Author Archives: Dana Pico

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As nearly as I can tell, black lives don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer unless they are taken by a white police officer.

When you have been married for 41 years, 11 months and 7 days, as my wife and I have — but who’s counting, right? — a six-month anniversary seems pretty inconsequential, something that you remember like six-months of dating or you first six months of being married.[1]Actually, we got married just six months and two days after we met, and one day short of five months after our first date!

So, April 26th being the six-month anniversary of Walter Wallace, Jr, being sent to his eternal reward by two Philadelphia policemen as he was advancing on them with a raised knife never occurred to me when I mentioned his death in an article on the 25th.

But Mr Wallace’s family remembered, and held a small, roughly 200-person rally, and it was covered by The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Walter Wallace Jr. is remembered 6 months after police fatally shot him

“We will never let my brother’s name be forgotten,” said Lakitah Wallace, growing choked up. “Our lives matter. Our lives matter.”

by Rita Giordano and Kristen A. Graham | April 25, 2021

Three siblings stood in Malcolm X Park on Sunday and looked out at a crowd of more than 200 who gathered in West Philadelphia.

But there should have been four, said Lakitah Wallace, 28. Six months ago Monday, her brother Walter Wallace Jr. died at the hands of Philadelphia police.

“We will never let my brother’s name be forgotten,” said Lakitah Wallace, her voice catching. “Our lives matter. Our lives matter.”

In her brother’s honor, scores marched from 58th and Spruce to Malcolm X Park. The event marked one of the first times the family has appeared publicly since Wallace’s death. It was part of a multi-city rally calling for freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal and Russell Maroon Shoatz, both convicted of killing Philadelphia police officers.

Screen capture when searching Google for “Mumia”. Screen cap by Dana R Pico, April 26, 2021, at 7:46 AM EDT.

Freedom for Wesley Cook, who now goes by the fake name Mumia Abu-Jamal, huh? Mr Cook murdered a police officer, so naturally he’s some kind of hero to the #BlackLivesMatter protesters.[2]According to Wikipedia, “In 1968, a high school teacher, a Kenyan instructing a class on African cultures, encouraged the students to take African or Arabic names for classroom use; he gave … Continue reading

If you do a Google search for Mumia Abu-Jamal — and Google fills it in as soon as you finish typing Mumia — you get what I screen captured on the right, a claim that Mr Cook is a “Journalist.” If you click on his Wikipedia biography, you’ll get more material slanted in Mr Cook’s favor.

Mr Cook was sentenced to death for the murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981. Through exhaustive appeals, his sentence was later reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.[3]Fortunately, Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) does not have the power to issue pardons or sentence commutations absent “the recommendation in writing of a majority of the Board of Pardons,” or … Continue reading

Back to the Inquirer:

Lakitah Wallace — who was flanked by her sister Wynetta Wallace, Walter Jr.’s twin, and brother John Brant — led the crowd in a chant: “Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.”

“We want to give support to any family who has been traumatized by police brutality,” Lakitah Wallace said. “We want justice for my brother, we want justice for every other Black man who has been murdered and sacrificed in front of their loved ones.”

This is no different from the cries of outrage that a Columbus, Ohio, police officer shot and killed Ma’khia Bryant, a 16-year-old black girl, as young Miss Bryant was trying to stab another young black girl to death. What was the officer supposed to do, wait for Miss Bryant to kill her victim and then ask her to politely surrender so that he could place her under arrest?

A site search of the Inquirer’s website yielded no returns for Jaslyn Adams, a seven-year-old girl killed in a McDonald’s drive-through lane in Chicago, because gang-bangers were trying to kill her father? Her black life doesn’t matter, because it wasn’t taken by a white policeman.

Fortunately, one of the young Miss Adams’ alleged killers has been apprehended:

Marion Lewis, 18, faces a first-degree murder charge along with 17 other felony charges, including one count of aggravated vehicular hijacking, three counts of attempted first-degree murder and six counts of aggravated discharge of a firearm. . . . .

During Sunday’s bond hearing, prosecutors said Lewis was behind the wheel when two other suspects got out and fired several rounds into Adam’s vehicle. Police have identified the two suspects. Both remain at large.

But while Miss Adams’ murder has been prominent in the Chicago media, it still hasn’t been the media sensation that Ma’khia Bryant’s or Walter Wallace’s were, even though Miss Adams was an innocent victim, and the two killed by police officers were attacking with knives.

Where is the outrage in the black community, the nationwide black community, over the death of Miss Adams? Where is the outrage that the Inquirer, once considered a great newspaper, and, by some rights, the oldest daily newspaper in the United States, had no stories at all on the website main page, as of 8:45 AM EDT on any of the three homicides in the City of Brotherly Love over the weekend?[4]The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is updated only Monday through Friday. It reported that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, April 25th, 159 homicides had occurred … Continue reading

“If it bleeds, it leads,” is an old, old newspaper saying, yet, for the Inquirer, unless the bleeding victim is a child, a local child, a “somebody,” or a cute little white girl, — a site search for Rian Thal yielded 2,963 results — the Inquirer doesn’t cover it. As nearly as I can tell, black lives don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer unless they are taken by a white police officer.

References

References
↑1 Actually, we got married just six months and two days after we met, and one day short of five months after our first date!
↑2 According to Wikipedia, “In 1968, a high school teacher, a Kenyan instructing a class on African cultures, encouraged the students to take African or Arabic names for classroom use; he gave Cook the name “Mumia”. According to Abu-Jamal, “Mumia” means “Prince” and was the name of a Kenyan anti-colonial African nationalist who fought against the British before Kenyan independence. . . . . Cook adopted the surname Abu-Jamal (“father of Jamal” in Arabic) after the birth of his first child, son Jamal, on July 18, 1971.” There is no indication in the Wikipedia biography that Mr Cook ever legally changed his name, and even if he had, as a cop killer, he does not deserve any respect, and I will not show him any respect by deferring to his use of a made-up name.
↑3 Fortunately, Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) does not have the power to issue pardons or sentence commutations absent “the recommendation in writing of a majority of the Board of Pardons,” or that idiot probably would set Mr Cook free.
↑4 The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is updated only Monday through Friday. It reported that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, April 25th, 159 homicides had occurred in Philly. The previous update, on Friday morning, stated that there had been 156 homicides as of the end of Thursday, April 22nd.
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The credentialed media are the ones telling us that most black lives don’t matter

We noted on the 23rd how credentialed media institutions like what I like to call The Philadelphia Enquirer have been pushing the “cops shoot black people for no reason” meme, and how such an august newspaper — founded in 1829, making it decades older than The New York Times — responded with such glee at the conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin over the death of George Floyd:

Even on Sunday, April 25th, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page is running a big section on the verdict against Mr Chauvin:

Screen capture, The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 25, 2021, taken at 11:25 AM EDT, by Dana R Pico.

