How Can A British Tabloid Do This Story About Horrifying Dysfunction in NYC's Criminal Justice System But The 'New York Times' Cannot?

 

Another silent salvo in the NYT's "War On Noticing," as per the Daily Mail. 

A serial burglar in New York City who has been arrested 19 times in the past eight months was free on bail when he broke into a child's bedroom and molested her this week. 

Raymond Wilson, 31, was detained this week after allegedly breaking into a Greenwich Village home and rubbing his exposed genitals on a 10-year-old girl's feet while she slept.  

NYPD Police Commissioner Dermot Shea slammed 'the failed policy' that allowed Wilson to be on the streets on Friday. Shea has been a vocal opponent of New York City's bail reform since it was enacted. 

He tweeted: 'A 10 year old girl traumatized and we are again left to pick up the pieces for a failed policy. How long must we wait? How many victims must suffer? Over and over NY'ers ask, 'How can they be released?' ……and there is no logical answer.' 

 

Police say the assault happened on June 12 when Wilson allegedly got into the young girl's home at 1 am while she and her younger sister were home alone sleeping. 

'The victim felt something slimy on her feet and noticed the defendant was rubbing his penis against her toes,' said Assistant District Attorney Meghan McNulty. 'The victim screamed for her parents, but nobody was home except her younger sister, who was sleeping in another room.' 

The disturbed man quickly redressed and fled the scene once the young girl woke up screaming. The terrified girl stared at the bedroom door for 15-20 minutes, worried that the guy might return, before calling her mother. 

Police later released surveillance images of the suspect and asked for the public's help identifying him. He left a cigarette lighter and a camera lens at the scene and stole a bicycle from the building hallway which he rode away on.  

Wilson fled the scene before officers arrived but was later connected to the crime from DNA from a stain left on the young girl's duvet cover. When police recovered his DNA and ran his name they realized he was also being sought for additional burglaries. 

The serial burglar and sexual assailant was arrested and jailed this week on $500,000 cash bail or $750,000 bond at a hearing in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday. 

'I'm requiring this defendant to return to court,' said Judge Anne Swern of the bail. 'Because of that criminal record. Because of the fact that he was not reachable by phone. Because I know he goes by a number of different names. Because he has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ... a number of different Social Security numbers.'

'I think he faces a significant period of incarceration.'

Wilson's recent prior arrests include at least six burglaries, plus arrests on four successive days in May for lesser offenses since November. He was repeatedly released with no bail sometimes with no conditions, other times under terms of supervisory release such as addiction treatment or job training. 

A spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. acknowledged bail was not sought in a number of cases where prosecutors had the option to do so, according to the Daily News. 

 

New state reform laws enacted in 2020 demand that suspects in a long list of crimes go free without having to post bail. Shea has blamed New York's sharp rise in crime on New York's new bail reform laws. On July 7, Shea pointed to the sweeping bail reform measures when asked about the city's surge in crime. 

'I think you've got to get uncomfortable here, and the uncomfortable conversation for a lot of people is we have to address that law that was passed in 2019, and the implications that we're feeling today' referring to the bail reform. 

In February the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice released a report showing that, 97%, of the roughly 50,000 people awaiting trial monthly in 2020 haven't been re-arrested. While Judges have increasingly used supervised released as an alternative to jail, this trend existed before New York City reformed bail laws and continued afterward.  

 

A New York Post analysis of NYPD's crime statistics data found that most people released under the criminal justice reforms were not connected to the surge of violent crimes. Criminal justice experts suggest that the cops focus on the flow of illegal guns into the city instead which the White House has announced plans to do.  

If You Still Think COVID-19 Couldn't Have Come From a Lab Leak In Wuhan, Maybe You're Bats!

Opinion on the lab leak scenario, once seen as a fringe theory, has shifted dramatically, Politico reports, citing a new Harvard Poll which surveyed 1,009 adults from June 22-27. “Most Americans now believe that the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory in China,” the magazine explains, noting “a high level of public interest in investigating Covid-19’s origin, with almost two-thirds of Democrats and Republicans calling the issue “extremely” or “very” important.

 

According to Politico: 

 

U.S. adults were almost twice as likely to say the virus was the result of a lab leak in China than human contact with an infected animal, which many scientists believe is the most likely scenario. 

