Category: Deceit O’ The Day

How to Lie About Guns, New York Times Style

One of the easiest ways to lie and not get sued for libel is to simply do so through exclusion. The New York Times is famous for this and if you don’t know enough about guns they can make things sound pretty bad, just by leaving out a little bit of information. In the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict we ought to brush up on the tactics of far-left media. To do so, we simply just need to look to the past. Back in March of 2021, I found an article so egregious that I decided to go ahead and fill in the blanks. I believe the resulting work should be saved and used to inform anybody who is arguing for more gun control without all of the facts. For reference the original article can be found here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/us/ruger-ar-556-boulder-shooting.html

You’ll see that the author is attempting to paint Ruger’s AR-15 pistol and the 5.56 round in a darker light than it deserves.

The article opens with the basic facts and uses that tired old phrases like “military-style semiautomatic rifle and pistol.” Of course, the author leaves out that they are “military-style” in appearance only. Camouflaging a Kia doesn’t make it an M1 Abrams tank. As the piece starts to “develop,” the author also goes on to write, “Statements from the police and the charging documents did not make it clear which of the weapons was used in the attack, but it appeared at least one is a semiautomatic derivative of the assault rifles that have long been used by the American military.”

For starters, holy long sentence Batman. I had to read it a few times to keep up with it all, leaving just the catchphrases like “assault rifles” and “American military” to stand out. However, if you read it a few times you pick up what is being said. The guns being referenced are derivatives as opposed to copies because they are semi-automatic, like a common pistol. This is unlike the military’s fully automatic M4 carbines. Only folks who know guns are going to know that and only a few are going to be that dedicated to pull all of that from this poorly structured sentence.

Later on, I found what is arguably the poorest display of journalism in the entire article. The author goes on to state, “According to a police affidavit, the suspect charged with 10 counts of murder, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, bought a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic weapon, essentially a shortened version of an AR-15 style rifle marketed as a pistol, six days before the killings took place. It is also unclear if that weapon was used in the shooting on Monday.”

Wait…if  it’s “unclear” that this gun was used at all, why does this article include this statement? Actually, why is there even an article entitled “What we know about the gun used in the Boulder shooting” in existence? The Times didn’t need 284 words to put this piece together, thanks to this statement I can do it with just one, “Nothing.”

About halfway through is where I found the most manipulative piece of information and this is where the author states “Both the AR-15 style rifle and the Ruger version fire the same small-caliber, high-velocity ammunition, which was first developed for battlefield use.” Sure, the 5.56 was built for the military… To replace the current, larger cartridge that was regarded as uncontrollable and too powerful for common battlefield use! I’ve had enough with media like this trying to make the 5.56 round out to be some sort of baby-killing monster. It’s one of the least-potent centerfire rifle rounds on the market, considered by most to be too small even for deer hunting. Is it more powerful than a pistol round? Sure, but almost any given rifle has more power than any given handgun.

As things begin to wrap up the author proceeds to attempt to make large-format pistols look like the “ideal” tool for mass shootings where she says “Based on their size, ‘AR pistols’ are much easier to conceal than a typical AR-15 carbine or rifle. According to the manufacturer’s website, the Ruger AR-556 pistol comes with either a 9.5-inch or 10.5 inch-long barrel, while a typical AR-15 has at least a 16-inch barrel.” Pretty convenient that she left out the fact that common pistols have barrels from 2 to 6 inches and are capable of the same rate of fire and in most cases, capacity. So although an AR Pistol is easier to conceal than a rifle or shotgun, it’s far less concealable than many other semi-automatic firearms.

As a New Yorker, I have been conditioned to read between the lines and sadly that’s where you are going to find the facts in dribble like this. It’s a shame that our publication doesn’t reach the same people who read the Times, because it would be nice to give the Times’s readership a complete and balanced idea of what that this firearm is—and more importantly what it isn’t. This, my friends, is why we must remain vigilant and never shy away from the conversation. We can only change an informed mind and that duty lies squarely at our feet.

SloJoe appears to have either grown tired of performing in the puppet show, or he’s mentally incapable of keeping up. Either way, he’s not running the show, and he’s still aware enough to know it.

As Biden Goes Off-Script, White House Tech Team Cuts the Mic and Blasts Music

President Joe Biden signed multiple pieces of legislation from the fake White House set in the Eisenhower Office Building Tuesday morning. During the event, he repeatedly took off his mask to turn toward attendees to speak.

The bills on the desk were the Protecting Moms Who Served Act of 2021, Hire Veteran Health Heroes Act of 2021, Colonel John M. McHugh Tuition Fairness for Survivors Act of 2021 and a bill Requiring GAO to Report on the Disparities of Race and Ethnicity in Administration of VA Benefits.

Before signing, Biden started to read the title of the legislation and then gave up. Previously, he gave a brief summary of each bill.

The bills on the desk were the Protecting Moms Who Served Act of 2021, Hire Veteran Health Heroes Act of 2021, Colonel John M. McHugh Tuition Fairness for Survivors Act of 2021 and a bill Requiring GAO to Report on the Disparities of Race and Ethnicity in Administration of VA Benefits.

Before signing, Biden started to read the title of the legislation and then gave up. Previously, he gave a brief summary of each bill.

