Category: Scratch a Lib-Find a Tyrant

New laws in Vermont that start July 1: Gun purchases,….

Vermonters will soon see new laws that affect their wallets or their legal choices — and even possibly cut down on the theft of car parts.

Every year, July 1 is the date that many new laws take effect. Some of these laws were recently passed by the Legislature; others were approved a while ago and are just now rolling out.

Here are 11 of the changes you should know about this summer.

Waiting period for gun purchases

Young people in Vermont are less likely than their peers in other states to report feelings of sadness, hopelessness or suicidal thoughts — and yet their rate of suicide deaths is higher than the national average.

Lawmakers have decided that easy access to guns is a significant factor in those deaths. And legislation that goes into effect July 1 will institute a 72-hour waiting period for gun purchases. Lawmakers hope that preventing someone in crisis from gaining immediate access to a gun will allow time for suicidal impulses to pass. The vast majority of people who survive a suicide attempt never make an attempt again.

A new law in Vermont creates a criminal penalty for unsafe storage of firearms if those guns are used in a crime.

The law will allow family members to petition courts for an extreme risk protection order, and creates a new criminal penalty for negligent storage of firearms, if that negligence results in commission of a crime.

The 72-hour waiting period provision is almost certain to invite a legal challenge. In a landmark ruling last year, the U.S. Supreme Court established a new precedent for the manner in which courts should assess the constitutionality of restrictions on gun ownership.

Though Gov. Phil Scott allowed the bill to become law, he said he doesn’t think the 72-hour waiting period will survive a constitutional challenge.

[It makes one wonder why the goobernor let it become law then, but scratch a lib, find a tyrant applies]

Doctoral student opines lying gun owners aren’t being reached with ‘responsible’ messaging

There’s no lack of progressive think tanks out there that claim they’re not coming for our guns, they just want to promote “safety.” The New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center is one of those groups that claims to be all about safety, however they never put out any studies, materials, or articles, on the responsible and law-abiding gun owner, nor any material about the corporeal topics of gun use or ownership. A recent study done by a doctoral student at the GVRC has her claiming foul over potential untruthful survey results.

In a study published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, researchers found that based on their answers to a variety of other questions, a group of individuals appeared as though they might be falsely denying firearm ownership when directly asked by researchers.

While some of these individuals resemble what previous research indicated to be a typical American firearm owner (e.g., white, male), others looked quite different (racial or ethnic minority, female, living in urban environments), highlighting that the landscape of firearm ownership in the United States may be shifting.

“Some individuals are falsely denying firearm ownership, resulting in research not accurately capturing the experiences of all firearm owners in the U.S.,” said Allison Bond, lead author of the study and a doctoral student with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. “More concerningly, these individuals are not being reached with secure firearm storage messaging and firearm safety resources, which may result in them storing their firearms in an unsecure manner, which in turn increases the risk for firearm injury and death.”

This hiccup that Bond has highlighted is a valuable feature in our evolution in my opinion. Unequivocally, I will personally stand by these statements – until the medical field shows they’re unbiased – I don’t suggest exposing whether or not you’re a gun owner to anyone associated with it, without relevant cause. I salute the people that elected to “falsely deny” their firearm ownership – even though a false denial would be a double negative, but I’m not the PHD student here.

What’s really hubris, troubling, and disgustingly elitist is that Bond has this concern that because “these individuals,” which I’m going to read as meaning “those/these people” – the ones that are “racial or ethnic minority, female, living in urban environments” – who smartly elected to lie to the center, they’re too obtuse to get proper “messaging.” Whatever Bond considers safety resources, it’s rather opinionated to assume those people won’t get them because they don’t trust those conducting the study. Bond is beyond out of touch here.

The Rutgers GVRC has done nothing but put forward an abstinence-only approach to firearms ownership. There’s never any research done on, or paper they put out, that highlights the positive elements of owning guns. Every rabbit hole they go down has a result that has to do with more regulations. Fortunately many of the regulations they’d want to see implemented would be considered unconstitutional if looked at properly with an unbiased approach.

After following the GVRC acutely since anti-gun Governor Phil Murphy instituted them, pumping taxpayer’s dollars into this gibberish, their main objective seems to have an ends in requiring firearms to be stored in a 100% unusable state. That condition goes directly against the Heller decision I might add. This has been my suspicion for a while and this study/reporting on it helps fortify that hunch.

