February 10, 2024
Counterpoint: More guns don’t equal more crime
There may be no tenet of faith so fundamental to the cult of gun control than the idea that more guns equate to more crime — a theory that was soundly disproven in 2023.
Just four years after the biggest recorded one-year spike in our nation’s homicide rate, it looks as if the United States may have just gone through the biggest one-year decline, an impossibility according to gun control activists.
There are millions more guns around than there were four years ago, yet the vast majority of cities reported fewer homicides than they did in 2020. That includes several cities where permitless carry recently took effect. Atlanta reported a 22 percent decline in murders. Toledo, Ohio, saw a 34 percent drop in the homicide rate, almost identical to the 33 percent decline in Oklahoma City.
The mayor of Miami boasted that the city had the fewest homicides since 1947, even though gun-control activists predicted the state’s permitless carry law would lead to more violence when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law last year.
Those same advocates also asserted that the demise of “may issue” concealed carry laws, which required applicants to demonstrate a justifiable need to have a firearm in self-defense, would also lead to more dangerous cities. There’s no evidence that the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen had any detrimental effect on public safety last year.
Indeed, in the first full year that “shall issue” concealed carry was in place, Baltimore recorded fewer than 300 homicides for the first time in nearly a decade. At the same time, Los Angeles and New York saw 10 percent declines, even as more citizens were lawfully carrying firearms in self-defense.
Meanwhile, some of the most gun-controlled locales in the country saw their violence grow worse last year while it remained stagnant in many others. For instance, the District of Columbia reported the most murders in more than two decades. Bridgeport and New Haven, Connecticut, saw double-digit increases in homicide, with New Haven’t murders spiking by almost 65 percent.
Seattle witnessed a 20 percent rise in the number of homicides, while the number of murders in Oakland, Calif., and San Francisco were almost unchanged from 2022.
The truth is that most U.S. cities had fewer murders last year regardless of the amount of gun-control laws in place. That shouldn’t come as a surprise given the local nature of violent crime, which is typically driven by fewer than 1 percent of a city’s population and who are already well-known to local police and the criminal justice system. The most effective crime-fighting strategies are those that target the most likely and prolific offenders, which means that gun-control laws aimed at legal gun owners are wildly off-target.
Those strategies vary wildly from city to city, just like their crime rates. And their effectiveness depends far more on the individuals guiding those programs than any legislation signed into law by a governor. Take Kansas City and St. Louis, which operate under the same Missouri gun laws but saw the number of homicides veer off in different directions last year, increasing by 7 percent in Kansas City while dropping by more than 20 percent in St. Louis.
Gun-control advocates may want to point at Kansas City’s woes while ignoring the progress made in St. Louis, but if we’re serious about improving public safety, we need an honest accounting of what’s working, what isn’t, and yes, what can be done without infringing on the fundamental right to armed self-defense. The data are telling us that more guns don’t equal more crime, but unfortunately, the gun control lobby and their allies in elected office don’t seem to be listening.
it’s always the same old tired, worn out ‘objections’ that have never happened.
Nebraska Legislators consider bill to alter self-defense laws
LINCOLN, Neb. (WOWT) – On Thursday the Nebraska Legislature’s Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a proposal that would allow the use of force to defend yourself or someone else from serious harm without the “duty to retreat”—that is, the requirement for you to first try to leave the situation and go to safety, if possible.
It would also give you immunity from prosecution for using that justifiable force.
“I’ll address the first point of the bill removing the duty to retreat from our state laws,” said Sen. Brian Hardin, who proposed the bill. “Bills similar to this are often referred to as stand your ground laws.”
Hardin said this would provide an avenue to ensure that an individual who is already a victim of a crime and had to use force as self-defense is not also “victimized by the legal system.”
Supporters said it’s not just related to firearms.
“Whether armed or unarmed, the idea that citizens are required to endanger themselves by turning their backs and running away from a clear-and-present danger is nonsensical, especially when you understand the remainder of our self-defense statutes,” said Patricia Harrold, who is the Nebraska director of Women for Gun Rights.
Opponents said that’s not an accurate portrayal.
Under current state law you are not required to retreat first if you’re in your home or workplace.
