It's Already a War

I was listening to a news show the other night, and when it got to this part, I paused it, re-listened, and then set up so I could later transcribe it. Next morning, Mr. Spherical Model had seen the same news show, and when I told him a part had gotten my attention, he guessed it was this part. Let’s proceed before further comment.

The daily news broadcast is Crossroads, with Joshua Philipp, a production of The Epoch Times. This is from late Friday, August 21, 2020. CCP refers to Chinese Communist Party.

Joshua Philipp reporting on CCP role in US riots
screenshot from here

The Chinese regime may have played a hand in the mass protests and the riots that have been sweeping across the United States. They’ve allegedly identified and sent guidance to people who are aligned with Black Lives Matter and the far-left radical organization Antifa. This is according to a recent article by Radio Free Asia, which also noted the CCP’s actions played a role in the US ordering the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston.

According to the story, the CCP had sent soldiers from the Second Department of its General Staff Department to the Chinese consulate in Houston. They were equipped with fake IDs as well. From there they used data from a large video platform to identify people whose interests suggested that they may participate in protests around Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and then created and sent them customized videos on how to organize riots and how to spread their messages. The story does not name the companies that were involved in the operations.

Now, this is interesting from a few different angles. When it comes to the soldiers the CCP sent to the consulate, the General Staff Department is the war fighting branch of the Chinese military. The Second Department, the spy branch, operates alongside its Signals Intelligence Branch known for its military hackers, which is a Third Department. You might remember those individuals indicted during the Obama administration with unit 61398. Those were Third Department.

Now, why were spies from the war fighting branch of China’s military sent to the United States to stir up unrest?

It’s also interesting that soldiers from the CCP’s military spy agency were sent to the United States with fake IDs. This may relate to the recent announcement from US Customs and Border Protection that it seized close to 20,000 fake IDs in Chicago and said the majority of them had arrived from China.

When it comes to the CCP getting involved in the protests and riots in the United States, it’s also interesting to note that Russia was found to have done something very similar ahead of the US elections in 2016. And now that we move on to the 2020 elections, this is a big deal in that context. This is among the few points that were used as evidence of Russia meddling in the elections. The Russian trolls were exposed for buying advertisements in different social media platforms that promoted civil unrest.

And as Slate noted at the time, the findings emerged that “Russian trolls were obsessed with Black Lives Matter.” Part of this ties to long-running operations around ideological subversion. These were Soviet era methods of demoralizing and destabilizing a country. Part of the idea was to encourage and to accelerate what would have otherwise been grassroots unrest.

The CCP appears to have taken this even further, however, by deploying soldiers on American soil, then using big data technology to identify and target Americans directly, with their guidelines on how to organize riots.

In Shanghai, meanwhile, the personal information of more than 1.9 million Communist Party members was leaked. And The Epoch Times received Excel files containing details on CCP members in Shanghai’s municipal government institutions and businesses. The leaked records contain names, birthplace, ID numbers, home addresses, and communication information of the Shanghai members of the Chinese Communist Party. And Epoch Times was able to confirm the legitimacy of these documents. The leaked list of party members began to circulate online after the United States announced potential visa restrictions on CCP members and their families. While the documents were only leaked recently, it does appear they come from as early as July 2016.

And why does this matter? This adds to fear among CCP officials, both of the discussions are on travel restrictions on CCP members, and of the possibility that they could be hit by US sanctions for carrying out abusive orders from the Chinese Communist Party.

Interesting.

This is the Radio Free Asia story referred to, which I had Google translate for me: “The last straw that overwhelms the Houston Consulate.” Here’s a key statement:

According to reports, the Second Department of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army recruited people from a major Internet company, used false identities to go to the Houston consulate, used the background data of a major audio-visual platform in the powerful country [China] to assist BLM and ANTIFA, and sent "tailor-made" to African Americans. A promotional video for the riot organization; in a word, it is to "weaponize" big data.

Photo from Reuters profile, found here.

