Tyre Nichols Isn’t the Only Victim Entitled to the Truth

Americans deserve to see all of the police bodycam video from Jan6, not just cherry-picked excerpts confirming the government narrative.

by Julie Kelly for American Greatness

Imagine if law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C., had acted as swiftly as police in Memphis in releasing body worn camera footage related to the use of lethal force

It took Memphis authorities less than a month to compile security and body camera recordings to show the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols, who died three days after five police officers attacked him on January 7 following a traffic stop for alleged reckless driving. Under pressure from family members and civil rights groups, the city of Memphis made public nearly an hour of footage aggregated from several angles to show what happened to Nichols.

“Throughout the struggle, Mr. Nichols appears to have been kicked violently at least twice in the face, beaten three times with a baton, sprayed in the face twice with a chemical and punched in the head six times,” according to a timeline produced by the New York Times.

In the span of a few weeks, not only did authorities release all relevant videos, the five officers were arrested, investigated by a grand jury, indicted on second degree murder charges, and fired by the Memphis Police Department.

Transparency and justice, to the extent it ever will ease his family’s grief, came quickly for Tyre Nichols.

That is not the situation for four Donald Trump supporters who died on January 6, either wholly or partially due to the actions of Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers on duty that day. More than two years after the fact, body worn camera footage is only slowly being released at the criminal trials of January 6 defendants. (Only D.C. Metro police are required to wear body cameras.)

And the Department of Justice, unlike the city of Memphis, is making it nearly impossible for the general public to access the very limited trove, which has been uploaded to a platform created to house all digital evidence for the department’s “Capitol Siege” investigation.

But the unedited video—the government has produced cherry-picked clips from otherwise protected recordings to bolster the regime’s “insurrection” narrative in the media and in court—so far documents what I described last week as the worst incident of police brutality since the civil rights movement. Footage from just three D.C. Metro officers revealed how police wantonly and, in some cases, viciously attacked American citizens exercising their rights to protest at a government building. Cops used an arsenal of munitions, including rubber bullets, flashbangs, stinger balls, and massive amounts of chemical gas against protesters assembled on Capitol grounds.

Recordings also capture the conduct of other officers involved in the assault; at one point, D.C. Metro police officer Daniel Thau admitted the approach is backfiring. “We can hit ’em with a lot of pain compliance, but you’re hittin’ innocent people,” one commander told Thau at 2:14 p.m. on January 6. Thau replied that “not only that, we’re taking out one, and 10 are getting angrier.”

“We’re multiplying them by hitting them,” Thau said.

By “them,” Thau meant enraged Trump supporters who, as the footage further confirmed, were respecting police lines at the time. And around the time Thau made that comment, two men, Kevin Greeson and Benjamin Phillips, were dead of cardiac arrest.

What happened to them?

The public does not know because, unlike the death of Tyre Nichols, no politician has demanded accountability. No news organization or civil rights group has demanded justice. No family member, for reasons understood in the destructive climate created for anyone associated with January 6, has asked for answers.

D.C. Metro police officers undoubtedly were in the vicinity of both men when they suffered fatal heart attacks—very likely due to law enforcement’s reckless use of flashbangs, a metal device that emits a disorienting blast of light and sound. When used improperly—as appears to be the case in most instances on January 6—flashbangs can cause serious injury or death.

Here is just one video of what happened when a flashbang was thrown into the crowd on January 6:

Interviews of first responders and witness accounts of those near the scene suggested at least one of the men suffered cardiac arrest after being hit with a munition. 

The only way to know for sure is to release video from both Capitol security cameras and footage recorded by D.C. Metro police in the same vicinity.

And what about releasing the body-worn camera footage of Lila Morris, the D.C. Metro officer who repeatedly struck Rosanne Boyland with either a baton or stick on January 6? Newly released open source footage shows a horrific scene after her beating as protesters attempted to resuscitate her as other officers looked on.

Body cam footage of Morris’ colleague, Officer Terence Craig, indicated he was in the lower west terrace tunnel when the attack on Boyland occurred. “She’s fucking dead! This is on you, motherfuckers!” one man screamed at the officers. “This is the woman you killed, you fuckers!”

But where is Morris’ body cam video or that of other officers near her on January 6? Surely Rosanne Boyland is entitled to the same level of transparency and accountability as Tyre Nichols, since she too was pepper sprayed and beaten—where is #JusticeforRosanne hashtag?

