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Is “Defunding the Police” Libertarian?

I have become increasingly cognizant of a tendency of many libertarians to conflate “libertarian” with “antigovernment.” There are a variety of groups and movements in the U.S. who hate “the government” for their own reasons, but aren’t by any stretch of the imagination libertarian. If you hate the U.S. government because you think is it’s controlled by “Zionists” who are trying to destroy European American culture by organizing an alliance of Third World immigrants and native African Americans, you will likely support dramatic cuts in government; but you are not libertarian, because if you thought “your people” were in control, you would happily have a massive, unlibertarian federal government………….

There are plenty of police reforms that could be enacted from a libertarian perspective that would improve matters. Qualified immunity reform is libertarian. Holding police accountable for misbehavior is libertarian. Reducing the power of police unions is libertarian. Getting rid of overtime and pension abuse is libertarian. Banning no-knock raids is libertarian. Reducing bloated police department bureaucracies is libertarian.

Broader reforms that would reduce the need for police and reduce police/civilian encounters are also libertarian. Getting rid of victimless crimes, especially the drug war, and certain categories of criminal business regulation that should be handled civilly is libertarian. Getting rid of taxes that lead to black markets that in turn lead to police/civilian encounters is libertarian. Abolishing laws that allow local governments to put people in jail for failure to pay civil fines is libertarian. Separating forensic science services from prosecutors’ offices is libertarian. Holding prosecutors accountable for misconduct is libertarian. Finding alternatives to prison for certain categories of offenders is libertarian.

By contrast, “defunding the police,” if that just means willy-nilly cuts, is not libertarian………..

If defunding the police means getting rid of the police entirely, without any remote prospect of alternative means of protecting lives, safety, and property suddenly arising in its place (and in the current legal environment, the anarcho-capitalist dream of private protection services replacing police is impossible, even if it were somehow practical), is both crudely antigovernment and stupid.

Michael Barone: As in the 1960s, violent rioting hurts the most disadvantaged.

“America is burning. But that’s how flowers grow.” So spoke Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

“Riots are an integral part of the country’s march toward progress.” So read a statement from the Democratic Committee of Fairfax County, Virginia, the affluent Washington suburb that has a population of 1 million.

“Please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful,” asked CNN’s Chris Cuomo. He’s apparently been too busy interviewing his brother, the governor of New York, to reread the First Amendment, which protects “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”

I take a different view. I know how violent rioting, and that’s what we’ve been seeing, despite media attempts at hiding it, can destroy a city and ruin the lives of its residents. In the summer of 1967, I was an intern in the office of the mayor of Detroit when the city suffered a six-day riot in which 43 people died. I was at the mayor’s side in the so-called command center as radio calls came soon after nightfall. Police were abandoning 1 square mile after another.

The riot finally ended after some 12,000 federal and federalized national guard troops restored order. But most of Detroit has still never fully recovered. You can still see the abandoned commercial structures and the residential streets with burned-out houses and hauntingly empty lots.

Downtown and adjacent areas have enjoyed a revival, which I hope will continue. But the lesson is clear. Violent riots destroy people’s willingness to invest their lives and money in a city. Those most harmed are those who start off the most disadvantaged. Violence and crime are a confiscatory tax on what people would otherwise earn and accumulate over a lifetime.

The combined effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns and the last several days’ rioting threaten to destroy the efflorescence of gentrifying central cities, which has followed Rudy Giuliani’s demonstration in New York City, a quarter-century ago now, of how to reduce and nearly eliminate violent crime. The demonstration these last few days that it can be suddenly increased threatens to undo that progress for the next quarter-century.

The short-term political effects are harder to gauge. A Morning Consult poll showed a 58% to 30% majority, unusual in these polarized times, supporting “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.” Will President Trump and Republicans benefit from their calls for “law and order,” as President Richard Nixon and Republicans did in the years after the riots in Detroit and many other cities half a century ago? Maybe, and especially if folks like Healey and the Fairfax County message poster are seen as representing the Democratic Party.

