Who Speaks for the Riots' Victims?

Article by Ryan Preston in "PJMedia":

How many homes have been destroyed in the riots of the past weeks? How many businesses?

How many Americans have died in the riots that began out of justified and peaceful protests over the killing of George Floyd?

My colleague Tyler O’Neill highlighted two of them in this piece. Their names are Princess Pope, of Dallas, and K. B. Balla, of Minneapolis. Looters burned Balla’s sports bar, which he built using his life’s savings, to the ground. And then they ran off, presumably to burn someone else’s life down.

“The night of the destruction.. whew,” Pope told a local TV station. “When I came in, it just was just so terrible. It was so terrible. I stand with the protesters, but I do not stand with the looters.”
 ​​
Pope makes a distinction too many politicians and the national media have failed to make. Peaceful protest is thoroughly American and is protected in the First Amendment. Rioting and looting are criminal activity, often done opportunistically while others peacefully protest for justice and police and engaged in protecting them. 

K. B. Balla worked his whole adult life to get to the point where he could open his bar, but rioters destroyed his dream in minutes. Both of these victims of the looters and rioters are black. Princess Pope spent years building her Guns and Roses Boutique, only to see it looted and destroyed in minutes. 




  Riots destroyed Princess Pope’s Dallas boutique, but the community is coming together to save it.

 
 Riots destroyed KB Balla’s bar. He built it with his life’s savings.

There are many victims beyond these two. They have names and faces, they have families. They’re in every major city in the country. They did nothing to warrant the violence and injustice done to them by rioters and looters.

Google “number killed 2020 riots George Floyd.” Other than a lone report from a local Fox affiliate, there isn’t much. That report has not been updated in several days. But it does list more than 20 Americans who have died because of the riots.

These are their names: David Dorn. David McAttee. Chris Beaty. Dorian Murell. Italia Kelly. Marquis Tousant. Patrick Underwood. Calvin Horton Jr. James Scurlock. Javar Harrell. Barry Perkins III. Jorge Gomez. Jose Gutierrez. Victor Cazares Jr. Marvin Francois. And there are two additional victims who as of the time or writing have not been identified. The youngest was athlete Dorian Murrell, 18; the oldest was retired police captain David Dorn, 77. Dorn was guarding his store when rioters broke in, killed him, and looted it. All of these victims were minorities, and most were black.

Patrick Underwood was a career law enforcement officer. He died literally guarding the rule of law. 

“Pat was guarding the federal courthouse, a symbol of equal justice and the rule of law. During the riots in Oakland on the night of his death, it appears his death was part of a targeted attack on federal law enforcement,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy said at Underwood’s funeral.

“We pray that justice comes swiftly and completely for Pat, for George Floyd, and all victims of violence.”

But the media, along with most of the nation, is silent about these. If silence is truly violence, what does the media’s silence say to these victims and their families? The New York Times used its Memorial Day issue to print the names of 1,000 Americans killed by a mindless virus. It is ignoring the victims of the George Floyd riots. 

There are many other victims. Right now a six-block section of Seattle is under the control of extremists calling the area the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. There are 500 homes within the area the city and state have ceded to the extremists. There are businesses and jobs in that area. They’re all victims who have been left without a voice. CHAZ is under the control of an armed insurrectionist strongman who is extorting money from residents and businesses trying to continue their operations to keep their employees paid.

Who can they count on? Democratic governors and mayors have ceded their homes to extremists. Democratic candidates like Kim Olson in Texas say that “If people loot, so what. Burn it to the ground if that’s what it takes to fix our country.”

Those are Americans’ homes and their dreams and their lives. They deserve better than callous dismissal from the likes of Olson and the national media.

Thankfully both Balla and Pope will have their businesses restored. Their communities have come together, and Pope has a GoFundme and is working with local Vista Bank to get back to business. The Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce is also working with local First United Bank to help Pope and other Dallas victims of the riots including Coffney M Salon and BurgerIM. Those links go to their respective GoFundMe pages.

“We recognize how hard it is to build a small business and we are honored to play a small part in helping her come back from this,” Vista Bank President John D. Steinmetz said. 

“First United Bank has been instrumental in helping the Black-owned businesses the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce sent during COVID-19 and now is no different. We appreciate their support to businesses in our communities across North Texas,” DBCC President Harrison Blair says.

Balla, a former firefighter, has raised over a million dollars to rebuild his bar, another case of Americans coming together to restore what was all too easy to destroy. 

Neither Pope nor Balla sound like victims. They both sound like overcomers. They will thrive and hopefully pull many up with them. 

Patrick Underwood’s sister, Angela Underwood Jacobs, directly addressed the riots during her brother’s funeral.

“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, always avoid violence,” she said. “If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.”