According to testimony by Robert Contee, then-acting chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, more than 1,000 of his officers were at the Capitol on January 6. Quick clips of a handful of officers, including Daniel Hodges, who repeatedly referred to Trump supporters as “terrorists” during his public testimony to the January 6 select committee in 2021, have been used to garner sympathy and stoke outrage.

If it’s acceptable to make public small segments of body camera footage from selected officers, then the Department of Justice and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser should order the release of all footage on an accessible platform for the American people to see for themselves.

After all, Tyre Nichols isn’t the only victim entitled to the truth.

Corporate America Doesn’t Like America At All

posted by Derek Hunter at Townhall

If you watched any of the NFL playoffs you saw some good games and some really bad commercials. Every other ad was seemingly a Verizon ad with Paul Giamatti playing Albert Einstein (great actor, but enough already) or for a car company selling a product 99 percent of the audience couldn’t afford and wouldn’t want. It was enough to make you wonder who these corporations are trying to sell to, what they’re really advertising, and how it is their corporate boards allow it to continue.

Do you own an electric car? Probably not. I don’t, nor do I want one. They’re too expensive, it’s just this side of useless in a harsh winter, and once the battery goes you’re on the hook for the cost of 5 Hemi engines if you ever want it to drive again. Hard pass.

But most, if not all, of the car ads I saw last weekend during the NFC and AFC championship games were for electric cars. Are NFL fans disproportionately rich? Really into the environment without knowing just how awful manufacturing an electric vehicle is for the planet or where electricity comes from? It’s pretty doubtful. But the NFL has been ignoring huge chunks of their fan base for years, why wouldn’t advertisers? 

Or is it something else? Do these corporations even know or care who their advertising to? 

The ads themselves are awful and only tangentially about the car, if that. One is some hippie douchebag getting up at the crack of dawn dragging a beach in his Kia whatever so a bunch of turtles can lay eggs. What strikes me as so odd about this commercial, aside from the general sense of fakeness, is how he’s scooping up like giant laundry detergent bottles that were, apparently, buried in the sand. I get there’s a lot of plastic garbage in the oceans, mostly thanks to horrible Asian countries, but what beach in (presumably) California is so abandoned that detergent bottles wash up on shore and sit there long enough to get buried in the sand? 

Putting aside the improbability of the premises of the ads, who are they trying to sell to? There are cars that are “dog approved.” I don’t currently have a dog, but if we get one I’m not seeking his input on any major purchase, and if you do you need help. 

There are commercials where the car is climbing up a rocky, steep mountain with “DO NOT ATTEMPT” written across the bottom of the screen. Why the hell are you showing me a car doing something, as THE selling point of the ad, that you expressly tell me not to do? 

Then again, if you watch any of these ads the odds are better than 80 percent that at some point in the commercial the words “Professional driver, closed course. Do not attempt” will appear on the screen for a minute. Sometimes, hilariously, they pop up while the car is just driving down an empty street at night. If a car can’t do that, or if you need to be a “professional” in order to operate the vehicle at night, who the hell would buy it? And no one should.

These companies have been infiltrated by progressive lunatics who put activism (their brand and only their brand of activism) ahead of everything else. They aren’t trying to sell you a car, they’re trying to push you into a lifestyle; trying to make you conform. “Obey” would make an accurate tagline in every one of these things. Where are the boards? Where are the shareholder revolts? 

It’s not just cars, at least the sales of them. Domino’s Pizza is running ads about how they’re replacing a bunch of their delivery fleet with electric vehicles. Honestly, who the hell cares? Your pizza sucks, focus on fixing that. There are maybe 3 people in the country who’d base where they order pizza from on the type of vehicle it’s delivered to them in, everyone else would pass. How is this a selling point?

It’s not, it’s an agenda to normalize left-wing ideology. Take a look at the people in commercials. It’s like they’re trying to market to the smallest segment of the population possible. We’re living in a time where men dressed as women are the spokespeople for beauty companies. That’s not happening because the “tuck” crowd is a huge, untapped market. There’s no way they aren’t turning off more people than they’re bringing in. It’s because they’re seeking to normalize the abnormal and, most importantly, get people to conform and obey. 

If you can get otherwise sane, rational people to actively participate in the delusion that men can be women simply by declaring it, you can convince them of anything. If you can bully others into being so afraid to point out how men can’t be women, no matter what, you’ve also won. Willing conformity or conformity through fear of being found out, either way the end result is compliance. And that’s the ultimate goal. 

