Bodycam footage has been released on the police shooting last night in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. Three police officers, one black man, one white man and one woman, stopped a vehicle being driven by 20-year-old Daunte Wright. Wright was wanted on an arrest warrant.
As shown in photos tweeted above by Andy Ngo, Wright’s Facebook page features a gun, wads of cash, gang signs and what looks like a joint.
This case is somewhat reminiscent of Mohammed Noor’s shooting of Justine Damond in Minneapolis a few years ago. That incident, too, involved almost incredible negligence on the part of the police officer. The difference, of course, is that Damond did nothing whatsoever wrong. Having called 911, she approached the squad car that responded to her call on the driver’s side and Noor, for no discernible reason, pulled his gun and shot her, firing across his partner’s body. In the current case, Wright was resisting arrest and attempting to flee. It was the confusion caused by his struggle that led to the police woman’s fatal error.
It doesn’t appear that there was any racial angle in last night’s fatal encounter at all.
A final observation: At this moment, Governor Walz and others are giving a press conference on last night’s shooting. They recited a list of victims of police shootings, but never mentioned Justine Damond–the one case that is actually analogous.
Operation Safety Net is the law enforcement initiative to protect local government infrastructure (such as the Hennepin County Government Center) following the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin. The Chauvin trial is taking place in the Government Center, which otherwise remains closed for security purposes.
An officer-involved shooting in Minneapolis suburb Brooklyn Center yesterday afternoon put OSN to work overnight. The video below captures the OSN media briefing held at 1:15 a.m. this morning to discuss operations around town today. It is not particularly informative, but the relation to the Chauvin trial makes it of interest. The media alert for the briefing warned us not to disclose its location.
Facts regarding the shooting are few. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has initiated the investigation that it performs in such cases. Here is a collection of statements made about Wright and the shooting by family and friends in the immediate aftermath. Newsweek has more here.
The Star Tribune has a story on the obligatory rioting and looting that have already spread from Brooklyn Center into Minneapolis. The story reports: “Looting was widespread late Sunday into early Monday, spilling into north and south Minneapolis. Reports said that stores in Uptown and along Lake Street were also being looted.”
Star Tribune reporter Liz Sawyer tweeted out the items below that give us yet another taste of what is past, or passing, or to come, as Yeats puts it in “Sailing to Byzantium.”https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=powerlineUS&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1381443397123252228&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.powerlineblog.com%2Farchives%2F2021%2F04%2Fsailing-to-brooklyn-center.php&sessionId=d78f387a1a4cb586a7f83bed638a7e34a910fdb5&siteScreenName=powerlineUS&theme=light&widgetsVersion=1ead0c7%3A1617660954974&width=550px
Over the weekend, the CEOs and executives of more than 100 major corporations took part in a massive Zoom call, but they weren’t discussing market competition or sales. They were meeting to consider a strategy to combat what they claim is “voter suppression” in Georgia and other states currently crafting similar election integrity laws. Among those in attendance were the owner of the Atlanta Falcons football franchise (who also co-founded Home Depot), the chairwoman of Starbucks, and the heads of several major airlines. They are all apparently quite concerned about states that want to prevent the massive confusion and potential fraud seen in the disastrous 2020 election, particularly when it comes to mountains of mail-in ballots that many states were clearly unprepared to deal with. But since these captains of industry are coming at the issue from the private sector, just what do they think they can do? (Daily Caller)
The leaders of over 100 major corporations spoke via Zoom on Saturday about how they could combat election integrity laws similar to the one passed in Georgia, according to multiple reports…
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor who helped organize the meeting, told the Washington Post that the corporate leaders on the call “felt very strongly that these voting restrictions are based on a flawed premise and are dangerous.”
“There was a defiance of the threats that businesses should stay out of politics,” he continued. “They were obviously rejecting that even with their presence. But they were there out of concern about voting restrictions not being in the public interest.”
The fact that this call was the brainchild of a professor from Yale should come as a surprise to no one. This is precisely the type of woke activism that has infected and degraded the nation’s institutes of higher learning for several generations. But it does call into question the intellectual rigor of the people who are making it to the top of the corporate food chain these days. What Jeffrey Sonnenfield describes as “defiance” against the idea that businesses should stay out of politics is actually more of a case of market suicide that should have stockholders in all of these companies running for the hills. As soon as you turn off one-half of the political spectrum in this country, you’re going to see your sales plummet and your stock values drop. Home Depot still hasn’t fully recovered from its venture into woke territory over the gun control issue.
Should people be worried about what these CEOs plan to do? I would argue absolutely not for two practical reasons. First of all, their options are extremely limited and likely close to zero in number. They can run advertisements criticizing the state legislatures of states enacting voter integrity laws if they wish, but who is going to be listening to them that didn’t already agree with their position? They can’t stop people from shopping in their stores based on how they voted. I suppose they can cancel their sponsorships of events that draw tourists to these states, but that only going to hurt (and anger) everyone who lives there. For proof, look no further than the example of how quickly Stacey Abrams backpedaled away from the MLB boycott.
Beyond that, all they could really do is shut down their outlets in these states. Of course, shrinking your business and slashing your own revenue based on your political ideology isn’t going to make you very popular with your shareholders.
