There are few words to describe the depth of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s depravity. I’m not going to even try.

This is a person (because no real man would ever govern like him) is so thoroughly ill-prepared for its job it doesn’t even know how to properly read from the prepared script.

It was all fun and games making Trudeau/Hitler memes until yesterday when Trudeau’s enforcers on horseback trampled an old woman.

A man with any sense of decency does not send men on horseback into a crowd. The only thing worse than that are the people commenting on this saying some variation of ‘well, she deserved it.’

Yes, she could have gone home.

Yes, she could have gotten the clot-shot.

Yes, she could have just complied with whatever Justin Trudeau told her what her morality was.

But Trudeau could have chosen differently as well. As opposed to acting like a scared little boy worried about facing public ridicule, he could have sacked up and met with the protestors.

Instead, he did what all boy-emperors have ever done, he chose violence and intimidation.

Those who blame the victims are worse than Justin Trudeau. They will never admit it, even to themselves, but their belief in the state as moral arbiter is shaken to its foundation when things like this happen.

So they bluster about playing stupid games, win stupid prizes. Empathy? Who needs that in Davos’ Brave New World.

Those against the protests have their reasons, none of them, however, are morally justified. Because if you allow the state, an immoral construction at its core, to define your morality, you will forever having to justify tyranny to remain on the side of the angels.

Blaming the victim is the easiest thing to do. How many rapists have claimed “she had it coming?” How many abusers every day blame the people they abuse because they are too ashamed to admit they are in the wrong?

We Are All Unclean Now

The part of the Great Reset pertaining to COVID-19 was always about amplifying the divisions between people. To create a new religion around it. Its sacrament is the vaccine. Its Lord’s prayer is demonizing ivermectin and trusting the science. Its vestment is the mask.

Its “amen,” is “in the name of public health.”

It has led to such dehumanizing that those who do not comply with the high priests now deserve their fate.

Mario Draghi in Italy declared the unvaccinated to no longer be a part of Italian society.

Are they going to have to sew a yellow syringe onto their clothes now? https://t.co/UtTSVkH5lB

— Tom Luongo (Mr. Ungovernable) (@TFL1728) February 16, 2022

And, in a way, sadly, Trudeau’s supporters are correct. One always has the choice to accept the abuse if the alternative is death. That woman didn’t go to Parliament Square with that choice in mind because, she, sadly, still believed in the religion of the State as a subordinate partner with the people in shaping society.

Those final illusions were trampled fully in the eyes of millions around the world.

Politically, there is no going back for Justin Trudeau. He, along with his supporters, will hide behind their ‘cope’ and refuse to accept the responsibility for their actions.

The Ottawa police are doing the same thing, putting out disinformation about trying to trip the horses and harm the policemen.

At this point those still on the job in Ottawa made a choice as well, to side with tyrants and embrace their own inner one.

Many of them will enjoy finally getting to mete out the violence that festers in their souls, after all, it’s why many of them became cops in the first place.

Those who still have their humanity are now deciding whether to go along or walk away. If they go along they will lose what’s left of their humanity just like men did during World War II.

And their true face has been revealed.

No Zeal for More Tyranny

Now, as bad as things are in Canada, In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, tried to follow Trudeau’s script to quell protests in Wellington.

And from all reports there, her efforts have failed completely. She convened a meeting of essentially the national security council on Thursday.

We have no solid reports of what went down.

Therefore, the silence about the outcome of that meeting speaks volumes. The military weren’t willing to get involved, just like what happened to Trudeau in Canada.

Moreover, New Zealand’s police commissioner Andrew Coster came out with a public statement saying negotiation was the path forward, something Arden has rejected out of hand, just like Trudeau, both reading from the same Davos’ script.

Coster said negotiations and de-escalation were the only safe ways to resolve the protest and he would continue to talk to the protesters. Police say there are about 800 protesters but numbers could rise over the weekend.

Coster said any forceful police action would risk injuries to the public and could turn a largely peaceful protest violent, and could increase the number of protesters.

Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly tried to hold the line against Trudeau’s megalomania earlier this week. That resulted in him resigning, presumably because he wouldn’t give the order to roust up the protestors and beat heads, and a more pliant enforcer put in his place.

The result is what we’re witnessing now in Ottawa.

Look at the police drag this guy between the trucks so an officer can knee him as as hard as he can. None of the other cops seem to care about his behaviour as he quickly checks to see if any Canadian saw him pic.twitter.com/tcD4URV1vT

— bu/ac (@buperac) February 19, 2022

The casual obscenity in this clip is the newscasters’ commentary about police restoring order.

The reality is that Ardern and Trudeau are both hanging on by a thread because public opinion already turned against them. The only thing propping Trudeau up at this point is the shock at the speed he has escalated events. That shock will wear off very soon.

If parliament doesn’t act to limit/censure or simply get rid of this guy, Canadians will have a much bigger problem on their hands.

Too many Canadians are still asking, “Is this Canada?” When they should be stating, “This is not Canada.”

Stop asking for permission to feel outraged and feel the outrage.

In New Zealand, the veil of authority for Arden is thinner thanks to Trudeau’s mistakes in Ottawa. No doubt they are seeing the same things we are and want no part of it. The knives will come out for Ardern quickly if she doesn’t back down.

I say all the time, spooks start civil wars, militaries end them. In Canada, the civil war there is just beginning. What we’ve not seen in New Zealand means it’s likely over before anyone even realized they were in one.

The Great Reset rests on tyrants like Justin Trudeau to win through fear, intimidation and the banal corruption of weak people to support them. With each image of peaceful people being trampled under the bootheel of Canadian stormtroopers, more people awaken from the slumber of the comfortable lie the government protects us from chaos.

That’s what the State is folks, violence. Always has been. This is why Klaus Schwab and his minions like Trudeau, Ardern and others will fail. There is no law these people recognize. There is no restraint on their behavior they feel is justified for their holy cause.

The sooner we accept that, like many of the truckers who organized this protest, the sooner we can all begin bridging the divide.

I’ll leave the last word for Viva Frei.

I have spent 12 days live streaming from Ottawa. I did not see one shred of violence until the police showed up.

— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) February 18, 2022

tomluongo.me

Law enforcement officials have begun a watch beat of sorts against the American Civil Liberties Union, whose support of justice reform has translated into more criminals roaming the streets as police officers lose their jobs.

A number of liberal activists, armed with the most altruistic intentions, of course, are busy remaking America into a liberal bastion of utopian thinking, where the Cultural Marxists have put down the stakes on their zany new world, which promises to go international. But if surging gun sales in the Golden State are any indication, the progressives are off to a disastrous start.

“I’ve always been anti-gun,” Debbie Mizrahie of Beverly Hills said, as quoted by Michael Shellenberger in the New York Post. “But I am right now in the process of getting myself shooting lessons because I now understand that there may be a need for me to know how to defend myself and my family. We’re living in fear.”

And it’s not difficult to understand why. According to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report released in September, the nation experienced a 30 percent increase in murder in 2020, the biggest annual jump since the bureau began tracking crime statistics 60 years ago. That record comes attached with a footnote that the mainstream media is at tremendous pains to ignore: this year, of the 12 major U.S. cities that broke annual homicide records, every one of them – from Rochester, New York to Baton Rouge, Louisiana – are run by Democrats. Or more specifically, by organizations that wield tremendous power and influence over the Democratic Party.

The one obvious name that always surfaces when speaking about the ‘criminal reform’ initiatives well underway in liberal-run cities is the billionaire philanthropist, George Soros. As the Democratic Party’s most prolific benefactor, Soros has filled the campaign coffers of various District Attorney races. For example, last year, amid the George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests, Soros donated $2 million to a PAC that backed Kim Foxx, who went on to become the State’s Attorney for Cook County, Chicago, where murder is now at its highest rate in almost 30 years. In keeping in line with woke ideology, which blames the ‘oppressive white system’ for the behavior of felons, Foxx immediately began to defer many prosecutions while reducing bail and sentencing guidelines for hardened criminals.

As it turns out, however, Soros is in good company, particularly with the ACLU, which is also working overtime defending the worst elements of society, while depriving victims of their rights. For a long time, this watchdog group was doing all the watching, imposing its warped worldview on communities around the nation. That looks set to change, however, after a coalition of seven police unions from three states put together a website to track exactly what the ACLU has been up to.

Sponsored by the San José Police Officers Association, San Francisco Police Officers Association, Los Angeles Police Protective League, Seattle Police Officers Guild, San Diego Police Officers Association, Sacramento Police Officers Association and the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, ACLU Watch says it is “dedicated to fighting for victim’s rights, accountability for criminals, and exposing those that defend the indefensible.”

