Is The Defund The Police Madness Receding?

June 17th, 2020

Now that the madness and rioting seems to be receding just a bit, so too has the mad enthusiasm for the hard left’s cause of “defunding the police.”

Maybe they finally started reading the polls. Only 16% of Americans support defunding the police, while 65% oppose.

You know who doesn’t want to defund the police? Trayvon Martin’s mom.

In 2012, a young Florida man named Trayvon Martin became a cause célèbre after he attacked a man named George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman was found not guilty of second-degree murder, but the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged from the killing lives on. You might’ve heard about it on the news recently.

Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, is running for county commissioner in Florida and says she disagrees with demands to defund the police that some have called for in the wake of George Floyd’s death, according to the Guardian…

Fulton has kept a close eye on the protests over the death of George Floyd — her son’s death helping spark the Black Lives Matter movement — and told the Guardian she doesn’t agree with calls to “defund the police…”

“I think we need more police,” she said. “We need police with better standards, and police with better ethics and better work habits…”

If large cities actually go ahead and defund the police, it would cost thousands of black peoiple their lives:

Amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, riots, looting, and calls to defund the police, a Harvard economist has found that proactive policing saves black lives.

“Defunding the police is not a solution and could cost thousands of black lives,” Roland Fryer told The College Fix in an interview about his latest research.

“I think the streets are talking and we should listen. People are frustrated,” he continued in the email. He sympathizes with frustration at “big racial differences” in educational achievement, life expectancy and “almost every part of life.”

The youngest African-American professor to receive tenure in Harvard history, Fryer uses a data-driven approach on fraught social issues.

He made waves four years ago with his research on use-of-force incidents by race. It found that black suspects were less likely to be shot by police than white suspects.

His new research is similarly controversial in the media. In a Manhattan Institute video late last month, Fryer exclaimed that he encountered an “absolute refusal to grapple with the data” from the media and “insistence” that he should not publicize it.

Referring to a reporter whom he showed the research, Fryer told The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley: “I thought the person might sit with the numbers for a bit and go, ‘Damn, a thousand lives. That’s a lot.’”

It’s a repeat of the controversy over his 2016 paper on police use of force. Though that research “didn’t find racial bias in shootings,” he told Riley, it “did find very large racial differences in lower level uses of force.”

John Nolte noted that the war on police is a war on black people:

Unless you’ve lived in an inner-city, or ghetto (as we called it back in the day), you honestly can’t imagine what life is like.

During the mid-80s, I spent two years working and living in the inner-city of Milwaukee. My world revolved around 6th and Wisconsin and 35th and Highland (look it up) years before the violent crime decrease of the 90s. On top of that, during the insane 70s, I went to an inner-city school, Jackie Robinson Middle School, on 37th and Fond Du Lac (look it up).

You can write off my experience because I’m a white boy, but my neighbors weren’t white, and during the 80s, my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, wasn’t white, and yet we were all suffering under the same government oppression — the inescapable, suffocating oppression of living in a high crime area.

Believe me, racism was the least of anyone’s problems…

All I can tell you is this… Living in a high crime area is like living in a world where vampires rule. You better be home and behind a locked door before the sun goes down. You might not hang garlic and crucifixes, but you do hang bars on your windows (and hope you don’t have to escape a fire) and install multiple locks on your doors, and you choose the suffocating heat over the cool but dangerous breeze of an open window.

Walking to your car after work when it’s dark (especially for a woman) is a daily dread.

Walking those two or three blocks home after work in the dark from the bus stop (especially for a woman) is a literal act of bravery.

I know what it’s like to come home to find my apartment robbed, to have my car stolen, to get assaulted after turning over my wallet. I know what it’s like to have a drug gang squat in the vacancy down the hall. I know what it’s like to get a panicked call from the woman you love because she’s trapped at work, at a retail store, where a street gang just walked in and announced it was taking over.

And I know how all of this ensures you forever tread water. You can’t get a better job in a nicer area because now you have no car to get to work. You can’t save money to get out, because now all your stuff’s been stolen and you have to replace it. You can’t get a better paying job because the crime long ago scared away the kind of employer who might offer such an opportunity. You live hand-to-mouth, a gerbil on a wheel, so there’s no way to save for the first month, last month, and security deposit on a nicer, safer place.

Yes, we finally got out. It took a measly $900 loan (that took me 15 months to pay back), but lemme tell you, that’s no way to live. There’s nothing romantic about poverty, and when criminals reign, it’s a literal dystopia.

Looking back, even though my skin color made me the racial minority, I don’t ever remember race being an issue with any of my coworkers or neighbors. We were all in it together.

But back to the corruption…

This system is put in place by design, to keep people down, to keep them from becoming a complacent member of the middle class. And if you care enough to take a good look around, to study past and present history, it is a system put in place by Democrats to keep the people who live in these predominantly black neighborhoods poor, angry, desperate, and huddled.

