Can There be Good News About Public Violence?

Some of us are afraid of bad news. Most of us know someone who is afraid of going to the doctor because they don’t want to make hard decisions about their health. The great news is that most medical conditions can be treated. That emotional reaction is also common when we consider public violence. It is particularly accurate about how we feel about mass-murder.

Many of us feel both compelled to watch the news about public violence, while at the same time we want to turn away and pretend it doesn’t happen. Let me bring you good news. We learned how to stop mass-murder in several ways. We’ve done it, so we are talking about actual practice rather than mere theory. The first thing we have to do is get past the fantasy of Hollywood violence and talk about what really happens.

I’m going to go back to the medical model for a moment. I’ve had friends who oscillated between denial and helplessness. They feel that there can’t be a problem, or that the problem is intractable so why bother. They become hopeless and vulnerable to people who sell quack cures. I won’t do that to you. I’ve studied public violence for a decade, and there is real hope to stop mass-murderers. For a moment, let’s set aside both fantasy and our fears.

Part of us knows that what we see from Hollywood isn’t real. Yes, we might be caught up in the story. At the same time, part of our mind knows that hundreds of people don’t suddenly explode in a flash of flame and get thrown backwards when someone waves a gun around. The truth is that mass-murder is hard, and ordinary citizens stop mass-murderers most of the time. That is fairly obvious if we’re willing to look at it for a minute. Again, I promise it will only be a minute. It turns out that you have lived through the critical experiment many times.

Remember one of the times you walked into a group of your friends and shouted hello. Your friends look at you. One of them points their finger at you and you point back at them and wave. You do that a number of times as more of your friends recognize you.

Then you see a friend of to the side that you missed. You wave and smile to see someone you didn’t notice at first. There is a feeling of an unexpected, pleasant surprise. We didn’t see them at first because we were concentrating on someone else in the group. We thought we saw everyone, but we really didn’t. A friend we didn’t see slaps us on the shoulder and asks how we’ve been. We were looking at the group so we never noticed our friend come up behind us.

Hold that experience in mind for a minute. I could ask you all kinds of questions about your friends and we’d find out that you didn’t really see them at all. How were they sitting? Who was talking to whom? How were they dressed, and what were they doing with their hands when you said hello? We are not a camera, and we imagine that we see more than we really do.

We don’t see everything. As soon as we look at one thing,
we become blind to the rest of the world around us.

(The hard part starts now, but it won’t be long.)

That common experience explains why we kill mass murderers time after time. To put it in simple terms, they don’t see us and we shoot them. Maybe they die right there, and maybe they are only wounded. Being shot at makes the attacker feel deeply vulnerable. Usually, they run away. This wasn’t the violence they had imagined and they usually take their own life.

(The gruesome part is over so you can breathe again.)

There are other perceptual and tactical factors at work, but I’m not trying to make better murderers. The fact is that mass-murderers are vulnerable.

Where ordinary citizens were allowed to be armed, we stopped attempted mass-murderers almost two-thirds of the time. That also had a drastic effect on the number of people who were injured or killed. Ordinary citizens like you saved over a thousand lives. Again, the reasons might not be obvious to everyone.

It is clear that stopping the murderer means that more innocent people aren’t getting shot. It also means we can move the people who were injured to safety and we can quickly start life-saving treatment by stopping the bleeding. EMTs get to the injured victims faster because the scene is safe. There are fewer victims to treat, so each victim gets more attention, and the victims are in better condition when EMTs first reach them.

That is what happens time after time. On average, we’ve done that about every 18 days for the last 8 years. None of that happens while we wait another 15 minutes for the police to arrive.

It turns out that the murderer wasn’t so deadly because he had some Hollywood super weapon. Mass-murderers hunt us in “gun-free” zones. The murderer was deadly because he could kill at will without someone to stop him.

Millions of us go armed every day, but we obeyed the rules and left our guns outside.
The mass-murderer didn’t.