One of the ACLU’s pet projects involves bail payments, the site disclosed, which have been dramatically reduced in the name of ‘combatting racism and economic inequality.’ The initiative allows the convicted to put up just 10% of an already drastically reduced bond requirement, which has led to all of the predictably tragic consequences.

As just one example, James McClendon, 45, who police said had been in and out of jail dozens of times, was suspected in June of committing a double shooting that left a man dead and a woman injured in Atlanta. Yet the judge in his trial set bail at just $50,000, and McClendon was free to walk three weeks later.

“Most of the individuals were getting out within a couple of days and the bond was generally low,” Maj. William Ricker told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “On average, $28,000 was the general bond amount. Then, of course, you talk about being able to just pay 10%, that’s a significantly small amount for people to be back out on the streets.”

If bail reform doesn’t keep criminals on the street, then Proposition 47 certainly will, at least in California. Under the updated ruling, shoplifting charges on the theft of merchandise $950 or less was reduced from a felony to misdemeanor. Then-Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, together with the ACLU were supporters of the legislation.

“Prop. 47 reduces the barriers that many people with a low-level, non-violent felony conviction face to becoming stable and productive citizens, such as a lack of employment, housing and access to assistance programs and professional trades,” the ACLU wrote in support of the legislation back in 2014.

But it’s not just the thieves and murderers that the ACLU seems determined to defend, but kiddie flashers as well. Back in 2018, The Ohio House voted 80-0 for a bill that increases penalties for people who expose themselves to children. As Tier 1 sex offenders, such individuals are forbidden from living within 1,000 feet of a day care center or school. Such a rule seemed, somehow, incomprehensible to the New York-based watchdog.

“There is no evidence these policies and laws keep people safer or reduce recidivism,” said Gary Daniels of the ACLU of Ohio in written testimony. “Exiling sex offenders and making it more difficult to find housing and unemployment increase the chances they will commit another offense,” he said, as though employment has ever stopped perverts before.

Since the murder of George Floyd, these ‘crime reform’ endorsements by the ACLU, which negatively affects two groups of people – the victims of crime, and the police officers who were hired specifically to ‘preserve the peace’ – have been moving ahead full steam. Yet now, with the introduction of ACLU Watch, more people can better understand that a robust police presence is not the true source of America’s crime problem. By coddling criminals, the ACLU has helped to make U.S. neighborhoods infinitely more dangerous, something which more Americans need to understand.

November’s off year elections revealed that the rollback of wokeness, if not imminent, may be nearer than many had hoped. Voters rejected decisively two of wokeness’s core policy components: Defunding the police lost badly in heavily Democratic cities from Seattle to Minneapolis to Buffalo, while Republican Glenn Youngkin’s vow to curb critical race theory in Virginia schools was central to his surprise win in the blue state.

Extremist political cycles seem to have a natural lifespan. Five years passed between the storming of the Bastille and Thermidor—the arrest of Robespierre by his fellow revolutionaries, fearful that the guillotine would touch them next; another five and a national equilibrium of sorts was restored to France. A similar ten years ensued between years between Mao’s launching of the Cultural Revolution and the arrest and imprisonment of its major backers by their rivals within China’s ruling hierarchy. Neither country had meaningful elections, but they did have public opinions, which eventually shifted enough to embolden those in position to challenge the radical wave to step up and assume the risks. If one dates the onset of wokeness from 2014, which saw the sudden explosion of phrases about race, equity, and white supremacy in the prestige media, we are seven years in.

The United States has free elections, a First Amendment, and political norms which remain more or less intact, and wokeness is an ideological movement which has managed to humiliate its victims and get them fired from their jobs, not to kill them. But it is not a stretch to see in it parallels to the totalitarian movements of the past century: the preening self-righteousness of its enforcers; their seeking of forced confessions, depicted as apologies from their victims; the attempted politicization of every aspect of social life, including language; the insistence that the traditional mores of their own country are utterly debased. Never in American history has so much energy been devoted to getting people fired for expressing an opinion.

Wokeness may well advance to the point where many of its goals become as institutionalized and naturally accepted as the abolition of slavery. (Some of the woke elect left style themselves as abolitionists). More likely it will be rolled back, its practitioners and cultural preferences first widely mocked and then ignored, its victims rehabilitated and in some cases honored. November 2 marked the first hint of a real electoral pushback against wokeness; hopefully it will prove as pivotal as the battle of Midway.

* * *

The core idea of wokeness is that America and the West are essentially defined by interlocking systems of oppression, the main pillar of which is white supremacy, while secondary but important ones are the privileging of heterosexuality and of men over women. To be woke is to believe that all social life is permeated by these dominations, and that overturning them is a moral imperative. Radical leftists have held views proximate to this for over a century, but their nominal embrace by much of the establishment is a new thing.

For the woke, America’s history of slavery and segregation are at its core, more important than virtually everything else. Wokeness portrays itself as a struggle against whiteness, or white supremacy, rather than against white people themselves, a rhetorical evasion which allows white people to become the main practitioners of woke politics.

With black activism, wokeness has a somewhat contradictory relationship.

On one side it is given to displays of performative submissiveness. While fires from the George Floyd riots were still smoldering, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer led Democratic members of the House and Senate to the halls outside the congressional visitor’s gallery, where they donned kente cloth and knelt before the cameras; similar, if less striking, quasi-religious enactments continued throughout the summer. A few weeks later the New York Times announced it would henceforth capitalize black when it referred to race (white would remain lowercase) as its standard style, inevitably evoking the Bible’s capitalization of pronouns referring to the deity. Virtually every national news organization followed suit.

On the other side of wokeness is a kind of paternalism, which sees black Americans as people without much agency or control over their lives, defined by the past injuries of slavery and segregation and still burdened by chains of structural racism which are seldom specified but so pervasive that standards of achievement and conduct appropriate for other Americans must be suspended for them.

But despite its apparent dominance in corporate media and major institutions, wokeness increasingly resembles what ’60s era Maoists called a “paper tiger”; when confronted directly, as wokeness has seldom been in the past seven years, its popularity and power prove less than meets the eye.

* * *

Curiously, the response by the Terry McAuliffe campaign—to charges by his opponent that Democrats were ignoring parents and teaching CRT in schools—was to claim that there was “no critical race theory” taught in Virginia schools, that the whole issue was a racist “dog whistle” cooked up by conservative activist Christopher Rufo and others. This denial was echoed repeatedly by nearly every mainstream media outlet covering the election.

This itself was an interesting tell. Liberals generally have no reluctance to defend their beliefs or policies, whether they be the right to have an abortion, higher taxes on corporations and the rich, or worker and environmental protection laws. But on CRT they mounted no defense, just denial and obfuscation. They would explain, as to a fifth grader, that critical race theory was a high brow discipline sometimes studied in law schools, and is absolutely not something taught to Virginia elementary and high school students. As if they assumed that people wouldn’t notice that programs and curricula explicitly grounded in CRT pedagogy, endorsed officially by the nation’s largest teacher’s union, was seeping into the schools.

Why did the sophisticated, consultant heavy, and poll savvy McAuliffe campaign lie? The most plausible answer is that it understood that the substance of a critical race theory pedagogy couldn’t be defended before voters in a campaign, knew it was extremely unpopular among people of all races, and knew also that it couldn’t be disavowed, because powerful constituencies within the Democratic party, especially the National Education Association, were too heavily invested in it. When push came to shove in a tight election, the establishment left wouldn’t stand up and fight for woke pedagogy.

Woke attitudes about law enforcement fared no better. The aptly named war on cops has been building for years, generating a narrative that most American police departments have been systematically oppressing black people. Its first major significant victory came in New York, with a series of court rulings against the NYPD’s policies of proactive policing, sometimes called “stop and frisk,” in 2013. Stop and frisk had proven enormously successful in getting illegal guns and the criminals wielding them off the street, but the tactic almost invariably targeted young black men.

This made sense to those who believed police should focus their efforts on those neighborhoods plagued by a disproportionate share of illegal gun crime. But by the end of the Bloomberg mayoralty, ending proactive policing had become a liberal cause célèbre. The next year, when a black man from Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, was killed while resisting arrest, the anti-police narrative exploded nationally, with major voices in the mainstream media giving oxygen to the idea that the nation’s police were waging a “genocidal” war against black people, that calling 911 was an effort to get black people murdered.

It was a lie of course—the number of unarmed black Americans killed by the police is small, not disproportional to the number of white people killed by the police and infinitesimal in comparison to number of black people killed by black criminals. But the sheer enormity of the lie—repeated incessantly—made it a widely accepted fact, if not a true one. If the police were indeed racist murderers as frequently portrayed, defunding police departments made a great deal of sense.