But unlike Nixon in 1968, Trump in 2020 is the incumbent president. Incumbents’ first duty is to maintain order and keep things from spinning out of control. Trump might be in trouble if voters come to agree that, as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson put it in his Monday monologue, “No one in authority is keeping order.”

The late political scientist Nelson Polsby called 1968 — with its King and Kennedy assassinations, multi-city urban riots, and violence outside the Chicago Democratic convention — the most awful election year in American history. So far, 2020 is looking like a competitor for that title.

“The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism,” Joe Biden tweeted. Doing so, he might argue, is the only way to get things under control. But one might ask why that moment didn’t come earlier — if not in the 36 years he served in the Senate, then in the eight years he served as an active and involved vice president in the administration of President Barack Obama.

The uncomfortable fact is that the election and reelection of the first African American president did not produce the improvement in racial relations most of the public surely hoped for.

Quite the contrary. In 2008, the Gallup Poll reported that 70% of non-Hispanic whites and 61% of blacks said “relations between blacks and whites” were very or somewhat good. Gallup showed similar results to that question in seven polls during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Feelings deteriorated under Obama. By 2015, only 45% of non-Hispanic whites and 51% of blacks said relations between the races were good.

One can debate how much of this deterioration was Obama’s fault, a subject for another day. But surely there was a widespread sense of disappointment that black-white relations had not become as harmonious as many expected or hoped. Violent rioting won’t help, do that, any more than they’ll grow flowers.

Are we being honest about who is to blame for systemic racism?

The Knoxville News Sentinel published a front-page photo on Wednesday with a caption about protests against “systemic police brutality against people of color.”

Systemic racism is being discussed a great deal in the wake of George Floyd’s death under the knee of now-former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

The video of Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, as Floyd repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe, has ignited protests peaceful and violent, with the tragedy also being used by some as a way to destroy, steal – and worse. In one case, looters in St. Louis shot and killed David Dorn, a highly respected black retired police captain, as he was trying to protect a pawn shop.

It’s likely – just as it’s likely the sun comes up in the west – that when a good many people say “systemic racism,” they’re not including the politicians they like and the political party they favor.

One way to tell? Their attitude toward who has been running the systems.

On social media the other day, in discussions of George Floyd’s death, I saw an increasing number of references from Democrats and Democratic friends about the problem of systemic racism. I wrote the following post, citing only a few municipal examples:

“Below are pertinent questions, given the way the Democratic Party defines itself as being the party of tolerance and inclusion, and many Democrats’ characterizations of Republicans or conservatives as racists or racially insensitive.

“Minneapolis, Minn. has been under Democratic control since 1978. Chicago has been under Democratic control for 89 years; its present mayor is a black woman. Philadelphia has had Democratic mayors for 68 years; three of its last five mayors have been black men. Six of the last seven Atlanta, Ga., mayoral administrations were led by black Democratic mayors, and the present mayor is a black woman.

“A city runs its police department and other services; therefore, if there is so much ‘systemic racism’ in these organizations, why hasn’t it been corrected over so many years under Democratic leaders?

“Why aren’t these cities garden spots of racial tolerance, understanding, and virtue?”

There have been no answers.

In the wake of the 2015 riots in Baltimore after the death in police custody of a black man named Freddie Gray, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo interviewed black Baltimore City Councilman Nick Mosby, a Democrat.

Mosby’s answer, particularly to Cuomo’s last question below, is instructive, in that it’s clear he wasn’t expecting it:

MOSBY: This is much more than Freddie Gray. Freddie Gray was the culmination of, again, decades – the young guys out here showing their frustration and venting, being angry and doing it in an unproductive way, they are carrying their father’s burden. They’re carrying their grandfather’s burden. Again this is generations old of failed policies and broken promises.

CUOMO: You are a Democrat, right?

MOSBY: Yes.

