Numerous catalytic converters are being stolen in my neighborhood in the City of St. Louis. This note is from a recent meeting of my neighborhood association: "The number one crime continues to be the stealing of catalytic converters from people’s cars. These types of crimes are hard to investigate since they happen very quickly." The attached surveillance video below that it only takes 1 minute to steal a catalytic converter.
One of my neighbors was very upset to find hers stolen a couple weeks ago. To replace the converter on her Honda Element would have been in excess of $3,000, and this was more than the value of her car. How much do the thieves get for damaging or destroying your car? "Although the amount of metal in a single catcon is relatively small, a thief could expect to get from $50 to $100 out of a single poaching." This can ruin a car for many people and this is happening during the pandemic, when many people are already severely stressed.
Back in October 2020, I watched Jodi Shaw go public to explain a problem with the hostile work environment at Smith College, her then-employer and her alma mater. I'll never forget the earnestness in her voice, the determined look on her face and her intense emotions as she carefully described the situation. She knew she was about jump off the high dive and there would be no turning back. As I watched her video, I didn't sense any attempt at advocacy or showmanship. Shaw made her video to say some things that were factually straightforward, but socially dangerous for the many Smith adherents of the new religion of Critical Race Theory. She called out that the Emperor had no clothes.
Shaw was concerned that Smith College was attempting to fight racism with what has come to be known as neoracism, a pernicious new version of racism. At Smith College, Martin Luther King's great dream is dead. At the urging of the leadership of Smith College, complex human beings are proudly categorized and judged by the color of their skin, not by the content of their character.
I've followed Shaw's postings and videos carefully since October. Shaw has expanded on her concerns in subsequent videos and tweets: Reducing people to "colors" undermines moral agency, reduces people to "racial objects," and needlessly creates antagonistic in-groups and out-groups. She knew that breaking her silence would threaten her loss of income and perhaps her personal safety and it now has, as explained below.
Jodi Shaw was, until this afternoon, a staffer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She made $45,000 a year — less than the yearly tuition at the school. She is a divorced mother of two children. She is a lifelong liberal and an alumna of the college. And she has had a front-row seat to the illiberal, neo-racist ideology masquerading as progress.
As part of her article, Weiss has reprinted Shaw's resignation letter in full. Here is an excerpt from Shaw's letter:
I can no longer work in this environment, nor can I remain silent about a matter so central to basic human dignity and freedom. . . . Under the guise of racial progress, Smith College has created a racially hostile environment in which individual acts of discrimination and hostility flourish. In this environment, people’s worth as human beings, and the degree to which they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, is determined by the color of their skin. It is an environment in which dissenting from the new critical race orthodoxy — or even failing to swear fealty to it like some kind of McCarthy-era loyalty oath — is grounds for public humiliation and professional retaliation. . . . Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. . . .
What passes for “progressive” today at Smith and at so many other institutions is regressive. It taps into humanity’s worst instincts to break down into warring factions, and I fear this is rapidly leading us to a very twisted place. It terrifies me that others don’t seem to see that racial segregation and demonization are wrong and dangerous no matter what its victims look like. Being told that any disagreement or feelings of discomfort somehow upholds “white supremacy” is not just morally wrong. It is psychologically abusive.
Jodi Shaw is no longer working as an employee of Smith College, but she is continuing to actively help Smith College find its way out of the Critical Race Theory thicket. You can follow her tweets here. She has set up a GoFundMe to help with her living expense and her legal fees.
What is happening is wrong. Any ideology that asks people to judge others based on their skin color is wrong. Any ideology that asks us to reduce ourselves and others to racial stereotypes is wrong. Any ideology that treats dissent as evidence of bigotry is wrong. Any ideology that denies our common humanity is wrong. You should say so. Just like Jodi Shaw has.
The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism” that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.
We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,” vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,” treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.
Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology. Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU . . .
An entire book could — and probably should — be written on why all of this is so concerning. For the moment, two points are vital to emphasize.
First, much of the alarmism and fear-mongering is being driven by a deliberate distortion of what it means for speech to “incite violence.” . . .
To illustrate this point, I have often cited the crucial and brilliantly reasoned Supreme Court free speech ruling in Claiborne v. NAACP. In the 1960s and 1970s, the State of Mississippi tried to hold local NAACP leaders liable on the ground that their fiery speeches urging a boycott of white-owned stores “incited” their followers to burn down stores and violently attack patrons who did not honor the protest. The state’s argument was that the NAACP leaders knew that they were metaphorically pouring gasoline on a fire with their inflammatory rhetoric to rile up and angry crowds.
But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, explaining that free speech will die if people are held responsible not for their own violent acts but for those committed by others who heard them speak and were motivated to commit crimes in the name of that cause (emphasis added)
. . .
And that is directly relevant to the second point. Continuing to process Washington debates of this sort primarily through the prism of “Democrat v. Republican” or even “left v. right” is a sure ticket to the destruction of core rights. There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside.
The last several months of politician-and-journalist-demanded Silicon Valley censorship has targeted the right, but prior to that and simultaneously it has often targeted those perceived as on the left. The government has frequently declared right-wing domestic groups “terrorists,” while in the 1960s and 1970s it was left-wing groups devoted to anti-war activism which bore that designation. In 2011, British police designated the London version of Occupy Wall Street a “terrorist” group. In the 1980s, the African National Congress was so designated. “Terrorism” is an amorphous term that was created, and will always be used, to outlaw formidable dissent no matter its source or ideology.
If you identify as a conservative and continue to believe that your prime enemies are ordinary leftists, or you identify as a leftist and believe your prime enemies are Republican citizens, you will fall perfectly into the trap set for you. Namely, you will ignore your real enemies, the ones who actually wield power at your expense: ruling class elites, who really do not care about “right v. left” and most definitely do not care about “Republican v. Democrat” — as evidenced by the fact that they fund both parties — but instead care only about one thing: stability, or preservation of the prevailing neoliberal order.
Unlike so many ordinary citizens addicted to trivial partisan warfare, these ruling class elites know who their real enemies are: anyone who steps outside the limits and rules of the game they have crafted and who seeks to disrupt the system that preserves their prerogatives and status. The one who put this best was probably Barack Obama when he was president, when he observed — correctly — that the perceived warfare between establishment Democratic and Republican elites was mostly theater, and on the question of what they actually believe, they’re both “fighting inside the 40 yard line” together
This point can't be over-emphasized, but I fear that this point is invisible to the tens of millions of Americans who are convinced that U.S. politics can best be understood as a tribal pursuit between the "Left" and the "Right." They are deeply trapped in an illusory matrix that has the viscosity of fundamentalist religion.
Greenwald's articles are mostly only for subscribers, but this one is open to the public.
Eric Weinstein lays it out succinctly for you, no matter what your political persuasion. These entities need to be regulated or we need to create public equivalents. If only we could trust our politicians to step in and protect free speech across the board . . .
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