Saturday, May 01, 2021

Isn't it far-fetched to argue that police in Minnesota or New York or… Atlanta are imbued with the spirit of Southern militias tasked with tracking down slaves?

Regarding a key contention of the 1619 Project (as well as of race hustlers) — that policing in America is allegedly rooted in the South's slave patrols — Jonah Goldberg admits that,

Yes, policing in Southern slave states has some roots in slave patrols.

But policing doesn’t. 

Policing—enforcing the law, preventing crime, apprehending criminals—has a very long tradition of existence. I don't know where it started, but for our purposes we can note that Augustus Caesar, born in 27 B.C., created the cohortes urbanae near the end of his reign, to police Ancient Rome. Policing in England takes rudimentary form with Henry II's proclamation of the Assize of Arms of 1181. In the 1600s England established constables and justices of the peace to oversee them. The Metropolitan Police Act created the first recognizable police force in the U.K. in 1829.

Meanwhile, in America the first constables were created in the 1630s in what came to be known as New England. Boston has the oldest “modern” police department. It was created in 1838. New York and Philadelphia soon followed.

They were not created to search for runaway slaves.

Elsewhere, Jonah proceeds to add even more historical information (thanks to Ed Driscoll) about police forces from around the planet, going as far back to 1,000 to 2,500 years Before Christ:

Founded in 1275, the [York Minster Police] boast that they are the world’s oldest police force. That makes them a couple centuries older than [the Vatican’s Swiss Guard].

But that doesn’t mean policing began in 1275. Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty apparently had something called “The Judges Commandment of the Police.” Ancient China didn’t call them police but “prefects.” The Babylonian’s cops were called paqūdu.

Now, you might not be able to tell from my pleasant tone and demeanor, but I’m actually pretty angry that I have to tell you this (again).

The other day, I got into a little spat with Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, because she peddled to CBS the idea that modern policing has a “direct lineage” to slave patrols because, “in certain parts of the country,” slave patrols were deputized to catch slaves. She’s right about that—to a point.

 … But … Let me type this slowly so everyone can understand: The Columbus Division of Police, established in 1816, was not founded as a slave patrol. Ohio was not a slave state. In 1841, it passed a law that runaway slaves were automatically free once they made it to Ohio. Similarly, the Minneapolis Police Department, founded two years after the end of the Civil War, wasn’t built upon slave patrolling and has no “lineage”—direct or tangential—to slave patrolling.

The police officer who shot a black teen about to plunge a knife into another black teen was not in any way connected to slave patrolling. Derek Chauvin was not living down to the legacy of slave patrolling. Even Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison conceded to 60 Minutes this week that prosecutors couldn’t find any evidence that Chauvin was racist or that his crime was racially motivated. If you know anything about Ellison, you’ll know he wanted to find such evidence.  

Even the connection to slave patrolling in southern cities is, at best, literary. Does anyone actually believe that Rodney Bryant, the chief of police in Atlanta, sees himself as part of some great unbroken chain in the long tradition of slave patrolling? Of course not. And not just because Bryant is black, or because cops are not trained and educated in slave patrol tactics, but also because slavery has been illegal in the United States for 158 years, three months, and 27 days.

(This goes for Houston, Charlotte, El Paso, Nashville, Memphis, Raleigh, Lexington, Kentucky; most of the big cities in Virginia, Baton Rouge, and Tulsa—just some of the cities with black police chiefs.)

Modern policing—or even policing qua policing—owes far less to slave patrolling than NASA owes to Hitler’s rocket program. And yet no one talks about the troubling Nazi roots of modern space exploration, or asks Elon Musk if he’s exorcised the ghost of Werner Von Braun from SpaceX.

I have seen this slave patrol thing brought up countless times in interviews, and not once have I seen an interviewer say, “Really?” never mind, “What the hell are you talking about?” It’s as batty as any conspiracy theory, and it’s a deliberate attempt to heap innuendo on policing in lieu of making an intelligent argument.

And that’s what frustrates me to no end. It’s the job of journalists to call out B.S. when it’s being thrown in their faces.

Jonah Goldberg comes to this conclusion:

It is true that slave patrols were created in slave states and they were an early form of policing. How much that taints the police forces of modern-day Atlanta or Charleston or any other state is clearly up for discussion.

But it strikes me as somewhat far-fetched to argue that police in Minnesota or New York are imbued with the spirit of southern militias tasked with tracking down slaves. It even strikes me as a bit of a stretch to claim that the slave patrols of the 1840s have a lot of bearing on the actions of police departments in majority black cities like Atlanta.

Indeed, there's something uncomfortable to the idea that attempts to prevent rape, murder, robbery, etc., have some obvious racist intent behind them. Black people are just as deserving of protection from crime as anybody else.