Now comes former Washington Times reporter Robert Stacy McCain, noting how the credentialed media — if you can actually call the HuffPost “credentialed” — are still fanning the flames:

Media: The Enemy of the People

by Robert Stacy McCain | April 25, 2021

Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics remarks on Twitter:

Hard to imagine a more divisive, sensational, context-less headline. A textbook example of the media being the enemy of the people.

The story in question is by the Associated Press:

Even as the Derek Chauvin case was fresh in memory — the reading of the verdict in a Minneapolis courtroom, the shackling of the former police officer, the jubilation at what many saw as justice in the death of George Floyd — even then, blood flowed on America’s streets.

And even then, some of that blood was shed at the hands of law enforcement.

At least six people were fatally shot by officers across the United States in the 24 hours after jurors reached a verdict in the murder case against Chauvin on Tuesday. The roll call of the dead is distressing:

  • A 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio.
  • An oft-arrested man in Escondido, California.
  • A 42-year-old man in eastern North Carolina. . . .
  • An unidentified man in San Antonio.
  • Another man, killed in the same city within hours of the first.
  • A 31-year-old man in central Massachusetts.

The circumstances surrounding each death differ widely.

Were they engaged in crime? Were they resisting arrest? Did they pose a threat of deadly violence? “Circumstances . . . differ widely,” we are told, but all the Associated Press and the headline writers at the Huffington Post are interested in is the number, with the implication that the lives of innocent Americans everywhere are endangered by the police.

There’s more at Mr McCain’s original.

The “16-year-old girl in Columbus”? A police officer shot her as she was attempting to stab another girl to death! The Inquirer ran two stories on the death of Ma’khia Bryant, but I have not been able to find a single story on the newspaper’s website main page concerning the individual deaths of people virtually every single day in the City of Brotherly Love, which I believe to be because there’s no perceived political advantage to be found in stories about young black men being shot by other young black men. Jaslyn Adams, the seven-year-old girl killed in a McDonald’s drive-through lane, because gang-bangers were trying to kill her father? Her black life doesn’t matter, because it wasn’t taken by a white policeman.

Mr McCain noted:

Even if someone is charging at you with a knife, cops can’t shoot them — that’s the madhouse toward which the media seek to lead us.

When I saw that brief paragraph, with the internal link about Ma’khia Bryant, my mind went to the shooting of Walter Wallace, Jr. There were riots in the City of Brotherly Love last fall after two officers shot Mr Wallace, a mentally unstable man who had been the subject of several calls to police, by his own family, that very day due to his rampages. Body camera photos showed the whacked out Mr Wallace charging two officers, on the last call concerning Mr Wallace’s threatening behavior, with a raised knife.

Of course, the Usual Suspects waxed wroth. Why didn’t they shoot him in the leg, the Snowflakes™ chimed in? Why didn’t they use tasers? (The responding officers did not have tasers.) William Teach noted that the San Diego Union Tribune’s Editorial Board said that Police urgently need a more humane alternative to lethal weapons. It’s time to design one, as though no one is trying to do that right now. Sometimes I think that these people have watched too much Star Trek and think the police can just set their phasers on stun.

Naturally, the family, the same family who called the cops on Mr Wallace, “wanted answers.” The answer was simple: two officers responded, had to make a split second decision on a guy charging at them with a knife, and took the right one. Riots followed in Philly, and the Inquirer’s website gave 99 returns in a site search for Walter Wallace.

The activists at Ohio State University, which is located in Columbus, the city in which Miss Bryant was killed, were just thoroughly upset about it:

Destiny Brown, a senior at the Ohio State University, breathed a sigh of relief in her dorm room on Tuesday when the guilty verdict came down for former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. But the moment of respite proved short-lived. Minutes later, she scrolled on Twitter and learned that a 16-year-old Black girl, Ma’Khia Bryant, had been shot and killed that afternoon by Columbus police.

“I can’t even begin to process the fact that we live in a world where people’s lives — regardless of what they’re doing, what they have going on, guilty or not, innocent or not — their lives just do not matter,” Brown told Yahoo News. “It doesn’t make sense to me and never will.”

Overcome with a feeling of helplessness, Brown fired off a group text message to her friends Tuesday evening. “I’m ready to organize again,” she told them.

In a matter of hours, Brown and her friends had planned a sit-in to be held the following day at the Ohio Union, the university’s student center in Columbus. Their goal, Brown said, was simple: to demand that the school sever ties with Columbus police over Bryant’s killing and its mistreatment of students of color.

Columbus, Ohio, saw 175 murders in 2020, and, as of mid October, 75% of the victims were black:

Columbus Police also shared details on the homicide suspects. Of the 79 identified, 65 are Black with 59 being Black men, and nine are white with eight being white men.

Of the cases police say were solved, 56 had a Black victim and a Black suspect, two had a Black victim and a white suspect, seven had a white victim and a Black suspect and six had a white victim and a white suspect.

I couldn’t find more recent numbers, but in 2010, the population of Columbus was 28.0% black. Shouldn’t Destiny Brown, a senior at Ohio State, be asking why a city that’s 28% black is seeing 75% of murder victims being black, and that 96.6% of the solved murders of black people were committed by other black people? Then again, if the local media in Columbus are anything like the media in Philadelphia, Miss Brown may never have heard that so many black people had been killed locally, the vast majority of them by other black people.

The lovely Miss Brown wouldn’t admit it, of course, because she’s too #woke to do so, and asking the question leads to an uncomfortable truth: in urban America, the black culture allows these killings to happen, and the credentialed media have been their willing accomplices.