The national media could do good by focusing on these stories and relentlessly drawing distinctions between the peaceful protesters and the violent rioters. The former seek justice for a fellow American. The latter are nihilists who want to destroy the country and they do not care what and who they have to destroy along the way. 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/bryan-preston/2020/06/12/who-speaks-for-the-riots-victims-n520149

Next Big Crisis: Racist Evictions of Black People

 
 Article by Rick Moran in "PJMedia":

The numbers are staggering — and frightening. On July 24, the moratorium on rental evictions will expire. At that point, 26 million apartment dwellers will be at risk of losing a place to live. That number is an estimate of renters who will be unable to come up with a rent payment by September.

At least 44 percent of blacks who rent say they are unsure if they can make the next payment. Needless to say, it’s a combustible situation.

“Think about it: People are still unemployed. If they’re being evicted, they’re going to be out in the streets anyway,” said Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance. “If what you want is to get people back to work and not have people out in the streets protesting, then maybe you don’t want to kick them out of their houses.”

Sounds like a threat. It is. The problem is that most landlords are not rich. They are middle-class or upper-middle-class. But they won’t be for long if they can’t fill their rental units with paying customers.

Landlords get a bad rap, of course, and some of them deserve it. But the fact is, during the lockdown, landlords carried hundreds of thousands of renters across the country. Many of them forgave some of the rent.

But it won’t be enough. Building owners and managers will have to start evicting people so they can open a unit up to someone who can pay. There is no animus or racism involved in evictions. It’s dollars and cents. Unfortunately, that simple equation escapes the simple-minded.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided it was best to throw a little gasoline on the fire.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told housing advocates on a call last week that the furor over Floyd’s death had brought new urgency to discussions of the racial disparities endemic in American life.

“One knee to the neck just explode[d] a tinderbox of other injustices that we must address, and one of them is housing,” Pelosi said. “Housing security is a matter of justice, as structural racism puts communities of color unfairly at risk of being rent-burdened or homeless.”

So making people pay rent is a “knee on the neck”? Oh, Nancy. Such colorful metaphors.

There is logic to trying to keep tens of millions of people from being thrown into the street after being evicted. But do you approach the problem from the landlord’s point of view or the tenant’s? Someone, somewhere, somehow is going to have to pay the rent. And it smells like another taxpayer bailout is on the way.

Housing advocates warn that landlords around the country are already preparing eviction proceedings to file the moment they’re allowed to proceed, even as more than 20 million Americans — including more than 1 in 6 black workers — remain out of work.

“Unless Congress intervenes soon, the coming tsunami of evictions and homelessness will disproportionately harm black and brown people,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Of course, this isn’t about George Floyd or police reform. This is about a massive transfer of wealth from the productive to the non-productive. Will this make us more “equal”? Will “racial disparities” be narrowed if we use outcomes that reveal inequality as evidence of racism?

This is only the beginning. As long as this hysteria continues, the takers will keep taking and the rest of us will be forced to give.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/06/12/next-big-crisis-racist-evictions-of-black-people-n519892

Trump Administration Reverses Obama-Era Regulation That Redefined ‘Sex’

Article by Alexandra DeSanctis in "National Review":

 

The new rule defines “sex” to mean biological sex for the purposes of Obamacare’s nondiscrimination policy.

 

  The Department of Health and Human Services has just announced a rule undoing an Obama-administration policy that had redefined “sex” to include “gender identity” and “termination of pregnancy” for purposes of nondiscrimination under the Affordable Care Act.

Section 1557 of Obamacare prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in health-related programs or activities. Near the end of President Obama’s second term, his HHS Department released a regulation redefining “sex” for the purposes of Section 1557 to include “gender identity” and “termination of pregnancy.”

As a result of the rule that HHS released today, that regulation has been reversed and “sex” once again refers only to biological sex, as was intended in the statute.

In December 2016, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas enjoined Section 1557’s prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and termination of pregnancy. Last fall, the same federal judge vacated the rule, saying that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

As a result of these rulings, HHS no longer could enforce the Obama-era provision, and today’s new rule brings federal policy into compliance with court rulings.

“What this regulatory reform does is update the books to reflect the reality that ‘gender identity’ and ‘termination of pregnancy’ have been deemed unlawful interpretations of civil-rights law,” Roger Severino, director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, told National Review. “This final rule is merely conforming to that legal reality.”

Severino noted, too, that the new HHS rule “carries forward the Obama administration’s decision not to include ‘sexual orientation’ as a protected category under the definition of sex discrimination.” Some progressive advocates had urged the Obama-era HHS to add “sexual orientation” to its regulation, but it failed to do so.

Opponents of the Obama administration’s regulation had both health-care and religious-freedom concerns about its implications. Because the policy applied to any health programs or activities funded or administered by HHS, as well as any plans offered in Obamacare’s health-insurance marketplaces, it affected a huge number of health-care providers in the U.S.

By redefining “sex,” the policy required medical professionals to treat biological males who identify as women, and biological women who identify as men, according to their gender identity rather than their biological sex — a practice that can lead to improper health-care decisions.

There was, for instance, a documented case in which a biological female who identified as a male visited a hospital complaining of abdominal pain. Because the doctors were required to treat this person according to gender identity, this biological woman, who was unknowingly pregnant, ended up delivering a stillborn child.

