Is social justice really a serious problem in the country?

November 28, 2023

Social justice is an old concept that has become a hot topic lately.

The Britannica website offers this description: “Social justice, in contemporary politics, social science, and political philosophy, the fair treatment and equitable status of all individuals and social groups within a state or society. The term also is used to refer to social, political, and economic institutions, laws, or policies that collectively afford such fairness and equity and is commonly applied to movements that seek fairness, equity, inclusion, self-determination, or other goals for currently or historically oppressed, exploited, or marginalized populations.”

Human Rights Careers online offers the following: “The connection between social justice and human rights has strengthened over the years to the point where many use ‘social justice’ and ‘human rights’ interchangeably.”

And, from Wikipedia: “Social justice is justice in relation to a fair balance in the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society where individuals' rights are recognized and protected.”

While the idea of social justice in America has involved everyone having an equal opportunity to make their own choices about their future, there is a faction that believes that certain groups have been discriminated against, and therefore deserve what the Wikipedia description says: equal distribution of things, not equal opportunity to pursue things.

Yes, discrimination does exist. But is it really a major problem?

A new book analyzes the “social injustice” that many people claim to be rampant in America. Titled “Social Justice Fallacies,” the author is Dr. Thomas Sowell, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a brilliant thinker. 

Comments on the cover of the book say that “The quest for social justice is a powerful crusade of our time, with an appeal to many different people, for many different reasons.”

“’Social Justice Fallacies’ reveals how many things that are thought to be true simply cannot stand up to documented facts, which are often the opposite of what is widely believed.”

“History shows that the social justice agenda has often led in the opposite direction, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.”

Those errors were the result of human fallibility, due to the fervor of the crusader mindset, which often is so strong in its followers that they make serious mistakes in their efforts to correct a problem, including ignoring contrary evidence.

In the book Sowell details the problems with this error-ridden theory.

Addressing the idea that everyone should get the same opportunities, or the same amounts of all things, he notes that people with different backgrounds do not necessarily even have a desire for the same things, and certainly do not want to do whatever may be necessary to achieve them. This may perhaps be the case even if those things are given to them.

An example he cites is that some social justice warriors blame sexual discrimination for the fact that women are statistically under-represented among Silicon Valley employees. But a step further into the data shows that the work done in these companies requires engineering skills, and women receive less than 30 percent of the needed engineering degrees. Why? Because they do not choose to study engineering. 

People are not all the same. There are natural and lifestyle differences that play a part in a person’s capabilities and desires. Geographic areas encourage different lifestyles and behavior. Living in Florida is not like living in Alaska, or Iowa, or West Virginia. Growing up in farm country is different than growing up in a big city.

A person’s family and the family’s experiences most often play a major part in how children develop, and how they pursue life.

Sowell wrote that “children raised where there is only one parent present have been found in a number of studies to have a higher incidence of many social problems.” Boys without fathers have a higher incidence of things like truancy and murder. Girls raised by one parent have a higher incidence of teenage pregnancy. 

So, the question of why Billy made the football team and Joe didn’t; why Mary was the valedictorian and Freda wasn’t; or why Jane got the promotion to sales manager over Frank, probably was not the result of discrimination. There are many factors that may be involved in most outcomes other than race, ethnicity or gender.

In seeking persons to fill advanced medical research positions, Sowell posits, do we want equal numbers from all population groups, and hope for the best? Or will we make sure that we get those from whatever backgrounds who have demonstrated a mastery of medical science?

He wrote, “But neither society nor government comprehends or controls all the many and highly varied circumstances — including a large element of luck — that can influence the fate of individual classes or nations.”

And, “Circumstances beyond our control are major factors in economic and other inequalities. Trying to understand causalities is not necessarily the same as looking for someone to blame.”

Is the alleged “white supremacy” real and the result of racial discrimination? Is it because white people make up 59 percent of the population? Or, is it a false flag promoted for some political purpose?

Sowell shows us that social justice is another politically correct concept that causes more problems than it solves.

What’s happening to our country? The United States of Anti-America

Those Americans who have been around for a while may be wondering what is happening to their country. While there have been periods of disruption before, such as the anti-war/peace movement of the 60s, the magnitude of what is going on today surpasses previous challenges. America is under attack from within.