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The Lexington Herald-Leader finally publishes a photo of a criminal suspect Could it be that because, this time, the accused is white rather than black?

We have previously noted that the Lexington Herald-Leader does not like posting photographs of accused criminals, even when those suspects are still at large and publishing the photo might help the police capture him.

So, we were somewhat surprised when the newspaper did publish such a photograph:

Kentucky man allegedly tried to kidnap 3-year-old boy, offered $1,000 to buy him

By Bill Estep | April 23, 2021 | 9:41 AM EDT

Ronnie L. Helton was charged in April 2021 with attempting to kidnap a child. Whitley County Detention Center

A Kentucky man who allegedly tried to kidnap a 3-year-old boy as he played in the yard has been charged in federal court.

A grand jury indicted Ronnie L. Helton, of Corbin, Thursday on one charged of attempted kidnapping.

Helton, 73, was arrested on state charges hours after an April 7 incident in Corbin in which a woman named Kristy Baker told police a man had tried to take her grandchild.

Baker said the boy was playing on a trailer sitting next to a fence around her yard when a man parked across the street and walked over to the child, according to the citation in the case.

There are more details of the case and the arrest at the Herald-Leader original.

This is one of the times I miss my late best friend, who grew up in Corbin. He would have turned 67 years old a month and a half ago, and, Corbin being the small town it is, might even have known the accused. He used to refer to the paper as the Lexington Herald-Liberal, and if it was true in the past, it is even more true today.

Mr Helton is, of course, presumed to be innocent until proven guilty, and perhaps the presumption of innocence could explain the Herald-Leader’s reluctance to publish photos of other suspects; after all, suspects’ photos will almost certainly lead to negative consequences for them locally in the event that some of them are acquitted or the charges are dropped! But such a consideration must not have been applied to Mr Helton, and in a much smaller town like Corbin, 2019 guesstimated population 7,202, he is likely to be far more widely known than in a city like Lexington, 2019 guesstimate population 323,152.

Mr Helton’s photograph was provided by the Whitley County Detention Center, and thus was freely available. But, as we noted in a previous story, the photo of then at-large suspect Juanyah Clay was published by all of the other Lexington media, and was available from both the Lexington city government and on the Lexington Police Department’s Facebook page. The Herald-Leader would not have had to pay for it, nor was bandwidth a problem, given that the newspaper’s website included stock photos of the police stringing up crime scene tape.

There was a stock photo in the story on the charges against Mr Helton as well, of two hands sticking through jail cell bars.

So, why not publish the photos of other suspects when they are freely available? As I speculated previously, I am guessing that it is because Juanyah Clay is black. The published photo of Mr Helton, who is obviously white, might not be proof that my speculation was correct, but it certainly provides evidence of it.

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Is it any wonder black Americans don’t trust the police? Liberal media organizations like The Philadelphia Inquirer try to undermine trust

Do you know who Jaslyn Adams is?

You could be forgiven if you hadn’t heard of young Miss Adams, whose black life didn’t matter all that much, because she wasn’t shot by a white policeman.

‘I want my baby’s killers in jail,’ dad says at vigil for 7-year-old Jaslyn Adams

About 75 neighbors, family members and friends gathered in East Garfield Park Wednesday to honor Jaslyn, who was fatally shot Sunday while at a McDonald’s drive-thru with her father.

Jaslyn Adams. Photo provided to media by family.

By Madeline Kenney | April 21, 2021, 9:48pm CDTAbout 75 neighbors, family members and friends gathered in East Garfield Park Wednesday evening to honor the life of 7-year-old Jaslyn Adams, who was fatally shot Sunday as she and her father were getting food at a McDonald’s drive-thru.

Pink spray paint covered the sidewalks and brick wall with messages, like “I love you, Pinky” — Jaslyn’s nickname. Dozens of pink balloons were taped to the wall.

Jaslyn’s father, Jontae Adams, who was also wounded in the Sunday afternoon shooting, struggled to get out of his car when he arrived at the vigil. His loved ones helped him walk with his crutches before his father stopped him and the two embraced.

“I’m sorry, man,” Adams murmured as he cried on his father’s shoulder.

I’ve said it before: murders of black people are not news to The Philadelphia Inquirer unless the victim is a child, a “somebody,” or a cute little white girl. Young Miss Adams was killed in Chicago, as some thug was gunning for her father, so it’s not Philly news, and, a site search of the Inquirer’s website for Jaslyn Adams, at 9:24 AM EDT today, got zero returns. The Inquirer never mentioned her killing.

Fortunately, a suspect has been apprehended, and Chicago police have said the killing was gang-related.

Police body camera image of Ma’khia Bryant trying to stab another woman.


The Inquirer did have two stories about the shooting death of 16-year-old Ma’khia Bryant at the hands of a white police officer; young Miss Bryant was shot while attempting to stab another black woman. Miss Bryant’s black life mattered because of who fired the shots who killed her, and, for some people, her black life mattered more than the girl, another black girl, she was trying to kill.

And so we come to the newspaper I have sometimes referred to as The Philadelphia Enquirer:[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.

Families of murdered Philadelphians know the hollow victory of justice

No verdict will undo the harm — whether it’s a death by state-sanctioned police brutality or by Philadelphia’s relentless gun violence.

by Helen Ubiñas | Columnist | April 21, 2021

Aleida Garcia watched the verdict against former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin at home, alone, and found herself reliving the 2018 day she sat in a cramped Philadelphia courtroom praying for justice in the murder of her son.

It all felt so familiar, she told me moments after the Chauvin verdict was announced Tuesday: the anxiety, the adrenaline, and then, finally, the relief when, just like the man who murdered her son in 2015, Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd.

Victory — if only a painfully hollow one.

“It’s like the twilight zone,” Garcia said, recalling the day the man who killed her son was sentenced to life in prison. “You feel like somehow you earned a prize and the prize is having your child back, that he’s going to walk through the door, but of course that’s never going to happen.”

Because as she and other loved ones of murder victims know all too well: No verdict will undo the harm — whether it’s a death by state-sanctioned police brutality or by Philadelphia’s relentless gun violence that claimed nearly 500 lives last year and more than 150 so far this year.

