Better All Three Ways

This past Saturday was our senatorial district convention, which was postponed from March because of Covid-19. There was a good turnout. And it was kind of thrilling to have an actual get-together in person after so many months of isolation.

There we are at the Senatorial District 7 Convention
photo from Mark Ramsey's Facebook page

Much of my day was spent in the resolutions committee, working on the platform. Our SD7 is bigger than most, and more conservative, and hopefully more influential. So we put out our version of the entire platform. We’re required to use the previous platform as a starting point, so we used underlines and strikeouts to show changes we were making. Surprisingly, at the end of the day, after our chair presented some of what we’d done, both in the temporary committee and in Saturday’s permanent committee, no one wanted floor debate; the committee as a whole accepted it as we did it. I’ve never seen that happen before.

The SD7 Resolutions Committee at work; that's me second from right
at the table. Photo from Pauline Ramsey's Facebook page

Our chair, Mark Ramsey, gave me a lot of credit for the editing I did (and still had left to do after the convention to clean it up); I don’t know where else grammarians actually get applause. It was a privilege for me.

Before we got to that, I did hear a few of the speeches. And a highlight was my Congressman Dan Crenshaw. He has an easy way of speaking, putting profound truths in a conversational, understandable way. When I’m looking for ways of wording things that connect with people, I turn to him.

His ten-minute talk, without notes, talked about the contrast between what the other party offers and what we conservatives offer. And these came under three categories: political, economic, and social. Where have I seen that before? [Hint: SphericalModel.com]

So I’ll share portions of his talk to show ways of presenting, in a brief and conversational way, soem of the things that I talk about here all the time.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, the quick photo I took
before using my phone to record his talk

The Political Sphere

Dan started out talking about what “liberalism” used to mean:

You know, liberalism used to stand for a couple of different things, like free speech, like the right to peacefully assemble, equality of opportunity. These are actually liberal foundations. But the Democrat Party has completely left those. They’ve completely trampled over their good-natured liberals—whom I still disagree with on many issues. But at least they’re actually liberal. At least they actually stood for the foundations of a liberal democracy. At least they actually stood for what our founding stood for.

That has been completely trampled over as of late. And I don’t mean that figuratively. We can see it quite literally being trampled over.

I’m old enough to be his mother (he’s the same age as son Political Sphere), so I remember when “liberal” meant something different. In a personal journal I described myself as a liberal—when I was 18, before college, but I was voting conservative Republican. To me it meant freedom-loving and open-minded, rather than any political philosophy. I attached a note in that journal some years later to mark the change in meaning.

Dan talked a bit about what is happening in Seattle. And he talked about a bad movie he saw recently in which the government response to chaos was to send out some sort of mind-control signal to stop people from committing crime. Just fiction. Still, he asked himself,

Is this like the liberal utopia that they want? Where there’s so much anarchy that it takes complete centralized government control to persuade human nature, to affect human behavior?

He points out that they think they—the leftists, which I call southern hemisphere tyrannists—can change human nature. It can’t be done. Over thousands of years, we’ve developed institutions, like the church, to help guide people toward better behavior than their unbridled nature would lead them to do. As he says,

You can’t rely on haphazard government intervention based upon principles that were thought of just five minutes ago. And they change, constantly. You never know what the next attack is by the left. They’re determined to create a sense of crisis in order to justify their revolution.

They seem to like the romantic notion of revolution. It’s a “youthful exuberance,” trying to do something important, to effect change. But, he says, what we’re seeing is “an attack on America at its core”:

It’s one thing to say that we have improvements to make. We will always have improvements to make, and we should lock our arms together and to speak out for the improvements that we need to make, and live up to our founding ideals.

But it is quite another to say that those ideals are evil to the core, when in reality they are not. When in reality they are based in truth. When in reality the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written by men who learned these ideals and took them from the best ideas that mankind ever had—from Jerusalem, to Rome, to Athens, to London. And conservatism stands for these great ideals. Conservatism stands for a republic, a functioning political system that actually works. Not mob democracy.

He goes on,

Democrats actually want mob democracy. They’re not hiding the ball on this. When you want to get rid of the Electoral College, when you want to remove states’ rights, when you want the federal government to have centralized control over the society and the economy—  They also say they don’t like that small states have two senators. That’s a federalist system that they want to undo.

They want 51% of the population to tell the other 49% what to do, because they believe they can change human nature. They believe they can control your thoughts and your feelings. And they believe that preferences across a vast country don’t matter. This is what they believe.

How does our side compare?

