"As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions." — James Madison, National Gazette Essay, 1792
Investigators were trying to determine Sunday what may have motivated a 30-year-old man [Shannon Miles, black] accused of ambushing a uniformed suburban Houston sheriff’s deputy [Darren Goforth, white] filling his patrol car with gas in what authorities believe was a targeted killing.
Well, I can help them with that. Let’s start with the obvious. Shannon Miles (a black man) is a crazy guy, just as Dylann Roof (the white man from the Charleston church shootings) is a crazy guy and Vester Lee Flanagan (the black man who killed his white co-workers at a Virginia TV station the other day) was a crazy guy. The latter two claimed they wanted to start a race war. No word yet on Miles, but if we believe in what our grandmothers told us — that actions speak louder than words — he’s already more than half way there.
Also obvious, Barack Obama and Eric Holder (and now Loretta Lynch) are to blame for encouraging an atmosphere of racial divisiveness and, yes, hatred in our society. Anyone honest can see — and the polls have reported — a serious increase in racial tension and violence (Baltimore, Ferguson, etc.) since the beginning of the Obama administration. The racist-to-the-core “Black Lives Matter” movement is quite simply their evil spawn.
Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin (a regular on Fox News) calls the “Black Lives Matter” movement the “Black Lies Matter.” In an interview with Judge Jeanine Pirro a few nights ago on Justice with Judge Jeanine Clarke said that Obama and Holder laid the groundwork for “this war on police” by supporting ‘activists’ who have disparaged law enforcement based upon a set of lies.”
He continued by saying “I am too pissed off tonight to be diplomatic with what’s going on and I’m not going to stick my head in the sand about it. I said last December war had been declared on the American police officer led by some high profile people, one coming out of the White House, and one coming out of the United State Department of Justice. And it’s open season right now. No doubt about it…
…I’m tired of people calling these black activists. They’re not black activists. This is black slime and it needs to be eradicated from American society. I need every law abiding person in America to stand up and start pushing back against this slime. (It should be noted that Sheriff Clarke is black and elected as a Democrat)
On August 31st Sheriff Clarke said during an interview on Fax and Friends. Clarke pointed out that the headline of that tragic story should be “Black Man Shoots White Defenseless Police Officer,” since Black Lives Matter activists always point out when it’s a white officer shooting a black man.
“President Obama has breathed life into this ugly movement,” Clarke stated. “It is time now for good, law-abiding Americans to rise up like they did in Houston around that Chevron station, an outpouring. But it can’t just be symbolic we now have to counter this slime, this filth coming out of these cop haters.”
Clarke asserted that the Black Lives Matter movement is nothing more than an attempt to weaken the institution of policing.
“If there’s anything that needs to be straightened out in this country, it is the subculture that has risen out of the under-class in the American ghetto,” Clarke said. “Fix the ghetto, and you will see a lesser need for assertive police officers or policing in these areas, and then you’ll see less confrontation. Stop trying to fix the police. Fix the ghetto.”
Illinois grandmother Peggy Hubbard blasted the Black Lives Matter movement last week in an emotional Facebook video, which has gone viral.
Hubbard said that Black Lives Matter activists are focusing on police brutality instead of incidents like the tragic death of Jamyla Bolden, a 9-year-old Ferguson, Missouri, girl who was fatally struck by a stray bullet in her mother’s bedroom while doing her homework.
“You say black lives matter? Her life mattered. Her dreams mattered. Her future mattered. Her promises mattered,” Hubbard said. “Police brutality? How about black brutality?”
On the Hannity show Hubbard said “that anti-police activists don’t want to face reality.”
“We want to glorify the criminals, the bad guys. We want to glorify them and give credence to their life. What contributions did they make?” Hubbard asked.
“It’s not a black issue. This is not a white issue. It’s a human issue. It’s an accountability issue. It’s a responsibility issue. That is what it is,” Hubbard said. “They made this about race. This was never about race. This was about right and wrong.”
Milwaukee Country Sheriff David Clarke joined the program and said that 75 percent of the problems in the black community are self-inflicted.
He pointed to things like father-absent homes, drug and alcohol abuse, poor schools and failure to stay in the workforce.
“The other 25 percent are inflicted by the Democratic Party with their modern liberalism, which is conduct without borders,” Clarke said. “They reward underachievement, they make excuses for criminal behavior like black-on-black crime, and they blame everybody else for the problems that go on within our community.”
When we talk about growing violence in America’s larger cities we frequently focus on New York and Baltimore (and for good reason). But the nation’s capital has been experiencing its own problems along those lines lately. A rather chilling recounting of some of these “local stories” provides the backdrop for a recent column in the Washington Post by Colbert I. King.
