11/17/16

George Mason Univ. Gets Their Fascism On – Who Knew It Was A Crime To Hang Anti-Terrorism Posters?

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

My friend and compatriot Oleg Atbashian found that out the hard way. Imagine my surprise this morning to find out he had been roughed up and arrested in Fairfax, Virginia. His crime was hanging anti-terrorism posters on the university campus. Oh, and bonus… he wasn’t even read his rights. He is now out on $8,000 bail for putting up pro-Israel posters to combat a pro-Islamist conference at George Mason University. He faces the very real prospect of five years in prison for allegedly committing a “class 6 felony.”

Oleg is an artistic genius. His satirical site, The People’s Cube, is one of the very best out there. Oleg did the graphics for NoisyRoom and has done work for Trevor Loudon and Cliff Kincaid as well. He is a member of a small circle of commie hunters out there. We all have very long memories and we take it very personally when one of our own is treated like this.

Oleg: “Back in my Soviet dissident days, when I was collecting signatures in defense of Andrei Sakharov, I was screamed at, threatened, and lectured by the KGB and Communist functionaries,” Oleg says. “What I never imagined was that in the United States, the land of the free, I would not only be subjected to similar treatment, but go to jail.”

Daniel Greenfield of FrontPage Mag and Sultan Knish fame had this to say regarding Oleg:

Oleg’s mixture of art and satire took off with Communists for Kerry. He’s the mastermind behind The People’s Cube and his tweaking of the radical left and its alliance with Islamic terrorists allowed him to continue the same fight he had pursued in the days of the Soviet Union. But as the US comes to resemble the USSR, political satire and activism carries a serious price.

This is what happened to Oleg when he put up some of his Freedom Center posters challenging the anti-Semitic environment created by the left’s alliance with Islamic terrorists on campus.

This was supposed to be a two-day poster campaign, to counteract the George Mason University hosting an official national conference for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is an anti-Semitic organization with well-documented ties to Hamas – a terrorist group whose stated goal is to exterminate the Jews. The GMU poster campaign was conceived by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

In every communist regime or despotic hellhole throughout history, one of the first groups of people they go after are the artists. They are considered especially dangerous. That’s when they aren’t going after Jews of course. Oleg went to GMU to hang posters and stickers against Justice in Palestine. A group that has terrorist connections. Instead he was treated like a domestic terrorist himself.

The police knew which rental car he had and as they were putting up three posters with wheat paste, the police arrested them for destroying property… it’s totally water soluble and the posters would have washed off with the first rain. Instead of giving Oleg and his partner a citation or a warning, the campus police frisked them, cuffed them and took them in. They wanted to make an example of him.

Here is the first part of Oleg’s story about persecution for doing nothing more than hanging anti-terrorism posters in defense of Israel and Jews in Virginia:

My part in it was to create provocative artwork for the posters and to hang them around the GMU campus, as well as to distribute flyers in order to raise awareness among the students, faculty, and the administration about the true meaning of their support for the SJP conference.

On the first day, my friend and I placed a few stickers on walls, poles, and signs around the GMU campus. We also placed paper flyers inside and outside the university buildings. We had decided to hang the larger posters on the following night, right before the start of the SJP conference.

Arriving at the campus in the evening, we noticed a large police presence everywhere, including the campus Starbucks. From what we overheard at the tables, the police were on the lookout for people posting “disturbing” flyers. At one point we considered canceling our mission due to this higher risk, but then decided to hang a few posters in new locations, in order to get the message out more effectively.

We only had time to hang three large posters when, at about 4am, our car was pulled over by a GMU PD cruiser with flashing lights. As we found out later, they already had a description of our rental KIA Optima. Officer M.J. Guston and his female partner, Officer Daniels, requested to see our drivers’ licenses, which they took away. Then they inquired if we had any weapons and proceeded with the visual search, noticing our bucket with mixed wheat paste and some rolled posters on the back seat, covered with towels.