“We agree with the court’s rationale that the plain original meaning of ‘sex’ under our sex-discrimination laws referred to the biological realities of sex, and this is particularly important for programs administered or funded by HHS, because we so often deal with the scientific reality of sex in our health and research programs,” Severino explained.

As the federal judge determined, the Obama policy also had negative implications for religious-liberty and conscience rights, particularly for health-care workers.

“There were religious-freedom concerns at play, as well as to the ability of doctors to be able to act according to their best medical judgment, as well as their conscience and religious beliefs,” Severino said.

 

The decision to reverse the Obama-administration regulation will almost certainly be met with fury by progressive activists and their allies in the media. When it first became public that the Trump administration was considering undoing the Section 1557 rule, the New York Times falsely asserted that “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration.”

Nevertheless, the move fulfills a key promise that Trump made both on the campaign trail and throughout his time in office, voicing support for undoing Obama-era policies that redefined “sex” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” This move, though it comes near the end of his first term, is another step in showing his supporters, especially social conservatives, that he is willing to follow through.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/trump-administration-reverses-obama-era-regulation-that-redefined-sex/ 

Red flag warnings issues for 4 western states

OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 1:20 PM PT — Friday, June 12, 2020

The National Weather Service has alerted multiple states to conditions that lend themselves to increased fire risk.
As of Friday, Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah were under red flag warnings. High winds, low humidity and low vegetation moisture are expected within the next 24 hours.
 A fire weather watch has also been issued for Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Utah, which are expected to see the same conditions within the next 72 hours.

These alerts came after the Big Horn Fire consumed over 7,000 acres of Arizona’s Catalina Mountains. As of Friday, it was only 10% contained.
Residents in the area were urged to evacuate as local fire teams moved in to extinguish the flames.
 “We don’t want to see folks out of their homes any more than they want to be out of their homes,” stated Tuscon Fire official Travis Mayberry. “One of our big things is to try to get them back into their homes as quickly as possible.”

The other three states have experienced fires as well within the last few days.
The warnings and watches are expected to remain in effect through the weekend. According to experts, the dry conditions and high winds will likely continue for the next few days.
 A firefighting DC-10 Air Tanker drops fire retardant on the Elizabeth Fire, Wednesday, June 10, 2020, near Santa Paula, Calif.

 A firefighter lights a backfire to stop the Quail Fire from spreading near Winters, Calif., on Saturday, June 6, 2020

https://www.oann.com/red-flag-warnings-issues-for-4-western-states/

The ‘Institutional Racism’ Canard

by Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review

It bears no resemblance to reality — 

not in police forces, and not in America.

Protesters gather in the Manhattan borough of New York,, June 2, 2020. (Jeenah Moon/Reuters)

About twice as many white people as black people are killed by police. In fact, in about 75 percent of police shootings, the decedent is not black. Of course, that is not what you would grasp from consuming media.

Take the website statista.com, specifically its breathless focus on “Hate crime in the United States” — counterfactually insinuating that any shooting involving a black victim must be a “hate crime.” Here’s their big headline: “Black Americans 2.5X More Likely Than Whites to Be Killed By Police.”

It is fiction. It is sheer demagoguery, peddled as American cities are besieged by rioters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. The falsity of the claim is demonstrated even by statista.com itself. Just three days ago, the site posted another series of bar graphs, showing that, in fact, whites are nearly twice as likely as blacks to be shot to death by police. Here are the numbers:

Year                White  Black

2017                457      223

2018                399      209

2019                370      235

2020 (so far)   42       31

The rest of the bar graphs break out the numbers of Hispanic decedents (slightly lower than black, significantly lower than white), as well as those whose heritage is described as “other” and unknown.

Right underneath its chart, statista.com writes, “Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems only to be increasing.” In point of fact, it is steady — and if I wanted to play games like statista.com does, by, say, weighting the numbers to account for population growth while ignoring all other relevant factors, I could even pretend that the number was decreasing. The Washington Post acknowledges that fatal shootings by police have run steadily at around 1,000 per year since 2015 — 995 (2015), 963 (2016), 987 (2017), 998 (2018), and 1,004 (2019).

As Heather Mac Donald relates in an insightful Wall Street Journal op-ed, blacks make up only a quarter of the total number of people killed in police shootings annually, a ratio that has held steady since 2015. The reigning canard, however, is that this 25 percent figure proves racism since African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population.

Ridiculous as this syllogism is (as we’ll see, it conveniently elides more consequential factors), it still puts the lie to the slanderous narrative that police are hunting down black men. Even if we ignore the fact that an increasing number of police officers — obviously including those involved in encounters with black suspects — are themselves African Americans, the percentage of black deaths from police shootings would be much higher if blacks were being targeted.

