I recently watched a YouTube video that featured a Boise Idaho police officer interacting with two young Black males who were suspected of peeking into cars after midnight which violated a curfew law for minors. They also allegedly matched the description of suspects involved in several vehicle burglaries. This incident occurred in November of 2019.

In the body-worn camera footage, both males were seated on the curb while the officer was trying to get information from them. None of them were handcuffed at this point. The two suspects were verbally chipping away at the officer, although it was comparably mild to what I’ve seen and heard on many other police body-worn camera videos.

The officer, seemingly annoyed, engaged in a verbal dispute with one of the males who was swiftly kicked to the ground when he tried to stand up. The officer ordered this same male to cross his legs as a means of gaining greater control of him. When the male suspect refused the order, the officer handcuffed him and walked him to the rear of his patrol car. It was at this point that the handcuffed suspect kicked the patrol car causing the officer to throw him to the ground. After striking a sign when he fell, the handcuffed suspect began to scream and screech in order to create as much chaos as possible at the scene.

This is a very common overreaction among Blacks when detained or arrested by the police. They do it to gain sympathy from any gullible observers and to make themselves appear as victims of “racist white police officers.”

White Officers Must Adjust to the Racial Climate of the Times

My point in highlighting this incident is not to critically dissect everything that went wrong at the scene, but to illustrate how seemingly large numbers of cops throughout the nation still do not understand the times we are living in. They have not yet adjusted to the political and racial climate of much of the nation in their policing styles. They are caught up in a mindset that is at least twenty years outdated.

What was once generally permissible or at least moderately tolerable in terms of use of force among cops two decades earlier is completely unacceptable today. The times have indeed changed — and yet, many street cops still don’t seem to understand this. They have failed to shift with the tone and mood of how the public expects officers to conduct themselves. Whether we like it or not, officers will get little support from the community they serve if they are seen as disrespectful, officious, or heavy-handed.

This seems like such an obvious and even unnecessary thing to point out, yet I wonder at times whether the average police officer really understands it and the implications. Simply watch the various incidents involving cops on YouTube which records the demeaning attitude and conduct of officers who know full well that they are being recorded on video! How could they be so brazen and seemingly unaware of the public backlash that will occur? I attribute it to arrogance, probably because they’ve gotten away with it throughout much of their career.

Have Officers Forgotten the Law Enforcement Code of Ethics?

Created in 1957, the Law Enforcement Code of Ethics expresses beautifully how officers are to conduct themselves, the level of professionalism they are expected to exhibit regardless of whatever personal biases they may carry. They are to treat the public they serve with respect, civility, and fairness in all they do. Such expressions found within it as: “I will keep my private life unsullied as an example to all and will behave in a manner that does not bring discredit to me or to my agency. I will maintain courageous calm in the face of danger, scorn or ridicule; develop self-restraint; and be constantly mindful of the welfare of others.” And “I will never act officiously or permit personal feelings, prejudices, political beliefs, aspirations, animosities or friendships to influence my decisions. With no compromise for crime and with relentless prosecution of criminals, I will enforce the law courteously and appropriately without fear or favor, malice or ill will, never employing unnecessary force or violence and never accepting gratuities.”  This conduct was codified so that each officer knew what was expected of him or her.

Yet does any of that seem to mark the caliber of today’s officers? Granted, many officers throughout the nation conform well to the standards outlined in the Law Enforcement Code of Ethics. But I suspect that a good many do not as is evident in the many police body-worn camera videos available on social media. Far too many officers, it seems to me, have little knowledge of what can and what cannot be done within the limits of the law. They act as if their authority is limitless. They have forgotten everything they were taught about constitutional law during their academy days.

What is it about cops in the age of George Floyd who haven’t yet learned to tone down their rhetoric and conduct when dealing with Blacks — or anyone for that matter? This is especially so for the White officer wearing a body camera so that every word and deed is going to be scrutinized by their own department, the DA’s Office, as well as by the defendant’s civil rights attorneys?

These two young Black males featured in the video above were proverbially yanking the officer’s chain, but he was too caught up in the moment to realize what was being done to him. He allowed them to dictate how things would turn out. He reacted quite predictably as they wanted. How did engaging in a pissing match with two juvenile minority suspects benefit this White officer? It clearly didn’t, and he was lucky things didn’t turn out worse for him.

Boise’s Interim Police Chief, Ron Winegar, called the video “troubling” in an internal department staff email. Winegar later told the Idaho Statesman newspaper in an interview that “the police department’s internal affairs office reviewed and investigated the incident, after being notified by a supervisor and watch commander. The investigation found that “the sum of the conduct depicted in the video was clearly unacceptable,” Winegar said. . . . Winegar added that corrective action — which could be anything from counseling to termination — was taken. He declined to specify what kind. The investigation was closed in April 2020, mayoral spokesperson Maria Weeg told the Statesman in an email” (Alex Brizee, 3/2/2023).

The lesson here is that as a White cop, you’ve got to be smarter, more discerning, and wiser than the criminals and the defense attorneys they employ.

You’ve got to expect that whatever you say and do on a department-issued body-worn camera is going to be used against you if you find yourself in a use-of-force incident, or in an officer-involved shooting. Anything said that even has the slightest hint of “racism,” or suggestive of a “racist motive,” is going to be used to discredit a White officer. They will scour the entirety of his social media comments, his Facebook page, and they will interview other officers and associates in hopes of finding a ‘white supremacist’ they can parade and shame before the public. There is no forgiveness or rehabilitation for such White officers in today’s racially obsessed society bent on destroying any vestiges of White America.