Bond leaves out that every single brand new firearm sold in the United States includes a user manual. Nearly all handguns come with a lock and hard lockable case. In those manuals, there’s general instructions on so-called proper storage. Anyone walking into a gun store to purchase a firearm is approached with plenty of resources in the form of capitalism and altruism. At a shop, there’s generally someone wanting to help new gun owners to be safe, in addition to the fact businesses can only profit by selling more firearm safety devices.

The problem with Bond’s assertion that those people don’t get appropriately schooled on what she considers proper storage and safety rules is that Bond – and her ilk – try to squeeze everything into a one-size-fits-all solution. If we asked Bond or anyone else over at the GVRC about proper storage, they’re going to tell you firearms need to be stored unloaded, in a locked container, and ammunition stored in a separate locked container. I suspect Bond is not going to say that it makes sense to have a loaded firearm in the home for self-defense. The thought of storing a firearm in a night stand loaded, if appropriate for the given household, would be looked at with horror.

To people like Bond and groups like the GVRC, self-defense via firearm use is abhorrent. So keeping a firearm stored in any condition for ease of use would go against their biases. It’s unfortunate these alleged people of science don’t come standard where bias is completely removed. Follow the science – pish posh to that for these purposes.

The rest of the “safety resources” includes what? I’ve never heard the GVRC advocate that gun owners should take an NRA or USCCA training course to learn how to use a firearm. No, safety resources are going to come in the form of their own abstinence-only branded “education.” If groups like the GVRC advocated for people to take such branded training – by name – they’d have some credibility.

There’s an undertone that Bond was making about those people not being exposed to resources because of these “false denials.” Beyond their silly survey, what’s Bond and the GVRC doing to “educate” respondents? Do they offer self-described gun owners these important resources when respondents say they own guns? And in what form are these resources?

The study indicates a percentage of firearm owners may not feel comfortable disclosing their ownership status. Among those identified as potentially falsely denying firearm ownership, many were women living alone in urban environments.

The study indicates a good portion of people that have the right idea. While I’m all in favor of accurate data collection, I cannot support supplying any information about whether or not one is a gun owner to the GVRC or groups like it. Physicians and doctors out there may take exception to my advice here, but too bad. When the authors and groups behind these so-called studies make a good faith effort to not inject their anti-gun conclusion before the study has even concluded, then we can have a chat about being honest. They all claim they’re not about “making policy,” but that’s total and complete malarkey. I’ve chatted with the “I just want to save lives, I’m not about policy making” doctors, and I conclude they’re lying after reading their rhetoric and papers.

One of the other things that’s hinted at when talking about messaging is not said in the piece covering the study. Read into comments made by the GVRC executive director:

“There are several reasons some firearm owners might feel uncomfortable disclosing that they own firearms,” said Michael Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and senior author of the study. “These results serve as an important reminder that we should not assume we know everything about who owns firearms and that we should ensure that our efforts to reach firearm owners can resonate with broad audiences we might not realize would benefit from the message.”

Anestis left out one of the newer en vogue buzzwords that all readers need to be aware of. With the narrow exception of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and a few other very limited number of groups, if the phrase “credible messenger” is in the literature, run. While I have read some reporting in NSSF – who makes a good faith effort to protect firearm owners and the industry – literature where credible messenger was used, generally speaking, only grossly anti-gun think tanks use it.

The mechanism for these groups is for them to find the right person, to talk to the right people, using them as a puppet to get their own message out. That’s it. It’s agenda driven and has everything to do with policy and culturally appropriating as many people as possible – to their way of thinking.

To all “those people” out there…the “racial or ethnic minority, female, living in urban environments,” welcome to the fray. There are resources out there, which I”m sure you’re well aware of, should you need any. With Second Amendment supporters, there’s an entire community of people that are more than willing and happy to help each other, including you.

Continue to go with your gut and learn there are trustworthy organizations out there.  Let’s call the other groups those who utilize their alleged academic “achievements” to bend pseudoscience into a conclusion that results in our disarmament. Judging by Bond’s complaints, many of you have already figured this out. Kudos for that.