The police officers took pictures of the contents of our car and retrieved some of the loose fliers from the floor as evidence. They claimed that since we were covering the posters and flyers with towels, we intended to conceal our wrongdoing. We explained that the towels were needed to wipe our hands, to prevent the bucket from spilling, and to stop the papers from rolling around the car, which was the honest truth.

The officers said we had been photographed while attaching the flyers, but never showed us the actual pictures. They ordered us to give them our car key and to step out of the car. Then we were told to put our hands behind our backs and to spread our legs. Officer Guston then held my thumbs behind my back with his left hand, while his right hand gave me a complete and very thorough pat-down and searched the content of my pockets. He repeated the same procedure with my friend, repeatedly asking us if we had any kind of weapons on us or in the car.

My friend and I tried to be as friendly and cooperative as the situation allowed, but that had no effect. We were ordered to sit on the curb, as Officer Daniels told us that the content of our posters was violent and disturbing to some students, especially the one with the Hamas terrorist standing in pools of blood over his dead victims. Such interpretation flipped our message on its head entirely, turning it from sympathy for the victims of violence into a threat of violence.

It dawned on me that the reason they kept searching us and asking about weapons was that they were convinced we were members of some violent militant group of “domestic terrorists” who meant to do harm to the students – a stereotype largely created by the “progressive” media and unscrupulous politicians. And now we, defenseless artists, armed with nothing but brushes and paper, became victims of this manipulative mythology, which caused the police to treat us with extreme prejudice. At the same time, the officers who handled us as if we were terrorists, seemed to be blissfully unaware of the true nature of the SJP they were defending, and their organization’s very real ties to a known terrorist organization with a record of mass murder, kidnappings, and targeting innocent civilians.

Since they couldn’t find any weapons and our message was protected by the First Amendment, the officers decided to charge us with “destruction of property worth of at least $2,500,” which was a “class 6 felony.” (Editor’s note: According to VA law, intentional destruction of property that is worth $1,000 or more is a class 6 felony, punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a maximum of $2,500 in fines.) They claimed we had “super-glued” our fliers to school signs and it was impossible to peel them off.

It didn’t matter that we never used permanent glue, or that there could be other volunteers on campus who posted the stickers they could have downloaded online. Our wallpaper paste was made of wheat and water; we only used it on three large posters, which could be easily removed with water and would be washed off by the first rain. The rest were stickers, printed on regular self-adhesive paper found in any office store. They, too, could be easily removed with a tissue soaked in Goo Gone, a common household cleaner found in any dollar store. We even offered to remove any posters and stickers for them, then catch our flights in the morning and never bother them again. But the officers weren’t interested in that. They seemed to have a rather inflexible phantom image of us as dangerous felons and “right-wing extremists” who belonged in jail.

A phone call that Officer Guston made inside his cruiser seemed to reinforce their determination. Stepping out into the street, he ordered us to put our hands behind our backs and then handcuffed us so tightly that our bruises were painful to the touch even on the following day. Then he emptied our pockets, took away my hat, and placed everything in two plastic bags.

We were then taken to the back of his police car. Officer Guston never read us our rights; he simply declared that we were under arrest for committing felony and were going to jail. The partitioned space in the back of his police cruiser was extremely narrow, which forced my friend and I to contort our bodies in order to avoid additional pain from leaning on our tightly handcuffed hands behind our backs.

The full account can be found at American Thinker… please go there and read it all. It was Oleg this time, but it could be any of us next.

The arresting officer told them they could never come to GMU again. What happened to free speech and your constitutional rights? These charges should not stick… they were not read their rights and therefore the charges should be dismissed. But with the Progressive courts and judges we have now, who knows what will happen.

Oleg quoted George Orwell: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” He adds: “that is what the future of America also will look like if progressivism and political correctness continue to expand their grip on every sphere of life.”

