The Effort To Punish Rittenhouse’s Heroism Isn’t About Just Him — It’s About You, Me, And Anyone Else Who Resists

For the hard left, this is only the start of the battle, not its end. When the rules work out badly for the left, they don’t start playing by them. They try to change the rules.

Article and Video by

Christopher Bedford for The Federalist

Kyle Rittenhouse got acquitted last week. There’s no need to go into the details of that one; you already know them.

The news was fantastic; Rittenhouse deserved vindication. But it’s important to pause and think about the many, many people whose ending isn’t as happy as his.

The McCloskeys had to plead guilty for defending their own home from a braying mob.

Jake Gardner, a man very much like Rittenhouse, who protected his bar from a group of rioters and shot one, lost his business, was charged with murder, and finally committed suicide. A Democrat in the state legislature celebrated his death.

And then, of course, there are all the people like David Dorn in St. Louis or Chris Beaty in Indianapolis. They both tried protecting their communities during riots, and their efforts only ended with their own murder. That could easily have been Kyle’s fate.

Rittenhouse saw that rioters were about to destroy his community, so he went out armed and prepared to defend businesses and people. Was it “smart” for him to do that? No, but it was the courageous thing to do.

It’s easy to be a keyboard warrior, saying that Kyle should have cowered in his home like everybody else, waiting for the storm to pass by him. That’s the safe thing to do, but it’s not what a hero does.

Whatever else you can say about him — that he was dumb, or naïve, or “shouldn’t have been there” — here’s the truth: Kyle Rittenhouse was a hero. Millions of conservative men like to boast about what they’d do if things really hit the fan; they talk about how they’d be out there fighting the mob. Well, he actually did it — and God bless him.

That’s why there was so much of a frenzy to destroy him: Because if Kyle Rittenhouse, slayer of pedophiles and defender of his community, is allowed to go free, then others might see him as a model rather than a warning to cower.

Think about how much effort went into destroying this young man. Rep. Cori Bush, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and President Joe Biden denounced him as a white supremacist domestic terrorist, all without evidence.

CNN and MSNBC presented him like a white supremacist terrorist too, but Monday morning were a lot more circumspect about the man who ran over the Waukesha Christmas parade (despite his Facebook page bragging about hurting old white people).

GoFundMe took down fundraisers to support his defense, so backers had to raise money at GiveSendGo.com instead. Then, hackers stole data from GiveSendGo, and a “journalist” at The Guardian named Jason Wilson took that data and doxed the people named on it. A cop in Norfolk, Virginia lost his job for donating $25. A TV reporter named Jason Nguyen went and harassed at the man’s home a paramedic who donated $10.

You know this case isn’t a one-off. It’s why the McCloskeys were hit with felony charges for standing, armed, outside the front door of the home they painstakingly restored when a mob crashed into their gated community and milled menacingly outside.

Know this, too: For the hard left, this is only the start of the battle, not its end. When the rules work out badly for the left, they don’t start playing by them. They try to change the rules.

The morning of Nov. 19, before the final verdict was even delivered, University of Wisconsin law professor John Gross wrote that “the law on self-defense must change” in America to make sure people like Rittenhouse are no longer protected by it.

Gross’s proposed changes would, in short, create a legal obligation to let Antifa destroy your community and burn down your home, while you are legally powerless to stop them, or even protect yourself. He wants to, “deny the right to act in self-defense to people who … are in a place where they are not allowed to be.”

Got that? Rittenhouse broke curfew; that means Antifa has the right to execute him, with no distinction necessary between who is defending civilization and who is trying to burn it down.

Gross argues that states should make it illegal to claim self-defense if a person tries to steal a gun from you: If you carry a gun to protect yourself and a psycho tries to seize it, it’s your duty to wait until he takes it to defend yourself in any way.

He also suggests that, “We could also restore the requirement that before someone has the right to use deadly force, they have a duty to retreat, [and] we could make self-defense an affirmative defense that must be proven by the defense by clear and convincing evidence, not disproven beyond a reasonable doubt by the prosecution.”

Understand? Even in your home or your places of business, your duty is to flee from your attackers rather than defend yourself. And if you do defend yourself, then you are guilty until proven innocent.

The presumption of innocence has been with us since the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius, almost 1,900 years ago, but progressives want it dumped to make sure their enemies go to prison. Not gangsters, not Antifa killers, not fentanyl smugglers — people like Rittenhouse, whose crime is wanting to defend their community from a mob.