 

The poll's findings show what was once a fringe belief held mainly among some on the political right has become accepted by most Republicans, as well as most Democrats, amid heightened scrutiny of the lab leak theory.

 

In March 2020, a Pew Research Center poll found 29 percent of Americans believed the virus was made in a Chinese lab and released either accidentally or intentionally. 

 

The new survey shows 52 percent believe the virus came out of a lab, including 59 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats, while 28 percent said it was from an infected animal.

 

The absence of a large partisan gap on the issue is particularly striking, said Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who designed the poll.

 

“Usually, our polls find a big split between Republicans and Democrats, so this is unique,” he said. “More conservative media have been carrying the ‘lab leak’ issue, and it’s been a Trump talking point from the beginning, so we expected people who lean Democratic would say either ‘It’s not true’ or ‘I don’t know.’ But the belief is bipartisan.”

 

Blendon said Democrats likely became more receptive to the idea after President Joe Biden’s recent order that intelligence agencies investigate the virus’ origin and comments from Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical officer, that it's worth digging into. 

 

Fauci and other scientists have cautioned the answer may never be known definitively.

“That the president thought there was enough evidence to ask intelligence agencies to put together a report sends a signal to Democrats that there might be something there,” Blendon said.

 

Democratic lawmakers have also faced pressure to look more closely at the lab leak scenario, though they worry Republicans will stoke uncertainty about the virus origin for political gain. Several congressional committees have launched inquiries, and the House Science Committee plans to hold its first hearing on the issue next week.

 

The POLITICO-Harvard poll, which will be released next week, also found there’s a high level of public interest in investigating Covid-19’s origin, with almost two-thirds of Democrats and Republicans calling the issue “extremely” or “very” important. The finding also surprised Blendon, who said the public isn’t typically invested in such a scientific inquiry.

 

The broad attention on the issue underscores the stakes for the Biden administration’s upcoming report on the virus origin, due in August. Even if the report concludes the virus came from nature, it could be hard to move public opinion, lawmakers and researchers like Blendon have noted.

Putting The Hitlerizers On The Couch: After Indulging Them For Years, WAPO Now Says No More 'Ignorant' Analogies

 

Tossing around ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ as insults is reckless and historically illiterate, says former Congressman Mitch Daniels in yesterday's Washington Post. 

Inapt use of “Nazi” is not new but has proliferated in recent years, hurled by hands both left and right. It was thrown at Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The term has been used to criticize immigration enforcement by one side and pandemic lockdowns by the other. Even in the early Internet days, in 1990, writer Mike Godwin formulated the theorem that “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.” 

Such reckless verbiage is, of course, not just grossly disproportionate and non-analogous to the real thing, it’s historically illiterate. The Anti-Defamation League has frequently had to issue reproaches such as, “Glib comparisons to Nazi Germany are offensive and a trivialization of the Holocaust.”  

The term “fascist” is, if anything, even more absurdly misused, also by both of today’s tribes. From one side, fascist has been applied to proponents of gun control, mask mandates and speech codes. From the other side, at almost anyone who deviates from their various orthodoxies: people dubious about cutting police budgets during a crime and homicide surge, committed feminists who balk at today’s more extreme demands on gender issues, college presidents supportive of free expression, and so on. A Christmas Day article on Salon attacked Hallmark movies as “fascist propaganda.” I’m not making that up. 

Here, too, ignorance reigns. The inventor of fascism a century ago, Benito Mussolini, also defined it: “Everything in the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.” That sounds closer to one side of today’s arguments than the other, but let’s stipulate that neither really is advocating the complete eradication of voluntary, intermediating institutions or of all forms of personal freedom. At least not yet. 

The loosening of discipline around the terrible insults that “Nazi” and “fascist” represent has crept beyond the fevered denizens of Internet chat rooms and fringe “activists.” Thinkers I admire deeply, such as Michael Gerson and Jonah Goldberg, have launched the Other F-bomb — Gerson at the supporters of the previous president, Goldberg in his 2008 book “Liberal Fascism.” The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg spat it at a U.S. senator for suggesting the use of federal troops in a public safety emergency. Good idea or not, it hardly merited the fascist slur, any more than it did in Little Rock 1958, Detroit 1967 or D.C. 2021. 