A Quiet Bluegrass Genocide

Bluegrass Genocide

Sometimes, the comments on Bastiat’s Window take my breath away. Tuesday, (6/6/23) brought one such case. In his terrific Shiny Herd substack, Ted Balaker interviewed me on the mania for eugenic sterilization of those deemed “unfit to reproduce” for the first 75+ years of the 20th century. As Ted and I discussed:

“They were forced to undergo hysterectomies. Their tubes were tied and they were given vasectomies, sometimes without anesthesia.”

The scientific and political communities in America were solidly behind the project. Those performing the sterilizations were considered humanitarian heroes, and academics who questioned the idea were subject to vilification, loss of employment, and loss of academic funding. The press and political activists formed a solid phalanx to protect the pro-eugenics side. Glenn Reynolds of

Glenn’s Substack

PUBLIC HEALTH HAS ALWAYS INVOLVED A LOT OF GROUPTHINK: When Sterilization Was Dogma: Why the Eugenics Movement is Relevant Today. “Eugenicists sought to ‘improve’ the human species in the same way that one would improve cattle or soybeans—and using basically the same techniques.”

Later in the day, Glenn added an update—an excruciatingly poignant email that he had received from a reader:

“After giving birth to me in 1971, just months after turning 18, the rural community hospital staff convinced my mother to have a tubal ligation before she left.

Only decades later did I realize how improper this seemed for a healthy, married, drug-free young woman of 18. But she was in Appalachia, and poor. Was the hospital staff trying to avoid more of “her kind” being born?

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/title-x-family-planning-program-1970-1977

Then I heard of the Family Planning Services Act and began to wonder if there was in 1971 a federally-funded bias toward sterilizing poor young women in Appalachia. Is this why I never had siblings and face being the sole caretaker and provider for my aging mother?

But I can only wonder because I can’t find any research or data or even articles inquiring about changes in birth and sterilization rates among women in Appalachia before/after the Family Planning Services Act took hold.

Maybe the Act didn’t make a difference at all. Or maybe it was a quiet Bluegrass Genocide.

No one seems to want to ask.”

This writer’s expression, “bluegrass genocide,” is a marvel of imagery, simplicity, and power. Nowhere to be found on the internet (till now), the term lashes an arcadian adjective to a dystopian noun. Just two words and five syllables describe a sweeping saga, imparting both sense of place and sense of horror. It starkly captures the inhumanity that, for the better part of the last century, exerted a vice grip over science, medicine, culture, politics, journalism, and public policy—the notion that experts are entitled to play God with lives in pursuit of their favored social goals. The writer’s addition of “quiet”—”a quiet Bluegrass Genocide”—makes the events described all the more vile.

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Prof: ‘Nothing wrong with’ murder of Trump supporter from a ‘moral perspective.’

University of Rhode Island Professor Erik Loomis appeared to defend the murder of Aaron “Jay” Danielson, the member of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, during recent social unrest in Portland, Oregon.

In 2012, Loomis came under scrutiny after he called for NRA executive Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick” following the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Just weeks later, in January 2013, Loomis said, “I know the central mission of the Republican Party is to have a membership made up entirely of old rural white people.”

Now, Loomis is once again under fire after publishing a blog post titled “Why was Michael Reinoehl killed?” Reinoehl is the man suspected of fatally shooting Danielson. Reinoehl was killed as federal authorities tried to arrest him.

“Michael Reinoehl is the guy who killed the fascist in Portland last week. He admitted it and said he was scared the cops would kill him. Well, now the cops have killed him,” Loomis wrote in the September 4 blog post.

 

“I am extremely anti-conspiracy theory. But it’s not a conspiracy theory at this point in time to wonder if the cops simply murdered him. The police is [sic] shot through with fascists from stem to stern. They were openly working with the fascists in Portland, as they were in Kenosha which led to dead protestors,” Loomis continued.

In the comment section of the blog post, one reader challenged Loomis by writing, “Erik, he shot and killed a guy,” referring to Reinoehl.

Loomis responded by saying, “He killed a fascist. I see nothing wrong with it, at least from a moral perspective.” He further added that “tactically, that’s a different story. But you could say the same thing about John Brown.”

Loomis furthered compared Reinoehl to Brown who in the 1800s used violence as a means of fighting slavery.