Police do not go looking for people to shoot. In shooting situations, police are confronting crime suspects, the majority of whom are armed. But given that George Floyd was unarmed, let’s consider unarmed people killed in such encounters. Such unarmed decedents, too, were twice as likely to be white as black in 2019 — i.e., 19 unarmed whites, nine unarmed blacks. As Ms. Mac Donald observes, this ratio is not stable (and there is some looseness in what the media define as “unarmed”): In 2015, it was 38 unarmed blacks to 32 unarmed whites.

The Floyd killing has been injected into the bien pensant narrative of innocent, unarmed black men murdered by cops. But the number of unarmed black men killed by police is vanishingly small. As Mac Donald notes, there were 7,407 black homicide victims in the United States in 2018, the last year for which final numbers are available. Assuming a comparable number in 2019, the nine unarmed men killed in police shootings would represent just 0.1 percent of black homicides.

In stark contrast, she asserts, “a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”

The media, the bipartisan political class, the academy, and the commentariat concoct their “systemic,” “institutional,” “unconscious” racism fiction by statistical tunnel vision: We must conclude that African Americans — in particular, young black men — are being targeted by police because the percentage of killings of blacks significantly overrepresents the black population. It makes no sense, however, to look only at the percentage of blacks involved in police shootings, as if it were the only attribute that mattered — as if it were the only attribute by which blacks are overrepresented compared to their percentage of the overall population.

While African Americans are involved in two times more police shootings than their percentage of the population would seem to warrant, they commit 53 percent of murders and 60 percent of robberies — well over four times their percentage of the population. The political establishment would have you assume this statistical disparity is caused by institutional racism that myopically beams police attention onto black men. But we know the statistics accurately reflect reality because crimes get reported by victims — a large percentage of whom are black (also outstripping their share of the overall population).

If you just focus on interracial crime, though, Mac Donald (writing this time in the City Journal) has crunched those numbers. “Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations.” This, she qualifies, excludes interracial homicide. Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff fills in that blank: “Blacks commit around 70 percent of black-white interracial homicides.” For this, he draws on FBI crime statistics for 2016. They show that, of 776 black–white homicides, blacks committed 533 and whites 243. Neither of these numbers, by the way, nor their combined total, comes anywhere close to the number of blacks killed by blacks: a staggering 2,570 — the overwhelming majority male.

The most dangerous threat to the African-American community in America is not cops. It is liberals. The United States is not institutionally racist. The political system, the criminal-justice system, and academe overflow with political progressives. The notion that they would tolerate racism in their institutions would be laughable if sensible people were encouraged to think about it rather than mindlessly accept it. Nor could we conceivably be “unconsciously” racist. Let’s put aside that to discriminate is to choose, and that, where it exists, racial discrimination is a conscious state of mind. The reality is that our institutions of opinion are so obsessively racialist, no one in America has the luxury of being unconscious about racism.

The African-American community is not a monolith. Like other segments of the American population, it is diverse and dynamic. The policies pushed by progressives damage the parts of it that need the most help. And the false narrative of racist police, which pressures law enforcement to back off from the communities most victimized by crime, is now destroying entire cities.

Poor People and Minorities Are Victimized by...

written by Daniel J. Mitchell

Poor People and Minorities Are Victimized by “Predatory Cities”

One week ago, I wrote about how the welfare state creates high implicit marginal tax rates, thus making it difficult for low-income people to climb out of poverty and dependence.

But that’s not the only way that poor people are victimized by big government.

Another very serious problem is the way local and state governments impose a plethora of fees, fines and charges that can wreck the lives of the less fortunate.

In a column for the New York Times, Professor Bernadette Atahuene of the Chicago-Kent College of Law opines on the problem of greedy local governments.

I coined the term “predatory cities” to describe urban areas where public officials systematically take property from residents and transfer it to public coffers… Ferguson, Mo., is one well-known predatory city.

As a 2015 Department of Justice report showed, the police in Ferguson systematically targeted African-Americans and subjected them to excessive fines and fees. …local courts issued arrest warrants for unpaid fines and fees… Minor offenses, like parking infractions, resulted in jail time… The Ferguson Police Department and courts prioritized revenue raising over public safety, transforming Ferguson into a predatory city.

Professor Atahuene cites the pernicious policies of New Orleans and Washington, D.C. (and note that asset forfeiture is one of the problems).

New Orleans is another. …Orleans Parish Criminal District Court’s primary source of funding was the fines and fees it collected. This created a structural incentive for judges to aggressively and erroneously pursue payment from those with no ability to pay, turning New Orleans into a predatory city. Washington, D.C., is yet another predatory city. While civil asset forfeiture laws allow the police to seize property that they suspect was involved in a crime, in Washington, D.C., property owners had to post bonds of up to $2,500 in order to challenge the seizure. If the owner could not raise money in time, the D.C. Police Department sold the property, and the money went into its annual budget. In a two-year period, the Police Department made $4.8 million in profit by seizing money from over 8,500 people as well as seizing 339 vehicles.

Every decent human being should get upset about the grotesque way that politicians are mistreating their residents.

Especially since poor people are being disproportionately victimized.

