money Teaching Racism appeared first on The American Conservative.
A Claremonter’s response to the New York Times.
One advantage of working at the Claremont Institute, which the New York Times recently called “a nerve center of the American right,” is that you get a lot of real-time feedback when you are winning. Of course, not all of that feedback is necessarily pleasant. The left is many things, but it’s not stupid when it comes to realpolitik. If you’re causing real damage to their team, they’ll come after you.
That’s why we’ve been the subject of extended profiles (some more negative than others) in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Atlantic, and other major left-wing publications in just the last couple of years. Not bad for a think-tank whose annual budget is equal to the cost of a few of the missiles that America lobs ineffectually at Houthi tribesmen in Yemen.
Now the Times is back with a front-page above-the-fold Sunday piece calling us “the nexus” that is responsible for the “playbook and thinking” of anti-DEI forces on the right.
Guilty as charged.
The Times article perhaps isn’t a full-on hit piece, although it does a fair bit of bottom-feeding on sarcastic and humorous internal Claremont emails. Yet to be strictly fair, it does occasionally seem to be interested in why we actually take the positions that we do rather than simply screaming “Nazi” at us for not having our thoughts fully vetted by the New York Times editorial board. Yet the only scandal uncovered is that so many right-wing donors are giving to ineffective organizations or losing political candidates, rather than to groups like Claremont that actually move the ball—and the narrative—forward.
Indeed, there is less to the Times report than meets the eye. Principally, they seem scandalized that we are against DEI and America’s current racialist regime. I am not a disinterested observer of this of course. My forthcoming book The Unprotected Class (available for pre-order now and being published in April) is entirely devoted to the rise of anti-white discrimination and racism in America. This rise in racism has been enabled by our DEI and affirmative action regime, and is fundamentally anchored in metastasizing civil rights law and, perhaps even more importantly, subsequent rulings from the unaccountable administrative state.
The Times article was largely pieced together from public records requests, enabled by the fact that some Claremont scholars also have public university affiliations. One could scarcely imagine a similar unprovoked fishing expedition done by the New York Times against a left-wing organization.
The notion that “flippant banter” as my friend David Azerrad appropriately called it—joking remarks that were dashed off in a few seconds for friends and colleagues– somehow represents Claremont’s secret “real” views is comical. Much of the conversation is gallows humor, understandable given the completely marginalized state of conservatives from establishment institutions. The idea that these comments, rather than the ideas Claremont scholars express in books and articles that we painstakingly write and research for weeks, months, and even years, represent our “real” views is a rather ungenerous assessment.
None of my emails popped up in the Times article, but no doubt if you selectively published my (or most other people’s) private correspondence at various times over the thirty or so years I’ve been emailing friends, one could construct a monstrous, and wholly inaccurate, parody of me and my views. Journalism by innuendo is an unsavory way to conduct business.
As to the substance of the article:
Yes, it is true that Claremont does not believe that diversity is our greatest strength. In fact, I have written endlessly and publicly (as have many of my Claremont colleagues) about how, ceteris paribus, diversity is often a weakness.
Yes, it is true Claremont does not think that every racial disparity in outcomes is a result of racism. Indeed, we think this is a pernicious view that, while not necessarily hegemonic in the initial civil rights ideology—King’s “content of their character” vision still has its partisans—has increasingly come to dominate it.
Yes, it is true that Claremont President Ryan Williams and my colleague Scott Yenor have written that the Civil Rights Act, and, most importantly, its administrative and jurisprudential interpretations “have warped American law and culture and traded one set of racial preferences for another.” That is a wholly accurate statement, and in a sane society, would not be controversial.
Yes, it is true that Claremont opposes restrictions of fundamental freedoms, including freedom of association. At times this has been a lonely struggle, but, as Williams and Yenor write, absent that view, America has moved “toward a country with weak, easily controlled subjects cut off from republican control of their government or policy.” We don’t think that’s good for anyone.
Yes, it is true that Claremont would like conservative and traditional ideas of the good, consistent with our Constitutional system, to replace the current far left ideology that runs America’s public schools. The Times is shocked that we have publicly claimed to advocate for diversity while in reality wishing to eliminate leftist ideas from our colleges in schools. This is trivially true in the sense that it is true that I would have wanted to knock out prime-era Mike Tyson in boxing—but in reality, I would have been ecstatic to settle for a draw. Similarly, in 2024, almost everyone at Claremont would be utterly delighted to have ideological balance in our educational institutions rather than our current intransigent and unaccountable left-wing hegemony.
Yes, it is true that, as our Board Chairman Tom Klingenstein wrote, “In support of ridding schools of CRT, the Right argues that we want nonpolitical education,” “No we don’t. We want our politics. All education is political.” This is not necessarily incompatible with some diversity of ideas being presented. But we want our vision of education to be the base, rather than the left’s version, unmoored from the traditions of both the American founding and the West more broadly. This is, again, not a radical notion: The idea of education being inherently political goes back to Plato and Aristotle, if not earlier.