By the summer of 2020, the topic of racist policing dominated the national conversation; and left-wing candidates calling for abolition of police departments began winning democratic primaries. A month after George Floyd’s murder, Minneapolis’s City Council voted by a 9-3 margin to dismantle the police department altogether, replacing it with a social worker agency.

But it did not take long for anti-cop wave to peak. In Minneapolis, as murders surged 50 percent and the number of downtown shootings doubled, city residents mobilized against the City Council’s anti-cop campaign. In Dallas, the City Council moved to hire more cops. In New York, progressives were stunned when a former black cop running on a law-and-order platform trounced progressives in the Democratic mayoral primary, while running up impressive margins in black and Latino working class districts. On election day last November, a defund-the-police socialist who had won the Democratic primary in Buffalo lost the general election even though she was the only person on the ballot. In Minneapolis, voters rejected an abolish the police department ballot measure decisively. In very liberal Seattle, an actual Republican won the city attorney race.

A restoration of the kind of policing that cut crime rates so successfully in the 1990s won’t come quickly—much legal damage had been done to inhibit effective policing, while in many cities left-wing district attorneys, elected late in the last decade in low turnout elections and committed to not putting criminals in jail, remain in office. But a 30 percent rise in murders in 2020—the largest since records have been kept, and a surge in violent crime in nearly every major city has made defunding the police a non-starter.

These political battles over education and policing plainly originate from America’s long standing racial divisions of black and white. But they are now contested on a very different demographic playing field. After 40 years of historically high levels of immigration, the United States has a far different racial makeup than it did when Martin Luther King was assassinated. An influx of immigrants from Mexico, Latin America, Asia and the Mideast has reduced the white share of the population from over 85 percent to under 65 percent; among school children, “Anglo” white kids make up less than half.

* * *

This analysis is intuitively persuasive. It was also prominent in paleoconservative circles in the early 1990s; Peter Brimelow at National Review published essays showing the GOP shrinking to national irrelevance by the early middle of this century. To some extent it has been vindicated: California, which launched the political careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, has become a reliably one-party state and other states are moving in the same direction. On many issues, the new immigration probably has shifted the United States towards the left; certainly any kind of “old fashioned” rooted-in-land-and-tradition conservatism, including anything associated with Dixie, now has a smaller demographic base to appeal to.

But this is not the case for the particular issues that emanate from wokeness. To state the obvious, most Asian, Latino, and other non-white immigrants and their children are not that invested in black-white history and the proper negotiation of the historic wrongs white Americans have done to black Americans. The vast majority of them have lived all their American lives in a post-civil rights revolution country, where racial discrimination is carefully monitored and illegal. Their ancestors didn’t own slaves, nor fight a war to end slavery. They can’t easily be made to feel guilty about the American past, and despite great efforts by university social science departments, it is not so easy to get them to feel aggrieved by it either.

An unforeseen aspect of the wokeness phenomenon is how many new immigrants, or children of new immigrants, are playing critical roles in pushing back against it. Optimistic “immigrants are socially conservative” arguments have bandied around pro-immigration Republicans for decades (I was never one of them), but no one predicted the polemical vitality and occasional brilliance that would emerge from newer Americans as wokeness pushed into the center of the national agenda. Any list of names will leave out dozens, but those paying attention know that writers and activists as distinct in style and ideology as Andy Ngo, Wesley Yang, Zaid Jilani, Harmeet Dhillon, Sohrab Ahmari, and Melissa Chen—to pick a half dozen at random—are not only important in the pushback against wokeness, but that their arrival at the battlefield was an absolutely necessary reinforcement. Of course one could point to comparable numbers of woke leftists of recent immigrant background, but compared to their conservative counterparts they don’t seem important or agenda setting to a movement emotionally centered on black and white Americans.

Indeed, if one wanted to design a movement explicitly to alienate Asian Americans, it would be hard to improve on the woke’s agenda on law enforcement and schools. Some consequences of the war on cops and so-called “over-incarceration” were predictable: Police would retreat from proactive policing, and crime would rise. But no one foresaw that this would produce a surge in crime against Asians. The mainstream media took great pains to obfuscate the most salient aspects of this trend. Stories about it invariably mentioned former President Trump’s depiction of Covid-19 as the “China virus” so as to imply without saying that the hate crime perpetrators were white Trump supporters. Always highlighted was the horrific case of the white man who murdered several Asian massage parlor workers and others of different races on a killing spree apparently prompted by feelings of sexual guilt. But the reality is that what is experienced by many as an open season on vulnerable Asian Americans in our cities is driven by the same group that commits most American street crime.

One must assume Asian Americans know this. Last summer’s New York Times Magazine story about the murder of a Thai grandfather in San Francisco quoted his son-in-law, who had begun attending anti-Asian-hate rallies in the Bay Area and asking how many people there had been pushed or spat on, and by whom. Yes, many, was the response, always by a black person. This Times piece acknowledged, with seeming reluctance, that hate crimes against Asians were “more likely” to be committed by non-white people. A former Oakland police captain relates that suspects in anti-Asian hate crimes are almost exclusively black. In New York City, black people are six times more likely to commits hate crimes than white people, and comprise half the suspects in anti-Asian attacks. In the all too common videos of such attacks that show up on social media, the perpetrators are almost always black.

The tensions between the groups have roots which have not been systematically explored, but were evident as early as the racially incendiary 1990 boycott of Korean grocery stores in Brooklyn and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Of course, all ethnic and racial groups suffer from rising crime, and those in black neighborhoods are numerically most victimized by it. But in the past year of racial reckoning, the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes does, to say the least, complicate the woke narrative of an ascendant Rainbow coalition struggling to overcome white supremacy.

* * *

The education issue is far more direct. For years, progressive educators have railed against standardized tests as barriers to racial equity. They have won some stunning recent victories: The University of California has ceased using the SAT as means for sorting applicants, and hundreds of other colleges have followed suit.

The SAT has not been discredited as a metric for determining the likelihood of a student succeeding academically; for that it has no equal. Its problem is a political one: Standardized test results reveal with considerable precision how much of a leg up is given to black students in college admissions competition over white and especially Asian students. The frequent result is a mismatch between student and institution where black students have less developed academic skills than their classmates, with many pooling in the bottom of the class. Some of the most notorious instances of woke cancel culture deployed against truthful speech have occurred when professors who had noticed and lamented these facts were hunted down by leftist students and subsequently dismissed from their jobs.

But in terms of potential to spark a widespread disaffection, the five decades long dispute over affirmative action in college admissions will pale next to the battles over the use of standardized tests for granting admission to academically selective high schools and curricula. In the past year of racial reckoning, the use of student standardized test scores for admission has been dropped or rolled back in Lowell High School in San Francisco, the Boston Latin School, and Thomas Jefferson High school in northern Virginia. Outgoing New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio sought unsuccessfully to have the tests banned entirely for its top schools, the storied Stuyvesant and Bronx High School of Science, and is still maneuvering to reduce the percentage of students admitted to those schools by exam only. His rationale is that they aren’t sufficiently diverse—at this point more Asians pass the exams than other groups and black students do so at comparatively low rates.

Not surprisingly, Asian parents from New York to California have begun to mobilize politically and legally to combat what is quite plainly an effort to tilt a level playing field against their children. (In San Francisco their pressure has at least temporarily kept in place the exam as criterion for admission to Lowell.) In picking a fight against the exam high schools, Democratic politicians following the woke playbook have chosen to attack an institution vitally important to one of the country’s most dynamic and academically successful immigrant groups. For the first time since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, grassroots organizations of Asian parents are at odds with Democratic politicians.

Wai Wah Chin, president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, observes (in an interview on Glenn Loury’s podcast) that De Blasio and other Democrats pitch their campaign against the high performance schools in the language of representation, claiming that the student bodies of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant are not “representative” of New York. (Former New York schools chancellor Richard Carranza had gone further, warning Asian parents to back down with the menacing formulation that “no ethnic group owns admission to these schools.”) In response, Chin makes the necessary point: The kids who pass the rigorous math and verbal exams are not “representing” anyone but themselves. They have studied as individuals and take the exam as individuals, representing not a community but their own efforts. She adds that the student’s family or community might feel pride in their accomplishment; one could add that all Americans might feel proud of these incredibly successful schools. Graduates of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech have won an extraordinary 14 Nobel Prizes in the sciences, more than many countries. Wai Wah Chin’s assertion stands directly against the racial essentialism that lies at the core of wokeness.

