Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, said Sunday he would consider paying the legal bills for an elderly man who was arrested after sucker-punching a protester at a Trump rally in North Carolina ..
.. Cumberland County Sheriff’s deputies arrested 78-year-old John McGraw on Friday after video of him sucker-punching a young black man who had been protesting at the rally rippled across the Internet. McGraw told “Inside Edition” he didn’t regret throwing the punch because the man “might be with a terrorist organization.”
Trump said he doesn’t condone violence, but also said the punch may have been justified because the victim flipped off the crowd before the punch was thrown.
“From what I understand, he was sticking a certain finger up in the air,” Trump said. “And that is a terrible thing to do in front of somebody that frankly wants to see America made great again.”
NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Trump about the legal bills after quoting Trump telling told a crowd he would pay for the legal bills of anyone who attacked a protester. Trump said his stance was justified at the time because protesters were threatening to throw tomatoes at him.
“He was dragging a flag along the ground and he was playing a certain type of music. And supposedly, there was chatter about ISIS,” Trump said. “Now, I don’t know. What do I know about it? All I know is what’s on the Internet.”
Spike Lee’s Necessary, Overwhelming “Chi-Raq”
The movie isn’t about guns; it’s about masculinity and manhood, and the need to break the pathological cycle of self-identifying virility and violence.
.. The control that Lee imagines isn’t so much gun control as it is self-control. “Chi-Raq” is a vision of political change (about which the movie is amazingly specific) but, first, foremost, and from beginning to end, it’s about personal change—about giving up guns, and, for that matter, giving up much more.
Why safety now trumps freedom
“We still barely understand why homicide rates have declined consistently across the western world over the past 20 years,” admits Manuel Eisner, criminologist at Cambridge university. The rise of screens may have helped: nowadays many violence-prone young males spend their days on WhatsApp or PlayStation. But Eisner and other thinkers suggest another fascinating explanation: starting in the early 1990s, western countries entered an age of restraint. Our generation has chosen safety over freedom.
.. Perhaps coincidentally, the EU experienced “a marked decrease in recorded adult per capita alcohol consumption” from 1990 through 2010, says the World Health Organisation.
.. We now have evidence – which Elias didn’t – that western homicides have fallen fairly steadily for 700 years.
.. American teenagers’ “use of illicit drugs has generally declined over the past two decades”, says the Monitoring the Future survey.
.. Only one western realm of disorder survives, says Pinker: entertainment. Violent video games, rap music and online porn are everywhere. But, argues Pinker, most consumers of this entertainment are ironic: they don’t confuse it with reality. In fact, real violent entertainment – as in ice hockey – increasingly generates outrage. Today’s security-obsessed media encourage permanent fear. The evidence suggests an age of restraint.