South Africa: The White Liberals’ Burden
I have been to South Africa twice, once under Apartheid and once after it. That does not make me an expert but it does tell me enough to know that the article below is largely a whitewash
White South fricans are dominated by fear -- fear of hostility towards them by blacks. And vivid grounds for that fear is seen in the repeated vicious and often fatal attacks on isolated white farmers by black gangs.
So every white South African I met last time wanted just one thing -- to get out. And many have done so, particularly the young people. A lot of them are in Australia. Perth has a substantial population of white South Africans
Another symptom of the fear is a change I saw between my two visits. In Sandton, a wealthy Johannesburg suburb, I saw no fences between the houses first time around. Now they have 8' security fences.
Many whites feel that the present relative calm is the calm before the storm and, given the frequency of armed revolutions in Africa, fear of a violent storm ahead is not unrealistic
The most substantial reason for the present black/white truce is black fear of the whites. All the whites have guns and there is still a substantial white presence in the police and the armed forces. And blacks know how well whites can organize
Incidentally, a lot of the white South African "liberals", who had agitated for an end to Apartheid, left the country after blacks took charge. Novelist J.M. Coetzee, for instance now lives in Adelaide, South Australia
Many Afrikaners welcomed the end of apartheid, but 30 years on, they’ve found Black-majority rule in South Africa hard to live with.
By Eve Fairbanks
When I first arrived in South Africa, in 2009, it still felt as if a storm had just swept through. For most of the 20th century, the country was the world’s most fastidiously organized white-supremacist state. And then, in one election, in 1994, it became the first modern nation where people of color who’d been dispossessed for centuries would make the laws, run the economy, write the news, decide what history to teach—and wield political dominance over a substantial white minority. Unlike in other postcolonial African countries, white South Africans—about 15 percent of the population—were suddenly governed by the people whom they and their forebears had oppressed.
Over the decade I lived in South Africa, I became fascinated by this white minority, particularly its members who considered themselves progressive. They reminded me of my liberal peers in America, who had an apparently self-assured enthusiasm about the coming of a so-called majority-minority nation. As with white South Africans who had celebrated the end of apartheid, their enthusiasm often belied, just beneath the surface, a striking degree of fear, bewilderment, disillusionment, and dread.
The story of white settlement in South Africa has uncanny parallels with U.S. history. In the late 1600s, a group of predominantly Dutch-descended settlers started arriving by boat from Europe. After a century and a half working on semifeudal wine estates under the command of the Dutch and then the British, a band of them, now known as Afrikaners, decided to assert a new pioneer identity. Thousands set out for the interior in ox wagons. Their guiding dream, they declared in a newspaper-printed manifesto, was to uphold “the just principles of liberty.” On the frontier, they set up a host of small, independent republics with constitutions modeled on America’s. Many believed that they had been sent by God to tame a new world—Africa’s own version of Manifest Destiny.
After taking the reins of the government of South Africa—which amalgamated the Afrikaner republics and several British colonies—in the mid-20th century, white leaders began to legalize segregation under the term apartheid. They sent emissaries to the U.S. to study the Jim Crow South, which they used as a model for their own regime. Hermann Giliomee, a historian of the Afrikaners, told me that when the South Africans saw Alabama’s segregated buses and colleges, “they thought to themselves, Eureka!”
Apartheid completely partitioned South Africa by race and reserved the best jobs and land for white people. The system endured until the 1990s, when, thanks to a sustained effort by the African National Congress (ANC), it crumbled. Sometimes I like to tell people that South Africa, very loosely, collapses hundreds of years of American history—from the antebellum period, through the end of Jim Crow, and well into our future—into about 50. For being such a tragedy, apartheid seemed to have a miraculous conclusion—a rapid and peaceful end that spared even the defeated oppressors.
Unexpectedly, white people benefited materially from the end of apartheid. Thanks in part to the lifting of foreign sanctions, the average income of white households increased 15 percent during Nelson Mandela’s presidency, far more than Black incomes did. White businesspeople started to export wine and $10,000 ostrich-leather sofas to Europe, and white-run safari lodges welcomed a flood of new tourists.
White South Africans were rewarded in other ways, too. They no longer had to serve in a military that hunted Black-liberation groups. In the run-up to apartheid’s end, strict censorship laws were dropped, and they could finally listen to the likes of Bob Dylan on the radio. And for the many white progressives who had opposed apartheid, South African society moved far closer to their ideal of racial equality.
Yet these progressives’ response to the end of apartheid was ambivalent. Contemplating South Africa after apartheid, an Economist correspondent observed that “the lives of many whites exude sadness.” The phenomenon perplexed him. In so many ways, white life remained more or less untouched, or had even improved. Despite apartheid’s horrors—and the regime’s violence against those who worked to dismantle it—the ANC encouraged an attitude of forgiveness. It left statues of Afrikaner heroes standing and helped institute the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to some perpetrators of apartheid-era political crimes.
But as time wore on, even wealthy white South Africans began to radiate a degree of fear and frustration that did not match any simple economic analysis of their situation. A startling number of formerly anti-apartheid white people began to voice bitter criticisms of post-apartheid society. An Afrikaner poet who did prison time under apartheid for aiding the Black-liberation cause wrote an essay denouncing the new Black-led country as “a sewer of betrayed expectations and thievery, fear and unbridled greed.”