And what wold does the hard left envision after police are abolished? One where they hold the monopoly on force:

While traditional policing implies deputized professionals enforcing laws passed by the legitimate representatives and—it is to be hoped—duty-bound to respect individual rights, Community Armed Defense rejects the individual rights upon which the U.S. system is built in favor of the collective communal “rights” of identity politics. It exists not to uphold law, but to enforce the “political demands” of favored groups.

The image of a volunteer fire department but with guns may suit the anarchist ethos, but in fact Community Self-Defense is about establishing revolutionary shadow governance.

Far from simply providing armed enforcement, the term covers a full panoply of activities, providing all manner of services traditionally provided by the government—from food banks and co-op gardens to housing and medical clinics.

This may seem overly ambitious. But for the revolutionary insurgent it is just good policy. And as a tactic, it works. From the Taliban to FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) to the Mexican drug cartels, the language may be different but the model is the same. Create instability, force out the government, and finally replace it. Reports from Seattle suggest that, already, groups are “requesting” $500 per business owner to help support “community protection and security.”

In areas where the logic of revolutionary politics is operative, those who can provide services and a sense of stability, even for a fee, reign. Whether they were the ones who caused the instability to begin with is immaterial. In revolutionary periods, groups that demonstrate even a modest ability to perform this function should not be underestimated.

Attempts to abolish police, including the most recent Seattle Autonomous Zone, may seem risible. They are likely to be short-lived and collapse upon themselves as revolutionary ardor wanes. But they provide a short-term proof of concept, a propaganda victory, and justification for future efforts. Abolition of the police—whether by groups like Antifa, or through elected radical city councils—is now officially on the menu. The establishment of Community Self-Defense and its standards of collective group rights will represent a kind of de facto regime change.

Have Democrats finally realized they’ve plopped the boiling frog into revolution too quickly, or will victimhood identity politics drag them into the same electoral defeats that breakdowns in law and order have delivered in the past?

“Ordered Signed Book. Received Live Spiders. Would Not Buy From Again.”

June 16th, 2020

This is a pretty crazy story:

Six former eBay Inc. employees have been charged with waging an extensive campaign to terrorize and intimidate the editor and publisher of an online newsletter with threats and disturbing deliveries to their home, including live spiders and cockroaches, federal authorities said Monday.

Executives were upset about the newsletter’s coverage, so their employees set out to ruin the lives of the couple who ran the website, sending a funeral wreath, bloody pig face Halloween mask and other alarming items to their home, authorities said. The employees also sent pornographic magazines with the husband’s name on it to their neighbor’s house and planned to break into the couple’s garage to install a GPS device on their car, officials said.

“This was a determined, systematic effort by senior employees of a major company to destroy the lives of a couple in Natick all because they published content that company executives didn’t like. For a while they succeeded, psychologically devastating these victims for weeks as they desperately tried to figure out what was going on and stop it,” Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling told reporters.

James Baugh, of San Jose, California, who was eBay’s senior director of safety & security, and David Harville, of New York City, who was eBay’s director of global resiliency, are charged with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses. The other former eBay employees charged are Stephanie Popp, former senior manager of global intelligence; Brian Gilbert, former senior manager of special operations for eBay’s Global Security Team; Stephanie Stockwell, former manager of eBay’s Global Intelligence Center; and Veronica Zea, a former eBay contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst in the Global Intelligence Center.

There were no lawyers listed for them in court documents.

Court documents detail how two members of the company’s executive leadership team orchestrated a plot to go after the couple after the newsletter published an article in August 2019 about a lawsuit filed by eBay accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers. The article also discussed an executive, referred only in court documents as “Executive 1,” according to court documents.

A half hour after the article was published, “Executive 1” texted another executive, identified as “Executive 2”: “(Victim 1) is out with a hot piece on the litigation. If you are ever going to take her down..now is the time,” according to court documents.

An online article with the same headline as the one described in court documents shows the person described as “Executive 1” as eBay’s CEO, who was then Devin Wenig.

Wenig stepped down in September and is not charged in the case. On Monday, a person who answered at a phone number listed for Wenig said “we’re not interested,” before hanging up.

In addition to the disturbing deliveries, the employees set up fake social media accounts to send threatening messages to the couple, authorities said. After the bloody pig mask was delivered, the editor received a message saying: “DO I HAVE UR ATTENTION NOW????,” according to court documents. They also posted the couple’s names and address online, advertising things like yard sales and encouraging strangers to knock on the door if they weren’t outside.

It sounds like a regular crime ring:

“All the while, they were hiding behind the internet, using burner phones and laptops, overseas email accounts, and pre-paid debit cards purchased with cash, to try and cover up their alleged crimes and evade and obstruct the Natick Police Department,” Bonavolonta added. The couple lived in Natick, Massachusetts.

Except, of course, for the lack of actual profit involved.

How crazy and/or stupid do you have to be to break federal law to harass a blogger for something they wrote about your giant corporate employer? Especially over a story that was already public news? Especially if you’re a well-compensated executive. Moreover, all have been fired for their efforts.

Pro-Tip: If “corporate loyalty” requires you to break federal law to wreck revenge on someone who said nasty things about your employer, find another job.