“Traditional self-defense laws, like Nebraska’s, do not prohibit a person from using deadly force if they believe it’s necessary to protect against serious harm,” said Alison Shih, legal counsel for the gun violence prevention group Everytown for Gun Safety. “It merely requires a person to take an alternative course of action when they are in a threatening situation outside of their home, if they know that they can safely do so.”
Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine also worries about the repercussions it could have when dealing with criminals.
“We have gang problems in Omaha at times,” Kleine said. “I’m worried about a gang involved with another gang and using this defense saying, ‘Well, I had to use deadly force because I thought this other gang member was going to draw it out on me, and so I shot.’
“So there’s all sorts of consequences for this that I think are unintended.”
Hardin disputed other critics, saying it would not give someone “a license to kill.”
His proposal first has to make it out of the Judiciary Committee before it can be debated on the floor.
A Simple Moment of Weakness
Reconnecting with History—Special Installment
“The President’s job—and if someone sufficiently vain and stupid enough is picked he won’t realize this—is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it.” —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
My phone buzzed early in the evening. A message from one of my paid subscribers telling me about an impending press conference by one of my least favorite subspecies of humanity: a politician. She requested that I watch the conference and give my take on the potential historical significance of the event and/or share some history that might inform her understanding of the event.
This is not my idea of a “good time.” I would literally rather explain the evolution of torture techniques during the Spanish Inquisition—that, at least, would have a flavor of the lurid to leaven the horror on display.
Nevertheless, I allowed myself to be convinced. I need to keep my paid supporters happy (and yes, if you’re a paid supporter, I will pay attention to your requests for topics—I may not always fulfill them the next day, but they will go into the hopper. I’m an honest intellectual whore: I know how to sing for my supper). Besides, the event in question turned out to be a lot more important than I was hoping it would be. So here we go.
During his years as Vice President, Joe Biden appropriated a bunch of classified documents, some of which wound up in file boxes in his garage. On the face of it, this seems an even more egregious a violation of the official documents handling laws than did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server (a matter on which the DOJ declined prosecution) and former President Donald Trump’s stockpiling of maybe-declassified-then-reclassified-but-maybe-not documents in his part-time residence at Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida (for which he is currently being prosecuted).
The special prosecutor’s report on the Biden matter dropped today. You can read it here. You can read a Twitter thread digesting it here (warning: partisan account).
Tucked among the pages were an implied justification for declining to prosecute (the administration cooperated with the investigation, and without obstruction charges in the mix the rest becomes harder to prosecute) and a startling explicit justification: President Biden, the most powerful man on the planet, is incompetent to stand trial.
Biden held a press conference in response:
It did not go well.
You can watch it for yourself here:
Even as Biden declared himself competent and his memory sound, he forgot the name of the church from which his son’s memorial rosary was procured, he mixed up the President of Egypt with the President of Mexico, he inadvertently (if subtly) changed American foreign policy with regards to the current war between Israel and Hamas, he seemed unsure for a fleeting moment whether his dead son was, in fact, dead [3m11s], and he claimed responsibility for the crimes of which the special prosecutor had just declined prosecution (even while denying they took place and dissembling about their nature).
In my lifetime so far, I have seen seven Presidents. If I were to evaluate them by competence (Note: This is NOT a comment on the policies or politics of any of these men), I’d characterize them thusly:
Two of them were pretty-okay (Reagan and Bush 1), one was not politically astute (Carter), and then there was the parade of the most incompetent, self-involved, and corrupt dip shits ever to occupy the Oval Office, each one worse than the last (Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, and Trump—the first two of these were, at least, capable of holding productive conversations with other people in government, despite their inability to be consistently interested in the actual prosecution of their own avowed policy agendas).
Even if he hadn’t done so before, Biden revealed in this press conference that he is, hands down, the least-fit occupant of the Oval Office in the history of the Republic (which, in light of his four immediate predecessors, is a hell of an accomplishment).
In a “normal” world—which is to say, the artificial world my generation was taught about in our high school history classes, which is far from normal—Joe Biden would be removed from office tomorrow, on 25th Amendment grounds, by his own party. The party itself would not lose power, as they still control congress and would still control the White House, and they would head into the November Election from a position of moral strength: “We care so much about the country that we will remove this good man who isn’t up to the job anymore.”
Failing that, he would be impeached by his own party.
And, failing that, he would be locked out of a brokered Democratic Convention and not allowed to run for a second term.
But that “normal world” is long gone.
Having been in the belly of the beast, I can’t disagree.