Yes, it is true, as Klingenstein and Yenor have stated, that Claremont believes that “intellectual diversity and free speech are not ends in themselves but means to other important ends, including a vision of education.” This is not a shocking statement, nor is it at all new in conservatism. Indeed, it was the central conceit of William F. Buckley’s 1951 book God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’, arguably the work that kicked off the modern conservative movement.
Yes, it is true that, as Yenor wrote, that Claremont does not believe that “‘the good of minorities’ is the standard by which we judge public policy or the effects of public policy.” We believe that public policy is best when it serves the needs of *all* American citizens, not just minorities.
Yes, it is true that it is our goal “to energize conservative politicians and thinkers, many of whom [we regard] as too timid, or even complicit with a liberal regime infecting American government and business.” Our scholars and leaders say this in public pretty much every day, and you don’t need to read our private emails to find this out.
Yes, it is true that we as an institute are very concerned that Americans do not seem to understand the difference between the generally laudable notion of equality and the entirely pernicious notion of equity—and that we intend to inform them of the difference and fight against the current equity regime.
We believe all these things. And we wish to tell the New York Times and the rest of the liberal grandees that nobody at Claremont is ashamed of what we believe. In the long run, you are going to lose this fight and we will win it. Your false and pernicious vision for America’s future will be replaced with a vision based on the principles of our founding, principles that served America well for centuries, and, with the work of organizations like Claremont, will do so again in the future.
The post The Claremont Institute Is Upsetting the Right People appeared first on The American Conservative.
Why do the statue warriors come after some perceived villains, and not others?
In northern Mexico City, about three miles west of the Palace of San Lazaro, stands a tall monument topped with a bronze statue of Cuauhtemoc, the last Huey Tlatoani, or emperor, of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. On the base of the monument, which was erected almost four centuries after Cuauhtemoc’s defeat at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors, is the following inscription:
A la memoria de Quautemoc y de los guerreros que combatieron heroicamente en defensa de su patria.
Or, in English:
To the memory of Cuauhtemoc and the warriors who battled heroically in defense of their fatherland.
Cuauhtemoc was born into a royal house that ruled over about six million people, from a capital whose size and wealth rivaled the best cities of Western Europe. All of this changed in November of 1519, when the emperor made the ill-advised decision to let Hernan Cortes, who had arrived with a force of about 600 Spaniards and 20,000 Tlaxcaltecs, into the capital for negotiations. In a failed bid to preserve his own life, Montezuma ended up governing as Cortes’s puppet for several months while the Spaniards ransacked the city for gold, until at last they were expelled in an uprising led by the fallen emperor’s brother, Cuitlahuac.
Cuitlahuac died of smallpox after only 80 days on the throne, and the chiefs of the Mexica proclaimed his 25-year-old cousin, Cuauhtemoc, the new Huey Tlatoani. Meanwhile, Cortes had retreated to his base in Tlaxcala, a hardy indigenous republic that had decided to support the Spaniards’ bid to take the place of the Mexica as overlords of what would later be called New Spain.
Within a year, Cortes was back in the Valley of Mexico with an even larger army. All of Cuauhtemoc’s former advantages were gone. Most of his vassals, upon seeing that a new power had arrived in their world, had leapt at the chance to rebel against him, and there were now as many natives attacking Mexico-Tenochtitlan as defending it. Meanwhile the capital, which stood in the middle of a lake and could only be reached by long causeways, was not quite as isolated as before, thanks to a Spanish shipwright named Martin Lopez, who had taught the Tlaxcaltec carpenters how to build lake brigantines, which they carried over the mountains in pieces and reassembled on the shores of Lake Texcoco.
Notwithstanding all these advantages, plus such wonder weapons as steel swords, steel breastplates, horses, and cannon, the siege of Tenochtitlan was no easy battle for Cortes’s men, and the Mexica held out for 79 days. Early on they even won a small victory, when two brigantines chased a fleet of canoes into a reedy thicket, ran aground on submerged palisades, and were taken in an ambush. When the Spaniards had reached the main island, they were often lured into narrow alleyways, or backed against canals, where their weapons and tactics availed them little. More than a hundred Spaniards were taken alive in these skirmishes and sacrificed to the gods; their heads and hands were sent to the Spaniards’ native allies to intimidate them into deserting. It was only with great effort that Cortes kept his army together.
The battle did not end until about half of Tenochtitlan’s inhabitants were dead, and seven-eighths of the city had been razed to the ground. On August 13, 1521, Cuauhtemoc surrendered, fully expecting to be ritually killed in much the same way as his own empire’s defeated foes. Instead, Cortes spared his life—for the next four years. In 1525 he was implicated, along with several other Aztec nobles, in a conspiracy to assassinate Cortes, and the men were hanged from a ceiba tree.
