Category: Deceit O’ The Day

2A Reality isn’t “falsehood,” no matter how much you scream

The text of the Second Amendment is, all in all, surprisingly clear for a bit of law. The same can be said for most of the Bill of Rights, of course, but the Second is particularly important, and it’s the reality of that we need to talk about. After all, few disagree that people have the right to assemble, worship as they please, or petition the government. The idea that people should be protected from unreasonable search or seizure is also pretty well agreed upon.

But there is this weird perception of the Second Amendment that simply doesn’t conform to anything real.

You see, there are still those who think the individual right to keep and bear arms is a modern invention and call any claim to the contrary a fabrication.

Like this dipstick from The Hill:

The gun lobby’s triumphs have been due in large part to two coordinated and well-funded disinformation campaigns. The first was designed to revise legal scholarship around the Second Amendment and the second flooded Americans with false information about the benefits of firearms. These campaigns use what is called a “firehose of falsehood” strategy, a type of disinformation campaign that is challenging to counteract and has four foundational features:

  1. It is high-volume and multichannel
  2. It is rapid, continuous and repetitive
  3. It lacks a commitment to objective reality
  4. It lacks a commitment to consistency

The first firehose deployed by the gun lobby was intended to change the interpretation of the Second Amendment itself. The book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” found that before 1960, every law review article on the Second Amendment rejected the “individual rights” interpretation touted by the gun lobby, which was trying to claim that the Second Amendment should be applied to an individual, not just to a group (such as a militia).

And?

What? I’m supposed to be moved that law review articles–which are authoritative in many ways, but are not how we are governed, nor should they be–found something that makes absolutely no sense?

See, the author is trying to use law review articles and a review of them to deflect from some very simple facts that don’t require legal expertise.

First, there’s the fact that the Second Amendment plainly says, “the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Nowhere else in the Constitution is “the people” taken to mean the right is collective, rather than individual. There’s no understanding that the Fourth Amendment only applies to society as a whole rather than you as an individual.

So why would that suddenly change in the Second Amendment and not before or afterward in the Bill of Rights?

Second, what law reviews say is less than meaningless in this discussion because what ultimately matters is what the Founding Fathers intended, not what some lawyers decades or centuries later thought.

From the Founding Fathers’ own quotes, it was clear they intended gun rights to be individual rights. The Buckeye Firearms Association has a nice collection of those quotes. Here are a few highlights:

“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
– Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Constitution, Draft 1, 1776

“To disarm the people…[i]s the most effectual way to enslave them.”
– George Mason, referencing advice given to the British Parliament by Pennsylvania governor Sir William Keith, The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adooption of the Federal Constitution, June 14, 1788…

“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops.”
– Noah Webster, An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, October 10, 1787…

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country.”
– James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434, June 8, 1789…

“The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”
– Samuel Adams, Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788

So it seems pretty clear that regardless of what some people wrote in various law reviews, the Founding Fathers saw the Second Amendment as an individual right.

And really, why wouldn’t it be?

In what reality would the government need to preserve the right for the government to have guns? On the very surface, that makes no sense and no amount of law school is going to change that.

Oh, but our author at The Hill was far from finished in distorting reality.

The second firehose of falsehood strategy was designed to convince the public that firearms make people safer. The U.S. has a long history of gun ownership for hunting, but in the 1970s and 80s, the gun lobby’s focus shifted substantially to promoting guns for self-defense. When research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention demonstrated that a firearm in the home substantially increased the risk of death, the gun lobby successfully petitioned their allies in Congress to threaten the CDC with massive funding cuts if such research continued. This greatly hampered the production of new research, as well as the dissemination of such research to the public.

Except that the research was fundamentally flawed and would never have been tolerated on literally any other subject.

We’ve already seen a lot about how gun research is heavily biased toward the anti-gun side and how pro-gun results are routinely stifled.

And that’s a gross misrepresentation of what happened. The CDC was always permitted to carry out whatever research it wanted. The threatened cuts to funding were from anti-gun advocacy. The fact that the CDC interpreted their research as advocacy is telling, of course, but only in so far as it revealed their own biases.

The truth of the matter is that the “falsehoods” the author seeks to debunk are nothing of the sort. He simply cannot fathom that reality refuses to conform to his own beliefs. Well, that’s just how life is sometimes and he’ll learn to deal with disappointment.