Never forget that soft-minded jurors are going to watch that body-worn camera footage. These folks are in large part sheep — simpletons who believe all they’re told in the mainstream media and on social media. They know little about the realities of police work. If they are White jurors, chances are they have been badly propagandized by current “diversity” dogma. Why, then, would any officer — especially a White officer — potentially raise the ire of a jury by getting into a pissing match with two Black male juveniles? Why make matters worse by throwing one of them onto the pavement which caused his head to strike a nearby sign? The suspect, after all, didn’t kick the officer, he kicked the patrol car. Big deal.

When I was a cop, I had suspects kick my patrol car on several occasions. They would also intentionally bang their heads against the protective metal grill that separates the front seat from the rear seat of the police car. So what? If they were stupid enough to harm themselves in this way, more power to them. The point is that kicking a patrol car upon being arrested doesn’t justify throwing a handcuffed suspect to the ground. The officer should have restrained him better and made sure to secure him inside the car while causing no physical injuries to the arrestee.

The primary officer involved in this altercation, Tyson Cooper, a nearly seven-year veteran of the Boise Police Department, appears to have gotten off easily in this case. His chief was unwilling to provide to the Idaho Statesman details about corrective disciplinary measures given to the officer, and he remains employed by his department. I doubt this would have been the same outcome if Cooper were employed as an officer in any big city, blue-state police department. He’s lucky that Idaho is a staunchly red state, and even though Boise has a growing politically liberal enclave, there is still a large population that supports its police officers.

You Get What You Give to Others

Prior to my retirement, I was a police officer for many years. For fifteen years of my professional career, I was a Field Training Officer. My specialty was to train new officers fresh from the academy how to do police work the right way. I taught them in practical ways how to handle emergency calls, principles of officer safety, how to conduct a thorough criminal investigation, how to interview suspects, how to get information from witnesses, including the policies of our agency, relevant case law, and how to have a long and productive career in law enforcement.

I taught each of the new officers assigned to me that they were expected to treat everyone with respect and dignity and that, contrary to what some sour or cranky veteran officer might say, it would never benefit them in the long run to talk down to people. Even the criminals in the city I worked for were treated fairly and respectfully because that was the culture of our department, one that I wish more agencies followed as strictly as we did. We all knew that our investigations would be hampered, and we would not get as far if we were demeaning and officious toward those whom we contacted. Arrestees were more inclined to give us confidential information if we treated them with common courtesy and civility.

None of this negated the truth that there are times when an officer must talk directly to people in terms they can understand. There is a time for everything, and police work is not always pretty. But these should be rare occasions, and never the routine way an officer should speak to people. I taught new officers that their approach with people should always be on a calm, low-key level unless circumstances dictate otherwise. I essentially taught them the “Columbo method” of contacting and interviewing people which at its core is unassuming and nonauthoritative. You talk to people as you would have them to talk to you. You still aim to have your questions answered. You’re still doing your investigative job as an officer. You’re just doing it in a subtle and inquisitive manner as opposed to one where you’re acting officious, threatening, or dictatorial. Time after time, this approach proved fruitful in my investigations.

More than that, I taught these same officers the principle that if there are going to be any mistakes, let it be the suspect who makes them. The perceptive officer realizes that he or she has the greater price to pay if they are caught doing something stupid or illegal to a suspect. That price is being sued and losing one’s home, one’s livelihood, or even a prison sentence. In an age where there is a greedy attorney on every street corner, and where Americans are ready to sue others at the drop of a hat, why would any officer negate or downplay such practical realities?

The sensible officer, then, knows he is always being watched. Even when he thinks no one is watching him, there’s always some citizen observing and possibly even recording him—likely a big reason why there is a huge upsurge of crime in big cities, as police are reluctant to do their job. There’s no real or guaranteed privacy when you’re attired in a blue uniform. More reason, then, to conduct oneself in a professional and courteous manner when interacting with anyone, no matter who he or she may be or what you may think of them.

Here’s another thing to consider. Just as a criminal defendant might try to portray himself as innocent to a potentially sympathetic jury, so also the smart officer plays to the jury in portraying himself as innocent too. The difference is that while the criminal defendant does his best to convince the jury after he’s been arrested and while standing trial, the officer does his convincing before and during any arrest.

In other words, his words, respectful demeanor, and professional and policy-abiding conduct at the scene of any arrest or use of force serves as his defense before the jury. What real need is there to persuade a jury that the officer’s actions were justified and without malice when they can watch the body-worn camera footage for themselves and see how the officer conducted himself throughout the entire ordeal?

Granted, there are no guarantees because any body-camera footage must still be filtered through someone’s interpretation of the events. I’m also not denying that the most well-behaved officers may still need to testify before a jury or a judge to explain what they have done and why. My point is simply that the officer is more than likely going to be vindicated in his actions if he behaved in good faith and sought fully to conform to the law and departmental policy.

The smart officer, then, anticipates how a later jury or judge will rule dependent on how he communicates and behaves at the scene.

This must always be in the forethought of an officer when dealing with anyone. This means he doesn’t verbally belittle any suspects he contacts (commonly referred to as “jacking up” someone). He doesn’t intentionally provoke them so that a use-of-force incident ensues. All of this will later be carefully investigated, and if it’s shown that the officer was guilty of goading the suspect to react the way he or she did, the officer will be held accountable (or, at least, should be) which may result in a suspension or even termination.