William H. Prescott, the grandson of the hero of Bunker Hill, whose 1843 History of the Conquest of Mexico was largely responsible for introducing these events to the English-speaking world, had this to say of Guatemozin (i.e., Cuauhtemoc):
Such was the sad end of Guatemozin, the last emperor of the Aztecs, if we might not rather call him “the last of the Aztecs,” since, from this time, broken in spirit and without a head, the remnant of the nation resigned itself, almost without a struggle, to the stern yoke of its oppressors. Among all the names of barbarian princes, there are few entitled to a higher place on the roll of fame than that of Guatemozin. He was young, and his public career was not long; but it was glorious. He was called to the throne in the convulsed and expiring hours of the monarchy, when the banded nations of Anahuac and the fierce European were thundering at the gates of the capital. It was a post of tremendous responsibility; but Guatemozin’s conduct fully justified the choice of him to fill it. No one can refuse his admiration to the intrepid spirit which could prolong a defence of his city, while one stone was left upon another; and our sympathies, for the time, are inevitably thrown more into the scale of the rude chieftain, thus battling for his country’s freedom, than into that of his civilized and successful antagonist.
Are these the words of an airy idealist, filled with romantic fantasies of the noble savage? A man so eager to make out the Europeans as villains that he was willing to overlook the brutality of Cuauhtemoc’s empire, and the 20,000 or so human sacrifices it performed each year? Hardly. In another passage, Prescott writes:
The Indian empire was in a manner conquered by Indians…. The Aztec monarchy fell by the hands of its own subjects, under the direction of European sagacity and science. Had it bean united, it might have bidden defiance to the invaders. As it was, the capital was dissevered from the rest of the country, and the bolt, which might have passed off comparatively harmless, had the empire been cemented by a common principle of loyalty and patriotism, now found its way into every crack and crevice of the ill-compacted fabric, and buried it in its own ruins. Its fate may serve as a striking proof, that a government, which does not rest on the sympathies of its subjects, cannot long abide; that human institutions, when not connected with human prosperity and progress, must fall – if not before the increasing light of civilization, by the hand of violence; by violence from within, if not from without. And who shall lament their fall?
Basically, William H. Prescott had a clear enough view of history to see that men worthy of admiration can be found on all sides of a conflict. And while he could hardly regret the final outcome of the war, he could, at the same time, admire the courage and skill that Cuauhtemoc and the other Mexican warriors showed in defense of their homeland, and of the only way of life they had ever known.
Nobody in present-day Mexico is trying to bring back the Aztec system of government, or the religious rites that flourished beneath it. At the same time, nobody is trying to tear down Cuauhtemoc’s statues, or scrub his name off of streets and plazas. Most Mexicans seem to recognize the injustice of erasing a man from history because he didn’t live up to a later culture’s moral principles.
At least, they recognize the injustice of doing that to a non-white man. Europeans such as Cortes himself are different. There are hardly any statues of Cortes left in Mexico, and those that remain are frequent targets of vandalism. This, in a country where everyone alive today, of whatever political persuasion, has a lot more in common with the Spanish viceroys than with the regime that they replaced.
Meanwhile, one country to the north, it is Confederate heroes who have borne the brunt of the double-standard. All of the virtues that Prescott praised in Cuauhtemoc are also to be found in Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Like the Mexica during Cortes’s final siege, they showed great courage and resourcefulness in defending a homeland that—however barbaric its way of life might look to future generations—commanded in them the most natural feelings of patriotic duty. They faced a more numerous, technologically superior enemy, and they held out much longer than might have been expected.
“Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land, which the LORD thy God giveth thee.”
To Christians and Jews, this is one of the Ten Commandments revealed from heaven at Sinai. But it is also ingrained so deeply in mankind’s sense of natural law that one would search in vain for a pagan nation for whom filial piety is not a central virtue. Most of the human beings who ever lived have never seriously doubted the moral lessons that they received, by word and by example, from their parents and older generations.
If you accept the worldview of enlightenment liberalism—or, for that matter, the worldviews of medieval Christendom and biblical Israel that lie at its root—then you will recognize limits to this virtue. Gideon destroyed his father’s altar to Baal; King Asa burned his mother’s idol of Asherah; both are praised by the Biblical narrator for these deeds. Yet Gideon only destroyed the Baal altar after an angel told him to do it, and Asa probably had temple priests to turn him against the cult of Asherah. Left wholly to themselves, neither of these men would have acted; our culture puts hard limits on what even the best of us can do.
Robert E. Lee grew up in the American South, at a time when slavery had been an ordinary part of life since long before the birth of anyone then living. Yet slavery existed uneasily in a nation that justified its own founding with a claim that “all men are created equal.” Meanwhile, that pro- and anti-slavery ministers could peach from the same Bible only added to the confusion.