Or he won’t and can be miserable for his entire life. I honestly don’t care.

But he should be aware that the only one peddling falsehoods here is him.

BLUF
Documentarians have an obligation to present the facts of history, even if those facts reflect badly on their favorite president.

PBS Holocaust documentary perpetuates well-worn myths to glorify FDR, says historian
Streaming this week, historian Rafael Medoff says ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ misrepresents President Roosevelt’s actions leading up to and during the genocide

Early in his new film “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” documentarian Ken Burns claims the United States admitted more Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany than any other country on Earth.

The problem with this statement, according to historian Rafael Medoff, is that it flies in the face of publicly available data on refugees from that period.

Clocking in at six hours, “The U.S. and the Holocaust” begins airing on PBS this week. In recent press interviews, Burns said he attempted to handle Roosevelt “more critically” for “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” compared to the previous, somewhat glowing treatments of FDR in his other documentaries on the period.

Calling Burns “seriously mistaken” about the issue of Jewish refugees, Medoff told The Times of Israel that the discrepancy is connected to several other “well-worn myths” that appear in “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” These myths, said Medoff, run the gamut from why the US could not rescue Anne Frank to Roosevelt’s role in the “St. Louis” affair, alongside the perennial debate on bombing the tracks to Auschwitz.

Medoff is an American professor of Jewish history and the founding director of The David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which is based in Washington, DC. He is the author of “America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History,” among other works on the Holocaust and Zionist history.

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Lawrence Solomon: Finally it’s safe for the whistleblowers of corrupted climate science to speak out
The greatest scientific fraud of the century will be laid bare, along with its corrupt enablers in government, academia, industry and the media

Whistleblowers at the U.S. government’s official keeper of the global warming stats, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), claim their agency doctored temperature data to hide the fact that global temperatures plateaued almost 20 years ago.
Can the whistleblowers be believed in this claim, originally made in 2015? And in the further claim that NOAA then rushed this doctored data into print in time for the UN’s Paris global warming summit of world leaders, to dupe any doubters that the planet was in fact overheated?

Of course the whistleblowers can be believed, and not just because NOAA repeatedly stonewalled inquiries, even failing to comply with a congressional subpoena. No one paying attention can have any doubt that the governmental global warming enterprise has been a fraud. It’s been lies from the start, starting with the very mandate of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which astonishingly ruled out factors like the sun as being worthy of investigation.

Among those astonished was the Danish delegation to the IPCC. It discovered at one of the IPCC’s early meetings a quarter-century ago that its scientists could not present their study, newly published in the prestigious journal Science, showing a remarkable correlation between global warming and solar activity. To their further astonishment, to squelch dissent the IPCC cabal set out to destroy the reputation of its chief author, falsely accusing him of fabricating data.

Whistleblowers now know they will no longer be silenced.

Dissenters from the climate change orthodoxy soon learned that, if they refused to recant, they stood to lose their jobs, their funding, and their reputations. They also learned the corollary: to get hired, to get funded, to get promoted, they needed to produce the science the authorities wanted. Governments annually spent billions of dollars on climate change research, virtually all of it commissioned to prove that the science was settled — that man-made climate change represented an existential threat to the planet.

None of the billions spent on research amounted to anything — none of the models proved reliable, none of the predictions were borne out, none of the expected effects materialized. The Arctic ice cap hasn’t disappeared, polar bear populations haven’t declined, hurricanes haven’t become more common, malaria hasn’t spread, temperatures haven’t continued to climb. What did materialize was fraud after fraud.

Climategate — the 2009 revelations of hacked emails showing scientists labouring to manipulate data and cover their tracks — was followed by Climategate 2.0 (a second damning batch of hacked emails), by Amazongate (the revelation that the IPCC’s claim of coming devastation in the Amazon was based on non-peer-reviewed research by WWF eco-activists), Glaciergate (here the IPCC relied on speculation in a popular magazine) and other scandals.

The mega-fraud was the assertion that the science was settled, which the IPCC trumpeted with claims that 2,500 scientists from around the world endorsed its findings. Except those 2,500 — a number that was soon inflated to 3,000 and then 4,000 — didn’t endorse anything. They merely reviewed some of the studies heaved into the IPCC’s maw, many of them giving the research the thumbs down.