Edited to add: Dwight has more on the story.

BidenWatch for June 15, 2020

June 15th, 2020

Biden comes out of his basement and sees his shadow, more questions about China and Ukraine, more veepstakes, and questioning just how much of that #BlackLivesMatter money ActBlue is raking in goes to Biden. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • “Financial Contributions to Black Lives Matter are Being Funneled to Biden Campaign“:

    After reaching the BLM homepage, which features a “Defund The Police” petition front and center, if a user chooses to donate, they’re rerouted to a site hosted by ActBlue and prompted with the message: “We appreciate your support of the movement and our ongoing fight to end state-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people, and end white supremacy forever.”

    Joe Biden is the top beneficiary of the ActBlue’s fundraising efforts.

    Is there any evidence that BLM funds donated through ActBlue aren’t going to Biden? If so, who are the recipients?

  • Reminder: Biden once had a very different view of street disorder and black lives:

  • “Madam president, we have predators on our streets…they are beyond the pale”:

    I’m not sure that highlighting the 1994 crime bill will actually cost Biden votes, but showing videos like this does provide a stark contrast of the Joe Biden of today and the Joe Biden of the past who obviously had a far more functional brain…

  • Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying:

    Creepy Joe Biden is beginning to emerge from the basement again, and the results have not been auspicious thus far.

    Cut to Philadelphia, Wednesday. He was sporting the de rigueur mask, but it was dangling loosely from his left ear, as if he’d forgotten it. That made his statement attacking President Trump (I think) all the more bizarre.

    All dialogue guaranteed verbatim:

    “You know, the rapidly rising uh, um, uh, in with the — with the — I don’t know, uh uh,” he said, finally looking up in utter confusion from his notes.

    “His, his just inability to focus on any federal responsibility,” Biden mumbled, and I don’t believe he’s been seen outside the basement since.

    That latest stumble got a good leaving alone from approximately 99% of the media’s Democrat stenographers. So the next day the Trump campaign manager put out an email demanding that the press’s Democrat rump swabs “stop protecting Biden.”

    “The failure to expose the American people to these rambling displays of incoherence, ineptitude and forgetfulness is depriving voters of a clear picture of Biden’s inability to execute the duties of the office he seeks.”

    Which is exactly why Biden’s comrades in the media are doing their damnedest to keep him under wraps.

  • All of which explains why Democrats want Biden out of sight:

    Staying out of the limelight is good for Biden because the election is not about him. It’s about Trump and his missteps, and Biden is the generic Democratic alternative to another four years of the current administration.

    Biden’s campaign is explicitly trying to define the election based on whether or not to give Trump four more years in office. A slide in a Biden campaign strategy briefing last month said, “This election is a referendum on Trump.”

    “If the country is asked to have an up or down vote on whether or not Donald Trump should receive four more years, the country would say no, and [the Trump campaign] themselves admit it,” Biden campaign strategist Mike Donilon said during the presentation.

    Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe plainly explained why Biden does not need to be out in the open during a video call with a local Democratic group over the weekend.

    “People say all the time, ‘Oh, we got to get the vice president out of the basement,’ He’s fine in the basement,” McAuliffe said. “Two people see him a day: his two body people. That’s it.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Hey hey ho, it’s Word Salad Joe:

  • Biden wants to undo Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reforms:

    Will a Joe Biden presidency derail housing reform and the “recap and release” of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

    The answer is a resounding “yes,” according to housing analysts who have ties to Biden’s economic advisers and their thinking on what might happen to the housing giants, if as current polls suggest, the former vice president unseats Donald Trump and becomes president in November….affordable housing is a significant issue to Biden and he would like to expand Fannie and Freddie’s mandate and likely keep them under government control.

    Of course they do. How else are Democrats supposed to rake off the graft?

  • Stephen Kruiser thinks that now is the time for Trump to start going after Biden:

    We all agreed that Trump has been too tepid lately and not using the instincts that blew up the political world in 2016.

    We are all aware that Joe Biden has benefited greatly from his pandemic-induced basement quarantine. He’s such a train wreck that his handlers are no doubt working overtime to come up with excuses to keep him away from the campaign trail and — more importantly — from sharing a debate stage with President Trump.

    The three of us agreed that President Trump needs to seize the initiative now and start goading Biden to get back in the public eye and into a debate. One of Trump’s greatest gifts is the thing that drives old guard Republicans crazy — his ability to drive a narrative on social media. Now is the time for him to use that bully pulpit and relentlessly bait Biden and force his hand.

    Biden can’t win a Twitter throwdown with Trump. His handlers are tweeting for him and they are not the most inventive lot. His Twitter feed reads like something that came from a book titled “Democrat-y Stuff Candidates Should Say.” It would be very easy for the president to make Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep look awful all day, every day. The end game is to get Biden back in public, of course, but there is an immediate return on investment in a Twitter flame war.

