Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The Democrats sure love a fearful public

In 2020, Reichsstatthalter Andy Beshear (NSDAP-KY) tried to use the fear of COVID-19 to push through authoritarian orders, including a ban on groups of more than ten people, from more than two separate households, gathering together for Thanksgiving. I am proud to say that that our family violated that ban, and would do so again.

Fortunately, Kentuckians banded together in the voting booth in November of 2020, and elected a Republican super-majority in both chambers of the General Assembly, and the Republicans, once the legislative session began, quickly limited the Reichsstatthalter’s executive authority. Naturally, the Governor, with the help of his toady Democrat judge, Philip Shepherd, temporarily blocked the legislature’s actions, but, eventually — and far too long eventually — the state Supreme Court ruled that the laws passed were constitutional.

And now, here it is, two years later, and the Governor is trying to stoke fear again:

No KY counties are at high COVID levels but 10 are medium, CDC says. See the map

by Aaron Mudd | Sunday, November 20, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

During his weekly update Thursday covering the state of the coronavirus pandemic in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear underscored one dismal data point that he said, “I know we can do better than.”

Beshear was talking about the number of Kentuckians who still haven’t received their Omicron booster for the COVID-19 vaccine — even as seasonal flu and RSV cases spike and shutter schools or fill up beds in Kentucky’s children’s hospitals.

Beshear cited data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There’s more at the original.

One interesting thing about the article: if you look at the ‘tab’ at the top of the screen, the article isn’t entitled what I have noted, but “Where do I need a mask in KY? See latest CDC COVID-19 data”. That must have been the article title when reporter Aaron Horn submitted it, but either he or one of the Lexington Herald-Leader’s editors thought better of it.

“Current data from the CDC indicates only 8% of Kentuckians 5 and older have gotten the Omicron booster,” Beshear said.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader, November 20, 2022. Note that, even subdued, most counties are low transmission in the bordering states as well as Kentucky. Click to enlarge.

Yet, as we can see from the image to the right, almost all of Kentucky is experiencing low levels of COVID-19 transmission, as are the surrounding states.

That might be a bit deceiving, given that it reflects only those tests about which the government knows, while many people are using the at-home tests. But that also implies that, regardless of any home test results, people aren’t getting sick enough from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, regardless of variant, that they have been seeking professional medical attention.

The issue is compounded by the fact that the flu is making a roaring comeback after all but disappearing in the U.S. in 2020 to 2021. Additionally, fewer than half of Kentucky’s children got the flu shot during the 2021-22 flu season.

Uhhh, if “fewer than half” of the kids in the Bluegrass State got the flu shots last winter, and influenza “all but disappeared” in 2021, maybe, just maybe, the flu shots weren’t really needed last winter.

Of course, kids were still under health restrictions last winter, with schools either closed or operating under serious restrictions.

As Kentuckians enter the holiday season, Beshear said, “Get the (flu) shot. Get the booster, and … if you’re concerned about your health or other conditions, consider wearing a mask at indoor get-togethers right now. It’s not forever.”

At least the Governor isn’t trying to make it an order this time, but, then again, he can’t. It isn’t just that the 2020 elections resulted in 75-25 and 30-8 Republican majorities in the state House of Representatives and Senate, respectively, but the 2022 elections upped those to 80-20 and 31-7. 🙂 It’s hardly a surprise, though: the Democrats didn’t even contest 44 of the 100 House seats, or 10 of the 19 Senate seats up for election!

I might have ignored this story completely had I not noticed Mr Horn’s original article title. “Where do I need a mask in KY?” The answer is nowhere!

Kentuckians specifically, and Americans overall, are just plain done with masks. Oh, I still see a couple, now and then, but I’d guess that well over 90% of the public are not wearing them anymore.

That might be worldwide as well: I saw a few, but not many, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv last week, and only a few of the airline passengers were wearing the silly things either, despite us being crammed in a long aluminum tube for hours on end.

Yes, things could change, but at least right now, COVID-19 has changed into something of no more concern than the flu. Yes, it will be serious enough in some people to require hospitalization, and can even result in death, but the same is true of influenza, and we haven’t resorted to the idiocy that attended COVID-19 when it came to the flu.

It’s simply something with which we have to live, just as we have to live with the flu.

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I suppose that it is much easier to be a ‘progressive’ when you don’t look at the facts

One would think that an actual Philadelphian, even if she’s lived there only a few years, would have a better grasp on the facts in the City of Brotherly Love, but when that Philadelphian is named Amanda Marcotte, you’d be very, very wrong.

Hours before it was announced that Democrats have won a majority in the state House for the first time in 17 years, the lame duck legislature in Pennsylvania made its last stand for MAGA by impeaching Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia. While understandably unknown to most people outside Pennsylvania, Krasner has become a favorite punching bag in right-wing media, for his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime. Republicans paint him as “soft on crime” and blame him for the rise in gun violence in Philadelphia, even though a likelier culprit is the lax statewide gun laws passed by Republicans.

As always, Miss Marcotte doesn’t look more deeply into the question. Pennsylvania law states is that no subordinate governmental unit may impose firearms control restrictions stronger than those under state law. Thus, while there might be a couple of tiny tweaks in there, the City of Brotherly Love is under the same firearms laws as the rest of the Commonwealth.

I lived in Jim Thorpe for 15 years, and during those 15 years we had two murders in Carbon County, one in 2004 and another in 2006. If there was another one, I never heard of it, and I did search through the data, which is, regrettably, by township and borough in the county, and found only the two mentioned. And, as I recall, neither involved a firearm!

So, if the problem is the Commonwealth’s firearms control laws, why are the homicide rates so very, very different in Philly?

I previously wrote that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse last year: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.

For some reason, a reason Miss Marcotte did not choose to explore, Philadelphia is simply different from the rest of Pennsylvania, at least in terms of its crime rate. Pennsylvanians in the rest of the Commonwealth are not shooting and killing each other at nearly the rate seen in Philly. Of course, to have investigated that more deeply would have been to ruin Miss Marcotte’s entire point.

As we noted on Friday, there’s more to the story. Under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, Philly’s tremendous homicide rate was brought down dramatically. Sorted by total homicides for the year, five of the six deadliest years from 2007 through this year were under the terms of Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Krasner. When Mr Kenney  had Mr Williams as his DA, murders were significantly lower.