Connecting Two Disparate Dots

Yesterday afternoon I had a long phone conversation with a childhood friend I grew up with in Vancouver and his wife. We spent much of the time talking about Covid and the insanity around it. He then asked me why I was skeptical about being vaccinated. I responded that I was not at all against vaccinations. In fact, I willingly got a tetanus shot a few weeks ago. What am I adamantly against are vaccine mandates and penalties for anyone who refuses the jabs. The logic behind this insistence hasn’t stood up against even the simplest questions.

Then a very different topic ran across my mind and I said, “I’m now going to explain the #1 reason I’m skeptical of the Covid jabs but will come at it from a completely different angle. See if you can connect the dots before I explain.” Shortly afterwards, this video appeared on my YouTube feed and Carl Benjamin parallels what I said very closely:

In point of fact, with my friends, I mostly focused on how the Waukesha tragedy had been memory-holed (hidden) within 48 hours after it happened. Why? Because it didn’t fit the media’s narrative.

Does it surprise anyone that the same despicable people who have so easily spit on the graves of those murdered on November 21st, would have any moral qualms about spinning a wide web of lies, half-truths, and obfuscations about a pandemic that occurred nearly two years ago?!? I will forever listen to everything they say with great skepticism. And, as I’ve done all of my life, will politely ask questions about anything that doesn’t make sense to me. Questions like these, for example.

  1. Can fully vaccinated people contract Covid?
  2. Can fully vaccinated people give others Covid?
  3. Statistically, are children more at harm if they contract Covid or if they get the Covid mRNA jab?
  4. Why has Japan turned away from vaccinations in favor of giving its citizens Ivermectin?
  5. Since Japan made this decision, what has been the result?
  6. Tell me what you know about the yellow star program in the 1930’s.
  7. Would you have been in favor of treating homosexuals differently during the AIDS crisis in the 1980’s?
  8. Are you in favor of “othering” those who have chosen not to get the Covid mRNA jab?
  9. If you are fully vaccinated, then could you explain to me why you are worried about being around unvaccinated people?
  10. If the Covid booster program continues for some time to come, are you prepared to continue to get a jab every 3 to 6 months?

Your Default Assumption Should Be That Everything Corporate Media Says Is A Lie
The media’s deluge of lies about the Rittenhouse case is a disturbing reminder that the corporate press lies about everything all the time.

As far as corporate media are concerned, the massacre in Waukesha, Wis., on Sunday was a “Christmas parade crash.”

That’s how the attack that killed six people and injured more than 60 others is being described by ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Newsweek and others. Not an intentional attack, not a massacre allegedly committed by a violent career criminal already facing multiple felony charges, but merely a crash. The New York Times is calling it a “tragedy.”

Not to be outdone by major news outlets, The Daily Beast rushed to remind its readers that “there are no indications of any additional motive for the Waukesha killings, or any reasons to label it domestic terrorism. That didn’t stop these right-wing trolls.”Oh no we wouldn’t want to assign ideological motives to a case too soon. But these damn right-wing trolls sure will! No mention from the Beast, of course, of the worst possible example of that in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, which every major news organization gladly went along with.

Here’s the thing. The next time you read an article in the New York Times or the Atlantic, watch a bit of breaking news on MSNBC or a panel on CNN, or hear a report on NPR, your default assumption should be that what you are reading, watching, or hearing is not true. Either it is an outright falsehood, a distortion of the facts, or not the whole story. That should be your posture toward literally every piece of news you consume from corporate media from now on.

There is ample justification for such a posture. It’s justified by every single major news story in recent years — the Russia collusion hoax, the origins of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter riots, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the debate over Covid vaccines, the January 6 riot, and especially the Rittenhouse trial, to name just a few. Every one of these stories, and many more besides, were dishonestly reported by a corrupt media establishment that you should never trust again.

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Former Obama Doctor: “White House is Doing Everything They Can to Hide Biden’s Obvious Cognitive Decline”

Congressman Ronny Jackson, who was the former White House physician under Presidents Obama and Trump declared Wednesday that the reason Joe Biden has avoided cognitive exams is because he would have “failed miserably,” and his team “didn’t do it because they know, if they do it, you don’t ask questions that you don’t want the answers to.”

Appearing on Newsmax, Jackson described Biden’s latest health report as “six pages of superficial fluff.”

“Honestly, there were six pages of stuff that most people just don’t care about,” Jackson said, adding “I mean, you know, Dr. O’Connor spent six pages addressing like an occasional cough and some stiffness and things like that when the elephant in the room was the president’s cognitive ability.”

Jackson continued, “Over 50% of this country does not believe he’s cognitively fit to be our Commander in Chief and our head of state, yet that wasn’t addressed anywhere in there.”

“We set the precedent when we did President Trump’s physical. I did,” Jackson explained, further noting “The far-Left and the mainstream media were relentless in their pursuit of me to do something to address not only his physical capabilities, but his mental capabilities, which we did — we did a cognitive test. As far as I’m concerned, we set the precedent. And he should have had one done as well.”

Jackson added that “if anyone needs a cognitive test, it’s this president that we have right now. And I was really surprised to see there wasn’t any mention of anything like that in there.”

The Texas Congressman emphasised that Biden’s team “know that if they gave him a cognitive test, that he would have failed miserably, and then they would have had to explain that away somehow.”

Urging that Biden’s handlers “were doing it just to check a box,” Jackson added “Dr. O’Connor should have done what I had to do whenever I briefed President Trump’s physical, is stand up in front of the press in the press briefing room, and brief the physical. I was up there for an hour and 15 minutes answering every single question that the press had picking his physical apart. And instead what did we get? We just got a six page report and that’s the end of it. We’re supposed to just move on and play like everything’s fine now.”