The Epoch Times is more attuned to China news than most outlets, and Joshua Philipp’s report in particular tends to cover China news before other world news. But wasn’t this a huge story that ought to be appearing elsewhere?

Earlier today I came across one other source. This is a story by Texas writer Bryan Preston for PJ Media, “Did China’s Consulate in Houston Use TikTok to Stir Up Antifa BLM Riots?” He refers to the same Radio Free Asia “ChinaScope” story, and observes this:

If this ChinaScope report is true, and the Houston Chinese consulate was the hub of unrest via TikTok, it makes sense of the recent events noted above. It also makes some sense of the riots themselves. Antifa got its start as the communists’ street fighters in Weimar Germany. Black Lives Matters’ leaders have openly stated they are trained Marxists. The strongest communist regime on earth today is the one in Beijing under its most authoritarian leader in decades, Xi Jinping. The rioters’ goal is not any particular policy outcome, but to subvert and weaken America. Destroying our cities, defunding law enforcement, agitating against ICE, and dividing America along racial lines all support the goal of weakening the United States, which happens to be China’s long-term foreign policy goal.

The part of the story that is not new related to TikTok, and Thousand Talents, a CCP effort to infiltrate and subvert US science and medical research. It related to the spying coming out of China's recently closed Houston consulate, among other consulates to be closed. Preston says this:

That talent plan is Thousand Talents, a large and sprawling effort on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to subvert top-level researchers in the United States and across the free world in a variety of key fields and buy their research, which is turned over to the People’s Liberation Army. That’s China’s ironically named military, which liberates no one, threatens its own citizens, and helps maintain the communists’ police state. Thousand Talents has been uncovered and several arrests have been made this year, including the high-profile arrest of Dr. Charles Lieber of Harvard. Lieber is one of the world’s top nanoscientists. The Department of Justice accuses him of secretly working for the communists in Beijing via the Wuhan University of Technology.

Someone passed along a video to me today, of a dad in California, whose child’s school lesson on day 4 was pro-Black Lives Matter, under the pretense of teaching against racism, which he got to see because they're doing distance learning. (This propaganda to kids is yet another reason to homeschool.)

Screenshot (flipped) from here

I was curious about that raised fist symbol, which I remember as a black power symbol over many decades. According to Wikipedia,

The black fist, also known as the Black Power fist is a logo generally associated with Black nationalism, defiance, solidarity, and socialism. Its most widely known usage is by the Black Panther Party, a socialist group, in the 1960s. 

Wikipedia also informs us,

Different movements sometimes use different terms to describe the raised fist salute: amongst communists and socialists, raised right fist is sometimes called the red salute, whereas amongst some African-American activists, especially in the United States it has been called the Black Power salute. The Rotfrontkämpferbund paramilitary organization of Communist Party of Germany used the right hand fist salute as early as 1924. 

Different organizations may add elements to use it for their purposes. One example is the hammer and sickle being combined with it, used as part of communist symbolism.

Interestingly, the raised fist is also used by officials in China when being sworn into office.

The symbolism is just another clue. These are the same forces fighting a war against our liberty for a very long time.

Black Lives Matter is Marxist. (And, I might as well add, so is Antifa, which is about as anti-fascist as Nazi Germany of the 1930s-1940s was.) BLM has been open about that on their website, and their founders brag of being “trained Marxists.” Who trains a Marxist? Somebody already steeped in that philosophy. Rumors have flown about George Soros funding. I wouldn’t discount that; he’s definitely an authoritarian, and a Marxist, with a stated intention of bringing down the United States, as well as other countries.

Another possibility is Russia. They’ve worked against the US since—well, probably since they became Marxist at the inception of the Soviet Union. But they’ve been weakened recently. And even in 2016 their efforts were a relatively minor continuation of ongoing disinformation practices.

Then there’s China—the largest and most threatening Marxist regime on the planet. We have a president who has stood up to them, and the US is both their biggest rival economically and philosophically. That is, the real America, with a constitution that is antithetical in every way to Marxist authoritarian rule. Wouldn’t it be in their interest to attempt to get the US to collapse from within?