This is not an argument for either side of any of these issues. It isn’t a plea for “safe spaces” because of the hurtful character of such invective. They are, after all, only words. It’s just a suggestion that words packed with this much meaning not be thrown around so loosely, and ignorantly. 

Somebody once said — maybe it was George Carlin, gee I miss him — “What’s another good word for synonym?” Instead of “Nazi” or “fascist,” how about “tyrannical,” “autocratic,” “coercive,” “despotic” or “dictatorial,” just for starters? 

Because, God forbid, we may one day need to use those other words accurately again, and if so, it would be important that we not have cheapened them and erased their actual meaning from memory. There are real concentration camps in this world, but they’re not in El Paso or Portland, Ore. Innocent people are executed for their ethnic background or religious beliefs, but not in Seattle or Tuscaloosa, Ala. As a people, we are nowhere near the kind of polity that produces such atrocities, and we ought not talk to each other as though we are. 

The Magic Of My Father's City: Remembering the 'Gendarmes Of The Generation Gap'

 

What did you do in the 1960s, Daddy?

 

As Father's Day looms, this question might be on the lips of many a “woke” son or daughter curious about their Boomer parents' relationship to the Vietnam War, antiwar protest or countercultural experimentation with drugs or sex. My late father, a World War II Navy vet who retired as a Detective Captain after 27 years in the NYPD, always had a singular answer whenever one of his children or grandchildren made inquiry. It was a response most definitely shorn of the moral vanity and generational narcissism permeating novels, plays and movies evoking that period, as well as the self-stroking memories of those who lived through it.

 

"I ran the Hippie Squad," he would say with a sly grin. The natural raconteur in him was always eager for yet another chance to describe an earlier chapter in what everyone refers to now as "Re-Imagining the Police" which, curiously enough, has evolved into what the now uber-trendy New York Times calls an "epic" youth scene where "the city streets are so teeming with fresh-faced pleasure seekers one might squint and think it 1967, the Summer of Love." 

 

During his long police career, my father had many interesting experiences and assignments. He guarded Fidel Castro in September 1960 during the Cuban leader's controversial trip to address the UN, led gambling investigations in Madame Sinclair's Harlem, made the first arrest in the infamous Harry Gross investigation, and held down the desk in the "Four-One" otherwise known as "Fort Apache," the arson-ravaged precinct in the South Bronx not too far from Yankee Stadium. He also claimed that he taught fellow baldino Telly Savalas how to answer the phone like a real detective would in Midtown's "Manhattan South" for Kojak. (Unfortunately when I tried to confirm this with Savalas a few years before he passed away, Lt. Kojak didn't pick up the phone.) 

But leading the twenty or so young undercover detectives in this little known, real-life The Mod Squad was his favorite command ---and his most satisfying. He was able to both police and bridge the Generation Gap, helping several hundred underage runaway Flower Children escape the depredations of countercultural charlatans and exploiters. Good Morning, Starshine: the next time your parents wax nostalgic about how "hip" they all were then, remind them that there was a certain period on St Mark's Place when it was hard to tell who was actually a Merry Prankster and who really was "the Man."

 

Flashback, October 1967: As the Summer of Love fades into autumn in New York's East Village, runaway teenage Connecticut socialite Linda Fitzpatrick is found nude and bludgeoned to death along with her hippie celebrity boyfriend, James "Groovy" Hutchinson. Just a few months before Fitzpatrick graduated from Maryland’s prestigious Oldfields School. The proverbial "girl who had everything", she was on her way to an art college in that fall. But at the time of her death, she had become a "meth monster," last seen strung out on speed and panhandling on the street. Later that night, Fitzpatrick and Hutchinson were lured into the basement of a decrepit tenement off of Ave B by promises of a late-night LSD party.

 

Fitzpatrick was only one of many runaway flower children who had flocked to San Francisco's Haight Asbury and New York's East Village. But her murder, which became the basis of a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times account written by J. Anthony Lukas, left parents and public officials everywhere desperate to understand the "forces at work on young people" who were, by the tens of thousands, "leaving middle class homes throughout the country for the 'mind-expanding' drug scene" in places like the East Village. Why would talented privileged teenagers like Fitzpatrick leave their gilded suburban lives ---and their guaranteed futures----for a life of "crash pads, acid trips, freaking out, psychedelic art, witches and warlocks." 