The Second Amendment Ain’t That Complicated

When looking at the Bill of Rights, it becomes clear that the Second Amendment is pretty important. After all, it’s second in the list of amendments. Additionally, the First Amendment preserves a number of specific rights, whereas the Second is focused on a single right. That suggests some importance for that particular right.

For many of us, we’ve referred to as the insurance policy on the Bill of Rights. After all, your right to protest or worship as you see fit can be snatched away by any government willing to ignore words on a piece of paper. Having the right to keep and bear arms means a potentially tyrannical government will have to account for a populace that is both armed and outnumbers them.

But some have managed to take this relatively simple concept and make it complicated.

That’s at play in a recent editorial that appeared in several newspapers, but appears to have originated from the L.A. Times:

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a mess, a muddle, a grammatically challenged pair of clauses that allows two or more readers to insist that it says two starkly different things, both of which are of life-or-death importance and each of which can be only partially defended.

To some, it is foremost the militia amendment, plainly referring to “the people” as a collective entity and embodying a young, rebellious nation’s mistrust of professional standing armies in favor of armed citizens banding together at times of crisis.

Yet to others, it is primarily the gun-rights clause, safeguarding an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, notwithstanding the clear references to “the security of a free state” and the lack of any mention of individual rights.

The drafters of the Bill of Rights were learned men who knew how to write, so there must have been some reason for them to submit these oddly assembled 27 words that give us such trouble today. They most likely disagreed over the place of firearms in American society. Was their primary and most contentious purpose to defend the nation (against foreign invaders, but perhaps also against the abuses of their own government)? Or was it for shooting squirrels for the dinner table (and defending against slave revolts and Indian uprisings)?

I’m going to give the writer credit. For once, they at least acknowledge that we have an argument at least as equally valid as the gun control crowd’s.

Usually, they simply pretend we’re making stuff up.

However, I have to point out that the Second Amendment really isn’t that difficult to understand.

Let’s start by addressing the militia clause for a moment. “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” is an introductory clause, but it doesn’t actually carry much weight grammatically. You can purge it from the sentence and it still makes sense. Trust me, I use way too many introductory clauses in my own writing. I’m well versed in what they are.

But even if it’s not, the claim that “the people” refers to a collective group should be problematic for each and every person in this country, even if you don’t like guns.

After all, “the people” are referred to multiple times in the Bill of Rights. At no other point does it seem to refer to a collective right except with regard to the right to keep and bear arms. Now, why would the Founding Fathers write it that way?

Oh, and it’s highly unlikely that our Founding Fathers disagreed over the place of firearms in American society. These aren’t the vanguard of an ancient civilization lost to time. Their writings still exist, preserved by a society that recognized the importance of their words. We have many comments about preserving the right to gun ownership. We also have stories of these same men carrying firearms with them as they passed through the city.

What we don’t have, though, are any references to them believing that the right to gun ownership should be limited.

I mean, the Constitution gives Congress the power to issue letters of marque, empowering privateers to hunt the shipping of our nation’s enemies. That at least suggests that the private ownership of artillery was on the table. If they were unwilling to restrict cannons, then why should we believe they were accepting of any other restriction.

The fact is that there’s no evidence to suggest our Founding Fathers struggled with the role of guns in our society. Quite the contrary, actually, they not only accepted them but felt that they were a necessity for maintaining a free society.

The editorial goes on later to argue:

In some parts of the country, people still do use guns to put food on the table, for sport or simply as an attribute of their lifestyle. Gun-toting behavior that would be natural and acceptable in, say, rural Pennsylvania, would be menacing and is wisely prohibited in downtown Los Angeles. For now.

In issuing a ruling in the case currently before it, the Supreme Court may well strike down not merely New York’s permit requirements but also California’s, and those of the six other states that reserve the right to grant or deny permits based on the applicant’s reason for wanting one.

States have long made their own decisions about how to balance residents’ safety with their gun rights, based on the values expressed by voters at the polls and their representatives in the legislature.

This, of course, is in reference to the case before the Supreme Court, as is most of the editorial. The editorial board responsible for this one argues that these restrictions are good and necessary.

However, as I’ve already illustrated and as the courts have found, the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right. That means restricting people from exercising that right based on a subjective interpretation of need is an infringement of that right. You can’t argue otherwise without simply pretending the right doesn’t exist.

The truth is, the Second Amendment isn’t that complicated.

Quote O’ The Day:
“One of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
–Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Journos and Other Libs Can’t Defend Darrell Brooks, So They Attack Andy Ngo.

For the past 15 months, our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press have screamed that Kyle Rittenhouse is a “white supremacist” for shooting three white men who were attacking him. Now those same journos are trying to suppress information about a black supremacist who ran over dozens of people at a Christmas parade in Wisconsin. The journos and other libs can’t use this mass murder for their own political purposes, so they’re blaming Andy Ngo for revealing facts about the killer’s past that they’d rather you didn’t know.

Ngo and a few others confirmed the identity of Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha mass-murderer, almost a full day before the mainstream media got around to it:

Twitter avatar for @MrAndyNgoAndy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 @MrAndyNgo

That would be this individual from a prior arrest. (He has a very long criminal record.) #Waukesha

Image

Karol Markowicz @karol

Darrell E. Brooks, black male, late 30s is the suspect in custody in Waukesha.