Over the first 55 years of his life, Lee entertained many doubts about the morality of slavery, and he even manumitted several of his own slaves in 1862. Lee also viewed the secession of the southern states as a dangerous mistake. Yet when the matter came to war, he never doubted which side he would have to fight on: Virginia was his homeland, and defending Virginia from invasion was his duty, and the pricklier points of the slave question didn’t change any of that.
Nathan Bedford Forrest is a harder man to honor than Lee; his brutality toward black Union soldiers during the war, and his role in founding the Ku Klux Klan after it was over, do not reflect well on his character. But like Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet, as a soldier Forrest was ultimately a man fighting to defend his homeland, and the only way of life he had ever known, from violent disruption by outsiders.
When the war broke out in 1861, the 39-year-old Bedford Forrest left behind his prosperous life as a plantation owner and livestock trader to enlist as a private in the Confederate Army (he was the only soldier on either side of the war to be promoted from private all the way to lieutenant general). This sort of courage and dutifulness is nothing to wink at, even in a man whose values are offensive to our own.
If leftists continue to shine the best possible light on Aztec war heroes who literally cut people’s hearts out and offered them to their gods, then they have no real basis for wailing on Forrest. Cuauhtemoc, of course, grew up in a world where opposition to human sacrifice didn’t exist at all. In his country, courage in battle, honest conduct within one’s own social class, and fierce loyalty to one’s tribe were the only virtues—and they were virtues that he displayed par excellence during his short and chaotic life.
To the fair-minded observer, Robert E. Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Cuauhtemoc have much in common with each other—and with many heroes who are generally seen on the “right” side of history, such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, or Volodymyr Zelensky. It is of course rare for leftists to see things this way. They seldom ask about a man’s character, the complex amalgamation of virtues and vices that drive his conduct. Instead, they ask mainly about his race and his social background. Cuauhtemoc and his countrymen were people of color; thus they can only be victims, not oppressors. General Lee? He was a brutal racist.
Defend Lee’s statues, this sort of thinking seems to suggest, and a moment later you’ll be trying to put up statues of Hitler and Himmler. But it is very easy for a thoughtful person to make a distinction here. Hitler and Himmler didn’t grow up in a world where it was acceptable to gas the Jews. The Nazis, and the Communists, fought to introduce new evils to society, not to defend a cultural heritage to which they were bound, despite its flaws, by ancestral custom and natural law. An enormous gulf lies between the Nazis’ death camps and Cuauhtemoc’s human sacrifice, and an even larger one between Nazis and the Confederate generals.
Yet the political left has a way of looking at violence and oppression that effaces all these distinctions. It goes somewhat like this: white on white violence is bad, white on non-white violence is worse, non-white on white violence is unthinkable, and non-white on non-white violence is ignored.
The rule is simple, but it explains a lot of things. Why do anti-gun activists care more about mass shootings (which are mostly white-on-white) than the much deadlier problem of urban gang violence? Because nonwhite-on-nonwhite violence is ignored. Why did the 2015 Charleston church massacre stay at the top of the news for so much longer than did most other mass shootings? Because its perpetrator was white, and its victims were black. Why did the 2016 sniper attack that killed five policemen, and wounded nine others, at a Dallas BLM rally get dropped by the press like a hot rock? Because it was the other way around.
This rule even works at the largest scales of geopolitics. During the Cold War, the United States allied with Red China against the USSR because the nonwhite-on-nonwhite violence of the former was more palatable, to America’s liberal elites, than the white-on-white violence of the latter. Yet the USSR, despised as it was, never had to face anywhere near the hatred from American liberals that the pre-1994 regime in South Africa endured. After all, even though white-on-white violence is bad, white-on-nonwhite violence is worse. And since nonwhite-on-white violence is unthinkable, when people in present-day South Africa sing about killing white farmers, the New York Times writes an op-ed about how the song isn’t hateful.
This same principle explains why minimizing the Holocaust (white-on-white violence) will ruin your career, while minimizing Aztec human sacrifice (nonwhite-on-nonwhite, except for a few Spaniards at the very end) usually won’t. It also explains why it’s so much easier to have a statue of Cuauhtemoc than one of Robert E. Lee. After all, those hundreds of towns and villages that had to send tribute of boys and girls for slavery and sacrifice to Mexico-Tenochtitlan were of course nonwhite, but so were their rulers. So all is forgiven.
Don’t you know your Kendithought? Aren’t you aware that oppression requires whiteness? Hernan Cortes and his companions? Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, and Nathan Bedford Forrest? Those men were evil incarnate. People with a healthy respect for our collective human past—or even just an ounce or two of common sense—will recognize this double standard for the absurdity it is.
