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conservatives, Eric Holder, gangs, liberals, progressives, public defender, race, racial tribalism
credit: washingtonpost.com
During my police years, I generally got along well with defense attorneys. While they were careful about making any admissions against the interests of their clients, the people I arrested, we would often laugh about their client’s exploits, and I’d kid them unmercifully about potential defenses for the indefensible.
Some defense attorneys were not likeable people. They not only hated the police, they identified with their clients, encouraging their delusions. Some even helped them commit crimes. I found most of these people, usually male, used drugs–in many cases, their clients were their suppliers–and often wore ponytails. Go figure.
But some were rational people, doing a necessary job, but never losing sight of the fact that we need jails, and some people absolutely need to be there for the benefit of us all. They also understood that culture matters, it matters a very great deal, and because of it, they were doomed to represent the same people, over and over again, punctuated only by short spans in prison.
A regular reader, “pre-Boomer Marine brat,” provided the link to an article that took me back to those days, because it was a virtual echo of some of the conversations I had with defense attorneys, and others working in the criminal justice and public health fields (EMTs, the occasional rational psychologist, social workers, etc.). It’s the lessons learned by a Liberal defense attorney, anonymous for obvious reasons. I’ve no doubt it will cause many progressives to immediately scream “RACISM,” but such people usually scream loudest when their beliefs are being exposed as lies, when their rhetoric is obliterated by fact.
credit: wnd.com
Former Attorney General Eric Holder (it feels so good to say “former AG”) once called Americans cowards because they aren’t fond of being harangued about racism they don’t possess. As regular readers know, all race cards had been cancelled at SMM before I posted my first article back in 2011. Here then, a few examples from the article:
I am a public defender in a large southern metropolitan area. Fewer than ten percent of the people in the area I serve are black but over 90 percent of my clients are black. The remaining ten percent are mainly Hispanics but there are a few whites.
I have no explanation for why this is, but crime has racial patterns. Hispanics usually commit two kinds of crime: sexual assault on children and driving under the influence. Blacks commit many violent crimes but very few sex crimes. The handful of whites I see commit all kinds of crimes. In my many years as a public defender I have represented only three Asians, and one was half black.
As a young lawyer, I believed the official story that blacks are law abiding, intelligent, family-oriented people, but are so poor they must turn to crime to survive. Actual black behavior was a shock to me.
While I worked in areas with relatively small black populations, the proportions the author mentions are familiar to any honest cop of any race.
Most blacks are unable to speak English well. They cannot conjugate verbs. They have a poor grasp of verb tenses. They have a limited vocabulary. They cannot speak without swearing. They often become hostile on the stand. Many, when they testify, show a complete lack of empathy and are unable to conceal a morality based on the satisfaction of immediate, base needs. This is a disaster, especially in a jury trial. Most jurors are white, and are appalled by the demeanor of uneducated, criminal blacks.
It has been my experience that jurors aren’t racist. In fact, most go out of their way to avoid even the appearance of racial bias, but as the author notes, some people are their own worst enemies. If you’re judging someone, and you have only a few hours, or days, of observation, and no opportunity to ask questions, their demeanor, speech, attitude and apparent humanity are the only factors you have to make that judgment.
As a public defender, I have learned many things about people. One is that defendants do not have fathers. If a black even knows the name of his father, he knows of him only as a shadowy person with whom he has absolutely no ties. When a client is sentenced, I often beg for mercy on the grounds that the defendant did not have a father and never had a chance in life. I have often tracked down the man’s father–in jail–and have brought him to the sentencing hearing to testify that he never knew his son and never lifted a finger to help him. Often, this is the first time my client has ever met his father. These meetings are utterly unemotional.
Many black defendants don’t even have mothers who care about them. Many are raised by grandmothers after the state removes the children from an incompetent teenaged mother. Many of these mothers and grandmothers are mentally unstable, and are completely disconnected from the realities they face in court and in life. A 47-year-old grandmother will deny that her grandson has gang ties even though his forehead is tattooed with a gang sign or slogan. When I point this out in as kind and understanding way as I can, she screams at me. When black women start screaming, they invoke the name of Jesus and shout swear words in the same breath.
I often saw this utter lack of empathy for others, the unemotional aspect. Such people are unemotional about the suffering of others, but delight in taunting them, finding their agony hilarious.
I am a liberal. I believe that those of us who are able to produce abundance have a moral duty to provide basic food, shelter, and medical care for those who cannot care for themselves. I believe we have this duty even to those who can care for themselves but don’t. This world view requires compassion and a willingness to act on it.
It’s fascinating how the author can come so far in understanding the world as it is rather than as it should be, yet still resist coming the rest of the distance. The duty about which the author speaks is a moral duty, not a legal duty. Charity is freely and lovingly given, charity forced is taxation and/or theft.
