The Lexington Herald-Leader mugshot policy They love to print photos of Capitol kerfufflers being sentenced to just probation, but hide the photos of convicted sex offenders!

The Lexington Herald-Leader adheres to the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, which begins:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness.

Though I disagree with that policy, its basis is clearly and explicitly stated protection of those charged with crimes, but not yet convicted. Why, then, is what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal not publishing the mugshots of those convicted of serious crimes?

2 sentenced to prison time over ‘very disturbing’ sexual assault of a Lexington child

Crystal Secrest. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, via Lexington Herald-Leader, December 8, 2018.

by Jeremy Chisenhall | Monday, November 8, 2021 | 12:04 PM EDT | Updated: 4:04 PM EDT

A Lexington woman and an Indiana man will each spend more than a decade in prison after entering pleas to sex crimes against a child.

Crystal Annette Secrest and Patrick Christopher Noble were both sentenced in Fayette Circuit Court Friday after pleading guilty in the same case; Secrest was accused of repeatedly forcing the victim to perform oral sex on Noble. Judge Thomas L. Travis, who sentenced Secrest to 16 years in prison and Noble to 18 years in prison on Friday, said the case was a “very disturbing situation.”

“I must say this is one of the more disturbing things that I’ve had the occasion to see and read about while I’ve been here on the bench,” Travis said prior to imposing Secrest’s sentence.

There’s more at the original. Miss Secrest is 32 years old, so if she serves the 13 years remaining on her full sentence — she was credited for time served since her arrest in December of 2018 — she won’t get out of prison until she’s 45 years old. I would like to think that she’ll serve the full term, but don’t really have much confidence of that.

Patrick Noble, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, a public record.

Then there’s Patrick Noble. Mr Noble has been locked up since March 12, 2019, so he’s already served 2¾ years, of his 18 year sentence. Since he’s already 56 years old, we can at least hope he won’t be released until he’s 71 years old.

Mr Noble entered an Alford plea, in which he did not admit guilt, but conceded that there was enough evidence against him to be convicted in a jury trial. Nevertheless, Mr Noble maintains his innocence, and his attorney, Shannon Brooks-English, said that he would appeal. Rosa Noble, his wife, said that she supported her husband 100%, and she knew that he did not commit the crimes.

Uh huh, right.

So, why did the Herald-Leader, which wasted bandwidth on a stock illustration, not publish the mugshots of these two malefactors? Surely their offenses were far greater than those of some of the Capitol kerfufflers, people whose crimes were so heinous that they were allowed to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge, the maximum sentence for which is six months, and some of whom have received probation!

Governor Tom Wolf dances to avoid a court ruling He's going to end mask mandate in January, hoping to get the lawsuits against the state dismissed as moot.

Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) will, thankfully, be gone in a year, but he’s anxious to protect what executive authority he can while he remains in office.

As the Delta variant spread, Governor Wolf initially stated that he would leave mask mandate decisions up to local school boards. Then, when many of those school boards didn’t decide the way he wanted them to decide, the Governor got acting Secretary of Health Allison Beam to issue a public health order requiring masks indoors in the Commonwealth’s schools, public and private alike, as well as early learning and child-care facilities.

We noted, last June, that the Governor scheduled an end to the state’s mask mandate just a day after the state legislature slapped him down over it. Now, he’s doing it again!

Pa. mask mandate for public and private schools expected to end in January, Wolf says

Gov. Tom Wolf’s update to the school mask mandate comes as vaccinations have expanded to children ages 5-11. The mandate will remain in early learning and child care centers.

by Jamie Martines | Monday, November 8, 2021

HARRISBURG — A statewide order mandating students, staff, and visitors to public and private K-12 schools to wear a mask while indoors is expected to be lifted Jan. 17, Gov. Tom Wolf announced Monday.

At that point, local school officials will be allowed to decide what mitigation efforts to implement.

Part of the order that applies to early learning programs and child care centers will remain in effect until further notice, Wolf said in a statement. . . . .

“Now, we are in a different place than we were in September, and it is time to prepare for a transition back to a more normal setting,” Wolf said in a statement Monday. “Unfortunately, the COVID-19 virus is now a part of our daily lives, but with the knowledge we’ve gained over the past 20 months and critical tools like the vaccine at our disposal, we must take the next step forward in our recovery.”