Due to the lack of coverage by the mainstream media on the goings on in the nation’s capital I’ll confess that some of the stories of violence and mayhem King is talking about were completely unknown to me, leading King to compare Washington to “the wild west.” One example is the case where the Metro had decided to wave the white flag and stop running bus lines after dark to a particular section of Elvans Road SE because somebody had been shooting at the bus. (After public outcry, the Metro retreated from their decision and sent the buses back anyway.) This was followed by more people being gunned down in the streets and in their homes this month.
King notes that a greater police presence might not make much of a difference because the criminals really don’t seem to care. In one of the most shocking bits of evidence presented, three people were shot one night on Missouri Avenue NW. Sadly, that might not have been a notable enough event these days to raise an eyebrow if it weren’t for one thing… it happened within eyesight of the 4th District police headquarters.
So what’s the solution if you can’t just throw more cops at the problem? Mr. King offers some tough medicine which certain high profile activists these days aren’t going to want to hear. Read this portion carefully.
“Not to get all existential, but the problem is much deeper than synthetic drugs, high-capacity gun magazines, turf wars, rejiggering police deployment or keeping an eye on repeat violent offenders.
We have on our hands — in our neighborhoods, on our streets and maybe living next door — walking disasters: individuals who believe that their lives matter, but not yours or mine. Neither do our laws and institutions.
The Wild West’s outlaws felt that way, too. But it didn’t turn out so well for them. Won’t for ours, either, in the long run.
The challenge, as always: to keep our potential outlaws from going down that path. That’s not up to the police. Look at the faces of the killers and their victims. It’s on us — parents, preachers, politicians, community pontificators — all who profess that black lives matter, to prove it.”
For some reason it’s always tough for anyone taking part in the public discussion to try to bring up the staggering amount of violence which takes place in our cities. (See my blog: Fact vs. Fiction) Because the phenomenon occurs largely in the most economically depressed areas, this largely falls within the black community. Rather than focusing strictly on violence which happens between the races, conversations such as this need to keep in mind that the FBI’s homicide data for 2013 (the latest year available) shows that 2,491 black Americans were murdered. Of those, only 189 were committed by whites while 2,245 (90%) were done in by black suspects. (It should be noted that the same report will show that the vast majority of white homicide victims (83%) were killed by other whites and 14% by blacks.) The vast majority of this can be chalked up to gang activity in the cities. There’s a big problem with violence inside the community, but these conversations are generally cut short any time a white politician or journalist tries to bring it up.
Note that of these 5,723 homicides (not 30,000 as the left-wing media reports) between 64.7% (West region) and 72.1% (Midwest region) were committed with firearms. This 2013 FBI report is loaded with statistics and one could spend hours perusing it. This should be the job of the mainstream media and their talking heads, but it seems that they don’t have time for the facts!
When an analysis from an African-American writer like King treads into these waters, specifically name checking the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s sure to raise a fuss. But it’s also a reality that needs to be dealt with. Reforms in some police procedures, better training and body cameras are all positive steps, no doubt. But if you really want to cut down on the number of deadly encounters between black citizens and the police, it’s never going to happen until a way is found to drive down the crime rates significantly and we start giving the cops a reason not to be policing those high crime communities so heavily. That’s not race war talk, folks. It’s just math.
Kurt Schlichter writes in Townhall.com:
“In the wake of yet another killing spree by an Obama voter, there were the predictable calls to “do something” about guns. It was no shock that the liberals’ preferred solution to the problem of Democrat mainstream media personalities murdering people because of their racial and sexual grievances was to disarm everyone who isn’t a Democrat mainstream media personality who murders people because of his racial and sexual grievances. But what was shocking was how quickly the anti-civil rights left moved on to pursue other tyrannies.
Liberals initiated their “guns are bad” mental macro before the killer had even botched his suicide – the serial bungling of enterprises like the VA becomes more understandable when you see how a liberal can’t even blow his brains out right. Liberal media types immediately started blaming the NRA members who did not do it instead of their fellow media liberal who did. An unconfirmed rumor has it the first reporter who actually finds a mass shooter who is a member of the NRA will get a new Prius from Michael Bloomberg.”
…
“Yet within 24 hours of the hideous murders, the liberals stopped talking about gun control. Obama was back dodging the Senate’s treaty approval power to give the Iranians the bomb. Hillary, whose campaign strategy is to try to out-nationalist and out-socialist Bernie Sanders, was busy comparing GOP candidates to national socialists – though this time, she did not mean it as a compliment. Even Mia Farrow had fallen silent again, taking a break from lecturing her fellow citizens and returning to her usual pastime of making good romantic choices.