Mr Krasner’s campaign website itself tells people what we already knew: he doesn’t like to lock up criminals:

When Philadelphia voters elected Larry Krasner as its District Attorney in 2017, he promised to end the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past, work to support victims and the community, and hold the powerful accountable. He has kept his promises. It hasn’t been easy. Larry inherited an office committed to incarceration regardless of the cost, even when this policy endangered and devastated our communities.

But in just three years, he has upended the office culture and implemented policies that put people first. Under Larry’s leadership:

  • The county jail population has decreased by 40% and this summer fell to its lowest level since 1985.
  • The amount of time people will spend in prison has dropped by over 18,000 years.
  • Years under probation or parole have decreased by 57% overall, 65% for drug offenses and 70% for property offenses in the most oversupervised big city, Philly, and the second most oversupervised state, Pennsylvania.

A rational observer might just wonder: have Mr Krasner’s ‘progressive’ policies actually worked to reduce violence and crime in the city?

Along with Chicago, New York and other racially diverse cities, Philadelphia has also become central to right-wing media efforts to blame crime on the Black Lives Matter movement. Even in his supposedly “serious” campaign announcement speech Tuesday, Trump made the grotesque claim that “The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crime.” In reality, the spike in crime in the past couple of years seems largely attributable to the pandemic. Gun sales rose during the lockdown and schools were closed, meaning the streets saw an influx of weapons and bored young people, an almost perfect prescription for rising crime. As the pandemic has begun to recede, homicides have also started to decline.

This is kind of laughable. Were people buying guns to shoot the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as one would expect if such was “largely attributable to the pandemic,” or was it because of the huge increase in the crime rate?

Now, it is true that the number of homicides is down, as I have previously mentioned, but, if the number of murders has decreased a bit, the number of attempted murders has increased: according to the city’s Shooting Victims Database, There were 2,107 shooting victims through November 16th of this year, compared to 2,069 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love through the same date last year. More people are surviving being shot, with much of the credit going to the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of quickly putting shooting victims into their patrol cars and taking them to the emergency room rather than waiting on an ambulance.

Again, had Miss Marcotte looked more deeply into the publicly available data, she’d have known that.

Krasner, for his part, is painting the impeachment as a direct attack on the right of Philadelphians to choose their own leaders. “History will harshly judge this anti-democratic, authoritarian effort to erase Philly’s votes — votes by Black, brown and broke people in Philadelphia,” he said in statement.

This impeachment of Krasner sews together two of the biggest and most racist themes that fuel the MAGA movement: A belief that anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates, and a belief that voters in racially diverse urban areas are “frauds” who are “stealing” elections from white conservatives.

While keeping in touch with my Pennsylvania conservative friends, I’ve yet to see any of them state that “anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates”. I’m the one who has been pointing out that, to the left, and especially The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives don’t matter, not when talking about them might upset progressive politics. And if the impulse to impeach Let ’em Loose Larry is an effort to reduce the tremendous violence rate in Philly, the primary beneficiaries of such efforts would be black Philadelphians!

Miss Marcotte called Philadelphia a “racially diverse cit(y),” which is true enough, but only if you look at the city as a whole. As even the “anti-racist news organization” that is the Inquirer has reported:

  • The eight-county region’s Black-white residential segregation is the fourth highest among the 20 biggest metropolitan areas, as defined by the Census Bureau. The region is the sixth-most segregated between Hispanic and white residents.

  • Among the 30 biggest cities, Philadelphia is second only to Chicago in its level of residential segregation between Black and white residents, according to data from Brown University. Between Hispanic and white residents, it’s the sixth-most segregated.

  • Considering every U.S. county that has at least 10,000 people and a Black population of at least 5%, Philadelphia is more segregated than 94% of them.

  • While residential segregation between Black and white residents has declined nationwide over the last several decades, it’s happened much slower in Philadelphia. The city’s position near the top of rankings of segregated places has stayed almost the same since 1980.

These are things that one would expect a savvy political commentator like Miss Marcotte, who told us in 2019 that her boyfriend and she had moved to South Philly, would actually know something about the city in which she lives. If she actually read what is now her hometown newspaper, she’d have known that Philly’s ‘diversity’ is actually pretty superficial, but, once again, she doesn’t seem to look at these things in any depth. But, then again, to look at the facts in depth would challenge her progressive worldview and politics, and nothing which would do that should be allowed.

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Republicans take control of the House of Representatives; Vanity Fair writer waxes wroth If there's one thing the left despise, it's populism

The Democrats in the House of Representatives, the ones who created the silly Capitol Kerfuffle Committee, the one which almost all Republicans refused to join, are just terribly, terribly worried that, now that the GOP have regained the majority, they’ll, Horrors! investigate Democrats.

Remember Paul Ryan? He was House Speaker in 2018, the last time Republicans were in control. He left Congress quietly in the middle of the night. Well, not really, but sort of. Blaming “identity politics” and “polarization,” Ryan abruptly announced in April 2018 that he’d be exiting at the end of his term the following January, just as Democrats assumed power. Ryan went on to join the board overseeing the place that helped cause so much of that polarization in the first place, Fox News. Ryan may have reaped the benefits of Donald Trump moving into the White House—tax cuts!—but he didn’t have the stomach for MAGA. The same cannot be said for “my Kevin,” the little nickname the former president has given to Kevin McCarthy.

McCarthy helped rehabilitate Trump after the January 6 riots with a visit weeks later to Mar-a-Lago, where the two grinned side by side for a photo op. As fellow Republican Liz Cheney pointed out after McCarthy’s trip, “He’s not just a former president. He provoked an attack on the Capitol, an attack on our democracy. And so I can’t understand why you would want to go rehabilitate him.”

Here’s where Vanity Fair’s paywall begins, but, if you have only checked in for one of their articles in a month (?), you’ll still be able to access it for free. That’s how I did it; I would certainly never pay for it!

There is, of course, the amusing point of referring to Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY At Large) as Representative Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA 22) “fellow republican,” when Miss Cheney decided to abandon all party loyalty and accept Nancy Pelosi’s appointment to the January 6th committee.