Preston ends with this:

This report, if true, connects several dots and casts the riots of the past few months in a new light. It’s an effort on the part of a hostile regime to weaken our nation’s integrity. Its leaders and operators on U.S. soil are, knowingly or not, doing the bidding of a hostile foreign government.

To summarize, for clarity, the Chinese government has been conducting a war against the United States. At this point it is a cold war, rather than a full-on hot one, but a war nevertheless. They have put their military on US soil. And they have been targeting Americans to recruit to the anti-American side.

The protests you are seeing—the supposed peaceful ones, where it’s just about speaking out against racism—those are a propaganda movement. Those attending have been targeted through social media to have their opinions manipulated; their news has been controlled so they don’t see another side. What ought to be a reliable US media has been willfully complicit.

And what about the riots—the actual violence against property and people, such as has been going on for 13 weeks and counting in Portland, as well as elsewhere around the country? A few rioters might be opportunists. But mainly those are people targeted, recruited, and trained by our enemy, a Marxist authoritarian regime, in league with other Marxists around the world, intent on the overthrow of our Constitution and the subjugation of free American people.

Next time someone insists that you have to support Black Lives Matter or you’re a racist—let them know that you know the truth. If they’re really about making America better, they’ll hear you. If they won’t hear you, they’re among those targeted and recruited by our deadliest enemy.

Do you give up on such a person? It depends on how much you love and care about that individual, and how much energy you can devote to deprogramming them while we’re in a war in defense of our liberty, our lands, our families, and our religion[i].

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[i] Alma48:10 uses this list and calls it the cause of Christians.

A Time for Truth

Yesterday was Father’s Day. I thought I might approach today’s topic by talking about fathers in the family as an essential ingredient for civilization. That’s true. But the urgent situation doesn’t give us enough time to solve things by means of that necessity only.

So, with that fatherhood idea in the background, this message is for those who already learned enough about living in a civilized world.

Truth is always better.

Jordan Peterson’s Rule for Life #8: Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie.

Also,

Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor.—Exodus 20:16

Some things we’ve known for a very long time, but as humans we keep re-testing. As if, “Maybe it’s different now, for me, in my circumstances.”

Hint: It’s not different. You don’t make things better—in the long run—by lying.

So when some new power monger comes at you with a threat of ruining your life if you don’t bow and speak untruths that they dictate to you, would your life be better off if you lie?

Back in the day, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were told to lie by kneeling to display their worship of the king as their deity. They didn’t. Their honor was at stake. Their standing with the God they worshipped was at stake.

August Landmesser, the man who didn't salute Hitler
image from here

Bowing down has meaning. Often religious meaning. Certainly it is submissive. By doing it you grant power to the entity to whom you are bowing down. If you’re doing that while it is a lie, you are granting power to an entity you do not wish to serve.

Sometimes it’s another gesture, maybe a salute, or taking a disrespectful knee when the national anthem is playing.

What am I referring to? A power-mongering movement disguised as a gesture of goodwill.

Black lives do matter—as well as all other human lives. God is no respecter of persons. God-given rights are granted to all humans. In our country, founded on the idea that all of us are created equal—rather than granting certain classes or individuals special rights before the law, as has been common historically—that should be obvious to us.

But suddenly it’s uncomfortable to say so. More than that, it’s dangerous to say so. People have lost their livelihoods for holding such a belief.

Something is very wrong.

It’s bigger than this issue, but this is one that illustrates our dire straits. Here’s what it is. While black lives matter, Black Lives Matter is a coercive force intent on taking down our civilization and replacing it with a tyrannical racist regime. And they’re working to force you to submit to them.

Bad guys have a pattern that includes depending on people of goodwill to act as expected—to humbly do what it takes to get along, to be sympathetic, to examine themselves and recognize their own imperfections. To say, “excuse me,” even when the other person bumped into them; to assume maybe they were in the way. People of goodwill are expected to be apologetic for the sake of civility.