A little piece at a time, a little bit here and there, and the leftist blob absorbs more; gets bigger. None of this is by accident. These corporate leaders might not know what they’re participating in, but the people inside these companies – the “D.I.E.” crowd (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, which is usually D.E.I. but DIE is more accurate) – know exactly what they’re doing. And now, so do you.

Classified Documents Are A New Potential Trap For Any Politician Who Crosses The Deep State

The Trump years saw a massive acceleration in the trend of unelected bureaucrats exercising power over elected officials by weaponizing classified information.

Joy Pullman reporting for The Federalist

Procedural complaints about classified documents are quickly turning into a catch-all trap that can depose duly elected officials, especially those tasked with oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. Last August, an unprecedented classified document complaint provided a pretext for an FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home, in an eerie echo of the use of police and military resources against opposing politicians typical of banana republics.

That administrative power flex has now been turned into the unprecedented appointment of three special counsels, most recently against the deeply unpopular current Democrat Party figurehead, Joe Biden. This all reverses the American structure of elected officials maintaining oversight of unelected permanent administrators. Instead, we now have unelected bureaucrats performing selective “oversight” of elected officials.

Of course, that pattern erases Americans’ deepest political birthright: government of the people, by the people, and for the people. A government not ultimately controlled by elected representatives of the citizenry is not a republic, nor is it any kind of democracy. Without elections truly affecting government policies, the original United States is no more and its elections are a sham.

The subversion of elected representative government via weaponized intelligence has been expanding for some time. The Trump presidential years saw a massive acceleration in this pre-existing trend of unelected bureaucrats exercising increasing power over elected officials, including by weaponizing classified information, usually via highly selective leaks to leftist media.

Recall that Michael Flynn, a would-be reformer of U.S. intelligence, was neatly precluded from becoming Trump’s national security advisor via leaks of classified intel to the media that a (still) gullible Vice President Mike Pence bought hook, line, and sinker. Rather than the leaker being sought, caught, and punished, Flynn was. The selective and deceptive leaks were shanghaied into a Justice Department investigation that ended with Flynn narrowly escaping jail time and professional repercussions for his son so long as he promised to disappear from public view.

The same pattern occurred in multiple cycles with Spygate, the wholly manufactured projection of treasonous collusion with Russia from the Democratic Party onto Trump. Rep. Adam Schiff, who has been recently kicked off the House Intelligence Committee, repeatedly used his access to classified intelligence to fan the Spygate flames as well as the two impeachments of Trump. So did multiple other deep-state actors, including the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Notice there’s no probe into Schiff’s blatant and repeated misuse of the classified information he was privileged to receive on the House Intelligence Committee. But there could be if he stopped being such a useful Democrat.

This is how, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Trump early in the latter’s term, intelligence agencies “have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” It is how the intelligence tail can — and now does — wag the congressional dog. This has been ongoing now for decades and is perpetually expanding its reach.

This allows the document-holders to function as a shadow government that essentially controls the elected government by picking what bits of information to release to achieve its own ends rather than the priorities of American voters. This selective deployment of intelligence has been even used to goad the United States into wars it doesn’t win that expand the military-industrial complex and distract U.S. officials while defenestrating U.S. national interests. It was used to lie to Trump about U.S. military activities and prevent him from exercising his due presidential authority over U.S. military affairs.

Those who presented unreliable, counterproductive, and false intelligence to presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Trump have not been punished, nor often even identified. Neither has the person who compromised the safety and collegiality of the U.S. Supreme Court by leaking the pro-life Dobbs decision last May.

Curiously, neither have there been any administrative-state leaks about the many connections between the Biden family and the Chinese Communist Party. This is not a tool to be applied equally, you see, or in service of the public good. It’s only yet another knife to pull out against those who cross the wrong people.

That’s how expansive, vague, and proliferating laws, regulations, and bureaucracies all work: as tools of selective prosecution to be wielded at the whims of the powerful against those who threaten their power. The erasure of self-government and the rule of law go hand in hand, collapsed by the administrative state’s erasure of the separation of powers that protect individual liberty and justice for all.

This expanding weaponization of classified intel into selective probes of those who have access to at least some of it allows deep-state entities even more control over elected officials. This standard of probes for possessing “unauthorized” classified documents can be applied to any current or former president, as well as many other officials.