Oleg survived the Soviet Union and persecution there. He’ll survive this. But it is just disgraceful that in the Land of the Free that someone would be treated this way for exercising free speech. Just shameful and it figures it is in Terry McAuliffe’s state. There was no permanent damage done as claimed… but a man who is an acclaimed Soviet dissident was treated like a domestic terrorist, while the real terrorists were giving lectures on campus. Or is it a crime now to stand up to Islamic extremists and speak out in defense of Israel?

#StopCampusSupport4Terrorism

05/14/15

Media Attack “Clinton Cash” Message Not Facts

By: Bethany Stotts
Accuracy in Media

Criticisms of Clinton Cash follow a common template, one which emphasizes that Peter Schweizer’s book is really an unsuccessful partisan attack on the Clinton family. Some of these critiques point to errors within the book while asserting that the rest of it has leaps of logic amounting to a false account full of speculation and innuendo. For good measure, some journalists throw in background information about the author that emphasizes Schweizer’s conservative ties, as if that should disqualify his analysis entirely.

“So, let me ask you this for the record—were you looking deliberately and hoping for this kind of pickup in the, quote/unquote, ‘mainstream media’ to blunt some of the criticism that you are just a Clinton critic and that this book lacks credibility as a result?” asked CNN’s Reliable Sources host Frank Sesno on the May 10 show. Sesno questioned the lack of a smoking gun, or definitive proof that the Clinton family was corrupt. “I mean, if you did that—if you were writing for a major newspaper, they’d send you back and say you haven’t got the story yet,” he said.

“Any serious journalist or investigator will tell you that proving corruption by a political figure is extremely difficult,” writes Schweizer in his first chapter of Clinton Cash. “…That is also why investigators primarily look at patterns of behavior.” He argues that the “repeated pattern of financial transactions coinciding with official actions favorable to Clinton contributors” warrants “further investigation by law enforcement officers.” In other words, Clinton Cash offers no smoking gun. It is meant, instead, to provoke a public investigation and discussion based on his initial research—not to offer all the answers.

There were some errors found in the book, including that Schweizer incorrectly asserted that the company Digicel had paid Bill Clinton for speeches, and that Digicel had not received USAID funds. Also Schweizer was fooled by a fake TD Bank press release, which he used to make a point, and he held former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responsible for approving the Uranium One deal when it was actually an interagency decision.

“In a response to BuzzFeed News, Schweizer said that while Digicel had received previous USAID contracts, its charitable arm, the Digicel Foundation, did not receive USAID contracts until after the earthquake [in Haiti], and argued the basic premise of the book remains intact,” writes Buzzfeed.

As for Uranium One, the analysis seems to misconstrue Schweizer’s original words. “Besides the secretary of state, [the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] includes cabinet officials such as the secretary of defense, the secretary of homeland security, and the treasury secretary,” writes Schweizer in his book. His allegation is, “Hillary’s opposition would have been enough under CFIUS rules to have the decision on [the Russian purchase of Uranium One] kicked up to the president. That never happened.”

In other words, Schweizer actually informed his readers that Mrs. Clinton wasn’t the only one responsible for the CFIUS decision on Uranium One, which gave “Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States.” However, he implies that Mrs. Clinton should have interceded, given her past political record. His allegation is one not only of corruption, but hypocrisy.

“The rooster doesn’t cause the sun to rise, but this is the thrust of Schweizer’s argument,” wrote Taylor Wofford for Newsweek on May 1. “But throwing up a bunch of dots and not connecting them isn’t great judgment either.”

“The only evidence is timing: people who would benefit from the sale made donations to the foundation at around the same time the matter was before the government,” writes Paul Waldman for The Washington Post about the Uranium One controversy.

The timing of events in the book do, in fact, seem very suspicious on their face. “Even as Bill was being introduced to the audience by the crown prince of the [United Arab Emirates], the prince’s brother (the foreign minister) was en route to Washington for meetings with none other than Hillary,” writes Schweizer. “Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan arrived in Washington on December 12 and met Hillary the day after Bill collected his half million.”