What accounted for this disillusionment? Many white South Africans told me that Black forgiveness felt like a slap on the face. By not acting toward you as you acted toward us, we’re showing you up, white South Africans seemed to hear. You’ll owe us a debt of gratitude forever.
White people rarely articulated these feelings publicly. But in private, with friends and acquaintances, I encountered them over and over. One white friend and former anti-apartheid activist (who didn’t want to be identified in order to talk freely) told me that after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission publicized much of what Black South Africans had faced under apartheid, she felt humiliated to recall what she and her friends had once considered resistance: gestures like having a warm exchange with a Black maid or skipping class to join an anti-apartheid march.
She said that sense of embarrassment made her shy away from politics, as did the slow-dawning recognition that Black people—many of whom had worked in white people’s houses under apartheid—knew much more about the lives of white people than white people knew about Black lives. My friend had never even seen the inside of a Black person’s home.
Not infrequently, white South Africans who identified as progressive confessed to me that they wanted to withdraw from public life because they felt they couldn’t speak the truth about what they did see. Many felt that only Black people could point out certain realities—for example, that Black-majority rule hasn’t reduced economic inequality since apartheid or that half of Black people under 35 are unemployed. If a white person expressed too much pessimism, they could be considered demeaning. Too much optimism, and they could be accused of neglecting enduring racial inequalities. The window they had to exist in, intellectually, could appear so narrow as not to exist.
At a Johannesburg party I went to, two voluble white women who called themselves “socialists” started to debate with me about the U.S. As Africans, they wanted me to know that American greatness was a sham and American-style consumerism was a pox on Africa. The party’s lone Black guest—a young woman—crouched silently in front of the fireplace, pushing embers around with a poker.
Suddenly, she spoke. The two white women misunderstood America, she said, without rancor. She had gone to high school in California. And, yes, there was racism. But she found the country much less racist than South Africa, and exciting—a land of opportunity.
The party went silent. The white women’s lips were pressed into half-gracious, half-bitter twists. They had been shamed, and they wanted to argue. But their stated values—always to foreground historically marginalized voices—meant they had to take the Black guest’s word for it. Shortly afterward, they left.
Concerns about crime dominated the news in the years following apartheid. But the rates of violent crime were only half as high by the end of the 1990s as they had been before apartheid ended. In 2016, Mark Shaw and Anine Kriegler, two leading South African criminologists, wondered, “How is it that [the] huge reduction in fatal violence over the last two decades isn’t something we rejoice over, talk about, or even seem aware of?” They noticed stark discrepancies between crime’s actual and perceived prevalence. For instance, when white South Africans answered a survey about the crimes they’d experienced, their responses contradicted what they’d reported to police stations. To the police, they reported carjackings at double the rate they reported home invasions. But they told the pollsters they’d experienced home invasions twice as often as they’d had their cars jacked.
Carjacking is an easier crime to fake for insurance fraud, and therefore might be overreported. But the disparity was so stark that it suggested another explanation: A number of white South Africans had a memory of someone breaking into their homes when it never happened.
The journalist Mark Gevisser has called this fear of home invasion by Black burglars “Mau Mau anxiety,” after the guerrilla movement that helped drive white colonists out of Kenya in the 1950s. He wrote that this fear lurks even “in a bleeding-heart liberal like myself.”
Giliomee, the historian, told me he thought that what dogged white progressives after apartheid ended was less a concern for physical safety than a feeling of irrelevance. Under apartheid, many of them felt they belonged to a vanguard. One of Giliomee’s friends, a liberal white politician, left a secret 1987 meeting about a transition to Black-majority rule believing that he and the prominent ANC leader Thabo Mbeki were “best friends.” He expected the aftermath of apartheid to be an exciting time, full of the same thrilling work he had done to help build a democratic, multiracial future for the country.
Once Black leaders secured political power, though, they didn’t have to rely as much on white allies. When Mbeki became Mandela’s deputy president, he wouldn’t return the white liberal’s calls. The politician sent policy proposals and got no reply. After apartheid, the friend “started drinking heavily,” Giliomee said. “He drank himself to death.”
This was an extreme case. But a wide range of white South Africans I met felt a sense of alienation after apartheid. On the radio, I often heard an Afrikaans pop song with the lyric “I’m in love with my country, but does my country still love me?” It expressed an anxiety I noticed frequently: Do we still belong here?
In 2006, a group of Afrikaners founded an NGO called AfriForum to respond to these insecurities. The NGO gives its members the subtle but pervasive sense that a white-friendly South African ministate already exists, in which its trendy headquarters—home to multiple radio broadcasts, a publishing house, and a private Afrikaans-language college—serves as the alt-capital. Dues-paying members get access to lawyers who pursue claims against a government program that increases Black ownership stakes in large corporations. They can submit complaints to a system of private prosecutors. For those anxious about home invasion, an app features a “panic button” that dispatches private ambulances.
When I visited AfriForum’s offices in 2016, I was met by Flip Buys, one of the NGO’s founders. In the early 1990s, he and his friends feared Black rule, he told me. Before Mandela’s election, he remembered thinking, “They [Black leaders] have made compromises in order to get power. But after they’ve consolidated power, they will use it to pursue their interests.”