The same principle applies to an experienced officer during a DUI investigation. He knows that a defense attorney will later try to pick apart everything he did at the scene of his arrest. So, he makes sure to perform a careful and full DUI investigation, followed by a meticulous arrest report in which he anticipates and addresses the kinds of objections that the defendant’s attorney will later raise during trial.

Everything a prudent officer does, then, is a form of risk management in which he forecasts and prepares for any damages or accusations that his conduct might later bring.       

The Value of Body-Worn Cameras

What an officer says and does on his body-worn camera can either destroy or justify an officer’s continuing career in police work. I recall being asked by another officer years ago about the value of body-worn cameras when they first came out. He felt they were an intrusion of the officer’s privacy and would skew the opinions of anyone watching the resulting footage of any incident. I disagreed and told him that body-worn cameras would do no such thing. If an officer routinely spoke down to others or in any way mistreated them, body-worn cameras would surely ruin the careers of such officers and rightly so!

On the other hand, body-worn cameras would also serve to justify an officer’s use of force if he did what was right within the law and departmental policy. Body-worn cameras would also vindicate officers who were wrongly accused by citizens of misconduct or any other inappropriate behavior. I can personally attest that the body-worn cameras I wore saved my bacon on more than a few occasions when I was falsely blamed for things I never said or did. In the absence of video evidence, many juries, propagandized by the Defund-the-Police movement, are likely to assume the worst about the officer and side with the arrestee. Body-worn cameras to my way of thinking, then, became an important and protective tool that was just as integral to my job as my firearm, portable radio, and handcuffs.

Dealing with “Constitutional Audits”

Another thing to address is the popularity of “constitutional audits” seen on social media in which individuals record the activities of officers while in public. Whether the officers are arresting or questioning someone, or just engaged in writing a minor traffic violation, they are routinely video-recorded by “auditors” who claim to be holding them to constitutional accountability for anything they say or do in their official capacity. Some officers are annoyed by it, but most take it in stride. The truly disturbing thing about it is how many officers are easily provoked by the auditors and completely “nut up” while being recorded. How embarrassing to have been filmed getting easily triggered while violating the U.S. Constitution at the same time, and then having it plastered all over social media!

Many of these same auditors, of course, are intentionally trying to antagonize the officers, to get a rise out of them, and possibly a lucrative settlement for false arrest. Some of them have been quite successful at it too! The officers who succumb to having their chains yanked by these folks seem often to have little awareness that American citizens are permitted to film them when they are in public. So long as they do not prevent an officer from performing his or her duties, such public recordings are perfectly legal. What’s worse is how many officers will seemingly create out of thin air a reason to arrest an auditor. I have repeatedly watched on YouTube obscure legal justifications on the part of officers for detaining and arresting an auditor simply because he’s recording them in a public place. Many of these same officers are soon corrected by a supervisor who arrives on scene, and they’re forced to walk away in shame.

What these officers don’t seem to understand is that times have changed. The days when officers were respected by the general public are largely over. The era when people would just do as an officer told them by virtue of his authority has passed. The country has changed, and that for the worse. Their word is no longer trusted. Our judges don’t even trust them. An anti-authority mentality has gripped much of the country. Cops aren’t seen as good guys trying to protect us, but as “racist bullies with a badge” who can’t wait to gun down any Black person they see. A blatantly distorted picture, no doubt, but that’s how many easily manipulated Americans see it.

This negative opinion of police officers is more widely held than people think, though admittedly it’s not as prevalent in majority-White regions of the U.S. Our own federal government and its complicit media have so badly poisoned the mood of the country and its view of cops, that it’s not surprising to find that almost every police department throughout the nation is having great difficulty recruiting candidates and retaining them.

The anti-police mentality that prevails throughout much of the country, then, is really a symptom of the greater breakdown of our society. When traditional norms are constantly under attack, including that of the family, historic American institutions, and all forms of authority, it should surprise no one why there would not also be virulent attacks on cops.

This is not meant to deny that some officers have abused their authority and rightly earned the hate they’ve received. But all things considered, they comprise a small number compared to the overwhelming number of officers who comply with their sworn oath and conduct themselves honorably. For an in-depth and critical look at the widespread lies and outright distortions about police officers, I highly recommend two books authored by Heather Mac Donald: Are Cops Racist? (2010) and The War on Cops (2017). Both works serve as a corrective to the falsehoods promoted by such groups as BLM and other radical anti-police organizations. Mac Donald, unlike the great majority of mainstream conservatives, is not naïve about racial realities and she understands well the anti-White climate that has taken root in our society (see her The Diversity Delusion, 2019). This is from a recent article:

The perpetrators in this wave of predation are overwhelmingly gang members and overwhelmingly black. (At street takeovers, by contrast, it is not unusual to see Mexican flags.) Since Floyd’s death in May 2020, the mainstream media and Democratic elites have relentlessly sent the message that blacks are the victims of endemic racism. President Joe Biden claims that the criminal-justice system treats blacks unfairly. That message inevitably spreads into such underclass enclaves as South Central Los Angeles, where it produces more alienation and contempt for the law.

Yet, who would want to be a cop in an era when they are despised by so many and viewed as “white supremacists” ready and eager to gun down all minorities? White people seeking a career in police work, then, better prepare themselves for how they will be perceived by much of the public, especially so if they choose to work in a community with a large minority demographic.