It's the only hypothesis that fits all known facts. https://t.co/Gg6ZxiIvKh
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) February 9, 2024
Once again, experience is the best teacher, and the best experience is someone else’s.
Once Again, The Israel-Hamas War Shows the Futility of Gun Control
Last year, I wrote an article exploring some practical lessons from the initial attack on Israel from the Gaza strip. The biggest thing was that, as usual, a country had slid into anti-gun complacency. Everyone thought that it was somebody else’s job to protect people, so targets of all kinds were left vulnerable.
But, this time, the tables have turned. An Israeli operation at a hospital in the West Bank managed to drive the point home yet again. Instead of Hamas proving that gun control is worthless, Israel waltzed right into a hospital and proved it again.
I don’t bring this raid up because I want to comment on whether it was wrong or right to do this. Some people are saying they violated international law. Others are saying this was just a police action within their own borders to take out a threat that was using the hospital as a human shield. Everyone is entitled to either of those opinions or any other.
Instead, I want to take a look at the security situation in that hospital and compare it to most any hospital in the United States. Are there metal detectors at the doors? No. Are there armed guards who would stop people from simply walking right in with a rifle? Nope. Are there police there? Also, a big no in most places. The only thing stopping people from simply walking right in and doing whatever they want with a rifle is them choosing not to.
Sure, in many places, hospitals are off-limits to guns by some legal means or other. In this case, there may be some international agreement or something prohibiting soldiers from going in. In the case of U.S. hospitals, it’s often a sign that any private property owner can post prohibiting guns. In some jurisdictions, there’s a law on the books specifically banning guns from all hospitals.
But, do those signs have some magical quality that zaps guns into oblivion as the person carrying them crosses the threshold? Definitely not. The only thing that can stop people from hiding a rifle under a coat or in a violin case is someone who both physically checks everyone for guns and has the means to stop people should they reveal a gun and use it. Clearly this hospital (like almost all others) doesn’t have either of those things.
At the end of the day, a mixture of people’s goodness and people prepared to deal with those devoid of goodness is what keeps people safe. There are very few people who would enter a hospital with a gun and the intent to harm people. The rest of us either don’t carry a gun in or don’t do anything evil with it. For the rare person who isn’t good, there needs to be a good person (or multiple good people) ready to step in and stop bad things from happening.
In this particular hospital, the opposite was true. Instead of having good guys with guns, they were hiding bad people with guns. The Israelis, like this or not, went in there and took care of the problem before these guys could hurt any more innocent people.
NRA Board Elections: Support the Four for Reform Candidates
Four candidates dedicated to reforming the troubled NRA will be on the ballot for election to the NRA Board of Directors this year. Judge Phil Journey, Rocky Marshall, Dennis Fusaro, and me, Jeff Knox, all qualified for the ballot by petition of the members.
We are encouraging people to vote for only these four and no one else. This is called “Bullet Voting” and gives your votes more weight, increasing the odds of us winning seats.
Ballots are supposed to be in the March issue of NRA magazines for those members eligible to vote.
Winning a Board seat without the support of the current regime at the NRA is historically close to impossible.
Since only NRA Life Members, and those Annual Members who have been members for at least 5 consecutive years, without interruption, are eligible to vote, and since those eligible voters are only known to the NRA itself, and that information is not available to us, we have no choice but to use a shotgun approach in our attempts to get our message out. If we had access to the voter list, we’d reach out directly to those voters. If we had tens of thousands of dollars in our campaign coffers, we’d have placed ads in the various NRA magazines. But we don’t have access to the list, and we don’t have unlimited resources, so the best we can do is try to reach as many potential voters as we can through broad channels like AmmoLand News, email blasts, and asking others to help spread the word.
Each year, the NRA sends out around 2.5 million ballots to Voting Members, but only about 5% of those are ever returned, meaning that almost 2 million ballots are left on the shelf, taken to local libraries, relegated to the magazine rack next to the toilet, and eventually thrown away. Finding and activating those un-voted ballots this year could be the key to getting the reform candidates elected, so we need your help and the help of gun media nationwide.
No one knows what will happen with the trial now going on in New York. It’s almost certain that the NRA will lose, and LaPierre and former Treasurer Woody Phillips will be ordered to pay some restitution, but there’s just no telling what the judge will decide regarding the NRA itself.