There’s more at the original, but part of the answer is clear: the masking order has been challenged in court, and if the order is ended on January 17th, just 2¼ months from now, given the long delays in the court system, the lawsuits can be dismissed as moot, because the order will have ended. That would leave the method used by the Governor and his minions in place, in case they wanted to use it again.

The plaintiff’s attorney has stated that the lawsuits will proceed anyway, because the order will be kept in place for younger children and day care facilities, and that not challenging the order in court leaves the mechanism available if the Governor wants to use it again.

We had noted the vast assumption of power by the petty dictators in the executive branch. Then-Secretary of Health Richard Levine[1]Dr Levine is a male who is so delusional that he thinks he is female, and goes by the name ‘Rachel.’ In their continuing mission to normalize transgenderism, the credentialed media always refer … Continue reading even ordered Pennsylvanians to wear masks in their own homes, if they had non-household members present.

Of course, the mask mandate might not end in Philadelphia, because Mayor Jim Kenney and acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole just love to exercise authoritarian power.

References

References
1 Dr Levine is a male who is so delusional that he thinks he is female, and goes by the name ‘Rachel.’ In their continuing mission to normalize transgenderism, the credentialed media always refer to him as ‘Rachel,’ and no longer note that he is ‘transgender. The First Street Journal, in accordance with its Stylebook, does not go along with such stupidity, and always refers to people by their biological sex and proper name.

Governor Andy Beshear hurts the poor in Kentucky

Steve Beshear, the former Governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, has a guesstimated net worth of $1.5 million. Mr Beshear spent almost his entire adult life in politics, and:

is an American attorney and politician who served as the 61st governor of Kentucky from 2007 to 2015. He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives from 1974 to 1980, was the state’s 44th attorney general from 1980 to 1983, and was the 49th lieutenant governor from 1983 to 1987.

He ‘suffered’ through an interregnum when he finished third in the Democratic primary for Governor, and he spent twenty years practicing law with Lexington’s prestigious firm of Stites and Harbison. Briefly put, Mr Beshear led a reasonably privileged lifestyle in the Bluegrass State’s second largest city.

The former Governor’s son, Andy Beshear, wound up leading a similarly privileged lifestyle, able to attend Vanderbilt University, the only private school in the Southeastern Conference, current estimated cost of attendance $80,546 per academic year, and then the University of Virginia School of Law, current estimated cost of attendance for out-of-state students $91,704 per academic year.

In 2005, he was also hired by Stites and Harbison. No ambulance-chasing for the younger Me Beshear.

The younger Mr Beshear was elected state Attorney General in 2015, and subsequently Governor in 2019.

When the COVID-19 pandemic, or panicdemic as I sometimes call it, arose in early 2020, Governor Beshear issued draconian executive orders which shut down much of the ‘non-essential’ businesses in the Bluegrass State. Fifteen days to flatten the infection curve, we were told!

View from Natural Bridge, October 23, 2021. Photo by Dana R Pico. Click to enlarge.

Fast forward to this autumn. The Pico family visited Natural Bridge State Park on Saturday, October 23rd. It wasn’t a long visit, in that we didn’t have much time, so we took the skylift to the top of the bridge, from which I took the photograph.[1]Photos copyright by Dana R Pico. May be freely used with proper attribution.

When one of my Twitter friends replied, “I am surprised more leaves haven’t turned yet!” I resolved to return in two weeks to repeat the photo. So, we returned on Sunday, November 7th, and I got the photo, which will appear further down.

We had more time on Sunday, so while we took the skylift up, we decided to hike down Balanced Rock Trail, which ends not at the bottom of the skylift, but at Hemlock Lodge, the park’s hotel, gift shop and dining room facility.

Signs on the doors to Hemlock Lodge. Photo by Dana R Pico. Click to enlarge.

And Hemlock Lodge is where we found these signs on the doors, requiring masks for entry. Well, we didn’t have masks with us, and entered anyway, quickly discovering that the signs were mostly honored in the breach by park visitors, though employees did wear the infernal things.