One reader then asked, “What’s so great about assassinating a rando fascist? And in the absence of a sound affirmative justification, it should be easy to envision the drawbacks.”

Loomis was quick to reply with, “What’s so great about assassinating random slaveholders, said liberals to John Brown.”

In a separate comment, Loomis wrote, “the problem with violence is that it usually, though not always, is a bad idea. That I agree with.”

Loomis said in another comment, “Yes, sometimes violence is necessary, say to avoid greater physical harm, i.e. self-defense, or to defeat a literal army of fascists who are trying to kill people. But, ideologically, I think the idea that violence is good if it’s against our political enemies is a core part of fascism, and so the ideological opposition to that idea should be its opposite – that violence as a general rule is bad, unless the specific context of that situation requires a violent response.”

Loomis made headlines Tuesday for another comment he made on Twitter. In response to MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeting, “Trump is objectively pro-Covid,” Loomis tweeted “yeah, I mean, once Republicans figured out COVID was going to affect people of color and the poor disproportionately, they stopped caring about doing anything about it.”

The Ominous Reason Why Biden Keeps Repeating His False Claim About a White Supremacist Threat

As Ben Bartee noted Saturday, Old Joe Biden’s commencement speech at Howard University “included a hearty condemnation of the alleged scourge of White Supremacy™ in America.” In fact, the alleged president called white supremacy “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland.” Then on Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary and failed Disinformation Governance Board overlord Alejandro Mayorkas agreed with Old Joe, emphasizing that “domestic violent extremism is our greatest threat right now.” Many other Biden regime officials have said the same thing in the nearly two and a half years now that they have been inflicting themselves upon us. The reason why they keep making this false claim is clear and ominous.

At Howard, Biden first repeated his oft-stated lie that Donald Trump had called Nazis “fine people.” Then he said: “But on the best days, enough of us have the guts and the hearts to st — to stand up for the best in us. To choose love over hate, unity over disunion, progress over retreat. To stand up against the poison of white supremacy, as I did in my Inaugural Address — to single it out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy. And I’m not saying this because I’m at a black HBCU. I say it wherever I go.”

A “black HBCU”? As opposed to all the white historically black colleges and universities, Joe? But anyway, Old Joe’s lie about white supremacists being the nation’s biggest terror threat has also been repeated by Gestapo chief Merrick Garland and the FBI. In November 2021, FBI and Homeland Security Department officials increased investigations of “domestic extremists,” reiterating the claim that they are today’s foremost terror threat.

Yet no matter how often Biden and his henchmen repeat this, actual white supremacist terrorists in any significant numbers have been conspicuously lacking. Yet on MSNBC (of course) Sunday, “journalist” Jonathan Capehart perpetuated the myth, asking Mayorkas: “The president, yesterday at his commencement address for Howard University graduates, called white supremacy the major domestic terrorist threat in this country. Is that correct?”

Mayorkas, of course, answered in the affirmative: “It tragically is. And the terrorism context, domestic violent extremism is our greatest threat right now. Individuals are driven to violence because of ideologies of hate, anti-government sentiment, false narratives, personal grievances. Regrettably, we have seen a rise in white supremacy. The principle underlying our work is that when one community is targeted, Jonathan, when one community is targeted, we as a country are targeted.”

Note how Mayorkas related “anti-government sentiment” to “white supremacy.” Old Joe revealed the game that is being played here last September when he said in his ominous red and black speech that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

This regime aims to criminalize political dissent, and that will require demonizing and stigmatizing fully half of the electorate. It is increasingly clear that when Biden claims that white supremacists are the biggest terror threat the nation faces, he means ordinary Americans who have never broken any law but who oppose his agenda. If everyone who opposes him is a white supremacist terrorist, then the nation has over a hundred million of them. Arrests and prosecutions on false pretenses will follow. That’s the threat that was contained in his words at Howard.

And ever so conveniently for Old Joe, no sooner had he uttered this false claim again at Howard on Saturday than a couple of hundred actual white supremacist terrorists miraculously materialized in Washington. All were young, physically fit men; not a single fat Nazi in the bunch. All wore the same blue shirt and khaki pants uniform, all with their faces covered, and once again, the feds showed no curiosity about who they are and made no attempt to determine where they came from or where they went.