As a Project for Government Oversight lawyer told USA Today: “I’d bet you that if they go back to all of the living presidents and root through their homes and their libraries and their warehouses and garages, they’re going to unearth some classified documents there.” Other presidential experts told USA Today that essentially every presidential administration since 1978 has mishandled classified documents.

The same applies to numerous other elected and unelected officials, such as those on House and Senate military intelligence committees and in the executive branch. This is partly because U.S. intelligence agencies improperly classify “millions” of materials, partly to hide their activities by lying that materials elected representatives seek implicate “national security.” It’s a convenient, unfalsifiable excuse that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to function as poisonous self-licking ice cream cones.

This all recalls one of the famous lines of one of the world’s most famous of secret police, Joseph Stalin’s NKVD chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” That is how secret police function. It is how U.S. intelligence agencies function now, with help from their administrative-state allies such as the Department of So-Called Justice. Their use of selective prosecutions and investigations to hamstring and punish their enemies may not be unlimited now, but it is expanding.

All members of Congress must be aware of this and use all the powers at their disposal to fight it, for as the administrative apparatus strengthens, the American republic dissolves.

Why Biden’s Document Retention Is Profoundly Troubling

There are looming questions for the Grand Jury of public opinion regarding the documents Biden has been found to possess.

by John D. O’Connor for American Greatness

Major media pundits, not known for their critical thinking skills, have portrayed Joe Biden’s recently discovered possession of classified documents as likely innocent since he had, they claim, inadvertently come into their possession and willingly cooperated when they were discovered. 

In contrast, these same pseudo-sophisticates assert, Donald Trump resisted giving up his presidential documents, which included classifieds, causing a raid by the FBI, thus rendering him far more culpable than Biden. 

There is a fundamental problem with this comparative analysis: it is seriously lacking in that combination of commonsense inference and rigorous critical thought that we should expect from allegedly authoritative opinion leaders. 

Let’s apply analogies based on common experience. Mom dies. Daughter Mary, Mom’s live-in caretaker, scoops up some of Mom’s jewelry for safekeeping as she moves back into her own residence. She informs her siblings immediately. After much back-and-forth, Mary delivers what she says are all Mom’s jewels belonging to the estate. But she makes no bones about her claim that a few personally significant items, like a valueless but sentimentally important locket from Dad, were given to her pre-death by Mom and therefore belonged to her.

Unfriendly brother Bob, suspicious, persuades his crony, the sheriff, to raid Mary’s house. He uncovers the deliberately withheld items and a few more valueless trinkets clearly belonging to Mom. Bob declares Mary to be a major thief. Commonsense co-siblings think Mary is blundering but not, as Bob claims, a criminal. 

Contrasting analogy: Mom dies, and Mary spirits away some of Mom’s best pieces and tells no one. The siblings are none the wiser. 

Six years later, the family estate lawyer, Mary’s friend, helps her move from her home. He discovers some of Mom’s valuable pieces in Mary’s oft-occupied study and feels duty-bound to tell the siblings. Mary’s friend claims the removal of Mom’s best jewels was inadvertent and her current possession was unwitting, kept in a box in the study closet.

Later searches, however, find Mom’s jewelry in Mary’s second home, and in her desk at her place of business. Pictures show Mary’s daughter wearing Mom’s jewelry. Mary claims that she cooperated fully once the items were discovered, but refuses to explain her possession, apparent curation to select the most valuable items, her seeming division of the jewelry, and her use of them along with her daughter’s. 

Any person with common sense and a fair mind would conclude that, in the first example, Mary was at worst pig-headed and insensitive in her handling of the situation, but innocent of any substantial wrongdoing. 

That same fair-minded observer, however, would conclude in the second example that, by a preponderance of evidence, Mary is likely guilty of intentionally converting Mom’s valuable jewelry for her own use and benefit and defrauding her siblings to boot. Inadvertence could not adequately explain her intentional possession, curation, division, and use of stolen property.

In the comparison at hand, there is not a scintilla of evidence that President Trump tried to hide his possession of documents, reported widely by CNN and CBS on January 18, 2021, when Trump aides backed up moving vans to the White House for delivery of documents to Mar-a-Lago. Like Mary in the first example, he is properly accused, at most, of insensitivity to ethical norms and of pig-headed blunders. 

The “worst” document in his possession was reportedly one which stated that a certain country did not possess a nuclear arsenal but very much desired one. This document told all sentient beings what they already knew and had no value to anyone. 

