Normally I would be instantly out the moment someone suggests, much less deigns to do without any consultation, to use superstition as a means of "outreach" using my money.
It is only my respect for Glenn that prevents me from cancelling my patronage immediately.
On schools, here's a quote from Freddie DeBoer that I so totally agree with I'm sharing it! (The Cult of Smart)
"Here’s a basic point I’ve been making for at least a dozen years, including in my book, and will now do again: the educational function of public schools, while certainly of prime importance, is the secondary function of public schools. The first function is giving children warm, safe places where they can be stimulated and looked after, and where they can access cheap or free meals if they need them. The humanitarian good of this function dwarfs that of the education function."
I have a quandry. First blacks complain that they pay more at local stores. As I recall this was born out by a study that found this to be true. When the rioting and looting starts in these communities, who is in the forefront? Blacks don't seem to defend their neighborhoods. What does this mean? After things have settled down, does a would be store owner want to start up in that neighborhood? Does the insurance company want to offer him a policy? Will the premiums be higher or lower than other places in the city?
Awhile back I watched Washington DC. Black parents wanted school choice so that their kids could get a better education. The teachers' union opposed this. Blacks elected Democrats who took the unions money and ignored the parents. So the kids will grow up and fall into the same life styles,
Ty Glenn and Bob; I sincerely appreciate your insights and courage. I can’t imagine the sacrifices you have made to fight the good fight.
The KKK could not have engineered as crushing and diabolical policy and process as Democrats have done to persecute blacks; they have blacks killing blacks, black government leaders teaching that blacks are inferior and need massive extra help throughout their life, forcing black children in to unsafe and abysmal schools resulting in self-fulfilled prophecy of inferior aptitude. This has been going on since the 70’s and I expect it will only get worse in this decade because the culture now is too broken to fix in a few years. Another generation of blacks lost (killed, maimed, jailed, discarded, etc) due to Democrat Party while an embarrassingly small percentage make it through sheer courage and willpower or victim granting affirmative action quotas. The Democratic Party is the KKK except far more effective at ruining black lives.
Mr. Woodson says: '80 percent of blacks living in those communities are against defund the police.' Yet Atlanta just elected a Mayor who ran on a defund the police platform. I do not believe anybody gets elected Mayor in Atlanta with only 20 percent of the black vote. So, if the people living in the neighborhoods most affected by the defund the police movement don't like what is happening, perhaps they should change their voting habits.
Among other things, our Constitution guarantees every citizen a right to be free of "Domestic Violence" (which includes things like riots, widespread crime, etc."). It's time for people in these blighted areas to begin filing criminal charges against those responsible for these policies for violating the rights (class action - millions of charges) of citizens adversely impacted by clearly pro-crime policies.
Each violation of an individual's rights carries a sentence up to 10 years in prison. Start putting some of these Soros wonks in prison for a few millenia, this nonsense will stop magically almost overnight.
I live in Seattle, WA and can attest to the rapid descent of our city culture. I work with small business support in Seattle’s southend and can tell horror stories from the past two years. In the past 6 months alone, four people have died within 400 yards of the Mt. Baker Light Rail Station, the heart of the area I serve. Preschoolers were witness to the first gang murder of a teenaged youth waiting at the bus stop.
I’m now quoting a beloved local restaurant owner whose first name is Drea: “The neighborhood as a whole is no longer thriving, it's stagnant and depressing and sad and feels more volatile and unsafe than any previous times.
We've had windows smashed out on both our food truck and restaurant this past month. And just last week I was politely trying to get a homeless man to leave when another customer threw his phad thai across the table and told me we are shit for trying to kick the homeless man out. This homeless man has been trespassed from our property by SPD for multiple prior engagements including wearing no pants/underwear, verbally threatening my employees, entering without a mask, entering with a weapon, stealing, damaging property, spitting, bleeding, etc. And as I tried to explain our position to the phad thai thrower he just told me he had no interest in my explanation. It's really disappointing and discouraging to be a small business owner on Rainier Ave right now.”
Drea single handedly raised almost $45K in a Go Fund Me campaign and a community auction, to help one of her line cooks’ families survive him being in a hit and run accident on Feb. 1, 2021, as he walked home from work at midnight. Medics told her they hadn’t expected him to survive the trip to the hospital because his blood loss was so great, and then he had two thoracic surgeries to get all internal bleeding stopped. Drea had a sitting down, peeling potatoes kind of job ready for him after 3 months, so his health insurance could continue unabated, hoping all the while that his body would be able to engage. She’s a saint in my book.