Wyoming was President Trump’s strongest state in the 2020 elections, but Miss Cheney hated him. Despite having won re-election in 2020 with 66% of the vote, her participation in the Democrats’ witch hunt had her lose the 2022 Republican primary to Harriet Hageman by a landslide margin. Molly Jong-Fast Greenfield’s[1]Although the author does not respect her husband, Matthew Greenfield, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by … Continue reading article, which is based heavily on sources from not just the Democrats in the House, but the farthest left Democrats, is so ridiculously biased that her calling Miss Cheney Mr McCarthy’s “fellow Republican” is more of a mockery than an accurate description.

Maybe because McCarthy was desperate for the Speakership?

Now, with Republicans winning a slim majority in the midterms, that guy could be Speaker of the House—and honestly that’s the best-case scenario. McCarthy may be a cowardly sycophant, but he’s not full MAGA, something that MAGA-world is very much aware of. Though McCarthy won the Republican nomination for speaker on Tuesday, with 188 votes, dozens of members voted for Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Biggs—a signal that McCarthy might have to make major concessions to the party’s far-right flank in order to secure 218 votes before the full Congress in early January.

Yeah, referring to Mr McCarthy as a “cowardly sycophant” is going to help! 🙂

Meanwhile, the queen of MAGA, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is more than ready for Republicans to be in charge and apparently expects the likely next Speaker to appease the base. Regarding McCarthy, she told The New York Times that “to be the best Speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway.” She even predicted Monday that she’d be on committees investigating “traitors and criminals.” McCarthy has said he plans to put Greene back on committees, with some of her Trumpworld allies reportedly urging the likely Speaker to give her a plum seat on the House Oversight Committee. Imagine, from promoting QAnon conspiracies to possibly landing a key oversight post in Congress.

“We have to have the gavel,” Greene said Tuesday in discussing her support for McCarthy. “That is extremely important, because the gavel means subpoena power. And Republicans need subpoena power going over the next two years.”

Mrs Greenfield was in no way offended when Democrats had the subpoena power!

For Democrats, the outlook of a GOP-led House is grim. As Democratic representative Eric Swalwell texted me, “The GOP has laid a historic egg. Democrats ran on competence and contrasted it with chaos. And if Kevin McCarthy somehow holds on to become Speaker, he’s no Nancy Pelosi who can lead a narrow majority. McCarthy would be the leader of the land of misfit toys, a place that will exist exclusively as a vessel state of MAGA nation. A MAGA House majority will also operate as the largest law firm in Washington, DC, but serving just one client and his endless grievances. Functionally, without a Democratic votes it will spectacularly fail to execute its core functions: keep the government open, pay America’s bills, and fund the fight for freedom in Ukraine.”

I would imagine that the House under the GOP will keep the government open — though I would hope that they’d try to eliminate some of the stupid functions — but “fund the fight for freedom in Ukraine”? Try fund the struggle to make nuclear war more probable, because that’s how I see it. Sure, we all want Russia to somehow lose the Russo-Ukrainian War, but for some of us, including me, not at the expense of making a nuclear war more probable.

There’s more at the original, but what Mrs Greenfield tells us, almost as an aside, tells us a lot about her biases. Eric Swalwell, Ro Khanna, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all congressmen who know where to go for a sympathetic journolist[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading, reached out to her via text. Richie Torres, “first openly gay Afro-Latino elected to Congress,” is cited as calling Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Tayor Greene as “lunatic likes”. I’m just surprised that Mus Greenfield failed to mention Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), but, then again, Mrs Boebert’s race had not been decided by last Wednesday, when she published the article. Mrs Boebert was re-elected, though by just a few hundred votes.

There are several more paragraphs but none of it is sensible reporting; it’s simply more Democratic propaganda masquerading — though not very well — as a measured and sensible opinion piece.

What Mrs Greenfield and the rest simply don’t understand is that the Republican electorate has moved on from the go-along-to-get-along politicians, and is now solidly populist in outlook. The attitudes of Representatives like Mrs Greene, Mrs Boebert, and Mr Gaetz are the attitudes of the majority of Republican voters. We saw this in 2010, with the emergence of the short-lived TEA Party, rebelling against President Obama’s stimulus and socialized medicine programs, but the TEA Party movement failed to last, dominated in Congress by the more polite Republicans.

Now the populists are the apparent majority of Republican voters, and that means that more populists are among the elected Republican office holders. And the left really, really, really don’t like that.

Donald Trump is mortal. More than just mortal, he’s very overweight and eats terrible food. The populist idea in the United States will outlive him.

References

References
↑1 Although the author does not respect her husband, Matthew Greenfield, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by their proper names.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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To Solomon Jones, black lives really don’t matter To the left, black lives matter far, far, far less than progressive politics

I have not been exactly enamored of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a movement started over the wholly justified killing of Michael Brown as he assaulted a police officer. Young Mr Brown had just roughed up a store clerk half his size in the course of a robbery. Several grifting incidents have been recorded concerning the Black Lives Matter organization.

Nevertheless, black lives do matter and should matter, just as all lives do matter and should matter. Yet it is becoming ever-clearer that, to the American left, black lives matter much less to them than do ‘progressive’ policies.

Solomon Jones, from his Twitter biography.

And thus I come to Solomon Jones, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the author of “Ten Lives Ten Demands: Life and Death Stories and a Black Activistʼs Blueprint for Racial Justice.” He also has a radio show weekdays from 7 to 10 AM on WURD 900 AM. The amazon.com description of his book states what it concerns:

Told through the powerful stories of Black lives that were ravaged by racism, this manifesto holds 10 demands to rectify racial injustice

Told through his perspective as an activist, acclaimed commentator Solomon Jones tells the stories of real people whose lives and deaths pushed the Black Lives Matter movement forward. He explains how each act of violence was incited by specific instances of structural racism, and details concrete and actionable strategies to address crimes committed by our “justice” system.