With the bad guys, your very act of saying, “Maybe you’re right; I’m certainly not perfect” is used, not to improve the relationship between you and the bad guy, but to give the bad guy ammunition to use against you.

The solution? Tell the absolute truth. At the very least, don’t lie about some pretend sin you’re accused of in the hopes of getting exoneration and moving on. You’re not dealing with civilized people; this isn’t a small thing to be dispensed of with an “excuse me.”

If you have never enslaved anyone, you do not help anyone by apologizing for slavery to someone who has never been enslaved. If you’ve been falsely accused, expect to be convicted of the crime once you confess to it. Don’t give a false confession.

If you’ve treated people of all races equally, not only before the law, but as a natural part of your community of friends, acquaintances, and coworkers, then do not say, “Please forgive me for my inherent racism.” Why are you speaking that lie? Your words and life have already revealed your heart. If that isn’t enough, then you’re dealing with something completely outside of civilization.

The bad guys are not looking for ways toward peace; they are looking for ways toward power.

And right now Black Lives Matter is an entity seeking and gaining power—not for the sake of benevolent rule, but for the sake of ruling in violently coercive tyranny.

A few days ago Tucker Carlson discussed this on his show. It was frightening. Polls show this political force actually has higher approval than the president, or the Democrat candidate for president, or really than either party. People have been told by a lying media that approval of Black Lives Matter equals recognizing the struggles of a particular race—and, since you don’t want to appear racist, then of course you must support this movement.

No. Don’t fall for this bait and switch. Having sympathy for a group, instead of individuals, may be unwise in itself, but still it does not require you to give up approval of your nation with its freedoms, prosperity, and civilization. It does not require you to bow down to Marxist thugs whose plan is to dismantle everything you know as civilization and replace it with tyranny—with them in charge—along with the natural results: poverty, and savagery.

That’s the choice you’re making by supporting them. At least have the presence of mind to do it consciously.

Here’s something to think about: blacks do not need you, as a person of a different color, to grant them the right to matter.

There’s a PragerU video out this past week, combining part of a talk by Jordan Peterson on privilege with a 5-minute video by black former cop Brandon Tatum on the wrongness of supporting the idea that you’re required to feel guilty about some invention called “white privilege.”

In Peterson’s part, he says that we have all kinds of privileges, and we shouldn’t apologize for them. Here are his words:

I think the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it’s not because white people aren’t privileged. We have all sorts of privileges. And most people have privileges of all sorts. And you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them, I would say.

But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group—there is absolutely nothing that is more racist than that. It’s absolutely abhorrent.

He talks about the kulaks, farmers in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

They were the most productive element of the agricultural strata in Russia. And they were virtually all killed and raped and robbed by the collectivists, who insisted that, because they showed signs of wealth, they were criminals and robbers. One of the consequences of the prosecution of the kulaks was the death of 6 million Ukrainians in the famine in the 1930s.

He makes the point, “The idea of collectively held guilt at the level of the individual as a legal or philosophical principle is dangerous.” The 20^th Century has plenty of history to teach us that.

But, as you’ve probably noticed, history is one of the things the thugs are tearing down.

If you’ve paid attention to history, you know that punishing children for the crimes of their fathers was common in the ancient and pagan world; bringing it back is not progress.

Brandon Tatum, in his part, talks directly to those white people who think they’re more sensitive than all. To them he says,

Woke white people, I’d like to ask you a favor: Please stop asking for forgiveness for your white privilege. You’re not fooling anybody. You’re not helping black people, or any other minority. And your public confessions don’t make you look virtuous. They make you look disingenuous, which is a really nice way of saying fake, phony, and fraudulent.

He debunks the white privilege myth. Those things he’s supposed to have suffered? He hasn’t. Not only that, he says,

In many ways, in today’s America, blacks have more privilege than whites. It’s been my experience that whites bend over backwards to give blacks every possible advantage. If two people are equally qualified for a job, the black person will usually get it. Big companies and prestigious universities fall all over one another trying to sign up talented black people. If you deny this, you’re denying reality.