Moreover, the attempt to paint policing—all policing "across America," in former slave states and free states alike—as the poisoned fruit of American slavery is problematic. First, every decent country has police, including the non-white ones. Second, the South lost the Civil War. Under Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans imposed the North's will on the South. The slave patrols were disbanded. Some patrollers did indeed become police. But so did African-Americans. Meanwhile, the evil energies of the patrols were primarily expressed elsewhere—in the form of vigilante groups like the KKK. When Reconstruction ended, the South imposed tyrannical Jim Crow laws.

In other words, the history is complicated. But the important point is that it is history, not America today.

RELATED: The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence

Babylon Bee: Biden Admits His First 100 Days Were A Failure Since America Hasn't Yet Been Completely Destroyed


From the Babylon Bee:

As President Joe Biden’s first 100 days come to a close, he admitted to the press that he mainly saw his first months in office as a failure, as he was unable to achieve the primary goal of any Democrat: the complete destruction of the United States of America.

“If there is one thing that unites all Democrats,” Biden said, “it’s hatred of America and all of its freedoms. With me seizing the country after it’s been staggered by the pandemic, there was an opportunity for me to immediately eradicate this country. But I failed.”

It was a simple plan. After the wildly successful Trump presidency made America great again, the Democrats used the pandemic (which wasn’t really a big deal) to destroy the flourishing economy. All that they needed after that was to steal the presidential election (check) and get a meager majority in Congress to enact a radical, unconstitutional agenda to finish off the nation, the people Democrats hate more than any other.

“I thought I could destroy all freedom in 100 days with my executive orders and the help of the Senate,” Biden stated, “but I couldn’t do it. The American people are too resilient; I hate them so much.”

Related — Here are some more Babylon Bee stories from the past month or so that I have enjoyed:

Elizabeth Warren Barred From Entering Country Thanks To Travel Ban On Indians

In Push For Diversity, Military Canine Units To Give Equal Opportunities To Chihuahuas (For the first time, the military — which has always favored German Shepherds in the past — will admit other breeds such as Chihuahuas and Pomeranians)

New M1 Abrams Tanks To Come Equipped With Changing Tables (In addition to the changing table, each new tank will also be slightly larger in order to fit a private lounge for breastfeeding … The new tanks should be deployed worldwide very soon, as many hotspots aren’t doing very well since backup troops had to be rerouted to rebut Tucker Carlson on Twitter)

Billions In Damages As Military Allows Women To Park The Tanks (Billions of dollars of military equipment were destroyed today after several women were asked to park the tanks, even though women are really bad at parallel parking)

Sunday, April 25, 2021

Is the Mad Magazine Cancellation News Report Truth or Is It Satire?

Since being linked on Instapundit (thanks to Ed Driscoll) and Maggie's Farm, the recent "news report" on No Pasarán — "Mad Magazine Fact-Checked by Snopes, Denounced by the New York Times, Censored by Amazon, Banned by Facebook, and Slammed by SJWs" — has caused no small amount of commotion in a number of comments sections, with a rather large number of readers either taking it outright as truth or wondering whether it was truth or satire. (An additional number of readers have been noting — correctly — that the very fact that we are wondering about whether it is fact or fiction is quite a sad commentary on our times.)

To answer the question, and since Poe's Law has been mentioned, you must first understand how the Mad Magazine news report came about. (If you are pressed for time, scroll down to the sentence in bold.)

1) THE BIRTH OF THE BABYLON BEE

Three or four years ago, devoted Instapundit readers started learning of a new humor site by seeing hyperlinks to hilarious and often spot-on "news reports" penned by members of "Your Trusted Source For Christian News Satire."

In March 2018 came the scandal or, perhaps, the consecration: In a news report — one that not even The Babylon Bee could have made up — a Bee "news report" was fact-checked by Snopes (and called False). What makes the news item (the real one) doubly funny — and the Snopes website open to ridicule — is that the news item (the fake one) is utterly preposterous. (Just take the title: Did CNN Purchase an Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News?)

Soon, news outlets start chiming in — and doubling down in their defense of Snopes — saying basically, "Sure, the Bee says it is 'Your Trusted Source For Christian News Satire', but how can we expect everybody to know that it is news satire?"

FYI (and in Snopes's defense), David Mikkelson has invented a whole new group of ratings (after True, Mostly False, etc), including one called Labeled Satire (which, indeed, has replaced False on the CNN washing machine report); now regularly subtitles its Bee reports as A routine review of content labeled satire; and has penned a far-from-unreasonable editorial called Why We Include Humor and Satire in Snopes.com (although he gets points off by managing to avoid any mention whatsoever of the Babylon Bee ).