There’s more of the same drivel at the original, but notice: in both the article subtitle — which may have been written by an editor rather than Miss Ubiñas — and Miss Ubiñas’ copy, “state-sanctioned police brutality” is listed before “Philadelphia’s relentless gun violence.”

On the Inquirer’s website main page, at 10:03 AM EDT, there was not a single story listed concerning any homicides in Philadelphia yesterday or overnight . . . but, according to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, two more people were sent to an early grave in Philly’s mean streets, though one killing happened early enough yesterday for a very brief article on the website yesterday. The victim, a 20-year-old man, was shot “several times,” which makes it appear to be a deliberate hit, and probably gang-related. But, to Miss Ubiñas, let’s worry about the very few people killed by police officers. A whopping 156 people have been killed in Philadelphia so far this year, 38 more than the same date last year — and remember: 2020 was a leap year, so April 22nd was the 113th day of 2020, but just the 112th day this year — a 32.20% increase over last year. At 1.39 homicides per day, the City of Brotherly Love is on track for a record 508 murders in 2021.

But the Enquirer doesn’t care about that, or at least doesn’t comment on that, other than to use the euphemism “gun violence,” when the problem is bad people picking up those inanimate objects and shooting people. As we noted two days ago, the Inquirer was full of gloating and thankful articles about the conviction of Derek Chauvin, but nobody there seems to give a damn about the people, the mostly black victims, killed on the streets every f(ornicating) day by other people, mostly other black people, because to note that would offend the sensibilities of the #woke in the Inquirer’s newsroom.[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading

I’ve said it before: black lives don’t matter, at least not to the editors, columnists and writers of the Inquirer, unless they are taken by a white police officer. It has become obvious with the way the Inquirer does everything it can to undermine the Philadelphia Police Department, and to ruin what little trust black Philadelphians have in calling the cops.
___________________________________
Related articles from other sites:

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Sarah Longwell and Jennifer Rubin don’t like democracy, not if the rabble don’t kowtow to what they think is right

It was this tweet which caught my eye:

Wikipedia describes The Bulwark as:

an American anti-Trump conservative news and opinion website founded in 2018 by commentators Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol.[1][2][3] Its publisher is Sarah Longwell.[4] While it launched as a news aggregator, it was revamped into a news and opinion site using key digital staffers from the defunct magazine The Weekly Standard.

Anti-Trump? That’s why Jennifer Rubin likes it! Mrs Rubin has allowed her visceral hatred of former President Trump to change views she previously held:

Rubin has been one of the most vocal conservative-leaning writers to criticize Donald Trump, as well as the overall behavior of the Republican Party during Trump’s term in office. Rubin denounced Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement as “a dog whistle to the far right”, and designed to please his “climate change denial, right-wing base that revels in scientific illiteracy.” Previously, after Barack Obama had approved the agreement, Rubin characterized it as “nonsense” and argued that it would not achieve anything. Rubin described Trump’s 2017 decision to not implement parts of the Iran nuclear deal as the “emotional temper tantrum of an unhinged president.” She had previously said that “if you examine the Iran deal in any detail, you will be horrified as to what is in there.” Rubin strongly supported the United States officially recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Early in his presidency, she criticized Trump for not doing so, saying that it was indicative of his tendency to “never keep his word.” She concluded that Trump “looks buffoonish in his hasty retreat”. In December 2017, after Trump announced that he would move the embassy, she said it was “a foreign policy move without purpose.”[29]

In August 2019, Rubin was a guest on a panel on MSNBC’s “AM Joy” with the premise that Mr. Trump leads “an extreme administration” that is “dangerous.” Rubin said: “It’s not only that Trump has to lose, but that all his enablers have to lose. We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again“. [30]

In a tweet referenced by CNN Media, Mike Huckabee questioned Rubin, writing: “Jen Rubin is WAPO’s excuse for conservative,” and adding that Rubin’s “contempt for all things Trump exposes her and WAPO as fake news“.[31]

In April 2021 Rubin was declared winner of the second annual Liberal Hack Tournament, hosted by the “Ruthless” variety progrum, becoming the first woman to win the title.[32]

Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic argued that after the 2012 presidential election, Rubin criticized aspects of the Mitt Romney campaign that she had previously praised, with Friedersdorf insisting that she had acted as “a disingenuous mouthpiece for her favored candidate”.[33]

In a November 21, 2013, column, Rubin called on the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) to end its campaign against same-sex marriage.[34]

In September of 2020, she announced that she no longer described herself as a conservative, but given he criticisms of Mitt Romney’s positions and support of same-sex ‘marriage,’ perhaps she should have done that a decade earlier.

On to The Bulwark:

Did We Forget Our Democracy Is Still Under Threat?

Complacency is an inherent weakness of democracy.

by Sarah Longwell | April 22, 2021 | 5:30 AM EDT

Old joke: An old fish and a young fish pass each other. The old fish says, “Fine water today, isn’t it?” The young fish replies, “What’s water?”

This, I have learned in hundreds of hours of focus groups, is how many Americans think about democracy—or more accurately, don’t think about it. Democracy is the system we have, and have inherited, but most of our experiences with any of the alternatives are so remote that we view democracy as the default state. As something that just is.

That isn’t to say that Americans don’t think about politics. Oh, do we. Probably more than is helpful. We have, as a people, some pretty out-there opinions and preferences and expectations about politics.

But mostly when we think about politics, we think about the results we want. These choices are often framed in terms of personalities. Certainly, this phenomenon isn’t limited to the United States: Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson, Bibi Netanyahu, Emmanuel Macron—the list of personalities that more or less define political divides in democratic societies is long and diverse.

Sometimes the results we want are framed not as people, but as policies: higher taxes or lower taxes, more environmental regulation or less, strong national defense or retrenchment. Maybe having policy preferences is civically healthier than having preferences merely for certain individuals over others. Or maybe character is destiny and policy is transient, so choosing the better person is the way to go.

Miss Longwell continues on, to tell us about the enormous, enormous! dangers of the Capitol kerfuffle, but somehow manages to forget the definition of the words she uses:

Our freedom and self-government are under threat from domestic authoritarian cults in tacit—if not enthusiastic—alliance with foreign despots who desire that the world’s oldest democracy succumb to corrupt populist autocracy.

