Tag Archives: Leftism

Authors of study showing no police bias against blacks want their study retracted

If you're looking for truth, you won't find it at the university
If you’re looking for truth, you won’t find it at the university

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a peer-reviewed journal that claims to publish “only the highest quality scientific research.” Now, the authors of a 2019 PNAS article are disowning their research simply because I cited it.

Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland analyzed 917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings. Neither did. Once “race specific rates of violent crime” are taken into account, the authors found, there are no disparities among those fatally shot by the police. These findings accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.

In September 2019, I cited the article’s finding in congressional testimony. I also referred to it in a City Journal article, in which I noted that two Princeton political scientists, Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo, had challenged the study design. Messrs. Cesario and Johnson stood by their findings. Even under the study design proposed by Messrs. Knox and Mummolo, they wrote, there is again “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”

My June 3 Journal op-ed quoted the PNAS article’s conclusion verbatim. It set off a firestorm at Michigan State. The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.

Mr. Cesario told this page that Mr. Hsu’s dismissal could narrow the “kinds of topics people can talk about, or what kinds of conclusions people can come to.” Now he and Mr. Johnson have themselves jeopardized the possibility of politically neutral scholarship. On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds.

The authors don’t say how I misused their work.

College Fix notes that Michigan State University has even deleted a press release they had put out about the study, in which they praised it. The press release said:

Reports of racially motivated, fatal shootings by police officers have garnered extensive public attention and sparked activism across the nation. New research from Michigan State University and University of Maryland reveals findings that flip many of these reports on their heads – white police officers are not more likely to have shot minority citizens than non-white officers.

“Until now, there’s never been a systematic, nationwide study to determine the characteristics of police involved in fatal officer-involved shootings,” said Joseph Cesario, co-author and professor of psychology at MSU. “There are so many examples of people saying that when black citizens are shot by police, it’s white officers shooting them. In fact, our findings show no support that black citizens are more likely to be shot by white officers.”

In addition to trying to retract the study, and deleting the press release, we also have people losing their jobs.

College Fix notes:

Michigan State University leaders have successfully pressured Stephen Hsu to resign from his position as vice president of research and innovation after the Graduate Employees Union launched a campaign to oust him from his role.

As VP of research, he allocated money to partially fund the study. And the woke-scolds at MSU didn’t like that, so they got him to resign. There was no problem found with the research or the funding, they just didn’t like the conclusion.

If you’re going to go to university, be careful what you study. If you’re going to get a job, be careful what job you get and where you work. You need to be thinking about what sorts of programs and workplaces harbor these far-left psychopaths.

Harvard psychology graduate fired for threatening to stab people she disagrees with

Harvard University graduate Claira Janover wants to stab you for disagreeing with her
Harvard University grad Claira Janover wants to stab you for disagreeing with her

My wise advisor Dina sent me this news story about a privileged young woman who graduated Harvard University and got a job at the prestigious accounting firm Deloitte. She recorded herself threatening to stab people who disagreed with her Democrat convictions. Deloitte fired her. Now she’s complaining that she is the real victim.

Here’s the story in the New York Post:

Claira Janover, who graduated in May with a degree in government and psychology, went viral after posting a short clip in which she attacked anyone with “the nerve, the sheer entitled caucasity to say ‘all lives matter.’”

“I’ma stab you,” the Connecticut native said, zooming in close on her face.

“I’ma stab you, and while you’re struggling and bleeding out, I’ma show you my paper cut and say, ‘My cut matters too,’” she added.

And in another New York Post article:

In her new videos, she blamed supporters of President Trump for going after her job.

“Trump supporters took my job away from me,” she said in another new video posted Wednesday.

[…]“Now my future’s entirely compromised because Trump supporters have decided to come for my life.”

Yeah, getting fired for being a psychopath definitely is the same thing as Trump supporters coming for your life.

Here are the videos:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1278604728042172416

She’s trying to make herself into a victim now. I think it would help if she could Jussie Smollett or Bubba Wallace up some fake threats and hate crimes against herself. That’s what the universities teach young people – always be a victim, so that you can demand sympathy when you get caught being a fascist.

Keep in mind that the standard operating procedure for secular leftists Nazis nowadays is to dox you, vandalize your property, threaten your life, get you fired from your job. But when a young, entitled leftist gets fired, it’s the end of the world. These things aren’t supposed to happen to them. Christians and conservatives have been putting up with hate speech and violence from secular left terrorists for years, and no one batted an eye. No matter how gentle and respectful we are when putting forward our views, we know that some unhinged secular leftist is just waiting with a knife to stab us or get us fired.

By the way, I checked her Twitter account, and she hasn’t been suspended. Because making threats against conservatives doesn’t violate the Twitter terms of service. It only applies one way.

Black UC Berkeley professor writes the best essay on Black Lives Matter ever

My software engineering friend who wrote the last guest post sent me this essay. He said it was better than his (which was enormously popular) and better than my multiple posts on fatherlessness, crime, police, etc. He said it was gold from start to finish. I have to agree. And the most amazing thing about it is – the author of this essay is BLACK himself.

The essay was published anonymously, because otherwise, this professor would lose his job. There is no diversity of opinions in American academia. You’re for communism, or you’re out.

It says:

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews.

And:

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution.

Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is. No discussion is permitted for non-black victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of non-black violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders.

And:

The claim that black interracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin.

Regarding the Democrat party’s “solutions”:

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.

Corporate slactivism:

The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM.

The sainting of George Floyd:

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors. And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise.

Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species.

This part describes what my reaction has been to the mainstream approach to the experience of blacks in America:

It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

Please read the whole thing and share it! I wish that the mainstream news featured the viewpoints of more black conservatives like this!