Still, I think everyone should encourage these companies to pack up and move out of the states where their CEOs disapprove of actions taken by the elected representatives of the citizens. This is actually a moment to welcome free-market capitalism and observe it in action. If these CEOs want to lash themselves to a political mast, they have every right to do so. Pull out of those states, by all means. Two things would immediately happen. First, they will slash their own bottom lines massively.
But far more importantly, we need to remember that just as in nature, the free market abhors a vacuum. The moment one of these operations closes its doors to “punish” the voters of any given state, either one of their less woke competitors will expand into that space, or a new business will arise to fill the void, presumably run by people who are more motivated by profits than politics. It’s one of the oldest and most unshakable rules of capitalism. Where demand exists, a supply will arrive to meet it.
The woke left has been engaged in cancel culture and boycotts for quite a while now. What these CEOs apparently fail to realize is the fact that those people don’t even represent anywhere near half of the country’s population. And if they push these buttons, a lot of the more conservative and moderate consumers may not be marching in the streets, but they’ll be voting with their wallets and taking their business elsewhere.
The president wants to change the trajectory of the country. He’s off to a good start.
By Jonathan Alter at the New York Times:
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes,” Mark Twain (supposedly) said. If so, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. could be a couplet. With a few breaks and the skillful execution of what seems to be a smart legislative strategy, President Biden is poised to match F.D.R.’s stunning debut in office.
That doesn’t require Mr. Biden to transform the country before May 1, the end of his first 100 days, the handy if arbitrary marker that Mr. Roosevelt (to the irritation of his successors) laid down in 1933. But for America to “own the future,” as the president promised last month, he needs to do amid the pandemic what Mr. Roosevelt did amid the Depression: restore faith that the long-distrusted federal government can deliver rapid, tangible achievements.
With one of the biggest and fastest vaccination campaigns in the world and the signing of a $1.9 trillion dollar Covid relief package, the president has made a good start at that. His larger aim is to change the country by changing the terms of the debate.
Just as Mr. Roosevelt understood that the laissez-faire philosophy of the 1920s wasn’t working anymore to build the nation, Mr. Biden sees that Reagan-era market capitalism cannot alone rebuild it.
The New Deal was just that — a “deal,” a new social contract between the government and the people, with a new definition of what the government owes us when we’re in trouble.
Before Mr. Roosevelt, it was largely up to local communities and the private sector to relieve suffering and expand employment. Mr. Roosevelt shifted the onus of responsibility and didn’t worry about overshooting the target. Like Mr. Biden today, he argued that spending too little is riskier than spending too much. “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity,” F.D.R. said in explaining the philosophical shift, “than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
The heart of Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda is the same as Mr. Roosevelt’s: jobs and infrastructure. New Deal programs created more than 20 million jobs and built 39,000 new schools, 2,500 hospitals, 325 airports and tens of thousands of smaller projects that did not end the Depression but eventually helped power the postwar American boom.
Mr. Biden’s New Deal — Build Back Better — aims to upgrade the physical infrastructure that Mr. Roosevelt did so much to create. But it’s also a bold effort to add clauses to Mr. Roosevelt’s social contract that include a “service infrastructure” to boost support for the caring professions — the parts of the American economy that cannot be automated or outsourced overseas.
Of all the bills enacted in Mr. Roosevelt’s first 100 days, the one closest to his heart was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which by the summer of 1933 employed 275,000 young men clearing trails, building parks, and restoring the soil. The C.C.C. — “Roosevelt’s Tree Army” — went on to employ close to three million young men and plant over three billion trees. Now Mr. Biden aims to revive and update it with a new $10 billion Civilian Climate Corps that would help prepare for worsening heat waves, wildfires and storms and boost the national service movement that F.D.R. founded.
Like all effective presidents, Mr. Roosevelt knew how to sequence his proposals to build momentum. He split the New Deal into three objectives: “Relief,” “Recovery” and “Reform.” President Biden, who has stressed the importance of “timing,” is essentially doing the same.
“Relief” — through the mammoth American Rescue Plan — has already arrived. In fact, in constant 1933 dollars, the president has provided more relief in his first hundred days than Mr. Roosevelt did in his, though F.D.R. achieved structural changes (especially in the financial system) that Mr. Biden has not attempted yet.
“Recovery” will be broken into separate plans. The $2 trillion American Jobs Plan wouldn’t directly employ people — as Mr. Roosevelt did with his programs like the Works Progress Administration; it would instead use government contractors to invest in not just roads and bridges but water pipes and rural broadband (the equivalent to Mr. Roosevelt’s 1936 Rural Electrification Act bringing electricity to the countryside). We’ll see if cleverly placing many of those projects in red states is enough to win the 10 Republican votes in the Senate necessary to avoid a filibuster. Even small-government conservatives don’t like voting against the economic interests of their constituents.
Another more controversial element of Build Back Better — The American Families Plan, focused on human capital — would fund massive investments in education, health care and child care. These and other projects would be paid for, at least in part, with tax increases on those making more than $400,000 a year — far smaller tax hikes, by the way, than Mr. Roosevelt’s.
While I am not an attorney and cannot give formal legal advice, a 1943 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Murdock v. Pennsylvania, may give Second Amendment–supporters an overwhelming legal weapon with which to destroy every single firearm ownership (although not necessarily concealed carry) licensing scheme in the country. This includes those that require licenses to own or purchase firearms.