Last year’s murderous riots weren’t just some aberration — an aside to the hard left’s agenda for America — they were central. Tear down history, kill cops, threaten communities, expel feds, redefine justice, and let the rest of the country know they’d better take it.

Men like Chairman Mao desecrated the family home and grave of China’s most revered historical figure, Confucius, not because of anything Confucius had done to him or the Communist Party, but to let everyone in China know if they could do this to Confucius, they could do anything they want to you.

They can come after executives like Brendan Eich; policemen like Bill Kelly; actors like Gina Carano; gym teachers like Tanner Cross; students like Nick Sandmann; bakers like the Gibson family; parents like Scott Smith and Tara McNeally, professors like Dorian Abbot and Mike Adams.

Here in America, whether it’s a statue of George Washington, the bones of St. Junipero Serra, or a teenager standing up for his community, the message is the same: Cower, or fall.

The iconoclasm, the violence, the cancel culture and legal intimidation: These things work in concert, and they’re not about hurt feelings — they’re about control.

When Kyle Met Joey

The verdict on White House supremacist Joe Biden.

by Lloyd Billingsley for American Greatness

A Kenosha, Wisconsin jury on Friday found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges. Judge Bruce Schroeder tossed the weapons charge against the 18-year-old, who never should have been charged in the first place. The not-guilty verdict left Joe Biden “angry and concerned,” and observers have cause to wonder about Biden’s response to other landmark cases. 

In the case of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, tried earlier this year for the death of George Floyd, Biden told reporters he was praying for “the right verdict.” Chauvin was convicted of second and third-degree murder, and Biden praised the guilty verdict as a “a step forward.” Observers might also wonder about his anger and concern over deadly violence in 2020. 

The widespread riots, which leading Democrats insisted were “peaceful protests,” claimed at least 25 lives, including retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn. The African American was protecting a friend’s business when rioters shot and killed him, live-streaming what amounted to an execution. President Donald Trump honored the fallen officer but statements on Dorn’s murder from Joe Biden are hard to find. 

The major players in the 2020 mayhem were Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but Biden described Antifa as “an idea, not an organization” and said white supremacists pose a greater danger to the country. For Biden, Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist,” implying that his motive was not self-defense but racism. When it comes to true white supremacists, however, Biden readily goes on the record. 

“Although I and my colleagues behind me revere the Senate, Robert C. Byrd elevated the Senate,” said vice president Joe Biden in the July 2010 memorial service for Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), a former community organizer for the Ku Klux Klan. Byrd once wrote to Senator Theodore Bilbo, a segregationist Democrat from Mississippi, that he would rather die a thousand deaths than see the land “degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.” 

Senator Byrd opposed African American Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. Then-Senator Joe Biden joined the former Ku Kluxer in voting against Thomas. Nearly 20 years later, Senator Biden praised Byrd as a friend, mentor, and guide. The previous year, then-Vice President Biden clarified his views on mass murder. 

On November 5, 2009, U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan, a self-described “soldier of Allah,” gunned down 13 American soldiers, including Lt. Colonel Juanita L. Warman, Sergeant Amy Sue Krueger, and Private Francheska Velez, who was pregnant. The 13 murder victims—14 counting Velez’s unborn child—were more than twice the number killed in the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Hasan wounded more than 30 others, including Sergeant Alonzo Lunsford, shot seven times by Hasan. 

“Jill and I join the President and Michelle in expressing our sympathies to the families of the brave soldiers who fell today,” Biden said in a statement. “We are all praying for those who were wounded and hoping for their full and speedy recovery. Our thoughts and prayers are also with the entire Fort Hood community as they deal with this senseless tragedy.”

Hasan yelled “Allahu akbar” as he killed, but we heard nothing from Biden on Islamic supremacy or Islamic terrorism. The victims included African Americans and Hispanics, but the vice president failed to find any racist motive. The vice president, party to the best information, failed to name a single victim. Warman, Krueger, Velez and the others simply “fell” in what was only a “senseless tragedy.” If the murders left Biden angry or concerned about other jihadists in the U.S. military, he kept his feelings to himself. 

In 2013, Hasan was tried in military court, but Biden did not announce that he was praying for the “right verdict” in the case. Hasan was found guilty and sentenced to death but Biden left the survivors wondering if the verdict was a “step forward” in the interest of justice. If Biden ever reached out to the survivors and their families, nothing emerged in the media. 

Kyle Rittenhouse now understands that it’s “better to be judged by 12 than carried by six.” Without the rifle, Rittenhouse would have been shot or beaten to death at 17, so the verdict also validated the Constitution, which upholds the right to keep and bear arms. The verdict may have left Biden angry and concerned, but then a strong majority of Americans feel the same way about Joe Biden. 