I’m sure that some of you can see the answers already.
  • The personal solution is easy. Make sure that someone can shoot back.
  • The public solution is time tested. We’ve done it for the last decade, and we’ve never had a school attacked where they had a public program of armed school staff.
  • The legal solution is simple. Make property owners responsible when they disarm the people who obey the law. If you stop me from protecting my family, then you become responsible for their safety.
  • The media solution is easy as well. Most mass-murderers kill innocent people so the mass-media will show us their face, their name, and their manifesto. Stop giving mass-murderers a multi-million-dollar publicity campaign.
  • All that might sound simple, but the political solution is harder. We have to ignore quack cures that have failed in the past.

I told you there was good news.

Albuquerque city council members call for special session on crime, with a catch

In the wake of her ill-fated and constitutionally unsound attempt to suspend the right to bear arms in Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has resisted appeals from some of her fellow Democrats to call lawmakers back to Santa Fe for a special session on “gun violence”. Instead, the governor has chosen to continue going it alone; revising her emergency public health order last week and scaling back its concealed carry prohibitions to apply only to parks and playgrounds in the city and county in the hopes of convincing a judge to let her revised order stand.

Still, a growing number of voices are demanding a special session to deal with “gun violence”, including several members of the Albuquerque City Council. But in a sign of just how unpopular the governor’s unilateral order disarming law-abiding citizens is among rank-and-file voters, the request for a special session comes with a caveat

“When we’re talking crime here in Albuquerque, we are one of the most dangerous cities in America,” says Albuquerque City Councilwoman Brook Bassan.


The governor announced she would not call a special session for crime after Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen publicly urged her to. Now, Albuquerque city councilors are weighing in. Councilors Dan Lewis, Brooke Bassan, Louie Sanchez, and Renee Grout are introducing a resolution urging the governor to call a special session to specifically address crime.

“This is about making sure that we do everything we can. And we ask our governor for the support that we need so that she can do everything she can to help us while we also take some accountability,” says Bassan.

In addition to addressing the drug and mental health concerns, the resolution says a special session is needed to address reforming the pretrial detention system. Officials are calling for funding of the warrant program for the next five years and passing legislation to impose a lifetime sentence for repeat offenders who use firearms.

Virtually all of the gun control measures that Grisham has been demanding are notably absent from the resolution offered by the city council members; banning so-called assault weapons, raising the age to purchase a firearm from 18 to 21, and imposing a 14-day waiting period on all gun transfers in the state. Instead, the resolution is focused squarely on punishing violent offenders rather than targeting lawful gun owners.

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If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.

September 19

634 – The moslem Rashidun Arabs under Khalid ibn al-Walid capture Damascus from the Byzantine Empire.

1676 – Jamestown Virginia Colony is burned to the ground by the forces of Nathaniel Bacon during Bacon’s Rebellion.

1777 – Attempting to flank Continental forces under General Benedict Arnold at Bemis Heights, New York; British forces under General John ‘Gentleman Johnny’ Burgoyne win a costly tactical victory in taking the Freeman Farm near Albany in the First Battle of Saratoga.

1778 – The Continental Congress passes the first United States federal budget.

1796 – George Washington’s Farewell Address is published across America as an open letter to the public.

1862 – Near Luka Mississippi, on the opening day of the Luka-Corinth Campaign, the Union Army of the Mississippi, under General William Rosecrans engages the Confederate Army of the West, under General Sterling Price, and forces them to withdraw.

1863 – Near Chickamauga Creek in northwestern Georgia, the Confederate Army of Tennessee under General Braxton Bragg, engages the Army of the Cumberland, under General William Rosecrans; forcing them to retreat back into Union occupied Chattanooga,  effectively ending the Chickamauga Campaign.

1864 – Near Winchester, Virginia, during the Valley Campaign; the Union VI Corps, XIX Corps, Cavalry Corps and the Army of West Virginia under General Philip Sheridan engages the Confederate Army of the Valley District under General Jubal Early, forcing them to retreat and ending with the Union occupation of Winchester.

1881 – President James A. Garfield dies of wounds suffered in a July 2 assassination attempt; Vice President Chester A. Arthur becoming President.

1940 – Polish Cavalry officer Witold Pilecki is voluntarily captured and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp to gather and smuggle out information of Nazi atrocities for the resistance movement.