On this thin strand, the major media quickly speculated that Trump intended to sell his classified documents to enrich himself. After the midterm elections, however, the media revealed that authorities had long before concluded that Trump wished the documents for ego gratification. Regarding, as it did, perhaps the world’s most notorious egotist, this revelation was a teacup-rattler only to dupes who had swallowed whole the media’s previous jejunespeculation.

In Biden’s case, however, the same media has ignored that the Penn-Biden Center was one for “global engagement”; that the classified documents included our most priceless intelligence jewels, that is, presidential briefings on major foreign rivals, issued from 2013 through 2016; that Joe Biden’s son and brother, perhaps in concert with Biden himself, had been engaged in global influence peddling; that the Penn-Biden Center had been financed by at least $54 million in Chinese money, and likely more; that son Hunter was living in Biden’s personal residence, where classified documents were found, a box of which had been apparently pictured on Hunter’s laptop; that Hunter was paying his father $50,000 monthly for rent of this residence, inferentially from foreign money paid to the son for his father’s influence.

Meanwhile, China continues to menace Taiwan, where 90 percent of the world’s most advanced computer chips are manufactured—an industry that is extremely difficult to duplicate elsewhere, even with several years of preparation. These chips, based on nanotechnology involving tiny ultraviolet rays, are critical to the Western world’s most valuable military and industrial capability. 

China continues to increase its hegemony over the South China Sea, military bases on questionably owned islands, and associated shipping lanes. All of this while Hunter makes millions from his part ownership of the Bohai Harvest Fund financed by the Bank of China; and has completed energy deals for Chinese energy giant CEFC transferring American energy resources. 

So, there are, at the least, prior to a full investigation, looming questions for the grand jury of public opinion. Is Joe Biden a corrupt, treacherous criminal, weakening our most important national security bulwarks? Is it true, as Hunter wrote to his daughter via the laptop from Hell, that he shared fees with his father, likely from foreign actors? 

Politics, the venerated trope has it, must stop at our water’s edge. If so, our politically partisan, ideological media should put away their vapid chatter about Biden’s innocence and force him to demonstrate that he will protect our vital national interests.

No honest, intelligent person of moderate sensibilities wish Biden impeached or indicted. Nor does a sane person wish for a Kamala Harris presidency.

But we all seek a better world today and for generations to follow. So now is the time for the media to put on their big-boy and big-girl pants and become what they claim to be: investigators acting without fear or favor, therefore seeking the truth behind Biden’s deeply troubling actions.

There's One Democrat Kevin McCarthy Isn't Targeting, and He Should Be

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

After a contentious battle for the position, newly-minted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has made good on his promises to govern as a conservative and to punish Democrats for their broken precedents. Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff have been booted off the Intelligence Committee while Ilhan Omar is facing removal from the House Foreign Affairs Committee (if enough GOP squishes don’t save her).

But there’s another Democrat that has escaped McCarthy’s ire, and you’ve probably guessed by now I’m talking about Rashida Tlaib. A rabid anti-Semite and terrorist sympathizer, the Michigan congresswoman is not facing removal from her committees, and while I understand the reason why, I’m going to challenge it.

Let’s start with the logic behind what McCarthy is doing. He’s attempting to set a precedent that members won’t be removed from all committees for their bad behavior but will instead be restricted from those that deal most directly with national security. Tlaib’s top assignment has been the Oversight and Reform Committee, where she can make a lot of noise but has no access to sensitive information.

Ask yourself, are Democrats going to respect that precedent when they return to power? That’s rhetorical because we all know they aren’t going to respect that precedent. Besides, I believe Tlaib’s behavior is so uniquely bad, that there’s no reason to let her serve anywhere, especially given Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of all her assignments. I’d even go so far as to say Tlaib has been worse than Omar.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to prove that point. Did you know that Tlaib’s 2018 campaign events were organized by actual terrorist financiers (The Washington Examiner)? She’s also been a keynote speaker for CAIR, a rabidly anti-Semitic Muslim group with deep connections to Hamas.

How in the world did this person end up in Congress?

Two men who held key positions at nonprofit groups that were found liable in a Hamas terror financing scheme helped organize campaign fundraising events for Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) in 2018.