According to a recent Quinnipiac University Poll, only 36 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s performance, down from 37 percent last month. On the economy, 34 percent approve and on foreign policy only 33 percent. Even so, on Saturday, when Biden turned 79, the Delaware Democrat told supporters he’s planning to run again in 2024. 

Back in March, Biden said “my plan is to run for reelection” and he “would fully expect” Kamala Harris to be on the ticket. Biden called Harris a “great partner” but only 28 percent of Americans approve of her performance. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens. 

Meanwhile, during Biden’s colonoscopy on Friday, Kamala Harris was the most powerful person in the world for 85 minutes. Friday night Harris tweeted, “Today’s verdict speaks for itself. I’ve spent a majority of my career working to make our criminal justice system more equitable. It’s clear, there’s still a lot more work to do.” 

Woke Numerology

 Woke Numerology

How crazy are liberals? Whenever you think you have taken the measure of their nuttiness, you see something like this, from the Women’s March:

We apologize deeply for the email that was sent today. $14.92 was our average donation amount this week. It was an oversight on our part to not make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving.

— Women's March (@womensmarch) November 23, 2021

What is most striking to me, apart from the sheer stupidity of this tweet, is the low opinion that liberals seem to have of other liberals. The Women’s March people evidently assume that their fellow liberals are so fragile that they will be emotionally wounded by the mention of $14.92. Hence the need for an apology. I don’t know, maybe they are right. Maybe liberals really are that pathetic. But I think if I were a liberal, I would be offended.

The Democrat’s Incoherent Energy Policy

The Democrats’ Incoherent Energy Policy

Noah Rothman for Commentary November 23, 2021

Now that it’s acutely aware of the political costs associated with inflation, the Biden administration is finally taking action. “How about some immediate help with gas prices?” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klainasked in a November 17 tweet. He answered his own question by linking to a CNN article advertising a forthcoming coordinated release of strategic petroleum reserves by the United States and other major energy consumers abroad. The article’s headline advised readers who are enthused by the declining price of petroleum products in futures markets to “thank China and Joe Biden.”

This episode illustrates the general absurdity of the Democratic Party’s energy policy, to the extent that it has one. The White House is hostile toward fossil fuels—indeed, per White House Press Sec. Jen Psaki, “the rise in gas prices over the long-term makes an even stronger case for doubling down our investment and focus on [a] clean energy option.” But the administration also seems to believe that energy should be as cheap and abundant as possible. Biden officials don’t want to encourage the exploration and exploitation of domestic natural-gas deposits or crude wells, but they also want foreign producers like OPEC to increase supply. They believe that major polluters such as China should limit their use of hydrocarbons but, apparently, not if those limitations contribute to rising consumer costs.

This is incoherent.

The administration’s decision to release 50 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve into a nation that consumes roughly 20 million barrels per day isn’t an energy policy. It’s a publicity stunt. It comes on the heels of a truly shameless effort on the Biden administration to intimidate oil and gas companies into reducing energy prices by referring them to the Federal Trade Commission for potential “illegal conduct,” e.g. gouging Americans at the pump. This display of manic gesticulations won’t ease the financial burdens on Americans. Indeed, it showcases how little appetite there is in the White House for genuine solutions to the present energy crunch.

“We’re focused on the economic boom,” White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein told reporters in June. By then, Biden had already signed a nearly $2 trillion Covid relief bill into law, piling more stimulus atop the $4 trillion in emergency spending that Congress approved in 2020. The administration’s primary objective at the time was to secure yet another $4 trillion spending bill, this time focused on “infrastructure” spending.

Although Bernstein insisted that the administration’s members weren’t “sitting on our hands” when it came to the threat posed by inflation, their proposals for curing this “transitory” phenomenon involved more government spending to keep consumer demand high. In other words, more of the same. It somehow came as a shock when Washington’s efforts to subsidize consumer demand created more consumer demand—a phenomenon augmented by the easing of the pandemic’s artificial limits on Americans’ spending habits.

In the fall, consumer prices continued to rise well above expectations, and goods shortages resulting from the pressures of the pandemic on the supply chain only contributed to that condition. Energy is a consumer good like any other, albeit one that lacks the elasticity of other consumer goods that you don’t need to get to work or stave off hypothermia. A comprehensive energy policy that actively responds to these adverse conditions might involve the release of some strategic reserves, but only in concert with policies designed to bring more domestic energy to market. The Biden administration has forsaken the second half of that strategy to satisfy the Democratic Party’s environmental activists.