License to own: IL, MA, NY
License to purchase: CT, HI, IA, MD, MI, NE, NJ, NC, RI
The executive summary of the ruling in Murdock v. Pennsylvania (1943) was that it is unconstitutional for a state to levy a tax on people who want to sell religious merchandise. “A municipal ordinance which, as construed and applied, requires religious colporteurs to pay a license tax as a condition to the pursuit of their activities, is invalid under the Federal Constitution as a denial of freedom of speech, press and religion. The mere fact that the religious literature is ‘sold’, rather than ‘donated’ does not transform the activities of the colporteur into a commercial enterprise.”
What does this have to do with fees to obtain a license to own or purchase a firearm? The USSC also found, “A State may not impose a charge for the enjoyment of a right granted by the Federal Constitution.” This means the entire Bill of Rights as opposed to just the First Amendment.
It is similarly unconstitutional to charge a fee to exercise the right to vote, AKA a poll tax. This could well be the reason why states with voter ID laws must provide free identification cards to qualified residents who do not have driver’s licenses, as shown by Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. “The law’s universally applicable requirements are eminently reasonable because the burden of acquiring, possessing, and showing a free photo identification is not a significant increase over the usual voting burdens, and the State’s stated interests are sufficient to sustain that minimal burden.” States can charge fees for driver’s licenses because driving is a privilege, but voting is a right.
The racist nature of many gun licensing schemes is meanwhile underscored by an amicus curiae brief filed by the African-American Gun Association (AAGA) against California. “African Americans have been the target of some of the oldest and most odious attempts at forced disarmament[.] … NAAGA has a strong interest in this case because taxes and fees imposed on the right to keep and bear arms disproportionately affect African Americans,
due to the average lower income and higher rate of poverty in the African-American community.” White supremacists once argued openly that this was their intention, and I recall that the complete quote, while it did not use the N-word, did refer to the “son of Ham.”
It is a matter of common knowledge that in this state and in several others, the more especially in the Southern states where the negro population is so large, that this cowardly practice of “toting” guns has always been one of the most fruitful sources of crime[.] … There would be a very decided falling off of killings “in the heat of passion” if a prohibitive tax were laid on the privilege of handling and disposing of revolvers and other small arms, or else that every person purchasing such deadly weapons should be required to register[.] … Let a negro board a railroad train with a quart of mean whiskey and a pistol in his grip and the chances are that there will be a murder, or at least a row, before he alights.
The same went for a Virginia poll tax on the right to vote.
Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we propose; that, exactly, is what this Convention was elected for — to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.
The same applies to laws that require gun-owners to buy expensive liability insurance that might be affordable by people of the middle and upper classes, but not by low-paid workers among whom are many black Americans. While these laws cannot discriminate openly against black people (just as Jim Crow gun taxes and prohibitions on inexpensive firearms known as N-word Saturday Night Specials did not specify any race), they can and do exploit the economic disparity that unfortunately prevails between Caucasians and black people to disarm the latter. Perhaps certain elements of the Democratic Party have hidden the same sheets and hoods they wore openly 70 or 80 years ago instead of getting rid of them entirely.
An Illinois Court Questioned the FOID Card Requirement
More to the point, however, is the brief’s citation of Murdock v. Pennsylvania and the phrase “[a]cross constitutional rights, the courts have consistently forbidden the use of special fees and taxes on constitutionally protected conduct to generate general revenue.”
Even Illinois’s own courts appear to be finding issues with the Firearm Owner Identification Card per Illinois v. Brown. “The circuit court was correct that the FOID card requirement impermissibly infringes on law- abiding persons’ rights to bear long arms-in their own homes for self-defense.” The court filing also argues that the FOID card fee violates not just the U.S. Constitution, but also Illinois’s own laws: “a person cannot be compelled ‘to purchase, through a license fee or a license tax, the privilege freely granted by the constitution. Thus, Brown, who was merely exercising her right to keep a long gun in her own home for self-defense, cannot be made to purchase a card or obtain a license to exercise this fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution.” I do not know the outcome of this case but the bottom line is that an Illinois court had problems with the FOID law.
This article has hopefully provided Second Amendment–supporters with a valuable legal tool with which to attack all state laws that require people to pay for licenses to own or purchase firearms, and potential jurors (i.e., every citizen in the country) with information to use if called to serve in cases that involve these laws.
Civis Americanus is the pen name of a contributor who remembers the lessons of history and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way. The author is remaining anonymous due to the likely prospect of being subjected to “cancel culture” for exposing the Big Lie behind Black Lives Matter.
MISSION, Texas— Anyone paying attention to the news knows the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border is terrible. Anyone who actually visits the border discovers it is worse than that.
Here is what is most striking about the government’s response to the unprecedented surge of illegal border crossers: It is entirely improvised. Jury-rigged. Thrown together in a scramble to accommodate thousands of migrants who were not coming just months ago. And the reason it is being improvised is that during his first days in office, President Joe Biden blew up the foundation of the government’s handling of migrants. With a series of executive actions, Biden threw out key policies with nothing ready to replace them. And he did it using rhetoric that invited migrants to rush to the border — more than 172,000 in March alone, including nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children.
Now the government’s leading agencies, Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, are desperately trying to put together a new system to deal with the damage Biden’s hurried and irresponsible acts have done. Under administration orders, they are no longer really trying to prevent people from entering the U.S. illegally. Rather, they are attempting to humanely house and feed the thousands prior to releasing them into the country. The border’s guardians are overwhelmed and increasingly giving way to bureaucratic pressure to let most people in.