Sociologists leapt into the void, invoking "the generation gap." Pastors, parents and psychologists all scrambled for a way to bridge that gap. My father, then an NYPD Detective Lieutenant did his bit too. With Mayor Lindsay breathing fire down the police commissioner's neck, my father accepted orders to form an undercover unit whose mission was to infiltrate the hippie scene, locate underage runaways, reunite them with their parents and put countercultural predators---drug dealers, racial hucksters and Hells Angels types---behind bars. The squad's mission statement was emphatic: "To regain control of the Village: East and West."

 

At the time, the tide of runaway minors had completely overwhelmed law enforcement. According to former Squad Detective Greg O'Connell, who would later go on to become a major figure in the development of Brooklyn's Red Hook waterfront, "Before the Hippie Squad, parents of runaways were on their own." If the report they made to their local police department made it to the NYPD's Missing Persons squad at all, that squad was so overloaded with cases, all they could do was check the morgue. "There was just so much volume," O'Connell recalled.

 

In many cases, parents from Ohio, Wisconsin or Iowa would come to the city and walk the streets, carrying pictures of their kids asking random people if they had seen them. Empty storefronts, light poles and station houses were plastered with fliers, a la 9-11, describing the age, hair color, nicknames and "last seen" whereabouts of the missing. (At one point my father recalls having over 2000 displayed in or filed in his office.) Exploitation of parents by street hustlers and con artists was common, with an unmistakable racial edge. "A lot of the parents suspected they were being scammed," said O'Connell. "But if you were coming in from Minnesota, you'd take your shot."  

Like Linda Fitzpatrick, many runaways came to roost in the decrepit and abandoned buildings of the far East Village, aka "Alphabet City" --- Avenues A, B, C and D. Narrow, dimly lit and urine-stinking hallways were filled with squats, communes and shooting galleries. In some crash pads, 15 to 20 dirty mattresses would be spread out on the floor; bathroom facilities were often nonexistent. 

 

Free love, along with heroin and amphetamines had triggered an epidemic of VD, hepatitis and drug addiction, with junkies often involved in prostitution. Race relations between middle class hippies and impoverished local blacks and Puerto Ricans were bad, resulting in beatings, robberies, arson deaths and rapes. According to former Hippie Squad detective Robert Marshall, "rape was the norm for runaway girls." Linda Fitzpatrick's death got saturation coverage, but news reports of the day also told of a 13-year-old girl from Ohio raped and thrown off a rooftop and of a drug-addicted 17-year-old girl from New Jersey found in a steamer truck after floating in New York harbor. And I can tell you from having gone through the microfilm in the New York Public Library that these cases were not outliers. "It was a very intense era, a sad era," recalled now-deceased East Village detective Edward Murphy. "A lot of kids got hurt."

 

Prior to that assignment, my father had experience in culturally restive areas of the city, such as Harlem and the South Bronx, and didn't mind working at night. He also had eight kids, which he used to joke, must have made his commanding officers think he knew something about youth. "I was good at running away from the bosses too" he said. "So, putting me in charge of runaway youth must have seemed like a natural for them."  

Each detective squad in Manhattan was required to detail at least one of its members, preferably young. Many came from the narcotics squad and were familiar with undercover work. Although my father did not get to pick them personally, the Chief of Detectives promised there would be no deadweight, and he delivered, producing what police call a very "active" squad. The unit was also quite diverse---Irish, Italians, Blacks, Jews and Latinos---and forged a kind of family-like atmosphere, dining out together in ethnic restaurants downtown before beginning their 8PM to 4AM shift. 

 

To pass, some of the squad members merely grew beards or long hair and wore old, wore ratty clothes, guns holstered at the ankle under bellbottoms. Others got deeper into the part, donning buckskin and leopard print vests or putting bones in their ears and studs in their noses. The mufti got particularly extravagant whenever someone form the mayor's office would come downtown around the time my father was turning the men out for the night. "Born actors," my father would say of the squad members. "Should have been on Broadway." For his part, my father, then 45 year's old, never went native, dressing in an older detective style, a la Dragnet: Good suit, sharp tie and a fedora hat. 