- He could order them to clean up their act and go forth to sin no more – which would leave the same people in charge who allowed this mess in the first place.
- Or he could go so far as to dissolve the current board, throw out the current election, and order a new election, taking additional months.
- He could also appoint a Special Master or overseer to take charge of reorganizing the NRA.
He has a lot of leeway and options, and we can only guess at what he might do, so we’re trying to position ourselves in the best position to participate in the resurrection of the Association, whatever the judge decides.
There’s also a good chance that the NRA will appeal any decision that goes against them, resulting in more delays and more NRA member money being poured into the pockets of lawyers. For the time being, our focus must be on getting our four reform candidates elected.
GM!
Are red flag laws applicable to a demented, senile old man in possession of thousands of nuclear weapons?
Asking for a nation…
— Tim 🏴☠️🏴Decentralize and nullify 🏴🏴☠️ (@Tim_The_Sandman) February 9, 2024
Sen. Chris Murphy: the people we care about most
A gaffe is commonly defined as when a politician inadvertently tells the truth and/or reveals his true intentions. During this election season, we’re seeing a bumper crop of gaffes, and not all by Joe Biden. Sen. Chris Murphy, among the most rabid Democrat/socialist/communist (D/s/c) congress critters, dropped a classic:
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Wednesday that the Democratic Party’s push for a path to citizenship in border legislation has failed the people they “care about most” in this country, “undocumented Americans.”
MSNBC host Chris Hayes asked Murphy about the border security bill and said, rather than pushing for a path to citizenship in border legislation negotiations like the party has in the past, Democrats were using Ukraine funding.
“Well, I mean, Chris, that’s been a failed play for 20 years. So you are right that that has been the Democratic strategy for 30 years, maybe, and it has failed to deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country,” Murphy said.
Oooops. Murphy said the quiet part out loud.
“This is also not 2013 any longer, when we ran that play last. Back then, there were a couple hundred people showing up every day applying for asylum. Today, on some days, there are 8,000. And the reality is that the bulk of this country does not think that’s right or sustainable and wants us to change the reality at the border,” the Democratic senator added.
Ah! That’s why the failed border bill allowed in a minimum of two million a year: Murphy and the other D/s/cs are honoring the will of the electorate! That would be the electorate they’re trying to import, not actual Americans.
Murphy said there was a temptation among Democrats to run the “same play” they always run, but added they had a responsibility to adjust to what the country wants, because the play has not worked.
Which “play?” Ignore the law and illegally allow millions upon millions into the country, or pass a bill that ignores the law and illegally allows millions upon millions into the country, but pretends they’re not doing that and blames Republicans?
“Now this bill still had in it some very important things for migrant rights, including a right to representation and earlier work permits, and the biggest expansion of visas in 30 years. It’s not a pathway to citizenship, but it is something substantial for people that actually care about migrants,” he continued.
Of course. “The people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country,” have rights, which trump the rights of American citizens because they’re “migrant rights.” I think that’s the Ninety Third Amendment…or something.
Hayes asked Murphy if he was “proud” of the bill they put forward and wondered if he believed this would improve things at the southern border.
I think you are watching the issue of migration take down left and center-left governments all around the world right now. I think we’re at the point where if we didn’t bring some sense of order to the border, if we didn’t make a big down payment on reform to the asylum system, we were gonna have a really hard time holding on to a consensus in this country that we should keep legal immigration pathways alive,” Murphy responded during his media appearance.
Wait a minute. Didn’t Murphy just say: “the reality is that the bulk of this country does not think that’s right [illegal immigration] or sustainable and wants us to change the reality at the border?” And now we have to maintain “a consensus in this country that we should keep legal immigration pathways alive?!” I’m sure that’s Republican’s fault too.
“And so, I am of the belief that this is a moment where you had to show some big bipartisan momentum and progress on the border, or you would never, ever have the ability to try to rescue the undocumented Americans that desperately need to help,” he added.
“Undocumented Americans.” “Migrant rights.” Americans don’t want illegal immigration, but they’re worried about losing their consensus to keep illegal immigration alive. We must “rescue the undocumented Americans that desperately need to help.”
Well, at least Murphy is consistent about one thing: the people about which he, and the D/s/c Party, most cares are illegal immigrants, including terrorists, people with communicable Third World diseases, members of the Chinese military, few of which intend to assimilate, and many of which wish us deadly harm. And aren’t “undocumented Americans” everybody in the world not an actual American? I wonder if Murphy is purposely saying that?