By the way, it appears that Professor Atahuene is not a libertarian. She wants Congress to approve a big bailout, based on the theory that state and local politicians will be less likely to engage in what I’ve called “rapacious revenue-raising tactics” if they get big buckets of money from Uncle Sam.

Needless to say, I think that would be a mistake.

But I don’t think someone needs to agree with me on everything, or even most things, if we can periodically find common ground on proposals that would improve the lives of people (not just on the need to curtail greedy local governments, but also on issues such as over-criminalization and police unions).

P.S. I wonder if there would be fewer petty fines, fees, and charges if they were levied on the ability to pay, thus making higher-income people more sensitive to the problem?

RNC Moves The Fun Part of The Convention to Jacksonville, Florida

The official business part of the RNC convention will still take place in Charlotte, North Carolina, presumably still August 24-27, with a limit of only six delegates per state permitted.  The RNC already said the 2020 RNC platform will remain unchanged from the 2016 version.  However, the fun events typically associated with conventions, such as Mr. Trump’s acceptance of the nomination, will now be held in Jacksonville, Florida.

According to the New York Times the acceptance speech and event will take place August 27th at the VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena, which holds 15,000 people.  However, a note of caution… there is no official announcement of the Jacksonville date(s) from the RNC.

[Link To RNC Announcement]

The Great Inversion: Why the Left Is Pushing ‘Safety’ as the New Foundation of Civil Liberties

Article by Clint Fargeau in "RedState":

With the advent of the Wuhan virus outbreak, safety became a hot topic in American culture. The kerfuffle is far from new, but the public became acutely aware as issues of safety impinged on their daily lives.

Democrat mayors and governors, backstopped by compliant health experts, ordered their citizens to submit to house arrest, involuntary business closures, prohibitions on gatherings of any kind–including church meetings–and useless homemade masks when venturing out for groceries or a sanity walk.

The fuss struck many conservatives and traditionalists as hysterical and tangential, but only because they lacked context to grasp the stakes. Academics have noticed the increasing safety focus of Americans for a while and that it portended something momentous. In 2018, social psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote a book entitled Coddling of the American Mind, in which they discussed the emerging safety culture in America, particularly among the young. They dubbed the movement ‘safetyism’.

Believe it or not, the future of the United States hinges on the triumph or failure of safetyism. The reasons will become evident in a moment. First a look at what’s been happening.

SAFETY, SAFETY EVERYWHERE

Safetyism has cropped up in almost every American political battleground of late. According to the latest edition of the progressive catechism, sexual and racial minorities have the fundamental right to safety from speech that is in their experience hurtful, demeaning, or uncomfortable in any way. For years, universities have set up “safe spaces” as refuges for vulnerable ears; and contentious materials and viewpoints have been removed from university curricula for student safety. The accusation “this makes me feel unsafe” is a commonplace salvo now to banish ideological deviants and scuttle dialogue.

Appeals to safetyism extend well beyond arguments over speech and school curricula. Americans are told by progressives that they have the fundamental right to safety from gun violence–meaning the state should further limit and control lawful firearms owners, or even remove firearms from private hands altogether. Black Lives Matter and its sister initiative ‘Defund the Police’ frequently couch their arguments in the unsupported assertion that the police make most black Americans feel unsafe. Statues of Confederate generals and founding fathers also must be removed for the safety of black Americans feel. ICE makes illegal immigrants feel unsafe, so ICE must be abolished.

As the outbreak picked up steam, ‘safety’ was the rationale proffered for a laundry list of civil rights abrogations and the imposition of a low-grade police state. Anyone who complained or broke quarantine was browbeaten and publicly shamed for endangering the safety of others, as though contrarians were walking around in public tossing virus grenades over their shoulders. When skeptics noted the dearth of scientific proof for masks, they were told that it didn’t matter whether masks really helped to retard the spread: wearing them made people feel safe, a symbolic gesture of caring and mutual security.

Each new day brings fresh demands to make the United States safer for what are termed “vulnerable groups,” a grab bag that defies objective taxonomy but that makes a point of excluding the “privileged”–those who presumably live in perpetual safety by virtue of their whiteness, straightness, maleness, wealth, and the like.

WHY SAFETY MATTERS

To understand why safety and safetyism are so important, recall that our Constitution was founded upon the classical liberal philosophy of the Enlightenment. In this system of thought, A free citizen was assumed to possess the natural right (or “privilege”) to do whatever he liked, so long as his actions–his liberties–did not run afoul of The Test. The Test was:

“Does the exercise of a liberty harm others?”

If the answer to The Test was “yes,” the citizen’s liberty stopped. No citizen’s freedom extended to harm of others: e.g. assault, murder, theft, destruction of property, betrayal of his country, and in some periods adultery and blasphemy. For most of American history, ‘harm of others’ was narrowly defined by a pre-Enlightenment moral consensus rooted in traditional religion and traditional culture. In other words, to know what ‘harm of others’ meant, look at the Ten Commandments or English Common Law.