Likewise, a much heralded claim that 97 per cent of scientists believed the planet was overheating came from a 2008 master’s thesis by a student at the University of Illinois who obtained her results by conducting a survey of 10,257 earth scientists, then discarding the views of all but 77 of them. Of those 77 scientists, 75 thought humans contributed to climate change.  The ratio 75/77 produced the 97-per-cent figure that global warming activists then touted.

In fact, major surveys show that scientists in the tens of thousands do not believe that global warming represents a threat. With the departure of president Obama and his administration, which had blocked independent investigations from being pursued, whistleblowers in greater numbers will now dare to come forward, knowing they will no longer be silenced.

One of them is Dr. John Bates, a recently retired principal scientist at NOAA, who described how his agency manipulated data to manufacture a non-existent increase in global temperatures.  In a press release last week, U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith thanked “Dr. John Bates for courageously stepping forward to tell the truth about NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion.” This week a second press release from the same committee indicated that NOAA will be brought to account.

The blizzard of lies from NOAA and other corrupted agencies will soon be outed in excruciating detail. The greatest scientific fraud of the century will thus be laid bare, along with its craven and corrupt enablers in government, academia, industry and the media.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group.

 

The Pandemic Is NOT Over, Says the White House
If Biden doesn’t represent the Biden administration, who does?

By now, the pattern is familiar: President Biden says something stupid and/or insane and/or contradictory to his administration’s stated policies, and his beleaguered staffers need to run around denying that he meant what he very clearly said. This might be the first time they’ve had to do so twice in one day, though.

First they had to walk back Grandpa Joe’s comments on Taiwan. And now, inevitably:

Twitter avatar for @betsy_kleinBetsy Klein @betsy_klein

President Biden told CBS the “pandemic is over,” but those comments do not constitute a change in the administration’s Covid-19 response policy, an official tells CNN White House says Covid-19 policy unchanged despite Biden’s comments that the ‘pandemic is over’ | CNN PoliticsThe Biden administration is largely downplaying President Joe Biden’s comments declaring the coronavirus pandemic “over,” suggesting his remarks signal a continuation of the White House’s evolving stance toward the pandemic over the past few months.cnn.com

September 19th 2022

Did you get that? The president of the United States doesn’t speak for the White House. Biden is not in charge of the Biden administration.

So… who is?

Who’s running the show? It sure isn’t Kamala. And Jill — excuse me, Doctor Jill — is just barely more lucid than her husband. Who’s the boss of that house? Ron Klain? Susan Rice? Ex-PFC Wintergreen? What the hell is going on?

Whistleblower Alleges FBI Schemed to Distort January 6 Cases Into Nationwide ‘Domestic Violent Extremism’ Epidemic

A whistleblower has accused the FBI’s Washington Field Office of using cases related to the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot to “overstate” the threat of “domestic violent extremism” in America, according to Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

The whistleblower alleged the FBI office did not follow standard investigative practices for the January 6 cases when it moved the cases to various local Field Offices around the country based on where the case subjects were from, Jordan revealed in a letter addressed to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday.

January 6 cases “should all be officially led by the WFO [Washington Field Office] and categorized as WFO cases,” according to the letter, but instead, a “task force” dispatched instructions to open January 6 investigations to local field offices nationwide.

Those local offices received the cases, making it look as if they were conducting the investigations on the cases, when, in reality, the Washington Field Office continued to conduct the bulk of the work, according to the letter.

The whistleblower told Jordan:

The manipulative casefile practice creates false and misleading crime statistics. Instead of hundreds of investigations stemming from a single, black swan incident at the Capitol, FBI and DOJ officials point to significant increases in domestic violent extremism and terrorism around the United States.

Jordan noted in the letter, “Such an artificial case categorization scheme allows FBI leadership to misleadingly point to ‘significant’ increases in DVE threats nationwide,” which supports a narrative being perpetuated by the Biden administration.

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Trump/Russia investigator hid ties to Russian billionaire.

If there is one thing you can count on with The Swamp it’s that every time they accuse a Republican of doing something, they themselves are likely to be guilty of that very thing themselves.

That may be the case with Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City. In an exclusive report by Military and Defense Insider it was revealed that McGonigal appears to be under grand jury investigation for–get ready–improper ties to Russia.