These same easily triggered officers have forgotten that they are sworn “peace officers.” If that term means anything, it surely implies that those given authority to protect the public ought to have the qualities of a peacemaker, a person who instead of bullying or instigating conflicts is known rather as calming things down as well as respecting the rights of all.

Finally, White officers working in the law enforcement profession in the era of George Floyd need to be especially on guard when dealing with Blacks or any minority group. Your words and actions are going to always be carefully sifted through the lens of race, more so than any Black, Asian or Hispanic officer. You might not think it’s fair to be specifically targeted in this manner, and it isn’t. But that’s the kind of society we have deteriorated into, and it should surprise no one why we and the civilization we built are  in decline as a result.

Conclusion

Strange as it may sound, the White officer must intentionally put on his kid gloves when dealing with Blacks. If you expect to have a long police career, not get successfully sued and lose everything you own, or not find yourself serving a prison sentence in protective custody, you need to be strategically smarter and wiser than the hostile Blacks you encounter on the streets. This doesn’t mean you debase yourself or jettison your dignity, but only that you watch your words, watch your attitude, and conduct yourself in a way that doesn’t provide ammunition to those who would be happy to destroy you and your way of life.

If you’re unable to do this, then I’d recommend you get out of police work altogether. This once-respected profession has fast become one geared for compliant government types who will do nothing to oppose tyranny so long as they are paid handsomely. The assumption that most officers will uphold the Constitution they’ve sworn to protect is naïve at best. If the federal government or their own agency were to require them to confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens, I fear most of them would put up little resistance to such an order.

Racially conscious Whites who have eyes to see what is being done to them and their once great nation, might want to think twice before endeavoring in a law enforcement career that assents to all the basic ideas and ‘values’ of a tyrannical system that stands against the racial and cultural interests of Heritage Americans.

The future of American law enforcement

Writing for the traditionally neocon-friendly Claremont Institute, Christopher Caldwell  (Summer, 2022) describes the unintended consequences of the Ukraine war—consequences that are indeed playing out now.

Caldwell starts out with Prof. John Mearsheimer’s view on the causes of the war:

[2014] was a hinge year. Ukrainian diplomats had been negotiating an “association agreement” with the European Union that would have created closer trade relations. Russia outbid the E.U. with its own deal, which included $15 billion in incentives for Ukraine. President Viktor Yanukovych signed it. Protests, backed by the United States, broke out in Kiev’s main square, the Maidan, and in cities across the country. By then the U.S. had spent $5 billion to influence Ukraine’s politics, according to a 2013 speech by State Department official Victoria Nuland. Russia now viewed this activity as having funded subversion and revolt. Like every Ukrainian government since the end of the Cold War, Yanukovych’s government was corrupt. Unlike many of them it was legitimately elected. When shootings near the Maidan in Kiev left dozens of protesters dead, Yanukovych fled the country, and the United States played a central role in setting up a successor government.

Meddling with vital Russian interests at Russia’s doorstep turned out to be more dangerous than orating about democracy. Rather than see the Russophone and pro-Russian region of Crimea transformed from a Russian naval stronghold into an American one, Russia invaded it. “Took over” might be a better verb, because there was no loss of life due to the military operation. Whether the Russian takeover was a reaction to American crowding or an unprovoked invasion, one thing was clear: In Russia’s view, Ukraine’s potential delivery of Crimea to NATO was a more serious threat to its survival in 2014 than—to take an example—Islamic terrorism had been to America’s in 2001 or 2003. Understanding that Russia would respond accordingly to any attempt to wrest it back, Russia’s European and Black Sea neighbors tended thenceforth to treat Crimea as a de facto part of Russia. So, for the most part, did the United States. The Minsk accords, signed by Russia and Ukraine, were meant to guarantee a measure of linguistic and political autonomy in the culturally Russian Donbass. (Russia claims the violation of these accords as a casus belli.)

Contrast that with the neo-liberal position which is basically a moral crusade:

There is, of course, a different explanation, the moral/psychological explanation put forward by the Biden administration and its defenders. It differs from Mearsheimer’s account not so much in facts as in its apportionment of moral blame. In this account, the spur to war was not American encroachment but the erratic behavior of Russian president Vladimir Putin. …

Putin certainly had reasons to wish Ukraine kept in Russia’s sphere of influence. But in most Western accounts of what led to the invasion of Ukraine last February, these reasons are presented as psychopathological, not geostrategic. Putin comes off as Hitler. He wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. Or the tsarist empire. …

Those who back a bigger role for the West in supporting Ukraine often put their position in the form of a question: once he gets control of Ukraine, why should Putin stop there? The question has a simple answer: because he knows something about history and he can count. He doesn’t have the guns. He doesn’t have the soldiers. Putin invaded Ukraine with 190,000 men. That is just slightly more than the 170,000 Soviet soldiers who died trying—and failing—to retake the city of Kharkov in 1942. There were four battles of Kharkov in World War II, and Kharkov was only one of the cities fought over.