Our political system allows us to live together peacefully. It’s a republic, with checks and balances and states’ rights, and a federalist system. And that matters. Our founders thought very hard about this. Because they were students of history, and they saw what worked and what didn’t. They saw what was stable and what wasn’t.

We stand for stability. They stand for chaos.

The Political, Economic, and Social Spheres side by side

The Economic Sphere

So, that’s the political sphere. Then he turns to economics:

We also stand for a better economic system. Our founders understood this too. Most rational people understand this, that property rights matter. You can’t just confiscate somebody’s property. And one of the primary roles of government is defending that, through law and order, through law enforcement. They want to upend that too, defund the police. Our economic system, our economic way of looking at things, the free market is superior to socialism in every way.

He considers that there’s a spectrum of socialism, from full-on communism, to the socialism-light of some mainstream Democrats. But he offers an example of what these “light” socialists mean to do:

If you’re a company above a billion dollars in revenue per year, then your board has to be certified by the federal government. That’s pretty dang close to a government takeover of an institution, of an industry. Fundamentally, they want to tax more and more and redistribute that wealth. It’s collective ownership of wealth and prosperity. Those are the words they use. Then they call it democracy.

And here’s the important point I wish we could get across:

Fundamentally, it doesn’t work. That’s the thing. It doesn’t work. There’s no cases. No cases at all. About 25 countries have tried socialism. They’ve all failed—in blood, and slavery, and mass death and starvation—because it doesn’t work. The economic system has completely been discredited.

We have to maintain personal property rights: “The ability to keep your money, because you earn it. The ability to freely exchange with others.” He turns to what we’ve seen in reaction to the pandemic. It’s a problem when “foolish politicians,” mostly on the left, but not totally, but these policy makers

make a mistake by thinking that we could force you to engage in safe behavior. That didn’t make sense. It’s been discredited now. But the reality is, it was never government’s role to force your business to close—while Walmart stayed open.

Here’s what we need:

We need leaders that actually think through their civics education and understand what the proper role of government is—how do you enforce guidelines?

Maybe coercion is the wrong way to deal with law-abiding citizens.

The Social Sphere

Already you can see that there’s an interrelationship between the political, economic, and social spheres. But finally he covers the social sphere, or culture:

Conservatism is superior along a third line, and that’s our cultural perspective. Conservatives are the only ones that stand for cultural narratives that actually keep a society functioning. What do I mean by those? Well, first of all, we’re in a church. So we stand for moral truth. We understand that our laws are actually derived from the Ten Commandments. There are things that are true and cannot be argued with. You have to have a starting point. You have to have an anchor in morality. You can’t just decide what you want it to be.

We’re also the only ones who defend things like personal responsibility and accountability for your actions.

We’re the only ones who actually defend ordered liberty, the freedom for you to choose to make mistakes and to succeed, and then to be rewarded as such.

This is important. The fact that we even have to defend a simple ideal like a meritocracy is crazy. But we do. We’re the only ones that stand up for it.

He ends with this point about our neighbors who are Democrats—who are mostly decent people and not radical America-hating revolutionaries.

Here’s the infuriating part: your liberal neighbors absolutely teach these same principles to their kids. You know why? Because they actually love their kids, and they want their kids to succeed. You teach your kids these basic principles because you love them.

Maybe it’s time we actually used the same principles for the American people—because we actually love the American people, just like we would love our kids.

Indeed. If everyone who knows enough to want their children to succeed, so they teach them how to be decent and productive human beings who can live in peace among their neighbors—if every one of these people voted for conservatives rather than socialists, I believe we’d see an overwhelming majority choosing the good. People struggle to come here from all over the world because of the good we have here.

People who love America, and love one another, want freedom, prosperity, and civilization; they don’t want what the other side offers: tyranny, poverty, and savagery. It ought to be an easy choice, if we can just get them to hear messages like Rep. Dan Crenshaw offers in his everyday life.

Data, Debates, and Dystopia

Today’s post is about three somewhat disconnected things: coronavirus data, the senate district convention, and mayhem of anarchists. Maybe we’ll relate them somehow.

Coronavirus Data

I spent some time yesterday going over coronavirus data. We’ve been opening up here in Texas, with enough time to see if there’s a spike. I wanted to see if there was anything to worry about. The county judge says she’s going to issue a new stay-at-home order in a day or two, although it looks like the community is going by the governor’s recommendations regardless of what she says. That means we’re entering phase 3, in which restaurants and some businesses can open at 75% capacity.