 

The undercover detectives worked in groups of two or three and traveled in unmarked cars. They had no radios, and were required to call into the Squad Room every hour. "Every night was busy," O'Connell recalled. 

 

In the cases referred by Missing Persons, they sought specific individuals, using a network of street informants ---"stoolies"---to locate them. Other runaways were picked up randomly on the street and taken in for identification, their tender ages and demeanor a giveaway. The bulk of the squads action though involved minors taken in as a result of "no knock" raids on crash pads, communes or parties where both kids actively being sought, and many others, congregated. This being the late 1960s when the legality of warrantless searches was unsettled, "It was easier to take a door off its hinges,'' former Detective O'Connell explained, adding:  "We got results, that's all that mattered at the time. The situation had just gotten so bad."

 

Although many of the minors had fled abusive homes, many were simply naive "lost souls," according to Robert Marshall. "I don't believe they had the faintest idea what they had walked into and how they could be taken advantage of in such a short time," O'Connell added. 

Predators were arrested and charged, but as long as the apprehended runaway was not arrogant or verbally abusive to the detectives, the squad tried as much as possible to return them directly to their parents. This kept the kids from having an arrest record, which in those days was not as easy as now to erase and could affect their future prospects. It also spared families a stain on their reputation if news got out their child had been taken into the system formally. "We were looking for kids and trying to reconnect them to their families," O'Connell explained. "Ours was more a social mission than a law enforcement mission." 

 

Indeed, a lot of the kids had hit bottom, wanted to go home and just needed help in getting there. "We'd call the parents on their behalf and arrange tickets home, or a shower. If the kid was strung out on drugs, we'd take them to detox at Bellevue," said O'Connell. In one case, that of the daughter of a then well-known radio celebrity, detectives brought the girl home through the back door of the well-appointed uptown co-op, so newshounds and neighbors wouldn't see. 

 

Parents who came to New York to either report a missing kid or pick one up were never made to feel embarrassed. "Sometimes parents would come into the Squad and tell us what their son or daughter was like," O'Connell recalled.  "It was often the same sad story we had heard hundreds of times before. But they had taken the time and money to come to New York to look for their children and we felt it was our duty to listen. Your father having eight kids, he could relate to them, especially." The unit tied as much as possible to shield the parents from the conditions they found their children in. Upon seeing her dirty, drug-addled daughter, one middle-aged mother fainted as her brother, a priest, tried to explain that they were "a good family." 

 

Part of the squad's job was to help keep anarchy at bay in the streets. This wasn’t easy during the "long hot summer" of 1968. When the news would hit the underground press after a big "no knock" raid, hundreds of angry hippies would lay siege to the 9th Precinct---The Embassy" as it was called---- to protest, waving banners that said "Don't Bust Our Crash Pads" and "Join the Revolution." To have a station house taken over was the biggest fear any commanding officer could imagine, since it represented a profound embarrassment to the department. 

 

When such protests occurred therefore it would not be uncommon to see 50 mounted cops, a couple of busloads of riot police and 100 to 200 uniformed police ringing the precinct house itself. What was not so common to see, or to grasp if you did see it, were men from the Hippie Squad infiltrating the crowd in order to lead them off in other directions. Such operations the Squad used to call "cattle runs." 

 

"I'd talk to the Inspector," my father explained, "and when he thought they all had had enough protest time, he'd give me the signal and say 'Yep. Time to break 'em up." Often, they would lead them toward another precinct elsewhere downtown but by the time they were halfway there the energy ---and the threat---would have faded. My father would instruct his men "Don't ever tell the captain over there we tried to send them over. The captain over there would have killed me if he knew."   

 

This being the old NYPD, there was a definite political dimension to the job as well. My father often was asked to escort VIP's who wanted to see "the hippie scene" up close. He especially liked taking them to the Electric Circus on St. Mark's Place---"the Studio 54 of the Hippie Movement," as he called it when I interviewed him in 2000---and to the Rubber Room adjacent to it where most of the clientele was doing LSD and the pot smoke was so thick "you could get high just standing there." One night with an entourage from the Mayor's office, the experience got a little too mind-blowing. Standing on a balcony above a dance floor the group saw a woman and a man having sex. "Well, I guess we've seen enough for the time being," one of the mayor's aides said.