What we’ve been saying all along. This is really about exporting globalism and leftist political orthodoxy to the rest of the world and it’s corollary of maintaining a unipolar world dominated by the United States. They even said so: “In March 24 [2022], a month after Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine’s borders, the Biden White House summoned America’s partners (as its allies are now called) to a civilizational crusade. The administration proclaimed its commitment to those affected by Russia’s recent invasion—“especially vulnerable populations such as women, children, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTQI+) persons, and persons with disabilities.” Because of Western intervention since 2014, Ukraine has been completely transformed:

Few people have paid attention to how rapidly Ukrainian society has been evolving since the Maidan protests. In a recent interview in the New Left Review, the sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko described a power bloc that has lately come into being, uniting Ukraine’s globalizing oligarchs, Western-funded progressive foundations, and Ukrainian nationalists. The latter argued for ripping up the Minsk accords and ripping out the Russian roots of Ukrainian public life and high culture, leaving Ukraine with a hard-line form of political correctness. After 2014, according to Ishchenko, “a wide range of political positions supported by a large minority, sometimes even by the majority, of Ukrainians—sovereigntist, state-developmentalist, illiberal, left-wing—were blended together and labeled ‘pro-Russian narratives’ because they challenged the dominant pro-Western, neoliberal and nationalist discourses in Ukraine’s civil society.” Those who hold such views have often felt driven out of public life.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, today the symbol of resolute anti-Russian resistance, has himself undergone a transformation. An influential Ukrainian actor and TV producer, he won a landslide in 2019 on the promise he would render life tolerable for the Russia-friendly east. His popularity quickly eroded, according to Ishchenko, and shortly after the Biden inauguration, Zelensky began censoring Russophile channels, websites, and blogs.

Ukrainian democracy! This really comes down to the threat of World War III. Russia clearly sees the war as existential (see Putin’s February speech: “This means they plan to finish us once and for all. In other words, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation. This is how we understand it and we will respond accordingly, because this represents an existential threat to our country”). And the West sees a loss as a mortal threat to their hegemony, their globalization project, and their exporting hardline political correctness to the rest of the world, as has already happened in Ukraine.

American immunity from danger may be illusory. The progress of technology has imperceptibly eroded a longstanding distinction between supporting a combatant and entering the fray as a combatant oneself. In June, the U.S. began providing Ukraine with M142 HIMARS computer-targeted rocket artillery systems, and these present the problem in an acute form: the role of technology in the lethality of a weapon has grown to the point where the role of the human warrior is, relatively speaking, rendered negligible. An encounter with a sword is an encounter with a swordsman. An encounter with an arrow is an encounter with an only slightly more distant bowman. But an encounter with an M31 rocket fired from a HIMARS launcher is an encounter with General Dynamics. And it is the human warrior who is the repository of all the longings-to-be-vindicated and the sacrifices-freely-undertaken that consecrate war as a cause. With advanced weaponry, the soldier operating it almost doesn’t need to be there. Which is to say that, in this proxy war between Russia and the United States, Ukraine doesn’t need to be there. In these HIMARS artillery strikes, in the assassinations by drone of Russian officers, in the sinking of naval ships with advanced missiles, it is the United States, not Ukraine, that has become the battlefield adversary of Russia.

The substitution of high-tech for competent soldiers is likely what the trans-friendly, diverse and inclusive, politically correct military military brass is counting on to retain fighting capability.

The U.S.’s extensive financial sanctions on Russia have had little, if any, cost to Russia (see Putin’s speech) while it has motivated Russia to abandon the U.S. dollar as a mechanism of international trade, which is also something that China doubtless views positively. Moreover, because of the sanctions, Russia is insulated from any repercussions of the current bank implosion occurring in the U.S.—a crisis that has happened in large part because of the rapid rise in interest rates (rendering older bonds with lower yield held by institutions like Silicon Valley Bank relatively worthless) because the Fed felt it necessary to use higher interest rates to combat inflation which was in turn caused at least in part by increases in energy prices caused by the Ukraine war and by sanctions on Russian energy in conjunction with the Biden administration’s opposition to the domestic drilling industry and its obsession with clean energy, and because Biden goosed the financial system with trillions of dollars in federal spending. As I write, it’s not possible to predict the effects of the banking crisis on markets.

Rather than beg its way back into the U.S.-led global financial order, the Russians are trying to build a new one with new partners [like China]. They have a chance of pulling it off. In a speech at a June [2022] economic forum in St. Petersburg, Putin complained that the roughly $10 trillion that any trading country must hold in dollar and Euro currency reserves is being devalued at 8% a year by U.S. inflation. “Moreover,” he said, “they can be confiscated or stolen any time if the United States dislikes something in the policy of the states involved” [which has already been done to $284 billion of Russian money in Western banks at the behest of the U.S.]. Putin called for a replacement for the SWIFT system. “The development of a convenient and independent payment infrastructure in national currencies is a solid and predictable basis for deepening international cooperation,” he said. Until recently such an appeal would have fallen on deaf ears. This time it did not.

The times are definitely changing, and the war against Russia has made countries like China aware that the U.S. can always do the same to them—like embark on another moral crusade against China’s oppression of the Uyghurs or the Indian caste system.

In part, the great story we see playing out is the fulfillment of a prediction that people have been making for a generation: power and influence are shifting away from the United States and Europe, and toward Asia. In the 1990s, when the United States was imposing its will on Iraq and Kosovo, the G7 made up 70% of the world economy. Today it makes up 43%. India and China are both giant export markets for Russian oil and gas. It is clear why Russia would want to sell to India and China. The more complicated question is why India (tacitly) and China (explicitly) would back Russia against what American progressives call the “rules-based international order.” …

Yes, the West “swiftly moved” against Russia, but six months in, these moves seemed surprisingly ineffective. The reason is that, no matter where you place the fulcrum and the lever, Russia, China, and India collectively are now too much for the United States to lift. Inducements can be offered to get one country to break solidarity with the other two. But cooperating would be foolish, on any terms. At the end of the day, a country that permits itself to be isolated by the United States this way is increasing the risk that it will itself be subjected to a media-and-boycott campaign of destruction like the one we are now witnessing with Russia. A few words about the condition of the Uyghurs, a few talking points on Hindu nationalism, and the U.S. can crank this whole machinery of economic destruction into operation against China or India. They know it, too. The Italian writer Marco D’Eramo reported that, after a March 18 phone call between Biden and Xi Jinping, one Chinese anchorman joked that Biden’s message had been: “Can you help me fight your friend so that I can concentrate on fighting you later?”