These stories and strategies are a critical resource for social justice activists looking to further their anti-racist education. These 10 demands form an actionable plan that is necessary to repair our racist past, change the racist present, and bring justice to the future:

  1. George Floyd: Pay financial reparations to Black communities that have been damaged by legalized racism.
  2. Michael Brown: Use consent decrees to reform police departments that demonstrate a “pattern or practice” of racism and police brutality.
  3. Hassan Bennett: Offer compensation for all those who are wrongfully imprisoned.
  4. Breonna Taylor: Require functioning body cameras and ban no-knock warrants.
  5. Eric Garner: All police disciplinary and dismissal records must be made public.
  6. Alton Sterling: Change federal law to allow prosecution of flagrant lawbreakers within police departments.
  7. Tamir Rice: Use independent prosecutors to eliminate prosecutorial conflicts of interest.
  8. Trayvon Martin: Eliminate stand-your-ground laws.
  9. Deborah Danner: Defund the police and move funds to trained social workers, mental health professionals, and conflict resolution specialists.
  10. Sandra Bland: End racial profiling.

It seems that Mr Jones has picked from a list of mostly bad people — Tamir Rice was just a kid, but a kid playing with a realistic-looking toy gun about whom a civilian called the police with a “man with a gun” report — on which to base his ‘ten demands. Mr Jones’ ninth demand is very specific about his goal: to reduce law enforcement.

However, it is Mr Jones’ Inquirer column of Friday which tells us just how much he values progressive politics over black lives:

What was Larry Krasner’s biggest offense? Correctly calling out a racist criminal justice system.

While Pa. lawmakers blame the district attorney for the increase in gun violence in Philadelphia, I suspect their true motive is to punish him as a white man who challenged a biased power structure.

by Solomon Jones | Thursday, November 17, 2022

The Republican-led Pennsylvania House has approved articles of Impeachment against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and while the Republicans claim the impeachment is about Krasner’s failure to stop gun violence, I’m convinced that it’s about his attempt to address racism.

Sadly for Mr Jones’ argument, the homicide rate in Philadelphia has soared since Mr Krasner, an anti-police defense attorney sponsored by a big campaign contribution from George Soros, became District Attorney. Since taking office on New Year’s Day of 2018, the number of homicides recorded in the City of Brotherly Love jumped from 315 the previous year to 353, then 356, then 499, and to 562 in 2021. Through Thursday, November 17th, the 2022 homicide total stands at 461, a 5.53% decrease from the same day last year, but one which is still on track to see 524 murders for the year, easily good for second-place all time in Philly.

However, if the number of murders has decreased a bit, the number of attempted murders has increased: according to the city’s Shooting Victims Database, There were 2,107 shooting victims through November 16th of this year, compared to 2,069 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love through the same date last year.

Since and including 2015, black males in the city have been the victims of 10,010 fatal and non-fatal shootings, a whopping 74.01% of all victims, with an even 1,000, or 7.39%, being black females. There have been 1,384 (10.23%) Hispanic males and 188 (1.39%) Hispanic females. For us evil white folks, there were ‘just’ 598 males (4.42%) and 131 (0.97%) females shot. While Mr Jones believes that the opposition to Mr Krasner is “about his attempt to address racism,” the effect, if removal of the District Attorney helped to reduce shootings and killings, would be to reduce the number of black victims. Wouldn’t Mr Jones like to see fewer black Philadelphians shot and killed? Or is it that, like The Philadelphia Inquirer for which he writes, that black lives really don’t matter, at least not as much as reinforcing progressive politics?

While state legislators publicly seek to blame Krasner for the increase in gun violence in Philadelphia, I suspect their true motive is to punish him as a racial traitor. Krasner, you see, is a white man who had the temerity to challenge a racist criminal justice system that routinely puts innocent Black people in jail. In the eyes of the individuals and institutions that thrive on the current power structure, Krasner has challenged racism itself, and for that, he must be punished.

Among the admittedly smaller circle of friends with whom I deal, I still cannot, over 69½ years of my life, a significant portion of which, 43 years, has been spent living in the South, ever remember a white person refer to another white person as a “racial traitor.”

In a city where the death penalty was once the order of the day under prosecutors like Lynne Abraham, Krasner has brought significant change. He has exonerated the wrongly convicted, eschewed the testimony of crooked cops, and charged police officers who have killed unarmed citizens from Philadelphia’s poorest, most marginalized communities.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there have been only three executions in Pennsylvania since the restoration of capital punishment, all last century, only one of which was for a crime committed in Philadelphia. All three men executed were white, and all three were “volunteers,” meaning that they had voluntarily dropped all of their appeals to just go ahead and get it over.

Lynne Abraham was succeeded in office by Seth Williams. Like both Mrs Abraham and Mr Krasner, Mr Williams is a Democrat, but, unlike them, he is black. Somehow, I have a difficult time considering Mr Williams as someone who was supporting a racist system.

Mr Williams, who had legal problems of his own and was forced to resign in 2017, was part of the top three in law enforcement in Philadelphia, along with Mayor Michael Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, all of whom were black. And under those three men, the numbers of homicides dropped significantly. Does Mr Jones believe that those three black men were somehow racists, somehow prejudiced against blacks?

But, while all Democrats, they were just liberal Democrats, not ‘progressives,’ and not men who saw everything through some ‘racial justice’ lens.

There are several more paragraphs in Mr Jones’ original, and I have already quoted more of his column than with which I am comfortable, even though Fair Use standards allow such when fisking an article. Suffice it to say that Mr Jones uses the formulation “Black, brown and progressive” several times because his point is really a simple one: it’s racist to try to overturn the votes of minority citizens. Unhappily, I concluded a while ago that the voters of Philadelphia will, if he runs again in 2025, once again return Mr Krasner to office by a landslide margin, because his policies of not enforcing the law, of letting the less serious crimes go unpunished, is what a majority of the city’s voters really want. A homicide rate that has doubled from what it was under Messrs Nutter, Williams and Ramsey is apparently a price that the progressives are willing to pay to have fewer gang-bangers and wannabes locked up for rape, robbery and assault.

The only conclusion to which I have been able to come is that, in Philadelphia, black lives really don’t matter, not to Mr Krasner, nor to Mr Jones, nor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, nor to most of the voters.

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Let ’em Loose Larry wants to lock up police officers The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make it about race

Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner, the anti-police defense attorney who was elected District Attorney for Philadelphia thanks in large part to the huge donation from George Soros, explicitly believes in “decarceration,” saying on his campaign website:

When Philadelphia voters elected Larry Krasner as its District Attorney in 2017, he promised to end the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past, work to support victims and the community, and hold the powerful accountable. He has kept his promises. It hasn’t been easy. Larry inherited an office committed to incarceration regardless of the cost, even when this policy endangered and devastated our communities.