November 22nd 2021

6,501 Retweets

Then Ngo immediately got to work, collecting evidence from Brooks’ social media accounts:

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The USA Today editorial board are liars

The USA Today editorial board is incoherent and/or has a reading comprehension problem and/or is lying. And they tell the lie that they believe an inanimate object can be guilty:

Kyle Rittenhouse may be innocent, but not the assault-style rifles are (once again) guilty in deadly shooting

He said the weapon was a key reason he shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum during the mayhem. “If I would have let Mr. Rosenbaum take my firearm from me, he would have used it and killed me with it,” Rittenhouse testified during the trial.

Demonstrators saw the shooting and chased after Rittenhouse in an apparent effort to disarm him. One of them was Anthony Huber armed only with a skateboard. Huber grabbed the barrel of the AR-15, and Rittenhouse shot him to death.

“The irony of the case is that Mr. Rittenhouse has become a cause célèbre among gun-rights advocates, even though, according to his own defense, it was his carrying of the rifle that put him in danger in the first place,” the Economist noted.

Rittenhouse said no such thing. And they quoted the testimony which refutes their claim! The key reason for all legal use of lethal force is the reasonable fear of imminent severe injury or death. Rittenhouse articulated this well, repeatedly, and the video supports his claims. Without the rifle Rosenbaum would still have been outraged at his dumpster fire, being pushed into a gas station, being put out with the fire extinguisher. And that outrage led to Rittenhouse being chased by Rosenbaum and others. And when they cornered him without the rifle they almost certainly would have caused him severe injury or death. Hence, the rifle cannot be the “key reason” justifying the use of deadly force.

They are also liars:

Such weapons were expressly designed for the battlefield, and that may be a good part of their appeal.

Wrong. Such weapons are expressly designed to be easy to shoot, maintain, carry, economical, and accurate. They are the most common rifle sold in the United States and no AR-15 style rifle has ever been issued to a military for battlefield use (the AR-15 is semi-auto, militaries all use select fire rifles).

The primacy of assault-style rifles in American society is not a Second Amendment issue. When the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia authored a Supreme Court ruling in 2008 underscoring the Second Amendment’s right to possess firearms, he said the freedom is “not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever.”

This must be a deliberate lie. Here is the complete quote from the 2008 Heller decision (emphasis added):

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. See, e.g., Sheldon, in 5 Blume 346; Rawle 123; Pomeroy 152–153; Abbott333. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues. See, e.g., State v. Chandler, 5 La. Ann., at 489–490; Nunn v. State, 1 Ga., at 251; see generally 2 Kent *340, n. 2; The American Students’ Blackstone 84, n. 11 (G. Chase ed. 1884). Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment , nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.26

We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.”

I cannot imagine having read to middle of page 54 to pluck the “not unlimited” quote they did not read to the top of page 55 and see the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.”

Being the most popular rifle style sold in the United States the AR-15 qualifies as “in common use”. Hence, the AR-15 is protected by the Second Amendment.

Main stream media being deceitful… again?
Where’s that Gomer Pyle meme when you need it?

‘But CNN said …’ Yet *another* media narrative goes up in smoke as Waukesha Police set the record straight on suspect Darrell E. Brooks

In the wake of the deadly incident at a Waukesha Christmas parade yesterday, media have been circling the wagons around suspect Darrell E. Brooks, touting a narrative that Brooks may have driven his SUV into all those people because he was fleeing from the scene of another crime. Because if that were the case, it would mean that he didn’t mean to injure and kill anyone.

A lot of outlets were going with that.

 

 

 

Well, according to law enforcement — like, law enforcement willing to go on video, on record — Brooks was, in fact, not being pursued by police when he mowed down parade attendees:

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The author is a Harvard Professor, so you can see the low level that a university education has sunk to, when you have teachers who so openly lie. And what’s amazing is that they still lie in the age of the internet where just a little searching can find the facts of a matter.

While I have had my problems in the past in conversation with Attorney Branca on a gun control related subject (in reference to the definition of a ‘bullet core’ in relation to M855 ‘green tip’ ammo and federal law definitions of ‘armor piercing’ handgun ammo), his video reply to this article is on point.

Rittenhouse Verdict Flies in the Face of Legal Standards for Self-Defense

In a two-week trial that reignited debate over self-defense laws across the nation, a Wisconsin jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse for shooting three people, two fatally, during a racial justice protest in Kenosha.

The Wisconsin jury believed Rittenhouse’s claims that he feared for his life and acted in self-defense after he drove about 20 miles from his home in Antioch, Illinois – picking up an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle in Kenosha – in what he claimed was an effort to protect property during violent protests. The lakeside city of 100,000 was the scene of chaotic demonstrations after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, an unarmed, 29-year-old black man, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

In delivering its verdict, a Wisconsin jury decided that Rittenhouse’s conduct was justified, even though the prosecution argued that he provoked the violent encounter and, therefore, should not be able to find refuge in the self-defense doctrine.

As prosecutor Thomas Binger said in his closing argument: “When the defendant provokes this incident, he loses the right to self-defense. You cannot claim self-defense against a danger you create.”

The Wisconsin jury disagreed, and its decision may portend a similar outcome in another high-profile case in Georgia, where three white men are on trial for the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery after they claimed the Black man was a suspect in a rash of robberies. Like Rittenhouse, the three men claimed they were acting in self-defense.

Self-defense arguments are often raised during trials involving loss of life. Juries are then asked to determine whether a defendant’s conduct is justified by principles of self-defense or whether the offender is criminally liable for homicide.

