A couple of interesting facts about this supposed victim of racist cops have come to light that suggest that Derek Chauvin’s actions might not have been motivated by anything other than appropriate police procedure:
That casts rather a different light on the arrest, doesn’t it?
Hold on tight, Gentle Reader: we’re about to go adventuring. Linda’s citation below has charged my capacitors, and I feel a great need to discharge them. So here we go.
First: Imagine that, by techniques of investigation and correlation that are effectively beyond reproach, a government were to determine that all the crime in its jurisdiction was being committed within a single, well defined sector. ALL the crime, not just most of it. Where would that government be best advised to send its police assets? Would there be any rationale for spreading those assets evenly over its entire jurisdiction?
Second: Imagine that by the irreproachable techniques mentioned above, the government were to determine that all the crime in its jurisdiction was being committed between certain hours: say, between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. How would that government be best advised to schedule its police assets? Would there be any rationale for distributing those assets uniformly around the clock?
Third and most upsetting: Imagine that by the irreproachable techniques mentioned above, the government were to determine that all the crime in its jurisdiction was being committed by persons of a particular race or religion. How would that government be best advised to allocate its investigative assets? Would there be any rationale for investigating persons of all races / religions?
Go ahead: call me whatever names you have in mind. Get it out of your system. They really do slide right off my back. But the challenge is yours to answer those questions. And I have one more:
Fourth: Imagine that by the irreproachable techniques mentioned above, the government were to determine that a majority percentage — i.e., more than 50% — of the crime in its jurisdiction was being committed within a single sector / between certain hours / by a particular race or religion. How would that affect your answers to the challenges above? Would your answers change if the percentage was 60%? 70%? 80%? 90%?
I await your thoughts.
Herschel cites a typical case:
The leader of [Oklahoma’s] largest police department on Friday denounced the new “constitutional carry” law as a step in the wrong direction.“Saying that it makes communities safer, that’s (a) pretty tired and old statement, as far as I’m concerned,” said Oklahoma City Police Chief Bill Citty. “That’s not the case. We should be going the other direction and be more responsible about who we have carrying guns in this country.”
But Herschel begs to differ – and he has the citations to back his position:
You jackass. Assume that everyone is carrying a gun and act appropriately and respectfully.But I agree. We should be more responsible about who we have carrying guns in this country. Most LEOs, it appears to me, aren’t responsible. Let me know when you’ve disarmed your cops and we can all feel a little safer.
Cops, who:
- shoot Chihuahuas,
- invade the wrong home,
- pull guns on people for no good reason,
- kill each other in the line of duty,
- shoot the wrong person,
- routinely lose their guns,
- discharge firearms at moving vehicles in a busy intersection,
- engage in more wrong home raids,
- aim poorly, shoot unwisely and kill the wrong person,
- shoot people who are not the intended targets,
- fight with lawful gun carriers,
- cause negligent discharges,
- engage in more wrong home raids,
- engage in rolling gun battles where they discharge 600 rounds in crowded streets,
- shoot innocent people,
- burn toddlers in SWAT raids,
- lose their guns in dance floor moves,
- shoot innocent children,
- engage in more wrong home SWAT raids,
- have more negligent discharges,
- shoot heroes who stop shootings,
- shoot more heroes who stop shootings,
- shoot kidnapping victims,
- engage in more wrong home SWAT raids,
- use their guns like hammers,
- shoot more innocent people,
- shoot an innocent man during a SWAT raid,
- lose machine guns,
- shoot themselves,
- pull guns on the wrong people,
- engage in more negligent discharges,
- shoot photographers,
- shoot each other,
- violate the rules of gun safety,
- shoot innocent victims,
- unholster guns in road rage incidents,
- shoot dogs,
- kill more innocent people,
- shoot each other,
- point guns at each other,
- shoot more innocent people,
- engage in more rolling gun battles,
- have more negligent discharges,
- throw grenades at babies,
- shoot people with dementia,
- shoot their own children,
- shoot into day care facilities,
- shoot each other,
- engage in more wrong home raids,
- pull guns on seven year olds,
- shoot more dogs,
- engage in more wrong home SWAT raids,
- point guns at each other,
- violate the rules of gun safety and shoot each other,
- shoot more dogs,
- engage in more negligent discharges,
- shoot more dogs,
- point guns at each other,
- engage on more negligent discharges,
- shoot each other,
- engage in more negligent discharges,
- engage in more negligent discharges,
- kill more dogs,
- engage in more negligent discharges,
- engage in more negligent discharges,
- shoot each other,
- engage in more negligent discharges,
- kill more dogs,
- kill more dogs,
- engage in more wrong home SWAT raids,
- kill more dogs,
- point guns at politicians,
- fire guns in court,
- kill more dogs,
- engage in moe wrong home SWAT raids,
- engage in more negligent discharges,
- lose more machine guns,
- engage in more wrong home raids,
- engage in more wrong home raids,
- lose more machine guns,
- kill disabled war veterans in their own home,
- shoot each other,
- shoot more dogs,
and I could go on for hours more.
I’d save that list if I were you.
Alex over at Ammo.Com has invited my attention to this compendious, very detailed piece on the subject. I was toying with the idea of condensing it, but that would strip it of much of its virtue. If you’re interested in the topic, please read the whole thing. It’s more than worth your time.
Ammo.Com has an extensive set of essays online in its Resistance Library. Read a few. You’ll soon understand perfectly why I’ve allowed Ammo.Com to have an ad at previously ad-free Liberty’s Torch.
Just a few minutes ago, someone posted this on Gab.Ai:
When a police officer points a gun at you and tells you not to reach in your pocket or he will shoot you, and you reach in your pocket anyway, what happens? Chances are you die. You were warned by someone with authority to end your life. The case with the Honduran insurgence is no different. You tell them they are approaching a sovereign country. If they attempt to enter illegally, they will be shot. The message couldn't be any clearer. Democrats can spin it any way they choose. Democrats like to call it collateral damage when they ruin the life of a judge. Well guess what assholes?