“Based on the Clintons’ financial disclosures, it does not appear that the UAE royal family had ever paid for a Clinton speech before.”

Schweizer doesn’t just rely on his own account of what the Clintons may or may not have done—he also produces a couple of witness statements alleging that they had either bought off the Clintons or were told that they needed to. These statements were made to law enforcement or foreign media outlets long before the release of his book, and critics can’t claim they were solicited in order to support Schweizer’s assumptions.

Mukhtar Dzhakishev, former president of the government agency “that runs Kazakhstan’s uranium and nuclear energy industry” told authorities in 2009 that “prime minister Karim Massimov ‘was in America and needed to meet with Hillary Clinton but this meeting was canceled. And they said that those investors connected with the Clintons who were working in Kazakhstan have problems. Until Kazakhstan solved those problems, there would be no meeting, and all manner of measures would be taken,’” according to Schweizer.

“I called them, and they came. I met them in Astana and then Clinton’s aide, Tim Phillips, began to scream that this deal involves Democrats and is financed by them, and that we were hampering the deal,” said Dzhakishev, according to Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller.

“In its 2010 article, The Post considers that Dzhakishev’s account is questionable,” Ross writes. But Dzhakishev “has proven more truthful” than either Frank Giustra or Bill Clinton, at least in one case, Ross writes, when in 2007 Dzhakishev told The New York Times that he’d had a meeting at the Clinton home, and Giustra and Mr. Clinton denied having the meeting. Giustra later admitted to it.

“But, other than Dzhakishev’s assertion, there’s no proof,” complains Wofford. He fails to mention Schweizer’s accounts of the statements by Sant Chatwal, who the author describes as one of Mrs. Clinton’s “largest soft-money donors,” made to Indian media.

“Even my close friend Hillary Clinton was not in favor of the [Indian nuclear] deal then,” Schweizer quotes Chatwal. “But when I put the whole package together, she also came on board. …In politics nothing comes free. You have to write cheques in the American political system.”

“This is 100 percent wrong. There is not even an iota of truth in it,” Chatwal told India’s Economic Times on May 7.

Chatwal is one of “at least four [members of the] Clinton Foundation board of directors [who] have either been charged or convicted of financial crimes, including bribery and fraud,” reported Breitbart on May 7.

In 2014 Chatwal pled guilty to funneling illegal contributions to federal candidates, writes Schweizer. “During the course of the federal investigation, FBI agents recorded Chatwal discussing the flow of money to politicians,” he writes. Chatwal said, “Without the cash, ‘nobody will even talk to you.’”

If Schweizer’s allegations were mere speculation and empty innuendo, then why have a series of mainstream outlets built on his initial research to expose Clinton conflicts of interest and “errors” made by the Clinton Foundation? Those include The New York Times and The Washington Post.

“When Mr. Clinton worked as a co-chairman of Haiti’s earthquake recovery commission, [Hillary Clinton’s youngest brother] Mr. [Tony] Rodham and his partners sought a $22 million deal to rebuild homes in the country,” reports The New York Times’ Steve Eder in a May 10 piece that does not mention Clinton Cash.

“I deal through the Clinton Foundation. That gets me in touch with the Haitian officials,” Rodham told the court three years ago, according to Eder. “I hound my brother-in-law, because it’s his fund that we’re going to get our money from,” said Rodham. “And he can’t do it until the Haitian government does it. … And he keeps telling me, ‘Oh, it’s going to happen tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’ Well, tomorrow hasn’t come yet.”

In an interview with Schweizer, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos said, “you take it pretty far,” and, “As you know, the Clinton campaign says you haven’t produced a shred of evidence that there was any official action as secretary that—that supported the interests of donors.”

“We’ve done investigative work here at ABC News, found no proof of any kind of direct action,” said Stephanopoulos, asking, “Is there a smoking gun?”