Uhhh, populist is defined as:

(noun) a person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
(adj.) relating to or characteristic of a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

while autocracy is defined as:

a system of government by one person with absolute power.

Thus, a “populist autocracy” is a contradiction in terms.

“(D)omestic authoritarian cults”? It isn’t the Republicans who have held themselves in thrall to Democratic Governors exercising apparently unchecked power to issue orders regulating our lives under the pretext of protecting us from the China virus.[1]See this to explain why I have started to, occasionally, refer to COVID-19 as the China virus or Wuhan virus.

It isn’t the Republicans who are trying to control every aspect of our lives, to define other people’s beliefs as “hate crimes,” and to “cancel” people with whom they disagree from public life. Miss Longwell is upset, very upset, that we are now “debating corporate tax rates, Dr. Seuss, and trans bathroom access, like nothing ever happened,” as though she hasn’t come to grips with the fact that, though conservatives might not like it, we recognize that Joe Biden is President, that the Democrats control both Houses of Congress, and that we have to do everything we can to fight back against the leftists’ agenda.

But here’s where Miss Longwell really goes off the reservation:

Our democracy is under attack, for real, by a large portion of a major political party which seeks to utterly transform the relationship between the government and the governed.

Well, yes, we are trying to change the relationship between the government and the governed, because the government has become far, far, far too powerful. When a state Governor says that he can order us not to have too many people in our homes, and sets up ‘snitch hotlines’ so officious little Karens can tattle on us, when the Mayor of our largest city says that he can send the gendarmerie into your homes if you’ve traveled from the United Kingdom, then yes, we want to change that.

But, more than that, if a large portion of a major political party seeks to change that relationship, is that not democracy? If a large group of people want to change things, well doesn’t the First Amendment, which (supposedly) protects our freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right of the people peaceably to assemble to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, protect our right to seek change, to ask for change, to demand change?

For Miss Longwell and Mrs Rubin, it appears that democracy is all well and good . . . as long as it produces the results they want. But people, acting in concert, to change things away from what they want? Now that’s a threat, and cannot be tolerated.

References

References
↑1 See this to explain why I have started to, occasionally, refer to COVID-19 as the China virus or Wuhan virus.
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Even The Philadelphia Inquirer realizes that people are getting fed up with #COVID19 restrictions Once rights have been lost, they are very difficult to regain

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump 3,458,229 (50.01%) to 3,377,674 (48.84%) in Pennsylvania, but in Philadelphia County, Mr Biden’s margin was 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%), 471,050 votes, far greater than the 81,660 votes by which President Trump lost the Keystone State. I think it fair to say that Philadelphia is a very heavily Democratic area.

So, when I see The Philadelphia Inquirer, itself a very liberally-oriented newspaper, telling readers that Philadelphians are individually rebelling against the mask mandates of Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) and Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), I take note.

After a year of pandemic, wearing masks outdoors is up for debate

Even as the city holds firm with its mask mandates, Philadelphians are making their own decisions about whether to mask or not.

by Laura McCrystal and Jason Laughlin | Earth Day, April 22, 2021

White and pink pastel blossoms frosted the trees beneath a blue sky Tuesday afternoon in Old City, the kind of spring day that makes long sleeves optional. For many, though, masks were not.

“I do it because it’s the right thing to do,” said Ellen Stroman, as she walked by the colonial columns of the Shambles near Second and Pine Streets with her husband, their daughter, and dog.

Is it? Mrs Stroman was walking with her husband and her daughter, presumably members of her own household. If any of them have the China virus, then they all have it. If “it’s the right thing to do,” then the right thing for Mrs Stroman is to signal her virtue, not somehow fight the virus.[1]See here for my explanation as to why I have started to, occasionally, call it the China virus

There is ample evidence that masks help prevent COVID-19′s spread, and their value indoors, where transmission is almost 19 times more likely than outside, isn’t disputed. The risk of infection outside, especially through passing contact, appears much lower. Researchers have found COVID-19 spreads primarily through aerosols expelled by activities like talking, singing, sneezing, or coughing, and those disperse quickly in open air. Sunlight and humidity also play roles in reducing the risk of outdoor transmission. A letter to the German government from the Association for Aerosol Research this month stated, “Transmission outdoors is extremely rare and never leads to cluster infections as can be observed indoors,” according to Germany’s international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle.

The mass protests in summer 2020 that followed George Floyd’s death didn’t appear to cause coronavirus case surges in Philadelphia, and evidence is uneven about what role, if any, protests played in transmission nationwide.

Heaven forfend! Is the Inquirer, that bastion of the #woke, telling us that the authoritarian decrees of the Governor and Mayor might not be justified?

The Atlantic published an article recently asking whether it was time to consider lifting outdoor-masking mandates, noting confirmed cases of outdoor transmission almost always include close conversation or yelling. Once a person is vaccinated, the risk of being infected outdoors is “microscopic” to “nonexistent,” the magazine reported.

The article notes what we’ve all known: mask wearing has become highly politicized.

That highlights the unusual intersection of biology and social science that health experts and the public have navigated over the last year. Masks have moved beyond a public health precaution to become variously a courtesy, an indicator of solidarity, a symbol of respect for science — or a sign of reluctant acquiescence to government control. Some are so adamant about refusing to wear them they won’t enter places where they’re required.

“In America it’s been politicized,” said Eric Zillmer, a professor of neuropsychology at Drexel. “If you’re wearing a mask, you’ve kind of bought into the idea that there is danger.”

No, it means that you have bought into the idea that the government can tell you what to do and how to live your life!

I never wear a mask outside. If I am entering someone’s private property, and they have a notification up that they will decline service if I am not wearing a mask, I will comply; it is, after all, their private property. But, several times recently, I’ve come across businesses in which they have the signs up, but once inside I note that masks are optional, at which point I immediately exercise that option.

There were several paragraphs about how different people were behaving concerning mask wearing and, as usual, the obsessive controlling nature of government officials, but this is the one that struck me:

On the streets of Philadelphia, people make their own subtle adjustments. Some were masked up on a warm afternoon this week, while others went entirely without. Some kept masks ready to quickly put on if another person came nearby.