CUOMO: Is this on you guys? The mayor is a Democrat, you’re a Democrat, 50 years of Democratic rule here, and is this an idea that you haven’t gotten it done as a party, as a structure here, and is that the focus on the blame?

MOSBY: Leadership is not based off of party lines, and at the end of the day, have individuals failed in this city, in this state, in this country? Yes. Have there been failed policies? Yes. Have things adversely affected places like Baltimore? Yes, whether you’re talking about Reaganomics, whether you’re talking about the contraband where they talk about stop and frisk procedures or mass incarceration. All of these things directly play into recidivism and play into the things that plague these communities. So it’s all about leadership and not necessarily about parties.

That’s a lengthy, rambling way around the barn to say he wasn’t going to give a specific answer to a direct question, because it’s about the party to which he belongs. However, if you go to the City of Baltimore’s website and click on the government directory, under “P” you’ll find the Baltimore Police Department, because it’s the city of Baltimore’s responsibility.

Cuomo’s question was pertinent. It went unanswered.

Why do we not want a knee on George Floyd’s neck? Not only because it’s wrong, but because we don’t want one on ours. If we want our rights respected, we must respect – and protect – the rights of others.

Unfortunately, in too many cases when people say they want an open and honest discussion about race in America, what they mean is they want an open and honest discussion only about what they say is wrong with people who aren’t them.

When people talk about the need to deal with systemic racism, if they’re not willing to talk about the systems run – often for generations by the political party or politicians they support – they aren’t interested in an open and honest conversation; instead, they want only to use the issue as a club against people who aren’t them.

If that’s the case, we’re condemned to never get off this tragedy of a merry-go-round.

Radio Host, Pawn Store Owner Filing Lawsuit Over Gov. Northam’s Mask Policy

CHARLOTTESVILLE Va. (WVIR) — Charlottesville radio host Rob Schilling and a pawn shop owner are suing Governor Ralph Northam and other officials over the mask mandate.

Schilling and his lawyer, Matthew Hardin, spoke to the media and supporters Monday, June 1, explaining why this lawsuit was important.

“The legislature made it pretty clear, as I said, decades ago, that masks are illegal in the commonwealth of Virginia. It’s a class six felony,” Hardin said.

Northam announced Tuesday, May 26, that folks would be required to wear masks inside retail shops, restaurants, personal care and grooming establishments, places people congregate, government buildings, and on public transportation. Exceptions will be allowed, including while eating or drinking, exercising, those with trouble breathing, and children under age 10.

The governor has stated enforcement would be done through the Virginia Department of Health — similar to health inspections of restaurants — rather than using law enforcement. Governor’s Chief of Staff Clark Mercer said during Tuesday’s press briefing they are aware of equity and practical issues of enforcement for this policy, and a special session of the General Assembly is expected later this summer.

Tobey Bouch, the owner of Tobey’s Pawn Shop, says he is concerned businesses will be punished for not enforcing the mandate that folks be required to wear a face mask inside retailers.

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And all this had nothing to do with any ‘protests’, just Chicago Way™

16 dead, at least 30 injured in second straight weekend of violence in Chicago

Officials in Chicago said Monday that the city registered 16 deaths and at least 30 injured in shootings across the region over the weekend.

NBC Chicago reported that one of the incidents involved a drive-by shooting that killed two men who were also in a vehicle. They were shot in the head and pronounced dead at the scene.

The Chicago Tribune reported last week that there were 191 deaths so far this year as the result of violence. The paper reported that the majority of the deaths were a result of gunfire. The city, under Mayor Lori Lightfoot, saw its deadliest Memorial Day weekend in years, which included 10 deaths and 39 wounded.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the city had the bloody weekends despite a stay-at-home order due to the coronavirus.

“There is a validated playbook for dealing with riots”

Mayor Moron Destroys America’s Major Cities
When you reward bad behavior, expect more of it.

Can you make this stuff up?

Here is the city’s message in full, issued May 28, after several days and nights of rioting. Here is the final sentence:

The city urges everyone to exercise caution and stay safe while participating in demonstrations, including wearing masks and physical distancing as much as possible to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The city has made hundreds of masks available to protesters this week.