The author of Clinton Cash never claims to have found a smoking gun, only a suspicious pattern of behavior. Attempts to claim that Schweizer somehow failed in his attempt to reveal concrete proof of Clinton malfeasance are designed to deliberately set him up for failure by holding him to a standard higher than the mainstream media often expect of themselves.

How many times have pundits such as Al Sharpton called for further investigation into Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown with limited evidence available? “MSNBC titled one segment of Sharpton’s PoliticsNation show, ‘Still no arrest in Michael Brown shooting,’” reported Accuracy in Media.

The media were quick to leap to conclusions about the murder of three Muslims in North Carolina. They have accepted the word of anonymous government officials rather than reading public documents. And they constantly dismiss the overwhelming evidence of the ongoing Benghazi cover-up.

Demands that Schweizer, or any other author, find a smoking gun and present it to the media prepackaged demonstrate a sheer laziness on the part of reporters, and perhaps a hidden desire that his claims about the Clintons might not actually prove truthful. If reporters remain skeptical about Schweizer’s claims, they should get to work vetting the Clintons and find out for themselves what’s real instead of simply attacking the messenger.

Last week on Chris Matthews’ show, “Hardball,” on MSNBC, the host expressed his trust in Mrs. Clinton, and challenged the only skeptic on the set, Ron Fournier of the National Journal, to explain the reason for suspicion in the absence of concrete proof of a quid pro quo between any donors to the Clinton Foundation and favorable treatment these donors may have received from the U.S. government as a result. Fournier said, “What there isn’t evidence of is [that] somebody got a favor done because of money. But what we do have is a very obvious and big overlap between people who are donating to the foundation and people who are dealing with the government.”

Even Matthews tacitly admitted that these relationships are troubling. Fournier asked Matthews “Why did President Obama say she did not take donations from foreign companies? That the foundation should not take donations from foreign countries? Why did they say it would be disclosed?,” while Hillary was Secretary of State. Matthews replied, “For the reasons you’re arguing.” Fournier then asked, “So why didn’t she, and why did they still take funding and not disclose it?” Matthews replied, “I think Clinton advocates and Clinton critics see the same reality. They have different views on it…[the Clintons go] right up to the edge sometimes.”

04/8/15

Journalistic Blindspots Exposed at Rolling Stone and Beyond

By: Bethany Stotts
Accuracy in Media

Biased journalists view the world locked into paradigms dominated by their own preconceptions. Often, they and their editors select stories designed to confirm those narratives at the expense of the facts. This is pure punditry masked as reporting.

Take Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus,” for example. The Rolling Stone magazine writer approached a former rape victim working at the University of Virginia “searching for a single, emblematic college rape case that would show ‘what it’s like to be on campus now … where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there’s this pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture,’” according to Erdely’s notes of her now-retracted story, which were obtained during an independent but solicited investigation by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

In other words, Erdely had decided that rape was occurring at these schools, that it was a pervasive cultural problem, and that it was her business to dramatize her preconceived narrative about this contentious subject. “As much casting director as journalist, she was looking for a single character with an emblematic story that would speak to—in her words—the ‘pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture’ on college campuses,” writes Jonathan Mahler of The New York Times.

“By the time Rolling Stone‘s editors assigned an article on campus sexual assault to Erdely in the spring of 2014, high-profile rape cases at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Vanderbilt and Florida State had been in the headlines for months,” states the Columbia School report.

Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana appears to have come to the story with the same preconceptions.

“‘My original idea,’ Dana said, was ‘to look at one of these cases and have the story be more about the process of what happens when an assault is reported and the sort of issues it brings up,’” states the report.

The authors of that report called Erdely’s tactics what they were: “confirmation bias.” Mahler reports that Rolling Stone suffered from a “lack of skepticism.”

But those two phenomena are just symptoms of the underlying problem in journalism: the pursuit of a liberal political agenda. “Like ‘A Rape on Campus,’ [the Duke lacrosse rape allegations] was a story that seemed to conform to a lot of the public’s worst ideas about the behavior of privileged young men at elite colleges,” writes Mahler.