Uhhh, if you are outside, without a mask, and someone else chooses to come nearby, that’s on them, and they have clearly decided that they are not worried or do not care.

Well, we’re having a family gathering this Sunday, on our farm, of at least three households, and I guarantee you, there won’t be any masks worn! That will put us all in violation of Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) latest executive order:

3. People in Kentucky must cover their nose and mouth with a face covering when they are in the following situations that represent a high risk of COVID-19 transmission:

a. . . . any other indoor public space in which it is difficult to maintain a physical distance of at least six feet from all individuals who are not members of that person’s household;

c. While in outdoor public spaces in which the person cannot maintain a physical distance of at least six feet from all individuals who are not members of the person’s household and is not otherwise covered by previously issued guidance.

I suppose that my property might not be considered a “public space”, but I very much wish to consider my actions as defiance of our insipid Governor’s cockamamie and illegal orders. If the Governor showed up at my property — something extremely unlikely to occur — I would tell him to remove his mask or get off my land.

We must do all that we can to resist the encroachment of government on our individual rights. Once rights are lost, they are very difficult to regain.

References

References
↑1 See here for my explanation as to why I have started to, occasionally, call it the China virus
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Earth Day 2021

I was somewhat pleased when April 22nd was declared to be Earth Day, being as that is my birthday.

Yes, I know: that makes me full of Taurus!

It was, of course, many years later that I learned about Ira Einhorn, one of the ‘founders’ of Earth Day, was a stone-cold killer:

Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the “composted” body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.

A self-proclaimed environmental activist, Einhorn made a name for himself among ecological groups during the 1960s and ’70s by taking on the role of a tie-dye-wearing ecological guru and Philadelphia’s head hippie. With his long beard and gap-toothed smile, Einhorn — who nicknamed himself “Unicorn” because his German-Jewish last name translates to “one horn” —advocated flower power, peace and free love to his fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. He also claimed to have helped found Earth Day.

But the charismatic spokesman who helped bring awareness to environmental issues and preached against the Vietnam War — and any violence — had a secret dark side. When his girlfriend of five years, Helen “Holly” Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn’t come back to pick them up.

And so on Sept. 9, 1977, Maddux went back to the apartment that she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia to collect her things, and was never seen again. When Philadelphia police questioned Einhorn about her mysterious disappearance several weeks later, he claimed that she had gone out to the neighborhood co-op to buy some tofu and sprouts and never returned.

It wasn’t until 18 months later that investigators searched Einhorn’s apartment after one of his neighbors complained that a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid was leaking from the ceiling directly below Einhorn’s bedroom closet. Inside the closet, police found Maddux’s beaten and partially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers.

Mr Einhorn managed to flee justice, and wasn’t extradited from France until 2002. Nevertheless, he eventually was returned to the United States, tried and convicted in Pennsylvania, and sentenced to life without parole. Mr Einhorn took the stand in his own defense, and claimed that Miss Maddux was murdered by CIA agents who were attempting to frame him due to his investigations into the Cold War and “psychotronics”. He was sentenced to prison in October of 2002, and went to his eternal reward on April 3, 2020, dying of natural causes at the age of 79.

John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Gulfstream IV, registration number N57HJ. Click to enlarge.

But, I digress. I have to wonder, on this Earth Day, just what the hard-core global warming climate change activists have been doing to reduce their own ‘carbon footprints’? We have President Biden’s ‘climate envoy,’ former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry, using his family’s private jet, a Gulfstream G-IV private jet, with registration N57HJ, to travel all over the globe, to tell the rest of us to cut our CO2 emissions.

Of course, it’s up to us little people to bear the burdens of reducing our carbon footprints.

And so I do! Oh, it isn’t because I am worried about global warming climate change, but because I like saving a few pennies on my electric bill, and Mrs Pico has stated that she prefers it when the bedding has been dried outside, on the clothesline, for the fresh smell, rather than in the electric dryer. And so it is that when I buy light bulbs, I but the LED bulbs, not because I’m worried about the environment, but because they use less sparktricity and illuminate with little radiated heat.

There are many little things that people can do, and they needn’t be tied up in activism or worry about what other people have done, or in insisting that Other People follow mandatory rules and buy plug-in electric vehicles. But it sure would be nice if some of the activists told us just what they have done, what sacrifices they have made.

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An interesting juxtaposition #BlackLivesMatter protesters celebrate the conviction of Derek Chauvin, but don't help police solve murders of black Americans by other black Americans

There they were, two stories, side by side on the Lexington Herald-Leader’s website main page:

Lexington Herald-Leader website main page, 8:36 AM EDT, April 21, 2021. Screenshot by DRP.

Two stories, one about the glee being felt by some over the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, and one about the black lives that really don’t matter to the #BlackLivesMatter activists:

‘Justice can prevail.’ Group gathers in Lexington after verdict in Derek Chauvin trial

By Karla Ward | April 20, 2021 | 7:43 PM EDT | Updated April 20, 2021 | 8:11 PM EDT

A group that has been protesting since last summer against police violence gathered Tuesday night in downtown Lexington to hear the verdict announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin, who was found guilty on all counts in the death of George Floyd.

April Taylor, a member of LPD Accountability and a prominent protest organizer in Lexington, was emotional after the verdict was read. She addressed the group of a few dozen that gathered in front of the Fayette County courthouses.

Taylor said Tuesday night that she was grateful for the guilty verdict, but that police reforms are needed to prevent more deaths.

“I am worried about what will happen on appeal,” Taylor said. And she said, as a tear rolled down her cheek, “There are so many other people who have lost their lives who did not get justice.”

Taylor hopes that the verdict in Chauvin’s case will encourage people to keep fighting because “there are moments when we can have wins, when justice can prevail.”

It was only a few days ago that we noted Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers and his complaint:

Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers urged people with information regarding homicide investigations to speak with police. He said some witnesses don’t cooperate with police investigations, making it more difficult to identify suspects.

The other article noted the difficulties in obtaining justice on Lexington’s mean streets:

‘Tired of burying one another.’ Families of Lexington homicide victims rally to end violence

By Jeremy Chisenhall | April 20, 2021 | 8:14 PM EDT | Updated April 20, 2021 | 9:42 PM EDT

Concerned about a recent spike in fatal shootings, Lexington community members on Tuesday gathered to say they’re “sick and tired of burying one another.”