What we also found was that the once-thriving restaurant was closed to dining! There were two ladies working therein, who would get carry-out orders. I asked them why the place was closed, and was told that the facility had been shut down due to COVID-19, and that was in March of 2020. Most of the staff had been laid off, and now, twenty months later, they still were not back.

Natural Bridge State Park is located in the Red River Gorge geological area, and straddles Powell and Wolfe counties in Kentucky. These are two very poor counties:

  • Powell County: The median income for a household in the county was $25,515, and the median income for a family was $30,483. Males had a median income of $26,962 versus $18,810 for females. The per capita income for the county was $13,060. About 18.90% of families and 23.50% of the population were below the poverty line, including 31.00% of those under age 18 and 20.00% of those age 65 or over.
  • Wolfe County: The median income for a household in the county was $19,310, and the median income for a family was $23,333. Males had a median income of $23,859 versus $18,952 for females. The per capita income for the county was $10,321. About 29.90% of families and 35.90% of the population were below the poverty line, including 50.20% of those under age 18 and 26.70% of those age 65 or over.

As much as people hear about jobs going begging for people, much of that is in suburban and urban areas; rural eastern Kentucky is not like that. When Governor Beshear — a Democrat, of course — shut down so much of the state parks, he put people out of work that had fewer prospects for finding something else.

View from Natural Bridge, November 7, 2021. Photo by Dana R Pico. Click to enlarge.

For restaurant workers? There’s Miguel’s Pizza, right across State Route 11 from the entrance to the state park, but it offers lower wages and doesn’t have state employee benefits. Governor Beshear, reared in wealthier Lexington, the scion of a prominent family, doesn’t really understand what he has done to rural Kentuckians, or, if he does understand, he doesn’t really care.

This has been the problem with the Patricians all along: they are so wrapped up in their own little worlds that they have lost any concept of what it is like for the plebeians. For the well-to-do, well, heck, two weeks to flatten the curve was nothing, they could handle it!

But for the working class, two weeks without their jobs isn’t nothing; it’s two weeks without bills getting paid. Governor Beshear doesn’t understand that, and doesn’t want to understand that.

References

References
1 Photos copyright by Dana R Pico. May be freely used with proper attribution.

Killadelphia! Philadelphia's homicide rate has increased dramatically since Joe Biden was elected

Mayor Jim Kenney (Democrat-Philadelphia), District Attorney Larry Krasner (Soros-Philadelphia), and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (Puppet-Philadelphia) haven’t quite won the Bronze Medal for annual homicides for the City of Brotherly Love for the year, but they aren’t far away. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reports that there have been 471 homicides in the city so far this year, through 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, November 7th. With 471 killings over 311 days elapsed in the year, that works out to 1.5145 per day, or a projected 552.7814 for 2021. Since there’s no such thing as 0.7814 of a homicide, that works out to a projected 553.

As of November 7th in 2020, there had been 422 killings in the city. Due to the counting problems in the 2020 elections, that Joe Biden had defeated President Trump on November 3rd wasn’t certain until November 5th. Since the Philly Police don’t report the homicide numbers on the weekend until the subsequent Monday, this is the first day I could make this comparison, but since the evil reich-wing Donald Trump was defeated, and the all sweetness-and-light Joe Biden elected, there have been 548 homicides in the city, over 367 days.

Yet from November 7, 2019 to November 7, 2020, Philly saw ‘only’ 474 murders. It seems as though the killing rate in Philly has been significantly higher, as in 15.61% higher, since Mr Biden was elected! And remember: the vast majority of the COVID-19 lockdowns occurred when Mr Trump was President, so you can’t blame it all on the pandemic.

No Bronze Medal yet, but Miss Outlaw and Messrs Kenney and Krasner need just five more to tie for third place, and at the current rate, they ought to get that by Wednesday or Thursday.

Court-ordered idiocy

So far, 11:30 AM EDT, the Lexington Herald-Leader has nothing on this story, but if they do publish it, watch them not publish the offender’s mugshot, not try to help the police catch the malefactor.

    Lexington Police search for missing inmate

    By: Web Staff | Posted at 10:50 AM, Nov 07, 2021 and last updated 10:50 AM, Nov 07, 2021

    Alan Tatman. Photo by: Division of Community Corrections.

    LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — Lexington Police are searching for a missing inmate named Alan Tatman.