There is no better example of what is going on than the situation under the Anzalduas International Bridge that connects Mexico to the United States in Mission, Texas. It is about a mile walk through woods and a dirt road from the Rio Grande. U.S. officials have set up a temporary processing center for migrants whose smugglers have let them off on the riverbank in the dead of night and who have trudged to the bridge, guided at first by little signs with arrows, and then by the weird glow of huge temporary lights set up under the bridge. When they arrive, they get in line inside plastic fencing that guides them to a table where they give U.S. officials their rudimentary information and then to benches where they will sit through the night waiting for a bus to take them to the dangerously overcrowded U.S. detention center in Donna, Texas.
At about 11 p.m. on a recent evening, a group of ten Republican members of the House visited the bridge. (It was an all-GOP group; Democrats, apparently with little curiosity about what is going on, are staying away in droves.) The lawmakers arrived in a couple of mini-buses and got out, at first trying to figure out what they were seeing. As it began to sink in, they were stunned by what was happening. The migrants, dirty and exhausted, were sitting in row after row. Almost all were silent. The “facility” was mostly benches, a line of porta-potties, some basic supplies, and a trailer with the sign MOBILE DENTAL UNIT.
Rep. Devin Nunes, who understands a little Spanish, walked over to speak to one group — two adult men, one woman, and two children. It was a husband and a wife, their children, and another relative, Nunes told the other lawmakers. They had come from Honduras. It took them 40 days.
It’s heartbreaking, to be honest,” said Rep. Ann Wagner, who was standing nearby. “As a mother and a grandmother, to see this many children, to see this many people walking out of the brush who have just crossed a river. This is a horrible situation.”
“Border Patrol is handling it as best they can, but they are overwhelmed by what the traffickers are doing,” said Rep. Michael McCaul. “They can barely process it.” As McCaul spoke, a large bus arrived to take a load of people to Donna.
When Wagner referred to “people walking out of the brush” — that was exactly what was happening. After a while under the bridge, the lawmakers got back in the mini-buses and headed down a dirt road toward the river. As the buses slowly moved, one could faintly see groups of people emerging from the darkness, walking on the side of the road toward the bridge. Most groups were four to six people, and in most groups at least one person was carrying a small child.
They had all just crossed the border illegally. No one, not from the U.S. government or anywhere else, tried to stop them. The goal was just to make it to the bridge and start the process of moving into the U.S.
The next morning, the lawmakers went to the Donna center. (The delegation leader, Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Republican whip, had invited me to travel to Texas to cover the visit, but Border Patrol officials would not let me go to the Donna facility.) When they came out, the House members were more disturbed than they had been the night before.
“It’s far worse than I thought it would be, and I thought it would be pretty bad,” said Nunes. “Just the sheer volume of people that are in that facility is astounding.” Nunes noted that somewhere in the crowd were the people he had spoken to the night before, now heading toward who knows how many days in the detention center.
“You’re in a pod of children that is supposed to hold 60 that has 350 in it, head-to-toe, in space blankets,” said Rep. French Hill. “It was sad and tragic to see that many children jammed together in holding pens.”
“One of the first people we encountered was a young girl, maybe no more than ten years old, who was crying,” said Scalise. “We asked her, ‘Why are you crying?’ and she said, ‘Because I don’t want to be here.'”
The Republicans pointed to several things Biden has done to create the current crisis. First, he did away with President Donald Trump‘s Remain in Mexico policy, which required asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico, not in the U.S., while their asylum claims were adjudicated. Second, Biden ended Trump’s asylum agreements with the Northern Triangle countries, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, to steer would-be asylum-seekers from those nations into safe countries other than the U.S. Third, Biden gutted Trump’s use of Title 42, the government’s authority to expel most migrants for the purpose of controlling the spread of COVID. Biden did not throw Title 42 away altogether but is by some accounts now letting most would-be migrants stay rather than be turned away because of the pandemic.
The surge, Scalise said, “was created when President Biden got rid of things like the Remain in Mexico policy. He could put that back in place tomorrow and stop this surge of illegals coming over.”
In addition, Biden came into office promising to end all deportations for the first 100 days of his presidency. With very few exceptions, he has done just that. Finally, Biden stopped construction of the Trump border wall. All of these moves opened the door to would-be illegal crossers and also sent the message to thousands of people in the Northern Triangle and elsewhere: Come now, and you can stay.
After they visited the Donna facility, the Republican group headed to a boat ramp on the Rio Grande to check out river patrols run by the Texas State Department of Public Safety. Throughout the visit, state law enforcement had been part of the officials briefing the lawmakers. They are part of Operation Lone Star, a program that Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott started in March. The idea was to have state law enforcement fill in the gaps created by all the Border Patrol agents who are having to care for migrants. On April 1, Abbott announced that state agents in Operation Lone Star had made 598 criminal arrests, referred over 16,000 illegal border crossers to federal officials, and seized 14 pounds of cocaine, as well as arrested nine gang members.