Complicating matters is that each state has its own distinct homicide and self-defense laws. Some states observe the controversial “stand your ground” doctrine, as in Georgia – or not, as in Wisconsin – further clouding the public’s understanding on what constitutes an appropriate use of deadly force.

Five elements of self-defense

As a professor of criminal law, I teach my students that the law of self-defense in America proceeds from an important concept: Human life is sacred, and the law will justify the taking of human life only in narrowly defined circumstances.

The law of self-defense holds that a person who is not the aggressor is justified in using deadly force against an adversary when he reasonably believes that he is in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury. This is the standard that every state uses to define self-defense.

To determine whether this standard is met, the law looks at five central concepts.

First, the use of force must be proportionate to the force employed by the aggressor. If the aggressor lightly punches the victim in the arm, for example, the victim cannot use deadly force in response. It’s not proportional.

Second, the use of self-defense is limited to imminent harm. The threat by the aggressor must be immediate. For instance, a person who is assaulted cannot leave the scene, plan revenge later and conduct vigilante justice by killing the initial aggressor.

Third, the person’s assessment of whether he is in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury must be reasonable, meaning that a supposed “reasonable person” would consider the threat to be sufficiently dangerous to put him in fear of death or serious bodily injury. A person’s own subjective view of this fear is not enough to satisfy the standard for self-defense.

Fourth, the law does not permit a first aggressor to benefit from a self-defense justification. Only those with “clean hands” can benefit from this justification and avoid criminal liability.

Finally, a person has a duty to retreat before using deadly force, as long as it can be done safely. This reaffirms the law’s belief in the sanctity of human life and ensures that deadly force is an option of last resort.

‘Stand your ground’

The proliferation of states that have adopted “stand your ground” laws in recent years has complicated the analysis of self-defense involving the duty to retreat.

Dating back to early Anglo-American law, the duty to retreat has been subject to an important exception historically called the “castle doctrine”: A person has no duty to retreat in his home. This principle emerged from the 17th-century maxim that a “man’s home is his castle.”

The “castle doctrine” permits the use of lethal force in self-defense without imposing a duty to retreat in the home. Over time, states began to expand the non-retreat rule to spaces outside of the home.
“Stand your ground” laws came under national scrutiny during the trial of George Zimmerman, who was acquitted in the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

In that case, Martin, 17, was walking home after buying Skittles from a nearby convenience store. At the time, Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch volunteer who called police after spotting Martin. Despite being told by the 911 operator to remain in his car until officers arrived, Zimmerman instead confronted Martin.

It remains unclear whether a fight ensued, who was the aggressor and whether Zimmerman had injuries consistent with his claims of being beaten up by Martin. Zimmerman was the sole survivor; Martin, who was unarmed, died from a gunshot wound.

In the Zimmerman case, for example, under traditional self-defense law, the combination of first-aggressor limitation and duty to retreat would not have allowed Zimmerman to follow Martin around and kill him without being liable for murder.

But, in a stand-your-ground state such as Florida, Zimmerman had a lawful right to patrol the neighborhood near Martin’s home. As a result, during his trial, all Zimmerman had to prove was that he was in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury.

In Wisconsin, Rittenhouse was also able to put in evidence that he was in reasonable fear of death. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Rittenhouse testified. “I defended myself.”

The prosecution was unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rittenhouse was not reasonably in fear for his safety. This represents a high bar for the prosecution. They were unable to surmount it.

Ronald Sullivan is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

If you haven’t figured this out yet for yourself, you’re behind.

THEY ARE AFTER OUR CHILDREN

The precepts of Critical Race Theory are only taught to law school students, right? Sure. And also to pre-schoolers. Check out this new program from the University of Texas called GoKAR!. KAR stands for Kids Against Racism. UT is looking for parents “caregivers” who have preschool children ages four to five. They must “identify as white.” This is so the four and five year olds can be subjected to an “anti-racism” curriculum. In particular, “GoKAR! creates opportunities for caregivers to engage in dialogue about anti-Black racism with their preschool-aged children at home.” How about if we read them Winnie the Pooh instead? Please?

Click to enlarge, via Minding the Campus:

One stated objective of the GoKAR! program is to “increase awareness of racism.” I have no doubt that this goal will be achieved. These four and five year olds probably have little or no awareness of racism, but when the University of Texas is done with them, race will be front and center in their lives. Liberals think that is a good thing. God knows why.

That’s race. Now on to gender. In California, public school teachers’ union members are stalking middle-school kids on the internet, identifying potential 12- to 14-year-old kids whom they can groom into the LGBTQ life through school organizations. Seriously. Abigail Shrier has the story, obtained through audio recordings from a conference of California’s largest teachers’ union. Here, as is generally the case, the teachers’ union is a source of great evil.

Last month, the California Teachers Association (CTA) held a conference advising teachers on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.

You really should read Ms. Shrier’s post in its entirety. It includes lengthy quotes from union members that support that summary. For example:

Middle school kids, apparently, did not have endless interest in sitting around with their teachers during lunch discussing their sexual orientations and gender identities. “So we started to brainstorm at the end of the 2020 school year, what are we going to do? We got to see some kids in-person at the end of last year, not many but a few. So we started to try and identify kids. When we were doing our virtual learning – we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing school work. One of them was googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus. Whenever they follow the Google Doodle links or whatever, right, we make note of those kids and the things that they bring up with each other in chats or email or whatever,” Baraki can be heard to say. Beyond electronic surveillance of kids’ internet use, “we use our observations of kids in the classroom—conversations that we hear—to personally invite students. Because that’s really the way we kinda get the bodies in the door. Right? They need sort of a little bit of an invitation,” Baraki says in the clip.