Even MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews questioned back in December whether this story would end up just like coverage of the Duke lacrosse players.

Erdely and the editors at Rolling Stone consistently ignored suspicious behavior by their source, such as her fantastic recall of details of the event itself, yet apparent unwillingness to corroborate key facts through additional people. Even her mother wouldn’t talk to them. “She also said that her mother would be willing to talk to Erdely, but the reporter said that when she called and left messages several times, the mother did not respond,” states the report. Jackie’s contact was sporadic, and she would stop responding for periods of time.

“Yet Rolling Stone‘s senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems,” states the report. And yes, Erdely will continue with her work there. “Sabrina’s done great work for us over the years and we expect that to continue,” Dana told The Washington Post.

“Reading the Columbia account of the mistakes and misjudgments in my reporting was a brutal and humbling experience,” writes Erdely in her public apology. “I want to offer my deepest apologies: to Rolling Stone’s readers, to my Rolling Stone editors and colleagues, to the U.V.A. community, and to any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article.”

But, as Warner Todd Huston notes for Breitbart, members of Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity which Erdely and Rolling Stone maligned, are not mentioned in her apology. Maybe they are just part of the “U.V.A. community” and don’t deserve special mention. To be fair, however, they are mentioned in Dana’s apology in the editor’s note that introduces the report.

Of course, the fraternity has also announced it will sue Rolling Stone because of this story, stating that it suffered “130 days of living under a cloud of suspicion as a result of reckless reporting by Rolling Stone Magazine,” according to The Washington Post.

Rolling Stone is a biased publication pursuing a political agenda, no doubt about it. Yet The New York Times itself is no stranger to similar problematic reporting.

AIM reported at length how the Times’ Matthew S. Schmidt based an entire news report covering Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi emails on anonymous administration sources who failed to provide him or the Times with the text of the emails for verification. Such reporting opens the Times to the possibility of the same type of errors as were made in covering Jackie’s story—the inability to corroborate basic facts and perform a paper’s journalistic duties to the public. All papers, not just Rolling Stone, should consider “A Rape on Campus” a much needed caution against this type of biased news.

02/23/15

Common Sense Profiling or Racial Bias by U.S. Police Departments?

By: Bethany Stotts
Accuracy in Media

With mainstream media figures such as Al Sharpton acting as race-hustlers, adding fuel to the conflagrations that grow up around police violence, the media establishment has given America’s political leaders cover to claim that last year’s Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases are evidence of endemic police discrimination. But FBI Director James Comey was supposed to strike a new, more moderate tone with his speech at Georgetown University on “hard truths” about law enforcement and race.

“In addressing race relations, Mr. Comey will be trying to do something that politicians and law enforcement leaders—including his boss, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.—have failed to do without creating significant backlash,” wrote Michael S. Schmidt for The New York Times in advance of his speech. If the Director’s speech didn’t invite racial backlash, it’s probably because most people don’t understand the parlance he’s speaking, and the media aren’t about to enlighten them as to how much Comey’s speech echoes the ongoing Department of Justice agenda to reeducate the police.

“In the past five years, Holder has more than doubled the number of police department probes compared with the previous five years, opening more than 20 investigations and pressuring 15 consent orders to stop ‘biased policing’ and other alleged violations,” wrote Paul Sperry for the New York Post last December. One such city was Seattle, where Professor Rachel D. Godsil questioned whether the DOJ-condemned excessive use of police force was due to racial bias.

“To overcome implicit bias in behavior requires people to consciously override their automatic assumptions and reactions,” wrote Godsil. “This is particularly true in policing when the stakes are so high.” She cites studies in which police reacted more negatively to dark-colored faces than white ones when making decisions.