The attempt to isolate Russia from the American world system has had a striking unintended consequence—the possible founding of an alternative world system that would draw power away from the existing one. Twenty years ago, under George W. Bush, the United States removed the Iraqi deterrent from Iran’s neighborhood, transforming Iran overnight into a regional power. This year, under Joe Biden, the United States has made China a gift of Russia’s exportable food and mineral resources. We are displaying an outright genius for identifying our most dangerous military adversary and solving its most pressing strategic challenge. The attention of China is now engaged. Joe Biden argues that any wavering in the cause of obliterating Russia will be understood by China as a green light on Taiwan. He may have a point, but the U.S. management of the Ukraine situation over the past decade has constituted encouragement enough.

The multipolar world is coming into being and is being speeded up by the war in Ukraine. For the neocons in charge of U.S. foreign policy, it’s an existential moment because their much yearned for unipolar world run by the U.S. in close alliance with Israel may be unraveling, in large part because of their own ambitions to destroy Russia—a hatred borne of old grievances specific to the long sojourn of Jews in Russia, where anti-Jewish attitudes have a long history (even under Bolshevism), Putin’s banishing of politically involved Jewish oligarchs,  Russia’s alliances with Israel’s enemies Iran and Syria, their rejection of globalism in favor of nationalism (the ADL considers calling out any Jew for supporting globalism to be “anti-Semitic“), and their support for traditional Russian Christian culture rather than, e.g., LGBTQ+ which is championed by powerful Jewish organizations throughout the West.

It’s interesting therefore that in a recent UN General Assembly vote, earlier this month calling for an end to the fighting and Moscow’s immediate withdrawal from Ukraine, Russia voted against, while China, India and South Africa abstained. Add to that the recent Saudi-Iran rapprochement along with Syria and the U.S. may well be looking at an alliance among Russia, China, India, and much of the Islamic world that rejects what the West has become—promoting globalism at the expense of nationalism (which comes down to a small cadre of Western oligarchs and multinationals as represented by the World Economic Forum running the world) and moral crusades at the expense of traditional cultures which are inevitably seen as retrograde and change-worthy by the woke elites that run the West. Ukraine’s transformation under Zelensky  is paradigmatic. Ukraine’s transformation is clearly a top-down transformation like those that have occurred in all Western countries. I suppose that this transformation has a long way to go to capture the hearts and minds of Ukrainians, but, as with the West, control of the media and academic culture along with Zelensky’s heavy-handed methods of handling dissent (banning political parties and religions that dissent from the war despite constantly be advertised in the West as a democracy) may prevail in the long run in whatever is left of Ukraine.

Introduction

It seems that in the 1990s, training in multiculturalism could involve brainwashing or psychological abuse. How true is this of today’s anti-racism training?

Cornell in the 1990s

Almost thirty years ago a student at Cornell wrote to its president about what he saw as the brainwashing techniques used to spread the ideology of multiculturalism, or anti-racism as it might be called today, at the university, which he compared to those used by cults.[1] His letter reminds us how peculiar are the ideas that have been being pressed on us all this time, it throws light on the behaviour of anti-racists on social media such as Twitter, and shows how thrilling it can be for White people to believe that they have behaved abominably. We might also wonder how common today is the student’s independent-mindedness.

According to Jonathan Bloedow’s letter, he first encountered multiculturalism when he attended an event arranged by a Resident Assistant that had been advertised as for Whites only.[2] She had brought in two professors to lead a discussion about race, stereotypes, prejudice, power and privilege. When the professors’ ideas were challenged from the floor, the discussion became quite tense.

Afterwards, Bloedow and a friend continued the discussion with some students who agreed with the professors and tried to persuade the two to accept ideas that seemed to get more and more bizarre. Their argument relied on defining racism as prejudice plus power, on which basis they said that all White Americans were racist regardless of their actions or beliefs. When the anti-racists realised that they could not effectively counter their opponents’ objections, something strange happened. In frustration two of them told Bloedow and his friend that their problem was that they were thinking too much from here, pointing to their heads, instead of from here, pointing to their hearts. Bloedow wondered why both young women used the same words and gestures, which he had never heard or seen before, and surmised that they had been affected by a common source. He later spoke to other student multiculturalists, one of whom even followed him in to dinner and sat down with him to explain his new-found belief system.

Cornell University

Bloedow noticed that all the discussions of multiculturalism in which he had taken part had several things in common. Most striking was the peculiarity of the beliefs themselves and the simplistic nature of the explanations of complex social problems that were offered. Secondly were the formulaic phrases used. Not only did every student multiculturalist express the same ideas, they usually expressed them in the same trite words. Again Bloedow thought that this belief system must have a single source. Thirdly the multiculturalists’ ideas were new to them. They had only acquired them at Cornell. Fourthly, they were all very excited about their new beliefs. Like religious fanatics they displayed an almost frenzied devotion to them, which Bloedow found odd given the simplistic nature of the beliefs. Finally, they gave no sign of thought, seeming to have accepted the ideas without putting them through their minds. Something seemed to have snapped in them psychologically, letting the ideas in and changing the students permanently. In one case, when a couple with whom Bloedow had been good friends learned that he edited The Cornell American, which had presumably questioned multiculturalism, they were outraged and refused ever to speak to him again. When he greeted them in the street they ignored him, thinking him too evil to acknowledge. Bloedow became all the more interested in what was happening—and disturbed by it.