Protesters? Earth to Minneapolis Mayor Moron: Rioters torching whole sections of your city are not protesters. Many are professional agitators from out of town. Locals who loot stores are opportunists, many of them career criminals. The city’s message took zero notice of these elementary realities.

Mayor Moron’s contribution to the city’s full message was this: “We need to offer radical compassion and love that we all have in us. I believe in this city and I know that you do, too.”

There is a validated playbook for dealing with riots. It is a tale of two riots in the awful summer of widespread racial unrest in 1967. Eugene Methvin’s 1991 National Review “riot primer” laid out the playbook:

In a nutshell: Riots begin when some set of social forces temporarily overwhelms or paralyzes the police, who stand by, their highly visible inaction signaling to the small percentage of teenaged embryonic psychopaths and hardened young adults that a moral holiday is under way. This criminal minority spearheads the car-burning, window-smashing, and blood-letting, mobbing such hate targets as blacks, or white merchants, or lone cops. Then the drawing effect brings out the large crowds of older men, and women and children, to share the Roman carnival of looting. Then the major killing begins: slow runners caught in burning buildings and-as civic forces mobilize-in police and National Guard gunfire.…

The time to halt a riot is right at the start, by pinching off the criminal spearhead with precise and overwhelming force. The cops will usually be caught flat-footed (no pun intended) by the initial outbreak. But they need to spring into a pre-arranged mobilization that should always be as ready in every major city as the fire-department or hospital disaster-response program.

Methvin compared two July 1967 riots. In Toledo, rioters began smashing things, throwing rocks at police cruisers. The authorities resounded instantly and decisively, arresting the thugs, with order restored within 36 hours. No one died. Not so in Detroit, where the authorities decided to allow rioters to let off steam. Five days of violence followed, with more than 40 fatalities and more than 1,000 injured. Property damage was estimated at over $40 million, in 2020 dollars, roughly $300 million. It was the worst rioting in America since the 1863 New York City draft riots, not to be exceeded in scale until the 1992 Rodney King riots.

And there is a lasting loss for failing to do so. South Central Los Angeles never recovered from the double blow of the 1965 Watts and 1992 conflagrations. Detroit and Newark never recovered from the destruction of 1967. Washington, D.C., never fully recovered from the riots after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr……………….

Tucker Carlson: Our leaders have sided with the agents of chaos – we’re told crimes of the mob are our fault

Here’s a simple question: A police station in a major American city was occupied, looted and burned on Thursday night. Most of us assumed we’d never live to see something like that happen here. But it did happen.

So the question is, has anyone been arrested for doing it? Will anyone ever be arrested?

No one in authority seems especially interested in apprehending the people who did it. All of it happened on camera, but the perpetrators just walked away. And it’s, maybe likely, that most of them will never be punished for it.

That’s striking.

It’s a very different experience from the ones most Americans have living here.

As Minneapolis burns and crowds grow in the streets of Atlanta and many other cities, the rest of us are continuing on as we always do — dutifully following the rules. There are many of those.

Every year, there seem to be countless new rules to follow. They multiply like insects.

We do our best to keep up. We get our permits, apply for our licenses, put on our reading glasses to check the latest regulations on the internet.

We wear our little masks.

We keep our dogs on leashes.

We drive sober.

We don’t eat on the subway. We never litter.

We make orderly lines and patiently wait our turn.

In airports and government buildings, we remove our shoes and submit to body searches from strangers. We lose our dignity every time we do this, but they tell us we must, so we accept it without complaint.

In public, we hide what we really think.

We bury our natural instincts. We keep our deepest beliefs to ourselves.

We know the boundaries. We understand we will be punished for telling the truth.

This is the America the rest of us live in.

For the privilege of citizenship in a country like this, we work as hard as we can.

We never stop sharing what we earn with others.

demoncrap controlled cities. Need I say more?