The statues of Cuauhtemoc should keep standing, and the statues of Robert E. Lee should also keep standing, and for the same reasons. If we are to learn from the past, and not use it as a mere political football, then we need to preserve the memory of great men in their full human complexity—both admiring their greatness and recognizing their flaws.
We also need to acknowledge that all of us, whatever our race, are subject to the same human failings and weaknesses. Had we lived in the past, we would most assuredly have believed things, and done things, that we find dreadful in the present. And as we live in the present, we will believe things, and do things, that people will find dreadful in the future. If we want future generations to acknowledge our strengths, and not just condemn our weaknesses—to refrain from bulldozing our statues—then we had better learn to extend the same courtesy to the generations that came before us.
The post The Color of Oppression and the Statues We Tear Down appeared first on The American Conservative.
Liberal cities keep handing multi-million-dollar contracts to unqualified, criminal-led nonprofits.
In 2021, King County, Washington, contracted with a nonprofit called Renegades for Life Youth Outreach to provide services to boys at risk of gun violence. This nonprofit was run by a man called “Saleem Robinson,” who claimed to have a Master of Social Work from Seattle University and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Washington. Unfortunately, as the county would later discover, everything about Robinson, from his name to his credentials, was fake.
In reality, Saleem Robinson, whom the county paid over $260,000 to work with at-risk youth, is a registered sex offender who was arrested after a bartender accused him of staring at her while masturbating on multiple separate occasions. At the time, Saleem Robinson went by the name Basim Salim Abdul-Rahim, one of his multiple known false identities. Robinson was convicted on another charge of indecent exposure in 2007, at which time he was calling himself “James Thomas Tribblet.” It is unclear if any of these are Robinson’s real name.
Saleem Robinson, a.k.a. Basim Salim Abdul-Rahim, a.k.a. James Thomas Tribblet, does have some interests outside of public masturbation. He is also a longtime fraudster and con artist. None of the degrees that Robinson claimed to have were real. He told the county he’d earned his Master of Social Work from Seattle University in 2007, but this is impossible, as Seattle University didn’t begin offering that degree until 2018. Additionally, there are no records indicating that Robinson ever attended the University of Washington, despite claiming that school as his alma mater. During the time when he was mentoring at-risk youth on behalf of King County, he was simultaneously under investigation for felony insurance fraud.
How could someone with this criminal pedigree be granted a sizable government contract to mentor at-risk young people? The answer is that King County did not bother background checking any of the nonprofits that they chose to contract with. Even the most cursory attempt at verifying Robinson’s identity would have identified him as a man who should not be hired for an at-risk youth program. Since he claimed to have a degree that wasn’t even offered the year he said he obtained it, Robinson could have been caught in his lies with a single phone call to the university. Instead, King County paid over $200,000 to place young people from broken homes into the care of a sex-offending con artist.
This is not an uncommon occurrence in America’s most performatively progressive jurisdictions. Despite their claims to the contrary, the biggest supporters of privatization in the United States are often socialists. The difference between socialist privatization and conservative privatization is that if an organization calls itself a corporation, then socialists oppose contracting with it to privatize government services; but if an organization calls itself a nonprofit, then suddenly those same socialists are perfectly comfortable letting a private institution seize control of core government functions.
Because the government is contracting with a private entity, people working for that entity don’t always undergo the scrutiny a government employee would be subjected to. Contracting with nonprofits can therefore lead to the direction of public funding towards unscrupulous groups and individuals, because it is simply not feasible that the government could run background checks on all the employees and subcontractors with whom their contracted nonprofits are associated.
Earlier this year, a reporter for Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW investigated a nonprofit called Community Passageways, which King County paid $3.5 million to “prevent youth gun violence and incarceration.” One of the ways that the group does this is through the hiring of “violence interrupters,” whose job is to mentor at-risk young people and prevent them from making bad decisions.
In November 2022, Khalid Adams, a violence interrupter employed by Community Passageways, kicked down his ex-girlfriend’s door and held her new boyfriend at gunpoint. Seattle Wheeler, an 18-year-old cousin of the girlfriend, shot Adams in defense of his family. Wheeler happens to be a client of Community Passageways, one of the same at-risk youths that the organization is supposed to be keeping away from violent situations. Absurdly, a violent domestic abuser working for an organization King County paid $3.5 million to prevent shootings was shot by one of the very young people he had been hired to mentor.
Worse still, Khalid Adams was hired as a violence interrupter a year after pleading guilty to illegal gun possession. Adams wasn’t allowed to own a gun because he is a convicted felon who was previously found guilty of theft, assault, robbery, and rioting.
This problem is not exclusive to Seattle. This summer, Illinois authorized $30 million in funding for a “peacekeepers” program, with a similar goal to Community Passageways. In May of this year, a Chicago “peacekeeper” named Oscar Montes was filmed beating a motorist while wearing his peacekeeper’s uniform, an assault that left the victim partially blind. Montes was hired as a peacekeeper the same month he was released from prison for shooting a rival gang member.