But in just three years, he has upended the office culture and implemented policies that put people first. Under Larry’s leadership:

  • The county jail population has decreased by 40% and this summer fell to its lowest level since 1985.
  • The amount of time people will spend in prison has dropped by over 18,000 years.
  • Years under probation or parole have decreased by 57% overall, 65% for drug offenses and 70% for property offenses in the most oversupervised big city, Philly, and the second most oversupervised state, Pennsylvania.

Keeping people out of prison has been Mr Krasner’s goal, except, of course, if the person in question is a police officer. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Ex-Philly police officer sentenced to 11½ to 23 months in prison in landmark fatal shooting case

Eric Ruch was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of Dennis Plowden Jr. in 2017.

by Max Marin | Thursday, November 17, 2022 | 4:05 PM EST

Eric Ruch, Jr, photo by Philadelphia Police Department, published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 2022.

A former Philadelphia police officer was sentenced Thursday to 11½ to 23 months in prison for the 2017 fatal shooting of Dennis Plowden Jr., a conviction prosecutors called the first for an on-duty killing in recent city history. But the penalty fell years below the minimum state sentencing guidelines for the voluntary manslaughter conviction that a jury handed Eric Ruch in September, leading Plowden’s family members and criminal justice reform advocates to say he got a sweetheart deal. District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office said convictions on identical charges have yielded 5½-to-11-year sentences on average since he took office in 2018.

In sentencing Ruch, Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott said that he had demonstrated good behavior since he was charged two years ago and she believed a longer sentence would not offer him rehabilitation.

”Nothing he is going to do in prison is going to make him a better person,” McDermott said to a courtroom packed with family, friends, and colleagues of Ruch and Plowden.

McDermott suggested she would have let Ruch, 34, walk out of court with no prison time would it not diminish the severity of the voluntary manslaughter charge, which calls for a minimum of 4½ years in prison, according to state sentencing guidelines.

Naturally, Mr Plowden’s family “expressed sharp disappointment” that the sentence was as light as it was, and the distinguished Mr Krasner was displeased.

McDermott said the sentence came with parole eligibility and carried no financial penalties. A spokesperson for Krasner said the office is “reviewing options” and has 30 days to appeal the sentence to the Superior Court.

In a statement, Krasner noted that the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission recommendations allow a judge to reduce a sentence by one year below the minimum recommendation. “This sentence falls far below state guidelines,” he said.

In other words, Let ’em Loose Larry doesn’t want to let former Officer Ruch loose! KYW News Radio’s Kristen Johanson reported that the District Attorney’s Office, in what is phrased as a personal statement from Mr Krasner, will “be reviewing” their options to try to get Mr Ruch locked up longer.

In September, a jury found Ruch guilty of voluntary manslaughter for shooting and killing Plowden, a 25-year-old who was in the process of surrendering to officers following a high-speed car chase in the Ogontz neighborhood. Over the course of a five-day trial, witnesses said Plowden emerged from his crashed vehicle in a daze and was on the ground in a seated position when Ruch fired a single shot at his head. The bullet tore through Plowden’s left hand before entering his skull — a hand he was raising to surrender, prosecutors argued.

That jury had acquitted Mr Ruch of the more serious charge of third-degree murder. In charging Mr Ruch with third-degree murder, the District Attorney’s Office was saying that the officer was motivated by malice, and a wanton disregard for the danger to life posed by his action.

Ruch and five other officers, including his former partner, testified that they thought Plowden was reaching with his right hand for a gun while on the ground, and that Ruch feared his life when he pulled the trigger. “The hand you can’t see is the hand that can hurt you,” the former officer testified.

But Plowden didn’t have a gun on him. Officers disputed their department’s own crime scene sketch that showed Ruch had cover behind police cars when he shot Plowden. And witnesses — even though some agreed Plowden’s right hand was concealed when Ruch fired — acknowledged that the man was dazed and defenseless at the time of the fatal shot.

Now comes the bias of the Inquirer:

Police originally said Plowden, who was Black, was driving a 2013 Hyundai sedan that was connected to a murder investigation. They later determined that he had no connection to the case, and prosecutors questioned whether Ruch even knew about the wanted vehicle when he initiated the stop.

The Inky only rarely publishes photos of accused or convicted criminals, but, as shown, and linked, above, the newspaper published the photo of Mr Ruch. You are supposed to note that the former officer is white. And in the paragraph above, they want you to know that Mr Plowden was black. The Inquirer, which publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes stated is an “anti-racist news organization,” wants to make sure you see a racial angle in this story!

There would have been no shooting had Mr Plowden not fled the police in the first place.

Judge McDermott clearly believed that the former officer did not really deserve to go to jail for what was a mistaken judgement in the field, in the heat of the moment, facing a suspect who had led police on a high-speed chase. Left unexplained in the Inquirer article was why Mr Plowden fled in the first place.

According to the previous story in the Inquirer, former Officer Ruch was convicted on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, and was taken into custody at that point. This means that Mr Ruch has already served 57 days of his 11½ to 23 month sentence. This means, that if Judge McDermott’s sentence is upheld, he could be released from jail as early as September 7, 2024. I’d note here that former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathlee Kane, sentenced to 10 to 23 months for perjury, official oppression and some other offenses, was released two months early for good behavior. Mr Ruch could get out even earlier than September of next year if he keeps his nose clean in jail. I hope he does.

As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department is undermanned by hundreds of officers, and the situation is only going to get worse. Mr Krasner, who absolutely hates police officers, is doing his best to make the Philadelphia Police Department less attractive to potential recruits, by letting them know that he’ll do everything he can to get hem convicted and imprisoned, something he does not want to do for actual criminals.

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Do the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer have no mirrors in their homes? The newspaper is far, far, far more concerned with the killings of cute little white girls

I know, I know, I’ve said it before: to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes declared to be an “anti-racist news organization,” black lives really don’t matter.

Now, the Editorial Board are shocked, shocked! that a mass shooting in crime-ridden Kensington, over a week ago, has been greeted with perfunctory remarks, but mostly just shrugs.