 

McGonigal was no bit player in the Russia Russia Russia drama: he was one of the key instigators who got the ball rolling back in 2016. When he was at the FBI he was quite the bigwig, playing major roles in a number of high profile cases.

Before his retirement in 2018, McGonigal led the WikiLeaks investigation into Chelsea Manning, busted Bill Clinton’s national security advisor Sandy Berger for removing classified material from a National Archives reading room, and led the search for a Chinese mole inside the CIA. In 2016, when reports surfaced that Russia had hacked the email system of the Democratic National Committee, McGonigal was serving as chief of the cybercrimes section at FBI headquarters in Washington. In that capacity, he was one of the first officials to learn that a Trump campaign official had bragged that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, sparking the investigation known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Later that year, FBI Director James Comey promoted McGonigal to oversee counterintelligence operations in New York.

He has apparently been swept up into a grand jury investigation that is looking into his ties to a Russian billionaire and work he appears to have done with his representatives. It isn’t totally clear what exactly is being investigated and how central McGonigal is to the inquiry, but it looks pretty bad.

Late last year, according to internal court documents obtained by Insider, US attorneys secretly convened a grand jury that examined the conduct of Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City. The Justice Department declined to comment on what the grand jury was investigating or whether it remained ongoing. But a witness subpoena obtained by Insider seems to indicate that the government, in part, was looking into McGonigal’s business dealings with a top aide to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who was at the center of allegations that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to interfere in the 2016 election.

The subpoena, issued in November, requests records relating to McGonigal and a shadowy consulting firm called Spectrum Risk Solutions. A week after the subpoena was issued, a Soviet-born immigrant named Sergey Shestakov said in a separate filing that McGonigal had helped him “facilitate” an introduction between Spectrum and Deripaska’s aide. The filing also states that McGonigal helped introduce the aide to Kobre & Kim, a New York law firm that specializes in representing clients who are being investigated on suspicion of “fraud and misconduct.” Shestakov, who has been identified on TV panels as a former Soviet foreign ministry official and former chief of staff to the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, reported receiving $33,000 for the referrals.

It’s not clear that anything McGonigal did for the sketchy Russians was illegal, but he failed to report doing any work for them. That in itself may be a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Depending upon the exact scope of what the former FBI agent did he may or may not have violated the law.

While it wouldn’t necessarily have been illegal for McGonigal to work on behalf of Deripaska, failing to disclose activities covered by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such as lobbying and public relations, is punishable by a $250,000 fine and up to five years in prison. Deripaska was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2018 for acting as an agent for the Kremlin, and has been accused of ordering the murder of a businessman. “If McGonigal is mixed up in any way shape or form with Deripaska, that strikes me as unseemly, to put it politely,” says Tim Weiner, the author of “Enemies: A History of the FBI.”

There is little doubt that McGonigal’s ties to a sketchy Russian oligarch are clear evidence that he isn’t as squeaky clean as a top FBI official would like to appear. After all, one of the great perks of having had such a position is peddling the prestige of having had such a job. He certainly has been capitalizing off his status, and getting tied up with sanctioned Russian agents of the Kremlin might hit him in the pocketbook. Perhaps that is why he decided to hide his relationship.

It’s impossible to know at this stage whether McGonigal’s super-friendly ties to Russians played a role in his zeal to get Donald Trump, but these revelations certainly raise questions. Despite the constant repetition that Trump was Russia’s puppet, he was actually far more antagonistic in policy to Russia than Obama ever was. And we know that Hillary Clinton used her ties in Russia to stir up suspicion that Trump was colluding with Russia (she colluded with Russians to fake a narrative that Trump colluded with Russia; how ironic), faking the whole Steele Dossier narrative with Russian help.

Was McGonigal somehow involved? Did he have any contemporaneous or future financial interests? At the moment nobody but the grand jury knows.

These days McGonigal presents himself as a pious and wise man who is using his expertise to defend truth, justice and the American way. He compares the FBI to the FSB favorably.

Since he left the FBI, McGonigal has continued to trade on his expertise in counterintelligence. In 2020, months after his reported assistance to Deripaska’s aide, he appeared on a panel at the Atlantic Council, where he condemned the corruption of Russia’s security services. “You are seeing an erosion in any rule of law as it relates to the FSB,” he said. “It would be akin to having in the United States the FBI as a rogue element, operating at the behest of the highest bidder.”