The men, who organized events that were paid for by Tlaib’s campaign, were associated with a network of nonprofit groups that were found liable by a federal jury in 2004 for financing the terrorist slaying of an American teenager, David Boim, at a bus stop in the West Bank in 1996. A federal judge ordered the three groups to pay Boim’s parents a $156 million judgment for funding Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Past that, did you also know that Tlaib has continually pushed anti-Semitic blood libels, blaming Jews for the deaths of people even when those people were killed by Palestinians? In fact, she’s done that multiple times, going so far as to blame the death of an Israeli child at the hands of a Palestinian terrorist on the supposed “Israeli occupation.” More generally, Tlaib is always there to condemn Israel for merely defending itself from Palestinian terrorism.

Tlaib has even been shameless enough to use the Holocaust to condemn Israel, claiming that the horrific historical event gives her a “calming feeling.” Further, she claimed that Palestinians provided a “safe haven” for Jews during World War II. Of course, that’s completely untrue given the Palestinians collaborated with Hitler to kill Jews.

And lest anyone suggest Tlaib has changed, she is still showing herself to be a rabid anti-Semite. On Friday, a Palestinian terrorist committed a mass shooting outside a synagogue in Israel, killing seven people and injuring others. Tlaib did not directly condemn the killing, but when Israel retaliated by killing militants, she put this tweet out.

She’s got nothing to say when Palestinians murder Jews, but when Palestinian terrorists are killed in response, she’s boisterous in her condemnations. Sorry, but her history garners no benefit of the doubt. This woman is an anti-Semite who wants to see Jews killed, and you won’t convince me of anything else. That she actually has the Palestinian flag first in line at her congressional office only underscores the fact that she only sees the United States as a vehicle for her radicalism.

With all that said, while I’m glad McCarthy is playing hardball, and I’m not criticizing his performance so far, with some Democrats, he can always go harder. No one deserves to be barred from all committees more than Tlaib. Hopefully, that’s a battle that’s coming.

The Left Wants To Take Your Truck Because It’s Big And Scary

The left’s latest attack on pickup trucks is because they’re large and scary and allegedly bad for the environment.

Chuck DeVore reporting for The Federalist 

Unlike with the right to bear arms, there is no constitutional amendment protecting our right to own vehicles — other than a generally recognized right to move about freely (Crandall v. Nevada, 1867) — and, with almost all roads owned by the government, this could become a problem. 

With that, the ongoing campaign against “Big Truck” — or, as we call them in Texas, simply “my truck” — is bound to lead to additional restrictions to “save the planet” and “save the children.”

The latest push against large pickup trucks takes two basic forms: They’re large and scary and hurt people, and they’re bad for the environment, especially with people not really needing them for anything practical.

The large and dangerous argument goes like this: Americans only drive big trucks because Americans are vain, and big pickup trucks have become a status symbol, with mostly suburban owners citing their truck’s “ruggedness” and “power.” As further proof, detractors claim most of these large rides don’t even have a trailer hitch. 

Of course, one thing many Americans don’t much take a liking to is other people telling them what they must do with their purchases and lifestyle. I don’t own a large pickup truck — yet — but if these pearl-clutching busybodies don’t mind their business, I’m sorely tempted to go out and buy one. 

Child vs. Adult Deaths

As a result, after making some comments on Twitter and having an Ivy League liberal claim that large pickups are “behind the uptick in pedestrian deaths, especially little kids, and are obviously worse for the environment (both air quality affecting our health now and global warming affecting life more broadly)…so it hurts a lot of other people for no practical gain,” I decided to look into a key contention — that more “little kids” have been getting killed by big pickup trucks.  

I opened the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention database on the unintentional deaths of pedestrians by motor vehicles via its WISQARS™ (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System) database and ran two series. One was pedestrian deaths, ages 0-14 from 2000 to 2020, and the other was pedestrian deaths from ages 18 to 85+ over the same period. 

What followed is very interesting. Contrary to the claims of some, pedestrian deaths among “little kids” have been steadily dropping since 2000. This might be due to a few factors. First, the use of alcohol while driving has been dropping. Second, as the CDC helpfully notes, alcohol was a factor in 46 percent of crashes resulting in a pedestrian death in 2019, but only about 30 percent of these involved the driver while 70 percent were due to a drunk pedestrian. The CDC went on to note, “Most pedestrian deaths occur in urban areas, on roadway locations away from intersections (where higher speeds might occur), and at night.” 

In other words, conditions that are far less likely to involve a child and far more likely to involve alcohol- or drug-impaired adults. 