Merely being a member of the largest subgroup of people in the country — the primary group which founded and developed the country: white people — has each of them being regarded as a “supremacist,” a “racist,” and “privileged.” These people had no say in who their parents were or where they were born and grew up, yet they are now persona non-grata in the country their ancestors created.

This comes from a concept known as Critical Race Theory (CRT). It has the support of the woke among us, and seeks to persuade everyone that in America there are only two classes of people: oppressors and their victims. And white people are the oppressors.

CRT evolved from the Critical Theory attributed to socialist Karl Marx, author of “The Communist Manifesto.” CRT differs in that it includes racism as a fundamental factor. It focuses on cancelling the traditional American values such as family, democracy, honesty and truth. And traditional practices like hard work, learning, rational thinking and obeying time schedules are not sound practices leading to success, but racist values imposed by white supremacists.

Through the years, CRT has been sneaking into classrooms, and is now being touted by President Joe Biden’s administration to be part of the K-12 curriculum to replace what’s left of traditional civics instruction and history that taught hundreds of millions of Americans through the decades the truth about their country, its founding and how it operates. 

Instead, CRT will teach young students to focus on skin color and power, revising history to tell the story of a nation founded on white oppression. The goal of CRT is teaching white kids to hate themselves and their families, and teaching other kids to hate their country.

A tool used in this “progressive” destruction of America is “The 1619 Project.”

“The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

That is the opening of the New York Times Magazine’s (NYTM) description of “The 1619 Project.” A different organization, calling itself Project 1619, has the following statement about the NYTM’s mission: “Project 1619 Inc. was not consulted or involved in their production … [and] does not support or endorse their opinions.”

The NYTM’s 1619 Project suffers from both conceptual and data errors. First, it attempts to shift the beginning of America from its actual formal beginning in 1776 to a time when only one of the 13 colonies that formed the United States of America existed: Virginia, the English settlement established in 1607. At that time, and extending to 1619 and for many more years there was no drive to form a new nation.

Second, the first slaves were brought to the North American continent roughly 50 years before 1619 and many years before the Virginia Colony was established.

Surely, the story of the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans can be effectively told without revising history to increase the negative impact of the story, and unjustifiably dishonor the nation. 

The 1776 Commission was started by former President Donald Trump on November 2, 2020, by Executive Order 13958. Trump took this step to counter attacks on America’s founding. The EO cites “our country's valiant and successful effort to shake off the curse of slavery and to use the lessons of that struggle to guide our work toward equal rights for all citizens in the present.”

It continues: “Viewing America as an irredeemably and systemically racist country cannot account for the extraordinary role of the great heroes of the American movement against slavery and for civil rights — a great moral endeavor that, from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr., was marked by religious fellowship, good will, generosity of heart, an emphasis on our shared principles, and an inclusive vision for the future.

Section 2. (a) of the EO states: “Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Education shall establish in the Department of Education the President's Advisory 1776 Commission ("the 1776 Commission") to better enable a rising generation to understand the history and 4 principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.”

This effort to counter the vile, anti-American aims of CRT was cancelled by President Biden on his first day in office.

America was not perfect on its first day of existence 240-plus years ago, and it is not perfect today. No nation is or ever was perfect. Our country will not be made more perfect by indoctrinating generations of young people with misinformation such as this. In fact, indoctrination goes against the founding principles of America.

The cancel culture judges America by her mistakes, not her strengths

As the nation watches the riots and criminal behavior that evolved from protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has turned its attention to removing monuments to personalities from the Civil War that led to the end of slavery in the United States with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865.

But the mission to take down these monuments was confused from the beginning. It could have been a civil effort to have the “offending” items removed legally by petitioning the appropriate government agencies or property owners on which the statues reside, which is the proper way to do things. The statues could have been moved to museums or other places, if the proper authorities agreed with the petitioners.

But that wasn’t good enough for the cancel culture, which felt that the things must be removed now! And so, rioters — not protesters or demonstrators — turned their criminal behavior to destroying these historical items.

In addition to the monuments to southern Civil War personalities, they also blindly go after some who were on the same side of the slavery case as they are.

The statue of Ulysses S. Grant is one example. Grant was the 18^th President of the United States following the Civil War, from 1869 to 1877. But more illustrative of what a magnificent error it was to take down his statue, Grant was the Commanding General of the U.S. Army that defeated the hated Confederates — the targets of BLM — and won the Civil War, leading to emancipation of the slaves.