1944 – Units of the U.S. First Army under the command of Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges engage the Nazi 275th and 353rd Infantry Divisions under Generalleutnant Hans Schmidt holding positions within the HĂŒrtgen Forest on the border between Belgium and Germany.

1950 – During the Korean War, an attack by North Korean forces along the Nam River at the Pusan Perimeter is repelled by U.S. troops of the 25th Infantry Division & South Korean National Police.

1976 – As 2 Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom jets fly out to investigate an unidentified flying object detected by radar near Tehran, both independently lose instrumentation and communications as they approach, only to have them restored upon withdrawal.

1985 – Tipper Gore and other politician’s wives form the PMRC -Parents Music Resource Center

1991 – Ötzi the Iceman is discovered in the Alps on the border between Italy and Austria.

1995 – The Washington Post and The New York Times co-publish the Unabomber manifesto.

2010 – The leaking oil well in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is sealed.

2016 – The suspect – Ahmad Khan Rahimi- in a series of bombings in New York and New Jersey is apprehended after a shootout with police. At trial he is later sentenced to life in prison, without parole.

Markey, Ocasio-Cortez ask Biden to create Civilian Climate Corps by executive order

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), two of Congress’ most vocal proponents for aggressive climate action, on Monday called for President Biden to establish a Civilian Climate Corps.

The CCC had been a key element in early versions of the Build Back Better Act, the sweeping environmental and infrastructure bill. It was not ultimately included in the slimmed down Inflation Reduction Act, which was nonetheless the largest climate bill in U.S. history.

Biden was a vocal backer of the Climate Corps early in his presidency, comparing it to the Civilian Conservation Corps introduced during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The original legislation called for $10 billion to launch the new program.

In the letter, timed to the 30th anniversary of the bill that created Americorps, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey cited polling indicating the idea has more than 60 percent support. The two have also reintroduced a bill to establish a corps legislatively, although the measure will almost certainly not be given a vote in the Republican-majority House.

“A central coordinating body, overseen by the White House, will be essential to create a successful and cohesive Civilian Climate Corps,” they wrote. “Through interagency collaboration, as well as coordination with state climate corps, other state entities, and local non-profit organizations, your Administration can realize the vision of a Civilian Climate Corps that establishes a unified front in the face of climate change — one that looks like America, serves America, and puts good-paying union jobs within reach for more young adults.”

The letter is also signed by members of Democratic congressional leadership like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

Also on Monday, a coalition of more than 50 progressive and environmentalist groups sent a separate letter calling on Biden to establish the CCC, citing its popularity among younger voters in particular.

“While previous Executive Orders and legislation under your administration demonstrate tremendous progress toward meeting our Paris climate goals and your campaign promises, this summer has made clear that we must be as ambitious as possible in tackling the great crisis of our time,” they wrote.

“We encourage your administration to create a Civilian Climate Corps through existing authorities, with existing climate funding, that can coordinate across relevant federal agencies.”

Michelle Lujan Grisham tries to revive Democrats’ “Massive Resistance” to civil rights

Just off the main drag in Farmville, Virginia there’s an unassuming brick building next to a brightly painted tarpaper structure. The unobtrusive sign out front identifies the building at the Robert Russa Moton Museum; a largely unknown place that was the site of one of the most significant events in the civil rights movement. The museum was once R.R. Moton High School, the black public high school in Prince Edward County. In 1951, then 15-year-old Barbara Johns led her fellow students on a walkout in protest of the deplorable conditions of the building and the education they received.

After years of frustration with Prince Edward County school which she describes (later in a memoir) as having inadequacies such as poor facilities, shabby equipment and no science laboratories or separate gymnasium, Barbara took her concerns to a teacher who responded by asking, “Why don’t you do something about it?” Barbara describes feeling as though her teacher’s comments were dismissive, and as a result she was somewhat discouraged. However, after months of contemplation and imagination she began to formulate a plan. As Barbara describes it,

“the plan I felt was divinely inspired because I hadn’t been able to think of anything until then. The plan was to assemble together the student council members
. From this, we would formulate plans to go on strike. We would make signs and I would give a speech stating our dissatisfaction and we would march out [of] the school and people would hear us and see us and understand our difficulty and would sympathize with our plight and would grant us our new school building and our teachers would be proud and the students would learn more and it would be grand
.”