This is a very bad comparison. Someone attempting to enter the country illegally is committing invasion under international law, and is breaking American law prima facie. The use of force to repel or prevent his invasion is recognized as legitimate by all but a few SJW idiots. Indeed, it’s not a law enforcement issue but one of national defense and national security. But there are many instances in which a cop might pull a gun on a passing citizen without justification, and therefore without “authority” as any reasonable person would understand it. Were he to pull the trigger, regardless of his rationale, he’d be likely to get away with it – but not because he possesses “authority to end your life.”
Americans legally within the borders of the United States possess a right to life that the police cannot arbitrarily override. That’s not the case for persons attempting to invade our country against our laws and the laws of civilized nations generally.
You’d better be wearing your seat belt, Gentle Reader. It’s not often I get to start an essay with a title that provocative, so you can be confident that what’s coming will have a bit of an edge to it.
Is there a phrase in the lexicon of politics and government more ominous than “secret police?” Doesn’t it give you a little chill to imagine that We The People suffer such an indignity? It’s a pretty good distance from MAD Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” comic, you know. Back when that was popular, we had a Cold War, an arms race, and mandatory hide-under-your-desk drills to keep us mindful of the Red Menace.
But what is a secret police, anyway? Is it a police agency whose existence is concealed? Is it an agency that enforces secret laws – laws John Q. Public isn’t allowed to know about until he’s been accused of violating them? Or is it an agency whose existence is openly acknowledged, but whose operatives, operations, and methods are kept secret? Have you ever given it any thought?
Maybe it’s time.
The Soviet Union of late, unlamented memory possessed a number of police agencies. Two of them, the KGB and the GRU, were often referred to as secret police, despite being well known to the USSR’s people. Most of the agents of those agencies were open about their jobs. Indeed, a post in the KGB or GRU was regarded as a sign of status in the USSR. It marked you as one not to be trifled with.
If the KGB and GRU qualified as secret police by any standard, it could not have been that they or their operatives were kept secret. However, what those operatives were doing at any given time was kept secret...at least, until the agency was ready to pounce on a target.
The Soviet Union’s secret police conducted their “investigations” in secret. They selected their target quietly. They operated to gather “evidence” against him quietly, and by means that were seldom disclosed. Most telling of all, they operated under the presumption that a citizen of the Soviet Union had no right to privacy – in other words, no right to have any secrets.
That was the pattern for the secret police of all the Warsaw Pact countries, for Communist China, North Korea, and Cuba, and for every other totalitarian hellhole this sorry planet has ever endured. The secret police weren’t secret. Their methods weren’t secret either. What they were doing at any given moment was kept secret. That was necessary if they were to penetrate the secrets of their targets.
Secret police are about your secrets, not theirs.
To the extent that Americans have any privacy – i.e., any capability to keep secrets – it lies in the right of private property, which the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees. In recent years, the courts have extended property-like protections to our electronic communications: telephone calls and the Internet. However, the police are unhappy about that. They argued, successfully, that those privacy protections obstruct their investigations of individuals and organizations suspected of felonious activities. So systems were erected to permit police wiretapping and electronic monitoring of such persons and organizations, subject to the approval of the courts.
At that point we’d already hit a stunning departure from the traditional scope of police work. Yet it’s likely that you didn’t notice it.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are extensions of that earlier police argument. The averred aim was, of course, to better guarantee our “national security.” Ironically, and despite the rather phantasmal aspect of “national security,” the argument has greater plausibility at the international level than it does at the domestic level. However, the fly in the ointment remained the same.
For covert surveillance of a target to yield worthwhile evidence of wrongdoing, the target must be kept from knowing that his communications are being monitored. In other words, he must be induced to be a witness against himself without ever knowing it.
Consider also that such monitoring almost always takes place before there’s any other evidence of an operation against the United States, its properties, or its wider interests. The monitors are looking for evidence of a crime that might not have been committed at all. That same logical flaw invalidates the argument for police wiretapping of suspicious domestic persons and organizations. A court that grants a communications surveillance warrant without first being presented credible evidence of a crime already committed or in progress has violated the rights of privacy-in-communication that an American is supposedly guaranteed.
And the target is not allowed to know.
By the argument above, the FBI, CIA, and NSA constitute secret police agencies materially indistinguishable from those that terrorized the Soviet Union. They exist to penetrate Americans’ secrets, regardless of whether their targets have done anything criminal by our domestic laws, or averse to America’s “national security” according to the National Security Act or Espionage Act. Their very nature renders them largely beyond effective supervision, for the elected executives and legislators nominally tasked with supervising them are often themselves targets. It is in the nature of clandestinely gathered “intelligence” that an imaginative “analyst” can concoct an accusation of heinous conduct from the surveillance capability alone. Who could falsify the allegations of an agency permitted to work in such a fashion? Who is so completely without secrets of his own that he would dare?
Note that our supposed guarantees of communications privacy are essentially irrelevant to the above. What matters most is the covert targeting.
How about it, Gentle Reader? Are you at all disturbed by the notion that America’s secret police might be after your secrets? Have I got you looking over your shoulder yet, or are you certain that your comings, goings, and miscellaneous doings couldn’t possibly be of interest to our national snoops?
Consider Harvey Silverglate’s “three felonies a day” argument before you answer.
“Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” – Lavrenti Beria, the first head of the OGPU, later to be renamed the KGB
America has become a police state. Private citizens -- whom the cops resolutely strive to deny the means to defend themselves -- are now in more danger from “the forces of order” than they are from non-badge-wearing criminals.
I’ll stop saying so when someone finds an innocent explanation for events such as this:
A woman was shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer on Saturday after she called 911 to report a possible assault near her home just before midnight, authorities said.
The woman was fatally struck near her home in Minneapolis’ Fulton neighborhood after two police officers responded to the 911 call at around 11:30 p.m., according to authorities.
Officials have not released the woman’s identity, but ABC’s Minnesota affiliate KSTP identified her as a 40-year-old Australian native who had been living in the area with her fiancé. The two were planning to get married next month, according to KSTP.