An even more astonishing mistake is the threatening to take down the Emancipation Memorial. Because this memorial features the likeness of Abraham Lincoln with a black man, Archer Alexander, in chains at his feet, it is regarded by the rioters as a symbol of slavery.

The former slave and now-famous American Frederick Douglass, however, predicted that members of his race “will think of [the Memorial] and speak of it with a sense of manly pride.”

Rather than being a passive, submissive slave, the Memorial was in fact designed to show Alexander at Lincoln’s feet exerting his own strength to break the chains that bound him.

Douglas said, “We have done a good for our race today. In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator [Lincoln], we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us,” and “we may calmly point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”

And then there is Charlotte Scott, a former slave freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, who said upon hearing of Lincoln’s assassination, “the colored people have lost their best friend on earth! Mr. Lincoln was our best friend, and I will give five dollars of my wages towards erecting a monument to his memory.”

Her contribution sparked a movement among freed slaves to raise money for a memorial to Lincoln which totaled more than $12,000. At that time $12,000, and even $5, was a lot of money.

Female RE-Enactors of Distinction (FREED) is a group of actors that is committed to accurately depict the role of African Americans, including the U.S. Colored Troops and their families during the U.S. Civil War.

Marcia Cole is a member of FREED who portrays Charlotte Scott. Regarding the Memorial, she told Washington, DC TV station WJLA, “I’m here to speak on behalf of the legacy of Charlotte Scott. I understand there’s a big campaign trying to raise money to either take it down or mend it, and I say ‘no’ on behalf of Ms. Charlotte.” 

But the rioters don’t know this history.

So, the historical figures and sites that the BLM wants removed will not be decided by the American people and their governments, but by a relative handful of the people, who don’t know history and don’t care about history. They care nothing about what others think and willingly, eagerly, turn to criminality to accomplish their goal.

That isn’t the American way. But America and her ways are a foreign language to most of these folks. They judge America by her mistakes only, ignoring her strengths. They apply his same myopia to Civil War figures. They see only a part of the lives of the individuals that they target. That small part is all that matters to them.

That sentiment was fairly clearly stated by Hawk Newsome, president of the Greater New York Black Lives Matter. “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it,” Newsome said in an interview on Fox News’ “The Story” with Martha MacCallum.

And so, what we really have is not merely a crusade by a relatively small group to cleanse the land and remove elements they dislike and that stain our history, it is to wreak havoc and impose their will on the rest of us.

In the wise words of Marcus Aurelius: “How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”

Order must be restored, and those committing crimes must be held accountable.

The emotional whitewashing of history is an enormous mistake

The tragic and indefensible killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of city police officers created understandable emotions of pain and anger in the country.

We have all witnessed the resulting peaceful protesting of police brutality against citizens. But in many cases protests turned into violent, dangerous rioting, and now rising anti-slavery emotion has spawned tearing down statues associated with that dark period in American history, and condemnation of other things reminiscent of that period.

While these efforts have strong support, other people see them as wrong; as trying to whitewash history, instead of leaving these statues and other things to remind us of the evils of slavery, now gone from America for more than 150 years.

If slavery was a mistake of our nation — and it was — so is trying to erase every last vestige of it. We learn from our mistakes, so that we don’t make them again. But if there is nothing to remind us of our errors, at some point in the future we may again travel down those paths.

Through the years people have made important, illuminating comments about such situations.

One of the most relevant is this one: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” — George Orwell, 1984

Two more are from a current source, the brilliant Thomas Sowell: “Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.”

And: “Emotions neither prove nor disprove facts. There was a time when any rational adult understood this. But years of dumbed-down education and emphasis on how people ‘feel’ have left too many people unable to see through this media gimmick.”

HUD Secretary Ben Carson said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” recently, “We’ve reached a point in our society where we dissect everything and try to ascribe some nefarious notion to it,” he said. “We really need to move away from that. We need to move away from being offended by everything, of going through history and looking at everything, of renaming everything. I mean, think about the fact that some of our universities, some of our prestigious universities, have a relationship with the slave trade. Should we go and rename those universities?

“It really gets to a point of being ridiculous after a while,” Carson said. “And, you know, we’re going to have to grow up as a society.”