On the eve of the pandemic, in late 2019, the United States was producing a record 13 million barrels of crude oil and 93 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. Demand for energy cratered with the arrival of COVID. Subsidizing Americans’ lifestyles and the industries they patronized amid that temporary crisis was, indeed, a worthy priority. But Joe Biden didn’t enter office determined to restore the status quo. He came to overturn it. So for the first several months of his administration, the president put the screws to energy producers.

Biden shut down oil and gas leasing on federal land. He directed executive agencies to eliminate spending that in any way served to subsidize fossil-fuel producers. He forced developers to abandon critical transit networks such as the Keystone XL pipeline. All of this has contributed to the skittishness of the investor class, which was paring back expensive and risky investments in new wells even before the onset of the pandemic. This, along with high energy demand abroad, the reluctance of foreign producers to ramp up production, and increased costs of operations associated with clean-energy mandates, has exacerbated the supply crunch. “All of those different moving pieces took U.S. energy production down by about 2 million barrels a day over the course of the last year, at a time when demand has surged based on the global reopening trade,” one market strategist told Axios reporters in October.

Taken together, this means real pain—pain for American consumers, pain for Americans in the energy sector, and political pain for the White House. And yet, the administration hasn’t curbed its addiction to quick fixes and clever messaging strategies. Rather than address the conditions contributing to the rising cost of consumer prices by closing off the spigot in Washington, Joe Biden’s White House is looking to change the subject again. The voting public doesn’t seem inclined to let them get away with it.

Kyle Rittenhouse meets with 45th President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago

 

OAN Newsroom

UPDATED 9:39 AM PT – Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Kyle Rittenhouse met with 45th President Donald Trump following his acquittal of all charges in his homicide trial. During an interview Tuesday, Trump said Rittenhouse and his mother recently visited him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

The 45th president said the teen is a “really good guy” and added he should have never had to be put through trial. Trump went on to describe the trial as “prosecutorial misconduct” and said it’s happening all over the U.S. with the Democrats.  

Rittenhouse was found not guilty of all charges after fatally shooting two people and injuring another while defending himself during last year’s protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Days after the verdict, Rittenhouse criticized Joe Biden for defaming his character. In an interview with Tucker Carlson Monday when asked what Rittenhouse thought of Biden linking him to white supremacists during his 2020 presidential campaign, he said it was “actual malice.”  

“If I could say one thing to you Mr. President, I would urge you to go back and watch the trial, and understand the facts before you make a statement,” stated the 18-year-old.

Meanwhile, experts have suggested Rittenhouse should sue those who smeared him following his not guilty verdict. When Carlson asked whether he had plans to hold those accountable for bad mouthing him ahead of the justice process, he inclined that he has “really good lawyers that are taking care of that right now.” Rittenhouse went on to say the lies other media figures can get away with are “sickening and a disgrace to this country.”  

https://www.oann.com/kyle-rittenhouse-meets-with-45th-president-donald-trump-at-mar-a-lago/  

Bad vs. Dangerous

Bad vs. Dangerous

John Podhoretz  Commentary Magazine  December 2021

What is the difference between bad policy and dangerous policy? I think that no matter where you are on the political or ideological spectrum, there is a significant difference. Bad policy is policy you dislike and disagree with, but which falls within comprehensible or acceptable parameters. You, liberal or conservative, believe the policy you think is bad will have adverse consequences—but you also think those consequences can be reversed with better choices once the public sees and experiences the mistakes that have arisen from it. That is, in fact, what politics is about.

The infrastructure bill that passed the Senate in August and the House in November—in both cases with crucial if limited Republican support—is an example of bad but not dangerous policy, in my view. It throws money around like confetti at a terrible time for money-throwing, when inflation is on the rise. But there have been bills like this before, and there will be bills like this again, especially when it comes to spending on public works.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan actually vetoed a highway bill that passed a newly Democratic-dominated Senate (Republicans had had the majority for six years after Reagan’s blowout 1980 election until the 1986 midterms) on the grounds of its profligacy. Then he had his veto overridden—a terrible blow to a president’s credibility—when 13 GOP senators decided they wanted taxpayer money spread around their states more than they wanted to hew to principle and restraint.

To show how bipartisan, or even nonpartisan, the love of infrastructure spending can be, consider this sentence from an inaugural address: “We will build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation…rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor.” That was Donald Trump, 2017. There was a huge fight in Trumpland during the transition period after the 2016 election when populists in his camp, led by Steve Bannon, wanted Trump to seize on infrastructure as a way of fulfilling his populist message—spending in America on America.