But his main point is that, you people apologizing for your skin color, you’re doing it for self-serving reasons:

To acknowledge your white privilege is supposed to make you feel bad. Only it doesn’t. It makes you feel good, because, by acknowledging your white privilege, you’re declaring yourself to be enlightened. And, as a virtue bonus, it also makes you a better person than those whites who don’t acknowledge their privilege. White privilege, which is supposed to make you feel bad, ends up making you feel good.

Meanwhile, the real damage is to blacks. What makes whites feel good makes blacks angry. More than 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, the message is, “You’re still oppressed.” How can this not create a victim mentality?

He takes on the idea that the type of privilege you get from skin color matters more than plenty of other factors:

screenshot from here

Let’s take this for example. A black lawyer and his wife have a baby. And a meth addict single white woman has a baby. Which kid has privilege? The white one? Because he’s white? Come on, now.

Finally, he tells us what’s really going on:

So let’s be real. White privilege is an attempt by the left to divide Americans by race. It’s all theory, and all nonsense. If you want to fall for it, go ahead. It’s a free country. But don’t try to sell it to me.

I’m an American who deals with my fellow Americans one-on-one. Try it. It works.

screenshot from here

Brandon Tatum feels a lot more a part of my community than a person of my color who is a Marxist America hater. Maybe ideas and behavior matter a whole lot more than melanin content.

Candace Owens has been called a traitor to her “black community” for speaking out against Black Lives Matter, and in favor of personal responsibility. Here’s how she answers:

The criticism that I often get is, “Candace, how can you not support your community?” My answer to that is, How could you think that that represents my community? My community is not a group of men that do drugs. It’s not a group of men who taser police officers. It’s not a group of men who assault police officers, or who don’t want to listen to basic instructions.

My community is the larger American community, the community built on law-abiding citizens, who want to make sure they can raise their children and their families in a country that they recognize. In a country that is not run by radicals. In a country that is free of autonomous cities and states being built of radical individuals and socialists screaming, and demanding justice, and setting fires, and rioting and looting businesses. That is not the America that I recognize. It is not the America that I want to raise my children in. It is not the America that I want to see my family live in. And so I use my voice to speak out against it.

My question is, Why don’t you?

The people trying to sell the “white privilege” idea? They’re the racists. They hate you for your skin color. And they intend to rule over you by force. Do you really think that would be an improvement over our constitutional republic?

My concern is that, while we’re not looking, while too many people are pandering and mollifying and patting themselves on the back for their wokeness, an evil force is gaining power in our country, and that power doesn’t care about laws or elections or civilized expectations.

Don’t give in. Don’t sympathize with their false narrative. Don’t play nice to get along. Don’t kneel and mutter a lie.

Speak up with truth—or at the very least don’t lie.

Chaos Is Tyranny

On his show today, Andrew Klavan mentioned that Plato told us: “What erupts out of chaos is tyranny.” I looked for the quote and concluded he was paraphrasing. But I found this quote, and I’m highlighting what I think Klavan was referencing: 

By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses…The son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom… Citizens…chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority… they will have no one over them… Such…is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs tyranny… Liberty overmasters democracy…the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction… The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery… And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

By “the most extreme form of liberty,” Plato means anarchy, or chaos, not actual freedom.

The Spherical Model gives us a perspective when we’re dealing with ideas in the political sphere, and how they interrelate with the economic and social spheres.

I thought this might be a good time to review the idea of the Spherical Model and show some ideas on it.

The Political Sphere of the Spherical Model

Instead of right and left, we have three dimensions, so we use a sphere. North on the sphere is the freedom zone—the good direction—where we enjoy our God-given rights, and governments are limited to only protecting those rights.

South on the sphere is the tyranny zone—the bad direction—where we suffer oppression, and our rights are not respected.

That very farthest south area, the polar area, we might call totalitarian, because it would attempt total control over every aspect of life—actions, beliefs, associations, ways of doing business, use of money and property.