It turns out that very few middle school kids are actually interested in being gay, trans or whatever. So radical teachers “stalk what they [are] doing on Google”–their words, not mine–and “use [their] observations of kids in the classroom” to identify children who might be vulnerable to the gay message, and entice them into the queer–their word–“movement.” All of this is at taxpayers’ expense, and, as one of the teachers caught on audio tape exults, they can’t be fired for stalking and grooming children.

However concerned you may be about the Left coming after your children, you can’t be paranoid enough.

The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse

Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.

It turns out that account was mostly wrong.

Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.

This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.

Take this, for instance, from CNN:

 

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I briefly commented on this awhile back.
This is a better look into the flaws of the underlying ‘research’.

Fatal Flaw In Ph.D. Thesis On Second Amendment Suppressing First Amendment

The Atlantic has been on an anti-Second Amendment tear lately. After a couple of pieces by David Frum, which I’ve addressed before, they have an article (Archived) that employs the newfangled theory that the Second Amendment somehow threatens the First Amendment. We saw this in the ACLU amicus brief in the NYSRPA v. Bruen case, which Cam addressed recently.

This article goes one step further. It cites “research” by two parties to make broad claims about how open carry protests chill free speech. The crux of the article is as follows:

Some protests involving open carry firearms have resulted in violence. The presence of firearms at a protest causes some people to be scared. Due to this fear, they are unable to express their opinions freely. Therefore – you can guess where this is headed – open carry at protests must be ‘regulated’.

Lest we forget, this argument has already been employed in the Campus Carry debate, that concealed carrying of guns inside a classroom would somehow stifle discussions. There is no evidence that those fears materialized. Yet, that argument is being laundered and reused against open carry at public protests, with calls to “further study” the chilling effect of concealed carry.

The article states:

What most people do not realize is that the Second Amendment has become, in recent years, a threat to the First Amendment. People cannot freely exercise their speech rights when they fear for their lives. […] Diana Palmer, one of the authors of this article, conducted a study […] found that participants were far less likely to attend a protest, carry a sign, vocalize their views, or bring children to protests if they knew firearms would be present.

There are two underlying studies this article is based on. The first one is from Everytown/ACLED, and the second one is a Ph.D. dissertation by Diana Palmer, one of the authors of the article. Everytown’s research is shoddy; it has been taken apart thoroughly before. Their new “research” needs to be tackled, but I will focus on the Ph.D. dissertation, which you can download and look at yourself here.

The abstract of the dissertation states the following:

In this mixed-methods study, 1,205 participants were surveyed about their likelihood of engaging in First Amendment behaviors at a protest with and without firearms and asked to explain what factors they considered when selecting their answers. […] In the quantitative element of the study, differences in expressive behavior were analyzed in the condition with no firearms and the condition with firearms. The analysis showed that participants were less likely to engage in expressive behaviors when firearms were present.

The abstract only talks about public protest scenarios in which guns are either present or not present. I looked through the dissertation, and found that it lacks any questions on weapons that aren’t firearms. Participants were never asked what they would do if knives, swords, clubs, pepper spray, brass knuckles, bike locks, etc. would be present. Any chilling effect of non-firearms weapons on assembly is not considered in the dissertation.

Weapons aren’t the only things that people can react to negatively. Participants weren’t asked what they would do if there were head-to-toe incognito, masked protestors at an event. Anyone following the news knows that antifa mobs have been showing up at “protests” in all-black, covering their faces while violating journalists’ First Amendment right to record them. Likewise, would people show up to a protest if there were people wearing Klan hoods?

Another topic that wasn’t addressed is crowd density. Personally, I avoid crowds and wouldn’t be surprised if survey participants would factor in high crowd density as a deterrent… if they had been asked about it.

Lastly, the timing of a protest was not included in the surveys; there are people who avoid “protests” at 1 AM. Too bad the dissertation didn’t ask about that.

These are questions that should have been part of the research, and the Ph.D. advisor or members of the committee should have caught these misses. This is a fatal flaw, in my opinion, especially given what the dissertation lays out in conclusion:

The first recommendation is that the carrying of firearms at protests should be regulated separately from other forms of open carry.

Given all the important questions that were missed, I take objection to the singling out of open carry at protests. If it’s a matter of regulating open carry at protests with, say, having your gun unloaded, mag out, chamber flag in, that’s one thing. But I doubt that’s the sort of benign regulation the writers of The Atlantic piece are asking for.

Going back to the article in The Atlantic, the writers also want to study concealed carry:

Research thus far has focused on open display of firearms, but further study is needed to evaluate the public safety concerns that may still be present when protesters or counterprotesters bring concealed firearms to demonstrations.

Unfortunately, this looks like agenda-driven, or at a minimum, bias-distorted research to me. Watching the press amplify it is unfunny to say the least.

So the leftist media are deceitful…Cue the meme.

See the source image

Without False Claims About The Risk of Concealed Handgun Permit Holders, The Left Has Nothing

Preface: Last Friday, the National Law Journal ran an op-ed by Lisa Vicens and John Donohue with many errors in it regarding a case that the U.S. Supreme Court heard last Wednesday on New York’s concealed handgun law.