"My mom is dead because a police officer shot her for reasons I don't know," Damond’s stepson, Zach Damond, told KSTP on Sunday.
The Minneapolis Police Department told ABC News on Sunday that both officers had been placed on paid administrative leave pending investigation.
The Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which is investigating the incident along with the MPD, said that the officers’ body cameras and the squad camera were not on at the time of the shooting. Investigators are working to determine whether any video of the incident exists, the department said.
That last paragraph is the real punch in the gut. Why were the cops’ body cameras not on? Why were they so quick to unholster their sidearms, let alone to fire them? Have American cops become that eager to kill and that confident that they’ll get away with it?
As outrageous as this is, I don’t expect that the uniformed perpetrator(s) will face anything worse than a modest “administrative penalty.” If they apprehended a private criminal, some way will be found to lay the blame on him. And that upsets me more than the rest of this atrocity.
In any civilized society, those who are willing to use violence to gain what they seek will be a minority. Those who are eager to do so will be fewer still. But as I wrote a few days ago, when violence and intimidation fail to evoke an adequate – i.e., adequately violent and intimidating – response, we should expect the ranks of the willing to swell. However, the pressure on those who nominally have the job of responding will grow greater as well.
It appears from recent events that that’s exactly what’s happening:
Those are only samples from the most recent events, of course. For some years now the trend among left-wing activists has been to disrupt – to render impossible, if they can – any gathering of persons they regard as enemies. They’re distressingly good at it, and successful more often than not.
But the counterpressures are building. Conservatives expect the police to act: to suppress disturbances, maintain public peace, and protect the rights of the innocent. That hasn’t been the case in most of the recent leftist disruptions. If the police continue to hang back, there are three possible outcomes:
None of those developments would be welcomed by any man of good will. Yet there are no other possibilities.
We speak of the police as the forces of order. Sometimes they’re not, particularly when they confer de facto protection on thugs for any reason. De facto protection is what the leftist rioters have been getting: the police have stood by – sometimes under orders from civilian authorities – and decent citizens have been inhibited from action. Consequently, the rioters have...run riot. Brutalizations and destruction of property have been widespread.
Is it just too obvious to say that this will not end well?
Muscular minorities have taken power in other lands by the use of exactly the same tactics as the Left is using today. The best known case is, of course, the German Third Reich. The Nazis were never a majority; indeed, that was no part of their intentions. But they were classically “activist” in the streets of the Weimar Republic, and neither the police nor private Germans were willing to take up cudgels in defense of the civil order. The Brownshirts will triumph if the rest of society sits idle.
The Left believes its field forces and popular support are sufficient to carry the day. They make no pretense about what they want: the nullification of the November election and the installation of their preference in the Oval Office. Present trends continuing, it’s difficult to be confident that they’ll fail.
There must be a response, and the sooner the better.
Americans have been led to believe that all the “important stuff” happens in Washington D.C. That’s not the case, especially today. A “demonstration” such as those that have disrupted cities and universities nationwide – riots, really – is a local affair, to which a local response is required. It’s time for riot-riven cities, communities, and universities to press local executives to do their jobs. It must be made clear to them that those jobs will be peremptorily taken from them should they elect to remain sitting with folded hands.
Do you know your mayor’s, county executive’s, and governor’s email addresses, Gentle Reader? If not, why not?
At least, present trends continuing, pretty soon you won’t be:
Connecticut — Police are now voicing their concerns about domestic drone use — specifically, they want the option to be able to employ weaponized drones in the future, should the need arise.As if police brutality and aggression weren’t already an epidemic in the United States, police departments in Connecticut oppose a bill to outlaw the weaponization of drones. The bill also address unmanned aerial vehicles fitted with cameras, and their potential to violate the privacy rights of individuals. But law enforcement departments in the state appear far more concerned with being deprived of the possibility of arming them with weapons, rather than cameras.
This isn’t wild-eyed conspiracy-mongering blather. Fox 61 in Hartford, Connecticut has reported on it.
Connecticut is the state that went “anti-gun” crazy after the Sandy Hook atrocity. The very same state that’s straining to yank the guns away from private, law abiding citizens wants the privilege of flying armed police drones. Ponder that for a moment.
Anyone out there saying “It can’t happen here?” You might be surprised:
In 2015, North Dakota passed a law granting police the right to arm drones with “less than lethal” weaponry. Quietly slipping under the radar of the public and the media, the bill as originally written by its sponsor, Representative Rick Becker, banned all weapons on police drones — until a powerful police lobby had its way with the original draft.“Bruce Burkett of the North Dakota Peace Officer’s Association was allowed by the state house committee to amend HB 1328 and limit the prohibition only to lethal weapons. ‘Less than lethal’ weapons like rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, sound cannons, and Tasers are therefore permitted on police drones,” Justin Glawe reported for The Daily Beast in August.
But let’s go back to the first quoted snippet. Focus on that phrase “should the need arise.” Who defines the “need?” Who will sit in determination of whether the “need” has arisen? What criteria for qualifying the “need” are to be written into the law?
Imagine having a loud fight with your spouse. Nearly every married couple has one, now and then. Imagine that you've left a window open. Imagine that a busybody neighbor hears it and calls it in to the local precinct...and imagine that when you storm out your front door, intending nothing more violent than sitting in your car, a drone – oh, to be sure, armed with nothing “lethal,” merely rubber bullets, a Taser, and tear gas – draws a crosshairs over you and lets you have it. For arguing with your wife.
It needn’t even come to that. The drone might be equipped with a loudspeaker. It might merely blast out 120 decibels of “Lie face down on the ground!” You know, so the whole neighborhood can hear what a scumbag you are.
Are the police your friends, Gentle Reader? Are you sure of that?
Obama really, really hates dissent, express or implied:
FBI Director Comey just finished a briefing to the American public. It was a briefing said to have required the full and prior approval by Valerie Jarrett of Director Comey’s public comments....Barack Obama is said to have asked during an earlier meeting regarding the San Bernardino terrorist attack how best they “control the message on this.” Jarrett operatives have apparently already reached out to and continue to then remind supportive media figures to describe San Bernardino as a “shooting” and not connect it to Islamic terror.