A mass shooting must never be business as usual

After nine people were shot in Kensington, the ho-hum response sends a message that City Hall doesn’t care.

by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, November 15, 2022

There was a time when a mass shooting in Philadelphia would be cause for both alarm and action. But after nine people were shot in Kensington a little over a week ago, barely anyone batted an eye.

Maybe since the mass shooting was in Kensington — one of our city’s long-forgotten and grievously underserved communities — it was somehow deemed OK.

Yet what happened was absolutely horrific. Three or four people jumped out of a car on a busy Saturday night and sprayed at least 40 bullets into a crowd near the entrance to the Market-Frankford Line on Allegheny Avenue.

Police and rescue personnel swarmed in. Bloodied bodies were scooped up and rushed to the hospital. No arrests have been made. Mayor Jim Kenney issued a formulaic tweet decrying the grisly events and sending thoughts to the impacted families.

There’s more at the original. But you know what isn’t in the Inquirer, either on its website main page or specific crime page?[1]As of 8:30 AM EST. Anything, anything at all about the murder documented in Fox 29’s Steve Keeley via tweet.

The mass shooting the Editorial Board mentioned was bad, but no one actually died in it; gang-bangers, oops, sorry, “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families”[2]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading can fire off lots and lots of rounds, but are simply horrible marksmen.

But a 53-year-old black man was not just shot, but killed, was deliberately murdered at the intersection of North 50th Street and Westminster Avenue, and the Inky doesn’t care enough about it to have even a paragraph on it.

North 50th Street and Westminster Avenue, via Google Maps, July 2019. Click to enlarge.

Of course, that intersection, while not exactly the worst in Philly, isn’t exactly the greatest place to live, either. 5002 Westminster Avenue is currently for sale, for a whopping $95,000, in a zillow.com listing which says the three bedroom, two bath, 1170 ft² townhouse “needs some work,” and doesn’t include any photos. Another listing, for 5030 Westminster Avenue, shows a three bedroom, one bath, 1,256 ft² rowhome for sale listed at $135,000, and the few photos there shows a residence which has been at least partially fixed up.

And while the murder of a local, of a Philadelphian, didn’t make the paper, this story was on their website:

Idaho police: No suspect in slaying of 4 college students

Police in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, say they have not identified a suspect or found a weapon in the weekend slayings of four University of Idaho students in a rental house near campus

by Rebecca Boone and Nicholas K Geranios, Associated Press | Wednesday, November 16, 2022

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Police in the college town of Moscow said Wednesday they have not identified a suspect or found a weapon in the weekend slayings of four University of Idaho students in a rental house near campus.

Authorities continue to believe the attack was targeted but walked back a previous statement that there was no threat to the public.

“Investigators are working to follow up on all the leads and identify a person of interest,” Moscow Police Chief James Fry said at a news conference. “We do not have a suspect at this time, and that individual is still out there. We cannot say that there is no threat to the community.”

“We need to be aware of our surroundings,” Fry said.

Idaho murder victims, via CNN. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original, but the Inquirer published 582 words, exclusive of the headlines and bylines, about the murders of four college students 2,574 miles away. I have to wonder: is there anything, anything at all, which would lead the Inky to give that much space to four murdered students in Idaho, and none to a 53-year-old Philadelphian?

I’ve said it before: the Inquirer really is much more concerned about the killings of cute little white girls.

So, why was there so little real concern about the ‘mass shooting’ in Kensington? Perhaps the Editorial Board need to look in their own mirrors, because the newspaper they run doesn’t really care about shootings and murders in the heavily minority areas — Philadelphia is very racially and ethnically segregated internally — of their own city, and it shouldn’t take a 69-year-old white former Pennsylvanian now living 600 miles away to notice it.

References

References
↑1 As of 8:30 AM EST.
↑2 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups“
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They all looked scared

I wish I could more fully remember the scene from the movie The Right Stuff in which Scott Glenn, playing Alan Shepard is describing some people and says, in a normal tone of voice, “they all look” and then changes his tone to a sinister “scared.” Why? Because all of a sudden the people who have been pushing more and more support for Ukraine just started defecating in their pants. From The Wall Street Journal:

Missile Blast in Poland Risked Russia-NATO Clash Before Both Sides Dialed Back

Ukraine air-defense likely fired the missile, officials said, and responses from Biden and the Kremlin showed a shared wish to avoid escalation

By Daniel Michaels, Laurence Norman and Drew Hinshaw | Wednesday, Nov 16, 2022 | 12:54 PM EST

BRUSSELS—The explosion of a stray air-defense missile in Poland on Tuesday offers an unsettling reminder of how close Russia’s war in Ukraine is to NATO territory, and with that the risk of confrontation between nuclear powers.

But fast efforts by both sides to ease rising tensions indicate that despite the conflict’s brutality and mounting toll, neither Russia nor NATO countries want fighting to spill west of Ukraine.

The first sign of efforts to prevent escalation came hours after the missile crashed in Poland and killed two people, when President Biden said that preliminary information indicated that the missile strike was unlikely to have been fired from Russia and pledged to investigate the incident.

Hours later, top officials from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said the missile was likely a Soviet-made weapon fired by a Ukrainian air-defense system, and that there was no evidence it was directed there intentionally.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, as the Western democracies were worried that the huge Red Army could roll right in and conquer what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany more colloquially, and the Europeans hadn’t the strength to stop it. NATO’s guarantee was that an attack on one was an attack on all, which was, in effect, a guarantee that the United States, with its large forces and its nuclear weapons, would come to West Germany’s defense.

The USSR detonated its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, far earlier than it was estimated they could.

NATO was a military alliance, including the nuclear-armed United States, against the wholly conventionally-armed Soviet Union; that lasted for 4½ months.

Of course, the Soviets had no way of delivering atomic bombs to targets at the time, and only a few of the devices, but they kept building, and building, and building. By 1951, the USSR tested an air-dropped atomic bomb, which meant that the USSR now had deliverable nuclear weapons.

If NATO had kept to itself, and not expanded following the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, NATO might still be a credible deterrent. But NATO expanded into Poland, and the Baltic States, right on Russia’s doorstep. Russia now has the nuclear arsenal to completely destroy the United States; does anyone seriously believe that Joe Biden, or any American President, would put the lives of 330 million Americans in danger of nuclear incineration to defend Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia?