The article gave readers very inaccurate information on the academic research regarding the risk of crime by concealed handgun permit holders. This false claim of public safety is really all the state of New York has to base its case on. The left-leaning National Law Journal, a business partner with Michael Bloomberg, is unwilling to respond to repeated requests to correct the record on these extreme inaccuracies, so we are publishing our response here at Townhall. Unfortunately, all the judges, lawyers, and law professors who read the National Law Journal won’t hear the other side of the argument.

Our Piece: “The last thing we need is the infusion of additional guns into New York City,” said New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea on Sunday. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen last Wednesday. New York’s legal team argued to the Court that this would worsen gun violence.

 New York is one of seven “May-Issue” states where officials can turn down carry permit requests for any reason (or no reason) at all. The Court is considering replacing this discretionary process with objective “Shall-Issue” rules. That way, people can get a permit as long as they reach a certain age, have no criminal background, pay the fees, and complete any required training.

Since 1976, 18 states eliminated “proper cause” requirements, and gun control advocates have consistently predicted disaster. But in state after state, concealed handgun permit holders have proved to be extremely law-abiding, and Right-to-Carry states have never even held a legislative hearing to consider moving back to “proper cause.”

Those same fears were raised again and again during Wednesday’s oral arguments. Justice Stephen Breyer speculated: “People of good moral character who start drinking a lot and who may be there for a football game or — or some kind of soccer game can get pretty angry at each other. And if they each have a concealed weapon, who knows?”

But, with 21.5 million permit holders and laws over many decades, you should have seen that example at least once. We haven’t. 

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Hit a search engine for ‘White House Walks Back Biden….”.

White House walks back Biden comments on payments to migrant families

White House walks back comments Biden made at CNN town hall

White House walks back Biden vow to use National Guard to drive trucks

White House walks back Biden’s plan to let pandemic payments stop

White House Walks Back Biden’s Statement About Defending Taiwan

White House walks back Biden’s predictions about Afghanistan withdrawal

White House walks back Biden comments on cybercriminals with Russia

White House walks back Biden’s commitment to gun control legislation

I could go on and on and on like the Eveready Bunny, but I think you get the point.
The question isn’t whether or not SloJoe is in charge – he’s not.
The question is ‘ Just who is actually running things in the White House?

Remember this?

Then this?

It’s clear that SloJoe got taken to the woodshed and schooled about what he was going to say.

Of course he’s lying and it’s clear he’s not in charge.

Indiana Educator Warns Parents: ‘We’re Lying’ About Not Teaching CRT, ‘Keep Looking’

On Thursday, a science coach who works in the Indiana public school system issued a video in which he countered the narrative that Critical Race Theory is not being taught in schools, warning parents, “When we tell you Critical Race Theory isn’t being taught in our schools, we’re lying. Keep looking.”

 

Observation O’ The Day

I can guarantee you, this is another one of those times when the moron’s staff wondered why they ever let him take questions, as he once again announces he’s a clueless figurehead.

Biden: $450K to illegal immigrants? “Garbage report”! NYT, ACLU: *Ahem*

This leaves Biden in another jam entirely of his own making. What does he do now? He only has two choices, neither of them palatable.
One: Biden explains why he actually is incentivizing more illegal immigrations (by his own statement to Doocy, no less!) by making these payouts and making the border crisis worse.
Two: Biden tells the Department of Justice to drop the settlement, forcing the ACLU to go to court and end up defending Trump’s border-enforcement policy. Door #1 loses moderates and suburban votes, and Door #2 loses progressives and activists.

Oh, and let’s not forget that Door #1 has an extra added bonus of becoming the centerpiece of a GOP campaign in the fall against vulnerable House Democrats. And there are a lot more of those than Biden thought before Tuesday’s elections.

Even more importantly, however, this episode demonstrates that Biden really doesn’t have a clue as to what is happening in his own administration. Biden either didn’t know about this settlement or forgot it so entirely that he couldn’t recall it when asked. This doddering performance is why Biden doesn’t take many questions from reporters in the first place, and why Americans have begun to lose confidence in Biden’s abilities. And they may well be wondering at this point who’s really running the White House.

The Americans I’ve been hearing from haven’t ‘begun to lose confidence in Biden’s abilities’, they knew from the start his abilities were already non-existent.
And their wondering about ‘who’s really running the show’ is only a question of who, not of ‘is it’.
SloJoe is a meatpuppet and that’s merely being confirmed every day.

Comment O’ The Day

This is how the government libs funnel money to favored groups. They invite a favored group to sue them with the intention of “settling” for big bucks and no intention at all of ever defending the case, regardless of the merits

The Farce of American Despotism.

The Soviets had the gulag, we have “cancel culture” in our universities and a brittle obsession with race and weirdo sexuality everywhere. 

Reflecting on Joe Biden’s disastrous “town hall” with Anderson Cooper on Thursday, The Spectator’s Dominic Green asks a question that has to weigh heavily on the mind of every American adult: “Is it more worrisome that Joe Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge?” I have long argued that allowing Biden to appear in public is a form of elder abuse, and I have speculated that he really is not in control of his actions but is manipulated, puppet-like, by a shadowy cadre of unnamed string-pullers I have called “The Committee.”

