Our Decaying Civilization: What it looks like when a great nation commits suicide.

Last week, I received an email from a friend. As a former U.S. Army intelligence officer during the Cold War, he carried out clandestine collection operations for the Defense Intelligence Agency in Germany, and later worked as an international war correspondent for the Associated Press. He’s served on numerous corporate boards and is a military historian and lecturer. The email from him was to let me know that he’d just posted this on Facebook:

I have been in Denver for the past few days. I can tell you this once great and once beautiful city has become a leftist cesspool. With a Democrat mayor and governor, what else can you expect? Drug fueled tent encampments are all over the city with a major one just below the Capitol. Lots of graffiti and hateful anti-Trump racist Black Lives Matter slogans. Major government buildings are fenced off to prevent people from getting on the grounds or to prevent them from being attacked. Driving around, my main impression is this is a decaying civilization. If you are not strong enough to defend it from the barbarians, you are bound to lose it.

The rapidly decaying civilization my friend observed in Denver is nationwide in scope, and has been in a state of inexorable decline long before the recent race riots destroyed large sections of more than 140 U.S. cities, including the one where I live, Atlanta.

When I was a student at Georgia Tech in the mid-1960s, Atlanta was a clean, safe and truly beautiful city. Then along came a well-intended, but horribly misguided, war: the war on poverty.

Over the intervening half-century, Atlanta, like Denver, became an unsafe eyesore marked by urban blight, vagrants defecating on public sidewalks, boarded-up houses, vacant lots, abandoned buildings, rat-infested public housing, gang graffiti everywhere, inexcusably sorry schools, generational poverty and, of course, the inevitable offshoot of such wretched living conditions: chronic despair endured by millions of disadvantaged people in America’s rundown inner cities, crime infested urban war zones entirely unfit for human habitation.

After the bulk of $22 trillion in anti-poverty funding was siphoned off by blue state and blue city elected officials to expand their political empires with money intended to help lift the black underclass, urban America is in worse shape than ever, a humiliating national tragedy by any measure.

What happened to Atlanta and Denver also happened to virtually every Democrat-run city in America.

I do not say that as a partisan swipe. I say it because it is true. Decades of progressive rule has bred a snake’s nest of dysfunctional cities: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Cleveland, Baltimore, Newark, New York City, the nation’s capitol, and on and on and on.

  • Dysfunctional cities where mayors do fist-pumps as Americans taught to hate their country burn U.S. flags and tear down statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key, composer of the National Anthem.
  • Dysfunctional cities where mayors order police departments to stand down to clear the way for rioting and looting carried out by violent Marxist revolutionaries hiding behind the noble cause of racial justice.
  • Dysfunctional cities where mayors look the other way as masked anarchists attack police with guns, knives, two-by-fours, metal pipes, explosives spiked with nails, smoke bombs, rocks, bricks, bottles of frozen water, spray paint, bleach, spit and who knows what else. Federal agents sent to Portland to prevent destruction of a U.S. District Court may have beenpermanently blindedby anarchists who beamed laser light at their eyes. Please click here to see a sampling of the raging anarchy that’s been going on in Portland for nearly ten straight weeks, all while the city’s Democrat mayor and the state’s Democrat governor watched as portions of the city were methodically reduced to burned-out rubble.
  • Dysfunctional cities where mayors give a wink and a nod to rioting and looting in rare instances when police wrongfully kill a black person, but remain stone silent as black on black homicides in the cities they run leave thousands of African Americans dead each year, including dozens of young black children caught in the crossfire. Althoughnearly 450 people—450!—have been murdered in Chicago so far this year, the city’s Democrat mayor mockingly rebuffed President Trump’s offer to send federal law enforcement officers to help quell the carnage. Only after 15 people were recently shot outside a Chicago funeral home did she appear to begrudgingly change her mind.
  • Dysfunctional cities where mayors refuse to enforce their nation’s immigration laws, and now demand that big chunks of police department budgets be handed over to them so they will have even more money with which to further entrench the uninterrupted Democrat rule that bears sole responsibility for having run urban America into the ground.

A great country committing suicide, city by city by city. What a shame.

To understand how thoroughly Democrats have unilaterally decimated America’s once-thriving cities, check out the video below to see what four Chicago ex-offenders had to say in 2014, when President Obama was still in office.

Chicago Unchained: Black Activists Slam Democrat Plantation

©All rights reserved.

