This week we got two useful pieces of information on the politics front.

First, George Soros is handing over his fortune to his younger son Alex. Alex will use control of the fortune to "broaden his father’s famously woke interests to include issues like voting and abortion rights as well as 'gender equality.'”

In a way, this is comforting. Son Alex seems to be an out-of-the-box wokie believer, that prays at all the usual woke shrines. His father, George, was a more complex character.

Second, the Department of Justice issued a report on the Minneapolis police department and found that it is racist, uses "excessive force, including unjustified deadly force, unlawfully discriminates against blacks and Native Americans," and so on. Attorney General Merrick Garland said it was all "deeply disturbing."

To you and I, all this is laughable. We see the results of Soros prosecutors putting violent criminals back on the streets; we see soaring crime rates in the black community and we sneer at the Justice Department's accusation of systemic racism in the Minneapolis police force.

But I go back to Sun Tzu and his famous quote:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Therefore I say: never mind that Alex Soros is a wokey twerp, or that the Biden Administration's World War on systemic racism is a lie.

The fact is that our liberal friends really believe! They believe that we are all going to die of climate change; That systemic racism is a monstrous injustice on Black people.

Let us understand them. Let us understand ourselves. And then go out into the public square ready for a hundred battles.

Our liberal friends really believe that their analysis of the human world as the oppressors and the oppressed is a true and faithful understanding of reality. And they regard the failure of Blacks to thrive since the civil-rights era as proof of systemic racism and the power of white supremacists. They must believe this because otherwise they would have to understand that their programs and policies have Made Things Worse. What human ever does that?

At Powerline Scott Johnson goes into the whys and wherefores of how the Minneapolis police force is just dealing with the fact that

Every study ever conducted (including victim surveys) has shown that blacks are arrested in the same proportion as they offend.

But,

The [DoJ] report finds that blacks are treated differently than similarly situated whites, controlling for the reason, for the stop/use of force, and for the “similar behavior” of the offender.

We conservatives look at the studies and confirm that police use of force against Blacks is about right, considering that Blacks commit a lot more crimes. Liberals look at the studies and see disproportionate use of police force. Sophisticated people say that we all tend to interpret reality as "confirming our priors."

I tell you what would change things: if one fine day Blacks stopped voting Democrat, like the White working class did in 1980 when the "Reagan Democrats" voted for the "amiable dunce" Ronald Reagan.

Maybe one of the reasons that the White working class has switched to the GOP is encapsulated in this quote from longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer in "The Negro Revolution" in The Temper of Our Time published in 1966.

The simple fact is that the people I have lived and worked with all my life… have not the least feeling of guilt toward the Negro. The majority of us started to work for a living in our teens, and we have been poor all our lives… My kind of people does not feel that the world owes us anything, or that we owe anybody -- white, black, or yellow -- a damn thing.

But politics. There is no politics without an enemy, and in the politics of Allyship, we Allies fight with the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressor, because Change.

But politics is also about friends. Thus, the immortal quote of Óscar Benavides, president of Peru from 1933-39:

For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

Especially former President Trump.

For our liberal friends the friend /enemy distinction is extended into the moral, of good vs. evil, where fighting systemic racism is what All Good People Do, because Justice. So our liberal friends have a perfect moral-political system that explains everything, until the day after it collapses in ruins.

So we know liberals. Whatabout us? Sun Tzu says we should know ourselves.

We are like the Hobbits that just want to live peacefully and wive and thrive in Hobbiton. But, unfortunately, we are called, from time to time, to battle with the Saurons of the world, and wrest from them the Ring of Power before they destroy the world.

And that is what we are called to do with our liberal friends.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Pixabay