Rod DREHER
A reader sends in a link to this nine-minute New Yorker documentary about a woke young couple raising their child to be gender-neutral. I had to stop watching it out of pity for this kid. These loons are going to screw him or her up terribly, and he or she will hate them:
Blank-slate utopians, man. So very many of our problems today come from a refusal to accept givenness as a natural condition.
So many on the left today have forgotten human nature. In his sizzling monologue last night, Tucker Carlson featured a can’t-make-this-stuff-up moment. I’ve cued the monologue clip to that moment:
Here’s the tweet it came from:
Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) and Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton almost attacked: pic.twitter.com/Y1ph336GHI
— Henry Rodgers (@henryrodgersdc) June 23, 2020
The person lamenting the absence of the cops is Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting DC delegate to Congress. Gosh, it’s almost like if you defund the police, you will have no one to protect you from the violent and the crazy.
Here is a banana split of Schadenfreude, courtesy of The New Woke Times. It seems that a mostly white, left-wing neighborhood in Minneapolis decided that to protect black lives, its residents would no longer call the police when crimes are happening. This is not going so well for them. Excerpts:
After the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, Ms. Albers, who is white, and many of her progressive neighbors have vowed to avoid calling law enforcement into their community. Doing so, they believed, would add to the pain that black residents of Minneapolis were feeling and could put them in danger.
Already, that commitment is being challenged. Two weeks ago, dozens of multicolored tents appeared in the neighborhood park. They were brought by homeless people who were displaced during the unrest that gripped the city. The multiracial group of roughly 300 new residents seems to grow larger and more entrenched every day. They do laundry, listen to music and strategize about how to find permanent housing. Some are hampered by mental illness, addiction or both.
Their presence has drawn heavy car traffic into the neighborhood, some from drug dealers. At least two residents have overdosed in the encampment and had to be taken away in ambulances.
More:
“I’m not being judgmental,” said Carrie Nightshade, 44, who explained that she no longer felt comfortable letting her children, 12 and 9, play in the park by themselves. “It’s not personal. It’s just not safe.”
On Friday, she sat in a shared backyard with four other women who live in neighboring houses. The women, four of whom are white, had called a meeting to vent about the camp.
Angelina Roslik burst into tears, explaining that she had spent the past four years fleeing unstable housing conditions and was struggling more than she cared to admit with the chaos the camp had brought into the neighborhood. Linnea Borden said she had stopped walking her dog through the park because she was tired of being catcalled. “My emotions change every 30 seconds,” said Tria Houser, who is part Native American.
The women agreed to let any property damage, including to their own homes, go ignored and to request a block party permit from the city to limit car traffic. Rather than turn to law enforcement if they saw anyone in physical danger, they resolved to call the American Indian Movement — a national organization created in 1968 to address Native American grievances such as police brutality — which had been policing its own community locally for years.
And:
Tobie Miller, Ms. Albers’s 34-year-old daughter, lives just a block away from her mother, but lately, she said, they have felt a world apart. Ms. Miller began a concerted effort last year to challenge her own privileges by taking a class on racial biases.
She worries that a lot of what has been written about the camp on community message boards has been influenced by racial profiling. To the extent that illegal activity is going on in the park, Ms. Miller does not blame the tent residents. “My feeling around it is those are symptoms of systemic oppression,” she said. “And that’s not on them.”
This progressive white dude was robbed at gunpoint by two black teenagers. He called the cops. But now he feels bad about it:
Two days after an initial conversation, his position had evolved. “Been thinking more about it,” he wrote in a text message. “I regret calling the police. It was my instinct but I wish it hadn’t been. I put those boys in danger of death by calling the cops.”
Read it all. Please do — it is a glimpse into the kind of America these progressives wants for us all. They are lunatics. Ideology has made them crazy and self-destructive. They want to hand our cities over to armed robbers and roving lunatics.
The Minneapolis City Council, all Democratic, has voted unanimously to defund the police. If you can sell your house and leave, now is the time. Or if not, it’s time to try to break away from the city and incorporate as an independent municipality, or join with a suburb. Cities run by progressives are going straight into the ditch.
The other night, Tucker Carlson mentioned that Donald Trump laughed about this kind of thing, and said something to the effect of let the progressive cities destroy themselves. Understandable, said Tucker, but inexcusable: no American president should talk this way. He’s right. Along those lines, no American should merely laugh this off. It came upon Minneapolis very fast. Do not take this lightly.
theamericanconservative.com