    According to the Division of Community Corrections, Tatman did not return to jail on Saturday after a court-ordered pass.

    In a press release, Lieutenant Richard Frans said Tatman was released at 9 a.m. and was supposed to return at 5 p.m. but failed to do so.

    Frans said Tatman is being held on two counts of theft by unlawful taking and one count of failure to appear for a charge of burglary in the third degree.

    He is also being held on two warrants for probation violations out of Jessamine County.

    Tatman is 47-years-old, 5-foot-7, and weighs 185 pounds, has brown hair and hazel eyes.

Mr Tatman is already a convicted criminal, as the fact he was being held for probation violations attests. But, more incredibly, why would any judge issue a “court-ordered pass” to someone being held on a failure to appear warrant? Isn’t that pretty much the definition of a flight risk?

Any items he steals, any damage he causes, and any expenses he incurs in the police locating and apprehending him should be borne by whichever oh-so-wise judge ordered a day pass for him. Hold the judge accountable!

——————————-

Update: 5:53 PM EDT

As predicted, when the Herald-Leader did finally cover the story, in an article by reporter Jeremy Chisenhall time stamped at 4:45 PM, the fugitive’s mugshot, which was freely available to it, did not appear in the article, as screen captured on the right; you can click on the image to enlarge it.

Mr Tatman is not someone who has simply been charged but not convicted; he has previous criminal convictions. Now he’s a fugitive from justice, and if WLEX-TV, Channel 18, the NBC affiliate in Lexington could show his mugshot, and perhaps have some random citizen spot the fugitive and recognize him as such, why couldn’t what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal? Perhaps, just perhaps, a reader of the newspaper’s website might be the one top spot the man and call the cops.

The Herald-Leader is more concerned with protecting the anonymity of convicted criminals and fugitives from justice than with the safety of its readership.

Murder number 33 in Lexington Just one more to tie the record . . . with eight weeks left in the year!

On October 16th, we noted Lexington’s 30th homicide, which tied the then-record set in 2019. Then, on October 27th, we reported on number 31, followed by number 32 on the 29th.

So, now it’s November 5th, and the city is up to homicide number 33:

LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — Lexington Police responded to a shots fired call after 2:30 a.m. Friday morning at a house on West Main Street.

Police are investigating this incident as a homicide, which they say occurred upstairs in an apartment.

The owner of Trifecta, the location where the shooting happened, told LEX 18 that the victim who died upstairs is not a tenant there. “We appreciate everyone’s concern and know everything will be okay. We’re cooperating with authorities to do whatever we can to solve the case,” the owner said.

That’s four homicides in twenty days, well above the current annual rate of one every 9½ days. The city is on pace for 39 homicides now, which would shatter the current record of 34, set just last year.

But, if you get pissed off at someone in Lexington, you might as well shoot him! Out of 113 active shooting investigations — and, as of this writing, the Lexington Police Department last updated the shootings investigations page on October 28 — only 12 are listed as solved. Of the homicides, only 12 out of the 31 listed — that page is behind on updates, too — have been solved.

Another two bite the dust!

If I check the website of The Philadelphia Inquirer in the evening, I can sometimes — certainly not always — find brief stories about murder victims in the City of Brotherly Love:

2 women killed in North Philly shooting

The shooting occurred on the 1900 block of Ridge Avenue.

by Robert Moran | Thursday, November 4, 2021 | 8:10 PM EDT

Two unidentified women were fatally shot Thursday night in North Philadelphia, police said.

The shooting was reported shortly after 7:45 p.m. on the 1900 block of Ridge Avenue. Police arriving at the scene found two women inside a building that was first believed to be a church, but later described as a speakeasy.

The women were pronounced dead by medics at 7:52.

Police said the shooting scene appeared to be outside in front of the building, where they found spent shell casings.

That’s the entire story, and I’d bet euros to eclairs that I won’t be able to find it anywhere on the Inquirer’s website main page on Friday morning. But two more homicides brings the city’s total for 2021 up to at least 466.
——————————-
Updated: Friday, November 5, 2021

As I anticipated, the homicide total is 466, and no, there isn’t a single reference to the story concerning the homicide on the main page of the Inquirer’s website, even though the story was updated with more details at 9:39 AM this morning.