This clumsy false-flag operation was widely exposed and ridiculed on Twitter, but conservative writer Chris Brunet pointed out: “What’s sad about this clip is that everyone here on my side of Twitter instantly knows this is a glowie/fed operation… pure theatre. But it is actually a really effective psyop, they keep doing it, because it works. Ask any normal person on the street, ask your mom, ask your sister, and they will be terrified of this clip and fall for it hook-line-and-sinker.”

Indeed they will. They still have no idea what game is being played. But as Old Joe’s henchmen continue to move to make it possible for only their point of view to be enunciated in the public square, their objectives will become obvious to everyone.

Daydreaming the Guns Away

We find ourselves living in a highly consequential time for the legal clarification of the 2nd Amendment. Extremely aggressive, wide-ranging bans of semi-automatic firearms have been enacted in various parts of the country, drawing legal challenges. While the ultimate resolution of these challenges is unknowable, many observers believe the Supreme Court will eventually arrive at a decision prohibiting the wholesale banning of semi-automatic firearms. Those who dream of eliminating all private gun ownership in the United States face the prospect of a devastating legal defeat.

One can imagine their looming disappointment. They have failed to appoint Supreme Court justices who would effectively redefine the 2nd Amendment out of existence, and they are about to bear the consequences of that failure. But from their perspective, there is comfort to be had in the prospect of eventually stripping the 2nd Amendment from the Constitution altogether, no matter how long it may take.

Such is the hope that animates aspiring intergenerational social reformer Allan Goldstein, who, in his “Let’s get serious and repeal the Second Amendment” has stepped forward to boldly launch a 50-plus year plan to eradicate all privately owned firearms in the United States.

Perhaps the piece might have been better entitled “Let’s Get Hysterical.” How galling it must be to be deprived of so obvious a good — a gun-free society — on account of something as frivolous as an obsolete, suicidally-construed constitutional amendment. On Goldstein’s account “[t]he Supreme Court has decided that ‘a well-regulated militia’ includes gang bangers and wild-eyed loners with a grudge.” What a shame Goldstein did not bother to provide a citation to the Supreme Court decision in which this is asserted.

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BLUF
The only silver lining in this minatory storm cloud is the fact that such movements, though unconscionably cruel, arbitrary, and destructive, are also astonishingly fragile.

Deliver Us from Reality

“Because he can.”

That’s the answer one has to give to those who ask how Alvin Bragg, a local district attorney in office by the slimmest of margins—and then only because of a huge subsidy from the anti-American billionaire George Soros—can get away with antics like indicting Donald Trump, a former (and, possibly, future) president of the United States, and, now, with charging former Marine Daniel Penny with manslaughter because he (along with at least two others) intervened to stop Jordan Neely from attacking fellow passengers on a New York subway.

Because he can. As a friend remarked when digesting the spectacle of Penny being led away in handcuffs, totalitarian movements often start slowly, almost timidly, but as they gain power, they become more brazen. After a certain point, they do outrageous things just to intimidate the public and demonstrate their power.

We now know that the FBI, the CIA, and other elements of America’s security apparatus intervened directly in the decision making of Twitter and other social media companies to influence the course of the 2020 election. One part of that intervention had to do with organizing 51 senior former intelligence figures to sign a letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That was a lie. They knew it was a lie. It didn’t matter. They did it because they knew they could get away with it.

The United States is on the verge of being inundated with thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens. Many are from South or Central America. Hundreds are from China, even though they are crossing that notional line we used to be able to call, without irony, our southern border. Why did the Biden Administration decide to enact a real-life Camp of the Saints invasion of the United States? Because it could. There was no immediate price to pay.

In her classic study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes several observations that bear on our current situation. “There is no doubt,” she observes,

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The Left continues to whitewash its crazy, violent, and authoritarian history.

About a week before Jeff Sharlet’s new book , The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, was published in March, a new video was uploaded on YouTube. It was a short documentary from 1983 of when Harry Belafonte, an iconic American singer and actor, visited East Germany to perform in a concert promoting communism . The “World Peace Concert” was run by East Germany’s communist youth organization. Belafonte gave his blessings to the Soviet-sponsored campaign promoting unilateral Western disarmament.