Another political aspect involved what police call "contracts"---non-remunerative favors arranged by senior-most department officials or City Hall politicos on behalf of celebrities, politicians or even their own relatives and friends whose children had run away. The Police Commissioner, the Chief Inspector, the Chief of Detectives---"God" as my father called him---all issued contracts which the Hippie Squad was bound to fulfill. 

 

One of the more interesting contracts that came down from on high involved the daughter of Maxie Levine, an old "tough Jew" who had been an enforcer for a mob family and who was owed a favor by someone, somewhere. Maxie's teenage daughter, a methamphetamine addict, had run away to the East Village and then had gone to Miami, taking the family cat along with her. With permission from on high, a Hippie Squad detective accompanied Maxie to Miami. According to the detective, they located the girl quite quickly. But Maxie wanted to party and they stayed at the Carlyle Hotel for three days, at one-point drinking with Jackie Gleason. Finally, Maxie gave the signal to pick her up where she was crashing. They whisked the girl by jet back to a private sanitarium in New York, the cat traveling in the girl's hatbox. 

 

Another political favor involved assigning a detective to protect a female stalking victim whose mother had connections to the Greenwich Village political establishment. My father had ordered the detective not to let the girl out of his sight. But two days later, after travelling with the girl to Puerto Rico, maintaining that the mother had told him higher ups had okayed it, the Boss was livid. "Get back here right away," my father growled into the phone. "Don't even stop to breathe." 

 

A few instances of rule-bending aside, the squad was definitely on the straight and narrow. This was a huge relief for my father given the potential for corruption that existed anywhere in the department at that time but particularly in the East Village and Lower East Side where gambling had always been rife and the influx of drugs and transients was as perfect recipe for shakedowns. 

 

"I told them right from the get-go, 'Don't fool around, it’s a small squad and a small village and you know it'll get back to me," my father explained. "And if you do fool around, and it does gets back to me, there'll be no mercy whatsoever. You'll go down."  And then he told them:  "And if you even hear I'm 'on' with someone, walk into my office and punch me in the nose before you even ask me about whether it’s true or not.' I was that sincere." 

 

As it turned out, the relative youth of the men and their excitement for the squad's mission kept temptation at bay." They all did good work,  my father said. "They knew they had a good job. They weren't just sitting there catching cases like they would be in other squads. It was amazing the appreciation they showed." In fact, the amount of autonomy given squad members and their responsible acceptance of it allowed my father, in the old department style, to occasionally helm the operation from the uptown comforts of watering holes like Toots Shors, where the banter was warm, the drinks were stiff and "Sinatra's "You Make Me Feel So Young" always seemed to be on the jukebox. 

 

As former Detective O'Connell: put it, "Your father knew the guys, knew who they were and what they were about. He felt comfortable with us. He knew we weren't going to jam him up or embarrass him." Of his relaxed management style, my Dad only said: "They knew where I was if they needed me. They had all the phone numbers." 

By late 1968, the high tide of hippie-dom was ebbing and the number of runaways was on the decline. Tired of what the Village Voice called the "bad vibrations" of the East Village, many hippies were ready for the country. En masse, they headed "back to the land." 

One night, my Dad told his men that the squad had been disbanded and that they were to report back to their original commands. They did so with their resumes burnished and good recommendations, which helped many of them throughout the rest of the careers. The squad's arrest and conviction rate were high, and they had found and returned 350 underage runaways. 

 

For my father, running the Hippie Squad was a chance to use all the investigative, managerial and political skills he had honed for more than two decades on the force. For him the Summer of Love became a second spring, allowing him to do something fresh and original---not often easy in that button-down bureaucracy. And, upon soon passing the captain's promotional exam, it helped him stake out a spot for himself as a Detective Captain in prestigious Manhattan South, no small thing to have in your New York Times obituary. 

 

But the most satisfying thing about the assignment was the gratitude of the parents---and that of some of the hundreds of runaways the squad were able to return---letters from whom my father kept until he died. As these letters tell, being the boss of the Hippie Squad was a chance to play a real-world "Catcher in the Rye,” scooping up endangered kids before they fell off the cliff, into the clutches of the predators and those Holden Caulfield liked to call the “phonies. “

 

“Solid,” as Linc Hayes, the young black detective on the television version of The Mod Squad used to say.  