It would have been an interesting and unconventional gambit that might have thrown Democrats on the defensive. It would have given them a Hobson’s choice between supporting a president they wanted to run out of town or voting against a big-spending, big-government plan right out of their most luxuriant dreams. But Trump, for whatever reason, didn’t go for it. Had he gone for it, most of those who voted against the 2021 infrastructure bill would have voted in the affirmative.

It would have been bad policy then, too. But understandable within the classic boundaries of the American seesaw between the Democrats and the Republicans.

So what is dangerous policy? Committing $2 trillion to $4 trillion in entirely new spending in what would be the most radical expansion of the size and reach of the federal government in six decades—that is dangerous.

Creating giant new child-care entitlements and thereby empowering the public-education establishment that has become the national object lesson in bureaucratic self-dealing—dangerous. The semi-permanent return of national welfare 25 years after it was ended by Bill Clinton—dangerous. Direct federal construction of supposedly affordable housing that will only inflate housing prices and make homes less affordable—dangerous.

The passage of the infrastructure bill with Republican support (19 senators, 13 members of the House) is just an example of bad policy becoming law in response to normal political pressures. It would have been better if it hadn’t happened, but it’s something we know we can live with. The intrusions on and alterations in ordinary American life in the proposed “Build Back Better” bill is dangerous policy, and we will be heading down an irreversible path into a bleaker American future if (and I don’t think this will happen) it passes.

The White House Manages to Double Down on Joe Biden's Defamation of Kyle Rittenhouse

 Bonchie reporting for RedState

Following the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse last week, a Joe Biden campaign ad from 2020 remerged and began to make the rounds. In it, a picture of Rittenhouse is seen on the screen while soundbites in the background continually mention “white supremacy.” That has led many to wonder if the president himself could be one of the first targets of the defamation lawsuits that Rittenhouse and his lawyers are likely to unleash soon.

Yesterday, the White House was finally asked directly about their view of the matter. Fox News’ Peter Doocy (because no other “journalist” in the room would ever bring it up) asked Jen Psaki if Biden would consider apologizing for smearing Rittenhouse with false allegations of racism. Psaki’s answer was so incoherent that it left me wondering whether they actually want to be sued.

Is Psaki saying that Rittenhouse is responsible for “hatred, division, and violence”? Because her comments sure sound like the White House is simply doubling down on defaming the teenager, offering fresh evidence for his lawyers to use. Mentioning that Trump is heard on the video does not change the purpose of the video, which was to paint Rittenhouse as a white supremacist.

The facts are out there on what happened that night in Kenosha last year. There was no hatred or division involved in the Rittenhouse case, and to the extent that there was violence, it was in self-defense.

Yet, instead of just taking down the temperature here by offering some kind of clarification, Psaki pours gasoline on the fire, refusing to budge an inch. What exactly is the strategy here? It would have been easy to say the president doesn’t believe Rittenhouse himself is a “white supremacist” and that the video is being taken out of context. By contrast, the White House’s position seems to be double-dog daring Rittenhouse to file suit.

And to be perfectly honest, I hope he does. This administration is lawless in more ways than one. They simply do not think that the rules apply to them, and the only way to change that attitude is to make them pay. In this case, literally.

Doocy did press Psaki further, at which point she just repeated herself about hatred and division, doing nothing to actually offer clarity on the issue. On that note, I will levy one criticism of the Fox News reporter: He should have immediately followed up by asking “Does Joe Biden believe Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist?” That would have left her nowhere to go. Instead, she filibustered until it was time to move on.

In the end, I’m not so sure the White House doesn’t welcome this fight, though. Perhaps they see it as another pressure point to divide and conquer? Because they certainly aren’t behaving as if they’d like to avoid litigation here.

 

Article by John Stossel in Townhall

Thank Private Property

Happy Thanksgiving!

But beware the "tragedy of the commons." It almost killed off the pilgrims.

Now, via Washington, D.C., it's probably coming for us.

Tragedy of the commons is a concept from an essay by ecologist Garrett Hardin. He wrote how cattle ranchers sharing a common parcel of land soon destroy that land. That's because each rancher has an incentive to put cattle on the common. Soon, the extra animals eat all the grass. Shared grazing space is destroyed because no rancher has an incentive to conserve.

If the ranchers put up a few fences and divide the land, each rancher has an incentive to limit grazing. That saves the grass and the cattle.