The Belafonte concert is barely mentioned in The Undertow, a collection of essays and reporting by Sharlet, an award-winning journalist who teaches at Dartmouth College. Indeed, little of the Left’s history of flirting with authoritarianism is mentioned at all. Instead, The Undertow argues that a bunch of crazy right-wingers, including militia groups, are bent on conflict with the Left. They want a second civil war, Sharlet claims, and those who stand up to oppose them are American leftists, portrayed as Christlike figures of light and wisdom.

While announcing the Right has a strong and growing MAGA force that is armed and dangerous and itching for battle, Sharlet smothers any proof that the Left is violent and crazy. His book, which opens with a long and loving profile of Belafonte, fails to mention the singer’s hardcore leftism.

Not even Belafonte tried to airbrush his beliefs. In his memoir, Belafonte wrote: “I remained not just liberal but an unabashed lefty. I was still drawn to idealistic left-wing leaders … who seemed to embody the true ideals of socialism .”

Belafonte was friends with the communist singer Paul Robeson. He praised Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, writing that the latter has “a strong grasp of Latin American history and of the fine distinctions in law between Venezuela and its neighbors.” Belafonte called former President George W. Bush “the greatest tyrant, the greatest terrorist in the world.” He was a Marxist — pure and simple.

None of this is reported in The Undertow. Instead, Belafonte is portrayed by Sharlet simply as an inspirational civil rights leader — “a radiant man” who was friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and who remains a political visionary. Sharlet’s book is pure agitprop. It condemns conservatives and treats even the most violent and despicable leftists as, quite literally, messianic. In his essay about Occupy Wall Street, for example, the 2011 leftist street protests that resulted in stinky unbathed bodies and reports of sexual assault, Sharlet claims he felt like Jesus Christ — well, sort of: “I feel like one of five hundred title Christs, if by Christ you allow me to refer not to divinity itself but to one of its more wholly human representations, Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Piss Christ.”

Say what? Piss Christ is a notorious piece of garbage “art” that was created when Serrano placed a crucifix in a jar of his urine. To Sharlet, this is the icon worth emulating: “Appreciating what happened at Liberty Park [in New York’s Occupy Wall Street] requires a mental shift akin to the one necessary to see Piss Christ — an image of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s own golden urine — as not blasphemous but a strange breed of beautiful. I don’t mean ideologically beautiful, some baroque idea one admires for the complexity of its inversions. I mean gorgeous. Breathtaking, breath-giving, at the same time.”

This may be the clearest distillation of modern leftism ever committed to paper. It has the religious piety that surrounds liberalism’s self-regard but maintains its “woke” street cred by attaching itself to blasphemous “art.” We are like Jesus, but it’s the Jesus who hates Jesus. It’s perfect in its performative incoherence.

Sharlet’s main essay, “The Undertow,” takes on the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Central to the story is Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was killed by a police officer on that day. Here is Sharlet’s description: “Babbitt, shot for her trouble, was a fool who pursued her own death.” She was also, he claims, made into a symbol by the Right: “Ashli Babbitt was processed, made productive, almost immediately after her death, transformed right away into yet another flag, like a new tarot card in the deck of fascism.”

“A fool who pursued her own death.” What cold, despicable words. You can both think the Jan. 6 riot was an ill-advised disaster and question why Babbitt was shot and killed. But Sharlet, just like Belafonte and the communists he entertained and bankrolled, wants a world in which asking such questions gets you tossed into prison.

USA Today Op-ed doesn’t think your rights matter

I’ve long argued that the Second Amendment is the insurance policy the Founding Fathers took out to protect the rest of the Bill of Rights. You can’t take away someone’s right to free speech, to freely assemble, and your freedom of religion without first taking away their ability to resist. Otherwise, someone’s going to fight you.

But in the wake of a mass shooting, we start to get a glimpse of who some people are.

As Ben Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

For one USA Today writer, he’s clearly and firmly in that camp.

Three children and three adults are dead, gunned down in a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tenn., by a human being who had no business possessing an AR-style rifle, an AR-style pistol and another handgun.

“But, but, but … the Second Amendment,” some will scream, like a myopic, zombified Greek chorus.

Hang your Second Amendment. It’s Monday in America, there has been yet another school shooting. Children are dead. The students who weren’t shot are forever changed by the trauma, and plenty more people across the country will be killed by gunfire in the days to come because, as I wrote a few words earlier, it’s Monday in America, and we have a whole damn week to go.