The agents took lawmakers for a river tour in the boats. They were fast; 34-foot Yellowfins each outfitted with three 350 horsepower Mercury outboard engines. The state had mounted 7.62 mm machine guns on each side. The ride with members of Congress was all for show, of course, and Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz got a lot of internet mockery when he took a similar ride in March. “You’re in a border patrol boat armed with machine guns,” Beto O’Rourke, the perennial Texas Democratic candidate, said to Cruz. “The only threat you face is unarmed children and families who are seeking asylum (as well as the occasional heckler).”
Indeed, the Republicans got a few hecklers of their own. As the boats passed a Mexican park, a couple of men standing at a picnic table started yelling what sounded like insults. A woman with them pulled off her shirt and flashed the lawmakers in an apparent effort to make a statement no one understood. Perhaps she was trying to articulate some sort of policy difference.
As showy as it was, the boat ride made a serious point. Somebody needs to protect the border while the Border Patrol is busy taking care of migrant children. The fact is, the Border Patrol is clearly miscast in the new Biden border operation. One can tell talking to them that in their heart of hearts, what they really want to do is catch bad guys. The same is true for the state troopers. At one briefing, they showed videos of troopers in hot pursuit of smugglers who were trying to bring drugs into the country. It was dangerous, exciting, and terrifying work — precisely the opposite of processing exhausted migrants who walk up to a facility and ask to stay in this country. What Operation Lone Star is trying to do is keep up the traditional work of protecting the border, even if the President of the United States doesn’t really want to do it.
After the ride, the lawmakers held a brief news conference. Their statements were more political than they had been in private briefings when they mostly stayed away from politics and sought information from the experts. But at the news conference, they made a strong case that the highest levels of the Biden administration, that is, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, need to address the border situation publicly and personally. Harris has been put in charge of at least some aspects of the border issue and hasn’t even bothered to visit the border to see the problem for herself.
“What I saw on this trip was chaos and disorder,” said Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. “What the Biden administration does not want you to know is simply that they have handed over the borders of our country to the cartels and smugglers.”
Most Democrats are playing along with the administration — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually said recently that, “We’re on a good path at the border.” Only a few Democrats seem disturbed by what is going on. “Henry’s getting to a boiling point, and there a couple of others,” Scalise told me, referring to Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who has led his party in speaking out on Biden’s border mess. “This is something that you can’t defend,” Scalise continued, “so they [Democrats] can only hope that they can keep everybody quiet.”
After the news conference, the Republicans headed toward the airport and flights back to their districts. At the gates were small groups of migrants who, after having made it through the Anzalduas International Bridge processing center, and then the Donna facility, had now been given airline tickets by the U.S. government and were heading to new lives in various cities and towns around the country. Each group carried a manila envelope with travel information and the text of a few statements in English they could present to gate agents and flight attendants to help them get on their planes.
And then the congressional trip was over. The GOP lawmakers know they have no power in Nancy Pelosi’s House to address the border problem. And they can’t, by themselves, force the Biden administration to do anything. All they can do, a number of them said, is “raise awareness” of the worsening situation on the border. And that’s what they’re doing. Let Democrats dismiss it all as politics. But the fact is, awareness does need to be raised.
Racism is, by one definition, “A belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”
History is replete with societies and cultures signing on to such thinking. Hitler was obsessed with “racial purity” and the superiority of the Germanic or Aryan “master race” and sought to exterminate those who were not blond, blue-eyed, and tall.
In contrast, Martin Luther King, Jr dreamed of a colorblind society, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
President Joe Biden praised MLK as one his “only two political heroes,” the other being Robert F Kennedy. Rather than praising MLK, Vice President Kamala Harris plagiarized a story shared by MLK, in keeping with the long history of plagiarism by her boss.
Yet these two are presiding over and encouraging the exact opposite of MLK’s dream, where people are now judged solely by the color of their skin (or gender) rather than the content of their character. Here are several recent examples.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, one of America’s most prominent teaching hospitals, plans on offering “preferential care based on race” and “race explicit interventions” as part of its new “antiracist agenda for medicine.” Such a program uses a “reparations framework” to allocate medical resources.
Reparations means that those who were never slaveholders are paying money to those who were never slaves, over injustices a century and a half ago, committed by people who may have no connection to the current reparation’s participants. In other words, using racism to combat racism.
How ironic that the vision of the Mass General Brigham health system is dedication to delivering medical care that is, among other things, “equitable.” Nothing promotes equity like a racist concept of “preferential care based on race.”
Princeton University, an elite institution of higher learning, comparable in prestige to the Brigham in the hospital world, offered admission to about 1500 applicants to its class of 2025, according to Powerline Blog. Only 28 percent were white Americans, compared to 68 percent who identified as “persons of color.” This is less than half of the 61 percent figure of white students enrolled in US public schools. So much for a class of students that “looks like America.”
Last year, Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber all but admitted that his school was racist, that “racist assumptions from the past” remain “imbedded in structures of the university itself.” Now Princeton has embraced a new form of racism to fix their past racism.
This admission that Princeton is a racist institution prompted then-President Trump’s Department of Education to open an investigation into Princeton for violating the Civil Rights Act, which will undoubtedly go nowhere under the Biden administration. Once again, Princeton is an example of a woke institution embracing racism to fix racism.
United Airlines, joining the trio of woke airlines, is not protesting Georgia election law, but their own hiring practices. Aside from wanting to fly the friendly skies, United passengers want competent pilots, those who can safely land a plane when one of two engines explodes as occurred recently on a flight out of Denver. Or Captain Sully’s emergency landing on the Hudson River.