Unfortunately too many Americans have come to suspect that the FBI actually is a rogue element, operating at the behest of, if not the highest bidder, then the most powerful one.

As Donald Trump would say: sad.

Once again, the political acumen of Mitch McConnell deserves praise for stopping such a political hack as Merrick Garland from being seated on the Supreme Court

FBI Agents Accuse Biden of Pressuring FBI to Fabricate ‘Extremist’ and ‘White Supremacist’ Cases.

Current and former FBI agents have come forward saying the Biden administration is deliberately exaggerating the danger posed by white supremacists. They claimed that high-ranking FBI officials were pressuring field agents to fabricate domestic terrorism cases and label people as white supremacists in order to “meet internal metrics.”

“The demand for white supremacy” coming from FBI brass “vastly outstrips the supply of white supremacy,” one agent told the Washington Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate white supremacists than we can actually find.”

The FBI agent, who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal bureau politics, said that top officials in the FBI “have already determined that white supremacy is a problem” and established a policy to prioritize investigations into racially-motivated domestic extremism.

“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”

The FBI denies that they are targeting people based on politics, but sadly, these revelations are the latest in a longstanding pattern of the politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department under Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Last year, the administration previously came under fire for using the resources of the Department of Justice to target angry parents at school board meetings and treat them like domestic terrorists. Merrick Garland authorized the FBI to investigate parents who protested school board meetings alleging a “disturbing trend” of teachers being threatened or harassed. However, PJ Media’s Megan Fox looked into those allegations and concluded that they’re mostly bunk.

In addition, the National School Boards Association (NSBA), which had prompted Garland to write the memo with a letter likening parents to domestic terrorists, eventually apologized for doing so. Despite this, Garland has not rescinded the memo. Late last year, a whistleblower revealed an internal email showing that the FBI was using counterterrorism tools to monitor parents despite Garland denying before Congress that the FBI was doing so. This summer, whistleblowers revealed that the FBI “pressured and incentivized” agents to classify cases as domestic violent extremism.

Durham shocker: Danchenko was a paid FBI informant

Today, Special Counsel John Durham moved to unseal this motion in limine in the false statements case against Igor Danchenko.

This motion provides new information on the details of Danchenko’s lies to the FBI, further information on how Special Counsel Mueller ignored Danchenko’s false statements, expected testimony from Clinton-connected executive Charles Dolan, and one crazy development.

But we’ll start with the the most damning development: Danchenko was on the FBI payroll as a confidential human source (CHS) from March 2017 through October 2020.

The purposes of making Danchenko a CHS should be quite clear. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was plagued with problems from the outset. The reasons for opening the investigation were bunk. Those problems continued as the investigation went on, with claims of Trump/Russia collusion proven unverified or outright false. (Thus the targeting of Flynn for a Logan Act violation.)

That developed into the Carter Page FISA applications, first submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in October 2016, and which relied substantially on the Steele Dossiers (aka Steele Reports). The FISA applications were renewed three times – more on that later. Each application had its own problems, from FBI lawyers lying about Carter Page to the Court being generally misled.

Realizing its own misconduct, the FBI made Danchenko a paid CHS in March 2017 – just before the third FISA warrant was submitted in April 2017. This would allow Comey’s FBI to work directly with Danchenko in support of its counter-intelligence investigation against President Trump.

Danchenko being a CHS also served another purpose: it protected the Bureau and the Mueller Special Counsel from revealing their “sources and methods.” How do you hide misconduct? Bury the witness.

(Read again Inspector General Horowitz’s report concerning the Carter Page FISA warrants. Did Horowitz know that Danchenko was a CHS?)

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DOJ Admits Only 692 ‘Ghost Gun’-Related Homicide Cases in Last 6 Years

Buried in President Biden’s Department of Justice’s (DOJ) explanation of the new “ghost gun” rule is an admission that only 692 “ghost guns” were involved in homicide cases during the past six years.

The DOJ noted:

As the final rule explains, from January 2016 to December 2021, ATF received approximately 45,240 reports of suspected privately made firearms recovered by law enforcement, including in 692 homicide or attempted homicide investigations. The chart below demonstrates the total annual numbers of suspected PMFs recovered by law enforcement over the past six years.