Sharing things and "public" property sound nice, but only private ownership reliably inspires people to conserve and protect.

No one washes a rental car.

I bring this up now because the Democrats' new multitrillion-dollar spending bills are all about expanding the commons: more free highways, free health care, free day care, free money for parents, housing subsidies, tax credits for electric vehicles, etc.

All these handouts discourage responsibility by making it easier to take from the "commons."

Save for retirement? Why? The government will cover it. Save up for college? Why? Government will give you grants and loans and then forgive those loans.

I bring this up now because this same sort of thinking nearly killed the pilgrims.

When they came to America, the pilgrims decided to share everything. The governor of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, wrote that the pilgrims thought "taking away of property and (making it communal) ... would make them happy and flourishing."

Food and supplies were distributed based on need. Pilgrims would not selfishly produce food for themselves.

In other words, they, like Sen. Bernie Sanders and many American young people today, fell in love with the idea of socialism.

The result was ugly. When the first harvest came, there wasn't nearly enough food. Many pilgrims died that winter. If the Wampanoag American Indians hadn't helped them, all might have starved.

It was the tragedy of the commons. No individual pilgrim owned crops they grew, so no one had an incentive to work harder to produce extra to sell to others. Since even slackers got food from the communal supply, they had no incentive to work hard.

Many didn't.

Strong men thought it was an "injustice" that they "had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could." Women had to cook and clean for other women's husbands, and they "deemed it a kind of slavery."

The shared farming, Bradford concluded, "was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit."

When the Pilgrims ran out of food, they "began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop ... that they might not still thus languish in misery."

Their solution was private property. They split up the collective farm and gave every family a plot of land.

That was a big success. "It made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been," wrote Bradford. "The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn." Before, they "would allege weakness and inability."

Thanks to individual plots of land, food shortages turned into a surplus that became the feast we now call Thanksgiving.

"All men have this corruption," Bradford observed. In a common, everyone wants to take as much as they can.

Private property created prosperity.

This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for private property.

It's why I can eat turkey.

 

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2021/11/24/thank-private-property-n2599582 

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Article by Lincoln Brown in PJMedia

The Left's Vigilantes

Who would have thought that “across state lines” would have replaced “Donald Trump” as the Left’s favorite epithet? But whatever fans the flames, right? Anything to get the latest rounds of arson, looting and violence up and running. There’s a country to be destroyed, you know.

If you watched Ken Burns’ The Civil War, which originally aired what seems like a hundred years ago, you may recognize the name Shelby Foote. He was a Civil War historian who made frequent appearances during the series. He was very knowledgeable and his books are enjoyable to read. Like C.S. Lewis, Foote has a way of crafting a sentence that keeps you hooked and somehow is pleasing to the eye. Of course, given Foote’s southern origin, many critics automatically label him a Confederate apologist, without taking the time to see the nuance in Foote’s books. Foote tried to tell both sides of a story. And history can be messy and does not always favor the side in which we are interested. But then again, nuance is all but lost in the 21^st century.

In the book Confederates in the Attic, author Tony Horowitz sat down with Foote for an interview and the subject of the Confederate flag came up. Foote commented:

“Freedom Riders were a pretty weird-looking group to Southerners,” Foote said. “The men had odd haircuts and strange baggy clothes and seemed to associate with people with an intimacy that we didn’t allow. So the so-called right-thinking people of the South said, ‘They’re sending their riffraff down here. Let our riffraff take care of them.’ Then they sat back while the good ol’ boys in the pickup trucks took care of it, under the Confederate banner. That’s when right-thinking people should have stepped in and said, ‘Don’t use that banner, that’s not what it stands for.’ But they didn’t. So now it’s a symbol of evil to a great many people, and I understand that.”

And so it goes. The “right-thinking” people of the Left would never sully their hands in dealing with their enemies directly. Even if they do not explicitly encourage burning car dealerships, looting stores, attacking police stations or beating up unsuspecting people on the street, they know that their rhetoric inspires and encourages it. They know that they have an army of angry, under-educated or willfully uneducated group of people, highly vulnerable to the power of suggestion — people who will burn down a city while Leftist leaders and media mavens gather at the Kennedy Center or the Met Gala to sip champagne as their colleagues and errand-runners try to convince us that a building engulfed in flames is a sign of a peaceful protest.