And then there is this: “The modern Left: they cancel ‘Gone with the Wind’ ... and then burn Atlanta.” — U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-TX.

Other targets include brand names that have been part of American life for decades, without hurting anyone: Eskimo Pie, Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix and syrup, Uncle Ben’s rice, Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, and Cream of Wheat breakfast mix. These brands are considering changing their names and/or appearance due to pressure from the change culture.

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, recently ordered the removal of four portraits of former Speakers. “As I have said before, the halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy,” she wrote in a letter requesting the removal of the portraits, “there is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.”

The portraits are of Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia, Howell Cobb of Georgia, James L. Orr of South Carolina and Charles F. Crisp of Georgia. Crisp served in the Confederate Army, but entered politics after the Civil War in the 1870s. The other three were in Congress before the War, and then held high civilian office in the Confederacy.

Pelosi has been in Congress for a lifetime, and is Speaker of the House for the second time. Why did the presence of these four previous Speakers’ portraits not drive her crazy before now?

But let’s not ignore the other side of this coin. The advocates of whitewashing unpopular items from our history sometimes goof.

Along with the statues of Confederate luminaries, the cleansers of history also wanted to remove the statue of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was in fact the leader of the Union Army that defeated the Confederates, and became the President of the United States after the War from 1869 to 1877. Yet, the cancel culture wants his statue destroyed.

And then there are objects that fit the definition of things that they want removed, but maybe after thinking about it, they might change their minds.

A Facebook tweet reads: “Yale University was named for Elihu Yale. Not just a man who had slaves. An actual slave trader. I call on @Yale to change its name immediately and strip the name of Yale from every building, piece of paper, and merchandise …”

The idea of whitewashing history is not a good thing.

Democrats’ anti-Trump activities are rewriting the “Three Rs”

There are several things known through time as the “Three Rs.” Back in the days of FDR’s New Deal there was: Relief, Recovery and Reform. Trying to reduce the effects of science on animals gave us: Replacement, Reduction and Refinement. And now in the days of environmental consciousness we have: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

Some of us, the senior citizens among us, remember the “Three Rs,” as: “Readin’, Ritin’ and ‘Rithmetic” (reading, writing and arithmetic) when we were in school.

Today, we can thank Democrats in Congress, in the media and elsewhere for giving us another set of “Three Rs.” The first of the set was “Russia.” Next came “Racist.” And now we have “Recession.”

“Russia, Russia, Russia” was the war chant of the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency. But, alas, it was to no avail, as Russia’s interference in the 2016 election turned out to be significant, but to little effect, and the hoped-for connection between the Russians and Trump was a nothing burger.

Multiple investigations did not prove that Trump was a Russian agent, that the Russians colluded with his campaign to elect him, or any of the other allegations that were thrown around like the trash found on San Francisco streets.

Trump’s began an association with Russia in 2013 when he was there for his Miss Universe pageant, according to The Guardian. Trump told the paper he wanted to build a skyscraper in Moscow.

For a wealthy business person, a real estate developer, it is not unusual to have business interests in other countries. Trump is said to have interests in 25 countries, including Canada, Turkey, Panama, Ireland, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, India, Scotland, Indonesia, China, Mexico, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel and South Africa.

The Moscow skyscraper deal, however, ran into difficulties and had ended by June of 2016, before the election.

Next came charges that Trump was/is a racist. Combining poor reportage and opportunism, the anti-Trumpers take any opening, however narrow, to assert racism. 

Just because a group of four Congressional representatives who are people of color receive criticism from Trump for their words and deeds does not make him a racist.

Trying to secure our borders to prevent the illegal entry of people from other countries, some of whom are criminals, is not racist. Neither is wanting to send illegal aliens back where they came from.

What such efforts tell us is that those backing the efforts are failures, not that Trump is a racist.

One might expect that as part of this ill-fated exercise in imaginative politics, the accusers might consider that Trump’s unemployment numbers for African Americans and Hispanics are at their lowest in decades, or ever. His “racism” apparently also includes implementing the opportunity zones that help low-income distressed communities across the country, which includes those of black Americans and Hispanics.

The racist allegation against Trump and others on the right has been so widely and foolishly misused that the most significant result of this misadventure is to have rendered the term meaningless. Strike 2.