Suddenly everything fell into place for Bloedow when he remembered hearing of this phenomenon before. He had once attended a lecture given by someone from the Council on Mind Abuse about cults, brainwashing and mind-control, where the speaker had said that a principal aim of brainwashing was to get people to stop using their minds and start thinking with their hearts. He had explained how mind-controllers try to get people to see their minds and rational thought as their enemies.

Bloedow talked to a fellow student who had recorded his experience of multicultural training, which matched Bloedow’s own. The other student said that at the start of one session, trainees were told no fewer than four times not to think about what they were about to hear but to feel it. When the student had countered the claim that “Whites walk down the glistening sidewalk of life with everything handed to them on a silver platter” by saying that he knew White people who had lived in poverty, the other students had turned on him and screamed that he was an evil racist.

Now seriously concerned, Bloedow set out to discover all he could about brainwashing and mind control, learning among other things that mind controllers train people to respond to dissenters with harassment and abuse but to accept them warmly if they recant. When he read out parts of a book about brainwashing to his fellow student, the latter was shocked to see how accurately the book described what he had experienced. Bloedow’s scepticism gave way to the conclusion to which everything was pointing, which he found quite frightening.

He noted that all the students he came across who were possessed by the new belief system had been converted in one of three situations, the main one being the course “Racism in American Society”, taught by the chair of the Africana Studies Department and another professor. He learned that the university was thinking of making this course mandatory for all first-year students, something true of no other course.

It was later suggested to him by the former director of the Cult Awareness Network that Cornell resorted to mind-control techniques because it had only a short time in which to change students’ minds.[3]

Jane Elliott in the 1990s

A famous “diversity trainer” active at the same time, who has won the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, is Jane Elliott. She began her diversity training in 1968, appeared on the Johnny Carson show and has had several documentaries made about her. One from 1996 was recently shown online.[4] Apparently she relied on psychological abuse rather than brainwashing, although psychological abuse can be an element of the brainwashing process.

When signing trainees in to a workshop, she either placed or did not place a large yellow collar round their necks. Those with collars waited in one room, the others in another.

In the uncollared room, where most trainees were Black, she explained that she had separated trainees by the colour of their eyes, putting a collar on those with blue eyes. She was going to attribute to the blue-eyed trainees every negative trait that had been attributed to Black people so that they would learn how it felt to be non-White, she said. She told the brown-eyes that the blue-eyed waiting room contained just three chairs for seventeen people and laughed. She had had the heating turned way up there. A blue-eyed person must have come in to ask if it could be turned down, because she said: “It’s hot in there? Well, then it’s probably smelly, isn’t it, because White people smell a lot, don’t they?” She wanted the blue-eyed trainees to be uncomfortable, she explained to the brown-eyed ones.

Still in the brown-eyed waiting room, she suggested that IQ tests were biased against Black people because they tested “something that they know virtually nothing about”. But IQ tests don’t test knowledge; they test the ability to see and extrapolate patterns. Jane Elliott preferred to describe a question of aptitude in problem solving, such as the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (which is a non-verbal test of abstract reasoning) as a question of knowledge. She told the brown-eyes that they would be given a test that they would pass because the test itself gave them half the answers. This would resemble the way in which White people outperformed Blacks in IQ tests because White people are given the answers on a plate. Black trainees smiled, looking forward to outdoing the blue-eyes, who would presumably take a different test, which they would fail.

She seemed to think that the reason Black people did poorly in many ways was that White people expected little of them, a theory George W Bush alluded to when in 2009 he referred to “the soft bigotry of low expectations”, sometimes known as the theory of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Expect something of someone and they will do it. If only life were that simple! Teachers could raise whole classes of dull children to the top of the academic league just by predicting that they would get there. People with no ear for music would start singing in tune if only someone prophesied that they would.

Another explanation suggested by Jane Elliott of the fact that Whites exceeded Blacks was that they were in power and had set things up so that they would remain in power. They won every game because they had invented the game and set the rules. What chance therefore did a Black person have? This was the Great Race Conspiracy Theory, which says that Whites connive to keep Blacks down. It is a classic conspiracy theory because no one has found any evidence of the conspiracy, which must therefore be going on in secret. Nor can the theory account for the abundant evidence of White people trying to help Black people in every possible way.

Jane Elliott saw “cultural bias” everywhere, sometimes where it was bound to exist, sometimes where it could not. “We use culturally biased text-books, we have culturally biased pictures on the wall”, she said, without explaining how a book or picture could fail to reflect a culture. According to her, our maps were also culturally biased, although what shape a continent might be on a culturally unbiased map she did not say.

But she made the purpose of the workshop clear to the brown-eyes: “For two and a half hours we are going to make these people look inferior and feel inferior”. Clearly this was a sadist who particularly hated White people.

In the workshop, where the blue-eyes sat on the floor while the others sat in chairs, she described White people as slow, unmotivated and lazy. How was this supposed to reflect reality? It must have been extraordinarily rare for a white person to describe a black person in this way to his face. Yet Jane Elliott relished doing this to white people. The Black trainees loved it.