And at this point, it really doesn’t matter what else the writer has to say. He’s already made it clear that your Second Amendment rights are completely and totally irrelevant to him.

He’s also made it clear he’s not open for discussion about literally anything else that could potentially reduce mass shootings. Why? Because your rights don’t matter.

This is troubling in the Land of the Free.

See, one of the hallmarks of the United States is that we are a free land, that we value freedom. That freedom is protected in part by the fact that we have an armed populace that can react to any and all acts of tyranny.

We haven’t exactly used it, but mostly because the vast majority of us figure we can fight back without needed to expend ammunition.

Thankfully.

But we can’t “hang” our Second Amendment rights just because something bad happens. If we do that, we can then start hanging the rest of our rights when someone decides they need to go away.

Frankly, when you’re starting position is that my rights are completely and totally irrelevant, there is no discourse. There’s absolutely no reason to engage with you because there’s absolutely no chance of you being the least bit rational.

Do you want my rights? It’s not surprising. We’ve long known that gun control advocates ultimately want to gut the Second Amendment to the point that it’s little more than a trophy hanging on the wall.

The problem, however, is that it’s easy to say “hang your Second Amendment.” It’s a lot harder to do anything about it. Why? Because there’s an insurance policy in the Bill of Rights, and there are millions of Americans ready to act because of it.

Stop Lying: Watch How the Nashville School Killer Case Destroys Left’s Myth About Guns

No sooner had word emerged that a Nashville Christian school had been attacked by a mass shooter on Monday than the Left began dissembling about guns again. The shift from “thoughts and prayers” to “grab the guns from law-abiding gun owners!” occurred at hypersonic speed. And it was all wrong.

To save time, here’s a simple request by people who believe in the right to bear arms, which is explicitly guaranteed in the United States Constitution and is a God-given right. Stop lying. Try. It’s not that hard, and someone’s life depends on it.

First, let’s acknowledge that gender dysphoria is a real and treatable mental issue and obviously experienced by this 28-year-old biological female, who lived with her parents, and who police called a “she” even though the media insist we call her a “male.” She’s dead now, and her feelings won’t be hurt anymore by someone telling the truth about her. She can’t be defamed. And, obviously, “dead-naming” her is no longer an issue.

Think about this and many other after-effects of these lies. Imagine how this kind of “misgendering” will show up in crime stats. Males do the overwhelming number of mass shootings. It’s a fact. Will this wanna-be man show up in the crime stats as a male or female now? How does that help society understand the mentality of mass shooters? We need to stop lying about that too.

But here’s today’s lesson for the Left. You’ll want to commit this to memory, so pay attention as I explain this in words of one syllable.

Repeat after me: good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns.

And I can prove it.

First, who was called when the shooting broke out? That’s right, cops. Cops are called because they have guns. And let’s say something about these police officers who selflessly and bravely ran up the stairs to the sound of gunfire. They passed at least one body of a child without flinching and continued running to stop the monster. And they quickly dispatched this killer — unlike the cops in Uvalde, Texas. Watch the bodycam footage

You know the sad cliché: when seconds matter, cops are only minutes away.

And the killer knew it too. I repeat: the killer knew it too. This murderer knew this peaceful Christian school she’d attended as a girl years before was a gun-free zone, as are most schools in Tennessee.

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The nomenklatura is real. It sprang to life with the first law Congress passed that restricted the people and exempted goobermint.

American Nomenklatura.

A few weeks after Elon Musk formally acquired Twitter in October 2022, a senior official at the company who quit in the wake of Musk’s arrival took to the New York Times to pour cold water on Musk’s vision for the social-media platform. Yoel Roth, whose title had been Head of Trust and Safety, sought to assure his fellow progressives. Roth wrote that even if Musk wanted to remove the web of content-moderation rules and procedures Roth had helped create and enforce, the tech billionaire would be unable to achieve his aim. “The moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online,” he wrote.

What Roth meant was this: No Internet platform is an island, and Musk simply didn’t have the power to do what he wanted despite his 100 percent ownership of the social-media platform. It wasn’t merely that Musk would have to contend with Twitter’s progressive workforce, which believes that some political speech is so awful that it should be throttled or banned. He would also come into conflict with European regulators, the Federal Trade Commission, and Congress, all of whom also seek to limit what can be said online. And what about the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a trade organization of some of the world’s biggest consumer brands that advocates for “online safety”—a euphemism for protecting social-media users from accounts that may offend, harass, or trigger them?