United’s new woke goal states, “Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day.” Contrast this to Princeton University, which doesn’t want their student body to reflect the American population. Why not simply reflect the best suited for the cockpit or classroom?
United has its own plan to fix racism, structural, institutional, or whatever, “That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.”
United passengers will be comforted knowing that the pilots they are entrusting their lives to were selected based on gender or skin color, rather than competence. As Tucker Carlson observed, “Safety is no longer that airline’s top concern — identity politics is.”
Tucker went on, “The way people look is totally irrelevant. How they perform is all you should care about. Once you forget that, airplanes tend to crash…. Hiring on the basis of irrelevant criteria will, over time, get people killed, and it will.”
Most airline passengers never see the pilots, safely ensconced behind an armor-plated cockpit door, and likely don’t care what the pilots look like, only wanting confidence that their life is in capable hands. Much as how a patient might view their surgeon.
United can be proud of their wokeness, prioritizing race and gender over qualifications and competence, fighting racism by being racist. From “get woke, go broke” to “get woke and you might croak.” Whether at the hands of a pilot chosen based on skin color or a hospital allocating life-saving medical care based on ethnicity.
Those who scream the loudest about racism and sexism often are the guiltiest. CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin is leaving the woke network, citing “grievances with lack of women in key roles at liberal network.”
CNN’s parent company, AT&T, has a predominantly white and male board of directors. CNN boss Jeff Zucker is another old white guy. Why isn’t CNN practicing what they preach?
If diversity is such a good thing at Princeton or United, how about professional sports? 59 percent of NFL players are Black, compared to only 13 percent of the US population. And no women play in the NFL. If professional sports leagues are to be sufficiently woke, reflecting the diversity of America, then half of all players should be women, and only 13 percent black, 18 percent Hispanic, 6 percent Asian, and so on.
Why are woke news networks, Ivy League universities, and professional sports leagues not practicing the diversity that they preach?
Major League Baseball thinks the new Georgia voting laws are racist. They should look in the mirror at their owners, managers, and players and see how they compare to American diversity and admit their own racism and sexism.
Perhaps following Martin Luther King Jr’s admonition for a colorblind society would be the best way forward. Whether in the halls of academia, on the athletic field, in the airplane cockpit, or on corporate boards, how about hiring the most qualified, the most competent, rather than playing identity politics?
Virtue signaling opposition to racism by practicing racist hiring practices, is itself racist and does nothing to solve the purported problem, instead only making it worse. Do they not understand, or is this deliberate, using identity politics to destroy America from within, part of the great reset?
Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer. He is on sabbatical from social media.
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I have said several times that I don’t know whether the Democrats stole the 2020 election, but I do know that they tried hard to steal it. Their efforts included relaxation of voting standards, especially relating to mail-in voting, wherever they had Democratic Secretaries of State. Typically these changes to voting procedures, not enacted by state legislatures–likely in violation of the Constitution–involved waiving a statutory requirement of witness signatures to verify the identity of the person who mailed in the ballot, or otherwise made it more difficult to check the validity of mailed ballots.
Often, as in Minnesota, such changes were made via collusive litigation supposedly adverse to a Democratic Secretary of State, but actually in corrupt cooperation with that individual who would promptly “settle” the Democrats’ case by agreeing to do whatever the activist plaintiffs wanted. This was done to make voter fraud, which favors Democrats, easier and more widespread.
The Trump campaign filed lawsuits in several jurisdictions, arguing that last-minute changes to voting procedures by Democratic Secretaries of State loyal to the Biden campaign were illegal. Those cases are now wending their way through the courts. In Michigan, Trump won a victory at the trial court level last month, when a state court judge held that the Secretary’s “guidance” on counting of unverified mail-in ballots was issued in violation of Michigan’s Administrative Procedure Act. In other words, the Secretary of State needed to follow the statutorialy-required legal process, not just issue an order to help her party by encouraging cheating.
This is key language from the opinion:
Examining the “Signature Verification and Voter Notification Standards” through that lens, the Court agrees with plaintiffs that the same constitutes a “rule” that should have been promulgated pursuant to the APA’s procedures. The standards are generally applicable to all absent voter ballot applications and absent voter ballots, and it contains a mandatory statement from defendant, this state’s chief election officer, see MCL 168.21, declaring that all local clerks “must perform their signature verification duties” in accordance with the instructions. (Emphasis added). In addition, clerks must presume that signatures are valid. That this presumption is mandatory convinces the Court that it is not merely guidance, but instead is a generally applied standard that implements this state’s signature-matching laws. See MCL 24.207 (defining “rule”)…
This decision might be reversed on appeal, if Democrats hold the majority in the Michigan Supreme Court, but its logic appears sound. The Democrats engaged in a great deal of last-minute chicanery to lower electoral standards last year. They did do by hook or by crook, wherever they had loyal Secretaries of State willing to violate state law to erase protections against voter fraud. Why did they do this? I think it was because they knew voter fraud would help elect Joe Biden. Does anyone have an alternative explanation?
I should add that the Democrats’ assertion that numerous courts have rejected the Trump administration’s claims of voter fraud is fatuous. There is no court in which the necessary discovery on the factual issue of voter fraud has been conducted, let alone a court in which such claims have been rejected. That process, if it occurs in any court, will take at least a year and a half to complete, probably longer.