The Houston Chronicle has provided a page of data every day since March 31^st. It has a map of cases per county, and other charts. Mainly the page gives cumulative cases and deaths, with an ever-rising chart. Of course ever-rising. Because those numbers aren’t going to go down. There are other places to look at data that recognize a given estimate of recoveries; I think that number is low, but at least it doesn’t imply that each new case means the total number equals people wandering around possibly infecting you.

More useful data are daily new cases and daily additional deaths. And then, we need to ask questions to know what we’re seeing. Case counts and death counts both depend on when things get reported. Some numbers might be held over a weekend, or accumulate for a particular lab for a couple of days, and then it appears there’s a spike when there really wasn’t. So it’s more accurate to look at the 7-day rolling average. That means you look at the last 7 days, add them together, and divide by 7, to get the average of those 7 days. There’s a new number each day, but it’s less volatile and provides a more accurate picture than a simple daily count.

So, using all those daily counts, I figured out the 7-day averages and made charts. Here’s the 7-day rolling average of new cases in the Texas.

Yes, there has been an uptick in cases. But, unlike when this first started to spread, we are behaving differently. We’ve educated the public enough to know to protect the elderly, who are most susceptible to a severe case. And people with preexisting conditions know to be more cautious for their own safety. That means, even when there are more cases, that doesn’t necessarily mean that many more deaths.

There’s a lag of one to three weeks between the cases chart and the deaths chart. Here’s the 7-day rolling average of additional deaths in Texas. We’re not yet seeing anything like a surge in daily deaths.

Some people are predicting a dangerous surge in deaths in a week or two. We may see some, but the goal always was to keep from overwhelming the medical resources. I think it’s safe to say, we’re going to stay within those parameters.

I wanted to know things more locally. I didn’t have ready access to daily death rates covering this same area, but here’s a chart of the 7-day rolling average of new cases in the Houston area (Harris County plus several surrounding counties). There was an uptick a week after Memorial Day, but it appears to be going down already.

One thing I’m finding frustrating is that “confirmed cases” seems to be low. We don’t know actual death rates for those who contract the virus. Estimates are that Texas is probably 0.1% to 0.5% by the end of this. But if you do the math of confirmed cases to fatalities, Texas is at about 2%.

I looked up data by zip code. Mine is still fairly low. I was surprised to see there have been 2 deaths; there hadn’t been any when I looked a couple of weeks ago. There have been a total of 136 cases. That comes out to 1.47%. We know the death rate is not actually that high. So why is the “confirmed cases” number so low, causing the skewed death rate? That’s been frustrating from the beginning.

I found this chart helpful for perspective. It compares deaths per 100,000 in the US (green), Texas (yellow), and Harris County (red). Texas is still way below the US average. Harris County has at times been below the Texas average, but right now they’re about the same. But, unless something drastic happens that causes us to go up where the US average was during its apex, which still didn’t overwhelm the system, we ought to feel safe opening up cautiously.

Data put together by Leslie Joan May

Senate District Convention

I’ve been thinking about the data, again, because this weekend is our District Convention. This was supposed to be held back on March 21^st, but the stay-at-home began the Saturday before that—a date we’ve been able to keep track of, because Mr. Spherical Model broke his ankle that day, so stay-at-home orders coincided with his need to heal. He’s back to walking and doing physical therapy—not quite at full capacity, but getting there, which seems like a good comparison.

Anyway, the senate district convention could have as many as 300 people, although maybe less this year because of the virus and people’s worries. Masks are welcome but not required. This is the biggest (only) gathering we’ve been to since early March.

I don’t expect a guarantee that I’ll be safe. But I want to be safe, without having to spend the entire day breathing through a mask if possible. Hence the dive into the data.

I’ve been on the resolutions committee—that is, the platform writing committee. We took all the resolutions submitted by precincts, compared them to what is in the 2018 state platform, decided what to incorporate, worked on wording, and worked on improving wherever we could.

When we get to the district convention, we temporary committee members get installed as permanent committee members, and then we consider additional resolutions and testimony, and put together a draft for the entire floor to consider. Then that gets taken to the state convention in July.

[Note: I heard today that, because of logistical challenges related to the national convention, they will not update the national platform this year.]

I don’t know how to predict what the floor will find important. Sometimes the arguments there surprise me, because I think we committee members are pretty agreeable on conservative philosophy. But here are a couple of things I think will get noticed.

On abortion, we’re shifting from an incremental, piecemeal approach to an abolish-all-abortions single bill strategy. It’s time, I think. Decades of the other approach have not gotten us where we want to be. And every incremental bill tacitly enshrines the right to kill innocent human life. Certainly there will be arguments about the tiny percentage of unwanted pregnancies related to rape or incest—which happen against the choice of the woman—and also instances where the life of the mother and the baby can’t both be preserved (the latter of which the platform does acknowledge). But the platform isn’t to write law; it’s to present philosophy. So we’ll see how that goes. Texas is already behind other states taking this approach.