The issue is broader than the select exam schools which admit the cream of the student crop. There is a nationwide movement to eliminate tracking of students by ability. California, following San Francisco’s lead, is eliminating the teaching of algebra to eighth graders, which means far fewer public school students will have the opportunity to take calculus in high school. This will narrow the pipeline of students who might go on to pursue STEM majors in college and in their careers. The rationale for such changes is always the woke watchword “equity,” followed by lamentations that white and Asian students are overrepresented in advanced math courses. But of course parents of bright students want their kids to be challenged in school, and inevitably America as a whole will suffer if they are not. As one California math teacher put it, “I feel so bad for these students. We are cutting the legs of the students to make them equal to those who are not doing well in math.”

But if recent social history shows anything, it is that parents will fight harder over the education of their children than almost any issue. All over the country, parent groups are mobilizing—Asian parent groups often in the lead. As school questions emerge as hot button political issues, it will become apparent that the woke project of dumbing down schools to promote equity will fare no better than defunding the police.

* * *

Polling shows Hispanics lukewarm towards the Black Lives Matter movement, favoring it at lower rates than whites did (the question was posed at a time when support for BLM was assumed to be the only possible opinion for decent people). Latinos oppose reparations and defunding the police, core components of the woke agenda, by more than 2-1 margins. As Ruy Teixeira, a long time proponent of the view that Hispanic immigration was a key to solid Democratic majorities, recently put it, “clearly this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy.” Others noted that Hispanics are now jailed at lower rates than white Americans, and are increasingly employed in law enforcement.

Few discern specific issues for the shift, though it is unlikely that woke efforts to neuter the Spanish language with terms like “Latinx” have attracted more Latinos and Latinas to the Democrats. Might the trend continue towards transforming Hispanics into a group politically analogous to Reagan Democrats—that is, a formerly Democratic working- and middle-class constituency that now votes GOP? It seems improbable, but no one predicted that a candidate could be as tough on border enforcement as Donald Trump and experience a dramatic gain in Latino votes.

The fundamental political error of wokeness lies in its judgement about how popular a movement based on anti-whiteness is likely to be in a nation increasingly less European in ancestry. Immigrants have come to America for many reasons, but a hatred of “white supremacy” is probably nowhere near the top for the vast majority. One could easily surmise that many of them are motivated by appreciation of the very qualities wokeness either deplores or works to undermine: law and order, careers open to talents, advanced levels of science and technology—and the legal and cultural structures that make those things possible.

A passage from David Reiff’s book on Los Angeles from more than three decades ago comes to mind: In the coda of one chapter, Rieff describes a billboard for a Mexican beer, then visible in nearly every Mexican town, which touts the product as “a high class blonde,” double meaning very much intended. It played on aspiration, the kind that prompted men from Mexican small towns to decamp for Mexico City, or ultimately to Los Angeles, “the greatest blonde of all.”

One of the more provocative interpretations of the origins of the relatively new movement to bring critical race theory into the teaching of elementary and high school students was suggested, almost as an aside, by Wesley Yang. Sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s, the left looked at Latino immigration and realized that a considerable degree of assimilation was actually happening: that the Latino working class was not drinking in the vaguely Marxist ideologies incubating in university ethnic studies departments, and that there was actually a possibility—perceived by the left as a danger—that just as (according to ethnic studies phraseology popular on the left) Irish and Italian immigrants had been “allowed to become white,” the same thing was happening to non-European immigrants as well. Critical race theory thus developed as a kind of reaction, to indoctrinate school-aged children of the new immigration into a kind of racial essentialism, to deflect them from an assimilationist path.

Yang’s suggestion would correlate with Eric Kaufmann’s argument in Whiteshift, a detailed and comprehensive study of demographic transformations and evolving racial attitudes likely to occur in the West. Intermarriage rates between white Americans and new immigrants or their children are fairly high, and over time the boundaries of whiteness will expand—American and other Western majorities won’t be exclusively white any longer, but they will have some connection to white ancestry; they will acknowledge and feel cultural ties to the traditional heroes of their nations. This may be an overly optimistic view, but recent American elections do nothing to contradict it.

* * *

It can be notoriously difficult to read accurately the tenor of one’s own times. Historians can point to many private letters of learned people written well before the darkest nights of communism and Nazism, assuring one another that the worst was certainly over and things would soon improve. Still, it strikes me that America’s liberal elite is beginning to find wokeness a bit embarrassing. What does the president of Yale really think about his diversity deans publicly threatening a law student for sending an email that used the phrase “trap house”?

The actual number of the woke remains small—perhaps 6 percent of the population, according to Pew surveys of American political attitudes. It is educated, it is mostly white, it is heavily concentrated in the media and universities. But it isn’t powerful enough to control the country if majorities are mobilized to resist it.

Overcoming wokeness will require real political will and courage, as well as legislation. At some point there will need to be a successful legal challenge to the idea that disparate income and disproportionate racial outcomes by themselves constitute sufficient evidence of racial discrimination, but that too is in the realm of the possible. As voters from New York City to Buffalo to Seattle showed without ambiguity, when wokeness is on the ballot and opposed vigorously, it loses. In activism and voting patterns, America’s most rapidly growing demographic groups are largely showing themselves indifferent or actively hostile to woke policies. If the tide is indeed turning, in a few years wokeness will be more mocked than celebrated. If not, America’s long reign as a relatively successful country will end.

theamericanconservative.com

“In recent months and years, we have repeatedly voiced our concern over a steady increase in the use of excessive force, police brutality, and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, as well as arbitrary detention, against predominantly peaceful protesters in all regions of the world. This trend, often extending to journalists covering protests, has resulted in countless deaths and injuries, often exacerbated through torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, and enforced disappearance, and has intimidated, traumatized, and antagonised large segments of society worldwide.

The vast majority of these incidents are rooted in political, socio-economic, ethnic, racial, religious, or other tensions specific to particular national or regional situations. At the same time, there are also relevant, more generic contexts of global reach and underlying reasons of racism, gender-based and other forms of discrimination in law enforcement. Large-scale migration, protests of climate activists, human rights defenders, indigenous peoples and, more recently, the Black Lives Matter movement are affected by excessive use of force and police brutality. Additionally, since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been numerous reports of security forces employing excessive and often indiscriminate violence resulting in unlawful deaths, injury and psychological trauma, as well as arbitrary detentions, in order to enforce emergency measures for the protection of public health, such asbans on assemblies, lockdowns and curfews.

Most worryingly, throughout all regions and contexts, these acts of violence and abuse have often been encouraged by divisive, discriminatory and inflammatory narratives spread or condoned by political leaders, local authorities, and parts of the media, and by the resulting atmosphere of near complete impunity for perpetrators. This flagrant lack of accountability has further fuelled tensions and has given rise to a growing sense of powerlessness, fear, and resentment, not only among victims and their relatives, but throughout the most vulnerable and politically exposed parts of the population.

This phenomenon is symptomatic of a worrying trend towards the increasing militarization of law enforcement officials and their equipment, training, and rules of engagement, including on the use of force and coercion. As a result, in many contexts, law enforcement officials now display an attitude, appearance and mode of operation which is more readily associated with a hostile military force than with serving and protecting the general public. When law enforcement officials treat their own population as a potential enemy, growing segments of society will soon be antagonized and, in turn, begin to perceive their own government and its police forces as their enemy. At the same time, authorities often unfairly put law enforcement personnel into extremely difficult and dangerous operational circumstances, expecting them to enforce laws, policies, and regulations through violence and intimidation rather than making the required political efforts at defusing tensions through dialogue.

It is the prime responsibility of governments and political leaders to prevent such dangerous developments through non-violent means including, most notably, pro-active communication aiming at de-escalation, reconciliation, and the peaceful exercise of civil and political rights.

Undisputedly, illegal conduct, including attacks on law enforcement personnel and public or private property cannot be tolerated in any society governed by the rule of law, and the authorities are both entitled and obliged to enforce applicable laws and regulations. However, they must always do so with the utmost restraint and in strict compliance with established international human rights standards including the general principle of proportionality, the right to life and the universal, absolute and non-derogable prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The prohibition of torture is universally recognised as a jus cogens norm, which must be respected and protected under all circumstances, including in times of international and non-international armed conflict or disturbance and tension or any other public emergency. Equally, the prohibitions of arbitrary detention and arbitrary deprivation of life are absolute and cannot be derogated from in any circumstances.