Some of Trump’s cases have been dismissed on standing or mootness grounds–it is too late, in other words, Joe Biden has been inaugurated–but no court has allowed fact-finding, followed by a ruling that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were factually incorrect, or that Joe Biden carried a particular state, notwithstanding significant illegal votes in his favor. Maybe ongoing litigation will shed light on these factual questions in the years to come. Maybe not.
What we can say for certain is that election integrity is important to a large majority of Americans. In my own allegedly-blue state of Minnesota, 69% of registered voters said in the Thinking Minnesota Poll that they want voter ID. My guess is that the national percentage is even higher.
We have two parties in America: one that wants free, fair and honest elections, with only legal voters casting ballots, and doing so only once, and one that wants ballot harvesting, unverified mail-in voting, unattended drop boxes into which anyone can drop any number of ballots of unknown provenance, and so on. It isn’t hard to see which party has confidence in the power of its ideas to gain the support of most Americans, as long as only actual, living and legal voters cast ballots, and they only vote once.
The integrity of our elections will be one of America’s most important issues in the years to come.
An ex-business partner and I were recently reminiscing about an encounter we had with then Senator Biden at MBNA’s new corporate offices in downtown Wilmington in 1996. (MBNA was then the world’s largest independent credit card issuer.) Biden was running for re-election, so he was glad-handing anyone within reach, and we were, unfortunately, in the line of fire having just left a meeting and walking through the lobby. Flashing a toothy grin, dripping with condescension and insincerity, he grabbed my hand and said, “Good to meet you, hope you’ll vote for me in November. Like your tie.”
Fighting the urge to go and wash my hands and thinking of his disastrous 1987 presidential campaign and history of political sleaze, I said to my partner, after Biden had pressed his flesh, “Damn, I hope that oily bastard is never elected President.”
The chance meeting at the MBNA building was appropriate as Biden was not only a Senator from Delaware but was so blatantly acting as MBNA’s chief “lobbyist” that he was often referred to as “The Senator from MBNA.” In 1996, MBNA hired Joe’s son, Hunter, fresh out of law school, having never worked in finance or banking, as a “senior vice president” making $100,000.00 per year ($168,00.00 in 2021 dollars) plus a substantial signing bonus.
It was after this run-in with Joe Biden that I began to pay more attention to his fabulist tendencies, lack of character and compulsive lying. While his cognitive decline is an ancillary factor in what the American people see today, the reality is that he has always been someone who will do or say anything to advance his personal aspirations. Which has always been more than just mundane financial or material accumulation. Biden has long harbored the dream of being praised in the history books as the next Franklin Roosevelt, the demigod in the pantheon of Democrat party icons. His impatience to achieve that goal had him seriously considering a presidential run in 1980 when he was 37. His first bid for the presidency was in 1987 at 44.
Joe Biden is not an ideologue but a self-obsessed blowhard who is currently promoting extreme leftist ideology only because those policies are now de rigueur in the radicalized left-wing Democrat party and advancing them is the key to the esteem he craves. By stark comparison, during various stages in his 35-year Senate career he was a racist and segregationist, a zealot for tough on crime legislation, a hawk promoting military intervention in a variety of international conflicts and an avowed defender of crony capitalism.
Since he became President, many Americans and journalists in the alternative media have been taken aback by Biden’s penchant to outright lie repeatedly in the course of any speech, pronouncement or press briefing. Throughout his political career, in virtually every speech or answer to a question he has not only trafficked in political obfuscations but repeatedly told overt lies about his life history, legislative matters and his political opponents. He fits the definition of a compulsive liar:
A compulsive liar is defined as someone who lies out of habit. Lying is their normal and reflexive way of responding to questions. Compulsive liars bend the truth about everything, large and small. For a compulsive liar, telling the truth is very awkward and uncomfortable while lying feels right as they oftentimes have a need to embellish and exaggerate.
There is little doubt that Joe Biden is suffering from mild cognitive decline brought about by the aging process, but that should not be viewed as an excuse for his character traits, in particular self-obsession and compulsive lying. In reality, these types of character traits are not developed as a person grows older. Instead, lifelong traits become more pronounced and exaggerated in old age.
Thus, he is not an absent-minded grandfatherly and politically moderate occupant of the White House but the most dishonest, deceitful and mendacious person in a position of power in American history and, along with his influencers in the radicalized Democrat party, an empirical threat to the future of the country.
Determined to rid the nation of Donald Trump, the ruling elites inflicted Joe Biden upon the nation by egregiously and perhaps illegally manipulating election laws and obfuscating and oftentimes burying unflattering and negative stories about him and his family. Biden was an ideal choice for the elites as he is, in many ways, a reflection of who they are. However, this choice also revealed their obliviousness in dismissing the depth of Biden’s narcissism and habitual duplicity.
Professor Ted McAllister of Pepperdine University described the current generation of American elites or the Ruling Class as follows:
The deepest fact of our time is that America has a bad elite, a mendacious one whose skills, values, goals, tastes and types of knowledge are hostile to our nation’s inherited cultures and plural people. The new elite that has emerged in the last generation or two has no interest in preserving anything but perhaps their own power. They lack historical knowledge and vision, which they supplant by, or exchange for, the powers of transformation and change. Intoxicated by the power possible with emerging technologies, inspired by visions that only a deracinated globalist perspective could make attractive, this elite thinks of creative destruction as applied to culture.