People who they hate are being attacked by people they care nothing about. Just like their enemies, their foot soldiers are inconsequential and expendable. And if a neighborhood has to lose small businesses or a supermarket, drug store, or for that matter lives, so be it. After all, the goal is just, right? The rioters have never figured it out. They are a means to an end. They can put up all the signs they want and others can burn, loot and hand out beatings. They are still owned. They will never reap any of the dubious alleged benefits from their “revolution.” This time around, the plantation owners are the media and the politicos. And further, these people are also nothing more than an interesting outing for rich, spoiled white brats who want a fun night of looting and burning, as they enjoy a good ego-stroke in the process. Quite the racket if you can make it work. And the Left has.

Those causing chaos in the streets have never stopped to consider why their Leftist leaders are in the tonier areas of the country, enjoying a nice sauvignon blanc. Not one person in the legacy media has to go home to any of those areas and they would never be seen in one of the riots. To paraphrase Foote, the Leftist elite have said, “Let our riff-raff take care of that riff-raff.” Which is the one thing the Left hopes that the protestors and rioters never grasp. And to be honest, they probably never will.

 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2021/11/23/the-lefts-vigilantes-n1535953 

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New Study Says Biden Vaccine Mandate Will Cost Businesses $1.3 Billion in Compliance Costs

New Study Says Biden Vaccine Mandate Will Cost Businesses $1.3 Billion in Compliance Costs

https://www.theepochtimes.com/

President Joe Biden’s proposed mandate that millions of U.S. businesses require employees to be vaccinated against the CCP virus will put more than 44 million jobs at risk and cost firms nearly $1.3 billion to comply, according to a new report issued Nov. 23 by Republican members of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

The report analyzed the number of jobs put at risk and the compliance costs for businesses on a state-by-state basis. Biden’s proposed mandate related to the virus that causes COVID-19 was issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS).

“Using information gathered from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the analysis in the OSHA ETS, the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate will put an estimated 44,966,434 American jobs at risk. Additionally, U.S. businesses will spend at least $1.29 billion in complying with the requirements of the mandate,” the report said.

“Under President Biden’s unlawful and unconstitutional vaccine mandates, Kentucky risks losing up to 34 percent of its labor force, not to mention it will cost Kentucky businesses at least $50 million,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the ranking Republican on the Senate small business panel, said in a statement making the study public.

“In a free country, people have the right to make their own healthcare decisions. President Biden’s command that working Americans and private businesses submit to his mandate upon penalty of loss of livelihood is a flagrant abuse of power that will destroy Kentucky’s economy and work force.”

The jobs put at risk by the ETS’s requirement that employees who decline to be vaccinated either submit to regular testing or be terminated are located in most major economic sectors.

In economically thriving Texas, for example, more than 208,000 or 31 percent of the jobs in the wholesale trades sector would be at risk, as well as more than 367,000 (35 percent) in manufacturing, and in excess of 615,000 (36 percent) in retail trades.

The compliance costs for Texas businesses would be at least $190 million, according to the study.

The numbers for California, which has had some of the most rigorous workplace restrictions since the beginning of the CCP virus pandemic in March 2020, aren’t quite as high as those in Texas.

In California, more than 233,000 jobs, or 22 percent, in the wholesale trades would be at risk, while compliance costs for such businesses would exceed $21 million. More than 589,000 jobs (28 percent) of retail trade jobs would be jeopardized, and nearly 377,000 positions (26 percent) in the manufacturing area.

The compliance costs for those two sectors would be more than $35 million and $21 million, respectively.

On the East Coast, in New York, the wholesale trades sector would see more than 66,000 jobs at risk (17 percent), plus nearly 220,000 (22 percent) in retail trade jobs and more than 143,000 jobs (20 percent) in the professional, scientific, and technical services sector.

Compliance costs for New York businesses are estimated by the study at $146 million overall.

Among New England states, an estimated 175,000-plus New Hampshire jobs would be placed in jeopardy, with compliance costs hitting $25 million or more. The same figures for Massachusetts would be more than 766,000 jobs and $79 million in compliance costs.

The figures are somewhat higher for Midwestern states such as Indiana, where 35 percent or nearly 1.2 million jobs would be put at risk by the mandate, with compliance costs to businesses estimated at $73 million.

In Michigan, home of the U.S. automobile industry, the manufacturing sector would be hit particularly hard, with more than 256,000 jobs (36 percent of the total) put at risk. By comparison, 32 percent, or nearly 174,000 jobs would be in danger in the retail trades sector, and more than 66,000 (29 percent) in the wholesale trades sector.

In the states of the old Confederacy, 37 percent, or more than 821,000, jobs overall would be in jeopardy, while 36 percent would be at risk in Georgia and 25 percent in Virginia would be at risk. Compliance costs for those three states would total in excess of 235 million.