Heee's Back!!! Deranged Hitler Analogies Stage A 2020 Comeback After Failed 2016 Putsch

 

I’ve always found it somewhat mystifying why Donny Deutsch has had a presence in the world of broadcast journalism, since Deutsch has never actually functioned as a journalist, even in the most remote sense of the word. With this guest appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” earlier today, however, I think some of the reasonable suspicions I’ve had about Deutsch were reasonably confirmed when he upbraided his “Jewish friends” for not seeing the historical threat that Trump represents. Deutsch is the perfect voice of what has been called “Resistance Journalism." He's long on attitude, short on facts and with little historical perspective --- other than an exaggerated sense of the role that ethnocentric victimization narratives from mid-century Mitteleuropa should play in contemporary American political consciousness. As Breitbart News  described Deutsch’s diatribe:  

Discussing Trump’s Tuesday night rally in Pennsylvania, Deutsch said, “Look at that crowd… there’s not one person of a color. Anywhere. Like, usually behind him, he puts one kind of token in there, a token person, if you scan this crowd, this is stunning. If you go not even behind him, but through the thousands and thousands of people. And this, to me, looked like a rally from the early ’30s. You know, Joe, I was watching the first hour and as Jeh Johnson was talking about, comparing to Hitler. And you know, that’s something you cautiously do, because we can use the word fascist, but then when you go, Hitler, you can’t — oh, everybody starts to go —but what was going on in early 30s Germany?”

“Well, basically, you had a destruction of the belief in the free press, you had a blurring between the executive branch and the Justice Department, you have creating an other, whether it’s Muslims, whether it’s Mexicans, whether it’s congressmen who weren’t born in this country,” Deutsch continued. “And then you have the destruction of free elections. And we’re here. And what is the difference between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump? I’m not saying there’s a Holocaust, but when you look at the tactics, and that is where we are right now.”

He added, “I on a personal level — Joe, please indulge me for a second —want to talk to my Jewish friends who are voting for Donald Trump. How dare you? How dare you, with what our people have gone through in history, and you see a man who is a dictator, and once you give them an absolute power, he is possible of anything, and if you are a Jew in this country and you are supporting Donald Trump, you are not looking back at our history. And you are blind, and you are walking like a lemming off a cliff. It is time to wake up. I’m sorry, this is where we are. There is no difference from what Donald Trump is preaching from what Adolf Hitler preached in the early 30s. Let’s just say it once and for all.”

Sorrows of Woke: How 'Resistance Journalism' Might Re-Elect Trump

"Why Trump’s Negative Press Spurs Millions To Like Him Even More," by Augustus Howard, New York Post September 19, 2020

 

The Covid-19 economy being what it is, a lot of people are between jobs these days. New York Post contributor Augustus Howard seems to be between advanced degrees; it’s as if he’s a one-man credentialism convention. A William College graduate, Howard went on to get a masters from  Cambridge University, a law degree from Duke, and now a Cambridge PhD, punctuated somewhere along the line with a federal appellate court clerkship. 

 

But all that fancy book learnin’ hasn’t stopped him from developing a very grounded and incisive understanding of the politics of backlash operating in the 2020 Trump Biden race---and the media’s role in stoking it. Trump has kept a step ahead of the hounds baying behind not in spite of the media onslaught against him but because of it. Writes Howard:  

 

With Election Day in sight, the mainstream media is reaching a fever pitch in its quest to malign, discredit and defeat Donald Trump. The media’s disinformation campaign against Trump, however, may not be achieving the desired results. Joe Biden maintains a lead in public polls, but according to the Real Clear Politics polling averages, the gap is closing both nationally and in battleground states. Evidence of enthusiasm on the ground is also real: Thousands are again attending MAGA rallies, as Trump takes Air Force One on a “whistle-stop” tour of the country.

One can almost hear the collective gasp from establishment-media quarters: Can this really be happening again? Won’t any of our Devastating Reporting ever catch up with the Donald?

In fact, Trump has succeeded — and will likely continue to succeed — not in spite of the media campaign against him, but, at least in part, because of it. Voters have grown wise to the media agenda, and recognize stories crafted to fit a certain mold rather than to follow the facts. They know what a smear looks like, and they don’t like it. At the same time, the ceaseless onslaught has made Trump a permanent underdog. And Americans identify with and cheer for underdogs — an aspect of the national psyche that media and political elites, detached as they are, forget.