    In my five years of watching Donald Trump in the political arena, the only thing I’ve learned is that Trump probably isn’t going to do what I expect him to do, or think he should, and that what he ends up doing will probably be more effective than what I suggested. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Don’t buy Biden’s new tough on China act:

    Biden spent over three decades opening American markets to Chinese goods, ignoring China’s abhorrent human rights record, and dismissing the challenge posed by our greatest rival for global leadership. The “made in China” era coincided with the closure of tens of thousands of American factories, stagnant working-class wages, and the loss of America’s ability to produce essential goods domestically — a vulnerability that took on incredible significance when we learned that we were dependent upon China to produce the medical equipment needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

    This disaster was facilitated by politicians of both parties, and no one was more gung ho than Joe Biden, the poster child for the globalism that reigned supreme until the 2016 presidential election, which Donald J. Trump won by campaigning on a platform diametrically opposed to the “open markets and open borders” philosophy of the D.C. establishment. In the White House, President Trump became the first American leader in decades to take a firm stand against China’s malfeasance and demand a genuinely fair and reciprocal trade deal for American workers.

    While Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States, conversely, he was downplaying the consequences of China’s rise — even as his own family tried to get rich through deals with Chinese state-owned companies.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Ukraine busts $6M bribe scheme for gas company that hired Hunter Biden.”
  • Biden leading in swing states, yadda yadda yadda. Consider this your periodic reminder that polls are pretty much meaningless this election season. The one poll I dug into, for Texas, undersampled Republicans by about seven points, so expect widespread media falsification of just about every media to help drag Biden over the line.
  • Another reason not to believe those polls: When you ask people who they think will win, a majority agree that President Trump will beat Biden, 51%-37%. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Trump camp slams Biden as obstacle to black-owned business rebound“:

    As data show recent riots and the months-long COVID-19 economic shutdown hurt black-owned businesses more than any other racial group, the Trump campaign slammed rival presidential candidate Joe Biden for a “weak” response to these challenges.

    Democratic governors generally have been more hesitant to reopen their states’ economies than Republicans, leading to criticism from President Trump and his campaign, which argues that delays hurt black-owned enterprises.

    The Trump campaign pointed to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showing there has been a a 41% decline in the number of black business owners from February to April of this year, driven by the COVID-19 shutdown.

    “President Trump’s background as an entrepreneur and builder shapes his passion for protecting, supporting and empowering American black-owned business owners, especially right now,” Paris Dennard, Black Voices for Trump Advisory Board member told Just the News. “Every day Joe Biden fails to strongly call an end to the looting, and rioting in urban cities, more black-owned businesses are destroyed. Every day Joe Biden fails to support efforts to safely and expeditiously re-open the economy, more black businesses are destroyed. The data shows a prolonged economic shutdown hurts black American entrepreneurs, so Joe Biden’s opposition is standing in the way of black generational wealth, growth and opportunities.”

  • More veepstakes pandering. “Among the candidates who have progressed to the point of more comprehensive vetting or have the potential to do so are Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), former national security adviser Susan E. Rice and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, all of whom are black. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is white, is also in that group, as is New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is Latina.”
  • Another veepstakes piece:

    The search committee has been in touch with roughly a dozen women, and some eight or nine are already being vetted more intensively.

    Among that group are two contenders who have recently grown in prominence, Representative Val Demings of Florida and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta. One well-known candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has lost her perch as a front-runner. And some lower-profile candidates, like Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, are advancing steadily in the search process.

    Meaningless boilerplate horse-race verbiage snipped.

    Some of the contenders who have advanced furthest in the process are well known, including Senators Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But The Times confirmed that several other women — whose names have been repeatedly floated but who have not publicly confirmed that they agreed to be vetted for the job — are under active consideration as well.

    Ms. Harris and Ms. Warren have been interviewed at length by Mr. Biden’s team, as has Ms. Baldwin, who was the first openly gay candidate ever elected to the Senate.

    Two women with distinctive national-defense credentials have also been interviewed and asked for documents: Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq war combat veteran who is Asian-American, and Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and the first black woman to serve as ambassador to the United Nations.

    As the vetting process advances to a newly intense phase, the political currents of the last few weeks are also leaving a mark on the Biden team’s deliberations. The wave of demonstrations touched off by the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer there, has elevated a pair of black women long regarded as intriguing long-shot candidates: Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms.

    Though Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms are far less known to the national electorate than other figures on Mr. Biden’s list, they have played crucial roles in a cascading civil rights crisis: Ms. Demings, a former police chief in Orlando, Fla., has become a major figure in the law-enforcement debate, while Ms. Bottoms’s handling of chaotic demonstrations in her city earned her national acclaim.

    For “national acclaim” read “less incompetent than other Democratic mayors.

  • The Biden campaign does some tranny pandering.
  • Oopsie!

  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Video From War-Torn Minneapolis

    June 14th, 2020

    If this is what “mostly peaceful” protestors do, you’d hate to see violent ones.

    Also: Open thread. Talk about whatever you want, just keep it civil.

    Coronavirus in Walker County

    June 13th, 2020

    This is a quick look at varying statistics on the Wuhan coronavirus in one single county in Texas, and why reliable statistics on the coronavirus outbreak are so hard to come by.