What’s truly disconcerting is how many Black and Hispanic Americans are going to vote for whoever the D/s/c candidate is in November. Count among them millions of illegals, and the dead, who virtually exclusively vote D/s/c. Maybe that’s why Murphy cares so much for those folks.
This is your brain on Marxism.
Treasury Secretary: “We don’t have to get the prices down because wages are going up.”
Allow me to translate:
"Of course we're going to keep stealing your money through inflation — you're too feckless & cowardly to fight back … And otherwise we'd have to cut govt spending" https://t.co/fwPKVYdIiY
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 8, 2024
TUCKER:
“So, twice you’ve described U.S. Presidents making decisions and then being undercut by their agency heads. So, it sounds like you’re describing a system that’s not run by the people who are elected in your telling.”
PUTIN:
“That’s right. That’s right.”
Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview pic.twitter.com/67YuZRkfLL
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 8, 2024
February 9, 2024
No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.
– Lily Tomlin
Financial Big Brother is Watching You
A brief note on an overlooked nightmare.
A few weeks ago, Ohio congressman and Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan’s office released a letter to Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, an arm of the Treasury Department. Jordan’s team was asking Bishoff for answers about why FinCEN had “distributed slides, prepared by a financial institution,” detailing how other private companies might use MCC transaction codes to “detect customers whose transactions may reflect ‘potential active shooters.’” The slide suggested the “financial company” was sorting for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA,” and watching for purchases of small arms and sporting goods, or purchases in places like pawn shops or Cabela’s, to identify financial threats.
Jordan’s letter to Bishoff went on:
According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of “extremism” indicators that include “transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,” or “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”
During the Twitter Files, we searched for snapshots of the company’s denylist algorithms, i.e. whatever rules the platform was using to deamplify or remove users. We knew they had them, because they were alluded to often in documents (a report on the denylist is_Russian, which included Jill Stein and Julian Assange, was one example). However, we never found anything like the snapshot Jordan’s team just published:
The highlighted portion shows how algorithmic analysis works in financial surveillance. First compile a list of naughty behaviors, in the form of MCC codes for guns, sporting goods, and pawn shops. Then, create rules: $2,500 worth of transactions in the forbidden codes, or a number showing that more than 50% of the customer’s transactions are the wrong kind, might trigger a response. The Committee wasn’t able to specify what the responses were in this instance, but from previous experience covering anti-money-laundering (AML) techniques at banks like HSBC, a good guess would be generation of something like Suspcious Activity Reports, which can lead to a customer being debanked.
If Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already shown a tendency toward wide-scale monitoring of speech and the use of subtle levers to apply pressure on attitudes, financial companies can use records of transactions to penetrate individual behaviors far more deeply. Especially if enhanced by AI, a financial history can give almost any institution an immediate, unpleasantly accurate outline of anyone’s life, habits, and secrets. Worse, they can couple that picture with a powerful disciplinary lever, in the form of the threat of closed accounts or reduced access to payment services or credit. Jordan’s slide is a picture of the birth of the political credit score.
There’s more coming on this, and other articles forthcoming (readers who’ve noticed it’s been quiet around here will soon find out why). While the world falls to pieces over Tucker, Putin, and Ukraine, don’t overlook this horror movie. If banks and the Treasury are playing the same domestic spy game that Twitter and Facebook have been playing with the FBI, tales like the frozen finances of protesting Canadian truckers won’t be novelties for long. As is the case with speech, where huge populations have learned to internalize censorship rules almost overnight, we may soon have to learn the hard way that even though some behaviors aren’t illegal, they can still be punished with great effectiveness, in a Terminator-like world where computers won’t miss anything that moves.
What a crazy time we live in! See you from the Nevada caucus, and watch this space for other news soon.
Special Counsel Finds Biden Is Too Old to Be Charged in Classified Docs Scandal
“Your Honor, my client was clearly too drunk to have made it anywhere near I-25 from that maze of one-way streets in downtown Denver, and cannot be held accountable for how he or his car might have been found trying to enter the highway from the off-ramp.” —The World’s Best Defense Attorney back in my younger days
Some legal defense moves are so unscrupulous that it would take a high-caliber lawyer to think of them and a true scoundrel to implement them. I’m looking at you, Johnnie Cochran, in your $4,000 suits, with a combination of awe and horror.