On the website, we use this description:

Totalitarianism means that the state has all the power—the police, the military. The state can do what it wants, and the mere citizen is without any rights except what the state decides to grant. Anarchy, on the other hand, means that power belongs to whoever is stronger and meaner than the next guy. If you threaten to beat people up (or kill them) if they don’t give you all their belongings, and you’re strong enough to mean it, then you have power. If someone else is stronger or better armed than you are, then you have to yield power to them. In other words, anarchy, while less organized, is power in the hands of the strongest and best armed—just as in totalitarianism.

A large part of world history has been the creation of chaos for the purpose of accumulating power over people. Stalin and Lenin stated that as their purpose. People like Obama’s advisor Rahm Emmanuel put it as, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Use the chaos to build your power.

It doesn’t really matter what you call that southern tyranny: fascism, socialism, communism, or some other -ism or -archy. They’re still tyranny.

The horizontal direction on the sphere indicates level of interest, from individuals and families on up to states, nations, and world levels. At any of these levels, tyranny can be a statist tyranny—coercion run by the government. Or it can be anarchic tyranny—run by non-governmental individuals or groups that assert dominance by physical force. To the person being oppressed, it doesn’t make much difference who’s doing the oppressing.

Anarchy might mean lack of government, but there’s never a lack of people trying to exert power over others.

On the sphere, anarchic tyranny would always be to the west of statist tyranny. But when you look at the southern pole of the sphere, you can see that, whatever type of tyranny, at whatever level, they are very close to each other.

south pole view of the Spherical Model
with Anarchy adjacent to Statist Tyranny 

Communism, Socialism, and Fascism are close
and overlapping as varieties of statist tyranny.

The value of using the Spherical Model, rather than the typical left-right model, is that we can see just how close the “extreme left” (statist tyranny) is to the “extreme right” (also statist tyranny). And calling the “right” fascist, as though that were diametrically opposed to “socialist” or “communist” is misleading at best. They’re overlapping ideas.

Up there we have our Constitutional Republic. When we always abide by the Constitution, we remain up there in the freedom zone, with accompanying prosperity and civilization.

We can’t, as a people, compromise with southern hemisphere tyranny and expect to remain in the freedom zone. One compromise pulls us southward. The next compromise pulls us further southward. And so on, until the Constitution looks like a distant memory.

You can’t trust a party. You can choose a party that gets you closer to what you want—south to tyranny, poverty, and savagery; or north to freedom, prosperity, and civilization. And you can participate to move the ideas of that party toward your preferred ends.

In recent years, the Democrat Party has sunk further southward. It has people in it that think they value freedom, prosperity, and civilization. But their party—it’s ideas, platform, and thought leaders—do not want those things. However, they use language to relabel things to convince people that they can bring about good results, while claiming the conservatives—their enemy—want all things bad, which they tend to describe in terms of tribalist biases: racism, bigotry, homophobia, sexism, etc.

They talk about a utopia, but not a real world. They think they should get credit for simply wanting some good outcome—even when everything they do can only lead southward, because it takes away individual rights and grants power to government far beyond government’s proper role. With the help of a willing, biased media, they get away with the relabeling, despite their own pitiful track record of bad outcomes—particularly for the minorities they claim to be compassionate about.

I wanted to talk about this today, because of the calls for defunding the police, in the wake of the protests—and then riots—in Minneapolis, and then around the country.

Black Lives Matter is claiming the high ground. They’re the protesters, not the rioters. They want the protests to remain peaceful; they just want to call for the elimination of racism among police. They want things to get better in society. It’s those rioters who are trying to tear down everything, to create chaos.

But who, then, is calling for the defunding of the police?

It turns out that Black Lives Matter has that on their website.

Maybe we need to know more about them. On their “What We Believe” page, they say they started out as a response to state-sponsored racism. They use Trayvon Martin as an example [he was killed while attacking citizen George Zimmerman, not by racist police, however]. They add Ferguson, Missouri, which, if you’ll recall, brought about the lie “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” when a black thief, Michael Brown, attacked a police officer, who killed him in self-defense, according to multiple eye witnesses, including black ones. Despite their lie about Brown being gunned down with his hands up in surrender, this is the case that “galvanized” their movement, which they claim is not only national but worldwide.