    Walker County, Texas is a little over an hour’s drive north of Houston, and is home to the state’s main prison complex in Huntsville, including the execution unit.

    Accord to the Texas DHS coronavirus tracking map, as of today there are 1,098 “estimated active” coronavirus cases in Walker county.

    However, when you go to the website for Walker County itself, it shows precisely 223 listed cases, which it breaks down as “233 reported – 8 duplicates – 2 not county residents.” Indeed it breaks down those number into individual cases, anonymized into case numbers, sex, and age range.

    Moreover, it says that 113 cases have “graduated out” (which I take to mean they’ve had it long enough to be considered recovered and not infectious), meaning there are only 110 active cases, which suggests that (depending on the culling boundary for graduated cases), the state statistics are off by a factor of 5 to 10 times compared to county statistics.

    The county statistics also break down overall statistics, presumably since they began tracking the pandemic:

    Total Positive Cases: 1880
    Total Fatality Cases: 30

    They have an even further breakdown showing fatalities:

    Fatalities Residents: 3
    Case #18, male 70-80
    Case #31, female 60-70
    Case #126, female 80-85
    Positive Cases (Active & Recovered) Offenders: 1657
    Fatalities Offenders: 27
    Byrd – 1
    Ellis – 1
    Estelle – 10
    Goree – 1
    Wynne – 14

    Byrd, Ellis, Estelle, Goree and Wynne are particular prisons inside the Texas Prison System in Walker County, with Wynne and Estelle being the largest prisons. So only 10% of coronavirus deaths were that of free Walker County citizens, the rest were of prison inmates. This suggests that the prison system did indeed bungle its response to the coronavirus. (Here’s a Texas Tribune piece on poor conditions inside Wynne. The caveat is that the Texas Tribune only seems to report crime stories when either A.) The story is too big to ignore, or B.) Those stories might somehow reflect badly on Republicans.) Also, as reported in yesterday’s LinkSwarm, a change in the way Texas prisons count coronavirus cases led a noticeable jump in reported cases in Jefferson County. Without more details on those changes, it’s hard to understand whether they’re justified or how they impact the statistics in other counties with prisons.

    But the disparity between county and state on active case statistics on a single county for which we have readily available hard data suggests that the state level statistics can’t be trusted, which in turn suggests that overall coronavirus statistics can’t be trusted.

    So when you look at those fancy, impressive coronavirus tracking maps, realize that what you’re looking at probably has only the most tenuous connection to the truth.

    So treat any “breaking news” about dramatic jumps in coronavirus case numbers (and let’s face it, those are the only numbers our MSM will deem worthy of reporting) with severe skepticism.

    LinkSwarm For June 12, 2020

    June 12th, 2020

    Riots! Guns! Social Justice Warriors! Animated police dogs! Today’s LinkSwarm is packed to its furry ears…

  • The fire this time:

    This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.

    You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.

    When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.

    There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.

    The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.

    Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.

    We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.

    All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.

    The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.

  • Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
  • Looters in California stole a forklift to break into stores.
  • When Democratic Party race-pandering backfires.
  • There’s previous little evidence that black lives matter to Democratic politicians:

    Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.

    If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.

    They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”

    They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is ­entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.

    But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Secondary evidences suggest that the Wuhan Coronavirus was already ravaging Wuhan in September and October of last year.
  • Texas suffers a jump in number of Wuhan coronavirus cases reported. But is it real?

    Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.

    Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.

    Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.

    Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.

    Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.

  • The Bonfire of Wokeness claims the founder and editor of feminist Refinery29. Remember, you can never, ever be woke enough…
  • Andrew Sullivan gagged for having non-PC thoughts. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Thou Shalt Not Criticise Black Lives Matter

    To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.

    For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.

  • Well, this is just great: “FCC failed to monitor Chinese telecoms for almost 20 years.”
  • Meant to post this last week: “Whitmer Lifts Stay-at-Home Order Now That People Need to Go Out and Riot.”
  • Canadian professor fired for pointing out that biological sex is real. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Social Justice Warriors at Cornell are trying to get Legal insurrection’s William Jacobson fired for #wrongthink.
  • You know what really sucks? Having your store looted. “They tell me ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They’re lying…I’m black, look what you did to my store.”
  • Black gun owners guard businesses to protect against looting in Minneapolis.”
  • Eleven times gun owners defended life and property.
  • The gun debate is over.

    We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later

    The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.

    There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.

    Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.

  • West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
  • San Diego County government ordered hotels not to take guests unless they were “essential” workers. This strikes me as an unconstitutional taking…
  • Work privilege:

  • San Francisco’s mass transit agency announces it will no longer transport San Francisco police to riots.
  • The Republican National Convention has been moved to Jacksonville.
  • Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:

    The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.

    They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.

    Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • It’s a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization:

    “These ideas are wrong.”

  • Wokeness comes for the New York Times:

    For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.

    Snip.

    The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.

    It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.

  • Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:

    “One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”

  • Important questions:

  • Welcome to the Year Zero:

  • President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.

    President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.

    The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

    The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.

    “The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.

    Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.

    What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?