Clearly, had the killer not checked the box for every key demographic the Democrats depend on – black, gay, media, liberal, loser – we would be hearing a lot more about it. But there is another reason the liberals moved on besides the inconvenient fact that, as usual, it was one of theirs doing the killing. The left has lost on gun control.”
Let me just say first of all that anyone who thinks I am being callous with the above headline hasn’t spent most of their day the last week watching cable news, like I have. Obviously, the deaths of Alison Parker and Adam Ward were a tragedy and I don’t want to minimize the loss and suffering of their family and friends. But the media’s treatment of this story has long since passed honest respect for the untimely passing of two young people and wandered into obvious sermonizing on the evils of guns. What’s happening now isn’t news coverage; it’s ghoulish capitalizing on a tragedy for ratings and politics.
The reason for the obsession with these two particular crimes is obvious, and has nothing to do with the crimes themselves – it has to do with what the crimes are useful for. The victims are telegenic people and their families and friends all appear to be media savvy. They were killed by a gun and therefore this story provides a perfect vehicle for the activists in the media to push their narrative on gun control.
Consider that Adam Ward’s father has been given almost pro forma coverage throughout this entire ordeal, and that his remembrances of his son have been completely ignored. Meanwhile virtually the entire country can now identify Alison Parker’s dad. Both have similar stories to tell. Why is one on camera perpetually while the other might as well not exist in this story? Because Alison Parker’s dad dutifully stumps for gun control every time the lens is on him and Adam Ward’s dad stated the obvious in his one interview on the subject: stricter gun control laws wouldn’t have kept guns out of the hands of his son’s killer, since the Vester Lee Flanagan successfully passed a mandatory background check before purchasing his gun in the first place.
The media does not give a damn about Alison Parker and Adam Ward, nor the grief of their families. They are using both them and everyone around them because of the spectacle value and because it helps promote a political agenda they believe in. This transparent emotional manipulation at the expense of the legitimate grief of a family that has suffered loss is absolutely sickening to me.
Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman says that Deputy Sheriff Darren Goforth was targeted because of his uniform. Hickman is referring to the wild, violent, hateful rhetoric coming from black activists who have called for the murder of police in recent weeks.
According to Reuters
“Hickman linked the shooting to anti-police rhetoric following protests against deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white officers. Goforth was white, the suspect is black.
He said the department assumed Goforth was a target because he wore a uniform, and bluntly addressed protests against police violence and mass incarceration of blacks.
"We've heard black lives matter; all lives matter. Well cops' lives matter too," Hickman said. "At any point where the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated cold-blooded assassination of police officers happen(s), this rhetoric has gotten out of control," said Hickman.
The fatal shooting comes eight months after two New York police officers were ambushed by a gunman who had said he wanted to avenge the deaths of black men in confrontations with police.
Hundreds of people attended a vigil on Saturday night.
"I wanted to demonstrate that all lives matter, regardless of color," Carol Hayes, an African American woman, told a local NBC News affiliate.”
There is no comparison between charges of conservative "hate speech" leading to shootings and the ultra-violent, nauseating calls for the outright murder of police by black activists:
“Two teenage girls told Breitbart Texas they saw the shooter fire one shot into the back of the head of the deputy who was simply getting gas for his vehicle. After the deputy fell, they heard three or four other shots. According to the first witness, those shots were fired into the deputy’s back.
The execution of the deputy came just days after black radicals went on an internet radio show hosted from Texas and called for the lynching of white people and the killing of cops to “turn the tide” against blacks being killed by cops. Breitbart Texas reported on Friday morning the details of the radio show and the comments that were made.
One black man spoke up saying they needed to kill “cops that are killing us. The other black male on the show said, “That will be the best method right there.”
On August 29, 2015 Chuck Ross wrote in the Daily Caller:
“Black Lives Matter protesters marching on the Minnesota state fair on Saturday spewed violent anti-cop rhetoric just hours after a Harris County, Tex. sheriff’s deputy was ambushed and executed at a Houston-area gas station.
“Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” activists with the St. Paul, Minn. branch of Black Lives Matter chanted while marching behind a group of police officers down a highway just south of the state fair grounds.”
The White House hasn't deemed it proper to comment on the killing of Deputy Goforth - what's the life of one more policemen more or less seems to be the attitude. Of course, if they acknowledge the deputy's death, they have to answer questions about what role their encouragement of this violent rhetoric had on the execution.
The silence on the left about Deputy Goforth's execution speaks to a towering hypocrisy that reveals their concern about violent rhetoric only applies to their political enemies.
Barack Obama won’t be saying, “If I had a psycho son, he’d look like Vester Lee.” But he might as well. Because Vester Lee Flanagan II, the bigoted maniac who murdered the WDBJ reporter and cameraman on live TV, was a philosophical offspring of the Left.