That was Pastor Joseph Owens’ message as he spoke to other residents gathered in the parking lot outside Shiloh Baptist Church. Lexington has had 15 homicides in 2021, all of which have been shootings, according to police data.

An early spike in shootings this year follows a record-setting year for homicides in 2020. Lexington reported 34 homicides last year. Some of the people at Tuesday’s rally were concerned that violence involving gangs and other groups is a significant contributor to the spike in shootings.

It was just two days ago that we noted that Lexington’s 15 homicides by April 18th put the city on a path toward 51 homicides for 2021, and a 15.78 per 100,000 population homicide rate. But, at least the Herald-Leader regards homicides as newsworthy, something The Philadelphia Inquirer does not. Of course, when Lexington has an average of one murder a week, while the City of Brotherly Love averages 1.4 per day, I suppose I can see why the Inquirer doesn’t bother.

Today’s Inquirer? Their website main page was filled with articles of gloating and joy that Mr Chauvin was convicted:

You know what I didn’t see on the Inquirer’s main page? I didn’t see a single story about the the people who were murdered in Philadelphia last night. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page noted that there had been 154 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love by the end of April 20th, a 31.62% increase over the same date last year — and 2020 being a leap year, April 20th of 2020 was the 111th day of the year, not the 110th as it is this year — and three more homicides than just the day before.[1]It’s worth noting that very white Uber-feminist Amanda Marcotte, herself a resident of South Philadelphia, never writes about the black-on-black homicide rate in her adopted home town, but sure … Continue reading

But that didn’t matter to the editors of the Inquirer. It didn’t matter that former Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey used to lament the “no snitchin'” culture which hindered the police in finding and arresting the thugs who killed so many Philadelphians, it doesn’t matter that the city had a higher homicide rate than Chicago, it doesn’t matter that the vast majority of the homicide victims are black, because #BlackLivesMatter only means that black lives matter to the #woke of the Inquirer newsroom when they are taken by white policemen.

We noted, last October, in an article entitled We need to stop pretending that #BlackLivesMatter, because in the City of Brotherly Love, it’s very apparent that they don’t, that:

(A)s of 11:59 PM EDT on October 21th, 391 souls had been sent to their eternal rewards. That isn’t the record, of course, but 2007 is the base year on the Current Crime Statistics website, and that was the number of people killed that year in Philly. This year has now matched that total . . . with 71 days left in the year.

The math is simple: 391 people killed in 295 days so far equals 1.325 people killed every single day. With 71 days left in the year, at that rate the city should see another 94 people sent to their deaths before the ball drops in New York City.

By October 21, 2020, summer had been over for a month, and summer is the season when most murders occur in our major cities. But the math I did, 391 + 94 = 485, turned out to be short, as the daily homicide rate in Philadelphia increased, and 499 souls were sent early to their eternal rewards. And Philly’s homicide rate of 1.40 dead every single day, in just the depths of winter and the first month of spring is higher than it was that October day last year.

But that’s not news to the inquirer! Oh, there was an article by columnist Will Bunch blaming the increase in homicides on increased gun ownership, but the increase in black-on-black murders in Philly was never mentioned. As always, the problem was “gun violence,” rather than the culture and attitudes of the bad guys who used the guns. Malcolm Jenkins, formerly a safety with the Philadelphia Eagles, and Natasha Cloud, a guard with the Washington Mystics, wrote an article published yesterday blaming the police, even though deaths of blacks at the hands of the police are minuscule compared to the deaths of black Americans at the hands of other black Americans.

Michele Kilpatrick, one of District Attorney Larry Krasner’s minions, came ever-so-close to describing the problem:

In 2020, there were four victims of shootings in the Philadelphia Police Department’s 5th District, which includes the affluent, majority-white neighborhoods of Roxborough and Manayunk. Just a few miles away in the 14th District, which includes the low-income, majority-Black neighborhood of Germantown, there were 121 victims of shootings. That disparity is not new: In 2018, the 14th District had 20 times the number of shooting victims than the 5th. In 2016, there were 80 shooting victims in the 14th and none in the 5th.

We know that proactive policing policies like stop-and-frisk, which sometimes yields unlicensed or unregistered guns, are not the reason shootings have remained so low in Chestnut Hill — because the same policies have consistently failed to make shootings also rare in Germantown.

Instead, throughout Philadelphia and cities nationwide, generations of low-income Black and Latino residents have lived and died in communities that have been reduced to symbols in the public imagination — the South Bronx, Compton, South Side of Chicago — as we mistake failed policies for failed people and resign ourselves to the idea that certain types of places and people are just inherently dangerous.

Occam’s Razor is:

a scientific and philosophical rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.

Miss Kilpatrick is apparently not a fan of William of Occam, because she, like so many others, feels the need to go beyond the simple, go beyond the obvious, and find all sorts of reasons why bad people are bad people beyond them simply being bad people! She wants to blame poverty, but I grew up poor, grew up without a father, and it didn’t lead me to kill anyone. I didn’t have the community services she advocates, yet I wasn’t out committing crimes or shooting at people.

Mt Sterling, Kentucky is a small town, and we had something called October Court Day. On Court day, the third Monday of the month, the country folk would come to town and set up along Locust Street and other areas on the south side of town, to sell and trade for their products. On two separate October Court Days, I walked up North Maysville Street, in full view of where the city Police Department used to be on Broadway, across the street from the Montgomery County Courthouse, carrying long guns that I had bought, when I was still in high school . . . and nobody cared, because nobody thought that I was going to shoot anybody.[2]Sadly, Court Day has degenerated into nothing more than a professional vendor-driven flea market.

Why? Because everybody knew that my mother had taught me right!

There’s no way my solutions are politically correct, and many of the Special Snowflakes™ on the left who read it will be absolutely triggered, but I, of course, don’t care; it’s still the truth.

And that’s what it all boils down to: bad kids are brought up by bad parents, assuming that anybody brings them up at all. Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old in Chicago, is stone-cold graveyard dead after being shot by a police officer, because young Mr Toledo was outside, consorting with a 21-year-old convicted criminal, and fleeing with a gun, at 2:30 in the morning. The officer thought that Mr Toledo had turned on him with a gun, though the body camera footage shows Mr Toledo had dropped the weapon, but the real fault is that his parents were letting him run around at 2:30 on a Monday morning.