Safetyism seeks to revise The Test, to radically and permanently change our culture’s understanding of what ‘harm of others’ means. The Revised Test promoted by modern progressive safetyists is something like:

“Does the exercise of a liberty make any vulnerable groups feel harmed?”

This is a small change, but a very important one. It’s also very sneaky and very clever. The change strikes not at the Constitution itself but at the pre-Revolutionary system of ideas upon which the Constitution rests. To use an analogy, safetyism doesn’t attack the fortress walls; it tunnels under the walls and captures the fortress intact by swapping out the fortress commander with a guy who looks enough like him that most people inside the walls don’t notice.

Under the doctrine of safetyism, any liberty must pass a ‘harm test’ administered by an assortment of vulnerable groups. They evaluate the liberty not just objectively–“does this exercise of liberty murder anyone?”–but subjectively–“does this exercise of liberty make anyone FEEL murdered?” Should any vulnerable group cry emotional or psychological harm, then a particular liberty is invalid–in fact not a “liberty” at all but an “oppression” that must be banned.

Does all this sound familiar? Do you hear echoes of what’s unfolding in the United States today?

The shift from objective harm to subjective harm opens the door for the state to curtail traditional rights and liberties thought to be inviolable: the right to free speech (if a vulnerable group feels threatened by the speech); the right to free worship (if a vulnerable group feels harmed by a faith’s rules on, say, gay marriage); the right to self-protection (if firearms make vulnerable groups feel threatened); the right to peaceable assembly (if a vulnerable group feels its health or dignity threatened by the assembly) and on and on.

It should now be evident why safety is a political football today and the most important question facing the United States. Adoption of the philosophy of safetyism by a majority of Americans will fundamentally change the meaning of the Constitution without altering a single word of the document. Progressive lawmakers and the judiciary will gain a license to interpret or disregard the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in radically new ways.

THE COMING SHOWDOWN

Should safetyism triumph and become the ethos of American society–which seems increasingly likely with each passing day–conservatives will find themselves in an almighty bind. Their two dismal choices:

1. They can accept safetyism’s back-door change to the philosophical basis of the republic and submit to ferocious censorship, total disarmament, state control of faith, and a plethora of other safety interventions (as Europeans largely have already done).
2. Or they can declare the Enlightenment underpinnings of the Constitution hopelessly corrupted, liberal democracy in America dead, and seek to reconstitute government on a new philosophical basis.

Said another way, conservatives will have to choose between embracing the unknown or legitimizing with their assent an illiberal progressive authoritarianism wearing a liberal democracy hat. No third alternative presents itself, at least at this time. No matter how furiously some might fill the the pages of National Review and hope, the United States hasn’t a prayer of rewinding the tape to a classical definition of objective harm and narrow traditional liberties. That battle has been fought and lost. Opinion polls show more and more Americans–and particularly the young–support safetyism’s efforts to enact legislation criminalizing subjective harm, such as “hate speech” laws, “assault weapons” bans, institutionalized privileges for vulnerable groups, and the like.

It’s probably not too far off the mark to say the United States is one progressive president away from a point of catastrophic failure for the traditional view of liberties and rights–from conservatism being run out of town, philosophically speaking. So like the Marines used to say: “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.” Safetyism will forbid you from smoking in your own home soon.

https://www.redstate.com/diary/clint-fargeau/2020/06/12/the-great-inversion/

The COVID Skeptics Were Right

George Neumayr reporting for American Spectator

The COVID Skeptics Were Right

When Alex Berenson, the former New York Times reporter, said that people will look back on the coronavirus lockdown as a “colossal mistake,” many scoffed. But with each passing day, as the failures of government at every level become clearer, Berenson and other COVID skeptics look increasingly perceptive. The governmental cure was worse than the disease.

“What I think is that people took a very, very aggressive action a month ago without necessarily thinking through what the economic or societal consequences were going to be,” Berenson said to the press in April. “Now more and more evidence is coming out that we responded too harshly, that maybe we should have taken smaller steps and seen what happened before we went to the place we went. And it seems to me very, very hard, both for politicians and for the public health establishment, to acknowledge this and to walk us back in a reasonable way.”

The predictions about the virus were wildly wrong, said Berenson: “I’ve been watching this like a hawk and I’ve been watching the models, both the Imperial College and now more recently, the major U.S. model, which is the University of Washington model, fail on a daily basis, fail to predict what is happening now, what is going to happen in months or years or even in a week…. I think most scientists agree it is more dangerous than the flu, but it doesn’t seem to be 10 or 20 or 30 times as dangerous as the flu. It’s on the spectrum of the flu. That’s what the data is now suggesting.”

The sheer arbitrariness of the lockdown, during which pols, drunk on their new powers, deemed services essential or nonessential depending on their ideological preferences, has been punctuated by the riots and protests, where all the COVID rules suddenly disappeared. We see nanny-state liberals, formerly so censorious of clustered gatherings, marching arm and arm with Black Lives Matter.