The delighted Jane Elliott: Hating on White People

Posing with one of her delighted trainees

Some of her less of delighted trainees, with collars

She told those with collars that they would be treated “the way they have treated other people for a lifetime”. Even assuming that she meant White people in general rather than her White trainees in particular, how many White Americans had ever actually mistreated a Black person? The scenario was a product of Jane Elliott’s imagination, drawing on largely mythical but culture-wide dramatic categories.[5]

If Jane Elliott had really wanted the White trainees to know what it was like to be Black, she could have asked some Black trainees to stand up and tell them, in which case how many would have said that they were commonly abused? She was pushing the idea that Black people habitually suffered at the hands of Whites without a shred of evidence that it was true. The main purpose of the workshop seemed to be to gratify her love of insulting and humiliating White people.

She did at one point invite Black trainees to speak, not about being Black but specifically about their “stress”. One said that he had been unable to rent a house because, he was told, it was occupied, and he had later seen a White couple going into it: not a very persuasive example of persecution. A woman said that she was one of only two Black teachers at her school: hardly a major problem, one would have thought, let alone a case of mistreatment. The impression was reinforced that Jane Elliott’s idea of Black suffering inflicted by Whites was a fantasy.

This stubborn attachment of many White people to the idea of Black suffering recalls the time that in the Jim Crow era a journalist interviewed a Black man who had been refused admission to a hotel. “What did you do?” asked the journalist breathlessly, perhaps hoping to hear that the Black man had had to sleep on the street. “Went to another hotel”, he said.

Anti-racism training today

It would be interesting to know how the anti-racism training courses employees must undergo today compare to the brainwashing or psycho-torture sessions held in the 1990s. It would seem from the websites of companies offering such training that they might differ in three main ways.

First, whereas in the 1990s “multicultural” or “diversity” training aimed to get it across to White people that their society was riddled with racism, today this is taken for granted. For example, a prospectus from Equality and Diversity UK states that its course aims to “support delegates to understand the role of White privilege in racism” and help them “learn more about racism both the covert/overt [sic], including Subtle Acts of Exclusion”.[6] The existence of “racism”, “White privilege” and these “subtle acts” is presupposed rather than asserted. The course also aims to “support delegates to understand … White fragility and White saviourism”, thereby presupposing the existence of these things too. For anyone who might wonder what they are, the course will “give delegates the language … to tackle uncomfortable conversations”, as though without such jargon one would be unable to talk about race or whatever is supposed to be meant by “racism”. Yet it seems that some courses still find it necessary to inform trainees that all Whites are racist, as seen in the following picture.

All White people are racist, says this happy, edifying woman[7]

Secondly, today’s courses do not seem to advocate feeling rather than thinking but seem to be presented as almost academically respectable. Anti-racism now appears so confident of itself that it can pose as the product of rational thought and observation. Today’s courses also present themselves as caring. With White people’s interests at heart, they want to help them and support them in their efforts to overcome various afflictions of which they might have been unaware.

Thirdly, today’s courses modestly refrain from assuming that they will turn every White trainee into an anti-racist. Rather, they stress the concept of “allyship”, whereby those who do not become anti-racists will at least become their allies so that whatever anti-racists do, they will be behind them. Thus should it turn out that the thrust of anti-racism is to attack White people, their society and their culture, its new allies will also attack White people, their society and their culture.

Perhaps readers who have attended anti-racism training recently will tell us about it in the comments section below.

[1] The letter formed the main part of an article entitled “Does Cornell Use Brainwashing?” which I downloaded in 2001 and can now be accessed at: https://web.archive.org/web/20041221045833/http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/education/Does_Cornell_Use_Brainwashing.html  Unfortunately it does now record the author’s name or the date of publication. I would guess that the letter, if not the article, was written in 1994. It cannot have been earlier since it mentions the Waco incident, which occurred in 1993, nor can it have been much later since it refers to multiculturalism as something new.

[2] Resident Assistants at Cornell, apparently called house advisors or junior counsellors at other American colleges, were senior students employed by the university to live among younger ones as “the extension of the administration into residential life”.

[3] The former director of the Cult Awareness Network was Ron Loomis.

[4] Blackpilled, March 5th 2023, “INSOMNIA STREAM: STUPID CUNT EDITION”, https://www.bitchute.com/video/GHgVh3TbbYD4/.

[5] Dramatic categories are mental devices for perceiving events, which can make it easier to believe in myths than facts. “Certain unverbalized assumptions about what must be the case can often defeat what actually is the case,” wrote the philosopher John Searle when discussing the student uprisings at Berkeley in the 1960s. He gave as an example of a dramatic category: “oppressed minority wins struggle for justice against reactionary authorities”. This contrasted with “oppressed minority engages in pointless battle with authorities for something they are prepared to give anyhow”, which was not a dramatic category and so no one could see events in those terms. See John Searle, 1972, The Campus War, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 73-77. The unverbalised dramatic category that Jane Elliott drew on and promulgated was basically that Whites were horrible to Blacks.

[6] Equality and Diversity UK, no date (downloaded March 2023), “Anti Racism Training Course”, https://www.equalityanddiversity.co.uk/anti-racism-training.html.

[7] Source: VICE TV, https://presearch.com/images?q=fat%20Black%20anti-racism%20trainer%20says%20all%20White%20people%20are%20racist#view.