Some nonprofits garner contracts that are so massive it makes a mockery of the term “not-for-profit.” In April, for example, the Portland city council unanimously approved a five-year $50 million contract for the California-based Urban Alchemy to manage the city’s homeless encampments.
Urban Alchemy’s exponential revenue growth would be the envy of any tech company. Five years ago, Urban Alchemy had $36,000 in revenue and a contract with the City of San Francisco to manage public toilets. By 2021, their total revenue had surged to $51,000,000. Its founder, Lena Miller, now commands a salary of $215,000 a year, six times Urban Alchemy’s total annual revenue half a decade ago. Today, Urban Alchemy’s duties include managing homeless encampments and responding to dispatch calls regarding non-violent homeless people.
Like many left-wing nonprofits, Urban Alchemy enjoys hiring convicted felons. Lena Miller has practically bragged that the organization hires people convicted of “murder and attempted murder,” and a number of employees have been involved in extreme acts of violence on the job.
An Urban Alchemy employee got in a shootout in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood in 2021 while in possession of an illegal handgun. Although the employee was convicted, Urban Alchemy rehired him, telling the San Francisco Chronicle they considered him to be acting in self-defense—ignoring his possession of an illegal firearm—and further stating that they intended to promote him.
Another Urban Alchemy worker was shot while on patrol in February 2022 and a second was shot that April; an Urban Alchemy street ambassador was fired earlier this year for brandishing a knife while on-duty; and in November 2022 an Urban Alchemy employee was charged with attempted murder after he shot a man outside a homeless shelter run by the nonprofit while on a break. This is an abnormally large amount of on-duty gun violence related to the employees of a homeless services provider.
Perhaps more importantly, Urban Alchemy is effectively running a private security organization, since they provide security services to homeless shelters and respond to low-priority calls. Nonetheless, they are operating without any of the licensing required by private security contractors under California law. They provide none of the training normally required by security organizations, nor do they abide by regulations mandating background checks. When Sausalito, California, contracted with Urban Alchemy, their city manager said the group was being hired to “provide camp management, security [emphasis added], and support.” It is strange that the city would hire a security contractor that is not legally allowed to provide that service.
None of the above stories are the worst example of nonprofit malfeasance in progressive cities. In the midst of civil unrest in 2020, Seattle decided to fund a “racial justice study,” called the “Black Brilliance Research Project,” via a $3 million no-bid contract. The organization Seattle wanted to run the study was King County Equity Now, a coalition of nonprofits involved in organizing the George Floyd protests.
The city council quickly realized they had a problem. Under Seattle law, no contract larger than $54,000 can be granted without a bidding process, unless the contract is given to a registered nonprofit. At the time, King County Equity Now was not officially registered because it was a coalition of organizations that had not yet incorporated in its own right. Seattle therefore could not directly give the $3 million contract to King County Equity Now.
To get around this obstacle, Seattle gave the contract to Freedom Project, a nonprofit that would handle the money on behalf of King County Equity Now. Freedom Project would then subcontract the work to King County Equity Now, thus allowing the city to funnel the cash to an organization it was not legally allowed to fund directly.
All of this is legal, but there is nonetheless an element of sleaze to it. The law disallowing overly lucrative no-bid contracts exists for a reason. By finding a workaround, the city was violating the spirit of the law, even if their solution was not technically illegal.
From the start, Freedom Project was an odd choice to handle such an enormous contract. Its IRS filings show that in 2019, the year prior to receiving the research contract, Freedom Project’s total revenue was only $260,000. The contract Seattle hired Freedom Project to manage was more than eleven times larger than its total revenue the year before. At no point had Freedom Project ever shown the ability to manage funds of this magnitude, and Seattle provided no oversight to ensure the money was not misspent.
All of this has been reported by local Seattle media, but there is an incredible fact about Freedom Project that, up until now, no media outlet has mentioned: numerous people who work for Freedom Project have a criminal past, meaning Seattle gave one of the largest contracts in city history to an unqualified NGO run by a bunch of convicted felons.
These men’s criminal histories include attempted murder, multiple homicides, and the brutal gang rape of a pregnant 17-year-old girl. According to Freedom Project’s most recent filings with the Washington Secretary of State, three of the organization’s governors are Vidal Vincent, Qudaffi Howell, and David Heppard.
In 2003, Vidal Vincent was driving around Seattle with his brother, Vinson Carter-Vincent. Twelve-year-old Francisco Gutierrez and 9-year-old Jared Hester were biking home after a children’s meeting at a local church and one of the brothers fired a handgun at the children, hitting the sidewalk near their feet.