Progressives tend to give little or nothing to the poor, while Conservatives give a great deal. Is this because Progressives are heartless? Generally not, but they tend to think in terms of policy and groups, not individuals. Their political belief is it is government’s job to provide for the poor, and such provision must come from taxes–other people’s money. Therefore, their charitable obligations are covered by wise Progressive policy, not by directly giving of their resources and time. Conservatives tend to take the lesson of the Good Samaritan to heart and give when they see the opportunity. They don’t think it’s up to others, nor do they think they have a right to spend the money of others.
By all means, gentle readers, take the link and read the article. It will demonstrate, at the least, why it is going to be so hard to deal with the damage racial tribalism causes. Erik Holder was wrong: Americans aren’t afraid to deal with race. They’re just tired of being called racists for pointing out racial and cultural problems, and coming up with rational and effective means to solve them.
Stately McDaniel Manor 
I sound like a broken record on this topic, but until the black community commits to resolving its own problems, nothing will change. It’s just that now that the country is returning to the rule of law after a lawless 8 years, more of them will be going to or returning to prison. I think one of Obama’s legacies (and Holder’s/Lynch’s) has been to take a good deal of power away from the word “racism.” Over the last 8 years, many people have come to realize how they’ve been controlled and silenced and manipulated for decades by threats of being called racist. The awakening is not a happy one, just an acknowledgement that it’s no longer necessary to pretend the problems in today’s black community rest anywhere but at the feet of those in that community. It can also trigger some righteous anger that while so many of us are busting it out here to make ends meet, our tax dollars are being used to prop up groups of people who think we somehow owe it to them. Inner city blacks in particular seem to very much want to move far away from anything “white,” which leaves them with very limited options for making a decent life for themselves. There are only so many sports and hip hop stars and “concert promoters.” I wish them luck, but I’d like my tax dollars spent elsewhere. Since I know I’m not alone in my thinking, I do wonder how long it will be before the big government-loving, “here’s your handout” Dems will regain control.
“It’s fascinating how the author can come so far in understanding the world as it is rather than as it should be, yet still resist coming the rest of the distance.”
— Trivia Alert —
The resistance is not all that unusual, even among humans with serious ability to look history and events clearly in the eye. Reading the sentence, I was instantly reminded of Twenty-Three Years, by ‘Ali Dashti.
Dashti was an Iranian Senator and prolific author, jailed by the Shah for his writings, then thrown back into jail when the theocrats took over. Dashti’s Twenty-Three Years had been published anonymously in Beirut, but word had gotten out. Late in 1981, the theocracy released him from Evin Prison just days before he died from the effects of extreme torture.
The book is a clear-eyed look at many elements in the formative history of what became Islam. It pulls together a lot which I’ve found elsewhere, ranging from Lewis and Pipes to traditional Islamic and revisionist Muslim sources.
But Western-rational as he was, when Dashti comes to the alleged radical change in Mohammad’s thinking and behavior in Medina, Dashti can’t take it further. His Western education crumbles as he writes that Mohammed’s true “inner self” had emerged. [1]
Suddenly and stunningly, he reverses literary course from where he had been taking his description of Mohammad’s character. He’d previously cited evidence that Caliph Uthman’s scribes had, in fact, seriously revised sections of the Quran as they compiled the official version. He could easily have drawn out the hypothesis. The circumstantial and literary evidence supporting such is damning.
There are two Mohammads, one of the Quran’s Mecca chapters, and another of the Medina chapters and the hadith. The former came out of a Judeo-Christian background, was monogamous for 25 years with his first wife, and preached like an Old Testament prophet. The latter behaves as a jingoist, a warlike Arab tribal leader (in a phrase, precisely like an Umar would.) The former chapters are described as poetic, written in the classical Arabic literary style of the day. The Medina chapters’ prose is starkly pedestrian, much of it merely concerned with justifying things which have been done.
There is evidence that the Medina chapters were forged, done at the behest of Umar and Uthman, who wanted justification for Empire. Likewise, most of the hadith (the foundation of Islamist fascism), are probably forgeries.
From what was put into Twenty-Three Years, I have a strong hunch that Dashti was VERY familiar with that evidence, …. but something in the man could only go so far.
1. F.R.C. Bagley translation — Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, CA, 1994 — page 80, bottom paragraph
pre-Boomer Marine brat
Good stuff and extremely well written. Perhaps there should be a “pre-Boomer Marine brat” blog!
Thank you very much, Allyn, but no.
I was one of the cultural conservatives (not just political) over at LGF a decade ago. Then until a year-and-a-half ago at Correspondence Committee. I left there because one of the regulars kept calling me a “Muslim-loving pseudo American who’s helping destroy the country I love” and emailing vague but actionable threats.
I bite my tongue enough on overseas websites. I’ve gotten kudos on (Kurdish) Rudaw, but also enough down-dings to know that if some can ID and find me, I’ll be in physical danger.
I was thinking just recently that Holder was right in calling us a “nation of cowards” about racial discussions, since liberals had taken it upon themselves to become a nation of character assassins to anyone who disagreed with them about race.
The idea that “blacks commit crimes because they’re poor” is debunked by the Great Depression. Blacks were extremely poor, but not plagued by illegitimacy, the crime rate among blacks was far lower than today. Amazing what two parent families do to prevent gang membership and crime.