America Has a Silent Black Majority
They fear crime more than police and know
rioters are opportunists, not revolutionaries.Author: Jason L. Riley
The views of the Authors are not necessarily the views of Enigmose.
It’s too early to know what will come of the violent protests in response to the death of George Floyd. But we do know that recent history has not been especially kind to militant efforts to advance racial equality.
The methods championed most famously by Martin Luther King Jr. culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two of the most consequential laws in U.S. history. By contrast, the Black Power movement that followed eventually imploded, and its most prominent leaders wound up exiled, imprisoned or victims of murderous rivalries. Whatever white sympathy the civil-rights movement had gained was quickly depleted in the aftermath of rioting in Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and other major cities.
Moreover, the heightened group identity associated with black militants, as with the Black Lives Matter movement today, was followed by a white backlash in the 1970s and ’80s, which saw the rise of the skinhead and white-power movements in the U.S.
You don’t need to read an academic paper to understand that peaceful civil-rights demonstrations have had more success than violent protests, but a Princeton scholar just published one that is well worth your time. Writing last month in the American Political Science Review, Omar Wasow, a professor of politics, described the results of a 15-year research project on the political consequences of protests.
Mr. Wasow, who is black, focused on black-led demonstrations between 1960 and 1972, and he found that the “types of protest tactics employed” can make all the difference in advancing a social cause. “Nonviolent black-led protests played a critical role in tilting the national political agenda toward civil rights,” he concluded, while “black-led resistance that included protester-initiated violence contributed to outcomes directly in opposition to the policy preferences of the protesters.”
In the aftermath of the unrest caused by Floyd’s death in police custody, President Trump has made it clear that “law and order” will be a campaign theme, and Mr. Wasow’s research offers some clues as to whether it could be an effective strategy. In a recent interview with the New Yorker magazine, Mr. Wasow said he found a “causal relationship between violent protests” that occurred after the April 1968 assassination of Dr. King “and the shift away from the Democratic coalition.” More specifically, “if your county was proximate to violent protests, then that county voted 6 to 8 percentage points more toward Nixon in November.. Full Story @ Wall Street Journal
Can Trump appeal to America’s black silent minority?
Author: Matt Mayer
The views of the Authors are not necessarily the views of Enigmose.
Common sense would indicate Trump likely won’t be reelected in 2020, but common sense doesn’t cast votes. People do
One of the largest obstacles standing in the way of Donald Trump’s re-election is his weakness in every big city in America. Some cities produce such large vote advantages for the Democrats that a Republican simply can’t make up those votes across the rest of the state. That disadvantage is a write off in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago because Trump is guaranteed to lose the deep blue states those cities are in. It will matter, however, in nine battleground states that will decide who wins the 2020 election.
Specifically, in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the vote totals in the big cities and counties could make it nearly impossible to win those states in the suburban and rural areas. In 2016, those nine states possessed roughly 91 million Americans. Just three years later, those states added another 2.5 million people, with most of the growth coming in the south and west. In 2016, Trump won eight of nine states, with his only loss coming in Nevada.
In those states, there are 28 counties with large cities that result in six-figure vote tallies. The key for Trump is to minimize the damage he will suffer in those counties so that he can overcome the vote differential in the suburban and rural parts of the states. In 2016, Trump suffered 100,000+ vote defeats in 14 counties in seven of the nine states. Nonetheless, he still won all seven states, with narrow victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In the two states where he didn’t suffer large county losses, he won Arizona because he managed to win Maricopa County (Phoenix) by 45,000 votes while losing Pima County (Tucson) by 58,000 votes, so secured the state by 91,234 votes from the remaining counties. Conversely, he lost Nevada because Hillary Clinton won Clark County (Las Vegas) by 82,000 votes, which allowed her to hold onto the state by just 27,202 votes.
The 14 most perilous counties for Trump in 2020 are: Broward County/Fort Lauderdale, Florida (lost by 292,369 votes); Miami-Dade County/Miami, Florida (290,147); Orange County/Orlando, Florida (134,678); DeKalb County/Atlanta, Georgia (199,902); Fulton County/Atlanta, Georgia (179,268); Wayne County/Detroit, Michigan (290,451); Mecklenburg County/Charlotte, North Carolina (139,044); Wake County/Raleigh, North Carolina (106,585); Cuyahoga County/Cleveland, Ohio (214,060); Franklin County/Columbus, Ohio (151,867); Allegheny County/Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (108,137); Philadelphia County/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (475,277); Dane County/Madison, Wisconsin (146,422); and Milwaukee County/Milwaukee, Wisconsin (162,753).