It’s well known now that Flanagan was a professional victim, nurturing grudges against all and sundry based on his “status” as a homosexual black man. He had an axe to grind with white women because they supposedly made racial statements to him, and against black men because they supposedly directed anti-homosexual remarks his way. And it didn’t seem as if he liked anyone very much.
Of course, most of the bigotry he perceived from others was in his head, a function of his own prejudice, inculcated via decades of liberal indoctrination. When you dislike others, you view them through tinted lenses and ascribe negative motivations to everything they do. Where a fair-minded individual might interpret a comment as innocuous, simply a misunderstanding or an example of the issuer merely having a bad day, you see malice. “Of course it was racial! That’s the way white people are.” And, “That had to be ‘homophobic’ in this society, which macro and micro-aggresses against everything that I am!” (of course, certain things are supposed to be stigmatized). These notions, again, were put in Flanagan’s mixed-up head by liberals and liberals alone. They disgorge hateful, pure and utter nonsense such as micro-aggression theory, “white privilege,” critical-race theory and 1000 other things designed to divide with lies. It is evil.
To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, “Goods look a lot better when they come wrapped as gifts.” Everything is a gift, but the Left teaches just the opposite: to have a sense of entitlement, to believe you’re owed, to ever and always view our very large glass as half empty. Some have asked, quite naively, how it is that despite Flanagan’s pathetic performance as a reporter, he was hired by more than one media outlet and given chance after chance to right the ship. Well, golly gee, Cletus, it’s a mystery.
Flanagan was clearly an affirmative-action hire, enjoying the daily-double victim status of being black and homosexual. And that was part of the problem: too much was given to him on a silver platter — because of liberalism.
There have been many articles in recent years about how college graduates today enter the workforce with unrealistic expectations about their economic self-worth and starting salary. We hear about how so many of them can’t tolerate criticism and rejection; act as if their own feelings are inordinately important and should command respect; and how they lack a sense of propriety, a grasp of their place in a workplace’s hierarchy. As a consequence, they may barge into an office to vent their feelings, even if it’s neither the time nor the place.
This is all the result of liberal parenting, of the psychobabble disgorged by the likes of Dr. Benjamin Spock. It’s no wonder many young people today have little sense of just hierarchies — their permissive liberal parents didn’t establish a just hierarchy in the home. Instead, they acted as if their family was a dysfunctional democracy and junior a special-interest group that political correctness dictated must be coddled and catered to. Junior seldom heard the word “No!” uttered in exclamatory fashion; junior seldom had to delay gratification; junior got participation trophies just for showing up. He was treated as a little prince around whom the world revolved. He was marinated in “self-esteem” pap in schools, telling him how great and special he was. The result? Junior and many of his peers (not that he imagined he had any peers) grew up to be narcissists.
For the past 100 years our society has been under attack by the progressive liberals. This attack has escalated in the last 20 years and has skyrocketed since 2008. Liberals have managed to get God out of schools so there are no more absolutes of good and evil. The Ten Commandments are considered outdated and in many cases banned from the public square. These commandments have been the basis for are laws for the past 239 years. The rule of law is being replaced by the rule of the majority.
Everything is gray and moral equivalencies rule the day. University deans and professors threaten students with failing grades if they do not pledge allegiance to their agendas. Even speech is being regulated with the banning of certain words such as “alien” and “illegal” when referring to immigrants who unlawfully entered the country. Other words like “him” and “her” are even being banned from many university classrooms as the progressive liberals constantly attempt to alter the narrative to conform to their agenda.
Every good progressive liberal will tell you that given enough money and power they can make our Constitutional Republic into the Utopia of Sir Thomas Moore and not our Founders belief in the self-government of John Locke. Since Cain killed Able with a stone evil has existed in this world. This evil has manifested itself through history in many ways. It has shown itself from attacks by individuals on other individuals to the democide of governments.
[Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel (1932-2014) as "the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder." Most of this democide was carried out under the banner of liberalism in the aim of creating their version of Utopia, i.e., Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, and today’s radical Islam.]
Today’s progressive liberals just cannot face the fact that evil exists. To do so would force them to realize that there must be good and if there is good there must be a God. They just can’t wrap their minds around this concept. Instead they look for moral equivalents to justify their beliefs.
When a deputy sheriff, TV reporters, theater audiences, grade school students and teachers, or church goers are murdered by evil or insane people the progressive liberal cannot look to the person behind the gun, knife, or ax. Liberals will blame guns. This is partially because, unlike with Dylann Roof, they can’t blame Confederate flags or 19th-century statues. But it’s also because they’re incapable of putting the blame where it really belongs: the man in the mirror.
Guns don’t kill people. Liberalism does.