He would also be dogged by advocacy groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which have found a new and lucrative mission monitoring social-media platforms for hate speech. They work hand in hand with elite journalists and think tankers, who have taken to tracking the spread of misinformation and disinformation online. In Washington, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have personnel whose job it is to alert social-media companies to foreign propaganda and terrorism. In Atlanta, the Centers for Disease Control seeks to quarantine dangerous information that might lead Americans to forgo masks or vaccine boosters. And perhaps most important, there are other Silicon Valley giants—Apple and Google—that provide the digital storefronts or app stores that Twitter needs to update their software and continue to run its service.

Call it the “content-moderation industrial complex.” In just a few short years, this nomenklatura has come to constitute an implicit ruling class on the Internet, one that collectively determines what information and news sources the rest of us should see on major platforms. Talk about “free speech” and “the First Amendment” may actually be beside the point here. The Twitter that Musk bought was part of a larger machine—one that attempts to shape conversations online by amplifying, muzzling, and occasionally banning participants who run afoul of its dogma.

The existence of this nomenklatura has been known for a few years. But thanks to Musk and his decision to make Twitter’s internal communications and policies available to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others, more detail is now known on why and how this elite endeavors to protect us from all manner of wrongthink.

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Der apfel fält nicht weit vom baum (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree)

Klaus Schwab’s Father Ran ‘National Socialist Model Company,’ Exploited Nazi Slave Labor.

Davos frontman Klaus Schwab’s daddy, Eugen Schwab, while the Third Reich was ravaging Europe in the 1930s and 40s, served as managing director of Escher Wyss Ravensburg, an engineering firm that constructed turbines and fighter plane parts for the regime.

While the elder Schwab worked in this capacity, the Nazis awarded Escher Wyss Ravensburg the prestigious title of “National Socialist Model Company” for all of its hard work in the service of the Führer.

To achieve this recognition, Escher-Wyss Ravensburg, under Eugen Schwab’s leadership, utilized Nazi slave labor and prisoners of war in its facilities.

Ravensburg itself, aside from the slave factory, was the site of numerous Nazi crimes against humanity, such as forced sterilization for the purpose of “racial improvement.” But to Eugen Schwab, that was just the cost of doing business with the Third Reich.

You want to make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs, right?

Klaus Schwab’s sanitized Wikipedia page contains none of the gruesome details of his daddy’s wartime activities, other than to say “his parents had moved from Switzerland to Germany during the Third Reich in order for his father to assume the role of director at Escher Wyss.”

Newsweek ran a corporate “fact check” in which they cherry-picked a falsely attributed image of Eugen in a Nazi uniform as a way to seem to disprove his connection to the Third Reich entirely. But deep into the article, Newsweek subtly admits that it’s all true — which almost no one will get to, thanks to short attention spans:

The posts shared online in May, 2022, claim Klaus Schwab’s father, Eugen Schwab, was a close ally of Hitler, and include a photo of the World Economic Forum leader alongside a man in Nazi uniform… the photo shared online is not of Eugen Schwab, but of Nazi general Walter Dybilasz… Klaus Schwab’s father, on the other hand, was the managing director of a subsidiary of Zurich-based engineering firm Escher Wyss. 

The history of Eugen’s relationship with Nazism in general is complex… Eugen Schwab was a member of some National Socialist organizations, but that alone does not prove any relationship to German high command or a belief in Nazi ideology. While the Escher Wyss branch in Ravensburg, Germany, (which Eugen managed) used prisoners of war and forced laborers, it is not clear whether the company was forced to do so by the Nazis or because of a lack of workers.

So, Eugen Schwab was an avowed National Socialist, and yes, okay, his firm did use Nazi slave labor. But, you see, that doesn’t mean he was a Nazi. And maybe Escher Wyss had to use slave labor to make their products for the Nazis because of a worker shortage.

This is a common tactic in corporate media: Take a false claim that circulates on the web (in this case, an image incorrectly identified as Eugen Schwab) and use that single post to discredit the entire factual connection between Schwab and the Nazis.