But Buys also felt shamed because he was white. He and his college friends, who wanted to become academics, felt embarrassed to identify themselves as white South Africans when they attended international conferences. Europeans and Americans subtly kept their distance.
Buys found unexpected refuge in the ideas of the sociologist Manuel Castells, who argued that progressives had a duty of care for “Fourth World” groups that lack the protection of their own state. Castells used the term to refer to marginalized peoples such as the Australian Aborigines. “But what if Afrikaners are such a community?” Buys recalled thinking, in a moment of revelation. “I wanted to fight for Afrikaners, but I came to think of myself as a ‘liberal internationalist,’ not a white racist,” Buys told me. “I found such inspiration from the struggles of the Catalonians and the Basques. Even Tibet.”
One of his first projects after co-founding AfriForum was to send a mission to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights arguing that Afrikaners deserved protected status as an endangered ethnic minority. “As a discredited minority, I think we have to fight extra hard for our rights,” he said. “Some people think nothing ever changes, and that a group of people who once held power will always be empowered.” His idea found mass appeal. By 2016, nearly one-quarter of Afrikaners were paying AfriForum members.
On my tour of the organization’s headquarters, I met a young woman responsible for posting frightening security-camera videos of home invasions to social media. “I sought work with AfriForum because I consider myself a liberal and an environmentalist,” she told me cheerfully. She mentioned an AfriForum initiative to save threatened hippos. A Martin Luther King quote was printed on the office wall, and she pointed to it. “King also fought for a people without much political representation … That’s why I consider him one of my most important forebears and heroes.”
But she also said she hoped Afrikaners would seize back political administration from the Black-led government, because “everything is falling apart.” The Afrikaners, she said, were “naturally good” at management. “South Africa’s environment is very unique. God intended us to look after it.”
Buys told me that the Afrikaners “just want benign neglect” from Black people. Yet AfriForum is unable to resist provocations. The organization frequently sues the ANC government over such issues as white South Africans’ right to display the old apartheid-era flag.
I couldn’t tell if the AfriForum leaders believed their own messaging. Sometimes I felt as if I saw a wink forming in the skin around their eyes. They seemed to relish Black people’s bafflement and criticism. The more contempt the better: If the AfriForum’s provocations got its executives treated badly, they could claim equal status as victims.
This kind of goading could be cruel. “For those claiming [that the] legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative,” a top white South African politician tweeted a few years ago, “think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc. Would we have [any of that] without colonial influence?”
“You mean to say that, without white people, we would be nothing?” a Black commenter replied.
The politician would not stop. She doggedly pursued critics until a respondent lashed out, saying he didn’t want to kill white people just yet. Then the politician triumphantly declared that she’d been justified all along in thinking Black people someday intended to take revenge on her.
Nobody “likes to play the victim like white South Africans,” one of the young Black women I know best, the academic Malaika Mahlatsi, told me. She said she believed that “deep down, there is no way” that the vast majority of white people “don’t know what they did was savage. But for them to admit that is too heavy.”
Sometimes I wondered: Why was it so heavy? Why did admitting past sins seem to become harder even as they receded into history? The question began to feel urgent as I started to see a similar phenomenon back home in America.
In South Africa I often felt I was looking at America in a funhouse mirror, with certain emerging features magnified so I could see them more clearly. I saw how progressives could feel grief about being canceled, sneered at, or sidelined—just as their society comes to look more like what they had argued for.
I also saw historically dominant people—especially those who criticized their own authority—become fully aware of their dominance only as it started to ebb. Many white South Africans told me that during apartheid they’d sincerely believed that their country was, demographically speaking, majority white.
I saw how they might need to start telling themselves, and others, that people of color were letting the country down. This belief helped justify the panoply of privileges that many white people were unaware they even had under apartheid, when they had compared themselves to other white people instead of the Black majority whose experiences were partially hidden.
If white progressives recognized any good in post-apartheid South Africa, they would also have to acknowledge that they—who frequently live more comfortably than they could on the same salary anywhere else on Earth—were still making out like bandits. One white friend told me that he and his wife felt “deep down” that white people in South Africa had “got[ten] away with hundreds of years of injustice.”
Perhaps the strangest thing I saw was how deeply troubled white South Africans were by this feeling—that white people had never faced a full reckoning for apartheid. Apartheid-era white elites had justified white domination by saying that, without their rule, Black people would take revenge on them or ruin the country. When widespread revenge and ruin never came, many white people felt forced to fabricate it; otherwise, white dominance became all the more shameful—not only to apartheid’s proponents but even to anti-apartheid progressives, who had inevitably benefited from a regime that comprehensively promoted white interests.
The Afrikaner journalist Rian Malan, who opposed apartheid, has written that, by most measures, its aftermath went better than almost any white person could have imagined. But, as with most white progressives, his experience of post-1994 South Africa has been complicated.
A few years after the end of apartheid, he moved to an upscale Cape Town neighborhood. Most mornings, he drank macchiatos at an upscale seaside café—the kind of cosmopolitan place that, thanks to sanctions, had hardly existed under apartheid. “The sea is warm and the figs are ripe,” he wrote. He also described this existence as “unbearable.”