What I see in Seattle is a general lack of competence among the elected officials. Add to that progressive rhetoric about race and equity matters. Our past Mayor, who made Seattle famous because of the ‘Chop’ fiasco here after the George Floyd riots, may have arguably been a great prosecutor in her earlier career, but she lacked the spine and know how to prevent or then manage the rioters that overtook Seattle two summers ago. The same is true of our progressive City Council. They fly high with ideals but don’t understand the nuts and bolts of how things work for a community to thrive.
A friend of mine was in the Seattle Mayor’s race last year. When I asked him how he would have managed the riots as Mayor this was his answer:
1. When Minneapolis went up in flames, Seattle had two days before the riots would end up
here as well.
2. All the buildings in downtown Seattle would have been sprayed with anti graffiti paint and
the ground floor windows covered with plywood.
3. He would have a meeting with the heads of all the activist groups and ask them to create
a list of followers in their groups and be able to identify them in a crowd.
4. He would have identified a downtown street for folks to peacefully gather, have police
lined up single file down both sides of that street, and usher the collected crowd to the
football stadium where a stage with microphones would be ready for an organized
demonstration. We have a stadium in downtown Seattle near the ferry terminal.
5. The activist leaders would alert police to the faces in the crowd
that they did not know, a step to keep the anticipated looters and anarchists from
infiltrating the crowd as much as possible.
When I asked Lance how he knew this, he answered that this was how the marches were run in the Civil Rights Movement. Lance is from Georgia and his grandfather was one of three people that approached Martin Luther King Jr. while he was in Divinity School to lead the Civil Rights Movement. Lances grandfather was a businessman and his job was to bring forward the funding for the movement. Whether this would have worked in today’s world, I don’t know, but I do know that it filled me with confidence. I’m sorry Lance didn’t win, and I wish our new Mayor well.
Thank you Professor Loury for these conversations, I can’t tell you enough how much I think they help my blood pressure as I deal with people in Seattle that seem to think the way forward progressively is to keep improving on the lie.
Here’s a little treat that shows the better part of my neighborhood, one of many filmed businesses/organizations to promote the SE Seattle area right before the pandemic.
You know who pays the cost of The War on (some) Drugs and other failed Conservative policies? Poor people, overwhelmingly poor Black families.
It is disingenuous to complain about "Progressive" policies without giving them historical framing. Giving 1/3 of young Black men criminal records has a huge impact on Black communities abilities to form families, Black men's ability to find meaningful employment and the ability of Black's to generate and keep wealth.
The criminal justice system has been racist for generations. This has been documented in many studies, as well as just looking with your own eyes and with common sense.
Is it worse to lock up young men who will mostly improve their lives in a few years or is it worse for a community so suffer a modest increase in crime? I don't know the answer and neither do you. The right answer is to ask the community, not come in with come kind of savior complex, telling poor people what do with, with no understanding of what it is like to be poor and with no understanding of community dynamics.
I grew up poor. I have 11 siblings and five are men. We have all been arrested at one point or another. At least two have had their lives ruined by felony convictions, one caused by the ****** "War on Drugs", which has been failure by any standard.
Conservatives have no answer to the problems of poor communities. All they can do is cut funding for housing and food for the poor and then point fingers at our communities failures.
At least the original progresses were honest about the evil they were doing.... Today's progressives actually think they're good people... God save us from unaccountable do-gooders...
I tried having these conversations with my friends in the Brooklyn/Bay Area bubble during last summer's Floyd freakout, simply stating that this whole notion that police can be replaced by social workers was incredibly naive and dangerous, but 1) these are mostly people who've either grown up safely in suburbia or the much-safer-than-before cities of the past 20ish years, so they have no conception of crime, and 2) in the social media age, "discussing politics" is only and entirely a performance on Twitter that has absolutely nothing to do with what us older folks think of as the traditional purpose of politics, ie what are the best allocation of resources and what problems need clear and reasonable fixing, etc.
Political positions and discussions now exist entirely in the realm of the cultural, meaning sadly, that things like Defund the Police or Abolish the SAT are simply the new skinny jeans or plaid shirt that every cool kid must have.
None of this would matter much except for the fact that the perpetually neurotic blue-check Twitter class is the Democratic donor base and braintrust, so they set much of the national agenda (no matter how obviously silly and no matter how quickly their crowd-sourced dogma changes).
Dr. Loury, maybe in a future podcast you can unpack the Seattle initiative to lessen, in the name of social justice, penalties on drive-by shootings. Surely a topic worthy of one of your patented rants.
Normally I would be instantly out the moment someone suggests, much less deigns to do without any consultation, to use superstition as a means of "outreach" using my money.
It is only my respect for Glenn that prevents me from cancelling my patronage immediately.