The whole article is worth your time – it’s fairly short – but the following “update” is what struck me most powerfully:
Rumors now circulating that Barack Obama recently stood over Director Comey, who was seated at the time, and inquired whose side the FBI Director was on. Apparently the two men have been at odds for months, including Comey’s repeated repudiation of the Black Lives Matter movement and its highly negative impact upon law enforcement morale.
Barack Hussein “What the fuck was that” Obama is beginning to experience the internal backlash that naturally arises from law enforcement officers who:
Thank God he hasn’t yet managed to expunge them all.
Time was, we were told that civil asset forfeiture would focus on the revenues and resources of large criminal organizations. It would be used, its proponents said, solely to impede commerce in outlawed drugs, illegal arms, and similar contraband.
Maybe not so much:
(Thanks to David DeGerolamo for the link to the video.)
Surprised? I’m not. The incentives are so starkly against the rights of private property that it would have been lethally surprising had this not occurred. Consider in this light the frequent assertions by politicians, police chiefs, and courts, including the Supreme Court, that the citizen does not have the right to resist an illegal order or action by the police – that his only avenue of redress is a lawsuit in the very courts that have sanctified civil asset forfeiture.
The great wonder is that so few police lose their lives in their attempts to seize law-abiding citizens’ rightful property. Of course, that could change.
Again via WRSA, we have another report that looks like a murder committed by uniformed police:
MARKSVILLE, La. (AP) — A police body camera recorded the father of a 6-year-old autistic boy with his hands up and posing no threat as police fired into his car, severely wounding the motorist and killing his son, the man's lawyer said Monday."This was not a threatening situation for the police," said Mark Jeansonne, an attorney for Chris Few, who remained hospitalized and could not attend Monday's funeral of his son, Jeremy Mardis.
Derrick Stafford, 32, of Mansura, and Norris Greenhouse Jr., 23, of Marksville, were ordered held on $1 million bonds Monday on second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder charges, Jeansonne said.
The lawyer said he hasn't seen the video himself, but its contents were described during the hearing. Louisiana's state police chief, Col. Mike Edmonson, said Friday that "it's the most disturbing thing I've seen — and I will leave it at that."
These cops were equipped with body cameras. They had to know that their actions were being recorded in a fashion that would prove difficult, perhaps impossible to refute. Yet they fired into a vehicle whose operator was visibly unarmed – and whose toddler son was sitting beside him?
The story is more complex than most of its kind. The cops are both black; the driver and slain child are not. One of the cops is related to one of the county’s assistant district attorneys. Two other, as yet unnamed cops were also involved in unknown ways.
We’ve all read about the attempts by the federal government to militarize local police forces. There was a recent story that America’s urban police will somehow be put under United Nations supervision. Despite those stories and others, I’ve resisted the suggestion that the police forces of America are unanimously being transformed into instruments of cruelty, plunder, and oppression. But I’ve never heard anything like the spate of stories coming out lately about police intimidation and needless violence against private citizens.
I want answers. I’m not sure I’ll get them.
FBI Director James Comey gives us a slice of truth:
In two speeches, the FBI boss said he believes crime is rising in much of the nation in part because growing criticism of cops has emboldened criminals and caused law enforcement to retreat. He said cops complain their every move is often captured on cellphone videos by hostile crowds, and so have backed off from making arrests.“I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year,” Comey said at the University of Chicago Law School.
And indeed, that wind is amplified by selective use of videos such as the following:
...which show what looks like police brutality by removing the context. But context matters; in the above case, it’s critical:
Given the legal environment and the lack of options at the school’s disposal, what would you have done? Quoth David French:
After watching and re-watching the incident, I keep coming to the same conclusion: This is what happens when a person resists a lawful order from a police officer to move (UPDATE: CNN is now reporting that a third video shows the student hitting the officer in the face when he initially put his hands on her). Unless the school is willing to have one student commandeer the classroom indefinitely, the officer has few options beyond physical force — and the use of physical force is rarely pretty to see. In this instance, the use of force was decisive, brief, and did not physically harm the student.While I hardly claim to have grown up (or live) on the wrong side of the tracks, I’ve seen multiple police interventions in my 46 years on this planet — including in my own high school in the 1980s — and I’ve never seen the police be gentle when a person resists arrest. The use of physical force is never elegant, it’s always potentially dangerous, and it’s always easy to critique from a distance. Lawlessness typically leaves a police officer with options that simply don’t look good on camera.
Nevertheless, there is a problem with police militarization and the swelling of the us-against-them attitude among the police, as we have seen in other incidents. The situation is neither all one way nor all the other. Men of good will attentive to the evidence must remain mindful that cases that run in one direction don’t automatically preclude cases that run in the other.
I spend a bit of time each week perusing sites widely regarded as the seedy sub-basement of the World Wide Web. Among them are sites that occasionally indulge sentiments that any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch would regard as beyond the pale. Indeed, I would regard them that way, especially the expressions of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism (which, by the way, isn’t always joined at the hip to anti-Semitism).
Yet there’s something to be said for a writer brave enough to express a near-universally condemned opinion right out in front of God and everybody: you must grant him the courage of his convictions. And now and then, he’ll do the rest of us a service we’re reluctant to acknowledge: he’ll trumpet something we know all too well, that’s critically important, but that “acceptable” writers and sites lack the courage to say.
The problem with the Black Lives Matter movement, like so many regressive anti-White leftoid movements, is that it is bogus. Built on a foundation of lies. Utter bullshit, if you will.When an actual, fact-based analysis of police shootings is conducted, we find that most black suspects killed by cops are 1. armed, either with gun or automobile 2. shot by black cops 3. had prior arrest records or 4. are mentally ill (and thus more likely to behave erratically around cops).
Furthermore, a meta-analysis of simulations testing police use of deadly force, which was quickly shoved down the memory hole by Hivemind information gatekeepers, found that police reacting to threatening scenarios are biased IN FAVOR of black suspects and AGAINST white suspects....