  • The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
  • Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
  • Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
  • Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
  • Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”

  • Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
  • “Democrats Propose Replacing All Police With Traveling Bands Of Hippies Singing ‘Imagine.'”
  • And speaking of damn dirty hippies, Dwight has this CBS scoop from 1967.
  • World War II bomber story: Two planes, one crash landing. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Leftwing Madness: Defund The Police And Let Slip The Dogs of Anarchy

    June 11th, 2020

    The hard left has gone from crazy to super-mega-crazy in less than two weeks.

    First is the sudden irrational enthusiasm for defunding the police:

    DEFUND THE POLICE! DEFUND THE POLICE! What seemed like a crazy slogan on the far left is threatening to become a reality in some places around the country. On Sunday the president of the Minneapolis City Council announced that a two-thirds majority of the council now supports “ending the Minneapolis Police Department.” Council members said they will be “taking intermediate steps towards ending the MPD through the budget process and other policy and budget decisions over the coming weeks and months.”

    You ask what that means when someone commits a murder and they’re all “I dunno!”

    Early signs are not encouraging:

    On Sunday, a record 18 people were killed in Chicago in the worst single day of violence in 60 years, since the University of Chicago’s crime lab began keeping records in 1961. In total, over the weekend, 92 were shot and 27 succumbed to their wounds. All of the pictures of the known victims indicate they were African-Americans. And unlike with coronavirus, nearly all the victims were very young with much more life to live. Who is going to kneel on the ground for them? Who is going to pass legislation deterring repeat violent offenders, ending bail and parole for career criminals, and prescribing tougher sentences on gun felons? Well, certainly not the people using George Floyd’s death to promote the exact opposite.

    The reality is that at least 17 people have been killed so far during the riots. However, as we see from Chicago and other cities, an unknown number – possibly totaling in the hundreds – have died likely as the result of police taking a hands-off approach to their work. The results of the riots and the war on cops are more deadly for African-Americans than anything imaginable.

    Snip.

    Police are getting beaten and can’t defend themselves lest they face prosecution. Over 300 NYPD officers have been injured in the riots. Few will see justice. In Los Angeles, the prosecutor announced that few rioters will face charges and all those who violated curfew will be free from criminal charges. In Chicago alone, in just nine days, 2,665 arrests have been made for civil unrest and disorderly, 788 arrests for looting, and 525 guns recovered. Watch for the same people who claim to abhor guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens to suddenly ignore these gun crimes.

    What is the point of being a cop in America today? According to the FBI, in 2018, there were 58,866 assaults against law enforcement officers, resulting in 18,005 injuries. You almost never heard about them. God knows how many are taking place today. The resignations and retirements will continue while new recruitment will be nonexistent. The ones who don’t resign will be fired unless they kneel to the mob, like one police chief in Michigan who was forced out after voicing support for people engaging in open carry to protect their families from the politically untouchable rioters.

    Want a preview of what the future looks like? Los Angeles homicides are up 250% during the riot week.

    The notion that dangerous cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York will suddenly become feel-good hugfests if their police departments are defunded is patently absurd. The fact that they’ve all just experienced elevated levels of violence that have been perpetrated by the very people making the defund demand is indicative of just how bat-you-know-what crazy the mainstream American left has become. They can’t be left in charge of anything.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    Did you notice that Seattle antifa just declared their own autonomous zone there and occupied City Hall while the police just retreat? How’s that working out?

    Remember that Antifa is a violent revolutionary communist organization:

    Antifa—real name: Antifaschisitsche Aktion—was born during the street-fights of the 1932 Weimar Republic. It was founded by the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany (KPD), although various Communist “anti-fascist defense” units were associated with the KPD much earlier.

    Anti-fascist Action’s sole purpose was to help the KPD combat other political parties for control of the streets in the revolutionary politics of the rapidly failing Weimar Republic.

    And yes, they fought the Nazis.

    But they also fought liberal parties, conservative parties, and anyone and everyone who got in their way. While these early antecedents were short-lived, it is useful to view Antifa in this context. More than anything, Antifa exists to serve as a tool of revolutionary politics in a failed (or failing) state.

    Antifa would reestablish itself in the early 1980s, also in Germany, out of Autonomism. Autonomism is an anti-authoritarian anarcho-Marxist ideology associated with the Communist urban guerilla organizations of 1970s and ’80s Europe like Red Army Faction and the Red Brigade. Autonomism would find a home among the young punks of Germany’s squatters’ rights movement. Around this time, Antifa tactics like the “black block,” where large numbers of rioters dress in black and move together in formation as part of a larger protest, were developed.

    Antifa would form in a similar fashion in the United States, but under a different name.

    According to Antifa lore, an effort by young punks to expel neo-Nazis and white supremacists from the music scene led to the formation of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), beginning in the Midwest and then spreading outward. As chapters formed in various cities, regional councils and networks were formed, such as the Midwest Anti-Fascist Network (MAFN) in 1995.