He just couldn’t forgive Black people for forgiving him. Paradoxically, being left undisturbed served as an ever-present reminder of his guilt, of how wrongly he had treated his maid and other Black people under apartheid. “The Bible was right about a thing or two,” he wrote. “It is infinitely worse to receive than to give, especially if … the gift is mercy.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/south-africa-apartheid-white-afrikaners-the-inheritors/670554/
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Arrests in Chicago plummet to historic lows as crime rises and police admittedly pull back: 'No way'
Chicago police have arrested the fewest number of suspects in at least 20 years amid a crime wave that has continued raging in the city since 2020.
"In the past, I might see a guy with a gun in his waistband, and I’d jump out and chase him," one decorated officer said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. "No way I’d do that now."
Police made arrests in 12% of crime cases in 2021, which is the lowest rate since 2001, when the data was first released, the Chicago-Sun Times analysis found. The number of arrests in Chicago peaked in 2005 when arrests were made in nearly 31% of reported crimes. That number has been on the decline since, the data shows.
The number of traffic stops and tickets have also dropped, and the number of investigative stops fell by more than 50% between 2019 and 2021. Fewer crimes are also being reported to the police department by both residents and officers on beats, according to the analysis.
Chicago has been rocked by crime in recent years. Homicides skyrocketed in the city in 2020, following a drop in violence for the three previous years. The Windy City recorded nearly 770 homicides in 2020, up 50% compared to 2019. Last year, the city broke a 25-year record when it surpassed 800 homicides, the Chicago Tribune reported.
More of the same has unfolded with shootings since 2020. There were 2,151 shootings in the city in 2019, which increased to over 3,200 in 2020 and 3,561 shooting incidents in 2021.
So far this year, shootings and killings for the first half of 2022 are down roughly 17% and 10%, respectively. However, the city is still on pace to break the 600-homicide benchmark by the end of the year, WTTW reported this month.
The decline in arrests comes after sweeping changes were made to how the Chicago P.D. patrols the streets, including restricting their vehicle pursuit policy, ending foot pursuits if a suspect runs from an officer or if someone commits a minor offense. Police were also told to stop making arrests over offenses such as possession of small amounts of marijuana, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Police who spoke to the outlet, however, say they have pulled back from enforcing the law for other reasons.
One police officer told the outlet that some officers hesitate interacting with "criminals with guns" due to prosecutors having a tighter grip on approving felony charges against criminals.
Attacks, such as the fatal shooting of Chicago police officer Ella French last year ,made other officers "step back and think: Who really cares about us at that point?" according to the unnamed police officer.
"We can only support each other at the lowest ranks," the officer said. "And if that means going out there and not doing anything, then that means going out there and not doing anything."
President of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, John Catanzara, attributed police pulling back for a host of different reasons, including, the coronavirus, police coming under more scrutiny, and that making an arrest may not be worth their life or becoming a prominent news topic and villain, according to the Sun-Times.
Police of various ranks also detailed they feel targeted after a consent decree required the city to alter policing practices after the Department of Justice found the police department engaged in civil rights violations, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The crime spike in Chicago since 2020 follows a national trend that showed murders spiking by about 30% in 2020 compared to 2019, marking the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes, according to FBI data.
Crime experts who previously spoke to Fox News Digital have pointed to the defund the police movement, the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns that upended society, along with the Ferguson effect.
"Certainly, the protests and riots mid-2020 after the death of George Floyd followed a pattern of spiking violence that we've seen following past viral police incidents, such as the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. This pattern has been termed the ‘Ferguson Effect’: police pull back while violent crime spikes precipitously," Hannah Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital earlier this year.
One crime researcher who spoke to the Chicago-Sun Times reported similar findings, pointing to fallout from the pandemic for police pulling back, and speculating the riots and protests of 2020 could have caused crime to increase.
"What comes through is that context matters, the context of this decline in police activity and arrests," crime researcher Deepak Premkumar told the outlet. "When there is a high-profile event, the community scrutiny increases, [police] activity drops."
"There are so many factors related to the pandemic that could have led police to pull back and for crimes to increase," Premkumar says. "But it’s entirely possible that the murder of George Floyd, the highest-profile [police killing] in U.S. history, played a role in increases in crime."
As the police pull back in the city, the department has also been coping with staffing issues. Chicago P.D. saw the lowest number of staffers in March of this year after 300 personnel resigned or retired from the department and over a dozen more had stepped down.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/arrests-chicago-plummet-historic-lows-crime-rises-police-admittedly-pull-back-no-way
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Every one of the Uvalde cop cowards should be fired – they’ve shamed their badges and their country
It’s shocking enough to learn there were nearly 400 armed law enforcement officers at Robb Elementary School by the time one lone deranged shooter had spent 77 minutes obliterating 19 young children and two teachers.
“The only one way to stop a bad guy with a gun IS A GOOD GUY WITH A GUN,” tweeted the NRA last year.
How hollow that always disingenuous claim looks today when we learn 376 “good guys with guns” — including 149 Border Patrol officers, 91 members of the state Department of Public Safety, 14 from the Department of Homeland Security, 25 from the Uvalde Police Department, 16 from the San Antonio Police Department and 16 from the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office — couldn’t collectively summon the courage, sense of duty or basic humanity to charge into that classroom and kill one pathetic shooter armed with an AR-15.
As Texas Tribune journalist Zach Despart tweeted, there was a bigger force there than the entire garrison that defended the Alamo.