Again, Trump’s goal in those counties isn’t to win them, as that is a Sisyphean task; rather, his goal is to keep his losses as close as possible. So, how can Trump do that over the next five months?
Trump must define Joe Biden before Biden can define himself. Trump already has started to do this by labeling Biden ‘Sleepy Joe’ and raising concerns about his mental capabilities. Trump also has crafted the narrative that Biden is soft on China. Trump will use Biden’s comment that 10 percent to 15 percent of Americans are just bad people to crush him among the blue-collar voters alienated by Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ comment and Barack Obama’s ‘clinging to their guns and religion’ comment. Trump and his associates will make great hay asking who exactly does Biden believe is part of the 48 million ‘bad’ Americans. Full Story @ The Spectator
The Forgotten History Of ‘The Black Silent Majority’
Author: Mary Grabar
At a 1973 bill-signing session, the pistol-packing Reverend Oberia Dempsey of Upper Park Avenue Church in Harlem praised Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller for heeding the calls of his community to get rid of drugs. The “Rockefeller drug laws” mandated life imprisonment for drug dealers.
Acknowledging that addicts needed treatment, Dempsey asserted, “We are not going to stand any longer and see decent citizens brutalized or subjected to punishment because someone is out there sick.” He added sarcastically, “And I’m sorry for the bleeding hearts, I’m sorry for all of the people who are over-sympathetic with criminals and under-sympathetic with decent citizens.”
Only one African-American legislator, Sen. Vander Beatty, voted for the legislation, although it fell short of his aim: capital punishment for drug dealers. But Dempsey was joined by the “black silent majority,” working- and middle-class citizens who saw their once-vibrant cultural center terrorized by drug pushers. Two hundred Harlemites took up firearms with Dempsey and patrolled their streets, tracking and reporting drug pushers to the police in “Operation Confiscation” and “Operation Interruption.” They also escorted women to church and to the market.
Such extraordinary stories are told in City University of New York sociologist Michael Javen Fortner’s “Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment” (Harvard University Press, 2015). Fortner uses newspaper archives, meeting minutes, polls, surveys, oral histories, interviews, legislative hearing records, and even fiction and drama to piece together a compelling narrative about a community fighting for its life. Except for the occasional lapse into academic jargon (“the ebb of Fordism,” for example), this is fascinating reading. It is changing the conversation about mandatory minimum drug laws.
A Surge of Interest in Controversial Black History The book began receiving attention in advance of its release in September, with the Chronicle of Higher Education devoting a long feature article to it in August, which led to an interview later in the month on radio station WIND, in Chicago, then one on WNYC in September.
A first book, it garnered immediate attention from quarters that would make any author envious, including The New York Times, New Yorker, New York Magazine, Daily Beast, and Salon. A couple weeks after its release, Fortner wrote an op-ed for the The New York Times, addressing police shootings of black men that had spurred protests and sometimes riots. In January, he spoke at the Manhattan Institute. The New York Academy of History gave him the award for the best book of 2015.
The pace is continuing, with invited appearances coming up at places as varied as the Miller Center at the University of Virginia and the African American Studies Department at Columbia University. In a recent interview, Fortner told me happily, “My dance card is full.”
Reasons behind the attention include the fact that the book features subject matter that has been univocally promoted in the academy. It pushes against the narrative about the “new Jim Crow,” drug laws that have led to the disproportionate rate of African-American incarceration (six times that of whites). The theory holds that a white backlash against civil rights gains led to such discriminatory laws.
To the contrary, Fortner shows that the “black silent majority” pushed back against “the criminologies of the welfare state espoused by the white middle-class reformers who had monopolized the debate over drug addiction and crime during the 1950s and early 1960s.” The 1973 Rockefeller drug laws repudiated the liberal 1962 Metcalf-Volker Act.
African-Americans Oppose Their So-Called Advocates
The beleaguered residents of Harlem received little help from the new class of black politicians and activists, overwhelmingly Democrats. A. Philip Randolph’s Emergency Committee for Unity and Social and Economic Problems featured stars like Percy Sutton, Malcolm X, and Bayard Rustin; they considered drug users casualties of racism and decried police brutality and racial attitudes. The committee formed in 1961 but was short-lived, as members switched their attention to the national civil rights movement, specifically the 1963 March on Washington. Full Story @ The Federalist
The 1619 Project is an ongoing abomination focused on rewriting the history of Slavery in America, it was the brainchild of leftist New York Times journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones and developed by The NY Times Magazine in 2019 with the stated overt goal of 're-examining the legacy of slavery in the United States'. It was timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia. While its overt goal seems commendable, its covert goal is evident and reprehensible.
