#Robert Meranto

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Robert Meranto, Wilfred Reilly

Published: Jan 22, 2025

Successful policy innovations often come from the most unexpected people and places. As citizens quipped for a half century, only arch Cold Warrior Richard Nixon could open up Communist China. Today, perhaps, only some Donald Trump acolytes such as Elon Musk can make black lives matter, undoing years of bloody damage from progressive activists and indifference from everyone else. If there was ever a tempting target for the Trump administration’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), American policing and criminal justice is it, boasting whole orchards of low-hanging fruit. Success in protecting black (and all other) lives could simultaneously increase President Trump’s already substantial support among racial and ethnic minorities and free sensible Democrats from the grip of their party’s extremists.

For more than a decade — Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, Michael Brown in 2014 — Black Lives Matter has been an untouchable sacred cow for progressive Democrats, attracting at least $10 billion in donations and goosing progressive voter turnout, per serious scholars such as Harvard’s John Della Volpe. The dominant BLM narrative paints police as an existential threat to black people. Activists even claim, falsely, that modern police evolved from antebellum patrols organized to apprehend escaped slaves. In reality, of course, such institutions as the city watch and the king’s guard date back to an era when there were walled cities and kings. Robin Hood’s great opponent was the sheriff of Nottingham, and, as Guy de la Bédoyère notes in his excellent book Praetorian, the first true lawmen were probably pensioned-off Roman legionnaires. Any paradigm that simply denies all of this essentially requires that activists smear critics as racist, contributing to the toxic state of contemporary discourse.

Moreover, progressives sympathetic to the BLM narrative, and some of the movement’s scrappers, occupy key positions in governmental and private bureaucracies, which — as we noted at a recent conference — they use to censor others. The paradigmatic example is Harvard administrators’ attempt to fire star economist Roland Fryer after he published a sophisticated article showing that, controlling for behavior, police do not disproportionately kill black people. Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi details how thousands of woke activists and bureaucrats have until recently enjoyed high salaries for and considerable emotional satisfaction from their imposing the “correct” paradigm and purging critics.

This sort of virtue-signaling seriously damaged Democrats at the polls, likely enabling Donald Trump’s decisive electoral win this past November. But has it saved black lives? Sadly, it has not, and neither have activist reforms. Nevertheless, since the BLM era began around 2014, more police have died on the job, and activists’ demonization of cops has likely contributed to this trend.

In fairness, the 2014–19 period saw a small decrease in police killings of civilians, with about 200 fewer dead. Alas, as we document in “Black Deaths: How Black Lives Matter Took Lives That Better Policing Could Save,” thousands more citizens, mostly black citizens, died during this period as homicide rates among black males spiked from 30 to 56 per 100,000. And even the era of declining police homicides — for all groups — appears to be over. As Covid-19 and the post–George Floyd anarchy contributed to a striking surge in crime, American law enforcement officers fatally shot 1,050 people in 2021, 1,097 in 2022, and 1,164 in 2023, compared with 995 in 2015.

For all our lambasting of activists and academics, city mayors and officials have hardly covered themselves in glory. The graphic murder of a single wealthy white tourist in 1991, with its implications for the travel industry, turned New York City policing around in ways that the killings of thousands of regular New Yorkers could not.

Decades later, top cops continue to protect important (and disproportionately white) people in downtown business districts and tourist spots, while throwing bones to progressives by de-policing the poorer, blacker parts of town that need protection the most, and where homicides have soared in the BLM era. One thing that police-union leaders and street activists have in common is a remarkable callousness toward poor lives, often “black lives.” That’s horrible but understandable given that high homicide rates among low-income minorities rarely get police commissioners fired or mayors voted out.

Enter the DOGE.

While supporters claim that the Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by Musk and until recently co-led by likely Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, can potentially save the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars, smart critics note that most big federal spending today is in middle-class welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicare — the famous third-rail programs that politicos, including Trump, fear to slash. Absent such action, as National Review’s own Yuval Levin laments, “so far, the DOGE is pretty much a bunch of memes and an X account.”

With respect to Levin, he fails to see an opportunity. The reason to have smart, wealthy outsiders such as Musk onboard is that, unbound by the status quo, they can bring creativity and transparency to failing bureaucracies. Given that 87 percent of government employees are in state and local bureaucracies, there is no reason to limit the DOGE’s insights purely to the federal level of government. Though its role would be purely advisory, state and local governments that are open to unconventional ideas could greatly benefit from the DOGE’s counsel.

Regarding policing, for example, since the 1990s, the New York Police Department has transformed itself by learning how to hire better cops, fire bad cops, and use information technology to replace a costly paper-based system and position cops where crimes were most likely to occur. The results: an 80 percent reduction in police shootings of civilians and a more than 80 percent reduction in homicide, alongside a decrease in incarceration. In just a few years, New York went from being one of the nation’s most dangerous cities to one of its safest.

An agency like the DOGE could make suggestions of this kind to any governmental agency worth talking to. In the context of policing, this could look like advising departments not currently doing so to identify and incarcerate the few most serious criminals in every jurisdiction who are responsible for most crime, end the bizarre anarcho-tyranny of cities and larger entities that fund costly campaigns against such groups as clinic protesters and crosswalk desecrators while allowing theft below a certain dollar amount to go on at will, and most notably to ditch any expensive ceremonial activities unrelated to making arrests (“Throughout Pride Month, our painted cars symbolize . . .”).

If nothing else, the DOGE could intentionally become — as in some cases X/Twitter recently has — a go-to source for real data on topics that citizens fear to frankly discuss. High-dollar civic campaigns against “systemic racism and other root causes of crime,” for example, are unlikely ever to accomplish much ��� because “systemic racism” is not a significant causal factor for crime in 2024. In one of the most important and unremarked trends of the past 50 years, serious violent crime has increased by almost 400 percent between 1963 and 1993 — as welfare use increased and family stability dropped like a rock, but as racism steadily declined. This point should be made often and publicly.

Beyond policing, the potential scope of the DOGE is breathtaking. In our opinion, most things that large bureaucracies like government agencies and nonproductive Fortune 500 departments do are total wastes of space and time. Musk famously fired 80 percent of the staff of Twitter, and his platform runs slightly better today. That said, a very specific first goal for the DOGE should be to recommend that state and local governments cut the parasitical alphabet soup functions (BLM, DEI, CRT, ESG, SEL, NU-HR, AA) of as many public agencies as possible, at every level.

Doing that, and redirecting the focus of as many police departments as possible toward reality, would save not only billions of green dollars but also tens of thousands of black lives. Let’s go!

[ Via: https://archive.today/Fr6Qv ]