    But present at the birth of ARA were members of America’s long-time revolutionary clique, with roots going all the way back to the domestic terror group Weather Underground. Consulting the young anti-racist punks in the formation of ARA were members of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (JBAKC). Several separate ARAs would go on to form one of the largest Antifa networks in the country, Torch Antifa, whose website was registered by a former JBAKC member.

    JBAKC was formed as a front for the May 19th Communist Organization (MCO), itself founded out of the remnants of the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, the FALN and other terrorist groups of the ’60s and ’70s. (May 19 was chosen since it was the birthday of both Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh.)

    Following a split in the Weather Underground leadership over whether to emphasize class or racial struggle, the MCO emphasized working for “black liberation.” Members of the MCO were responsible for several bombings and robberies in the 1980s, including the infamous 1981 Brinks Armored Car Robbery.

    (Hat tip: Powerline.)

    The difference between 60s radicals and today’s radicals? Better funding, better organization, and deeper penetration into American institutions:

    But there’s a difference, and it’s the leftism of a much larger segment of the American public, the willingness of virtually the entire MSM to voluntarily become Pravda, the courts’ desire to play along as well, the amount of money supporting the movement, and what I see as the increasing sophistication of the violent forces such as Antifa who are ready to exploit any and every incident that lends itself to it.

    The 60s radicals were relative amateurs. These people, less so, at least in terms of organization. And we have not yet seen the worst of it.

    A few more links about the current leftwing madness:

  • Know who doesn’t want to defund the police? Joe Biden.
  • Know who else? Houston’s Democratic Mayor Sylvester Turner. Houston just passed a small increase to the police budget.
  • Uncomfortable truths:

    While it sounds great to attribute Floyd’s death to the racism built into the culture, what few are willing to do is analyze that culture. So why don’t we look into the system where this crime took place?

    To start, you have as the city Mayor, Jacob Frey, an avowed leftist who follows a string of Democratic liberal leaders. The last time a Republican was elected to run the city was 1957. The police chief of Minneapolis is Medaria Arradondo, a black police official. The federal representative for the city, in Washington, is the famed female POC Ilhan Omar, and the top cop for the state is another POC and former head of the DNC, Attorney General Keith Ellison. Are these the leaders perpetuating the culture of white supremacy?

    Just to add to the list, you have Minnesota headed by Democrat Tim Walz, the state is served by two Democrat senators, including Amy Klobuchar who spent years as an acting state attorney in a few offices, and even the sister city of Saint Paul has as its Mayor, Melvin Carter, another POC leader. These would be the people operating the ‘’racist and prejudicial system and culture’’. Looking over these names, note how few have incurred the wrath and blame over the past week, while President Trump has been pointed at as responsible.

  • More uncomfortable truths:

    This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
    In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
    The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

  • “A man who threatened to burn down Manhattan’s Diamond District, which is largely populated by Orthodox Jews, has been taken into custody.”
  • “CNN: ‘Death Star Destroys Alderaan In Mostly Peaceful Demonstration.'”
  • Project Veritas Goes Inside Antifa

    June 10th, 2020

    Once again Project Veritas has managed to plant people inside an institution to obtain footage inside an organization. This time it’s Antifa. The first two videos focus on violent fighting tactics:

    The next video focuses on “Redneck Revolt,” the gun-toting, rural militia wing of antifa:

    In 2018, Redneck Revolt was already talking about “abolishing the police.” Also “If you want to hunt down police you’ll have to do it on your own time.”

    For an organization that doesn’t exist, they certainly have a lot of chapters.

    I’m hoping additional Project Veritas videos will focus on the group’s command and control structure.

    Scott Adams Interviewed

    June 9th, 2020

    Here’s podcaster, tech investor and conservative orthogonal thinker Hotep Jesus (born Bryan Sharpe) interviewing Dilbert creator and persuasion expert Scott Adams on a wide variety of topics.

    A wide-ranging discussion of the Wuhan coronavirus, race relations, etc. Food for thought.

    BidenWatch for June 8, 2020

    June 8th, 2020

    I know people have been busy focusing on all the rioting and other Social Justice Warrior insanity, but the inexorable march toward the November general election continues, and first up is Biden passing a big milestone. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Joe Biden has officially earned enough delegates to clinch the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination.
  • Bloomberg has him at 2,004 pledged delegates, exceeding the threshold of 1,991, plus 372 “super delegates.”
  • So just how is Grandpa Simpson going to adapt to a party where a significant fraction of the young members are rioting and want to abolish police departments? He would like a word with “the youths.”

    Three and a half years later, as American streets fill nightly with young protesters, no one can quite agree on where Joe Biden stands. Is he running ahead of Clinton among the youngest voters owing to their hatred of Trump — and therefore even more securely buckled into the electoral driver’s seat than widely assumed? Or is Biden lagging dangerously behind Clinton’s pace — far enough back that he needs to significantly retool his youth outreach to beat Trump, no matter how unexpectedly strong his position may be among traditionally Republican groups like older voters and suburbanites? And, most urgently, have the recent weeks of unrest simply served to highlight the vast divisions between Biden and Trump — whose unacceptability to younger Americans deepens by the day — or are they instead underscoring a significant disillusionment with all politics, in particular among young black voters, that could spell trouble for the Democrat?

