All Episodes
Previous Next
May 5, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:59
2968 How To Fight Police Brutality!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
It is very tempting to spend one's anger and outrage on particular manifestations of an unjust system.
But all that does is pretend that the rest of the system is somehow just.
Some people are upset that I do not rail against what they perceive as specific police abuses because they do not understand how to oppose an unjust system as a whole.
In the old Soviet Union, the people's frustration and rage was regularly directed at supposed saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries and other ideological criminals through show trials, which allowed the people to focus their anger on particular individuals rather than the system as a whole.
In a democracy, show trials remain necessary, of course, but democracies have the option of focusing the people's rage On particular leaders, George Bush or Barack Obama, it doesn't really matter, so that everyone can indulge in the fantasy that, although political leaders are supposed to be bound by the Constitution and the rule of law, having a new leader will somehow magically change the system.
This is like believing that a new basketball coach will grant the team the ability to fly.
And so, in grim, propagandistic repetition, we see show trials regularly erupting regarding police brutality, political corruption, conflicts of interest, affairs, private email servers, public foundations, you name it!
Your attention is forever drawn to these public circuses.
In magic, this is called misdirection, which is the art of drawing the attention of the audience away from the hand, actually performing the trick.
In the black magic of politics, this is called the media.
Intelligent and alert people ignore the show trials, but rather look for what the show trials are designed to obscure.
You cannot see the stars when the sun is out, unless the moon covers the sun, at which point the constellations become visible.
When you cover the air horn blaring of the media circus, the true constellations of political power become immediately visible.
When you find yourself asking whether the money taken in by the Bill Clinton Foundation influenced his wife's decisions when she was Secretary of State, you can ignore the reality.
That almost all political donations are paid to influence the power of the state.
Or that 0.01% of the American public provide close to half of all political donations.
The 1% of the 1% effectively control the awesome power of the modern political state.
It is only by ignoring the reality that the rich buy political favors, that the $1.5 billion it takes to run a presidential campaign is paid for by people who will get far more than $1.5 billion worth of value out of their bought and paid for president.
It is only by ignoring this that you can describe the system as a republic or a democracy without rolling your eyes.
When the media gets you to focus on bad apples, by implication, the remaining apples must be good.
And that is the purpose of media attention, to validate the system as a whole by serving up exceptions.
If you are told that only one student out of a class of 500 was caught cheating and punished, you are being unconsciously programmed to regard the other 499 students as honest.
Exceptions reinforce the perception of standards.
Where are Lois Lerner's emails?
Should there be an IRS at all?
Did Hillary Clinton facilitate the transfer of 20% of America's uranium to Russian control?
Should the government have that power at all?
The government is wasting money.
Should the government control money at all?
Why is the media focusing on police violence against blacks?
Because elections and welfare.
The media is left-wing and the Democrats are left-wing.
Just look at Baltimore, a dying city that has been controlled exclusively by Democrats since 1967, almost one half of a century.
The mayor, police, city council, and other officials are all liberal Democrats.
The Maryland state legislature is controlled by Democrats.
They have had a Democrat governor for the past eight years, and out of eight congressional districts, six are controlled by Democrats.
The Democrats control the school system that has massive failure rates, despite ranking in the top five among the nation's 100 largest school districts in spending per pupil, Democrats consistently oppose school vouchers, which many African-American parents really want in order to keep the donations flowing from their union cronies.
Look at Detroit, controlled by the Democrats since 1961.
The American government spends almost $1 trillion a year fighting poverty.
That's over $61,000 per poor family.
And fails!
Since President Obama was inaugurated, federal welfare spending has increased by 41%.
Since Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, declared the war on poverty in 1964, the poverty rate has barely budged.
In real terms, poverty is almost infinitely worse because we now have persistent endemic poverty and also a crippling national debt and utterly unpayable, unfunded liabilities.
Being poor is one thing.
Being poor and in over $1.2 million in debt is quite another.
You can work your way out of poverty You cannot dig your way out of that kind of debt.
The welfare state is worse than a failure.
It is a soul-destroying, economy-shredding, poisoned poverty hole that has killed families, murdered neighborhoods, and slaughtered opportunity for more than two generations now.
Sure.
And the big problem for the poor, particularly poor blacks, is a few rogue cops.
We are now in danger of forgetting what life was like before welfare.
Let me remind you of what once was, and the birth of opportunity that was killed in the crib.
Between 1950 and 1965, poverty was cut in half in America.
Between 1940 and 1960, the poverty rate for blacks had been cut nearly in half.
Between 1936 and 1959, for various skilled trades, the incomes of blacks relative to whites had more than doubled.