We’ve added in some concerns about contact tracing, which have come up during the pandemic. Contact tracing is a somewhat useful tool at the very beginning of an outbreak, to completely prevent the spread. Once the spread has happened, it’s almost useless. What it does do is put a lot of power into the hands of government bureaucrats. Picture, for example, you go to dinner, and someone at the restaurant—someone you don’t know and did not even have close contact with—learned the next day that they had covid-19. Everyone that person was around for the past couple of weeks gets notified. You get contacted, because you were at the restaurant; contact tracing uses, for example, a phone app to track you. You are then required to be in quarantine (lockdown without being able to go out for food or other essential reasons) for at least two weeks. At last you’re released, and you go to the grocery store to resupply. The next day you get informed someone at the grocery store tested positive, so you’re required to quarantine for at least another two weeks. And so on.

During none of this time are you sick. You don’t prevent any spread, because you never had the disease. But your life, your livelihood, and your “pursuit of happiness” are denied you by a government entity exerting more power than is useful. If you volunteer for such tracing, that’s up to you. But forcing it on healthy law-abiding citizens is unacceptable in a free society.

Another issue relates to gun-free zones, which can include churches, schools, theaters, places of businesses—anyplace that declares itself to be a gun-free zone. A place that denies citizens the right to protect themselves is held liable for their protection. It’s a pretty simple idea that hopefully will cause businesses to think about the ramifications before declaring themselves a gun-free zone. Again, this isn’t legislation; this is the expression of ideas.

Anarchy

The temporary committee finished our work two weeks ahead of the convention. Since that time, there’s been a breakout of protests, riots, and anarchic terrorism. I expect we’ll see a resolution or two to address that. Conservatives think it’s bad. Are there reforms to be made for various police departments across the country? Maybe, although my sense is (according to the data I’ve looked at) that the need is highly overblown—for the purpose of stirring people up to anger. I don’t think it’s wise to cede any ground with these people.

The anarchists who have seized ground in Seattle are, I think, an example we should be noticing—to prevent any pandemic spread of their diseased thought processes.

Someone posted the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement’s 10 Points of Action. I think these are put out by the CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous  Zone) militants in Seattle. I’ve responded to each one.

Image found on Facebook, my comments added.

I'm reminded of the inane demands made by Occupy Wall Street, back in the olden days of the previous administration. And I'm wondering if some of the same supporters of that encampment are supporting this one. You can find a list of those OWS backers here.

In a normal world, you would see that, if you set yourself up in a “fortress,” walled in, with the enemy on the outside, you survive only as long as you have supplies. These guys don’t have any resources inside. They’re using electricity, water, cell service and even their barricades from the City of Seattle. They had some food. But they invited a bunch of homeless people in, who stole all the food. Because—no laws, no police. So, using their cell phones, these militants against the greatest military force on earth asked for donations of vegan meat replacements, oats, soy, and other “foods” to be delivered to them.

Seattle's lost hill, called CHAZ
image from here

The city, in an effort to be accommodating (for unfathomable reasons), provided port-a-potties.

While streets are blocked, they are allowing residents of the 500 or so homes and businesses in their non-America to come and go when they provide ID (which, of course, comes from the enemy state).

To thinking people, this is ridiculous. Send in the national guard to round them up, prosecute them, and be done with it. With some luck, the good guys (America) won’t even have to shed their blood.

But Seattle’s mayor, and apparently Washington’s governor, don’t seem to be thinking people. And people voted them in. It’s the same problem as in Minneapolis; the people voted these anti-Americans in. So I don’t know how to predict how this will go.

It’s untenable to allow the seizure of US soil by anarchic terrorists.

It has always seemed to me that, if you could lay out the truth, the facts, and the philosophy clearly, people will of course choose freedom, prosperity, and civilization. So it has been confusing to me why so many people eschew the good and purposely choose tyranny, poverty, and savagery.

One explanation is that we live in apocalyptic times. But I’ll save that discussion for another day. In the meantime, I guess we watch what’s happening and hope it stays far away from home.

Speaking of—Harris County Commissioners Court met on Tuesday and discussed police reform, but stopped short of calling outright for defunding the police force. The county attorney reminded them that they have no power to direct other elected officials, such as the county sheriff or the DA, to do anything; they are instead accountable to their voters. So nothing much came of it, at least for this month.

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.