17 people shot in just 12-hours of violence in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS — At least 17 people were shot in a 12-hour window between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said.

Mayor Lyda Krewson ’s statement on the shootings:

“I am outraged over the shootings and violence that have occurred over this Memorial Day weekend. Too many guns. Too much anger. Too many sad families. A sad, tragic beginning to summer. Please, no further retaliation. Put down the guns.”

Chicago’s deadliest Memorial Day weekend since 2015: 10 shot dead, 38 wounded

Ten people are dead and 38 others are wounded so far in weekend shootings in Chicago — the deadliest Memorial Day weekend since 2015, when 12 people were killed.

Despite the state’s stay-at-home order, the weekend’s death toll has already surpassed last year’s holiday weekend, when seven people were killed and 34 were injured during the period from 5 p.m. Friday through 5 a.m. Tuesday.

In 2018, seven people died and 30 others were wounded. In 2017, six people were killed and 44 others were wounded. In 2016, six people were killed and 56 wounded.

 

Der GretchenFührer™ strikes again

Gov. Whitmer Extends Michigan’s Stay-at-Home Order Again

On Friday, Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer extended her state’s stay-at-home order through July 12. The order was set to expire on May 28. The governor is facing mounting criticism for some of her coronavirus-related restrictions, among the strictest in the nation.

“I find it reasonable and necessary to extend Executive Orders 2020-62, 2020-69, and 2020-96 for three weeks from the date of this order,” Whitmer stated in her executive order.

Earlier this week, the governor did allow social gatherings of 10 people or fewer to resume and retail stores to arrange appointment-only shopping for customers. But things like gyms, hair salons and barbershops remain closed.

Despite a decline in coronavirus cases in her state, Gov. Whitmer says Michigan is “not out of the woods yet.”

“If we’re going to lower the chance of a second wave and continue to protect our neighbors and loved ones from the spread of this virus, we must continue to do our part by staying safer at home,” the governor said in a statement first reported by the Detroit Free Press.

Gov. Whitmer is accused of using her coronavirus response to boost her national profile as she competes for a spot on the ticket with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. But many in her state find the governor’s restrictions baffling, and the governor has faced protests and criticism over her handling of the outbreak.

How about that ‘The cure can’t be worse then the disease” thing?

California Doctors Say They’ve Seen More Deaths From Suicide Than Coronavirus Since Lockdowns

Doctors in Northern California say they have seen more deaths from suicide than they’ve seen from the coronavirus during the pandemic.

“The numbers are unprecedented,” Dr. Michael deBoisblanc of John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California, told ABC 7 News about the increase of deaths by suicide, adding that he’s seen a “year’s worth of suicides” in the last four weeks alone.

DeBoisblanc said he believes it’s time for California officials to end the stay-at-home order and let people back out into their communities.

“Personally, I think it’s time,” he said. “I think, originally, this was put in place to flatten the curve and to make sure hospitals have the resources to take care of COVID patients. We have the current resources to do that, and our other community health is suffering.”

Kacey Hansen, a trauma center nurse at John Muir Medical Center for more than 30 years, says she’s worried not only about the increased suicide attempts but also about the hospital’s ability to save as many patients as usual.

“What I have seen recently, I have never seen before,” Hansen said. “I have never seen so much intentional injury.”

Businesses across California have started defying stay-at-home orders imposed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, and hundreds of protesters have hit the streets, making the argument that the orders were only meant to flatten the curve of the virus’s spread, which Newsom himself said was achieved in mid-April.

Broad Lockdowns Are No Longer Constitutionally Justified.

Now into the third month of the coronavirus crisis, Americans are getting restless. Having for the most part accepted in March that fighting a pandemic with incomplete data required taking drastic steps, they now want the benefit of the lose-lose bargain that COVID-19 forced on them. We flattened the curve, the thinking goes, preventing our medical system from being overwhelmed—heck, health care workers are being laid off!—so now it’s time to resume our lives and recoup as much as we can.