As the Human Rights Council has acknowledged, “public confidence in police and other law enforcement officials is paramount for their ability to perform their functions effectively and depends on, inter alia, their respect for the human rights, fundamental freedoms and human dignity of all persons” (A/HRC/46/L.27). There is also universal consensus that law enforcement officials shall fulfil the duty imposed upon them by law at all times, by serving the community and by protecting all persons against illegal acts, consistent with the high degree of responsibility required by their profession. ¹ This means that, when confronted with unlawful acts – whether mere misdemeanours and civil disobedience, or violence and other forms of serious criminality – law enforcement officers must be trained, equipped and instructed to show restraint and moderation, avoiding any unnecessary resort to force and coercion.

Whenever absolutely unavoidable, any use of force by law enforcement officials must meet the following four requirements: 1) Legality: any use of force must pursue a lawful purpose and respect equal treatment of all persons before the law in accordance with the principle of non-discrimination; 2) Necessity: force must only be used when, and to the extent, strictly necessary for the achievement of a lawful purpose, noting that lethal force may only be used when unavoidable to protect against grievous bodily harm or an imminent threat to life; 3) Proportionality: the harm likely to be inflicted by the use of force must not be excessive compared to the benefit of the lawful purpose pursued, and 4) Precaution: law enforcement operations must always be planned, prepared and conducted so as to minimize, to the greatest extent possible, the resort to force and, whenever it becomes unavoidable, to minimize the resulting harm. Even exceptional circumstances such as internal political instability or any other public emergency may not be invoked to justify any departure from these basic principles. ²

The jurisprudence of international and regional human rights mechanisms has consistently confirmed that any use of force by State officials failing to meet any of these requirements amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and may violate the right to life and, therefore, is absolutely prohibited in all circumstances without exception. The same applies to certain weapons, substances and other means of law enforcement which, by nature or design, must be regarded as inherently cruel, inhuman or degrading. ³

States have an international legal duty to regulate the use of force by law enforcement officials in line with these principles, to take effective measures with a view to preventing any violations, and to provide victims and their relatives with adequate gender-sensitive redress and rehabilitation. States are further obliged to promptly, effectively and impartially investigate all allegations of arbitrary killing, of enforced disappearances, and of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that such an act has been committed, and to hold accountable those who encourage, instigate, order, tolerate, acquiesce in, consent to or perpetrate such acts, in a manner commensurate with the gravity of the offence. In order to support the judicial and investigative authorities in this task and to ensure transparency and the absence of collusion and conflicts of interest, States should establish institutionally and politically independent complaints and oversight mechanisms tasked with the monitoring and transparent reporting on the use of force by public officials, making this information accessible both to the judiciary and to the public, including statistics on when, against whom and through which means force has been used and on the resulting harm and measures of redress.

Public confidence in the reliability, legitimacy and integrity of State institutions and their law enforcement officials is the most valuable commodity of any peaceful, just and sustainable society and the very foundation of democracy and the rule of law. We therefore urge governments and political leaders not to needlessly squander the trust of their people, to refrain from any unwarranted violence, coercion and divisiveness, and to prioritize and promote dialogue, tolerance and diversity in the common public interest of all.”

Note:

The experts welcome the attention given to this important matter by the Human Rights Council at its 46th session and, in particular, to its Resolution “Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment: the roles and responsibilities of police and other law enforcement officials” (A/HRC/46/L.27).

In addition to numerous communications on individual cases or contexts, the experts have repeatedly expressed concern over the general trend towards the increased use of excessive force in the management of assemblies including through dedicated reports to the General Assembly by the Special Rapporteur on Torture to the UN General Assembly on “Extra-custodial use of force and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment  or punishment” (A/72/178); and jointly by the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association and the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions on the proper management of assemblies (A/HRC/31/66).

ENDS

* Mr. Nils Melzer, Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; Mr. Morris Tidball-Binz, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and Mr. Clement Nyaletsossi Voulé, Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association.

This statement has been endorsed by:

Mr. Ahmed Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief; Mr. Vitit Muntarbhorn, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Cambodia; Mr. Felipe González Morales, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants; Mr Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing; Ms. Mary Lawlor,Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; Mr. Javaid Rehman, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran; Ms. E. Tendayi Achiume, Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance; Ms. Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism; Mr.Francisco Cali Tzay,Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples; Mr. Yao Agbetse, Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Central African Republic; Mr. Olivier De Schutter, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights; Mr. Diego García-Sayán, Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers; Ms. Isha Dyfan, Independent Expert on Somalia; Mr. S. Michael Lynk, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory; Ms.Jelena Aparac (Chair Rapporteur), Ms.Lilian Bobea, Ms. Sorcha MacLeod, Mr. Chris Kwaja and Mr. Ravindran Daniel, Working Group on the use of mercenaries;  Ms. Elina Steinerte (Chair-Rapporteur), Dr. Miriam Estrada-Castillo (Vice-chairperson), Ms. Leigh Toomey, Mr. Mumba Malila, and Mr. Priya Gopalan, Working Group on arbitrary detention; Ms. Cecilia Jimenez-Damary, Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons; Mr. Alioune Tine, Independent Expert on the human rights situation in Mali; Mr.Marcos A. Orellana,  Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights; Dr. Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Eritrea; Mr. Michael Fakhri, Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food; Dominique Day (Chairperson), Catherine S. Namakula, Miriam Ekiudoko, Sushil Raj,Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent; Mr Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation; Ms. Irene Khan, Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Mr. Fernand de Varennes, Special Rapporteur on minority issues, and Mr. Tae-Ung Baik (Chair), Mr. Henrikas Mickevičius, (Vice Chair), Ms. Aua Balde, Ms. Gabriella Citroni  and Mr. Luciano Hazan, Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

New Zealand, the last of the dedicated “COVID Zero” nations on earth, has completed its transformation into a full-blown tyrannical regime, and shockingly, it has come with the consent of the vast majority of Kiwis.

Ja, smittskydd är jobbigt… Det skyddar ju bara liv, hälsa & ekonomin. pic.twitter.com/YGfEqBy5B4

— jan höglund (@janhoglund) September 2, 2021

Once hailed as the media and “public health experts’” favorite COVID-19 managerial “success story,” the puff pieces have been increasingly hard to find, as Wellington has spawned a dystopian concoction of insane, despotic government edicts, claimed as an absolutely necessary part of their everlasting fight against a disease with a 99.8% recovery rate.

Exclusive: Dr Anthony Fauci on why NZ ‘rose to the top’ in Covid battle https://t.co/c6FHHWGbja pic.twitter.com/RBAHaltFWA

— nzherald (@nzherald) December 6, 2020

Just observe what has happened in the Five Eyes partner nation during this week alone:

1) Virtually the entire country is once again under an indefinite lockdown, after a few COVID-19 cases were reported throughout the nation.  A single case necessitates a “snap lockdown,” in which all rights of millions of citizens are immediately restricted and indefinitely subject to the containment of a seasonal respiratory disease. The current lockdown has been extended over Auckland until at least mid September, with many predicting a much lengthier sentence. According to past precedent, Kiwis will not receive their freedom back until — this is the truly insane part of Zero COVID — there is zero community spread of COVID-19.

And the second another case pops up on the radar, the entire country goes back to square one of the Zero COVID protocol.

Covid 19 coronavirus Delta outbreak: Auckland lockdown could last ‘three to four weeks’, expert says, via @nzherald https://t.co/y5dK7T0Bm5

— Nino Brodin (@Orgetorix) September 2, 2021

2) A man is being shamed by his countrymen for having the audacity to “escape” from a government-sanctioned COVID internment camp. The camps have been described in a more positive, but false light by the press and government officials as “quarantine hotels,” but it is most certainly an internment facility, as leaving is not allowed, and it carries a fine and lengthy prison sentence.

The Hill reported: “The person was charged with failing to comply with New Zealand’s coronavirus health order. Under a new law passed last year, he could face a fine or up to six months in jail if convicted.”

Man facing charges after escaping quarantine hotel in New Zealand https://t.co/6pzI6x3aTF pic.twitter.com/85iHWJICrc

— The Hill (@thehill) September 2, 2021

3) The country’s police and military services are installing security checkpoints throughout New Zealand in an effort to make sure citizens are not traveling during the lockdown. Freely traveling during the lockdown now carries a massive fine and/or prison sentence as punishment.