Black Lives Matter? Yes, apparently they matter too much. White Lives Matter Less is closer to the truth. And the Lords of Lies, lying through their teeth about the reality of black violence and vigilantly promulgating their anti-White and anti-cop message of civilizational self-annihilation, have the blood of innocent Whites on their hands.
Please read the studies and analyses linked in the citation above.
While several of Chateau Heartiste’s opinions are highly unpopular, a couple of them fall into the category of “things we all know but of which we must not speak.” They are well supported by widely available facts, and facts cannot be racist, nativist, sexist, or any other form of “ist.” Facts are independent of anyone’s opinions, though they may cross-cut the pieties of our oh-so-politically-correct age.
This article has drawn considerable interest from the uncritical fans of armed, uniformed bureaucrats police:
A sharp spike in the murder rates of Democrat-controlled cities across America is one of the consequences of the increased tension between police and black Americans; tension that has been stirred up by both the liberal media and by Democrat-aligned radical political activist group Black Lives Matter.As Baltimore announced it is embedding federal agents with its homicide unit after one of the highest murder rates in years, the Washington Post took note of the sharp increases in other cities like New Orleans and Atlanta:
Some blame the increase in violence on the “Ferguson Effect” — officers pulling back on tough enforcement because of the intense focus on police-involved shootings like the one that killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last August.In neighborhoods where police have long been viewed with suspicion, people use their cellphones like all-seeing periscopes every time police officers get out of their cars. Officers and the unions that represent them describe a combination of surveillance and skepticism, with body cameras, ACLU recording apps and jeering wherever they go.
But while the correlation between anti-police activism and increasing murder rates is strong, note that all those Democrat-run cities also have:
...which leads me to wonder whether a city that experienced significant anti-police activism but which is overwhelmingly white, or which knows little or no welfarism, or had simultaneously reduced restrictions on the public bearing of arms, would suffer a similar rash of homicides.
I know, I know: Where there are Democrats in power, there will be large “minority” communities, significant welfare dependence, and rigid anti-gun laws. All the same, it makes you think: Are the Democrats secretly in favor of high murder rates?
Try it out on your left-leaning friends.
Given Barack Hussein Obama’s propensity for ignoring the Constitution, I’ve occasionally wondered whether we can be certain that he’ll leave office peacefully on January 20, 2017. Inasmuch as it’s now established beyond even the shadow of a doubt that Obama was mentored by Communist pedophile Frank Marshall Davis, we have good reason to believe that he has no attachment of any sort to either the Constitution or other American norms.
The esteemed CM Blake posted the following at his site just yesterday:
Now, when such a man, having risen to the pinnacle of executive power while succeeding for several years in concealing his hatred for America and its Constitutional basis, learns that an obscure video has surfaced that “blows his cover,” he might just get...panicky. Especially when there’s a rising sentiment of resistance to his tyrannies:
There is no need for a leader unless there is an army to lead. On this 9/11/2013 there is no leader, but the army is there – and building. The Two Million Biker ride came about in protest of the Million Muslim march, but make no mistake, it is much more than that. It is one “clan” making it crystal clear, on behalf of we, the people, that we are ready to take on any and all bent on destroying this country.
Which makes it uncomfortably plausible that the lurid “official” story of the “biker war” in Waco, Texas might be a wee bit off-center:
It turns out that the ATF claimed they had an anonymous tip that the dreaded Black Widow biker gang—you remember those scoundrels from the Clint Eastwood movie Every Which Way but Loose—was going to arrive looking for trouble. It’s too bad Clyde wasn’t around to throw those guys in the used French fry oil tank. The ATF was there with their Federal guidance to make sure that justice was swift and absolute.No shots were fired by anyone inside the restaurant. No shots were fired by anyone at the police. When bikers decided to leave the restaurant and enter the parking lot, the police began shooting full-auto equipped M-16’s into the crowd. Patrons began diving under tables and screaming for their lives. Little waitresses dropped their trays and ran with terror in their eyes behind the chef’s counter. A twice decorated Viet Nam War veteran was shot in the head and neck, although he was a highly respected pacifist, was unarmed and not involved in any of the scuffle inside the Twin Peaks establishment. Eight more US citizens were gunned down in cold blood. More than 500 rounds were fired by police, hitting cars, buildings, and injuring other innocent bystanders who happened to look like bikers. Two shots took seven of the nine people assassinated in the parking lot; one in the neck and one in the head fired by expert police marksmen.
Within an hour, the police press statement belched lies about “criminal biker gangs,” dealing drugs and other things that never happened; not once in the 18 years bikers have been meeting peacefully at the Waco Twin Peaks restaurant. The police spokesman first mentioned hundreds of weapons confiscated, including chains that connected wallets to belt loops. Then they changed it to dozens. Then, the facts showed there were fewer than ten, and one was still holstered by a licensed concealed carry American, who had undergone an extensive background check and was found to be spotless. His bond was placed at an unreasonable $1 million. Of the 170 bikers arrested for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, less than a third had any criminal record. Three of them had drafted a new piece of legislation about biker safety, and have since been awarded by the City Counsel for safety awareness. Of course, they couldn’t be there to accept the award, because they were in jail.
To this moment, no waitresses, cooks, or patrons have been interviewed by the press. Witness intimidation is in full force making sure no one says anything about what really happened. All surveillance video has been classified and is currently being edited by law enforcement professionals to make sure no officers are charged with murder. This was clearly a premeditated, Federal assault designed to kill first, and arrest the survivors.
I have no corroboration for the above. However, the author, Brooks Agnew, posted it under his real name and is apparently willing to stand behind it.
LadyRaven’s conclusions, while still notional, are chilling:
Remembering the first Million Bike Ride On DC, the reception nationwide was extremely positive. The message was beautifully clear to the government– don’t be messing with our country!The ride is scheduled again for this September 11th. Jade Helm 15 exercises will be full blown by that time.
Tarnish the biker reputation now. Slap the individual biker with fear of death or million dollar bails and we might be expected to see a very low turnout and a public less trusting of the 9/11 Army....