But it’s not just the cops’ now demonstrably proven inaction that is so scandalous. It’s also their outrageous antics as they did nothing.
One of them was seen on camera laughing.
LAUGHING!?!
What the hell did he find so bloody funny given what was happening to those poor young kids just a few feet away?
Another casually applied a squirt of hand sanitizer.
SERIOUSLY? That was his priority as the massacre unfolded?
Others stayed safe around corners or lay hiding on the floor with their big, powerful guns.
The Uvalde school police chief could even be seen treating the active shooter with gut-wrenchingly inappropriate respect: “Sir, if you can hear me,” he pleaded pathetically, “please put your firearm down, sir.”
SIR? This was no “sir” — this was a sniveling, evil mass murderer.
There was no time for such excruciatingly polite chat with someone firing a semi-automatic rifle at point-blank range into innocent young heads.
The only possible response was to storm the classroom as fast as possible.
Yet the only one who seemed to understand this urgent imperative was Uvalde SWAT team chief Sgt. Eduardo Canales, who was shot and wounded when he first tried to confront the shooter, but minutes later could be seen repeatedly yelling, “We’ve got to get in there, he just keeps shooting, we’ve got to get in there!”
He was right, but they ignored him, and he didn’t do it himself — instead, they all chose not to risk their lives to save the lives of young children.
Even as I write those words, I find it hard to believe that’s what happened, but it did.
“It could have been worse,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said at the time, as the false narratives initially spun by lying law enforcement that the brave, selfless cops had prevented an even worse death toll.
Actually, it couldn’t have been any worse.
This was as bad as law enforcement could possibly be. Nineteen children are dead because these self-protecting weasels couldn’t be bothered to do their jobs, and how any of them have the audacity to remain in those jobs is beyond my comprehension.
How can they possibly sleep at night knowing what the horrific consequences were of their appallingly gutless failure to act?
If they’re in any doubt about their culpability, they should listen to the grieving relatives of those who were killed.
Leonard Sandoval, whose grandson Xavier Lopez died on the way to the hospital, told the New York Times the report confirmed what the community had long known: The cops failed in their duty and then tried to cover it up.
“We all make mistakes,” he said. “We are all human. But they should have admitted to it and then resigned. It’s the lying that hurts.”
His words were echoed by many others whose lives were shattered that day.
“They’re going to have the blood of those kids on their hands for eternity,” said Manny Renfro, grandfather of Uziyah Garcia, 10, who also died. Renfro, 65, said the thought of what those officers did, or failed to do, made him sick to his stomach, as it did me and I’m sure everyone else who’s seen the hard evidence.
“I think every single lawman who was on the scene should be held accountable,” he said. “They lost 19 beautiful children, including my grandson. My blood just starts boiling, and I get upset because something more could’ve been done to save those kids.”
Mary Grace Garcia, an aunt of Uziyah, posed a simple question for the officers: “What were you all thinking? What was going through your mind by standing there in the hallway?”
Sadly, we know the answer. They were thinking of themselves, not the kids being slaughtered.
And for that, every single one of them should be fired today. They’re a disgrace to their badges and to America.
https://nypost.com/2022/07/18/every-coward-uvalde-cop-should-be-fired-theyve-shamed-their-badges-and-their-country/
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Biden’s looming purge of 27 percent of the Army partially vaccinated against Covid will take years to recover from, threatens national security
By Robert Romano
Currently, more than 260,000 servicemen and women in the U.S. military are only partially vaccinated — that is, they have only received one vaccine shot against Covid instead of two — and are now facing separations and discharges.
In February, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth laid out the separations policy, declaring, “Army readiness depends on Soldiers who are prepared to train, deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars… Unvaccinated Soldiers present risk to the force and jeopardize readiness. We will begin involuntary separation proceedings for Soldiers who refuse the vaccine order and are not pending a final decision on an exemption.”
Of the more than 268,000 servicemen and women not fully vaccinated, more than 252,000 are in the Army, or about 27.5 percent of the more than 914,000 men and women in the Army, according to the Department of Defense.
Other service branches are almost fully vaccinated. Only 2,983 Marines out of more than 203,000, or 1.4 percent, are only partially vaccinated, 5,300 sailors out of more than 389,000, or 1.35 percent, and 8,285 airmen out of more than 505,000, or 1.6 percent.
So, we’re mostly talking about the Army.
Every year, the U.S. military recruits more than 180,000 Americans for both active and reserve duty. In 2021, the Army recruited 57,600 active duty and 11,700 reserve duty soldiers, or about 69,000.
To offset a sudden loss of 252,000 soldiers — three-and-a-half years’ worth of recruits — then, would take the Army years, a decade or longer to recover from.
The military is already having a recruitment problem as the population of those eligible to serve continues to plummet, with 71 percent of the 34 million between the ages of 17-to-24-year-olds ineligible to serve due to being overweight, not having a high school diploma, medical issues or past convictions, according to the Pentagon.
Obviously, purging the Army will only exacerbate the recruitment problem.
Moreover, Covid is not as deadly as it was in 2020 as Covid fatality rates continue to plummet, according to the latest data from the Institutes for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
When the pandemic began, estimates cases peaked in March 2020 at 155,000 per day, and then fatalities peaked by April 17 at 2,335 daily, an implied 1.4 percent fatality rate.