And now, because the yield curve inverted for a day or so, we are told the nation is headed for a recession. As some know, there is a recession in our future because behind every period of expansion is a period of recession. It’s the business cycle.

After the 2007-2008 recession, the economy experienced its slowest recovery ever, but has been doing pretty well in the expansion phase, with nearly all of the good things occurring since election night 2016. Sound Trump economic policies have proved their worth. 

An inverted yield curve is considered an omen of a recession in 17 to 22 months. However, a lot can happen in that period that could delay the economy going into recession for a fairly long time. The left’s prognostications are, to put it politely, premature.

But as Obama administration member Rahm Emanuel famously said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.” And a recession, when we have the next one, might be a serious crisis. Emanuel, who was at the time the White House chief of staff, went on to explain himself: “And what I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Clearly the Russia and Racist opportunities did not pan out, so perhaps the Recession one will. No doubt the left media and others who can benefit from this scare will take it to the limit, one more time.

But if a recession doesn’t do the trick, maybe after this third R is exhausted the left will give us another R: Regret. As in, “we regret going down these curvy, pot hole infested side roads, trying desperately to remove from office a duly elected president that we just do not like, and now we will live with the decision of the American people.”

Given the manic behavior of Trump’s political enemies in Congress, the media and elsewhere, such a thing may be a futile hope. However, hardly anything would benefit the country more than the anti-Trumpers getting their over-worked emotions under control, returning to doing their jobs properly, and helping the country move forward.

Due process and proving guilt are important principles of fairness

Defending Democrats is not something I feel the need to do very often, but recent developments compel defending those condemned for something without due process.

In America, we live by an important principle: everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

When the hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court began last year, many people automatically believed Kavanaugh was guilty of the accusations against him without having seen or heard anything besides the accusation of wrongdoing that allegedly occurred decades ago.

Today, the Lt. Governor of Virginia, Democrat Justin Fairfax, stands accused of sexual improprieties from years ago. Immediately upon those accusations being made public, there was again the jumping to the conclusion that he was guilty, based upon nothing more than accusations.

Yes, there is more evidence of Fairfax having a connection to each of his two accusers than what was shown against Kavanaugh. But so far it is just an accusation, albeit a somewhat convincing story. Even so, that falls well short of what ought to be required to remove someone from office.

There is a process for removing an official like a lieutenant governor from office. It’s called impeachment and trial. 

If we are so shortsighted as to be willing to demand someone be removed from a position simply because of an accusation, we will have abandoned a critical protection from vicious and unfounded charges that every one of us benefits from.

Never forget: Anyone can accuse anyone of anything at any time. If that is the standard required for trashing someone’s reputation and removing them from a position they hold, we are indeed in trouble as a nation.

The resignations of two other Democrats in high Virginia government offices also are being demanded for activity decades ago. Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring both have admitted to appearing in public in “blackface,” being made up to look like African Americans.

Northam first apologized for being in a photo showing a blackface man and another person in a KKK costume, and later denied being one of those two people. He also said later he had participated in a dance contest in blackface as Michael Jackson.

Northam and Herring are also hearing demands for them to resign. If these resignations happen, the new governor for the Commonwealth would be the Speaker of the House of Delegates, who is a Republican.

As much as I personally would like to see a Republican as Governor of Virginia, this is not the way that should be accomplished. Northam and Herring might be racists. This episode of decades ago, however, does not prove that.

Today, such activity as Northam and Herring participated in is identified as wrong. However, a few decades ago, it was not unusual for white folks to appear in blackface for minstrel shows and other performances. Blacks actually were sometimes in those shows. Many times these performances involved a white person playing the part of a black person, but they were not ridiculing or insulting blacks, they were often honoring them.

Perhaps this outrage is due, at least in part, to not knowing much about our history. White people appearing in blackface goes back a long, long way, to the 19^thcentury. More recent Americans to have appeared in blackface include old timers Judy Garland, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.

But some current popular folks appearing in blackface include Ted Danson, as his girlfriend, Whoopi Goldberg, looked on laughing. Dan Aykroyd appeared in a movie with Eddie Murphy. And left-media darlings Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Joy Behar and Sarah Silverman also have painted their faces. So have Billy Crystal, Cyndy Lauper, Robert Downey, Jr. and Jason Aldean.