On schools, here's a quote from Freddie DeBoer that I so totally agree with I'm sharing it! (The Cult of Smart)
"Here’s a basic point I’ve been making for at least a dozen years, including in my book, and will now do again: the educational function of public schools, while certainly of prime importance, is the secondary function of public schools. The first function is giving children warm, safe places where they can be stimulated and looked after, and where they can access cheap or free meals if they need them. The humanitarian good of this function dwarfs that of the education function."
REQUEST - could you please make the full version available on substack again! All that's showing is the 8 minute version.
Where's the rest of the show? It's only showing as 8 minutes, but I think it was about an hour when I first checked a few days ago.
I have a quandry. First blacks complain that they pay more at local stores. As I recall this was born out by a study that found this to be true. When the rioting and looting starts in these communities, who is in the forefront? Blacks don't seem to defend their neighborhoods. What does this mean? After things have settled down, does a would be store owner want to start up in that neighborhood? Does the insurance company want to offer him a policy? Will the premiums be higher or lower than other places in the city?
Awhile back I watched Washington DC. Black parents wanted school choice so that their kids could get a better education. The teachers' union opposed this. Blacks elected Democrats who took the unions money and ignored the parents. So the kids will grow up and fall into the same life styles,
Why is it called "progressive policy"? Socialistic and Communistic policy is already proved to be a regressive policy.
Ty Glenn and Bob; I sincerely appreciate your insights and courage. I can’t imagine the sacrifices you have made to fight the good fight.
The KKK could not have engineered as crushing and diabolical policy and process as Democrats have done to persecute blacks; they have blacks killing blacks, black government leaders teaching that blacks are inferior and need massive extra help throughout their life, forcing black children in to unsafe and abysmal schools resulting in self-fulfilled prophecy of inferior aptitude. This has been going on since the 70’s and I expect it will only get worse in this decade because the culture now is too broken to fix in a few years. Another generation of blacks lost (killed, maimed, jailed, discarded, etc) due to Democrat Party while an embarrassingly small percentage make it through sheer courage and willpower or victim granting affirmative action quotas. The Democratic Party is the KKK except far more effective at ruining black lives.
Mr. Woodson says: '80 percent of blacks living in those communities are against defund the police.' Yet Atlanta just elected a Mayor who ran on a defund the police platform. I do not believe anybody gets elected Mayor in Atlanta with only 20 percent of the black vote. So, if the people living in the neighborhoods most affected by the defund the police movement don't like what is happening, perhaps they should change their voting habits.
Among other things, our Constitution guarantees every citizen a right to be free of "Domestic Violence" (which includes things like riots, widespread crime, etc."). It's time for people in these blighted areas to begin filing criminal charges against those responsible for these policies for violating the rights (class action - millions of charges) of citizens adversely impacted by clearly pro-crime policies.
Each violation of an individual's rights carries a sentence up to 10 years in prison. Start putting some of these Soros wonks in prison for a few millenia, this nonsense will stop magically almost overnight.
Another great example of this idiocy... https://nypost.com/2022/01/04/manhattan-da-alvin-bragg-to-stop-seeking-prison-in-some-cases/
I live in Seattle, WA and can attest to the rapid descent of our city culture. I work with small business support in Seattle’s southend and can tell horror stories from the past two years. In the past 6 months alone, four people have died within 400 yards of the Mt. Baker Light Rail Station, the heart of the area I serve. Preschoolers were witness to the first gang murder of a teenaged youth waiting at the bus stop.
I’m now quoting a beloved local restaurant owner whose first name is Drea: “The neighborhood as a whole is no longer thriving, it's stagnant and depressing and sad and feels more volatile and unsafe than any previous times.
We've had windows smashed out on both our food truck and restaurant this past month. And just last week I was politely trying to get a homeless man to leave when another customer threw his phad thai across the table and told me we are shit for trying to kick the homeless man out. This homeless man has been trespassed from our property by SPD for multiple prior engagements including wearing no pants/underwear, verbally threatening my employees, entering without a mask, entering with a weapon, stealing, damaging property, spitting, bleeding, etc. And as I tried to explain our position to the phad thai thrower he just told me he had no interest in my explanation. It's really disappointing and discouraging to be a small business owner on Rainier Ave right now.”
Drea single handedly raised almost $45K in a Go Fund Me campaign and a community auction, to help one of her line cooks’ families survive him being in a hit and run accident on Feb. 1, 2021, as he walked home from work at midnight. Medics told her they hadn’t expected him to survive the trip to the hospital because his blood loss was so great, and then he had two thoracic surgeries to get all internal bleeding stopped. Drea had a sitting down, peeling potatoes kind of job ready for him after 3 months, so his health insurance could continue unabated, hoping all the while that his body would be able to engage. She’s a saint in my book.