Understood in this light, one can see why negative Trump coverage may boomerang, including recent “bombshells” from The Atlantic magazine and Bob Woodward. Citing unnamed sources, The Atlantic claimed that Trump ridiculed American soldiers killed in war. The story, however, was soon undermined by reality. None of its sources came forward. Officials who did come forward — including former National Security Adviser John Bolton, a noted Trump critic — contradicted the account. Voters were left to wonder: Is The Atlantic more interested in harming Trump, particularly with his military supporters, than it is in the truth?

As for Woodward, who taped hours of interviews with Trump for the book “Rage,” almost any statement can be grounds for scandal. Speaking to Woodward on March 19, the president said of the novel coronavirus: “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” On “60 Minutes,” Woodward, clearly eager to use the vocabulary of Watergate, suggested Trump was “going down the path of deceit and cover-up.” But attentive observers at the time intuited the president’s strategy — the fact that he wanted to take decisive action against the virus while instilling calm in the nation. Where Woodward sees a tragic cover-up, others will find a common-sense approach to an unfolding crisis, and leadership in the context of often conflicting scientific information.

While the Trump-bashing stories continue to mount, so, also, do Trump’s accomplishments. On Sept. 15, voters watched the signing of the Abraham Accords at the White House: agreements, facilitated by the Trump administration, that normalize and improve ties between Israel and two Persian Gulf states — the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Democrats and the mainstream media may dismiss the importance of these historic pacts — legitimate steps toward peace in the Middle East — but the American people won’t.

Nor will they disregard a stock market recovery, good news that a vaccine is likely near, or the president’s pressure on obstinate Democrat leaders to conclude another coronavirus relief bill. Trump’s record of action plainly belies his media coverage.

Many Americans see through the negative reporting and agenda-driven commentary. Lacking elite connections and influence, many voters also know, from their own lives, how it feels to be on the wrong side of power — as when their jobs were offshored, or when their businesses were kept closed by the same governmental elites who endorsed non-socially distanced mass protests during the pandemic.

These voters know, in other words, what it feels like to be the underdog, to go up against the establishment. They relate to their president.

It has been said before: Americans root for underdogs. Unfortunately for the nation’s media and political elites, they vote for them, too.

 

Sorrows of Woke: Bogus Black History Professor Fails 'Transcultural Negritude' At GWU

From NPR: George Washington Professor Resigns After Scandal Over Fake Racial Identity

George Washington University says associate professor Jessica A. Krug has resigned, after a blog post published under her name last week said she had invented several Black identities.

The blog post stated that Krug is actually a white, Jewish woman from the Midwest, who for years has "assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness."

Krug's apparent fabrications garnered swift criticism from the academic community. Krug worked in GWU's history department, focusing on politics and cultural practices in Africa and the African diaspora. GWU said in an email to the university community on Wednesday afternoon that her resignation is effective immediately. 

"Her classes for this semester will be taught by other faculty members, and students in those courses will receive additional information this week," the university said. It encouraged students, faculty and staff impacted by the incident to seek support. 

"We hope that with this update our community can begin to heal and move forward," the GWU statement read. 

Krug has not responded to NPR requests for comment about her resignation or whether she actually wrote the blog post. However, it's worth noting that she has not publicly distanced herself from the post since it was published on Sept. 3.

A day after the post was released, GWU said Krug "would not be teaching her classes this semester" while it reviewed the situation.

The post predicted that her apparent confession would cause pain: "People have fought together with me and have fought for me, and my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial — but it means that every step I've taken has gaslighted those whom I love."

"I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech," the writer said, adding that mental health issues probably contribute to why she assumed a false identity. 

Some members of the academic community have demanded more than Krug's resignation. Yomaira Figueroa, an assistant professor of global diaspora studies at Michigan State University, told NPR last week that she thinks Krug "took up some of the very few — very few — resources and spaces that there are available to Black and Latino scholars and use those to her advantage."

"There absolutely has to be a form of restitution for the things that she took. It's egregious," Figueroa added.

Lisa Betty, a doctoral candidate at Fordham University, echoed that call in a blog post. "Krug took up space, opportunity, time, and money. I call for reparations."