When one considers that there are on average 12,000 to 14,000 homicides in the United States annually–sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower–692 “ghost gun”-related homicide cases are a mere fraction of all firearm-related homicides.

Take, for instance, the higher number–14,000 firearm homicides annually for six years. That is 84,000 firearm-related homicides during that time frame, while during that same time frame there were fewer than 700 “ghost gun”-related homicide cases.

Breitbart News pointed out that the DOJ’s “ghost gun” rule change was announced August 24, 2022. The rule classifies parts in a gun parts kit as firearms that require a background check to purchase, like the one required for “traditional firearms.”

FAKE WOKENESS: Two New Junk Science ‘Studies’ Suggest Racism, Fears of Blacks Drive Opposition To Gun Control.

Remember the RAND study that found only 123 of 27,900 gun control studies actually used the scientific method to come to their conclusions? Well, gun control advocates have trotted out two fresh, steaming new “studies” and the flies are already swarming. The University of Wisconsin has promoted a new finding that whites own guns and oppose gun control because of racism and a fear of blacks.

And within days of squeezing out that specimen of woke clownishness, the American Psychological Association published their own “study” that — you guessed it — whites who support gun rights are racist.

Interestingly the same study showed that when whites support gun control they’re racist too! So you’re racist. I’m racist. We’re all racists! To the uber-woke racists at the APA, if you’re white, you must be a racist.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, gun owners and gun rights supporters — whatever their color — are some of the most open-minded, tolerant and welcoming people in our communities. Contrary to what the racial hucksters, the Grievance Industry and critical race theory practitioners are selling, most Americans aren’t racist. And frankly, most Americans oppose racist gun control laws, too.

Most normal people rightfully reject claims of inherent racism in whites (or anyone else), or any of the other woke, social justice nonsense peddled by the gun-hating left in America.

In fact, plenty of black gun owners would dismiss this Wisconsin Badger junk science (or the APA’s trash “science”) as nothing but poppycock.

The folks over at The Federalist have the deets on these new “studies” . . .

White people own guns — and oppose gun-control legislation — because they are racist and fear black people. Two new studies advance this dangerous narrative building among our academic elites. While such rhetoric is perhaps unsurprising among political pundits or celebrities, otherwise serious academics are now ascribing racist motives to gun ownership and opposition to gun control. These studies are not only based on a slew of bigoted assumptions, but also bad science.

The University of Wisconsin recently promoted a new study contending that in U.S. counties where black people were enslaved in 1860, gun ownership is higher today. In fact, gun ownership, they say, is correlated to the number of slaves formerly in each county. To support this more-slaves-means-more-guns theory, the authors construct a historical narrative that whites feared newly freed slaves, bought guns for self-defense, and then this fear somehow trickled down over 160 years.

But interestingly enough, just last month, National Public Radio ran a story on how black people are the fastest growing group of gun owners. If gun ownership is a product of white people being racist, then this is quite curious.

The University of Wisconsin study suffers from a series of flaws, even apart from its poisonous premise that white people believe or feel certain things because they are white. You’d never say the same about other races, and we shouldn’t give a pass to academics who traffic in the same type of racism…  

A few days after the release of the slavery-predicts-gun-ownership study, the American Psychological Association (APA) released another study contending that whites support gun rights because they are racist, and when whites oppose gun rights, that’s also racist.

Rest assured, gun control advocates will try to use these junk studies — like thousands that came before them — to paint patriotic, gun-loving Americans of all colors and persuasions as racists no matter their race, sex or religion.

And why not? Using pseudo-scientific hokum to support claims that gun control laws prevent criminal misuse of guns is actually less scientifically accurate than claiming drinking milk causes car accidents. But they have no fear of anyone in the media debunking the junk science on which they base their calls for civilian disarmament.

Plus most politicians and low-information types will probably believe it…so they keep pushing the politicized garbage to further their disarmament narrative. And so it goes.

Report on Possible Trump Charges Leaves the Resistance Reeling

As RedState reported, the DOJ dropped a filing on Tuesday evening in an attempt to deny the appointment of a special master regarding the documents seized during the now infamous Trump raid. In that filing was a photograph that set leftwing hearts a flutter, purporting to show “top secret” documents scattered on the floor of a Mar-a-Lago storage room.