    The confusion is understandable: One CNN analysis of national polling in April showed Biden roughly ten points short of where Clinton was among 18-to-34-year-olds after he was routinely destroyed by Bernie Sanders among this group in the primaries. But the well-respected Harvard Institute of Politics’ poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released a few days later placed Biden right around the 60 percent goal Mook had mentioned, and the former vice-president has consistently led national polls of the entire electorate. Plus, while many Democrats are worried that the protests show young voters ready to make a significant break from voting as a tool of politics as usual, others are convinced they are actually energizing this group to become further involved — usually pointing to the voter-mobilization groups boasting blockbuster registration numbers in recent days.

    This ambiguity has led Democrats to their strategically safest conclusion: They might as well step things up. So in recent weeks, Biden ramped up his digital-outreach hiring and announced the launch of a new, discrete effort within his campaign to marshal resources specifically around organizing young voters. He’s appeared on new kinds of platforms for him, like Megan Rapinoe’s Instagram Live and with Don Cheadle on The Shade Room, while party groups focused on youth turnout, like the Tom Steyer–funded NextGen America, have formally begun orienting more of their programs toward electing him. And, as the protests over the police killing of George Floyd have grown, those close to Biden have been considering calls for him to directly address his involvement with the 1994 crime bill as a way of engaging young black voters about his own growth, and assuaging their concerns. (One Wilmington youth pastor last week urged Biden to do so directly; Stacey Abrams, a potential Biden running mate, soon after told me, “If that is what young people need, then that is what they should have.”)

    Here’s the new head of Biden’s youth outreach group:

    Some polling and wishful thinking strategy talk snipped.

    Senior Democrats see that the youngest voters clearly prefer Biden to Trump, but they still need to organize them to actually vote for the man who, according to CNN’s analysis, won only 16 percent of Democratic primary voters under 30. “A lot of Biden’s support [among young voters] is soft support, so he has to shore up youth support, but also make sure to target all the people who say they don’t know and might vote third party,” explained Ben Wessel, the executive director of NextGen, which endorsed Biden in May and has pledged to spend $45 million this year. “What’s really clear is that Trump has a ceiling of about 33 percent with these folks — I don’t think there’s any risk they’re going to go to Trump. [Democrats] just have to make sure they’re going to Biden.” Now, especially amid the protests, senior Democrats have identified this task as a top priority for Biden — many believe he needs to work hardest to reach black and Latino Americans who feel disengaged from politics and not just the ones who supported Sanders in the primary.

    In late May, the Biden team announced steps it would take toward these ends, forming an effort it calls “League 46” to bring the campaign’s various youth-outreach strands under one umbrella hoisted by senior adviser Symone Sanders. The idea is to have a centralized hub for the campaign’s youth organizing and also to mobilize surrogates, including young lawmakers and activists, to expand Biden’s network with youth voters through events like Zoom happy hours. Already, organizers have held a handful of virtual brunches for young battleground-state voters that are focused on specific topics, like policies to support minority-owned small businesses.

    Yeah, there’s nothing young people love more than Zoom happy hours and brunch.

    Still, some of the usual tools for organizing students may be of limited use in the coming months if colleges begin the fall semester virtually. Wessel, whose group has a major presence on swing-state campuses, pointed out that most students would still likely be in the states where they go to school, but at home. That makes messaging to large groups of students at once trickier, and Democrats are making plans to be as present as possible on the virtual versions of those quads and dorms: “There are so many campus-based meme pages where you can spread content dedicated to people usually on those campuses,” he said. He cited the University of Wisconsin at Madison as an example: The “UW-Madison Memes for Milk-Chugging Teens” Facebook group has nearly 28,000 members; the school has around 32,000 undergraduates.

    I could quote more about their digital outreach plans, but it’s right there where political speak, marketing speak, and tech speak collide, and “engagement” is built on abstractions of abstractions of abstractions, without the benefit of hard-dollar results to measure effectivity. “What is the way to do TikTok that is substantive, on brand for him, and allows him to be the version of himself that has, historically, resonated with young people?” Why, is this not hell?

  • “Hey Joe, where do you stand on defunding police?” “A refund for Grease? Never saw it!”
  • Police unions are not fond of the “new” SJW-approved Biden.
  • President Donald Trump sees an opening:

  • “In the last week alone, two prospects who were initially not considered among the top tier [Vice Presidential] contenders have suddenly burst into contention: Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Florida Rep. Val Demings.” Guess what they have in common.
  • Colin Powell backs Biden. Needles moved: None.
  • Zing!

  • Evidently BidenMarch is an organization that wants another candidate at the top of the ticket because Biden isn’t woke enough. Will they succeed? Eh, probably not. DNC might still replace Biden as they candidate, but BidenMarch will have jack-all to do with it…
  • Shot and three chasers:

  • I repeat myself when under stress I repeat myself when under stress I repeat myself when under stress I repeat—

    

  • Facepalm:

  • Heh:

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