The number of blacks in professional and other high-level occupations grew more quickly during the half-decade before the launch of the welfare state than during the five years after it began.
The welfare state punished marriage, punished work.
If a woman on welfare married a man working a low-paying job, a few extra dollars in income cost thousands of dollars in benefits.
The two most essential routes out of poverty, marriage and work, are crushingly taxed in the welfare state.
This is one reason why out-of-wedlock births in the black community have tripled to almost 75% since the beginning of the welfare state.
Fully 50% of that disintegration comes directly from the perverse incentives of the welfare state.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People reported that, quote, The ready access to a lifetime of welfare and free social service programs is a major contributory factor to the crime problems we face today.
A 50% increase in the monthly value of combined AFDC and food stamp benefits led to a 117% increase in crime rates among young black men.
Barbara Whitehead wrote, The relationship between single-parent families and crime is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low-income and crime.
This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature.
The nation's mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials consistently point to family breakup as the most important source of rising rates of crime.
Welfare recipients are not lazy.
They are rational.
Low-paying jobs are pretty terrible.
If you're working as a busboy in a busy restaurant, hustling and sweating and being yelled at all day long until your feet ache and your boss takes you aside and tells you that he will pay you double your salary to stay home, would you come back to work the next day?
What happens to kids on welfare?
Dr.
June O'Neill and Anne Hill, comparing children who were identical in terms of such social and economic factors as race, family structure, neighborhood, family income, and mother's IQ and education, found that the more years a child spent on welfare, the lower the child's IQ. The more welfare income received by a family, the lower a son's earnings as an adult.
Throughout the epoch of slavery and into the early decades of the 20th century, most black children grew up in two-parent households.
Post-Civil War studies revealed that most black couples in their 40s had been together for at least 20 years.
In southern urban areas around 1880, nearly three-fourths of black households were husband or father present.
In southern rural settings, the figure approached 86%.
As of 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks nationwide was approximately 15%, scarcely one-fifth of the current figure.
As late as 1950, black women were more likely to be married than white women, and only 9% of black families with children were headed by a single parent.
During the nine decades between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1950s, the black family remained a strong, stable institution.
Its cataclysmic destruction was subsequently set in motion by such policies as the anti-marriage incentives that are built into the welfare system, which have served only to exacerbate the problem.
As George Mason University Professor Walter E. Williams puts it, quote, the welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do, and that is to destroy the black family.
Hoover Institution Fellow Thomas Sowell concurs, The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.
The entire democratic apparatus in the United States is set up to buy votes with stolen, borrowed, or printed money.
If the welfare state is threatened, half the political power in the United States goes up in smoke.
The evidence is accumulating.
The case is no longer open to reasonable doubt.
The American government is going bankrupt, buying votes.
As the money runs out, new enemies need to be invented.
Republicans passed the 13th Amendment ending slavery, and 80% of Democrats voted against it.
Republicans unanimously enacted the 14th Amendment granting freed slaves the rights of citizenship, with unanimous opposition by the Democrats.
Republicans passed the 15th Amendment giving blacks the right to vote.
Republicans tried to pass anti-lynching laws which were staunchly opposed by Democrats.
The Ku Klux Klan was the military arm of the Democratic Party.
The Democrats fought the Civil War in the hopes of continuing the enslavement of black people.
Democrats subjected semi-free blacks to Jim Crow laws and Ku Klux Klan violence.
Democrats fought hard for segregationist laws, anti-black gun restrictions, anti-black union powers, anti-black minimum wages, you name it.
In 1956, 99 members of Congress signed a Southern Manifesto denouncing desegregation.
Two were Republicans.
97 were Democrats.
Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, stripped Republican Eisenhower's 1957 civil rights bill of its enforcement provisions.
The bill was later opposed by 18 Democrat senators.
Every single Senate segregationist was a Democrat.
LBJ reversed his position on civil rights, sponsoring the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and reportedly explained to his fellow Democrats, I'll have them niggers voting Democrat for 200 years.
And thus, the rise and advance of an historically oppressed population was first arrested and then reversed.
The goal of the media...
is to focus the people's resentment on the police, rather than the welfare state.
The police are responding to the rise in crime where single motherhood is most prevalent.
However, rather than talk about how the welfare state destroys the family, the economy, and entire communities, and the future, the media want to talk about police aggression.
Thus, anyone who wants to talk about the root causes of violence and oppression to avoid surface symptoms and deal with what is really happening and why can be called a racist cop-apologist and dismissed from the pretense of a debate.
I grew up in a poor neighborhood.
I am the son of a single mother.
My friends were the children of single mothers.
I have seen the effects.
I know this world, this underworld.
If you really want to reduce police abuse, abolish the welfare state.
▲
Export Selection