Miss Kilpatrick got it wrong: the problem really is failed people, failed people in the neighborhoods she mentioned, the South Bronx, Compton, South Side of Chicago, and the ones she left out, Philly’s own Strawberry Mansion or Nicetown, because they are being brought up, are growing up, in a culture which glamorizes violence, which doesn’t teach right from wrong, and in which “street cred” is of major importance.

Well, I’m just enough of an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to tell you what the real solution is. It won’t be politically correct in the slightest, and will doubtlessly offend some people, but I’m retired, and can’t be ‘canceled,’ can’t be fired from a job for telling you the truth. They key to understanding the causes of violence is understanding what is most important to teenaged boys and young men: pussy!

There is nothing teenaged boys and twenty-something men think about more than sex. I know; I used to be a teenaged boy and twenty-something young man, sometime just after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. The greatest reward for young men of those ages is getting laid, and therein lays the key: when young girls reward the behavior of the bad boys with pussy, bad behavior is incentivized, and good behavior devalued. When the gang-bangers get laid, and the nerds do not, the girls wind up with some exciting times, but with guys who will never provide any sort of reasonable and safe future for them.

The key is the education of teenaged girls, teaching them that the nerds they are shunning are the guys who will be there when they get into their thirties and forties, the guys who will actually be fathers to their children, and the guys who will help provide a solid and reliable middle-class home for them. They will be the men who can be with them every day, and not be spending five-to-ten years away in Graterford or Eddyville prisons.

In the end, the solution to the problem is black mothers, teaching their black daughters how their behavior affects their neighborhoods, their cities, and all of society. The black mothers of Lexington and Philadelphia and Chicago and St Louis, mothers who now have a 69.4% out-of-wedlock birth rate, need to realize and teach their daughters that there is a better way of life than the ones the mothers have, need to rear their daughters to do what’s right for themselves and their neighborhoods and their eventual children rather than just what is exciting in the moment.

There’s no way that is politically correct, and many of the Special Snowflakes™ on the left who read it will be absolutely triggered, but I, of course, don’t care; it’s still the truth.[3]Trigger: to cause an intense and usually negative emotional reaction in (someone)

References

References
↑1 It’s worth noting that very white Uber-feminist Amanda Marcotte, herself a resident of South Philadelphia, never writes about the black-on-black homicide rate in her adopted home town, but sure jumps on the Derek Chauvin bandwagon.
↑2 Sadly, Court Day has degenerated into nothing more than a professional vendor-driven flea market.
↑3 Trigger: to cause an intense and usually negative emotional reaction in (someone)
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Is it time to start calling it the China Virus again?

Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4)

I have not referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus” or “Wuhan virus” on The First Street Journal because I thought that doing so generated more heat than light, and gave critics a weapon to use when they had no actually reasonable responses. It’s using the same reasoning which leads me to (normally) choose to use newspapers as my primary sources, since they are known to have a leftward bias, and that eliminates criticism that I am citing evil reich-wing sources, and thus cannot be taken seriously.

But Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4th District) tweeted the contents of a bill to be voted upon in the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee today, and that has me changing my thinking on this.

You can click on the photos he included and be able to read the bill yourself. But this is the part that gets to me:The online text of the proposed legislation is slightly different from what Mr Massie photographed. I have, in my transcription, used the words in Mr Massie’s photos.

(2) COVID–19 HATE CRIME.—The term “COVID–19 hate crime” means a crime of violence (as such term is defined in section 16 of 18, United States Code) that is motivated by—

(A) the actual or perceived race, ethnicity, age, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability of any person; and

(B) the actual or perceived relationship to the spread of COVID–19 of any person because of the characteristic described in subparagraph (A).

SEC. 3. GUIDANCE.

(a) Guidance For Law Enforcement Agencies.—The Attorney General shall issue guidance for State and local law enforcement agencies on the following:

(1) The establishment of online reporting of hate crimes or incidents, and the availability of online reporting available in multiple languages.

(2) The expansion of culturally competent and linguistically appropriate public education campaigns, and collection of data and public reporting of hate crimes.

(b) Best practices to describe the COVID-19 pandemic: The Attorney General and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in coordination with the COVID–19 Health Equity Task Force and community-based organizations, shall issue guidance describing best practices to mitigate racially discriminatory language in describing the COVID–19 pandemic.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The online text of the proposed legislation is slightly different from what Mr Massie photographed. I have, in my transcription, used the words in Mr Massie’s photos.

Let’s tell the truth here: the “COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act” includes sections intended to criminalize thought and speech, and to issue “guidance” for which language is appropriate, and inappropriate for referring to COVID-19.

Well, I will not have my speech somehow assigned by government! If I start referring to it, occasionally, as the China virus or Wuhan virus, or William Teach’s Bat Soup virus, it is to use it as a protest against the government trying to assign proper speech to you and to me.

The Bill of Rights

Why was our Bill of Rights a set of amendments rather than being included in the original Constitution? It was because James Madison, one of the primary authors of the Constitution thought it unnecessary, because the Constitution did not give the federal government the power to enact laws in those areas. However, several states, as they ratified the Constitution, were alarmed about the lack of a Bill of Rights, and asked the Congress to add them.

Thus, the First Congress wrote, debated, amended and passed proposed amendments to beco0me just that. Had the Bill of Rights not been ratified by the states, this Congress would damned well have criminalized Wrongspeech.

What’s that, you say? Congress wouldn’t do that! Well, our various state Governors have issued authoritarian decrees which have been used to restrict the right of the people peaceably to assemble, by limiting the number of people who can gather for any purpose, including for things like family dinners for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and have actually closed churches, prohibiting the free exercise of religion, all in the name of combating the China Virus, and far too many of the sheeple have nodded their heads sagely and said, “It is good.”

It isn’t particularly helpful to the debate, or to people’s precious little feelings to refer to it as the China Virus, because the left have already politicized it, but sometimes it is necessary to start being a bit rude to fight the linguistic enforcement of the left and the credentialed media.