Speaking Truth To Liberal Power

TALKING-HEAD Juan Williams is a reliable liberal voice on Fox News. David Fraser is a Briton who worked for decades as a probation officer. What do these two have in common?

The liberal intelligentsia doesn’t want to hear about their books.

Juan Williams has written Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It, in which he takes up where Bill Cosby left off. He asks the question:

"Why are so many black Americans, people born inside the gates of American opportunity, still living as if they were locked out from all America has to offer?" His answers include the debacle of big-city politics under self-serving black politicians; reparations as "a divisive dead-end idea"; the parlous state of city schools "under the alliance between the civil rights leaders and the teachers' unions"; and the transformation of rap from "its willingness to confront establishment and stereotypes" to "America's late-night masturbatory fantasy."

But according to conservative radio talk-show host Michael Reagan the MSM is ignoring his book.

On my radio show the other night Juan told me how he has been silenced by the very liberals who have always clasped him to their bosoms.

When you write a book criticizing the liberal pieties, you get the silent treatment. Still, Williams’ book is at #156 today on the Amazon bestseller list.

Then there is British writer David Fraser. This probation officer’s book is called A Land Fit for Criminals: An Insider's View of Crime, Punishment and Justice in the UK. You would think that British publishers would be falling all over themselves to publish a book like that, considering that British crime is up over 2,000 percent in the last century. But no.

Sixty publishers rejected Fraser’s book. Then, according to Theodore Dalrymple, he got lucky.

The 61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her husband’s son by a previous marriage had not long before been murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant[.]

In his book, Fraser shows with facts and figures how the British government is utterly failing to control crime and criminals, and openly lying and covering up about it.

The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters.

You wonder. Maybe the welfare state is further along to its collapse that we think, just because the depth of corruption and laxity gets slowly worse and worse with no attempt to correct its follies and its crimes. Governments generally do go this way, of course, until they are turned upside down by genuine reform or by something more radical.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.