The number one fact that sets me on this thinking is that of the nine dead we know how seven of them died. Four had head wounds, another wound in the neck. That is some mighty fancy shooting there. So I am just saying folks, just saying.
Don’t ask “Am I paranoid for suspecting that this might be so?” Ask rather, “Am I paranoid enough?”
There have been many stories about the steady militarization of local police forces, with reports of consequent police behavior that more resembled an army of occupation than traditional American law enforcement. My Esteemed Co-Conspirator Colonel Bunny feels these incidents have been blown out of proportion – that the overwhelming majority of local police remain trustworthy servants of the public peace. He might well be correct. It’s really not an arguable point, as the evidence for either proposition is lacking. But incidents of mass violence in which law enforcement – local, state, or federal (e.g., ATF, FBI) – is conspicuously involved must be publicized, and the possibility that those incidents were premeditated must always be kept in mind.
Given that American bikers are visibly willing to stand forward in defense of freedom, and that they’ve succeeded on more than one occasion at massing many thousands in one place for that purpose, they constitute a powerful potential source of resistance to any oppressive force. Consider this example, a blatant, defiant response to Muslim terrorism. Then consider this recent report of a reaction against it, and ask yourself on which side the “authorities” are more likely to range themselves.
"I Will Stand With the Muslims Should the Political Winds Shift In An Ugly Direction." (source)
Keep your powder dry, Gentle Readers. It’s looking ever more likely that you’ll need it quite soon.
For how many years, how many decades, have we and our minor children been harangued that “the police are your friends” -- ?
It was the baby’s fault that he was nearly burned to death in his own crib.Bou-Bou Phonesavanh was barely a year and a half old, just learning to walk, and unable to speak, but those limitations didn’t stop him from engaging in “deliberate, criminal conduct” that justified the 2:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which he was nearly killed.
The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib.
Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to “avoid the consequences” of that attack.
In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless.
This is the defense presented by Haberham County Sheriff Joey Terrell and his comrades in their reply to a federal lawsuit filed last February on behalf of Bou-Bou Phonesavanh and his family.
This sort of self-exculpating fantasy on the part of a gaggle of uniformed, armed civil servants whose nominal charter is to protect the rest of us from predation is the direct and immediate consequence of two things:
...and we let them get away with it.
The outrages have been multiplying faster than I can report on them. Particularly egregious are the many instances of outright theft by law enforcers, under the guise of “civil asset forfeiture.” Here’s a recent case:
It happened, [Joseph] Rivers said, to him on April 15 as he was traveling on Amtrak from Dearborn, Mich., near his hometown of Romulus, Mich., to Los Angeles to fulfill his dream of making a music video. Rivers, in an email, said he had saved his money for years, and his mother and other relatives scraped together the rest of the $16,000.Rivers said he carried his savings in cash because he has had problems in the past with taking out large sums of money from out-of-state banks.
A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why. When Rivers replied that he was headed to LA to make a music video, the agent asked to search his bags. Rivers complied.
Rivers was the only passenger singled out for a search by DEA agents – and the only black person on his portion of the train, Pancer said.
In one of the bags, the agent found the cash, still in the Michigan bank envelope.
“I even allowed him to call my mother, a military veteran and (hospital) coordinator, to corroborate my story,” Rivers said. “Even with all of this, the officers decided to take my money because he stated that he believed that the money was involved in some type of narcotic activity.”
Rivers was left penniless, his dream deferred.
“These officers took everything that I had worked so hard to save and even money that was given to me by family that believed in me,” Rivers said in his email. “I told (the DEA agents) I had no money and no means to survive in Los Angeles if they took my money. They informed me that it was my responsibility to figure out how I was going to do that.”
Apparently, there are municipalities that make a practice of this sort of seizure, using threats of jail and the separation of families to coerce their targets into complying. Combine that sort of “policing” with local police departments’ steady acquisition of military-grade weaponry and the scheduling of exercises such as “Jade Helm,” and perfectly law-abiding, patriotic Americans can’t help but wonder about the real motivations of our “protectors.”
Given Supreme Court decisions that ruled that the police have “no duty to protect,” and others that have denied the law-abiding citizen the right to resist unlawful police orders and intrusions, I no longer wonder. Indeed, I ceased to wonder quite a while ago.
The edifice is rotten to the core. It has pitted us against one another, especially those of us who work for government versus those who don’t, in a multitude of ways. It cannot be saved.
However, it cannot be replaced until it has first been demolished. How that is to be achieved, given the overwhelming preponderance of force in the hands of the State, I cannot say. More, and more ominous, there is no guarantee that the replacement would improve on its predecessor. Moralities and mentalities have changed too greatly since our Founding Era for any prediction to be sanguine –and that’s to say nothing of the hostile and alien sub-populations America has acquired these past few decades.
Of one thing we may be sure: a man acting “under color of law,” whether he wears a uniform, bears a weapon, both, or neither, is not there to serve you. Don’t talk to him. Don’t allow him into your home or onto your property. Don’t permit any member of your family to do differently. Whatever he might do to you, he must do under visibly coercive conditions, such that the outrage will be plain to every eye. Perhaps a sufficient amount of public furor will protect you, at least a posteriori.
When you see or hear “protect and serve,” think of the “Internal Revenue Service.” Act accordingly.
Rahm Emanuel laid down the maxim “You never let a crisis go to waste,” and come Hell or high water, Barack Hussein Obama will abide by it:
During a joint press conference with the Japanese Prime Minister Tuesday, Barack Obama used a question about Baltimore to further his views on federalizing local police forces without calling it federalization.The Obama task force on policing is in Baltimore along with the attorney from the Civil Rights Division to push his agenda, he told the assembled....
Barack Obama said there were “too many instances of what appears to be…uh…police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions. And it comes up what seems like once a week now, or every couple a weeks.”
He got his digs in at the Republican Congress but that’s an aside.
The federal police proposals from his task force will make a difference, he claimed Tuesday.
He has invented yet another crisis, using advisors like Al Sharpton, to put the federal government’s hand in police work....