What a treasure this George Floyd case must be, a black man actually killed by police! And possibly even because of race. They leave out that everyone the whole country over is appalled by the killing, regardless of any guilt of the victim. This was not justice, and Americans everywhere want to see justice done.

Let’s go on. This is further down the page: 

We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location….

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk….

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking….

So, this complaint about blacks needing to be treated fairly is something of a “social justice” whatchagot stew.

They want to toss out the idea of gender. They want to get rid of the traditional family, remove the responsibility of rearing children from parents and place it on the collective, so that mothers are free to go protest.

On another page, they proudly claim they are working tirelessly to dismantle ICE and concentrate especially on freeing black illegal immigrants, of which they say there are 600,000.

If you’ve been sympathizing with them because George Floyd was black, consider whether the rest of their agenda is relevant to your George Floyd sympathy.

Consider also that one of their three founders (all three are self-styled Marxist-Leninists), Assata Shakur, whom they revere at every meeting, fled to Cuba after being convicted of shooting a police officer during a routine traffic stop, and, finding him wounded on the ground, executed him . BLM uses the final line of the Communist Manifesto as a battle cry, apparently condoning the millions of deaths that manifesto has led to.

Back in 2014 and 2015, at their inception, they declared war on law enforcement. As David Horowitz has written,

The Black Lives Matter activists fomented riots, burned and looted cities, and incited their followers with chants that ranged from “What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want them? Now!” to “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.”[i]

Oh, and the hashtag #Defund the Police—that’s theirs. They say explicitly, “We call for a national defunding of police.” They’ve been putting forth that idea for years. It isn't a sudden response to the incident in Minneapolis. But now they are getting actual policymakers to go along with them.

The nine-member Minneapolis City Council voted over the weekend to dismantle and defund the city’s police department. They have a vague plan to cover public safety needs with social workers and counselors of some sort.

CNN host Alysin Camerota talked with Council President Lisa Bender, asking what most of us would think is the logical first question:

Camerota: What if, in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?

Bender: Yes, I mean, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors, and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege. Because for those of us for whom the system is working, I think we need to step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that reality where calling the police may mean more harm is done.

In other words, you only think you deserve police protection from a home invasion because of your white privilege. Blacks, I guess she’s claiming, couldn’t call the police to protect them from a home invasion, because George Floyd was killed? But she isn’t asking you to imagine what it feels like to live in a system without protective police; she is forcing the people of her city to experience it.

Not to be outdone, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio committed to diverting funding from police to “youth services” and “social services.” It's unclear how much money, and how many police jobs will be cut.

In our nation’s capital, Washington DC’s mayor had the street painted with “Black Lives Matter,” and renamed the place Black Lives Matter Plaza. Further down, the street was painted with “Defund the Police.”  

"Black Lives Matter" painted on street in DC
screenshot from here

Meanwhile, when protesters refused to obey the law and blocked a bridge, the black Dallas Police Chief Renee Hall had 674 arrested. "We warned them.... If you break the law, we will arrest you,” she said. 

As a regular law-abiding citizen, I much prefer the Texas way.

In the US we’re a federation; states and local jurisdictions can do some experimenting. My guess is that, in a city with no police, you will get a lot of crime—what we've always called crime. Bad guys come in with weapons, take what they want by force—what can you do? Defend yourself with your own gun—if you’re in a place that hasn’t already taken that right away from you.

We could watch and see.

But since we know that chaos leads to tyranny, we aren’t really guessing about how that experiment will turn out.

I suggest those cities fence themselves in first. Or, maybe, allow refugees to escape before the worst happens. Because, when people are given a clear choice, they don’t choose to live oppressed, poverty-stricken lives in a savage society. They’d rather enjoy their God-given rights, in a society that is much more likely to be prosperous for all, and where civilized people actually treat each other with respect and caring, regardless of race. People choose north.

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[i] Video here.