Black lives don’t matter in Philadelphia!

I’m in Twitter jail!

From the New York Post:

    Activists swarm Joe Manchin’s Maserati as he tries to leave parking garage

    By Samuel Chamberlain | November 4, 2021 | 7:38pm Updated

    A gaggle of far-left environmental activists followed Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) from his DC houseboat to his car Thursday morning and attempted to prevent him from leaving a parking garage — the latest fit of progressive pique over Manchin’s current opposition to the multitrillion-dollar Democratic social spending bill.

    Video tweeted by John Paul Mejia, a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, showed Manchin walking from his houseboat on the Potomac River — where the senator rests his head when not in his home state — to the garage.

    As he strolled, Manchin was serenaded by chants of “We want to live!” while individual activists yelled at him to “Fight for us!”

There’s more at the original, but the post then included this tweet:

That is an actual assault on a sitting United States Senator, but Twitter is just fine with that. But Twitter sure didn’t like my response:

So, it’s perfectly acceptable to publish a tweet showing an actual assault, but it’s not OK to say that, if the Senator had actually done what hey claimed he was trying to do, run them over — which he did not — they would have deserved it.

Of course I appealed, but I know that it will be rejected, and I’ll have to dump the tweet — which I most certainly meant! — or dump Twitter.

The 2021 elections: a victory for normal people!

Yascha Mounk, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the founder of Persuasion, clearly doesn’t like Donald Trump, clearly wants Democrats to win, but he is also clear headed about why Democrats lost so badly in Tuesday’s elections.

But the one option that is both intellectually dishonest and electorally disastrous is to insist on a verbal trick unworthy of a middle-school debate team: to keep claiming that widespread concern over these ideas is misguided because the term by which they have publicly come to be known technically applies to an academic research program rather than the lessons that real children are being taught in real schools. And yet, this is precisely what McAuliffe and so many others attempted to do—with disastrous results—over the closing months of his campaign.

For anybody who cares about making sure that Donald Trump does not become the 47th president of the United States, it is crucial that Democrats avoid repeating the mistakes that just put a Republican in Virginia’s governor’s mansion. It is impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. If Democrats keep doing so, they will keep losing.

Dr Mounk spent a fair amount of bandwidth telling us how ‘Critical Race Theory” is an academic concept taught only at the collegiate level, a defense made by many on the left, but he’s smart enough to note that some of its concepts and conclusions have filtered down to the teachers educated at those universities, and some of them have come up with lessons which stress some of CRT’s ideas.

(A)cross the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about America’s copious historical sins.

In some elementary and middle schools, students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as “perfectionism” or the “worship of the written word” as elements of “white-supremacy culture.”.

There’s a lot at his original, which you can read for yourself by following the link.

As I write this, #whitewomen is trending on Twitter, and it’s filled with all sorts of leftist hate for the white women in Virginia. Those voters helped Joe Biden to carry the Old Dominion in 2020, but, just a year later, they broke heavily for Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe, 57% to 43%. Tweets like this, this, and this show the foaming at the mouth anger of the left, but it demonstrates the wholly limited political view of the left. In creating every sort of demographic as a special interest group, and then setting themselves up as arbiters of what beliefs are acceptable for those groups, the left can’t see much beyond their noses. White women are supposed to vote for Democrats to support abortion, don’t you know, but the left can’t quite seem to grasp that white women are very often white mothers, and mothers have different interests. If elements of CRT have trickled down into secondary and even primary education, white mothers of white children are going to be worried about whether the far-left positions on race are going to have negative effects on their own children.

Amanda Marcotte, who is childless by choice, and thus has no first-hand experience in worrying about what the future will hold for her children, wrote:

Republicans are reliably easy to rile up with two main weapons: bigotry and resentment of liberals. The performative freakout over trans rights and “critical race theory” in public schools was built on easily debunked lies, and will be dropped the second it’s no longer electorally useful. But none of that matters, because Republicans live in a cloistered media ecosystem where kids reading “Beloved” in high school and imaginary rapists-in-dresses jumping strangers in the bathroom are treated like far more pressing threats to society than climate change or wealth inequality.