Police set up checkpoints across Auckland to prevent non-essential travel as New Zealand recorded 75 new cases of COVID-19. Auckland will remain in a strict level 4 lockdown for another two weeks, but restrictions for the rest of the country were loosened https://t.co/9BC92LkTRq pic.twitter.com/qipRa7dxds

— Reuters (@Reuters) September 1, 2021

Police checkpoints in Auckland as New Zealand records 75 new Covid cases https://t.co/Rt9ZZhtPba pic.twitter.com/m2Lg343WbU

— City A.M. (@CityAM) September 1, 2021

New Zealand is now the only country in the world left that is dedicated to COVID Zero, the pursuit of the total elimination of a virus from their nation, which has been under a government-sanctioned self-siege since the beginning of 2020. All of the other nations that attempted to pursue the pseudoscience behind COVID Zero have failed in catastrophic fashion. New Zealand has transformed from a highly-touted COVID “success story” to a full-fledged house of horrors, and sadly, there is no end in sight to the ongoing madness.

dossier.substack.com

The land Down Under appears to be reverting back to its original status as a penal colony as government officials, looking more like prison wardens than any servants of the people, clamp down on demonstrators weary of more Covid lockdowns.

A heavy police presence in the major Australian cities on the weekend didn’t stopped thousands of protesters from taking to the streets in what many saw as a last-ditch effort to protect their severely threatened liberties and freedoms.

The protests came after New South Wales announced its second extended lockdown, which puts Sydney’s 5 million residents under strict curfew conditions until mid-September. The wait will seem all the more excruciating, however, as rumors are flying that the shelter in place orders may be extended all the way until January.

I’m really depressed. I see no end to this nightmarish tyranny.

I just want to leave Australia and never come back.

— Geronimo (@NototyrannyNOW) August 20, 2021

Meanwhile in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city behind Sydney, citizens face similar restrictions, which mean that – aside from going shopping within a designated radius from their homes, exercising for an hour a day outdoors, and going to work so long as they are engaged in “essential employment” – have essentially become prisoners inside of their own homes.

At this point in Australia’s history, the only thing that remains certain is the uncertainty, which makes the lockdowns all the more unbearable.

Images from Australia’s two major cities on Saturday showed powder keg conditions as demonstrators squared off against police, who responded with batons, pepper spray and mass arrests (It will interesting to see if Big Media describes the police actions against the lockdown protesters in the same compassionate way it described the actions taken against Australia’s very own Black Lives Matter protests around the same time last year. As the Guardian sympathetically reported: “At least 20,000 attended the Sydney [BLM] march which passed off peacefully, except for ugly scenes when police officers used pepper spray on protesters who had flowed into Central station after the rally finished.” It will be advisable not to hold your breath). In live footage obtained by Facebook user ‘Real Rukshan,’ large groups of police are seen confronting individual citizens, seemingly guilty of nothing else aside from just being there.

In one scene (at the 2:10 marker), an elderly man who appears to be leaving a Starbuck’s coffee shop is surrounded by no less than five police officers, who proceed to handcuff the man and, presumably, take him to prison. In another scene (at the 0:30 mark), two men are seen standing in front of the Bank of Melbourne confronted by six officers. In front of them on the street are four mounted officers astride anxious horses. The feeling conjured up in these incidences is the same: authoritarian police-state overkill.

Given the massive police presence amid the steady deterioration of basic human rights a person might get the impression that Australia is really dealing with an existential crisis. While that may be true with regards to obesity, drug abuse and homelessness, it seems to be a real exaggeration when it comes to Covid-19. After all, while evidence of the above mentioned scourges is visible everywhere in the country, the only place the coronavirus seems to exist in Australia is on the nightly news channels (which, by the way, have done a very poor job of keeping their audiences up to date on latest developments. Sources in New Zealand, for example, have informed that the media there has largely ignored the story of anti-lockdown protests happening just across the Tasman Sea).

For example, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, in an effort to portray the pandemic as enemy number one, expressed from the boob tube her “deepest, deepest sympathies” to the families of three people who died overnight from/with the coronavirus. Who were these fatalities? The public was not informed of their identities, but Berejiklian described them as “a man in his 80s, and a man in his 90s, and a female in her 90s.”

It’s just a hunch, but could the comorbidity in each of those “tragic” cases have been that silent killer popularly known as ripe old age? Yes, every life is precious and worth saving, but is Australian officialdom secretly shooting for absolute immortality among the population and not just prevention? That would certainly be the height of irony if true considering that the effort is killing just about everyone. In fact, it seems that the real pandemic attacking the Australian people is government-sponsored fear.

Meanwhile, Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews added insult to injury when he commanded from his bully pulpit that citizens, now deprived of their favorite drinking holes to while away the jobless hours, were forbidden from removing their masks to drink alcohol in the great outdoors. As to whether the consumption of a non-alcoholic beverage outdoors would also fall within the tight confines of the mask regime, dear leader did not say. However, the answer seems pretty clear since the state is actually using police helicopters to shoo away sunbathers from the nation’s many famous beaches.

People are letting off flares now on Lonsdale Street in the CBD for the anti-lockdown protest, choppers are overhead. @theage pic.twitter.com/xbkNbeuPIS

— Cassie Morgan (@cassieemorgan) August 21, 2021

All of this insanity has befallen the people Down Under after the continent has witnessed the barest uptick of Covid cases. In the state of New South Wales, for example, where Sydney is located, there were just 825 acquired infections reported on Saturday, an increase from the 644 the day prior. In the state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, the situation appears even less worrying, with just 61 cases reported as of Saturday. These low infection rates, taken together with a high level of public skepticism with regards to the safety of the Covid vaccines, translates into just 29 percent of the population opting to be jabbed to date.

.@ScottMorrisonMP has presided over the biggest Big State government that Australia has ever seen.

And don’t try to tell me #covid19 is an extraordinary circumstance.

We’ve had two World Wars, Spanish Flu and the Great Depression and NEVER has the government behaved this badly.

— Alexandra Marshall (@ellymelly) August 22, 2021

So as the petty tyrants Down Under seem more concerned with getting every single Australian citizen the Big Pharma jab – together with the lifetime of booster shots and lockdowns that will certainly follow – the populace is more concerned about how to save their collective health, sanity and jobs. That’s no easy task when the police give a hard time even to people who are found to be walking their dogs without a face mask on. These days even man’s best friend seems to have it better than the people struggling to survive Down Under.

By Shea LEIBOW

This summer, we’ve seen the Bootleg fire rage through Oregon. East Coasters have been breathing West Coast smoke. Massive floods have slammed towns from Germany to China. The town of Lytton, British Columbia, burned to the ground.

These disasters give a new sense of urgency to transition away from the fossil fuels that are causing this climate chaos. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the movement fighting for this transition is running up against intense police repression — funded by private corporations as well as the federal government.

I saw some of this firsthand.

In June, I was one of the thousands who converged in Northern Minnesota for the Treaty People Gathering to protest the Line 3 tar sands pipeline. Tar sands are one of the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive fuel sources on the planet. The pipeline also violates the treaty rights of the local Anishinaabe people, threatening their water supply and sacred wild rice beds.

At least 20 Indigenous water protectors were arrested in Minnesota over the weekend during protests against the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. “The level of brutality that was unleashed on us was very extreme,” says lawyer Tara Houska (@zhaabowekwe). pic.twitter.com/CY9G8GgKSp

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) August 4, 2021

The Treaty People Gathering kicked off a summer of protests against the pipeline. Unfortunately, these nonviolent protests have been brutally cracked down on. Over 500 protestors have been arrested or issued citations so far.

While I was there, demonstrators were hounded by a Border Patrol helicopter flying close to the ground, kicking up dust and disorienting protestors. Police attacked protestors with a Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) and built a physical barricade outside a pipeline resistance camp on private property, preventing vehicle access.

Although the police claim to “protect and serve” the communities they work in, these confrontational, militarized responses would indicate the opposite. It’s disappointing, but not surprising — Enbridge, the pipeline operator, is directly funding many Minnesotan police departments.

The Line 3 construction permit requires Enbridge to create a “public safety escrow account” that allows Minnesota police to seek reimbursement for “services” including “maintaining the peace in and around the construction site.”

Aug. 9, 2010: Aerial view of oil sheen emitting from contaminated vegetation at the Ceresco Dam area between the Enbridge oil spill site and Battle Creek, Michigan. (U.S. EPA, Wikimedia Commons)

This incentivizes more arrests, as the police can bill Enbridge for any activity related to suppressing Line 3 resistance. The escrow account provides funding for police “personal protective equipment, ” which includes batons, shields, and gas masks. Police have also submitted invoices for tear gas grenades, tear gas projectiles, and bean bag rounds.

Federal 1033 Program

Funding police violence against nonviolent protests should cross a line. But it’s not just corporations — the federal government does it, too. The federal 1033 program transfers surplus military equipment to local police departments, free of charge.

This equipment has been repeatedly used by local police departments to violently suppress racial justice protests in places like Ferguson, Minneapolis, and Kenosha. The 1033 program also likely supplied the helicopters, assault rifles, excavators, and the mine-resistant armor-protected vehicle that violently suppressed the Standing Rock protests in 2016.