Seizing the moment, on April 23, 1951, Barbara Johns, a 16 year-old high school girl in Prince Edward County, Virginia, led her classmates in a strike to protest the substandard conditions at Robert Russa Moton High School. Her idealism, planning, and persistence ultimately garnered the support of NAACP lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill to take up her cause and the cause of more equitable conditions for Moton High School.

After meeting with the students and the community, lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill filed suit at the federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. The case was called Davis v. Prince Edward. In 1954, the Farmville case became one of five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka when it declared segregation unconstitutional.

While Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, public schools weren’t integrated in Prince Edward County for another decade. The school system dragged out any attempt to abide by the decision for years, and when that became untenable the county decided to shut down the public schools entirely rather than integrate. The “Massive Resistance” movement eventually resulted in several communities shuttering their schools, though none for as long as Prince Edward County. It took another Supreme Court decision in 1964 to re-open the schools, this time to both black and white students.

When I first moved to the Farmville area a decade ago I met a man who’d spent several years being taught in a church basement and in the living rooms of family and friends by parents and other adults who refused to let kids go unschooled. In fact, he was the one who told me about this shameful history in the first place.

Both Farmville and the nation at large have come a long way since 1951. Sadly, Massive Resistance to a Supreme Court decision is making a comeback among Democrats, and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham seems intent on becoming the standard bearer for the movement.

Grisham made it clear when she first announced she was unilaterally suspending the right to carry in Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County that she didn’t care what the Constitution says, much less the Supreme Court. Even after the police chief and sheriff said they wouldn’t enforce her order because of constitutional concerns she insisted that curbing violent crime required disarming lawful gun owners and rendering them defenseless in public.

During the court hearing that led to her original order being put on ice, the governor’s attorney repeatedly argued that there was no difference between a “good guy with a gun” and a bad guy, that every concealed carry holder was a murderer waiting to happen, and bemoaned the Bruen decision for it supposedly taking away the governor’s ability to “try” to effectively fight violent crime.

If Grisham truly thinks that the only way to do that is to prohibit the right to carry, then there’s no way she would have let her initial order expire after its 30-day period was up. She would have extended it for as long as she got away with it, just like Prince Edward County did with the public schools in the 1960s.

Unlike the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the bigots engaged in Massive Resistance today aren’t doing so on the basis of race (though there’s a strong argument that racial minorities are still suffering a disproportionate amount of harm from gun control laws). Instead, it’s the mere exercise of a constitutional right that causes Grisham and others to view their friends, neighbors, and constituents as dangerous “others” who must be suppressed in the name of public safety. Black, white, gay, straight
 it doesn’t matter. If you’re a gun owner, and certainly if you’re a gun owner who wants to carry your gun in public, you’re the problem. You must be “fixed”. You must be put in your proper place, and your right must be deemed a wrong.

I don’t know if Michelle Lujan Grisham is smart enough to have realized this, but the Massive Resistance movement failed. In Farmville the worst fears of the segregationists have been realized. Black and white kids are going to school, becoming friends, getting married, having kids, and living their lives in a community that is much changed for the better.

Like her fellow civil rights suppressors in the 1950s and 60s, Grisham is ultimately lashing out because she’s losing. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and there’s a portion of the gun control movement that believes it’s time to start lobbing Hail Marys through executive orders and tossing verbal hand grenades at the Supreme Court over Bruen, while the more institutional wing seems intent on taking a more traditional incrementalist approach.

If Grisham thought she was acting in a position of strength in proclaiming a constitutional right suspended because of a self-proclaimed public health emergency (at a time when homicides are actually trending down in Albuquerque, by the way), the backlash from many of her fellow Democrats and the refusal to enforce her order by local and state officials should have disabused her of her delusions. I think she was well aware of the weakness of her position before she made her announcement. She just decided if she was going to “do something”, she might as well do something big.