What I see in Seattle is a general lack of competence among the elected officials. Add to that progressive rhetoric about race and equity matters. Our past Mayor, who made Seattle famous because of the ‘Chop’ fiasco here after the George Floyd riots, may have arguably been a great prosecutor in her earlier career, but she lacked the spine and know how to prevent or then manage the rioters that overtook Seattle two summers ago. The same is true of our progressive City Council. They fly high with ideals but don’t understand the nuts and bolts of how things work for a community to thrive.
A friend of mine was in the Seattle Mayor’s race last year. When I asked him how he would have managed the riots as Mayor this was his answer:
1. When Minneapolis went up in flames, Seattle had two days before the riots would end up
here as well.
2. All the buildings in downtown Seattle would have been sprayed with anti graffiti paint and
the ground floor windows covered with plywood.
3. He would have a meeting with the heads of all the activist groups and ask them to create
a list of followers in their groups and be able to identify them in a crowd.
4. He would have identified a downtown street for folks to peacefully gather, have police
lined up single file down both sides of that street, and usher the collected crowd to the
football stadium where a stage with microphones would be ready for an organized
demonstration. We have a stadium in downtown Seattle near the ferry terminal.
5. The activist leaders would alert police to the faces in the crowd
that they did not know, a step to keep the anticipated looters and anarchists from
infiltrating the crowd as much as possible.
When I asked Lance how he knew this, he answered that this was how the marches were run in the Civil Rights Movement. Lance is from Georgia and his grandfather was one of three people that approached Martin Luther King Jr. while he was in Divinity School to lead the Civil Rights Movement. Lances grandfather was a businessman and his job was to bring forward the funding for the movement. Whether this would have worked in today’s world, I don’t know, but I do know that it filled me with confidence. I’m sorry Lance didn’t win, and I wish our new Mayor well.
Thank you Professor Loury for these conversations, I can’t tell you enough how much I think they help my blood pressure as I deal with people in Seattle that seem to think the way forward progressively is to keep improving on the lie.
Here’s a little treat that shows the better part of my neighborhood, one of many filmed businesses/organizations to promote the SE Seattle area right before the pandemic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=str-sfcY81I
Thank you again!
You know who pays the cost of The War on (some) Drugs and other failed Conservative policies? Poor people, overwhelmingly poor Black families.
It is disingenuous to complain about "Progressive" policies without giving them historical framing. Giving 1/3 of young Black men criminal records has a huge impact on Black communities abilities to form families, Black men's ability to find meaningful employment and the ability of Black's to generate and keep wealth.
The criminal justice system has been racist for generations. This has been documented in many studies, as well as just looking with your own eyes and with common sense.
Is it worse to lock up young men who will mostly improve their lives in a few years or is it worse for a community so suffer a modest increase in crime? I don't know the answer and neither do you. The right answer is to ask the community, not come in with come kind of savior complex, telling poor people what do with, with no understanding of what it is like to be poor and with no understanding of community dynamics.
I grew up poor. I have 11 siblings and five are men. We have all been arrested at one point or another. At least two have had their lives ruined by felony convictions, one caused by the ****** "War on Drugs", which has been failure by any standard.
Conservatives have no answer to the problems of poor communities. All they can do is cut funding for housing and food for the poor and then point fingers at our communities failures.
Do better than this Glenn. I know you can.
At least the original progresses were honest about the evil they were doing.... Today's progressives actually think they're good people... God save us from unaccountable do-gooders...
And it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. You better have a plan.....
I tried having these conversations with my friends in the Brooklyn/Bay Area bubble during last summer's Floyd freakout, simply stating that this whole notion that police can be replaced by social workers was incredibly naive and dangerous, but 1) these are mostly people who've either grown up safely in suburbia or the much-safer-than-before cities of the past 20ish years, so they have no conception of crime, and 2) in the social media age, "discussing politics" is only and entirely a performance on Twitter that has absolutely nothing to do with what us older folks think of as the traditional purpose of politics, ie what are the best allocation of resources and what problems need clear and reasonable fixing, etc.
Political positions and discussions now exist entirely in the realm of the cultural, meaning sadly, that things like Defund the Police or Abolish the SAT are simply the new skinny jeans or plaid shirt that every cool kid must have.
None of this would matter much except for the fact that the perpetually neurotic blue-check Twitter class is the Democratic donor base and braintrust, so they set much of the national agenda (no matter how obviously silly and no matter how quickly their crowd-sourced dogma changes).
Dr. Loury, maybe in a future podcast you can unpack the Seattle initiative to lessen, in the name of social justice, penalties on drive-by shootings. Surely a topic worthy of one of your patented rants.