The key element here is that when Northam and Herring performed these acts, they were not considered wrong. Context is important.

When someone is offended by what someone else does, says or writes, that is not all there is to the story. Being offended has replaced baseball as the National Pastime. It’s almost as if people go to college and major in “how to be offended.”

But just because being offended is popular today does not mean that the offended party is always correct in their reaction to things. And just because someone or some group takes offense at something doesn’t mean we must hasten to pass laws against it. The intent of the person being accused of some social infraction is far more important – it is the most important thing.

Just because one or more people think what someone wrote, spoke or did is bad doesn’t mean that the person intended it that way. The error might well be on the part of the offended party, who doesn’t understand the context, but feels empowered to complain about it.

Furthermore, it is unfair for people to be criticized today for doing things that were common and not unacceptable when they did them years or decades before.

We’ve got to get past this idea of perpetual victimhood, get control of the tendency to believe that our individual feelings are paramount, and return to dealing with things we don’t like in a mature, American fashion.

South Carolina Senator Scott discusses being a black man in America

“Mr. President, I rise today to give my second speech this week discussing the issues we are facing following last week’s tragedies in Dallas, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge. This speech is perhaps the most difficult because it’s the most personal,” said Sen. Tim Scott, R-SC, in the Senate Chamber last week.

Scott has a long, distinguished record of public service, serving 13 years on the Charleston County Council beginning in 1995. In 2008 he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives, in 2010 he elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and was appointed to fill an unexpired U.S. Senate term in 2012 and was elected to retain that seat in 2014. He is the first southern African-American senator since the late 1800s.

Scott said that in his first speech “I talked about how the vast majority of our law enforcement officers have only two things in mind: protect and serve. But as I noted then, we do have serious issues that must be resolved. In many cities and towns across the nation, there is a deep divide between the black community and law enforcement, a trust gap, a tension that has been growing for decades. And as a family, one American family, we cannot ignore these issues, because while so many officers do good – and we should be thankful, as I said on Monday, we should be very thankful and supportive of all those officers that do good – [but] some simply do not. I’ve experienced it myself. And so today I want to speak about some of those issues.”

Recalling his first encounter with the police, he said: “The very first time that I was pulled over by a police officer as just a youngster,” the officer came up to the window, “hand on his gun, and said, ‘Boy, don’t you know your headlight is not working properly?’” Scott said he was embarrassed and ashamed. And “scared, very scared.”

That was not the last time he was stopped by police, he said; he has been stopped seven times in the period of a year, and admitted that he was speeding a couple of times, but usually he was stopped for things like driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood, or some other equally trivial reason. “Imagine the frustration, the irritation, the sense of a loss of dignity” each of those times, he said, capping the story off with an incident that happened while he was serving in the U.S. Congress.

After having been in Congress for five years, and at the time in the Senate, an officer challenged him as he entered a government office building. “The pin, I know,” the officer said, referring to Scott’s U.S. Senate lapel pin. “You, I don’t. Show me your ID.” Later that day he received an apology from the officer’s supervisor, but the damage was done. Again. That was the third such apology he had received since entering the Senate.

Police question millions of Americans of all races every year in their effort to “protect and to serve,” and they should always have a legitimate reason for doing so. Obviously, they don’t always have a good reason, as Sen. Scott illustrated. But often they do have reasons, and sometimes it is at least partly due to the behavior of some of those in groups that are often the focus of police bias.

Chicago serves as a prime example, a place where black Americans are most often killed or attacked by other black Americans, not white Americans or police officers. In neighborhoods where back people routinely commit violence and murder against other blacks, why are we surprised that blacks receive greater police scrutiny?

Columnist Peggy Noonan recently wrote a column titled “Three Good Men Talk About Race” in The Wall Street Journal, all of them black Americans. They are Tim Scott, Dr. Brian Williams of Parkland Memorial Hospital, who fought to save injured Dallas police officers ambushed by a black man, and Dallas Police Chief David Brown.

“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” Brown said recently. “They’re paying the price for every societal failure. “Not enough mental health funding? ‘Let the cop handle it.’ Not enough drug addiction funding? ‘Let’s give it to the cops,’” he continued. The chief said that society must get in the game.