The constitutional analysis of the various shutdown orders tracks that popular sentiment: States have the “police power” to govern for the general health, welfare and safety of society, so long as they have sufficient justification for doing so. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no limit on the actions that state and local officials can take, or that actions that were justified at one point will continue to be justified forever, regardless of underlying developments.

In other words, it’s prudent in a pandemic to restrict activities that would otherwise bring people together in a way that facilitates viral transmission, but it doesn’t mean governors get to “shut down” anything and everything on a whim. Recall that viral video of the guy running along the beach in California, chased by a hapless cop. Or that dad who got arrested for playing catch with his kids in a public park. Or mayoral edicts that stop drive-in church but permit drive-thru liquor sales. Or the Michigan order banning motorboats but not sailboats; the sale of seeds but not weed.

State officials also have to follow their own constitutions. ……..

 

 

Dem-imposed coronavirus orders face lawsuits across the nation

Stay-at-home orders aimed at reducing the spread of coronavirus are now facing legal challenges from residents and state officials alike, alleging that some measures – mostly put in place by Democrats — go too far while the country gradually moves toward reopening.

California alone is facing at least a dozen lawsuits that include claims that the state has unjustly closed down gun shops and religious services, infringed on freedoms of speech and assembly by restricting protests, and one case where a resident alleges that being forced to remain at home constitutes forced detention without due process.

“We’re being challenged,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “All across this country, every single day, governors are being challenged, local health officials are being challenged, and it’s a spirit of collaboration. Those that continue to pursue things that put people in harm’s risk, you have to have stepped up efforts and enforcement and sanctions.”

That reference to “collaboration” was with regard to Tesla founder Elon Musk, who reopened business in Alameda County, stating in advance on the Internet that he would be disobeying an order requiring him to remain closed. Newsom said that by the time the Tesla facility was open for business, it was with permission following negotiations with the county government………

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is up against a lawsuit from Republicans in her state’s House and Senate over her extension of an already-strict emergency order that has regulated residents’ movement and closed businesses. The GOP lawsuit claims that Whitmer overstepped her authority by extending her previous shutdown order, saying she needs the legislature’s approval to extend it beyond 28 days.

Senator Rand Paul Questions Dr. Fauci, Drops a Bomb in Senate Hearing

Senator Rand Paul had the best five minutes in the first two hours of the hearing in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee today. It is clear he has been abiding by shelter in place orders because his hair and beard look dangerously close to qualifying him to join the cast of Duck Dynasty. However, his questions could not have been more on point.

Really the history of this when we look back will be wrong prediction after wrong prediction after wrong prediction starting with Ferguson in England. I think we ought to have a little humility in the belief we know what’s best for the economy.

As much as I respect you Dr. Fauci, I don’t think you are the end all. I don’t think you are the one person that gets to make a decision. We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there is not going to be a surge and we can safely open the economy. The facts will bear this out.

But if we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is that the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that can teach them at home are not going to learn for a year. I think we ought to look at the Swedish model. It’s a huge mistake if we don’t open schools in the fall.

It’s almost like it the scenarios were thought up for possible basic planning for whichever disaster just happened to pop up.
Naah, that couldn’t be, could it?

LOCK STEP: This is No Futuristic Scenario

Whatever has occurred inside China at this point it is almost impossible to say owing to conflicting reactions of the Beijing authorities and several changes in ways of counting COVID-19 cases. The question now is how the relevant authorities in the West will use this crisis. Here it is useful to go back to a highly relevant report published a decade ago by the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world’s leading backers of eugenics, and creators of GMO among other things.

The report in question has the bland title, “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.” It was published in May 2010 in cooperation with the Global Business Network of futurologist Peter Schwartz. The report contains various futurist scenarios developed by Schwartz and company. One scenario carries the intriguing title, “LOCK STEP: A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.” Here it gets interesting as in what some term predictive programming.

The Schwartz scenario states, “In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this new influenza strain — originating from wild geese — was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months…” He continues, “The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.” This sounds eerily familiar.

