"The Stalinization of Kansas City"

That's the title of an article in the American Spectator.  Kansas City is merely the latest example of progressive overreach.

“There’s no way you can do any homework on Black Lives Matter and not see that it’s a Marxist political organization,” Jason Whitlock, America’s bravest sportswriter, told Tucker Carlson of Fox News. BLM “is not about black death. It’s not about black men.” Whitlock, who is himself black, knows whereof he speaks.

The civic leaders of Kansas City, Missouri — where Whitlock got his start — refused to do their homework. On Saturday, Black Lives Matter murals were painted on six city streets to address “systemic racism” in a city that, although only one-third black, has a black mayor, sheriff, county executive, and congressman. Of the 13 members of the City Council, the sole Republican was the only one to vote against the project.

. . .

Like many of my fellow citizens, I now have some sense of how Ukrainians must have felt watching their overlords erect statues of Stalin in their town squares. They were forced not just to endure Soviet lies, but to celebrate them.

To be sure, the lies that sustain BLM are not as lethal as those that devastated the Ukraine under Stalin. Nor does a gulag await dissenters, at least not yet. That said, corporate citizens risk their careers should they protest the BLM shakedown, and business owners risk their shop windows — at least those that survived BLM’s “largely peaceful” protests earlier in the summer.

. . .

Reeling from the “Minneapolis effect,” cops have pulled back even further, and the thugs have reclaimed lost territory. The night before the Kansas City murals were painted, BLM bully boys and girls roamed at will through the streets of Rochester, New York, harassing sidewalk diners and turning over their tables.

On that same day, Kansas City reported its 139th homicide of the year, 30 percent more than at this stage of 2019, 60 percent more than in the entire year of 2014, and 20 times more than in neighboring Johnson County, Kansas, which has a larger population. The great majority of those killed were black. So were their killers. According to the Violence Policy Center, “Missouri now has the highest rate of homicides among African-Americans of any state in the nation,” and it is not cops who are doing the killing.

There's more at the link.

This illustrates the great lie that's been sold to the American people time after time after time:  namely, that the problem is "the system".  Accusations of "systemic racism" are used as a reason to replace the present "system" with a better one;  but inevitably, the new system will end up as flawed as the old one.

There's a simple reason for that.  Political, social and economic systems are designed, implemented and administered by human beings, all of whom, without exception, are flawed, limited and biased to at least some extent.  We can't change that.  It's human nature.  Therefore, a new system, designed by "new" human beings, will be flawed from its inception, and will deteriorate over time until it's as bad as (or worse than) the one it replaced.

H. L. Mencken put it well:

"Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in."

Right now, the progressive left appears to be dominating local politics.  However, the new "systems" they're putting in place are as flawed, and as incompetent, as those they're replacing.  Politicians, as a breed, are mostly rascals;  and we'd probably be better served by turning all of them out.  Sooner or later, it'll be shown that the BLM emperor's new clothes don't exist.  What will replace them?  Who knows?  It'll probably turn out just as phony.

That's why the US constitution is such a remarkable document.  It was not written by politicians.  It was written by thinking, educated people who could see the flaws in their present system of government, and who had studied other governments throughout history, and sought to codify a system that would restrict their excesses and limit their overreach as far as possible.  It recognized human nature, and sought to implement safeguards against it.  Even so, John Adams warned:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Can anyone argue that the US population today, in general terms, is a "moral and religious people"?  No, we're not - and therefore our constitution has fallen out of favor.  As long as its system of checks and balances was maintained, its protections endured.  With the relegation of the constitution to a historical placeholder rather than binding law, as has happened in many progressive and left-wing enclaves in America, it no longer protects us against the dangers it was built to avert.

That applies to cities as much as to the nation as a whole.  It seems Kansas City is on the way down the same progressive rabbit-hole as many others before it.  That's terrible news for those who live there.

Peter