In reality, the documents were found in boxes per the DOJ’s own documentation.

The DOJ knew what it was doing putting that photo out, though. They wanted to gin up more “the walls are closing in” outrage from the left, and sure enough, they got it. Social media was swamped with hysterical declarations that charges were incoming. That picture was “criminal evidence,” they screeched while racking up the likes and shares along the way.

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Well, SloJoe has always been known as a liar, so…

Fact Check: Biden Claims Mass Shootings ‘Tripled’ After ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Ended

CLAIM: During his speech in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, President Joe Biden said mass shootings “tripled” after the 1994-2004 “assault weapons” ban expired.

VERDICT: Mostly False.

Biden said, “Back in 1994, I took on the NRA and passed the ‘assault weapons’ ban. For ten years, mass shootings were down.”

He added, “But in 2004, Republicans let that ban expire, and what happened? Mass shootings tripled.”

There are two things to unpack here: First, his claim that the ban itself was successful while in effect and, second, his claim that mass shootings “tripled” once the ban expired.

On February 19, 2018, Breitbart News looked at a report by the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ), which found that the “assault weapons” ban could not be credited with any reduction in crime.

The NIJ report was written in 2004 as the ban was about to expire.

The Washington Times quoted University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper, author of the NIJ report, saying, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

The NIJ report observed, “The ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

So much for the claims of all the great things the ban accomplished. Now consider the claim that mass shootings tripled after the ban expired.

Breitbart News noted that the Washington Post fact-checked the claim about mass shootings tripling when Biden first made it in early June 2022.

The Post reported:

Biden claimed that mass shooting deaths tripled after the law expired. He appears to be relying on a study of mass shooting data from 1981 to 2017, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery by a team led by Charles DiMaggio, a professor of surgery at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. That group found that an assault weapons ban would have prevented 314 out of 448, or 70 percent, of the mass shooting deaths during the years when the ban was not in effect. But the data used in that study has come under attack by some analysts.

The Post added, “The new mass-shooting database shows that there were 31 mass shootings in the decade before the 1994 law, 31 in the 10 years the law was in force (Sept. 13, 1994 to Sept. 12, 2004) and 47 in the 10 years after it expired. As noted, some of that increase stems from population growth.”

The claim that mass shootings “tripled” after the “assault weapons” ban expired is mostly false. There was a modest increase in such shootings, but the expiration of the ban does not seem to be causal in that rise.

What the Mainstream Media Doesn’t Tell Us About Guns

It’s hard to fool an honest man or woman who wants to know the truth. Unfortunately, many of us depend on the media to bring us much of our news, and lying to us — or withholding key parts of the story — today makes it easier to fool us tomorrow.

Most of us feel horrible when we see news stories about violent crime. Beyond the emotional shock of the story, though, we are seldom told what the story means. Is that newsworthy event a common problem or is it rare? Are there good solutions that make us safer most of the time?

Besides the violence shown in movies and TV dramas, it’s almost as if the news deliberately keeps us in the dark about real violence and its causes. We can’t make good choices unless we have perspective. For a minute, let’s shed some light on the reality of armed citizens and guns

We’re told that guns cause crime. That’s odd because a lot of criminals didn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Only one out of twelve violent crimes are committed with a firearm. If someone says they need to disarm honest people in order to stop violent crime, they are going to leave about 92 percent of those violent crimes untouched. No wonder gun control laws don’t make us any safer.

If guns cause crime, then honest gun owners haven’t gotten the message either. Ordinary citizens like us own a lot of guns. About 40 percent of Americans live with a gun in our homes and we own hundreds of millions of firearms that are never used in crimes.

These are the guns you never seem to hear about. The news media don’t want to admit that firearms are ordinary tools that a huge portion of Americans lawfully own and use on a daily basis.

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Observation O’ The Day

There is a new trend, and it is battlespace prep. In both the US and Canada there is now a coordinated effort by the political/MSM class to portray every kind of dissent from secular progressive authoritarianism as nothing less than violent insurrection and terrorism. In the Canadian media, people who object to vaccine mandates have been promoted from Nazis to a vast network of violent insurrectionists. In the US, we are told that people angry about the Mar-A-Lago raid are about to commence terrorist actions against civilians, even using dirty bombs.