Grisham has backed down slightly from her original order, a decision I suspect that is almost entirely based on the unwillingness of police and prosecutors to go along. Massive Resistance implies mass, after all, and in Grisham’s case she (so far, anyway) hasn’t had the institutional backing she needs to pull off her unconstitutional scheme. That may have even factored into her decision to revise her original order instead of bringing lawmakers back to Santa Fe for a special session to address this “emergency”; she knows that she doesn’t have the political capital at the moment to control the outcome and ensure that her desired gun control bills get passed.

Lately, it seems like the governor’s been more interested in burning bridges with her fellow Democrats than building them, but that could easily change over the next few months. The self-proclaimed “emergency” in Albuquerque was her first attempt at massive resistance to the Bruen decision but I doubt it will be the last, and if she (or her handlers) have an ounce of political acumen they’ll be looking for buy-in and political cover from the Democratic majority before she unveils her next terrible and tyrannical idea.

Resident shoots, kills attempted burglar at West Melbourne apartment

Police in West Melbourne are investigating after an attempted burglary turned into a deadly shooting inside an apartment complex early Sunday morning.

According to the West Melbourne Police Department, officers responded to an apartment at the Reserves of Melbourne off Doherty Drive for reports of a shooting inside an apartment.

Officers learned that multiple, possibly armed, subjects had forcefully entered an apartment. According to police, one suspect had a gun.

The apartment’s resident, armed with their own firearm, shot multiple times and struck two of the subjects.

One was transported to Holmes Regional Medical Center, where they were pronounced dead. The second person who was shot also went to the hospital, where they are currently being treated.

Many in the neighborhood were caught off guard. “Oh my God. Sick, wow,” said Sarah Goodman, who has a relative in the apartment complex.

“I noticed six police cars and the yellow tape way out there,” Miles Svikhart, a resident, said. “Yes, it’s very scary,” a resident said.

After getting over the initial shock, people we talked to felt like the people in the apartment really had no choice.

“I mean, I’m a proud Second Amendment person myself. So if you invade my home, I’m going to protect my space,” Goodman said.

“The homeowner had to do something,” Svikhart said. “It’s self-defense. That’s why you have a gun. If he didn’t have that gun, I’m sure he’d be in a lot more trouble.”

At this point, no charges have been filed against the person who shot the home invaders. The State Attorney’s Office will handle that decision.

In the meantime, police are working to find out the motive and if they knew each other.

West Melbourne police say at least three people were in the apartment at the time of the home invasion. No one involved in the incident has been identified.

Kansas Will No Longer Allow Residents To Change Gender On Birth Certificates.

Kansas will no longer allow people to change the gender on their birth certificate after Republicans passed a law enshrining the biological definition of woman into law.

The state’s health department was compelled to follow the law after Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach sued to stop state agencies from allowing people who say they are transgender to be able to change the gender on public documents.

After a legal back and forth, Kobach won in court, and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment said on Friday that it could “no longer process gender identity amendments to birth certificates.”

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Vanderbilt professor: Climate change stories ‘cater to the white consciousness.’

A professor of English at Vanderbilt University recently gave a talk about how the genre of climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” has a problem with “its intersection [of] race and genre.”

Teresa Goddu  whose advocacy led to the creation of Vanderbilt’s Environmental and Sustainability Studies minor, told an audience at the Novel Seminar Series that climate fiction in the United States “depicts the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis,” The Hustler reports.

Such stories “often represent white, mostly privileged characters in communities becoming destabilized if not undone by climate catastrophe,” Goddu said. “Climate punctures the bubble of safety and security that cocoons the white psyche.”

Goddu added that she is “tired” of the focus on whiteness in climate stories, or “texts that actually just reify whiteness.” As a result, she’s working on “encompassing slave and neo-slave narratives” into such tales to “expand the canon.”

“I really think a lot of climate fiction is being written, but not recognized as such, especially African American literature,” Goddu said. “I want to expand [
] what is considered climate fiction and [redefine] what we are actually reading and paying attention to.”

Looking ahead, Goddu said she hopes her work will expand the genre and leverage optimism, satire and new tropes to innovate the body of work and reimagine a better, more sustainable future.

“I am more interested in reading stories that reimagine possible futures or teach me about the structures, historically and currently, that I live within,” Goddu said. “I don’t like literature as policy statements. I don’t like literature to be so instrumental.”