The next winter, cases peaked at 505,000 in late Dec. 2020, with 3,466 peak deaths on Jan. 10, 2021, and the implied fatality rate had dropped to 0.69 percent before almost any vaccines had been administered.
This past winter, cases peaked at 3.9 million daily in early Jan. 2022, with 2,616 peak deaths on Jan. 27, an implied fatality rate of 0.067 percent.
And with the recent spring and summer waves, daily cases peaked at 660,000 in early May and again in June at 530,000, with peak deaths of 390 on June 28, an implied fatality rate between 0.059 percent and 0.073 percent.
Do we really need vaccine mandates at this point?
And with a world at war, is this really the right policy? Russia has invaded Ukraine and may be threatening Europe with a wider war. China could invade Taiwan any day now. Either emergency could suddenly require lots of troops to be recruited and deployed overseas.
That makes Biden’s vaccine mandates not merely a problem for those who could lose the ability to serve their country, but a potential threat to national security itself if he follows through with his threatened Army purge. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
https://dailytorch.com/2022/07/bidens-looming-purge-of-27-percent-of-the-army-partially-vaccinated-against-covid-will-take-years-to-recover-from-threatens-national-security/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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July 19, 2022
Democrats spend millions helping ‘ultra-MAGAs’ win primaries
“I fear for our democracy if the Republicans were ever to get the gavel. We can’t let that happen. Democracy is on the ballot in November,” said Democrat House speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this year, echoing similar sentiments expressed relentlessly by the party’s elite.
It turns out Republicans are so dangerous Democrats are spending millions to help them win.
The ruling party has spent a fortune – $US44 million so far – elevating and supporting the most ardent supporters of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries, elections which determine which GOP candidates will stand against Democrats in the November midterm Congressional and gubernatorial elections, in the hope they’ll be easier to beat than moderates.
Such sums are more than any major US political party has spent meddling in the affairs of its opponents, with well over three months still to go.
In California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Maryland, among the biggest US states, the Democrat Governors’ Association and a gaggle of Democrat-aligned political action groups have bought prime-time television advertisements to tip the scales in favour of so-called ‘ultra MAGA’ Republicans, in elections where there is no Democrat on the ballot.
It’s a risky strategy – Hillary Clinton mentioned Donald Trump as much as possible throughout the 2016 Republican primaries, seeing him as the easiest candidate to beat.
In Illinois alone Democrats put down US$35m to smear moderate Republican mayor Richard Irvin and boost the chances of state senator Darren Bailey, whose campaign bus is emblazoned with Bible verses, making the race most expensive non-presidential election in US history, according to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign financing.
Bailey won and will face off against billionaire Democrat governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, whose family own Hyatt hotels, in the governor’s race.
In Pennsylvania, which narrowly voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, the campaign of Democrat state attorney-general Josh Shapiro, who’s running for Governor in November, spent almost $1m to help Doug Mastriano, who attended the January 6th riots at the Capitol building in 2021, clinch the Republican nomination.
“I’m going to have to send him a thank you card,” Mr Mastriano told LNP, a local Philadelphia news outlet, after seeing the Democrat advertisements.
The US$7 million Democrats spent in Colorado and California – unsuccessfully, Mr Trump’s loathed RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) still won there – was about US$4m more than Republicans spent on themselves according to the Colorado Sun.
Hypocritical? Yes, Democrat surely wouldn’t bankroll candidates they really believed were a threat to democracy.
But playing political hard ball is nothing new in US politics, and Democrat hardheads may have a point.
Donald Trump’s sour grapes after the 2020 election cost the Republicans not only two Senate seats in the January 2021 run-off elections, but their potential Senate majority, reducing the GOP’s red chamber headcount to 50.
Republican Glenn Youngkin won Virginia’s state election in November, against the odds, in a race the former president stayed well clear of, allowing the former hedge fund executive to talk about school curriculum rather than the 2020 election.
Will he or won’t he has quickly become when will he, even though no candidate has signalled a presidential bid so early in the US political cycle.
The former president, no stickler for convention, declared himself the 45th and 47th president while playing golf as far back as January, and has repeatedly hinted he intends to run, just shy of triggering campaign finance laws which would place restrictions on his US$100 million political donations war chest.
“Well, in my own mind, I’ve already made that decision, so nothing factors in anymore. In my own mind, I’ve already made that decision,” Mr Trump told New York Magazine in an interview published last week.
“Do I go before or after? That will be my big decision”.
Democrats will be sincerely hoping it’s before, wanting nothing more than the final three months of the midterm election campaign to be about the findings of the January 6th commission, which has already cast the former president’s actions, criminal or not, in a bad light, drawing almost entirely on former supporters and family.
Republicans would much prefer to be talking about 9.1 per cent inflation, the spread of far-left ideology into school curriculums, and the millions of refugees streaming across the southern border than relitigating the 2020 election and declaring their loyalty to Mr Trump.
Even Republicans appear to be tiring of the former president, according to a recent Sienna poll that found 47 per cent of them wanted another Republican to run for president in 2024, compared to 49 per cent who wanted Mr Trump.
A highly polarising, 78-year-old Mr Trump, as he would be in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election, potentially fighting sedition charges and obsessed with the 2020 election, might not be the ideal Republican candidate to win let alone heal a divided nation.