But that’s just trial law. Where things get really very quite seriously unsettling is the even twistier world of special counsels, where Washington agrees to investigate Washington insiders using Washington insiders who pinky swear that everything will be on the up-and-up and that the truth will be brought to light and justice will be served — no matter which Washington insiders might be punished or suffer public shaming as a result.
Then the Washington insiders all pour one another stiff portions of 21-year-old single-malt scotch and have a good laugh at our (literal) expense.
The latest example of just that comes from the Department of Justice™ headed up by Biden administration crony Merrick Garland.
ASIDE: I swear this actually just happened. When I started to type “Department of Justice,” a moment ago, I quickly corrected myself after typing “Derpartment.” I wish I’d let it stand with a [sic] at the end.
As you’re probably aware, the Biden administration was doing one of those pinky-swear investigations of itself because of that time Biden accidentally left boxes and boxes of classified doc in his garage with his Corvette. At first, Biden was prompted to tell people that his garage is a secure location because, unlike the Trump compound on many well-guarded acres at Mar-a-Lago, Biden’s garage door has one of those twisty lock handles on it.
That garage is practically a SCIF, they claimed.
That excuse held about as much water as my wife when she was 40 months pregnant and had to pee from just looking at a faucet, so Garland appointed pinky-swear special counsel Robert K. Hur to look into whether he should find some special excuse for Biden’s mishandling of classified documents immediately or if it would be better to draw it out longer so they’d have a chance to truly savor that bottle of Glenfarclas.
That was in August. Today, we have the Mother of All Justifications — and it has me laughing harder than it has Biden’s reelection campaign team breaking out in hives. Here it is from Hur’s findings:
We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.
Never mind the weasel language about how Biden would present himself to a jury because an “elderly man with a poor memory” is how he presents himself to members of the press, gathered audiences, and various deceased foreign dignitaries from countries he gets mixed up sometimes.
Remember those reports from a month or three ago that Biden was getting all upset about the public perception that he’s too old and feeble for the job? Yeah, his own DOJ just used that as the reason Biden can’t be held accountable for storing classified documents next to the case of 40 Weight Motor Oil and expired boxes of Fix-O-Dent.
But don’t you worry. I don’t think anyone in Beijing or Russia or Tehran pays much attention to what goes on in the Biden White House. So you can rest assured, Jack, that when the fella from that place, you know the one, tries to threaten Corn Hole with the asufutimaehaehfutbw that old Joe Biden is gonna make sure they feel the trunalimunumaprzure like the what was I saying?
And you can take that to the bank and smoke it.
Why Self-Defense Is The Only Type Of Violence The Left Won’t Endorse
After years of anti-cop rhetoric, violence is out of control in America’s cities. Smash and grabs, sidewalk attacks and old ladies being mugged in broad daylight — all just factored into the cost of living a metropolitan lifestyle. But these are not simply passive inevitabilities that somehow come to pass. They are active policy choices of a revolutionary left, firmly in control of every major city, that sees violence as a tool toward its political aims. In fact, there is only one type of violence the left will not condone — and the key to understanding it lies in these political aims.
The radical left may talk often of high-minded goals, but their ultimate goal is to eradicate hierarchy — the central push of the “equity” agenda. All must be made equal in order for all to be equally free. For classical liberals, this meant equal treatment under the law, unaffected by circumstances of birth. Yet for the radical outgrowth, this now means leveling all aspects of genuine human diversity. However, they do not truly seek egalitarian reforms, but merely to rejigger any form of traditional hierarchy (much of which had already been dismantled by their liberal forebears) and instead place themselves at the top. So the attack on hierarchy really becomes a spiteful, resentful attack on any form of tradition. This is the true nature of the radical left.
Traditional morality posits that the criminal is the “oppressor” of the “victim,” whom he victimizes with his crime. This has been the basis of virtually every legal system throughout human history. Yet radical left morality flips this notion on its head. The new “victim” becomes the criminal himself, victimized by the injustices of a hierarchical society that drives him to desperation: the thief stealing to feed his family or violence as the “language of the unheard.” The person on the receiving end becomes merely a casualty in the putsch to upend traditional morality, while the priests of the new morality consolidate their right to rule.