Ratings CRASH for NBA, MLB After Pathetic Protest-Filled Debuts

Good. Let these self righteous and self-aggrandizing idiots learn that insulting more than half of your customers is bad for business. The NFL will surely suffer the same fate this fall. You may want to re-think your policy of appeasing the anti-America Left, Roger Goodell. You still have time.

Ratings Crash for NBA, MLB After Protest-Filled Debuts

By Breitbart, August 2, 2020

As the NBA and MLB return from their coronavirus-imposed hiatus, it appears TV viewers are not interested in what the increasingly woke leagues have to offer.

With both baseball and basketball draped in all sorts of Black Lives Matter and social justice symbolism for their opening games, a substantially smaller number of fans tuned-in to the rest of the week’s games.

According to Outkick.com, neither league did well.

As for the opening games, Outkick reported that the return of the NBA on TNT saw the following numbers:

Lakers-Clippers: 3.4 million
Pelicans-Jazz: 2.1 million

ESPN’s MLB return numbers were also underwhelming:

Yankees-Nationals: 4.0 million
Dodgers-Giants: 2.8 million

Outkick’s Ryan Glasspiegel added more ratings numbers on Twitter.

“To be fair since I compared MLB vs NBA return night 1, here is night 2,” (July 24) he wrote, adding:

MLB (last Friday, ESPN)
Mets-Braves (4p) – 922K
Brewers-Cubs(7p) – 1.0M
Angels-As (10p) – 797K

NBA (last night ESPN) (July 31)
Celtics-Bucks (6:30p) – 1.3M
Mavs-Rockets (9p)- 1.7M

The Athletic’s Ethan Strauss also noted that the numbers continued to fall off for MLB:

For good measure, Strauss also pointed out that baseball can’t blame the coronavirus. The virus didn’t stop people from watching Tom Brady golf with Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson back in May.

Indeed, the charity golf match earned record TV ratings in May.

Dubbed “The Match II,” the game featuring Tom Brady, Phil Mickelson, Peyton Manning, and Tiger Woods peaked at an amazing 6.3 million viewers and raised more than $20 million for charity.

CALIFORNIA: Muslim Brotherhood-linked Group Runs Billboards Aggravating Racial Tensions

The Islamic Circle of North America is here perpetuating the destructive and incendiary myth that racist killings by police are a common phenomenon in the U.S. These billboards will only sow more strife.

The Islamic Circle of North America: “ICNA has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological forebear of all radical Islamic movements — including Hamas and al-Qaeda. Documents show that Hamas officials have participated in previous ICNA events. ‘The ICNA’s hatred of the Jews is so fierce,’ writes Emerson, ‘that it taunted them with a repetition of what Hitler did to them.’ In his book American Jihad, [terrorism expert Steve] Emerson expounds: ‘The ICNA openly supports militant Islamic fundamentalist organizations, praises terror attacks, issues incendiary attacks on western values and policies, and supports the imposition of Sharia [Islamic law].’ ICNA was named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document — titled ‘An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America‘ — as one of the Brotherhood’s 29 likeminded ‘organizations of our friends’ that shared the common goal of destroying America and turning it into a Muslim nation. These ‘friends’ were identified by the Brotherhood as groups that could help teach Muslims ‘that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands … so that … God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.’”

At a 2014 ICNA-sponsored protest in Florida, demonstrators chanted “We are Hamas!” One of its leaders was a jihad war criminal in Bangladesh.

“‘Stop racist killings’: Sacramento Islamic organization launches billboard campaign,” by Elyse Pham, Sacramento Bee, July 30, 2020:

Across the Sacramento area, there are four new billboards seeking to demonstrate how the fights against systemic racism and the coronavirus pandemic are foundational to Islamic beliefs.

As part of a five-week campaign by the Sacramento chapter of the Islamic Circle of North America, one billboard reads “We the people can’t breathe. Stop racist killings.” Another says, “Saving one life equals saving entire mankind (Quran 5:32). Thank you healthcare workers!”

At the bottom of each billboard is the website whyislam.org, as well as the group’s phone number, because, according to ICNA Sacramento president Ijaz Arif, racial justice is one of the religion’s “cornerstones.”…

During the first Hajj, Muhammad preached that, “Nobody is superior based on race, language, or color,” said Arif. Rather, people can only be differentiated by their varying degrees of “piety and righteousness.” The millions of worshippers gathering in Mecca each year all wear the same white clothing, Arif explained, which denotes Islam’s core value of equality….

Arif emphasized the billboard campaign isn’t limited to Sacramento — ICNA chapters nationwide are doing the same.