To be sure, Democrats, in the midst of the highest inflation in 40 years, under the leadership of a man that more than half the nation believes is mentally unfit, remain the underdogs this November.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/democrats-spend-millions-helping-ultramagas-win-primaries/news-story/456a1048b4c29489f6f0f42b5c01a921
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Dems’ ‘deplorable’ double standard on offensive speech
First the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton, called patriotic, God-loving conservatives who make up half the country a “basket full of deplorables.” Then, in May, President Joe Biden compared those who oppose abortion and support the MAGA movement to extremists. And on Tuesday, the president fondly reminisced about having lunch with a former segregationist while a US senator.
If that’s not hideous enough for Democratic apologists, on Monday while addressing a crowd in San Antonio, First Lady Jill Biden compared Hispanic and Latino Americans to breakfast tacos, prompting a sharp rebuke from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
“NAHJ encourages @FLOTUS & her communications team to take time to better understand the complexities of our people & communities. We are not tacos. Our heritage as Latinos is shaped by various diasporas, cultures & food traditions. Do not reduce us to stereotypes,” the organization wrote in a tweet Monday.
“Deplorables,” “extremists” and “tacos” are just a few insults and smears lobbed at fellow Americans by Democrats in Washington — when they’re not calling conservatives and Trump supporters “racist,” “sexist” and other “-ists,” harming the cultural fabric of our nation and widening divisions.
But if you recall, the left and their sycophants in the establishment media were perpetually “outraged” and offended by virtually everything former President Donald Trump said, including his tweets, which set their collective hair on fire.
Talk about glass houses.
What’s become evident in modern American politics today is that Democrats can dish it out when it comes to insults and inflammatory rhetoric, but they can’t take it when something offends them.
In those cases, they opt for more name-calling, “canceling” those who hold different viewpoints or all-out censorship, a political tool used by totalitarian regimes like China to suppress dissent. This was evidenced by Vice President Kamala Harris’ calls for Twitter to ban Trump from the social-media network during the 2019 Democratic presidential debate — a gross violation of free speech — and unprecedented in American history.
Harris said Trump’s tweets were “irresponsible” and “erratic.” But she said nothing of her current boss glorifying lunch with racist segregationists on the White House lawn last week during a congressional picnic, which disturbingly included shoutouts by Biden to the late Sen. James Eastland, a former Democrat lawmaker from Mississippi who “often spoke of Blacks as an inferior race,” according to The New York Times.
Never mind that Biden’s second-in-command, Kamala Harris, is the first African-American female vice president in history, or that his former boss, Barack Obama, is also black. Or that black voters helped deliver the presidency to Biden in 2020.
At minimum, Biden’s words were tone-deaf and racially insensitive. At worst, they were disqualifying for him to hold any elected public office.
Nevertheless, the left despicably calls fellow Americans (if they vote Republican) “racists,” “terrorists” and fill-in-the-blank atrocious smears, no matter how damaging their extreme rhetoric hurts the country and divides us, while getting offended themselves by virtually everything — including perfectly normal things like a woman calling herself a “mother” versus a “birthing person.”
Take last week’s heated exchange between Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges during a Senate hearing about the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to reverse Roe v. Wade and whether men can get pregnant.
Bridges repeatedly referred to “people with a capacity for pregnancy,” versus women. When Hawley pressed her on this and whether abortion rights were a “women’s issue,” she stunningly accused the lawmaker of being transphobic and cultivating violence against the trans community. “The Democrats say what they really think: Men can get pregnant and if you disagree, you are ‘transphobic’ and responsible for violence,” Hawley tweeted Tuesday.
And yet the mainstream media told us for years while Trump was in office that he was a “white nationalist,” a “racist” and a “madman” unfit to lead the nation. This is the same media that told voters to elect Biden, who continues to fondly reminisce about his chummy relationship with racist segregationists in 2022.
https://nypost.com/2022/07/17/dems-deplorable-double-standard-on-offensive-speech/
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Authorities Yet to Arrest Anyone Over More Than 50 Pro-Abortion Attacks
Since May 8, pro-abortion radicals have attacked pro-life institutions nationwide, but authorities have yet to make a single arrest.
So far, the “Summer of Rage” announced by pro-abortion groups has seen more than 50 attacks on pro-life groups, according to Catholic Vote.
Attacks by pro-abortion groups have left a trail of smashed windows, graffitied walls, and firebombed buildings from Alaska to Florida. Some pro-life groups have been attacked multiple times.
Northern Colorado pregnancy care clinic Life Choices saw its entire stock of baby clothes burn after a Molotov attack.
Life Choices, a member of the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), has helped more than 27,000 women and families over 37 years.
“We’ve pretty much lost everything but our ultrasound machines,” said Kathy Roberts, the clinic’s director.
Some pregnant women don’t want abortions, she said. And many Christian pregnancy care centers are eager to give these women another option.
Despite the attacks, there have been no arrests at federal or state level, pro-life leaders say.
The NIFLA, a group that trains, protects, and equips more than 1,600 pregnancy care centers across the country, said it knows of no cases against even vandals, its vice president of legal affairs Anne O’Connor said in an email.
“While we are unaware of any arrests related to these incidents, we know that in some cases, the FBI is investigating potential hate crimes and violations of the FACE Act. In others, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been brought in to help,” she said.