The shutdown revolved around an irrational assessment of risk, one which failed to weigh the consequences of crushing an economy, distorting social life, and suppressing freedom. Other means, short of a total shutdown, could have protected the old and sick, but officious pols, determined to retain as much power as possible, dismissed those plans out of hand. These same pols, who postured about the danger of “losing even one life,” support abortion and euthanasia and kept the abortion clinics open during the shutdown while banning religious services.

The speed with which these pols turned into little dictators was astonishing, and puts one in mind of C. S. Lewis’s observation:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

It will take some time to assess the appalling damage the COVID tyrants have wrought. “In medical terms, the shutdown was a mass casualty incident,” wrote a group of 600 doctors to President Trump. “Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%. We are alarmed at what appears to be the lack of consideration for the future health of our patients. The downstream health effects of deteriorating a level are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error.” They continued, “The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure. In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse.”

A group of academics — Scott W. Atlas, John R. Birge, Ralph L Keeney, and Alexander Lipton — have argued that the shutdown has ruined far more lives than the virus:

The policies have created the greatest global economic disruption in history, with trillions of dollars of lost economic output. These financial losses have been falsely portrayed as purely economic. To the contrary, using numerous National Institutes of Health Public Access publications, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and various actuarial tables, we calculate that these policies will cause devastating non-economic consequences that will total millions of accumulated years of life lost in the United States, far beyond what the virus itself has caused.

They explain:

The lost economic output in the U.S. alone is estimated to be 5 percent of GDP, or $1.1 trillion for every month of the economic shutdown. This lost income results in lost lives as the stresses of unemployment and providing basic needs increase the incidence of suicide, alcohol or drug abuse, and stress-induced illnesses. These effects are particularly severe on the lower-income populace, as they are more likely to lose their jobs, and mortality rates are much higher for lower-income individuals.

Statistically, every $10 million to $24 million lost in U.S. incomes results in one additional death. One portion of this effect is through unemployment, which leads to an average increase in mortality of at least 60 percent. That translates into 7,200 lives lost per month among the 36 million newly unemployed Americans, over 40 percent of whom are not expected to regain their jobs. In addition, many small business owners are near financial collapse, creating lost wealth that results in mortality increases of 50 percent. With an average estimate of one additional lost life per $17 million income loss, that would translate to 65,000 lives lost in the U.S. for each month because of the economic shutdown.

In addition to lives lost because of lost income, lives also are lost due to delayed or foregone health care imposed by the shutdown and the fear it creates among patients. From personal communications with neurosurgery colleagues, about half of their patients have not appeared for treatment of disease which, left untreated, risks brain hemorrhage, paralysis or death.

Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski has argued that the shutdown only succeeded in prolonging the virus, and that the stated reason for the lockdown proved illusory:

When the whole thing started, there was one reason given for the lockdown and that was to prevent hospitals from becoming overloaded. There is no indication that hospitals could ever have become overloaded, irrespective of what we did. So we could open up again, and forget the whole thing.

I hope the intervention did not have too much of an impact because it most likely made the situation worse. The intervention was to ‘flatten the curve’. That means that there would be the same number of cases but spread out over a longer period of time, because otherwise the hospitals would not have enough capacity.

Now, as we know, children and young adults do not end up in hospitals. It is only those who are both elderly and have comorbidities that do. Therefore you have to protect the elderly and the nursing homes. The ideal approach would be to simply shut the door of the nursing homes and keep the personnel and the elderly locked in for a certain amount of time, and pay the staff overtime to stay there for 24 hours per day.

But no one in the political class, he observes, was willing to defy the groupthink that ruled out a more targeted and balanced approach to the virus:

Governments did not have an open discussion, including economists, biologists and epidemiologists, to hear different voices. In Britain, it was the voice of one person — Neil Ferguson — who has a history of coming up with projections that are a bit odd. The government did not convene a meeting with people who have different ideas, different projections, to discuss his projection. If it had done that, it could have seen where the fundamental flaw was in the so-called models used by Neil Ferguson. His paper was published eventually, in medRxiv. The assumption was that one per cent of all people who became infected would die. There is no justification anywhere for that.

It has taken the riots to expose the full hypocrisy of the pols who so eagerly robbed Americans of their freedom. These opportunistic pols were willing to suspend all their strictures once a politically correct cause arose sacred to them, thereby showing that all their “risk models” had no objectivity to them whatsoever. These are the same pols who suppressed religious freedom, dismissed the maintenance of the Bill of Rights as above their “pay grade,” and condemned utterly peaceful lockdown protests as perilous to the common good.

Berenson was right. Entrusting a decision as momentous as a national shutdown to power-mad pols whose ignorance is only exceeded by their ambition was a “colossal mistake.”

President Trump holds 6-point lead over Biden in Fla.

