Attorney General Jeff Sessions is successfully implementing President Donald Trump’s populist, pro-American policies, admits Time magazine.
Sessions’ successes, however, sends Time‘s writer and editors off in a diversionary search for white racists under the metaphorical bed. The editors created some menacing photos of Sessions, but no racists were found — just Sessions’ successful advocacy on crime, migration and civil rights for the ordinary Americans who once comprised Time‘s readership.
Author Molly Ball writes:
Sessions seemed exasperated when I asked him to address the disproportionate impact of harsh policing and incarceration on black families and communities. He cited the work of Heather Mac Donald, the controversial conservative scholar who argues that racial bias in the criminal-justice system is a myth and that the real problem is a “war on cops.” Mac Donald popularized the concept of the “Ferguson effect,” an unproven theory that crime rises when police feel hamstrung by political oversight. Sessions embraces this notion. In cities like Baltimore and Chicago, he told me, politicians “spend all that time attacking the police department instead of the criminals.”
…
Sessions contends that the policies he champions help minority communities by cleaning up their neighborhoods. “If you do the map of your city and you’ve got five times the murders in a minority neighborhood, do you just go away?” he asked me, eyes narrowed. “Or do you prosecute the criminals who are committing the murders? That’s the fundamental answer. And the other thing is, you think the mothers who’ve got children, the older people who are afraid to walk to the grocery store–shouldn’t they be free just like they are in the elite part of town?”
Sessions leaned over the plastic airplane table. “Whose side are you on?” he asked. “I’m on the victims’ side, and overwhelmingly the victims are minorities. The prosecution of certain minorities for murder, the victim is overwhelmingly another African American or Hispanic. It occurs within their own communities.” (Law-enforcement statistics show white criminals also tend to target white victims.)
There are lots of other gems in Ball’s article, including this quote:
“He was extraordinarily consistent,” says Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and “sort of the opposite of a chamber of commerce Republican.”
Read it all here.