Barack Obama claimed today that the problem is he can’t federalize the police. Implementation of his plan would do exactly what he says he can’t do.
“We’re going to be working systematically with every jurisdiction around the country to implement solutions we know work,” he said today. “We can’t just leave this to the police,” Barack Obama added ominously.
Rep. Elijah Cummings called for a police czar who would undoubtedly federalize policing.
Al Sharpton, a racist agitator and White House adviser, will be in Baltimore to teach the community how to march “peacefully”, which is merely a more covert style of aggression and force.
A couple weeks ago, Sharpton called for the federalization of police. “There must be national policy and national law on policing,” the race terrorist said. “We’ve got to have national law to protect people against these continued questions.”
Remember Obama orating during his 2008 campaign that we need a domestic security force that’s “just as strong, just as well armed, as our military” -- ? Given the steady militarization of police forces country-wide, I think we can guess where he hopes to get it.
(Say, wasn’t there a band named Quiet Riot?)
From the national news media, you might not think matters in Baltimore were much different from their usual. From the national news media, you might infer that the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody is generally regarded as an explainable, if tragic occurrence – i.e., no big deal. From the national news media, you might assume that the political authorities and law enforcement agencies of Baltimore had the situation well in hand.
You might. You’d be wrong.
I expected there to be at least some unrest, and many strident calls for an independent inquiry, into why a young man who was healthy (apart from asthma) when the Baltimore police detained him should have died with his spine 80% severed. After all, he was black, and these days that’s considered cause enough to disrupt an American city.
The reports I’ve read say that Freddie Gray was transported to detention in a police van, shackled but not seat-belted or otherwise secured. This appears to be the cause of the fatal spinal cord injury that took Gray’s life. But for the life of me, I can’t find the reason for which he was originally arrested. Apparently, the Baltimore police were out in force in a part of the city known for drug traffic, but I can’t find any information beyond that.
No one in authority in Baltimore has yet said whether Gray was about to be charged with any crime. This might have been an arrest-on-suspicion. Suspicion of what is not definite, though the region’s reputation for drug activity seems most likely.
One way or another, the police arrested a man for reasons they haven’t disclosed, and that man died in their hands. There’s a good chance that this was a fatal miscarriage of justice.
But there’s no chance whatsoever that whatever happened can justify widespread violence and the destruction and looting of private property. Yet that’s what’s happening – and with the open connivance of the political authorities.
Hearken to Sara Noble:
Former DC detective Rod Wheeler joined Fox & Friends this morning to explain what went on. Mr. Wheeler is a great guy but his promotion of the new policing techniques needs to be challenged.The police deliberately allowed the protesters to do this, Mr. Wheeler observed. They stayed out of the picture. There were no military-type uniforms. There were no armored cars, he said.
Some officers didn’t wear helmets, he reported as if it was a positive step.
That seems to be putting the police in grave danger.
After they destroyed some cars and committed crimes, the police started moving in.
It’s similar to what went on in Ferguson when the mayor allowed 28 stores to burn down to keep the criminals calm.
Mr. Wheeler said the new tactics generated a different response from the crowd. It’s what they learned from Ferguson.
The crowd gets more aggressive if the police do, so now the police confine them to an area but when “they really start becoming destructive, we start moving in.”
“For the most part,” Wheeler said, “it wasn’t that bad.”
I wonder if the persons injured in the riots and the proprietors of the stores that were looted and destroyed feel “it wasn’t that bad.”
It’s beyond dispute that when a sufficient number of persons concurrently become inclined to violence and disorder, there will not be enough police to restrain them. Even an overtly totalitarian society can’t afford that much enforcement power. So under contemporary conditions, in which heavily propagandized American Negroes are easily provoked to mass violence, the police are effectively neutralized. An effective organized response would be on the order of a military invasion, which Americans are unwilling to tolerate.
The only effective diffuse response would be for law-abiding citizens to go to their guns. But Baltimore is in Maryland, and Maryland is among the states most hostile to the private ownership of firearms. Atop that, should a store owner kill a rioter, upon whom do you think the authorities of the city would descend with the full weight of the “law?” To assist you in arriving at your answer, here’s a picture of the current Mayor of Baltimore:
And here is what she said to the press about the tactics the police were instructed to adopt:
"I made it very clear that I work with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech."It's a very delicate balancing act. Because while we try to make sure that they were protected from the cars and other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well. And we worked very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to de-escalate."
That came from the mayor of a major American city – a city that, among other things, is the birthplace of Catholicism in the United States. It’s perfectly clear what she’d think of a private citizen who would dare to defend his property with force. A white store owner shot a black looter who was merely exercising his “right to free speech” by trashing the white man’s place of business? Unthinkable!
But I don’t write merely to note a horrific development and express my disapproval. I’ve made it my mission to forecast what will come of it.
I predict an outward migration of whites, especially white small-business owners, from the city of Baltimore. I predict that the cost of living in Baltimore will rise as insurers add “risk premiums” to their commercial coverage policies and the remaining businesses pass those cost increments down to their customers. I predict that as blacks in other cities “learn” from Baltimore’s example of laid-back riot “control,” the events there will be reproduced elsewhere, with similar demographic and economic consequences. I predict that racialist mouthpieces, starting with Al Sharpton, will blame the further deterioration in majority-black urban neighborhoods on “white greed.” And I predict that the national media, to the extent that they deign to cover those phenomena at all, will rationalize the violence as “to be expected” and deplore the flight of whites to safer, less racially mixed regions as “racist.”
Who would like to bet against me?
This disturbing article from David French demonstrates factual reporting as it was once practiced:
“They came with a battering ram.”Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking. The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking.
She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram.
She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door, her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door.
“I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.” She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed right in front of the police. The dogs were still frantic.
“I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.”
She got the dogs safely out of the house, just as multiple armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower. The officer or agent in charge demanded that Cindy sit on the couch, but she wanted to get up and get a cup of coffee.
“I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.” Wrong thing to say. “This made the agent in charge furious. He towered over me with his finger in my face and yelled like a drill sergeant that I either do it his way or he would handcuff me.”
