The crime rate in New York dropped in the ’90s, as it did around the country, but not because of stop-and-frisk. Of nearly 4.5 million stops conducted under the policy, only 6 percent resulted in arrests and 6 percent in summonses. In about 83 percent of cases, the person stopped was black or Hispanic.
.. “I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected,” Miller told a reporter from The Guardian.
O’Reilly: ‘You can’t second-guess’ Trump’s birther strategy
Bill O’Reilly brushed aside Donald Trump’s refusal to say earlier Friday whether he was going to disavow his questioning of President Barack Obama’s citizenship, saying, “you can’t second-guess the strategy that has him tied with Hillary Clinton, who should be ahead by 15 points.”
“I wouldn’t have done it this way, but I would have put it to bed a long time ago,” O’Reilly said in a telephone interview on Fox News in the minutes preceding Trump’s speech in Washington.
God Loves Donald Trump. Right?
Trump has boasted of infidelities, profited off gambling, mocked the handicapped, cheered and offered financial assistance for his supporters who fight protesters, supported abortion (until his fortuitous change of heart before the election), called for war crimes against innocent people,demonized minorities and immigrants, knowingly played upon racist fears, promoted open racists through social media, promoted conspiracy theories, and crudely treated women.
..Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants stand out as the only one in which a majority, 53 percent, agree that society has become too soft and feminine.
.. 68 percent of Trump supporters agree that society is too soft and feminine, far more than supporters of any other candidate, Republican or Democrat.
.. Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants voiced the highest levels of distress, 64 percent, when they find themselves around immigrants who speak little or no English,.
.. “Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”
A solid 57 percent majority of white Americans whom P.R.R.I. surveyed agreed, but two groups stood out: Trump supporters at 81 percent and white evangelical Protestants at 68 percent.
.. Yet another area of commonality between Christian conservatives and the Trump campaign is their shared belief in the duty of the strong to lead the weak — the importance of leadership built on strength, authority and discipline.
.. Dobson’s thinking on the topic of strength and authority is dominated by a single theme:
If the strong-willed child is allowed by indulgence to develop “habits” of defiance and disrespect during his early childhood, those characteristics will haunt him and his parents for the next twenty years.
.. Dobson describes his own method for dealing with a six-year-old pet Dachshund, Siggie, who refused Dobson’s order to go to sleep in “a permanent enclosure.”
The only way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me “reason” with Mr. Freud.
What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!
.. Dobson’s story about Siggie gives us a glimpse of how the views on authority of some on the right match up with Trump’s views on what it takes to be an effective leader.
.. For years, secular progressives have said that evangelical social action in America is not about religious conviction but all about power.
This year, Moore noted, Christian leaders who in the 1990s
gave stem-winding speeches about “character” in office during the Clinton administration now minimize the spewing of profanities in campaign speeches, race-baiting and courting white supremacists, boasting of adulterous affairs, debauching public morality and justice through the casino and pornography industries.
In backing Trump, Moore concluded, “a group of high-profile old-guard evangelicals has proven these critics right.”
.. Rev. Robert Jeffress in Dallas, who has said that if offered a candidate modeled on Jesus:
I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.
In practice, Jeffress said:
Nowhere is government told to forgive those who wrong it, nowhere is government told to turn the other cheek. Government is to be a strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers. When I’m looking for somebody who’s going to deal with ISIS and exterminate ISIS, I don’t care about that candidate’s tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest, toughest, son of a you-know-what I can find, and I believe that’s biblical.
Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth, who wrote ..
.. The religious right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical movement we know is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself. Since then, evangelicals have embraced increasingly secular positions divorced from any biblical grounding, and supporting Donald Trump represents the logical conclusion of that tragic aberration.
E pluribus unum
Many of us understand and agree that the way you lose to terrorism is to cop to its premises in the way that you react to it. If ISIS or Al Qaeda want to claim that there is a war of civilizations, a religious war between “Muslims” and “The West”, the worst thing we could do is to live up to the role into which the terrorists have cast us by indiscriminately harassing and attacking Muslims. Acts of ostentatious violence are calculated to goad us into reinforcing the enemy’s framing of the conflict.
.. I think that the “war on terror” cannot be won by defeating ISIS or Al Qaeda or any other enemy, but will end when the people of the Middle East have hope of living decent lives in stable countries with legitimate governments. Most problems in the world must be solved, not defeated, however attractive the branding of yet another “war on” may be.
.. But you can’t solve “Trumpism” by defeating racism.