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It’s Official – President Trump Kicks Off Campaign Restart in Tulsa Oklahoma June 19th

@TheLastRefuge2

If we think they’ve thrown the kitchen sink at us, just wait.  The Trump campaign has announced the restart of Keep America Great rallies to begin in Tulsa Oklahoma on June 19th. [Tickets Here]  And with that announcement we can immediately predict the apparatus of the resistance forces will once again start pushing the COVID-19 narrative.

My response, SCREW ‘EM.

I refuse to live on my knees.

“Rally to the standard” is a call to arms when a situation is critical, there is no time for lengthy debate, and optimal solutions are needed.  The COVID-19 virus was weaponized for political purposes against us and our economy. Nothing they attempt now to try and retake that position should be taken seriously.

Decades of living with one foot in a flip-flop and the other in a wingtip lends itself to a rather odd set of life-skills and friendships; and we’re at the point where we each of us needs to ignore the nonsense and go about living our best life.  We’re worth it.

President Trump is subjecting himself to ridiculous attacks by an insufferable corporate media press corps.  The result of all these attacks has been to expose a resistance ideology that rots our nation; and now we can rally again behind him.

CTH is often criticized for being too accurate outlining the schemes, and not putting enough emphasis on what actions can be done -by ordinary Americans- to counteract the duplicity and corruption amid DC politicians. Well, last year we outlined exactly what YOU can do when we wrote “STAND“.

It is the responsibility of each of us to stand, defiantly if needed, and support a President who is waging a battle against multiple adversaries on our behalf. “Stand” means be visible. “Stand” means let your voice be heard. “Stand” means telling your republican representatives what your expectations are. They represent us; WE are the people.

Why is this important?

Well, we cannot, we must not, count on Republican politicians to do the right thing.  If there is one lesson we have all learned through the years it is that our representatives will only do the right thing if We The People demand it… loudly.

As we bear witness, anyone trying to convince us this entire assembly of our union is headed in the right direction, well, they might want to revisit their proximity to the 2020 election ballpark. Because they’re not just out of the city – they’re also out of the same state the election ballpark is located in….. Then again, the media know that.

David Mamet had a famous saying, essentially: …‘in order for democrats, liberals, progressives et al to continue their illogical belief systems they have to pretend not to know a lot of things’… By pretending ‘not to know’ there is no guilt, no actual connection to conscience. Denial of truth allows easier trespass.

This hate-filled Democrat ideology relies on our willingness to accept their lies, falsehoods, and scripted presentations; and then demand we grant benefit amid their seeds of doubt.

The intelligence apparatus of our nation was weaponized against our candidate by those who controlled the levers of government. Now, with sanctimonious declarations they dismiss accountability.

Deliberate intent and prudence ensures we avoid failure. The course is thoughtful vigilance; it is a strategy devoid of emotion. The media can call us anything they want, it really doesn’t matter…. we’re far beyond the place where labels matter.

We’ve watched the ridiculing of cops, the riots, and the lack of support for laws, or their enforcement. We’ve been absorbing all that. We’ve been exposed to violence upon us by paid operatives of the organized DNC machine. We know; the media trying to hide it doesn’t change our level of information.

Cold Anger is not hatred, it is far more purposeful.

Foolishness and betrayal of our nation have served to reveal dangers within our present condition. Misplaced corrective action, regardless of intent, is neither safe nor wise. We know exactly who Donald Trump is, and we also know what he is not.

He is exactly what we need at this moment.

He is a necessary, defiant and glorious fighter.

He is our weapon.

Cold Anger is not driven to act in spite of itself; it drives a reckoning.

The awakened American middle-class insurgency, led by Donald Trump, is an existential threat to the professional political class and every entity who lives in/around the professional political class. Their entire political apparatus is threatened by our insurgency. The political industry, all of corrupt governance, is threatened by our support through Donald Trump.

Decision time.

You know why the entire apparatus is united against President Trump. You know why the corrupt Wall Street financial apparatus is united against President Trump. You know why every institutional department, every lobbyist, every K-Street dweller, every career legislative member, staffer, and the various downstream economic benefactors, including the corporate media, all of it – all the above, are united against Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is an existential threat to the existence of a corrupt DC system we have exposed to his disinfecting sunlight. Donald Trump is the existential threat to every entity who benefits from that corrupt and vile system.

This man has faced opposition that would overwhelm any other President. Our chosen President is constantly attacked by those holding a corrupt, conniving and Godless leftist ideology. It is our job now to stand with him, firm on his behalf.

To respond we must engage as an insurgency. We must modify our disposition to think like an insurgent. Insurgencies have nothing to lose. If insurgents are not victorious the system, which controls the dynamic, wins. However, if insurgents do nothing, the same system, which controls the dynamic, also wins.

Do nothing and we lose. Go to the mattresses, and we might win. The choice is ours.

Throw aside the sense of discomfort and bear witness to the evil we oppose. Do not turn your eyes from the hatred focused in our direction. Stand firm amid the solace of our number and resolve to the task at hand.

Those who oppose our efforts are merely vile parasites quivering as they stare into the Cold Anger furnace of righteousness.

Who fuels that furnace?

…..US !