The graph I created from the CDC data does show a drop in adult deaths through the Great Recession when driver miles dropped after years of slowing growth, likely connected to increased internet usage among young would-be drivers. Then, as people got back in their cars, pedestrian deaths climbed. 

But oddly enough, during the Covid-19 lockdowns, vehicle miles plunged by almost 13 percent at one point in 2020. Yet despite the reduced miles driven, the number of pedestrians ages 18 to 85+ unintentionally killed by vehicles rose from 6,359 in 2019 to 6,682 in 2020 for a rate of 2.6 per 100,000. In fact, 2020 saw the highest number and rate of adult pedestrian deaths in the 20-year period measured. 

Thankfully, the number of child fatalities ages 0 to 14 saw no meaningful statistical change in 2020 compared to 2019, with 235 dying for a rate of 0.39 per 100,000 vs. 228 in 2019. Compared to 2000, the rate of adults being killed by vehicles increased by 39 percent while the rate of children ages 0 to 14 being killed fell by 56 percent. This is odd, for if an increasing share of large pickup trucks on the road were responsible for increased carnage, you’d expect to see it among children and adults alike. 

Critics of large pickup trucks say, among other things, that the trucks are so large that drivers can’t see pedestrians just in front of them (assuming that their modern collision avoidance warning system isn’t working). Yet were that the cause of an increase in accidents, we would also expect to see an increasing death toll among young children, but we don’t. So, what else might be driving these fatalities? What might adults be doing that’s killing them on the roads?

Homeless Problem

Returning to the CDC, it noted that in 2019, almost half of pedestrian fatalities involved alcohol, and of those, 70 percent involved an impaired pedestrian. 

In the city of Austin, Texas, the left-wing city council reversed a longstanding policy in July 2019 regarding where the homeless could sit or lie down or “camp” on public spaces such as sidewalks, rights-of-way, and city parks. Overnight, Austin became one large homeless encampment. It got so bad that a majority of Democrat voters voted for a ballot initiative to overturn the ordinance in May 2021. 

Not coincidentally, the Austin Police Department started to report pedestrian deaths involving homeless people in 2019, finding that 19 of 36 pedestrians killed that year were homeless. Pedestrian fatalities rose in 2020. In 2021, 45 pedestrians died in Austin, rising to 50 in 2022. 

But with the city council cracking down on wrongspeak, the Austin Police Department grew quiet on reporting homeless traffic deaths. Instead, we see government officials emphasizing the erection of a pedestrian crossing barrier on I-35, Austin’s main north-south freeway, with the barrier reducing crashes with pedestrians by 89 percent.

Last month, a member of Austin’s “Vision Zero” team — so named for the intent to reduce traffic deaths to zero, a statistical impossibility without also eliminating vehicles  — dutifully pointed out, “We have large vehicles that are engaging with other vehicles or are engaging with other people outside of vehicles, so the speed matters tremendously and mass of the vehicle matters as well.” He went on to note, “People (are) wanting to walk around and bike around, and there aren’t as many safe crossings of our major freeways and frontage roads that are needed for people to get around safely.” 

He might have added, “For people to get around safely while blasted out of their minds screaming at unseen forces.” In October, the same crew, injecting race into traffic deaths, claimed that crashes disproportionately affect Austin’s communities of color. Morning commutes in downtown Austin often feature random homeless people crossing between intersections and weaving through busy traffic. 

The New York Times ran an article last February about the increase in pedestrian fatalities during the pandemic. The piece cited Harold Medina, the police chief of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who mentioned three factors: more aggressive driving, more drunk driving, and a growing homeless population. 

Thus, it’s possible that changes in behavior caused by Covid-19 lockdowns, such as an increase in alcohol abuse, as well as increasing homelessness (up 15 percent from 2016 to 2020), might be the main driver behind the 10 percent increase in adult pedestrian deaths over that same time.

Thus, general societal dysfunction, some of which is downstream from government policies, once again serves as a justification for activists to demand that government come for something the taxpaying citizenry use. Will the left soon demand a “certificate of need” be issued before anyone buys trucks of a certain size? 

The replacement for all those big, gas-guzzling trucks and cars will be even heavier electric vehicles that will cause even greater injuries to pedestrians while doing unprecedented amounts of damage to the roads — Ford’s F-150 pickup truck weighs in at 4,021 to 5,025 pounds — well exceeded by the Tesla X Long Range sedan at a hefty 5,185 pounds.