In response to blacks being killed by police we now see black men assassinating police officers. The shooter in Dallas who killed five officers and injured seven others was black. In Baton Rouge, six officers were ambushed last Sunday, and three of them died. Police killed the shooter, a 29 year-old black man who, according to The Daily Caller, was a former member of the Nation of Islam.

As Scott said, the country is deeply divided; there is a very tense trust gap. Police sometimes unfairly target black people. Many black people assume every death at the hands of police is a wrongful death.

We need leaders to calm the tension, not pour gasoline on emotional embers, to wait for details before reaching a conclusion. And we must make sure that all who do wrong are punished.

The U.S. in the 21st Century: Compassion takes a back seat to politics

The ink was barely dry on newspapers reporting the murder of nine people attending a Bible study Wednesday night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, when it started.

Amid the understandable outrage and feelings of grief and compassion, there arose the clatter of political demagoguery, as the vehicles were gassed up and engines were started to rush and join the forming parade.

Since the participants of this parade formed it not to provide aid and comfort to those in need, but to avail themselves of a convenient opportunity – as former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel advised, “Never let a good crisis go to waste” – reason and honesty were banned from the event.

Thursday morning Faheem Younus, who identifies himself as “Muslimerican,” and is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland, posted on Twitter: “This terrorist #CharlestonShooting is predictably White, called a ‘gunman’ by the media and has no mention of his faith.” It was most important to him to imply that had the murderer been a Muslim, that point would have been made abundantly clear.

And no leftist demagogic rant would be complete without taking a shot at Fox News. “The ideology of racism promoted by the @FoxNewsandCo. breeds the terrorists who commit #CharlestonShooting,” he tweeted.

At least in the midst of his mis-focused, cheap-shot tweets, the learned professor did brush up against the main truth: This attack was a racist act.

On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton used the shooting to advantage in her self-promotion. First, she suggested that “inflammatory things about Mexicans,” uttered by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, may have “triggered” the incident, and then turned to liberalism’s favorite boogeyman, gun control.

But at least President Barack Obama started out on the right path: “We knew their pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who, along with eight others gathered in prayer and fellowship, was murdered last night,” he said. “And to say our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families and their community doesn't say enough to convey the heartache and the sadness and the anger that we feel.”

But then: “We do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” he continued, finally getting to his main point.

No one argues that some people should not have guns. The argument begins with the method people like Mr. Obama prefer. The same people who use guns for violence would also use knives, TNT, poison, an automobile, hijacked air liners, or whatever tool they could find to commit violence against others, a point the anti-gun faction seems immune to understanding.

“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this kind of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries … with this kind of frequency,” Mr. Obama said. “It is in our power to do something about it.”

Mr. Obama must have found some study showing that the U.S. leads the world’s advanced countries in mass shooting casualties. The Rampage Shooting Index, in fact, shows that among 12 countries, from 2009 to 2013, the U.S. had 227 such deaths. Norway had 77, Germany had 25, the UK had 13, and Israel had 11. The US had 38 such incidents and the nations previously mentioned had only 1 to 3.

That is pretty damning evidence. But as usual in these sorts of campaigns, there is more.

The Index clearly shows that when population is taken into account, the results are far different. Per 1 million population Norway had 15.3 fatalities and .19 incidents per 1 million people; Germany - .31 fatalities, .04 incidents; the UK - .019 fatalities, .02 incidents; Israel - 1.38 fatalities, .25 incidents. The U.S. had .72 fatalities in .12 incidents, and fewer fatalities and incidents per 1 million than Norway and Israel. Furthermore, of the five countries discussed, all but the U.S. are said to have “Restrictive” gun policies.

Also, of the 12 nations in this study, when population is a factor the U.S. drops from first in mass shootings to seventh.

Mr. Obama was wrong. Again.

If you feel so strongly that a higher degree of gun control is a viable policy, why use faulty data to try to sell the idea to the people? If your cause is just, you needn’t lie or deceive to gain support.

Laying aside the distasteful efforts to politicize this issue, the real issue is not guns, it is the impulse to harm or kill innocent people, and how to protect against those impulses.

This was a racist act perpetrated by a white guy who used a gun. Dylann Roof had a drug arrest and conviction on his record, and had a recent history of racially charged comments. Reportedly, his father gave him a pistol for his 21st birthday in April.