Then the scenario gets very interesting: “During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems — from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty — leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.”

A relevant question is whether certain bad actors, and there are some in this world, are opportunistically using the widespread fears around the COVID-19 to advance an agenda of “lock step” top down social control, one that would include stark limits on travel, perhaps replacing of cash by “sanitary” electronic cash, mandatory vaccination even though the long term side effects are not proven safe, unlimited surveillance and the curtailing of personal freedoms such as political protests on the excuse it will allow “identification of people who refuse to be tested or vaccinated,” and countless other restrictions. Much of the Rockefeller 2010 scenario is already evident. Fear is never a good guide to sound reason.

Virus Deaths in Democratic versus Republican States

When controlling for the differences in population across states, the number of deaths from coronavirus is over three times higher in states with Democratic governors than in states with Republican governors. As of Sunday, April 26, states with Republican governors have experienced 57.53 coronavirus deaths per million of population, states with Democratic governors have 179.74 deaths per million of population. Even excluding the state of New York as an extreme outlier, states with Democratic governors have 138.58 deaths per million from coronavirus, still over twice as many coronavirus deaths per million as deaths in states with Republican governors.[1]

It merits emphasis from the get-go that this relationship is obviously not directly causal. The inauguration of Kentucky’s new Democratic governor on December 10, 2019 did not triple the state’s subsequent mortality from the coronavirus relative to what it would have been had Republican incumbent Matt Bevin been reelected.

The dramatically different death rates between states with Republican and Democratic governors, however, illuminates two issues concerning state-level responses to the coronavirus. First, the dramatically lower death rates in Republican states account for the willingness of Republican governors to consider relaxed shelter-in-place policies relative to governors in Democratic states. As is appropriate in a federal system where significant policy responsibility continues to be exercised at the state level, a shelter-in-place policy appropriate for New York would not necessarily work well in Wyoming. Governors should be encouraged, not condemned, for pursuing policies tailored to the unique characteristics of their states.

Secondly, however, the question, “what did he know and when did he know it,” is not merely a question to ask the President regarding national-level policy responses to the coronavirus threat since February. The near-certainty of a global pandemic of some sort has been well-known in policy circles for decades. The unique demographic characteristics of each state that make them more or less susceptible to pandemic contagion are best known to state politicians, especially state governors. In the U.S. constitutional system in which state governments uniquely hold police powers—defined to be general authority to protect the health, safety, welfare and morality of the people (a power that the US national government does not have today and has never had)—it is a fair question to ask why so many state governors were caught unprepared. Particularly governors in states that had well known characteristics, like large, cosmopolitan cities, likely to exacerbate the risk of pandemic contagion.

Tocqueville observed that the U.S. has a “complex constitution.” Note the small “c.” In discussing the nation’s complex constitution, he was not writing of the complexity of written state and national Constitutions. He was rather discussing how the entire system of governance in the U.S. was constituted – state governments with the national government. Needless to say, the size of the U.S. national government is dramatically different today than it was in the 1830s. At the same time, it remains completely false to suggest that states no longer retain significant authority over vast domains of policy within their states. This is true as a formal Constitutional matter in that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently denied that the U.S. national government has police power and continues to insist only state governments hold that power—except in limited areas where delegated to the national government. And it is true empirically as well.

For as large as the national government is, state governments nonetheless spend almost as much in total as the national government spends. Even in the exercise of power over everyday life, criminal and civil matters continue to be overwhelmingly defined and litigated under the authority of the states and not under the authority of the national government.

The advantage of a federal system is that it combines the advantages that large nations enjoy with the benefits of small ones. It is a virtue of federal systems that states can craft policies to their unique circumstances. Tocqueville observed that “In centralized great nations, the legislator is obliged to give a uniform character to the laws which does not encompass the diversity of places and mores.”

If the Democrats were so smart and caring, then why this huge divergence of death rates between Republican and Democratic states?