Dr Mounk debunked, with examples, her claim that CRT has no influence in the public schools, and her first link, in “trans rights” leads to her own article in which she claimed that transgenderism had nothing to do with the bathroom rape stories out of Loudoun County, Virginia, a claim which has been debunked by the (alleged) assailant’s own mother. No matter how many times the left try to tell us that there are no heterosexual boys who will exploit ‘transgender’ policies to get into the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, it doesn’t take many incidents like this to blow that argument out of the water. That it became public just a couple of weeks before the election surely didn’t help the Democrats.

Those white women in Virginia, the ones who gave a majority of their votes to Mr Biden? A lot of them might have a great deal of sympathy for the transgendered, in an abstract sense, but when their daughters are the ones put at risk by some of these policies, guess which side wins.

Mr McAuliffe made a huge gaffe in a debate, saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Uhhh, that’s saying that the state, not parents, ought to guide children’s development, and perhaps, just perhaps, a lot of parents disagree.

Then, just two days before the election, he said:

I promise you we’ve gotta diversify our teacher base here in Virginia. Fifty percent of the students in Virginia schools K-12 — 50% are students of color and yet 80% of the teachers are white.

In saying that, Mr McAuliffe raised the obvious question: why, in a state in which 67.63% of the population are white, are only 50% of the public school students white? How bad must the Commonwealth’s public schools be if so many white parents choose to put their children in private or parochial schools? Just as an example, at St Mary Star of the Sea School in Hampton, Virginia, where my daughters went to elementary school, tuition for two children, of parishioners, is $10,450 for the ten-month academic year, or $1,045 every month. For non-parishioners, it’s $12,620. That’s not just chump change, but, for a private school, that’s actually kind of low.

In the aftermath of the death in custody of drug addled convicted felon George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the #BlackLivesMatter riots that lasted much of the summer of 2020, the hard left thought that they could dramatically reduce or even eliminate police departments across the country. In the city that started it all, the voters rejected, by a wide measure, a ballot measure to amend the city charter to replace the police with a department of public safety.

It was all too, too much. Voters in Minneapolis may have had some qualms about the actions and tactics of their police department, but they realized that one is needed. The fact that the city is on a near-record pace in murders might just have influenced them. [1]“This killing is the city’s 81st homicide so far this year, according to a Star Tribune database. The man’s identity has yet to be released. The highest one-year number of homicides … Continue reading

I actually supported the Minneapolis measure; I wanted the idiots there to serve as a test case.

The left, emboldened by victories in the 2018 and 2020 elections, thought that they had carte blanche to ruin impose their agenda on America, and, were it not for Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) doing something really radical like representing the people who elected him, rather than the ‘progressives’ of the districts of the Squadristi,[2]Six radical members of the House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY14), Ilhan Omar Mynett (D-MN05), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA07), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI13), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY16), and Cori … Continue reading they might have succeeded.

But the voters, most of whom are actually normal people, want a normal life. They may have some sympathetic support for those afflicted with gender dysphoria, but they don’t want their kids put in greater danger. They might accept that #BlackLivesMatter, on an abstract scale, but in seeing the greatly increased murder rates in our cities, both the large majority of victims and perpetrators of which are black, the idea of defunding or eliminating the police departments was something which would have exposed their children and themselves to greater danger. They might accept the idea that black Americans were still impacted by historical discrimination, but that didn’t mean they wanted a society in which being white, and their children being white, would be legally pushed into a discriminated against situation. They wanted a calmer, safer lifestyle, and that was exactly the opposite of the radical societal reforms that the left were promising. And that was how they voted!

References

References
1 “This killing is the city’s 81st homicide so far this year, according to a Star Tribune database. The man’s identity has yet to be released. The highest one-year number of homicides in Minneapolis was 97 in 1995. There were 85 last year and 83 in 1996. By comparison, before the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, there were 48 homicides in Minneapolis in 2019.” 81 murders in 304 days equals 0.2664 homicides per day, which works out to 97 for the entire year, which would tie 1995’s record.
2 Six radical members of the House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY14), Ilhan Omar Mynett (D-MN05), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA07), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI13), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY16), and Cori Bush (D-MO01) call themselves the “Squad.” Given their authoritarian bent, I find the term “Squadristi” far more accurate; the squadristi, singular squadrista, were how Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts were referred to in Italian.