Hubbard County, Minnesota, where hundreds have been arrested, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of military equipment from the 1033 program, including M16 and M14 assault rifles and a mine-resistant armor-protected vehicle.

The simultaneous occurrence of this summer’s intense climate-related weather events and this severe crackdown on anti-pipeline activists is deeply troubling.

The development of more fossil fuel infrastructure such as Line 3 will only worsen our climate catastrophe. But while the anti-pipeline movement is trying to save the planet, militarized, corporate-funded police forces are making that as difficult as possible.

In order to protect our environment, the police must be demilitarized. That means ending the 1033 program and getting corporate money out of police departments. The fate of our planet depends on it.

OtherWords via consortiumnews.com

Here’s a tale of two cops and two murders, Derek Chauvin and George Floyd, and John Doe* and Ashli Babbitt. Two cops, two unarmed citizens killed. One you care about, one you don’t. Even murder is politicized these days.

It is hard to imagine anyone needs much of a recap on Chauvin-Floyd. George Floyd, a black man, tried to pass off a counterfeit $20 bill while messed up on drugs. Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and other cops responded, and in the process of restraining Floyd, killed him. Everyone has seen the video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, and as if it was a civic duty, judged for themselves whether it was appropriate, necessary, and the cause of Floyd’s death.

A jury judged those things, too, and the result was a 22.5 year sentence for Chauvin (in handing down the sentence the judge said it was justified in part because Chauvin “committed his crime in the presence of children,” who of course had gathered to help jeer at the cops.) The woman who shot the snuff video won a Pulitzer prize.

Floyd’s death set off an angry summer of violence under the rubric Black Lives Matter, as progressives shut down opposing voices and several downtowns to insist Chauvin’s actions were part of something called systemic racism reaching back as far as 1619 in unbroken lineage. Celebrities, politicians, and academics jostled each other for camera time to demand the police be defunded. You might have seen something about all this on the teevee?

There’s video of Ashli Babbitt being killed by law enforcement but it has been played by the MSM maybe 1/10,000 as often as the Floyd murder porn. Babbitt, wearing a Trump flag like a cape, was one of the rioters who smashing the glass on the door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby of the Capitol. A plain clothes Capitol Police officer without warning fired a shot and Babbitt fell into the crowd and died. It was the only shot fired in the riot. A SWAT team just behind Babbitt saw the situation differently and never fired on her or those with her.

Like Floyd, Babbitt was unarmed. Like Floyd resisting, Babbitt was committing a crime when she was killed by a cop. Unlike Floyd, there is no question of whether she was resisting arrest because the cop never got that far. He just shot her.

In Floyd’s case, we know everything about Derek Chauvin, and saw him convicted in open court. Not so with Babbitt’s killer. Almost all police departments nationwide are required to release an officer’s name after a fatal shooting. Not the U.S. Capitol Police, which answers only to Congress. Even as Congress demands nationwide police reforms (ironically, the new, lower standards of proof proposed by H.R.1280 — George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 — would condemn the Capitol cop) they have steadfastly refused to release the name of Babbitt’s killer. In February, the Capitol Police stated they would “share additional information once an investigation is complete.” Investigators closed the case in April, cleared the unnamed officer of wrongdoing in Babbitt’s death without addressing the fact that the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, and left it at that. Stuff happens, ya know?

No trial, no public accounting, not even a name for the Babbitt family to use in filing a wrongful death suit. Because Congress exempts the Capitol Police from Freedom of Information Act requests, the family is forced to sue “for documents that identify the officer who shot Babbitt… as well as notes and summaries of what the officer said regarding the shooting and the reasons he discharged his weapon.”

They’d like more information on Babbitt’s death than the “investigation” provided. The Department of Justice simply wrote there was “insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.” DOJ did not hide its legal fudge, which had its investigators look narrowly on a Constitutional question, not the homicide.

Without shame DOJ said it focused on 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal criminal civil rights statute. This requires prosecutors prove the officer acted willfully to deprive Babbitt of a right protected by the Constitution, here the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable seizure.  Prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that the officer did so “willfully” to deprive Babbitt of her 4A rights. That meant evidence an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent required. In lay terms, that’s called a set-up enroute to a cover-up.

Contrast that with the Chauvin prosecution, where prosecutors charged manslaughter, second-degree murder, and third-degree murder in the one death of George Floyd, leaving the civil rights question which saved the Capitol cop as a separate matter. That allowed prosecutors to instruct the jury (there of course was no jury in Babbitt’s case) to decide on emotion, saying “Use your common sense. Believe your eyes. What you saw, you saw.” Imagine a jury in Babbitt’s case, exposed to a looping video of her killing, acting on the same instructions. But that never happened.

No one had much to say during the Babbitt investigation. In Floyd’s case, Joe Biden said he was praying the jury would reach the “right verdict,” calling the evidence “overwhelming in my view.” Maxine Waters demanded protesters become “more confrontational” if Chauvin was acquitted. That was so blatantly inflammatory it was almost grounds for a mistrial.

The president cheers on one prosecution, remaining silent while another murder is made to go away. Cities erect monuments to George Floyd while the NYT runs gossipy articles on Babbitt’s marriage problems. Asking for justice in Floyd’s case is a duty, even if it means burning down stores. Those who want the same justice for Babbitt are mocked as QAnon cultists. Did she not also bleed?

Oh, there’s more. Floyd was only on drugs passing fake money because of racism whereas Babbitt was a seditionist, a vandal, who asked for it as certain as if she wore a mini skirt down a dark alley to taunt her rapist. Floyd’s death created a movement for change. Candidate Trump’s embrace of Ashli Babbitt as a martyr anointed “January 6 a heroic uprising” for white supremacists seeking to overthrow democracy. Absolutely no one would write of Floyd, as one MSM outlet did of Babbitt, “her death, while tragic, occurred for a very good reason. The Air Force veteran, who had been fully converted into the most dangerous and fantastical pro-Trump conspiracy theories, had joined the aggressive vanguard of the January 6 insurrection.” Bitch deserved it. The article went on to compare Babbitt’s martyrdom to “Horst Wessel, a German storm trooper killed by communists in 1930, who inspired the eponymous Nazi anthem.

Others claim Trump is liable for the death, that the answer to Who Killed Ashli Babbitt? is Trump. WaPo wrote “The death of Ashli Babbitt offers the purest distillation of Donald Trump’s view of justice,” which apparently means to them Trump supported George Floyd’s killing while mourning Babbitt’s. Daily Beast frets “If the base believes they are being prosecuted and even ‘assassinated’ [like Babbitt] they will justify anything to reject Democratic rule and future elections that deprive them of power.” Sears and Kmart apologized and pulled from sale T-shirts reading “Ashli Babbitt American Patriot” after an outcry on social media. Headlines read “Marjorie Taylor Greene provokes outrage by comparing Ashli Babbitt’s death to George Floyd’s” because Babbitt was OK-shot “while actively participating in a violent riot” and Floyd was murdered by racists.

It is difficult in the face of so much hypocrisy to find the air to comment on the state of our country. Some murders are more equal than others. Dead bodies only matter when they can be used for your sides’ political purposes. How many white conservative deaths does it take to equal one black death? Why are some cops murderers and others protected with anonymity and a free-pass investigation?

The absolute craven transparency of the progressive argument is what gives me hope. Hope that at some point enough Americans will set aside their blind Trump rage, look past the 24/7 propaganda directed at them, and come to realize even murder now only matters for the clicks it generates. Our media is happy to justify Babbitt’s death, seeing it almost in biblical terms for supporting Trump. Floyd, always just a victim of an unjust society.

Ashli Babbitt was put down for our political sins, and her killer escaped justice with the government’s help. Now ain’t that the Democratic vision of America?

*

*The Capitol Police and the Congress which controls them refuse to name the officer who shot Ashli Babbitt to death on January 6. RealClearInvestigations, however, has identified the shooter as Lieutenant Michael Byrd, a black man. Since then, CNN and others have “voluntarily” removed Byrd’s name from hearing transcripts, and his social media has been scrubbed.

wemeantwell.com

The Biden administration announced on Tuesday that guys who can’t get laid may be terrorist threats due to “involuntary celibate–violent extremism.” That revelation is part of a new crackdown that identifies legions of potential “domestic terrorists” that the feds can castigate and investigate. But there is no reason to expect Biden administration anti-terrorism and anti-extremism efforts to be less of a farce and menace than similar post-9/11 campaigns.