Similarly, the Post’s Max Ehrenfreund picked up on one thing about Comey’s recent speech: the Director said that no one was colorblind and quoted from “Q’s Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” In other words, no matter how colorblind someone attempts to become, they, too, will fail at confronting their own unconscious stereotyping.

The FBI Director’s public admission that creating a completely unbiased person is an impossible goal was apparently “huge” to Ehrenfreund. And the Post reporter referred his readers to an online program which tests racial bias based on how participants sort white and black faces so that they, too, can identify their implicit racism.

“[Lorie] Fridell contrasted implicit bias with what most people think of as racism against minorities,” continues Ehrenfreud. “It doesn’t require any hostility toward those groups,” Fridell, a criminologist at the University of South Florida, said. “It can happen outside of conscious awareness, even in people who are well-intentioned and who reject biases and discrimination.” In other words, such allegations can hardly be quantified—and are therefore difficult to challenge.

“She said that her group, Fair and Impartial Policing, has received several times as many inquiries since Brown’s death as before,” Ehrenfreund continued.

Fridell has ongoing research-related contracts with the Department of Justice, though her opinions about the police are controversial.

“She [Fridell] believes legal definitions of unlawful discrimination are ‘outdated’ and should be broadened to include even unquantifiable prejudice against people of color that occurs ‘outside our conscious awareness,’” wrote Sperry.

“Social psychologists report that bias has changed in our society,” writes Fridell. “What these scientists have determined—through voluminous research on this topic—is that bias today is less likely to manifest as explicit bias and more likely to manifest as ‘implicit’ (or ‘unconscious’) bias.” The solution, she suggests, is counter-stereotyping, or exposing her participants to information “that is the opposite of the cultural stereotypes about the group.”

“By retraining cops’ minds to perceive blacks as less of a threat, Fridell hopes they’ll be less likely to use lethal force against black suspects,” writes Sperry. “Problem is, she’s never produced any empirical results to prove her theories actually work to reduce discriminatory policing. She admits it’s impossible to look at the actions of an individual cop and know for certain they were influenced by prejudice.”

As the goalposts for what constitutes racism or bias shifts in society, we are drifting dangerously toward subconscious vetting and reeducation efforts. Those efforts don’t match common sense or basic assumptions about human psychology. Should America be left with a “modernized” and “de-biased” police force whose members hesitate to make decisions based on prior life experience?

Such psychological experimentation could add a deadly edge to life-or-death confrontations, and could change the instincts of a police officer at a key moment.

In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last year, Darren Wilson, the policeman who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, said, “All I wanted to do was live. That was it.”

“And you’re absolutely convinced, when you look through your heart and your mind, that if Michael Brown were white, this would have gone down in exactly the same way?” responded Stephanopoulos, intent on vetting for subconscious bias—or, at least, securing a good headline.

The mainstream media champion assertions of widespread racism, or at least unconscious bias, because they believe such factors caused the deaths of Brown and Garner, despite evidence to the contrary. Wilson was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, and eventually of any federal civil rights violations as well.

On the surface, the FBI Director’s speech seemed to call for moderation in this debate made hotter by the media spotlight. “Debating that nature of policing is very important, but I worry that it has become an excuse, at times, to avoid doing something harder,” said Director Comey, going on to say that police enlist because they want to help people and that there isn’t a racist epidemic in that profession.

Rather, he argues, police confront “cynicism.” It isn’t racism that causes the disproportionate number of blacks to end up in jail, but because “young people in ‘those neighborhoods’ too often inherit a legacy of crime and prison,” he said.

However, “Those of us in law enforcement must redouble our efforts to resist bias and prejudice,” said Comey. Something “happens to people in law enforcement,” he said.

“The two young black men on one side of the street look like so many others the officer has locked up,” he said. “Two white men on the other side of the street—even in the same clothes—do not. …We need to come to grips with the fact that this behavior complicates the relationship between police and the communities they serve.” But he still doesn’t think the police are racists.

No, apparently they just are unconsciously biased, jaded, or “cynics” using mental shortcuts.