How Extremist Gun Culture Is Trying to Co-Opt the Rosary
Why are sacramental beads suddenly showing up next to AR-15s online?

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled SANCTUM ROSARIUM alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.

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I’ll take ‘Almost Everything’ for $500, Alex

What the News Media Gets Wrong About Guns & Armed Defense

We know that the news media distorts our view of the world. We see it every day in the way the mainstream media selects and edits their stories. I’m sure you see unusual things in the news that I miss. That is because each of us sees this media distortion most clearly in the individual subjects we know best. For the last decade, I’ve studied what our neighbors do with guns. I see where the news media dangerously twists the truth about armed defense. As ordinary citizens, we need to know more about the world than to be simply fed a copy of the police report after a crime. In fact, ordinary citizens keep their families safe every day but the media sells us a different story. Here is what the mainstream media won’t say.

Evil exists. We face real dangers. The world is simply not the way we want it to be. On average, someone in our family will be the victim of a violent crime during our lifetime. Merciless criminals use force to take what they want and the police are not there to stop them. It is not safe to be defenseless, not even at home. To begin, we face about 30 thousand home-invasion robberies a year, and two thirds of sexual assaults begin with a home invasion. Being unable or unwilling to defend the people we love is not a virtue. Those truths sound obvious to me, but they are absent from our contemporary news.

The media wildly over-reported stories where we were victims of violent crime. At the same time, the media horribly under-reported the many stories where we successfully defended ourselves. It is almost as if the news media didn’t want us to know that we faced dangers and saved lives.

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Democrats’ Lame Attempt to Flip the Narrative on Crime: Claiming 2nd Amendment is Anti-Police

Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, with rising violent crime a top concern for voters, the vast majority of Democrats are now working overtime to distance themselves from their prior support for the “Defund the Police” movement. Increasingly, however, it appears that they’re linking this professed newfound support for law enforcement to another pillar of Democrats’ far-left agenda – gun control.

After backlash to the “defund” movement contributed to dozens of House Democrats losing or facing closer-than-expected races in 2020, the party slowly began changing its tune on policing. While some, like Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush, have continued their calls for “dismantling” police departments, the White House and Democratic leadership are now saying that they in fact support police and have always supported police – even accusing Republicans, who spent all of 2020 and 2021 vigorously defending police from attacks by left-wing politicians and news outlets, of not supporting them.

As Axios reported late last month, Democratic candidates in Ohio, Georgia, Florida, and other states are “spotlighting law enforcement to boost their credibility on fighting crime.” Party strategists are now privately admitting that “the defund debate damaged Democrats’ reputation on crime,” and many “fear a voter perception that Democrats don’t recognize the problem with violent crime and don’t respect the role police play in keeping communities safe.”

But as part of their effort to mask their complete reversal of position when it comes to support for police, many Democrats—including Biden himself—have attempted to make the issue of rising crime about guns rather than policing, implying that support for the Second Amendment is incompatible with support for law enforcement.

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When CNN Quotes Everytown Troublesome Facts Kick In

Over the weekend, CNN reported on gun control laws passed so far in 2022, adding this reference, “There is a direct correlation in states with weaker gun laws and higher rates of gun deaths, including homicides, suicides and accidental killings, according to a January study published by Everytown for Gun Safety, a non-profit focused on gun violence prevention.”

However, an article in the Keene Sentinel, a newspaper serving southwest New Hampshire, reveals a small problem with Everytown’s research that might raise an eyebrow, if not some serious questions. Headlined “New Hampshire paradox: State gun laws remain loose as violence rate remains low,” the story’s lead paragraph tells a different tale.

“National rankings indicate New Hampshire has some of the weakest gun laws in the nation, and yet the state also maintains a low rate of firearm violence,” the newspaper says.

The report also quotes State Senate President Chuck Morse (R-Salem), who told the newspaper’s editorial board recently that gun-related violence is a problem of people, not guns.

“I don’t believe it’s a gun problem because look at New Hampshire.,” Morse reportedly stated. “We have more guns than probably any other state per capita. We have open carry, we passed constitutional carry, and we’re one of the safest states in the nation.”

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