Since the French Revolution, politicians have defined terrorism to stigmatize their opponents, a precedent followed by the Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. The report labels the January 6 clash at the Capitol as a “domestic terrorism” incident but fails to mention it spurred a mushroom cloud of increasingly far-fetched official accusations. Capitol Police acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told Congress that January 6 was “a terrorist attack by tens of thousands of insurrectionists.” Less than a thousand protestors entered the Capitol that day but apparently any Trump supporter who hustled down the Mall towards the Capitol became the legal equivalent of Osama Bin Laden. Unfortunately, this “seen walking in the same zip code” standard for guilt could be the prototype for Biden era domestic terrorist prosecutions.

The Biden report did not bestow the same “terrorist” label on the mobs who burned U.S. post offices in Minneapolis or assailed a federal courthouse in Portland last year. In its litany of terrorist incidents, the report cites “the vehicular killing of a peaceful protestor in Charlottesville” at the 2017 Unite the Right ruckus but omits the 49 people killed in 2016 by a Muslim enraged by U.S. foreign policy at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Maybe that case was excluded because the murderer was the protected son of a long-term FBI informant and FBI falsehoods derailed the subsequent trial of his widow. Nor did the report mention the worst terrorist incident since 9/11—the Las Vegas bloodbath where a single shooter killed 58 people and injured 900 others. The FBI claimed it could never find a motive for that slaughter and its “final report” on the incident was only three pages long. Never mind.

The White House claims its new war on terrorism and extremism is “carefully tailored to address violence and reduce the factors that… infringe on the free expression of ideas.” But the prerogative to define extremism includes the power to attempt to banish certain ideas from acceptable discourse. The report warns that “narratives of fraud in the recent general election… will almost certainly spur some [Domestic Violent Extremists] to try to engage in violence this year.” If accusations of 2020 electoral shenanigans are formally labeled as extremist threats, that could result in far more repression (aided by Facebook and Twitter) of dissenting voices. How will this work out any better than the concerted campaign by the media and Big Tech last fall to suppress all information about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election?

The Biden administration is revving up for a war against an enemy which the feds have chosen to never explicitly define. According to a March report by Biden’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “domestic violent extremists” include individuals who “take overt steps to violently resist or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. government in support of their belief that the U.S. government is purposely exceeding its Constitutional authority.” But that was the same belief that many Biden voters had regarding the Trump administration. Does the definition of extremism depend solely on which party captured the White House?

The report notes that the “Department of Defense is reviewing and updating its definition of prohibited extremist activities among uniformed military personnel.” Bishop Garrison, the chief of the Pentagon’s new Countering Extremism Working Group, is Exhibit A for the follies of extremist crackdowns on extremism. In a series of 2019 tweets, Garrison, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, denounced all Trump supporters as “racists.” Garrison’s working group will “specifically define what constitutes extremist behavior” for American soldiers. If Garrison purges Trump supporters from the military, the Pentagon would be unable to conquer the island of Grenada. Biden policymakers also intend to create an “anti-radicalization” program for individuals departing the military service. This initiative will likely produce plenty of leaks and embarrassing disclosures in the coming months and years.

The Biden report is spooked by the existence of militia groups and flirts with the fantasy of outlawing them across the land. The report promises to explore “how to make better use of laws that already exist in all fifty states prohibiting certain private ‘militia’ activity, including…state statutes prohibiting groups of people from organizing as private military units without the authorization of the state government, and state statutes that criminalize certain paramilitary activity.” Most of the private militia groups are guilty of nothing more than bluster and braggadocio. Besides, many of them are already overstocked with government informants who are counting on Uncle Sam for regular paychecks.

As part of its anti-extremism arsenal, DHS is financing programs for “enhancing media literacy and critical thinking skills” and helping internet users avoid “vulnerability to…harmful content deliberately disseminated by malicious actors online.” Do the feds have inside information about another Hunter Biden laptop turning up, or what? The Biden administration intends to bolster Americans’ defenses against extremism by developing “interactive online resources such as skills-enhancing online games.” If the games are as stupefying as this report, nobody will play them.

The Biden report stresses that federal law enforcement agencies “play a critical role in responding to reports of criminal and otherwise concerning activity.” “Otherwise concerning activity”? This is the same standard that turned prior anti-terrorist efforts into laughingstocks.

Fusion Centers are not mentioned in the Biden report but they are a federal-state-local law enforcement partnership launched after 9/11 to vacuum up reports of suspicious activity. Seventy Fusion Centers rely on the same standard—“If you see something, say something”—that a senior administration official invoked in a background call on Monday for the new Biden initiative. The Los Angeles Police Department encouraged citizens to snitch on “individuals who stay at bus or train stops for extended periods while buses and trains come and go,” “individuals who carry on long conversations on pay or cellular telephones,” and “joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of time.” The Kentucky Office of Homeland Security recommended the reporting of “people avoiding eye contact,” “people in places they don’t belong,” or homes or apartments that have numerous visitors “arriving and leaving at unusual hours,” PBS’s Frontline reported. Colorado’s Fusion Center “produced a fear-mongering public service announcement asking the public to report innocuous behaviors such as photography, note-taking, drawing and collecting money for charity as ‘warning signs’ of terrorism,” the ACLU complained.

Various other Fusion Centers have attached warning labels to gun-rights activists, anti-immigration zealots, and individuals and groups “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority.” A 2012 Homeland Security report stated that being “reverent of individual liberty” is one of the traits of potential right-wing terrorists. The Constitution Project concluded in a 2012 report that DHS Fusion Centers “pose serious risks to civil liberties, including rights of free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, racial and religious equality, privacy, and the right to be free from unnecessary government intrusion.” Fusion Centers continue to be bankrolled by DHS despite their dismal record.

The Biden report promises that the FBI and DHS will soon be releasing “a new edition of the Federal Government’s Mobilization Indicators booklet that will include for the first time potential indicators of domestic terrorism–related mobilization.” Will this latest publication be as boneheaded as the similar 2014 report by the National Counterterrorism Center entitled “Countering Violent Extremism: A Guide for Practitioners and Analysts”?

As the Intercept summarized, that report “suggests that police, social workers and educators rate individuals on a scale of one to five in categories such as ‘Expressions of Hopelessness, Futility,’ … and ‘Connection to Group Identity (Race, Nationality, Religion, Ethnicity)’ … to alert government officials to individuals at risk of turning to radical violence, and to families or communities at risk of incubating extremist ideologies.” The report recommended judging families by their level of “Parent-Child Bonding” and rating localities on the basis in part of the “presence of ideologues or recruiters.” Former FBI agent Mike German commented, “The idea that the federal government would encourage local police, teachers, medical, and social-service employees to rate the communities, individuals, and families they serve for their potential to become terrorists is abhorrent on its face.”

The Biden administration presumes that bloating the definition of extremists is the surest way to achieve domestic tranquility. In this area, as in so many others, Biden’s team learned nothing from the follies of the Obama administration. No one in D.C. apparently recalls that President Obama perennially denounced extremism and summoned the United Nations in 2014 to join his “campaign against extremism.” Under Obama, the National Security Agency presumed that “someone searching the Web for suspicious stuff” was a suspected extremist who forfeited all constitutional rights to privacy. Obama’s Transportation Security Administration relied on ludicrous terrorist profiles that targeted American travelers who were yawning, hand wringing, gazing down, swallowing suspiciously, sweating, or making “excessive complaints about the [TSA] screening process.”

Will the Biden crackdown on extremists end as ignominiously as Nixon’s crackdown almost 50 years earlier? Nixon White House aide Tom Charles Huston explained that the FBI’s COINTELPRO program continually stretched its target list “from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.” At some point, surveillance became more intent on spurring fear than on gathering information. FBI agents were encouraged to conduct interviews with anti-war protesters to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox,” as a 1970 FBI memo noted. Is the Biden castigation campaign an attempt to make its opponents fear that the feds are tracking their every email and website click?

Biden’s new terrorism policy has evoked plenty of cheers from his Fourth Estate lapdogs. But a Washington Post article fretted that the administration’s report did not endorse enacting “new legal authority to successfully hunt down, prosecute, and imprison homegrown extremists.” Does the D.C. media elite want to see every anti-Biden scoffer in the land put behind bars? This is typical of the switcheroo that politicians and the media play with the terms “terrorists” and “extremists.” Regardless of paranoia inside the Beltway, MAGA hats are not as dangerous as pipe bombs.

The Biden report concludes that “enhancing faith in American democracy” requires “finding ways to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories.” But permitting politicians to blacklist any ideas they disapprove won’t “restore faith in democracy.” Extremism has always been a flag of political convenience, and the Biden team, the FBI, and their media allies will fan fears to sanctify any and every government crackdown. But what if government is the most dangerous extremist of them all?

theamericanconservative.com