The FACE Act was originally signed by President Bill Clinton to protect abortion providers.
Efforts ‘Appreciated’
It creates penalties for attempts to injure or intimidate people to prevent them from obtaining or providing “reproductive health services.” It also punishes attempts to destroy reproductive health service facilities.
Centers provide reproductive health services too and are now benefitting from the act’s provisions.
“Although violent acts against life-affirming pregnancy centers and medical clinics are on the rise, we appreciate the efforts of local and national law enforcement to maintain order and safety in our communities,” O’Connor said.
She also condemned violence against any human being.
Many of the attacks have come from the radical group Jane’s Revenge, which has called for escalated attacks against pro-life groups after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
No one knows the exact structure or numbers of Jane’s Revenge, but the group has conducted attacks across America.
“We will hunt you down and make your lives a living hell,” its online page reads. The group has announced that it is at “war” with pro-lifers, and that it is willing to take their lives.
Jane’s Revenge isn’t the only group behind attacks. Some attacks were by unaffiliated people.
Nationwide Violence
Some pro-life leaders have described the months after the leaked Supreme Court draft on Roe v. Wade as the “pro-abortion Kristallnacht.”
Pro-life leaders including Roberts say they are concerned about repeat attacks because of the lack of arrests.
“There is some concern,” she said. “We were actually threatened again by phone. And there are groups that want to pursue continuing to harass different centers.”
Roberts has hired 24-hour security guards after the attack. It is expensive, but she estimates the damage the clinic suffered will cost $250,000 to repair.
She added that the series of pro-abortion attacks might be enough to raise the cost of insurance as well.
“That has been at the top of my list of thoughts,” Roberts said. “It would be very possible for that to happen.”
Despite the uncertainty and risk of more attacks, Roberts said her clinic has to keep working to help pregnant women.
“We cannot ever let a bully on the block stop us from doing a good work,” she said.
Firebomb attacks like the ones that hit Roberts’ clinic are only solved 21 percent of the time, according to crime statistics.
The Epoch Times contacted the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs, but has not yet received a response.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/authorities-yet-to-arrest-anyone-over-more-than-50-pro-abortion-attacks_4601259.html
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Gender quotas bite the Australian Labor party hard
If racial discrimination is bad why is discrimination in favour of women good? Why should we not select the best person for the job on all occasions?
According to The Australian over the weekend, Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Queensland Labor government is set to ‘force’ (politely nudge?) three of its male MPs to resign so they can balance out the gender quotas in preselection.
What is it they say? Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
The alleged looming threat of coerced resignation is being made in line with the Labor Party’s ‘Affirmative Action policy’ – also known as gender discrimination when viewed in the daylight. How else could you describe a policy that advocates hiring and firing based upon gender (no – wait – do they mean ‘biological sex’?) instead of merit?
45 per cent of Labor preselection have to be women. No, Labor haven’t worked out how to define ‘women’ yet, but that won’t stop them writing policy referencing women.
The Australian names the potential unlucky gents as Jim Madden, Mark Furner, Stirling Hinchliffe, and Peter Russo. That’s four, but in the case of gender equality, the more ‘women’ the better.
‘All male MPs are affected by the Affirmative Action rule – all should be aware of that,’ said one MP.
Which begs the question, why does Anthony Albanese exist?
With all the quota girls padding out Labor’s ranks, it remains baffling that they chose a – how do we hear it phrased by the Left? Oh yes. A ‘stale, pale, male’ to lead the party… There is no point arguing on merit, experience, or hard work – as Labor have established, it’s all about the chromosomes in 2022, and Albanese has an errant ‘Y’ that no amount of Women’s Weekly makeovers can fix.
Unsurprisingly, several of the male MPs waiting for the ‘shoulder tap’ have chosen not to criticise the policy and instead insist that they are ‘hard working’ and ‘concentrating on their electorate’. It’s almost as if Labor MPs want something outdated like ‘merit’ to come to their rescue. Why are they fighting against the ‘greater good’? Do they ‘hate women’? Is that why they refuse to do the manly thing and step aside?
Kate Flanders, Labor Party secretary clarified the situation.
‘The rules are there to change the culture and they have we have a very proud record of increasingly female representation in the Parliament. It is about moving the culture forward and identifying great women who want to run in those winnable seats and so that is certainly something we will be aiming to do in the 2024 round.’
That said, the rule insists on 45 per cent so, when push comes to literal shove, three blokes are going to get shoved.
Meanwhile, in the real world, most women despise the very notion of ‘gender’ policies that reduce women to statistical requirements. It is a system that parachutes unqualified women into positions at the expense of more suitable candidates. At the same time, the women who deserve their roles are forever tarnished with the ‘quota girl’ suspicion.
It’s lose-lose for women, underpinned with a bit of extra resentment from men who (quite rightly) feel that it is wrong to award someone a job because they make the office ‘look right’ to meet some arbitrary virtue goal.
In this case, the Labor men deserve what they get. The party was happy to push ‘gender quotas’ as an election-winning (allegedly) campaign – so they have to live with it. Or retire with it, as the case may be.
As an aside, when are the media going to start calling out ‘positive discrimination’ and ‘affirmative action’ for what it is – racism, sexism, morally bankrupt and outdated discriminatory garbage…?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/07/gender-quotas-bite-labor-hard/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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