Still, that hardly justifies the Bee getting threatened regularly with cancellations, de-platformings, or demonetizations by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

As Christian Toto writes on RealClearInvestigations, satirizing George Orwell's 1984 in the process,

The Babylon Bee, the right’s online answer to the satirical site The Onion, has been at war with Facebook for years

For this reason — and because the Bee's reports are so spot-on — Glenn Reynolds and Ed Driscoll have transferred the title usually bestowed on the New York Times, "The Newspaper of Record," to the Bee. 

“Satire doesn’t have the intent of misleading people.
… It’s communicating truth through satire.” 

— Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee

Incidentally, before we get to the meat of this post, as an aside, here are a couple of Babylon Bee stories that prove Seth Dillon's words correct and that I have most enjoyed in the past month or so:
Elizabeth Warren Barred From Entering Country Thanks To Travel Ban On Indians,
In Push For Diversity, Military Canine Units To Give Equal Opportunities To Chihuahuas (For the first time, the military — which has always favored German Shepherds in the past — will admit other breeds such as Chihuahuas and Pomeranians),
New M1 Abrams Tanks To Come Equipped With Changing Tables (In addition to the changing table, each new tank will also be slightly larger in order to fit a private lounge for breastfeeding … The new tanks should be deployed worldwide very soon, as many hotspots aren’t doing very well since backup troops had to be rerouted to rebut Tucker Carlson on Twitter),
Billions In Damages As Military Allows Women To Park The Tanks (Billions of dollars of military equipment were destroyed today after several women were asked to park the tanks, even though women are really bad at parallel parking), and
Biden Admits His First 100 Days Were A Failure Since America Hasn't Been Completely Destroyed Yet (It was a simple plan. After the wildly successful Trump presidency made America great again, the Democrats used the pandemic (which wasn’t really a big deal) to destroy the flourishing economy. All that they needed after that was to steal the presidential election (check) and get a meager majority in Congress to enact a radical, unconstitutional agenda to finish off the nation, the people Democrats hate more than any other).

2) THE BIRTH OF THE MAD MAGAZINE YARN

And here is where things get interesting: it may have been Ed, or Sarah Hoyt, or Stephen Green, but I believe it was Glenn who linked to a Babylon Bee article written by an outside source who had contributed to the website

It turns out that people who are Prime Subscribers to the BB are (or were: see below) allowed to submit (or to pitch) articles.

Since I am known for having quite an appetite for satire, and since I am a comedy writer, I start developing my ideas for another humor outlet undergoing the same treatment and travails as the Babylon Bee. The Mad Magazine report would double as a very strong point in their favor, which they would love (I thought) to have added on their website.

Besides, I agree with the comment "The Babylon Bee Needs Your Support. Help us Save Comedy. Fight Against CNN and Snopes", and so I opened my wallet last year to become a prime subscriber.

After I put a lot of effort into the piece and after a long series of ordeals (after I finished the article in November, I lost 85% of the article on Blogspot — do not press Control Z more than once in a row after Blogspot's recent (so-called) upgrade (sic) or the entire text disappears! — and it took me four months to get the courage to re-write it), I — proudly — submitted it to the Babylon Bee last week. 

Result? 

Extreme letdown. 

In spite of their promise to this (and to all) Prime Subscriber(s), the Bee replied to the pitch with the comment that they cannot, and do not, accept outside material (with the exception of headlines). (What happened? Who knows? Maybe they had problems with one of their contributors and/or maybe some lawyer intervened with copyright issues or something…)

So there is your answer: the Mad Magazine news report
was intended to appear on the Babylon Bee website.
As a typical piece of Babylon Bee news satire.

And since I had put a lot of work into the story, and since I was pretty proud of the result, I simply decided that if nobody else wanted it, I would publish it on my blog No Pasarán. (I still read — and laugh at — the Bee's articles, although I probably laugh only 90% as heartily as before.)

If it had appeared on the Bee, everybody would have known immediately that it was satire, needless to say. (Are you listening, Facebook? Snopes?)

As for Instapundit's readers, quite a few, presumably, headed to the comments section in outrage after reading the headline without also clicking the hyperlink and reading (or skimming through) the story.

If they had, they would have had their antenna up already by the second sentence, with the identification of the Snopes spokesman as a certain Bobby Snopes Jr (even without realizing it was an homage to the Babylon Bee's parodies, often referring to a Snopes spokesman as one Bob Snopes).

There are, needless to say, many more hints that the story is not true, but to mention just two, there is the name of the SJW spokesperson (a typical Don Martin-type joke) and there is the lengthy paragraph (where the blockquote is located) of the demented Twitter spokesman who proceeds to try to prove why Alfred E Neuman is an undercover "conservative spewing Republican propaganda."

That said, even the title itself, to tell the truth, should have made people suspicious: it is utterly improbable that a headline would have listed all of the various cancellation actors — especially with a different action verb for each one. A real title would have used something like "controversial magazine in danger of cancellations from Snopes, the New York Times, and other sources," or something in that (jugular) vein.