They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter. Someone had tipped him off.
The neighbors started to come outside, curious at the commotion, and all the while the police searched her house, making a mess, and — according to Cindy — leaving her “dead mother’s belongings strewn across the basement floor in a most disrespectful way.”
Then they left, carrying with them only a cellphone and a laptop.
Disturbing? Indeed, terrifying. But why?
Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement and home of the “Wisconsin idea” — the marriage of state governments and state universities to govern through technocratic reform — was giving birth to a new progressive idea, the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents, and ruin lives.
That’s why.
To the best of my knowledge, the Gestapo-like raids above, all of which targeted conservative activists in Wisconsin, have not been reported by any major media organ. There’s been no mention of them in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Philadelphia Enquirer. Why?
I’m afraid you already know why.
The raids above were conceived by Milwaukee district attorney John Chisholm, a highly partisan Democrat whose wife is a shop steward in a Wisconsin teachers’ union. They were judicially approved by Judge Barbara Kluka, another Democrat. And of course, they were carried out by unionized Wisconsin police.
The motivation could not be clearer. Democrats only believe in free speech for Democrats. They’re particularly disturbed by the ascendancy of conservative Republican governor Scott Walker. That Walker has rationalized the state’s budget, turning a habitual deficit into an annual surplus, and his actions to reduce the bargaining privileges of Wisconsin’s municipal and state unions, have enraged Wisconsin Democrats beyond all description.
God help the conservative who dares to challenge the power of Wisconsin unions.
Will district attorney Chisholm face any legal penalties for his utterly unfounded “John Doe” investigations and the terrorization of Wisconsin conservatives by use of police power? Will Judge Kluka face any penalties for facilitating those SWAT-style raids? What about the happily cooperative Wisconsin police? For that matter, now that National Review has publicized the affair, will the Main Stream Media take an interest in this blatant use of political power to suppress the free speech and organizing rights of Americans?
Don’t bet the rent money on it.
I’ve written before about the evils attendant to prosecutorial discretion and sovereign immunity.
The combination of grand jury biddability and prosecutorial discretion has given rise to an assembly-line character in the criminal justice system. Prosecutors tend to be as ambitious for advancement as anyone else in "public service," and in their case the road to higher positions is paved with copious convictions, whether or not those convicted deserve their fates. Inasmuch as the luxuriance of criminal law has created a state of affairs in which every one of us, whether wittingly or not, is "guilty" of something, an aggressive prosecutor can "rack 'em up" by pursuing a simple strategy:
- Look around for "suspicious" behavior -- i.e., behavior on the part of a private citizen that can be made to appear suspicious;
- Ruthlessly probe every element of the "suspect's" life, using the effectively infinite resources of the State, until enough "suspicious" behavior has been amassed;
- Assemble a huge list of charges to place before a grand jury;
- Present the case in such a fashion as to promote the more plausible accusations and obscure the less plausible ones, thus securing a grab-bag indictment;
- Offer the indicted person a plea bargain that will spare him centuries in prison and complete pauperization at the bargain price of a few years and/or a few thousand dollars.
There is no brake to this strategy. Excessive law plus complete prosecutorial discretion plus a competent prosecutor's ability to lead a grand jury by the nose combine to put even a simon-pure citizen at the mercy of the criminal justice system. And what a system it is! Had it been consciously designed to put the maximum number of persons in prison regardless of guilt or innocence, it could not have been done better.
Those evils are on vivid display in David French’s article. Yet it would be foolish to expect any correction to them. The State never willingly surrenders power. It only takes; it does not give. And when persons whose ideology tells them that:
...have the opportunity to wield State power for their political benefit, no Earthly force is sufficient to restrain them.
I’ve ranted about this more than once:
Prosecutorial discretion, when coupled to sovereign immunity -- doctrines absolutely anathema to the Anglo-American legal tradition -- make it possible for statists to conceal evil motives behind a cloak of righteousness. No one can come out against "law enforcement" without exposing himself to pillory as an "anarchist." Worse, when the evil motives are revealed and the pressure is removed from the statists' targets, no remedy is applied and no restitution is offered to the victims.A long time ago, in commenting on a similar case that occurred in Florida, the legendary Russell Baker wrote that "When the government says it is going to get you, it is going to get you." It appears that nothing has changed since then, except for the identities and political orientations of the prosecutors and their targets.
Need I say more?
A number of the bloggers who entered the fray around the time I did have gone silent or near to it. Consider Mike Hendrix and Emperor Misha, two old favorites of the DextroSphere. Several others have gotten by mostly on reposts.
I miss their regular emissions, but I can understand the trend. We’re tired. We’re getting old. And we’ve been repeating ourselves rather a lot.
That’s what happens when outrage follows outrage with neither redress nor remorse. We’re still angry, but we’re beginning to feel that there’s little point to continuing on. And we dislike to think we’re huddled in an otherwise empty room, with no one listening to us but one another.
The American people appear to have been enervated to the point of surrender. The Howard Beale character in Paddy Chayevsky’s screenplay for Network captured my sense of it perfectly:
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.We know things are bad — worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'
Is it really this way? Are we unwilling to rear up on our hind legs and roar defiance into our oppressors’ faces?
Do you want your freedom back? Do you want to feel reasonably safe from “your” government? Voting every two or four years ain’t gonna do it, people. It will take actual resistance to the tyrants by persons brave enough to do so – and staunch support of those brave ones, political, legal, financial, and moral, by the rest of us.
I know, I know: Who bells the cat? It’s the old question, the one we use to paralyze ourselves. It’s more effective than ever. The State in our time can target individuals with frightening accuracy, and can bring overwhelming power to bear against them, as David French has told us. The Redcoats didn’t even have rifled barrels on their muskets.
Is there a Patrick Henry in the house?
Never mind. Forget I said anything. I’m just an old man who claims to remember what it was like to be free. We didn’t even have color TVs back then, so how good could it have been, really?
All rise for Flag salute. Here are your internal passport, your work permit, and your ration card. Now sit down and pay attention to the political officer. He’s here to serve!