According to her faculty bio, Goddu’s research deals with “slavery and antislavery, race and American culture [and] genre studies.” In a 2021 interview, Goddu said she began “noticing how the antislavery movement was being invoked by climate activists as a model.”

“This led me to consider what social change my own moment demanded of me and how I might bring my gifts—as administrator, teacher, and writer—to bear on the issue,” she said. “It made sense to connect my long-standing concern with racial justice to the issue of climate justice and my interest in how literature can affect social change to the climate crisis.”

Seven years ago another Vanderbilt academic, Ed Rubin, offered a pair of courses on cli-fi: “Visions of the Future in Cli-Fi” and “Climate Change Literature: A New Fictional Genre about a Real Problem.” Many of the titles on his reading list (“Earth Abides,” “The Postman,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) are Euro/white-centric.

Navy Puts The Kibosh On Digital Recruiting Program After Discovering Enlistees Aren’t Into Drag Queens

The U.S. Navy confirmed on Tuesday it has discontinued an online recruiting initiative featuring an enlisted drag queen that was aimed at bringing new sailors into the service.

In May, The Daily Caller revealed that the Navy brought on Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley — an active-duty drag queen who goes by the stage name Harpy Daniels and identifies as non-binary — to be a “Navy Digital Ambassador.” The Digital Ambassador Pilot Program, which ran from October 2022 to March 2023, was reportedly “designed to explore the digital environment to reach a wide range of potential candidates” for military recruitment.

In a letter sent to Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., on Tuesday, Erik Raven, the under secretary of the Navy, confirmed that the branch’s Digital Ambassador Pilot Program “will not be continued.”

“The Navy learned lessons from the pilot program that will inform our digital engagement and outreach going forward,” Raven wrote. “Our digital outreach efforts will maintain the important distinction between Sailors’ official activities and their personal lives.”

Tuberville — who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee — previously sent a letter to Admiral Michael M. Gilday, the chief of Naval Operations, in May, demanding to know the identities of the officers tasked with funding and promoting drag queen shows aboard naval vessels. The letter was sent the same day the Alabama senator and his Republican colleagues submitted a separate communique to Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro on the branch’s embrace of Daniels and whether Navy leadership is encouraging its “digital ambassadors” and public affairs personnel to use TikTok — which the Pentagon banned its members from using on government-issued devices — “on their personal devices” in order to skirt the agency’s prohibition.

In his Tuesday letter to Tuberville, Raven claimed the Navy followed existing guidelines restricting the use of TikTok and that while some sailors partaking in the digital ambassador program “had [a] personal social media presence on TikTok,” the branch did not issue government devices for purposes of participating in the venture. Raven further contended the branch will “continue to communicate” to its members the “national security risks associated with their use of TikTok on personal devices.”

The Navy’s embrace of Daniels — which generated backlash among many military veterans — comes amid the branch’s failure to meet existing recruiting targets. On Thursday, acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti confirmed that the Navy is expected to miss its fiscal year 2023 recruiting goals by roughly 7,000 sailors. The revelation came days after the Air Force announced it would miss its “active-duty recruiting goals for the first time since 1999.”

The U.S. Army and Coast Guard are also expected to miss their respective fiscal year 2023 recruiting targets.

 

‘Battle of Sacred Cow Groups’ Begins in MI After All-Muslim City Council Bans Pride Flag on City Property.

BLUF:
“We welcomed you. We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”

Though Democrats have blamed conservative Republicans for the growing outcry from the Muslim community over the radical LGBTQ agenda being forced on children in public schools, the belief still exists among woke leftists that if they continue to play nice they can coexist with—and win over—devoutly religious, socially conservative Muslims who have become disaffected with Democratic Party.

It’s almost an understatement to say that theory has been put to the test in one city in Michigan, which saw an all-Muslim city council and mayor unanimously vote to ban the Pride flag and some other flags from being displayed on city property, a vote they held during ‘Pride Month’:

 

From the Washington Post‘s report:

And last year, a Muslim who emigrated from Yemen as a teenager became mayor — the city’s first leader in nearly a century with no Polish roots — alongside what is believed to be the nation’s only all-Muslim city council.