The ruling elites in their headfirst dash to transform the culture have aligned themselves with the radical left whose sole objective is to centralize all governmental and economic power in a hybrid socialist federal government with themselves, and not the current ruling class, in permanent control.
Yet, the elites cannot see the forest for the trees. Their naiveté and egotism mirrors Biden’s self-obsession as the elites believe they can ultimately compromise with the militant left to their advantage and Biden mindlessly acquiesces to the left in order to satisfy his lifelong aspirations. This confluence of cowardice has placed the radical Left at the apex of the governing pyramid despite just 15% of Democrat voters (and 7% of all voters) identifying as very liberal.
The three-headed monster of radical leftism, a duplicitous Joe Biden and a credulous ruling elite has unleashed upon the nation the onslaught of identity politics and cancel culture, unconstrained illegal immigration, unfettered money creation and spending, manipulated and unfair elections, racial demagoguery and the near-permanent abrogation of freedoms under the guise of fighting a pandemic.
It is imperative that the American people become more involved in the nation’s governance by actively participating in a patriotic resistance against the tyranny of a central government dominated by the left. In a multi-ethnic nation of 330 million that spans a continent, the primary solution to this descent into potential anarchy lies in forcing an awakening by and a transformation of the elites and related institutions, thus recapturing the culture. As that is the key to permanently defeating the militant left.
This will require political turmoil. The people must force and endure dramatic, painful, institutional battles outside of the federal government: in universities, non-profits, media, arts, and the array of institutions that constitute the sinews of a self-ruling people. Meanwhile, the American people, and in particular the nation’s elites, must reject the false characterization of Joe Biden and recognize the mendacious man he is and the self-obsession that motivates him. Thus, making it imperative that he and his administration be thwarted at every turn by state governors and legislatures, the Congress and the Courts.
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by Glenn H. Ray, of the state of Minnesota when it used to be an honest, safe, and beautiful place in which to LIVE!
I once was reliably fluent in Russian, speaking in the USSR with a “tsarist” tongue. After all, my major instructors of Russian from 1952 -60 had fled for their lives from Asia to America! Their Manchurian lives and homes were stolen from them by the world’s greatest killer of all time, when LEFTY fascist murderer Mao Tse Tung captured China and territory in the late 1940s.
My tsarist tongue was unknown to USSR Soviets of 1966…..Stalin had managed to kill about all of the then educated Russians who dared to remain “home” during his decades of purging. Today’s Americans are stupid regarding this Soviet past. They elected Joe Biden in 2020 and began Black Lives Matter and Antifa for Stalin Starters.
American citizens these days are mentally vacant of such histories of our recent past. Our universities and colleges began their fascist Soviet style love for leftism in the 1970s causing the source of today’s Biden empty-headed drive to dictatorship from Washington. …..and the beginning of end of our American the Beautiful forever!
In 1966 the Soviet citizens I came across in Moscow, Leningrad, Rostov and Sochi, wouldn’t speak to folks with a foreign tongue or look in public. They hardly ever spoke in public among themselves for fear of disappearing into Siberia, for the secret police was about everywhere where people gathered.
On my first day in that USSR, I was smart enough to slip into the silent masses in Leningrad to buy the Soviet uniform of common Soviet man….white shirt with black trousers……I quickly became well received as it turned out, received with common Russian folk out on the streets….as long as we could speak in public…..all resulting from wearing my white shirt, black pants, and my guts to interfere will local Soviet silence in public, SPEAKING WITH SUCH A BEAUTIFUL RUSSIAN TONGUE…as they’d confess why they dared to agree to talk with me in public.
Today’s Americans don’t speak to their neighbors anymore where I live among the Minneapolis, Minnesota masses these days. They are lonely and isolated…and don’t speak any politics in public because in the masses they produce, Democrats have owned the states’ leftist show now for at least two decades. THEY, UNDER THE AGE FORTY, KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE SOVIET UNION, NOTHING ABOUT FASCIST GERMANY AND TODAY’S FASCIST JOE BIDEN!!!
IGNORANCE OF THE AMERICAN UNDER AGE FORTY, ESPECIALLY THE ‘collegiate’ seems to be universal….including the greedies in the Big Tech fascist crowds.
I was in Kiev in October, 1990, invited to join a group of Minnesota gals in Anoka County who had collected a great deal of money TO TAKE TO THE SOVIET UNION….NOR FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES, BUT FOR JUDEOCHRISTIAN PURPOSES….
They had collected a great deal of money to help the survivors of that horrible Chernobyl disaster earlier that year. They insisted upon delivering the funds directly to a couple hospitals in the Kiev area where hundreds of thousands of victims were struggling for life. The Soviets, in the eve of the Communist dictatorship, agreed.
I have never met more wonderful, more aware people of their state of affairs, than the countless Russian groups I was able to speak to in 1966 and again in 1990….wonderful folks who knew the evil in their fascist country.
WE AMERICANS ARE TOO EMPTYHEADED TO KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON TODAY IN WASHINGTON!
The chance meeting at the MBNA building was appropriate as Biden was not only a Senator from Delaware but was so blatantly acting as MBNA’s chief “lobbyist” that he was often referred to as “
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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