And now we’ve seen that first military “accident” from the Russo-Ukrainian War spill into a NATO country, and the policy-makers are all looking scared. They should look scared. They should look scared fecesless.

Further down:

(NATO Secretary-General Jens) Stoltenberg — a relentless critic of Russian aggression — sought to stress that events never got out of hand.

“NATO is prepared for situations like this,” he said, first by trying to prevent them, and if that fails, by working “to ensure they don’t spiral out of control.”

Russia also demonstrated a desire to contain the incident. Its Defense Ministry said Wednesday that precision strikes were carried out on targets only on Ukrainian territory and no closer than about 20 miles from the Ukraine-Poland border.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday offered some rare praise for the U.S. — while criticizing some Europeans — in his comments welcoming what he described as the “restrained and much more professional reaction of the American side and the American president” to the news.

Speaking to reporters, Mr. Peskov dismissed European and Ukrainian comments Tuesday blaming Russia as “another hysterical and frenzied Russophobic reaction,” which he said wasn’t based on any solid data.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said on Twitter on Wednesday that Kyiv was ready to participate in a joint investigation into the incident and requested immediate access to the site.

NATO ambassadors on Wednesday held an emergency meeting in Brussels to discuss the missile incident and to coordinate the alliance’s next moves. The incident also dominated a meeting of European Union ambassadors, who unanimously agreed “that Russia bears direct responsibility for yesterday’s tragedy, for the death of two Polish citizens,” said Poland’s ambassador to the European Union, Andrzej Sadoś.

The “alliance’s next moves” need to be to resist the pressure to increase military and economic aid to Ukraine. We’re going to see that pressure coming, from those who are stuck in World War II conventional thinking, to resist Russia more strongly, forgetting that the lessons of a war which ended 77 years ago among parties which were still limited in what they could do militarily by weaponry and geography might not be all that applicable to a situation in which Russia has the capability to rain down nuclear fire on every NATO country in 30 minutes after taking a decision to do so.

It’s no fun, no fun at all, to think that Russia could just start a war like this, could get away with killing thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians, could get away with devastating that benighted country, but at some point people have to consider that all of the rules and old ideas have changed with the development of strategic nuclear arsenals.

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NIMBY! The peasants are revolting!

One of the problems for the global warming climate change activists is that even those who support their causes and want to see far more renewable and non-carbon dioxide (CO2) emitting power sources seem to want those non-CO2 emitting power sources to burden other people’s lives, not their own. From a subscriber-only article in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Ocean City fights offshore wind cable planned to run under beach, through town

The plan to run an electric power transmission cable from 98 offshore wind turbines to land in Ocean City has drawn local opposition, but also supporters.

by Frank Kummer | Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Miles of power cables already snake through Ocean City to power its 5,000 households and light its famed boardwalk.

But the plan to run one cable under the beach to bring electricity generated by 98 offshore wind turbines onshore has sparked controversy. City and Cape May County officials, as well as other communities and homeowners, have lined up against it; other homeowners, environmental groups, and unions support it.

Note that: the plan is to run the cable under the beach, not over it. Once built, it would never be seen, save for some necessary maintenance access points.

Emotion is high enough that a virtual public hearing this week on running the cable under public property drew 244 viewers and dozens of commenters.

The Danish wind power company Ørsted has state approvals to build the utility-scale Ocean Wind 1 wind farm and run one of two electric power transmission cables from it under the beach at 35th Street, across the city, and along the bay north of Roosevelt Boulevard Bridge. The line would ultimately connect to a substation at the former B.L. England coal-fired plant on the Great Egg Harbor River in Upper Township, Cape May County.

The cable would run under four parcels totaling little more than a half acre of city-owned property for which the company would pay $200,000 for the “diversion” of public land, which is 13 times its appraised value. A public hearing was required because the land, including the beach, is considered part of the state’s Green Acres program aimed at protecting open space.

Four parcels, totaling less than an acre of city-owned land. Further down:

The proposal has met resistance from some residents who not only object to the cable but to the 850-foot-high turbines they believe will be visible from shore. Some just want the project moved farther out to sea.

However, Suzanne Hornick, of Protect our Coast-NJ, said her group doesn’t want the wind farm “in any way, shape or form.”

NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard!

So, the environmentalists who are wanting us all to drive plug-in electric vehicles — assuming we will be allowed to have personal vehicles at all — and live generally poorer, and who support wind and solar electric generating facilities aren’t so happy when those, in this case, wind-generated power facility, might be built where they might spot the tops of the windmill blades on a clear day, or have any way to get the power generated by such a facility to shore.

And then there’s this:

Voters defeat Michigan wind energy project, toss supportive officials

By Garret Ellison | gellison@mlive.com | November 9, 2022 | 4:56 PM EST

TRUFANT, MI — Rural voters delivered a crushing blow to plans for a 375 megawatt wind farm in mid-Michigan, where several local renewable energy ordinances were defeated across three townships and multiple officials were thrown from office for supporting the project.

On Tuesday, Nov. 8, midterm voters resoundingly rejected ordinances enabling the Montcalm Wind project by Apex Clean Energy, a developer attempting to erect 75 turbines on farmland in Montcalm County northeast of Grand Rapids.

I don’t normally use photos from news articles, but this one falls under Fair Use guidelines, as the photo shows a sign which specifically says “Not in My backyard!

Zoning ordinances in Maple Valley, Douglass and Winfield townships were voted down by substantial margins amid growing animosity toward wind and solar energy projects among rural residents in Michigan who see them as a potential threat to health and property values.

A Belvidere Township solar energy ordinance also fell amid the wave of referendums.

Seven township officials in Montcalm County were recalled over their support for the $463 million wind project, which would have generated $118 million for leasing property owners and $80 million for local governments and schools over 30 years, according to an Upjohn Institute report.

Voters recalled Winfield Township supervisor Phyllis Larson, clerk Colleen Stebbins and trustee John Black. Douglass Township supervisor Terry Anderson, clerk Ronda Snyder and trustee Tom Jeppesen were recalled. Maple Valley Township supervisor John Schwandt was recalled.

Voters told the Greenville Daily News on Tuesday that turbines are an “eyesore” and several cited disputed claims about their impact on wildlife such as migrating birds.