Many residents in this tiny enclave just north of downtown Detroit saw these changes as a sign of the Hamtramck’s progressiveness. The Muslim community that had previously experienced discrimination, including voter intimidation and resistance to mosques’ public call to prayer, had finally taken its seats at the table.

Yet the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity that made Hamtramck something of a model is being put severely to the test. In June, after divisive debate, the six-member council blocked the display of Pride flags on city property — action that has angered allies and members of the LGBTQ+ community, who feel that the support they provided the immigrant groups has been reciprocated with betrayal.

“We welcomed you,” former council member Catrina Stackpoole, a retired social worker who identifies as gay, recalls telling the council this summer. “We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”

The only flags that can be displayed on city property, per the WaPo‘s report, are “U.S., state, city and POW/MIA banners.”

My first thought when I read this was “What the heck did they expect?” My second was to remind myself that the far left always expects mindless subservience from their core voting blocs.

Though there seemed to be general agreement from Twitter conservatives with the vote to only allow the American flag and related flags on city property, some other observations were made about the widening political rift in Hamtramck which ranged from serious to downright hilarious:

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Oregon judge to decide in new trial whether voter-approved gun control law is constitutional

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An Oregon judge is set to decide whether a gun control law approved by voters in November violates the state’s constitution in a trial scheduled to start Monday.

The law, one of the toughest in the nation, was among the first gun restrictions to be passed after a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year changed the guidance judges are expected to follow when considering Second Amendment cases.

Measure 114 has been tied up in federal and state court since it was narrowly passed by voters in November 2022, casting confusion over its fate.

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September 18

324 – The forces of Co-Emperor Constantine decisively defeats those of Co-Emperor Licinius in the Battle of Chrysopolis, near modern day Kadıköy (Chalcedon) Turkey, establishing him as sole Emperor in control over the Roman Empire.

1066 – The fleet of Norwegian King Harald Sigurdsson Hardrada lands with his brother Tostig Godwinson and a force of 10,000 men at the mouth of the Humber River on the central east coast of England to back his claim to the throne.

1793 – The first cornerstone of the United States Capitol is laid by George Washington.

1837 – Tiffany & Young company is founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany and Teddy Young in New York City.

1850 – The U.S. Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

1850 – The U.S. Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

1851 – The New-York Daily Times, which later becomes The New York Times goes into publication

1864 – Confederate General John Bell Hood begins the Franklin–Nashville Campaign in an unsuccessful attempt to draw General William Sherman out of Georgia.

1870 – Observing the regularity of a geyser’s eruption during the exploration of Northwest Wyoming Territory by the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition, Henry D. Washburn names it “Old Faithful“.

1873 – The Jay Cooke & Company bank in Philadelphia declares bankruptcy, starting a financial crisis and economic depression in Europe and North America that lasts until 1877

1895 – Booker T. Washington gives a speech on racial relations at the Cotton States and International Exposition world fair at Piedmont Park in  Atlanta

1905 – Greta Garbo is born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Stockholm Sweden

1927 – The Columbia Broadcasting System goes on the air.

1931 – The Mukden Incident gives Japan a pretext to invade and occupy Manchuria, China.

1945 – General Douglas MacArthur moves his general headquarters from Manila to Tokyo.

1947 – The National Security Act goes into effect, reorganizing the United States government’s military and intelligence services, creating the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Council, separating the Army Air force into the Department of the Air Force and the United States Air Force, forming the Marine Corps as an independent service under the Department of the Navy, and merging the Department of the Navy into the Department of War as the ‘National Military Establishment’, later named the Department of Defense in 1948.

1977 – NASA’s Voyager I probe takes the first distant photograph of the Earth and the Moon together.

1984 – Retired USAF Colonel Joe Kittinger completes the first solo balloon crossing of the Atlantic.

1997 – United States media magnate Ted Turner donates $1 billion to the United Nations.

2001 – Letters originating from Trenton, New Jersey, containing anthrax spores, begin to be received the offices of several U.S. Senators and news media.

2020 – Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies of complications of pancreatic cancer in Washington D.C.