I do not have any proof that such is the case. I infer the existence and machinations of The Committee from Biden’s ostentatious incompetence and apparent senility. Has any president in the history of the Republic overseen such a destructive litany of failures so early in his tenure? Observers around the world caught their breath in August as our botched exit from Afghanistan went from appalling to something much worse and more deadly. What will be its defining image? The desperate Afghans clinging to and then falling from the landing gear of a transport plane as it took off from the Kabul airport? Or will it be the images of the slaughter perpetrated by a suicide (that is, a homicide) bomber outside the airport, an incident that killed some 170 people include more than a dozen U.S. military personnel?

Or maybe it will be the image of the drone strike launched in retaliation for that slaughter, a strike that was supposed to have targeted an ISIS-K operative but in fact killed zero terrorists and instead blew to bits 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. The United States initially said they had obliterated an ISIS-K operative along with the collateral damage, but eventually they had to admit that, nope, they got no bad guys, just 10 innocent Afghans.

General Mark “White Rage” Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, initially called the attack a “righteous strike,” but then walked that back to describe it as a “heart-wrenching” “horrible tragedy of war.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden himself called the evacuation from Afghanistan an “extraordinary success.”

I wonder what the hundreds of Americans stranded in Afghanistan think about that? The administration initially said that everyone who wanted to get out could get out, then it acknowledged that a handful of Americans were left behind, then “about a hundred.” That number has just been adjusted up to more than 400. I wonder, too, what the families of those murdered by the Taliban, and then hanged from construction cranes as “examples” to the populace, think of that judgment? Something similar, I suspect, to what the husband and children of Negar Masoomi, the pregnant policewoman who allegedly was murdered in front of them by Taliban agents in September, think.

But whether Joe is calling the shots or is merely the Howdy Doody mannequin manipulated by others, it is clear for all to see that the United States, as Green puts it, is “heading nowhere good.” And the volume keeps getting turned up on the awfulness.

Everyone has minuted the disaster at our southern border, where thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens are pouring into the country, only to be packed off and resettled in a town near you. It was horrible a couple of months ago. Now it is a screaming catastrophe, as another huge caravan of migrants is wending its way through Mexico towards America. Just so, inflation had spiked over the summer, but now it is out of control, the worst in decades, a situation compounded by a crippled supply chain as hundreds of cargo ships loiter off the coasts of California and New York, unable to make port or be unloaded.

Meanwhile Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary is off on paternity leave with his hubby and their adopted child. Santa is predicted to be leaving the North Pole a little light this holiday season, since many of the gifts people ordered will be delayed. And it’s a good thing his sleigh is powered by reindeer, since gas is going to be awfully dear by Christmas. At some spots in California, it is already north of $8 a gallon.

Last week,  the world, including our so-called “intelligence” services was surprised the the news that the Chinese had recently  tested a nuclear capable hypersonic rocket. The news of that broke right around the time that the State Department issued a tweet proudly announcing “International Pronouns Day.” “Today on International Pronouns Day,” it read, “we share why many people list pronouns on their email and social media profiles.”

Noting that until recently, the United States set “the global standard in political imagery,” Green argues that that day has passed. “The US no longer defines that global standard,” he writes.

The Chinese are the masters of political performance these days, whether it’s allegorical nationalist ballets at sporting events or the other nationalist ballet, the synchronized ovation in the Great Hall of the People. Yet our politicians feel they have to keep up with the old American standard. The result, as it was for the Soviets, is farce. We are now beating ourselves at our own game.

Indeed. And one result of that farce is that the mummers’ play of political correctness increasingly substitutes for serious politics, even as the ideology of wokeness replaces genuine enlightenment. “Twenty-first century America,” Green rightly comments, “is a shadow of its former self, so its politics have become a shadow play of propaganda.”

Marx famously adapted Hegel’s observations about history repeating itself, noting Hegel forgot to add that it does so first as tragedy, then as farce. That is the mode of American despotism at the moment. The Soviets had the gulag, we have “cancel culture” in our universities and a brittle obsession with race and weirdo sexuality everywhere. Are we supposed to be proud or alarmed that Rachel Levine, (né Richard) is the first “transgender” Assistant Secretary of Health and four-star admiral? Tocqueville saw the essentials of our peculiar servitude in his brilliant analysis of “democratic despotism.” Naturally, though, he missed some of the more farcical aspects for who, in 1830, could have predicted “International Pronouns Day” or phenomena like Rachel Levine?

Montesquieu put his finger on our situation when, in Considerations of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, he noted that “in a free state in which sovereignty has just been usurped, whatever can establish the unlimited authority of one man is called good order, and whatever can maintain the honest liberty of the subjects is called commotion, dissension, or bad government.” Montesquieu was talking about the moment when the Roman republic gave way to the autocracy of Augustus. Mutatis mutandis, what he says applies equally to our situation in which sovereignty has been usurped and concentrated in the hand of a tiny oligarchy that mouths clichés about “our democracy” the better to subvert it.

Welcome to the Party, Pal!

Polimath (and others) are feeling the same oppressive weight of the government boot on their necks that America’s gun owners have been feeling ever since the introduction of the Sullivan Act.

“Just give up a little bit of your rights, and you’ll make the rest of us feel safer” has been the motto of the gun control movement since day one. Now that same logic, (if you want to equate emotion of feeling safe as logic) is being applied to public health as a whole, and people aren’t liking what they’re hearing.

Stephen Kruiser once said that firearms are the gateway drug to freedom. In this case, however, firearms ownership is the canary in the coal mine. What big government and runaway political corruption have been doing to our freedoms under the Second Amendment, they’re now doing to every other civil right as well.

Welcome to the party, everyone. Don’t say we never tried to warn you.