……………

The idea that a nation as large and diverse as the U.S. should have a one-size-fits-all national “shelter-in-place” policy is absurd on its face. Yet so much of the mainstream media’s commentary ignores the variation in state-level experience, and criticizes Republican governors for precipitately re-opening their states. This does not mean that Republican governors are necessarily right, but they’re certainly not wrong simply for not aping the policies of Democratic governors.

Giffords’ and Democrat Mayors’ Plea to Congress Can Only Make Urban Violence Worse

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Four people were killed and 41 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago so far over the first weekend of May,” Sun-Times Media Wire reported Monday. “Twenty-one of the weekend’s victims were shot in a seven-hour period from Saturday night to Sunday morning, including five teenagers wounded in a drive-by in Lawndale on the West Side.”

“As Chicago struggles to treat the flood of COVID-19 patients, a surge in gun violence continues to disproportionately affect the city’s most vulnerable communities and further puts a strain on the city’s resources,” Mother Jones complains. “[G]un violence is surging in several major cities—including Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Dallas—and many of those cities’ resources to address the issue are dwindling.”

Several levels of fraud are being perpetrated here, which isn’t surprising, considering the source. The most obvious is the use of the pejorative term “gun violence,” meant to transfer blame from human actors to inanimate tools. Firearms aren’t the issue, nor are people having access to firearms. If they were, we’d be reading about daily bloodbaths perpetrated by members of the National Rifle Association, who number five million strong and are arguably the most heavily armed civilian population on the planet. When was the last time you read about an NRA member committing a “gun crime,” a hold-up, a drive-by or a rampage? Is there any doubt such an event would be headline news, played for all it’s worth, and shoved in gun owners’ faces at every opportunity?

So perhaps the issue is the “wrong” people having access to firearms? If you advocated racist policies, like Everytown and Demanding Moms bankroller Michael Bloomberg, you’d be pointing to the numbers for “male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25,” and using that as an excuse to disarm them all, regardless of who they are as individuals endowed with certain unalienable rights. It disregards the racist roots of gun control and the strides for freedom made by leaders of groups like Deacons for Defense and Justice and undermines the needed messages from important contemporary voices.

Still, there’s no arguing which communities the problems with violence are coming from. The anti-violence groups themselves admit as much, as does the Giffords group and a coalition of mayors petitioning Congressional leaders for more money. While they claim to be all about “violence interruption and targeted outreach,” it’s inescapable that every signatory to the letter is a rabid gun-grabber and a Democrat.

So while Giffords’ executive director Peter Ambler offers pandering weasel words like “In the midst of a difficult situation, violence interrupters and street outreach workers are providing hope and lifelines to communities who need it,” never doubt for a moment that his goal is citizen disarmament, and the goal of the mayors is a monopoly of violence. What such urban wealth redistribution programs really do is keep a handful of manageable voices parroting a narrative that the problem is with guns. They make it look like the “political leaders” are “doing something,” helping them retain and grow their power.

Having Congress provide more money for that will only make everything worse. That means more people will die. With “progressives,” every day is Opposite Day.
Think about what it would really take to “end urban violence” using guns – especially since those committing the acts of violence invariably are already breaking every “gun law” in the books, starting with having them in the first place. It would take nothing short of the complete elimination of all guns outside of “authorized” possessors to achieve the goal, and that’s clearly not going to happen – first because there aren’t enough enforcers to kill all of us who will not disarm, and also because anyone trying to do so legislatively would see the same “success” as the so-called “war on drugs.”

No doubt the ones who would profit the most would be cartels, which would add a whole new turf war dynamic.

The truth about urban “gun violence” is it’s not about guns, but about “progressive” fraud that keeps charlatans in power through a seemingly endless cycle of dependency and manipulation. True, race is a factor—not as a cause of violent crime, but as an indicator of populations most influenced and thus victimized by a continuing history of destructive collectivist controls over the economy, over education, and over the lives of those trapped in a corrupt system.