In the Pacific Northwest, Washington state would see more than 898,000 jobs at risk from the mandate, while compliance costs for businesses there would exceed $73 million.

While Biden’s mandate is currently being suspended under federal court order, the White House continues to encourage businesses of all descriptions to enforce informal vaccination mandates, pending the outcome of the litigation.

Thousands of federal employees and workers for federal contractors are also challenging a similar Biden mandate. There is opposition to the mandate among government workers, with the largest union representing such workers, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) issuing a statement in response to Biden claiming that mandates should be an issue of negotiation.

 Samson destroys the temple of the Philistines by Gustave Dore

Article by Victor Davis Hanson in Townhall

Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization

Millions of citizens long ago concluded that professional sports, academia, and entertainment were no longer disinterested institutions, but far Left and deliberately hostile to Middle America.

Yet American conservatives still adamantly supported the nation's traditional investigatory, intelligence, and military agencies - especially when they came under budgetary or cultural attacks.

Not so much anymore.

For the first time in memory, conservatives now connect the FBI hierarchy with bureaucratic bloat, political bias, and even illegality.

In the last five years, the FBI was mostly in the news for the checkered careers of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok. Add in the criminality of convicted FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

The colossal FBI-driven "Russian collusion" hoax was marked by the leaking of confidential FBI memos, forged documents, improper surveillance, and serial disinformation.

Prior heads of the CIA and FBI, as well as the director of national intelligence, have at times either not told the truth under oath or claimed amnesia, without legal repercussions.

Mention the military to conservative Americans these days, and they unfortunately associate its leadership with the disastrous flight from Afghanistan. Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility - much less resigned - for the worst military fiasco of the last half-century.

Instead, President Joe Biden and the top generals traded charges that the other was responsible for the calamity. Or both insisted the abject flight was a logistical masterpiece.

Never in U.S. history have so many retired four-star admirals and generals disparaged their president with charges of being either a traitor, a liar, a fascist, or a virtual Nazi, as occurred during the last administration.

Never has the proper advisory role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff been so brazenly usurped and contorted.

Never has the secretary of defense promised he would ferret out alleged "white supremacists," without providing any evidence whatsoever of their supposedly ubiquitous presence and dangerous conspiracies.

Conservatives have always been amused by the liberal biases of the old network news and big-city print media. But they grudgingly admitted that many liberal journalists of the last century were mostly professionals. News divisions mostly reported the news rather than simply made it up.

Not so now with Big Tech and 21st-century "woke" journalism. Few reporters have yet offered apologies for helping hatch and spread the Russian collusion hoax that paralyzed the country for three years.

Few have admitted culpability for reporting as fact the various fantasies surrounding the Duke Lacrosse team's prosecution or the Covington Catholic kids deception.

Many in the media ran uncritically with the Jussie Smollett concoction and the "hands-up-don't shoot" Ferguson distortions. Journalists promulgated misinformation about the "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin encounter, and doctored photos and edited tapes.

They invented the myth of the supposedly brilliant - but now utterly disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo - as well as the "Russian disinformation" yarn that allegedly accounted for the missing Hunter Biden laptop.

Most recently, reporters spread serial untruths surrounding the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

For much of 2020 to even suggest that the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have played a role in the birth and spread of the COVID-19 earned media derision.

Few reporters suggested that federal health agencies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases might be disseminating contradictory or even inaccurate information about the pandemic. To believe this was happening instead earned condemnation in the media as if one were some conspiracy theorist or nut.

Rarely have communication industries - veritable utilities in the public domain - so asymmetrically censored speech and applied such one-sided standards of suppressing free expression.

Conservatives used to oppose regulating larger corporations. Now, ironically, most are calling for regulating and breaking up multibillion-dollar social media monopolies and conglomerates that suppress as much as transmit private communications.

The American criminal justice system also used to earn the respect of conservatives. Prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, and big-city mayors were seen as custodians of the public order. They were entrusted to keep the peace, to prevent and investigate crime, and to arrest and prosecute criminals.

Again, not so much now.

After 120 days of mostly unchecked riot, arson, looting, and violent protests during the summer of 2020, the public lost confidence in their public safety agencies.

District attorneys in several major cities - Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and St. Louis - have often predicated prosecuting crimes on the basis of ideology, race, and careerism.

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation's military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system.

No one yet knows what the effect will be of half the country losing faith in the very pillars of American civilization.

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2021/11/24/losing-confidence-in-the-pillars-of-our-civilization-n2599609 

 

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