Later that evening, the Vincents spotted 16-year-old Shannon Thomas standing on a street corner in South Seattle. Vinson Carter-Vincent shot the teenager in the chest, nearly killing him. Thomas lost 40 percent of his blood and was in shock by the time he arrived at Harborview Medical Center. In order to save the boy’s life, part of his lung was removed in surgery. Both brothers were convicted of attempted murder.
The second Freedom Project governor with a felonious past is Qudaffi Howell, currently serving as Freedom Project’s finance director. Howell was arrested after selling an ounce of crack to an undercover police informant named Christopher Pelt. Following his release on bail, Howell began threatening Pelt, whom he concluded was the most likely snitch. Eventually, Howell followed Christopher Pelt to his house, where he committed a drive-by shooting, blowing out every window on Pelt’s car and leaving bullet holes in the fence and kitchen windows of his residence. At the time that Howell committed this drive-by shooting, Pelt’s girlfriend had six-year-old twins and a newborn baby staying in the home, any of whom could have been killed by Howell’s attempt to intimidate a government witness into silence.
The third of Freedom Project’s governors with a criminal history is the worst of the lot. David Heppard, now their executive director, was convicted of gang raping a pregnant 17-year-old, after which he allegedly plotted to have her murdered. He was only 16 years old at the time, but the facts of the case are so incomprehensibly heinous that his age hardly counts as a mitigating factor.
On February 18, 1994, Heppard and five of his friends spotted a five-months pregnant 17-year-old who is referred to in court filings as “J.H.” Cecil Morton III, one of Heppard’s co-defendants, proposed raping J.H. Morton stopped the car and he, Heppard, and a third member of the group forced the pregnant girl into the back seat. She begged them not to hurt her and Morton threatened her into silence with a machete; someone in the vehicle told her that if she didn’t shut up, they would kill her unborn baby.
They drove her into the woods where five or six of them raped her orally and vaginally. J.H. was then forced back into the vehicle completely naked and was ordered to direct them to her apartment. Some of the boys threatened that if she failed to do so, they would murder her and dismember her corpse.
Along the way, Heppard orally sodomized the terrified girl a second time and she was raped by two of his co-defendants upon their arrival. As the pregnant 17-year-old girl was being raped for the third time that night, the boys who weren’t otherwise occupied robbed her apartment, stealing a number of items belonging to her and her boyfriend. They then left the apartment, telling her that if she ratted them out, they would come back to kill her.
Once the boys were gone, their victim called a friend, who contacted the police on her behalf. Coincidentally, Heppard and his partners in crime were pulled over by Pierce County police officers at the same time the rape was reported. A call came over their radio regarding the assault, but the cops did not make the connection between the rape and the teenagers they were questioning; however, the rapists heard the report and were now aware that their victim had contacted the police. Heppard and Morton allegedly began plotting to have the girl murdered, but were arrested before she could be silenced.
Looking through the male employees at Freedom Project, it is difficult to find one who isn’t a violent ex-con. In 2017, Daniel McInally was serving as Freedom Project’s president and was listed as a governor in their state filings. Fifteen years earlier, Daniel McInally, who was 32-years-old at the time, raped his 13-year-old cousin twice. This was the second child rape of which McInally was found guilty. While still a teenager, he was convicted for molesting a 5-year-old girl.
Freedom Project’s Facilitator and Community Engagement Specialist, Eugene Youngblood, was released from prison in March 2021 for two counts of first degree murder. Meanwhile, the head of its credible allies program was convicted of murder in 2001 after kicking her three-year-old daughter to death. The daughter, Zy’Nyia Nobles, was reunited with her mother in February of 2000, after spending her entire life in foster care. Her mother beat the girl to death three months later.
Horrendous though these acts might be, some would argue that the crimes of the past shouldn’t haunt people for the rest of their lives and they ought to be allowed to move on once they have served their sentences. This is a reasonable enough position. However, if someone has committed felonies of sufficient severity, then that person must prove that he has reformed before being trusted to handle taxpayer money.
In the specific case of Freedom Project, they do not require any evidence of reform before hiring people to serve in executive positions. Most of the felons working for Freedom Project were hired shortly after release, making it impossible to know if they have reformed. It is one thing to hire a man as finance director if he’s kept his nose clean for years after his prison sentence, but hiring that same person in a position of major responsibility within months of his release is an act of irresponsibility.
Freedom Project’s willingness to hire murderers and rapists directly out of prison has resulted in proven instances where their recent hires went on to reoffend. An archived version of Freedom Project’s website shows that in January 2022, Parris Miller was working as director of operations. Parris Miller was released from prison less than a year earlier after serving 22 years in prison for second degree murder.
As it turned out, Miller was not quite as reformed as Freedom Project may have preferred. In September 2022, only 8 months after he was hired as director of operations, Parris Miller shot a man to death following an argument in a gas station parking lot and was found guilty of first-degree murder. It is likely he will never again see the outside of a prison cell.