There’s more at the original, and this one isn’t behind a paywall like the Inquirer article cited above.

Everybody wants cleaner energy sources, but it seems that most people don’t want to see or hear those cleaner energy sources. Just from where do they believe the electricity will come, fairy dust and unicorn farts? People want cleaner-running cars, but most people want other people to buy the Teslas and Chevy Dolts, not themselves. While electric car sales are increasing, the electric vehicle share of the US market is still just 4.6%. The environmentalists demand sacrifice, but it seems that they want Other People to sacrifice, not themselves!

Looks like the peasants are revolting!

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Missing the elephant in the room Sociology professors Kelsy Burke and Emily Kazyak manage to miss the most important datum in their attack on Republicans

Sometimes the credentialed media send out computer information which tells readers that an article is biased even before you read it. From The Washington Post:

Americans’ support for transgender rights has declined. Here’s why.

The culture war over transgender rights is part of a fight over competing notions of gender and sexuality, including issues like abortion and sex education

Analysis by Kelsy Burke and Emily Kazyak | Tuesday, November 8, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

During the 2022 midterm election campaign, Republican public officials targeted transgender rights in what NPR and other news media have called the new front in the culture wars. Last month’s Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey appears to offer confirmation, finding increased polarization on all measures of LGBTQ rights. In particular, Americans’ support for transgender rights has declined.

The article headline isn’t too terribly biased, but if you look at the tab for the page, the article title was, as first saved on the computer, “Why do Republicans attack transgender rights?” And the url for the article is https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/08/ transgender-republican-evangelical-bathrooms/. You can get around the Post’s paywall and read the article for free on the Microsoft network, but the msn.com version does not show the tab change; that can only be seen at the Post’s original.

Clearly, an editor at the Post changed the title the authors submitted electronically from Lincoln, Nebraska.[1]Article headlines in newspapers are normally written by an editor, so this isn’t anything abnormal.

Then there is the Post’s biography of the article authors, as shown in the screen capture to the right. Let’s face it: when sensible people see that one of the authors is an “associate professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies,” their eyes roll.

Take one measure: whether laws should require transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex assigned at birth, not their current gender identity. In 2016, only 35 percent of all Americans favored these “bathroom bills,” the first of which was proposed that year in North Carolina. In 2022, after numerous other states proposed similar laws, the number of Americans supporting them rose to 52 percent.

I always laugh when I see the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” No, sex is determined at conception, by whether the sperm cell which fertilizes the egg is carrying an X or a Y chromosome. This is something we’ve known for 100 years.

People chuckled when they read that His Majesty King Henry VIII blamed his wives for having girls rather than boys, because we now know that it is the father, not the mother, who actually determines the sex of the offspring.

But today? Today the silliness of the left is that sex is somehow “assigned” at birth, rather than recognized at birth. Good heavens, think of all of the troubles good King Henry could have avoided if he’d simply “assigned” Mary and Elizabeth as boys.

While I do wonder whether the Post has a stylebook preference or mandete for “sex assigned at birth” as a phrase, it’s very obvious that the good professors who wrote the article would have used it regardless; it is used several times throughout the article, and the transgender activists prefer it, because it makes it sound as though sex is something other than biologically determined and unchangeable.

The jump was especially pronounced for White evangelicals and Republicans. In 2016, only 41 percent of White evangelicals and 44 percent of Republicans supported the requirement that transgender people use bathrooms that aligned with their sex assigned at birth. By 2022, that number doubled to 86 percent and 87 percent, respectively.

Other groups also increased their opposition to transgender rights, but the rise was less dramatic for Democrats and Americans who are unaffiliated with religion. Only 27 percent of Democrats favored bathroom bills in 2016, compared with 31 percent in 2022. Among nonreligious respondents, support for requiring transgender people to use the bathroom that aligns with their sex assigned at birth increased from 21 percent in 2016 to 34 percent in 2022.

In other words, as people became more educated on the subject, they realized the silliness of transgenderism.

These numbers suggest that transgender issues are increasingly being lived out in polarizing ways among Americans — in other words, that the “culture wars” narrative holds true. As sociologists, we have sought to dig deeper than the quantitative findings to understand why Americans hold such diverging beliefs.

The article continues with their findings based on surveys, and they tell us the obvious: being conservative, Republican and religious makes you more likely not to accept the arguments of transgenderism. I’ll omit that for this article, because I cannot simply copy-and-paste the whole thing; that would be plagiarism, and you can read it yourself. However, while they want to blame people who are “politically conservative” and “White evangelicals”, they somehow never mentioned the most obvious and glaring bit of news about transgender people that people saw: the case of University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will Thomas, a male who claimed to be a woman named “Lia”, and went from being ranked #562 when competing as a male his first three years, to #1 as a female his senior season. Mr Thomas absolutely destroyed the real female competitors at the Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio. While some people are surely sympathetic to Mr Thomas psychological plight — it has to be traumatic to actually believe that you should be a different sex — he also awoke people who may not have paid much attention to transgenderism that this was a male, who had been a male athlete and gone through male puberty, and was simply different from real women.

You didn’t have to listen to Republican messages to realize that something was horribly wrong with the Will Thomas story.

Their politically liberal bias — and no, I do not claim to be unbiased myself — is blatantly obvious in their concluding paragraph:

Though these findings obviously relate to transgender people, they implicate cisgender people, too. The culture war over transgender rights is part of a war over competing notions of gender and sexuality, and how those should be regulated in the social world. Thus, in 2022, we have observed simultaneous political attacks on transgender people, reproductive freedoms, and sex education. Americans are divided because we have fundamentally different vantage points over whose identities deserve protection and which experiences are to be prioritized and believed.

Yeah, we get it: this was a biased article, listed as an “analysis” rather than an OpEd piece, and the conclusion, along with the original title, was meant to attack Republicans. But leaving out the huge input of the “Lia” Thomas story pretty much invalidates the authors’ conclusions. If, as the authors began, “Republican public officials targeted transgender rights in what NPR and other news media have called the new front in the culture wars,” such ‘targeting’ bore political fruit because Mr Thomas so thoroughly fertilized the ground.

References

References
↑1 Article headlines in newspapers are normally written by an editor, so this isn’t anything abnormal.