What gun law would have prevented Dylann Roof from killing those nine people?

When you are caught using faulty data, you tell the world that you really have a goal other than the stated goal in mind.

Privacy under attack? Stop-and-frisk vs. NSA surveillance

As Americans, we each have a guaranteed right to privacy. The online legal site FindLaw explains it this way: “The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects personal privacy, and every citizen's right to be free from unreasonable government intrusion into their persons, homes, businesses, and property – whether through police stops of citizens on the street, arrests, or searches of homes and businesses.”

That seems plain enough, but how one interprets the word “unreasonable” provides ample opportunity for mischief, as well as for good law enforcement.

As for good law enforcement, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has credited the City’s stop-and-frisk policy with helping drive crime to record lows since the policing policy was implemented in 1994, with the murder rate falling by an astounding 82 percent by 2009.

New York’s stop-and-frisk policy seeks to prevent crime before it happens by deploying officers with pinpoint precision to critical street segments in high-crime areas where they interact with individuals displaying suspicious behavior: they approach, question, and sometimes frisk the individuals. That practice has led to fewer people, such as members of street gangs, risking arrest by carrying a weapon on their person, and with fewer gang bangers carrying weapons, there are fewer spur-of-the-moment shootings in New York, and correspondingly fewer deaths.

You might think that, given the obvious level of success in reducing the murder rate in the Big Apple, such a policy would fall outside the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against “unreasonable” searches. But you would be wrong, according to U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, who believes that the policy indeed does violate the Fourth Amendment protection.

Mayor Bloomberg believes that the judge's decision will cause a reduction in the use of stop-and-frisk, which would reverse crime reductions and make his city a more dangerous place. And data indicates he is correct. In 2011, guns were used in 61 percent of all homicides, but in black neighborhoods 86 percent of young black males died from gunfire. Stop-and-frisk reduced the total number of deaths by reducing the number of guns on the streets.

The challenge to the policy arose because officers stop minority residents at a rate disproportionate to their number in the general population. But those stops are not disproportionate to the minority resident population in the crime-ridden neighborhoods or disproportionate to the number of crimes minorities commit in those neighborhoods.

As we have seen recently, there is the possibility that authorities may lose perspective and become abusive in the use of policies like this one, but supervisors are charged to competently manage their operation. And due to the depths of its crime problem when the policy was implemented, New York police applied stop-and-frisk more aggressively than other cities. But whether or not the City is too aggressive ought not be decided without considering its unique circumstances and surprising rate of success in reducing murders.

An opposite approach to systematically and thoughtfully targeting areas where crimes mostly occur and populations that most often commit them like New York City is doing is the blanket, indiscriminate, suspicion-less spying on telephone, email and other private communications and activities of millions of Americans by the National Security Agency.

The government’s spying on Americans is so egregious – eavesdroppers broke privacy rules or overstepped their legal authority thousands of times every year – it’s no wonder the administration wants to arrest and try Edward Snowden for making the information about its spying public.

Where New York police might appear to have been over-aggressive in implementing stop-and-frisk, the federal government’s policy itself is over-aggressive by design. Surely, observers familiar with the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on searches would be unable to conclude anything other than that NSA spying is precisely why there is a Fourth Amendment.

As reported in The Washington Times, “A Top Secret internal NSA audit, leaked by Mr. Snowden to freelance journalist Barton Gellman earlier this summer and published online by The Washington Post Thursday night shows that, in the 12 months prior to May 2012, there were 2,776 incidents of ‘unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications’ — those between Americans or foreigners legally in the United States.”

“Most were unintended,” according to The Post. “Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure.” Even if the problems were unintended, sloppiness certainly is no excuse: The infringements are no less wrong, no less a breach of individual privacy, and no less intolerable.

The larger the scope of a program, the greater the chance that something will go wrong, and the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong. Congressman Peter King (R-NY) defends the program, saying that the situation is being blown out of proportion, that the rate of error is miniscule.

Maybe so; however, since the NSA program seeks to find a few fake grains of sand on a beach, and involves millions upon millions of records. For every million records, ten thousand mistakes can be made, affecting the privacy of ten thousand Americans, and the success rate is 99 percent.

Even if such gargantuan programs are run efficiently and competently, they are examples of unjustified government excess, and should not be allowed.