In 2021, King County gave Freedom Project a $977,000 grant “to address disproportionate drug enforcement impacts.” This is on top of the $3 million grant Seattle gave Freedom Project to run the Black Brilliance Research Project. Freedom Project was granted at least $4 million by King County and the City of Seattle over a three-year period, during which time it had an executive director who was a convicted gang rapist, a finance director who dealt drugs and committed a drive-by shooting, and a recently released murderer who would shortly go on to reoffend as director of operations.
Unsurprisingly, this money was horrifically mismanaged. Following a disagreement, Freedom Project cut King County Equity Now out of the project entirely. They then breached their contract with the city by taking on subcontractors without city council approval.
The final Black Brilliance Research Project report is undeniably magnificent. It runs to nearly 1,300 pages. However, approximately 1,100 pages are appendices in which the Black Brilliance Research Project team reprinted preexisting work that was not done as part of the research project itself. Seattle spent $3 million on a racial justice study and only 15 percent of the final report was conducted by the people they paid to write it.
Which raises the obvious question of where the money went. Seattle City Council Insight, a local news website, dug into the project’s paperwork hoping to answer this question. What they found was that the project’s research lead received $300 an hour, despite claiming to be a volunteer; an organization called Sacred Community Connections was paid $78,000 to contribute five pages, mostly advertisements; East African Community Services received $722,000 for 80 pages, netting $9,025 per page; and Black Trans Prayer Group, which isn’t even based in Seattle, received $116,000 to produce eight pages and a video to be released later. The most egregious misuse of funds was $443,000 directed to a nonprofit called “Bridging Cultural Gaps” for 20 pages and 19 researchers, or $22,000 per page and 1.05 pages per researcher. Most of its contribution consists of powerpoint slides.
To recap: Seattle gave $3 million to an unqualified nonprofit that had gang rapists, murderers, child killers, and drive-by shooters working in major positions, which proceeded to onboard a bunch of subcontractors without first getting those subcontractors approved by the city, as was required by the terms of their contract. Hundreds of thousands of dollars taken from the good taxpayers of Seattle were siphoned off to politically connected NGOs, most of which performed work that was comically insufficient to justify their pay.
It will come as no surprise what policies are advocated by the research project produced by this process. The final report advocates massive police defunding, with one of the appendices demanding that the Seattle Police Department have its funding cut in half. One section of the report, written by Freedom Project itself, argues that violent offenders ought to be treated no more severely than those convicted of a non-violent drug crime. They claim that within five years of release, “only 39 percent of people convicted of violent offenses committed a new crime, as compared to 50.8 percent of people convicted of property crimes, and 42.8 percent of individuals convicted of drug offenses.” Thus, “people who commit a violent act are not inherently violent, and that act of violence represents only a single moment in someone’s life.”
This entire argument is self-serving. If you dig into the evidence on recidivism, the primary reason violent offenders have lower recidivism rates is because their prison sentences are longer and they are older upon release. As a 2021 study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics notes, “people released at age 24 or younger were 64 percent more likely to be reincarcerated at year five (56.8 percent) than those released at age 40 or older (36.3 percent).” If America reduced prison sentences for violent offenders, as Freedom Project advocates, then violent criminals would be released at younger ages and their likelihood of reoffending would increase.
A recent report from The Sentencing Project, an organization that supports reduced sentences for violent offenders, unintentionally proved that it is extremely dangerous to release the most violent criminals earlier. According to the report, only 2 percent of murderers and 1 percent of violent criminals are rearrested for murder within five years of release. However, 22 percent of convicted killers and 33 percent of violent felons will be rearrested for a violent crime over the following five years. In plain numbers, this means that if the United States released 100,000 violent criminals, we could expect 1,000 of them to be rearrested for murder and 33,000 of them to be rearrested for a violent crime within five years.
It is blatantly obvious why this $3 million report is filled with pro-criminal falsehoods. If you hire criminals to handle a report on policing and incarceration, those felons will tell you that criminals are victims of society and should be lightly punished. By giving this contract to Freedom Project, Seattle guaranteed that the report they were paying for would be too biased to have any value as a policy document.
The propensity of progressive cities to hand millions of dollars to unqualified, criminal-led nonprofits is made all the more infuriating by their unwillingness to learn from their mistakes or accept personal responsibility. Shortly after the conclusion of the Black Brilliance Research Project, a state auditor’s report found that the city had operated with a “bare minimum of accountability and transparency.” In spite of this damning indictment, the city council celebrated that the auditor found no legal violations. Incredibly, the people responsible for this catastrophe seem to consider themselves totally vindicated because an otherwise searing auditor’s report concluded that nothing they did was technically illegal. As every morally corrupt politician knows, technically legal is the best kind of legal there is.
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