The nonprofit grassroots organization decided to take action in light of recent instances of police brutality; not only has it erected the billboards, but it’s also galvanizing projects spearheaded by Black Muslim leaders. Moreover, Arif has noticed that members of the Muslim community have stopped calling the police.

“Like any other community, we have our own internal issues,” said Arif. “But at ICNA, we are committed to the principles of equality and justice for all.”

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Portland: Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters burn Bibles, but of course no Qur’ans

Canada: 16-year-old Muslim migrant plotted jihad massacres at ‘crowded places filled with crucifix believers’

Sweden: Muslim migrant rapes nine-year-old girl, threatens to murder her family, raped 12-year-old in 2017

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE: Here Is The Full Witness List For The Congressional Hearing On Antifa Violence

A subcommittee in the Senate is holding a congressional hearing on the violence caused by Antifa and will hear from a number of witnesses whose names have first been obtained by the Daily Caller.

The Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, which is chaired by Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, will hold the hearing Tuesday titled “The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble: Protecting Speech by Stopping Anarchist Violence.” The hearing will reportedly detail Antifa’s role in riots and more.

Here Are The Witnesses For The Hearing:

  • Acting Deputy DHS Secretary Ken Cuccinelli
  • U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas and co-head of the Department of Justice Task Force on Violent Anti-Government Extremists Erin Nealy Cox
  • Journalist Andy Ngo
  • Director and Senior Analyst for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy Kyle Shideler
  • George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley
  • Brennan Center Fellow Michael German
  • President and CEO of the Urban League of Portland Nkenge Harmon Johnson

This comes as riots continue across the country with a number of statues destroyed and defaced by rioters. Federal buildings and police offices have also been vandalized.

Many lawmakers have been calling out the violence caused by Antifa, while others like Democratic New York Rep. Jerry Nadler have called it “a myth.”

COLUMN BY

HENRY RODGERS

Senior Congressional correspondent. Follow Henry Rodgers On Twitter

RELATED VIDEO: Dinesh D’Souza: Antifa is a direct outcome of university education.

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NELLIGAN: There’s One Tactic For Getting Ahead In The Swamp That Everyone Should Practice

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Vandalism Is Violence: Destructive Riots Are Not ‘Just Property Damage’

Chaos is consuming Portland, Oregon.

Local police declared a riot on Saturday evening after rioters once again tried to burn down a federal courthouse and launched mortars and fireworks at police officers, several of whom sustained injuries. Similarly destructive unrest has unfolded each night in the city for weeks now, with rampant vandalism, arson, graffiti, and more becoming commonplace as protests over the death of George Floyd morphed into riots over President Trump’s controversial decision to send federal officers to Portland.

Yet Portland is by no means the only city gripped by unrest and violence.

Riots have also rocked cities such as Austin, Texas, and Seattle, Washington. In Seattle over the weekend rioters reportedly set fires, vandalized businesses, smashed car windows, and assaulted a court building. NPR reports that 21 police officers were injured while trying to contain the chaos.

And this is just the most recent wave. In May and early June, rioting broke out in cities from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Dallas, Texas.

We’re witnessing a breakdown in the rule of law. In many cases, city officials have enabled or encouraged rioting while law enforcement stands down and allows wanton property destruction. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler even joined rioters and participated in the same demonstrations that were spiraling out of control.

Meanwhile, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkin encouraged and lauded the self-described anarchists who declared an “autonomous zone” in the middle of the city. The mayor called the no-go zone a “block party” amid a “summer of love” despite rampant destruction and seizure of property. Only after weeks of skyrocketing crime rates and multiple shootings (including one that killed a teenager) did she finally order law enforcement to clear the city’s insurrectionists.

And in many of the other protests-turned-riots around the country, law enforcement stood down and watched as private property was destroyed and their city was rocked by rioters.

So how can anyone justify this madness?

Well, many left-wing journalists, activists, and commentators who are politically sympathetic to the rioters have argued that rampant destruction isn’t really a problem, because it’s “just” destruction of property, not violence against people.

One person who makes this argument is Oakland-based “racial justice organizer” Cat Brooks, who was interviewed by the New York Times.

“I don’t consider property destruction violence,” Brooks said in defense of the rioting and vandalism in her city. “Violence is when you attack a person or another living, breathing creature on this planet. Windows don’t cry and they can’t die.”

Meanwhile, New York Times writer Hannah Nicole-Jones, founder of the controversial “1619 Project,” has also defended the destruction of property and argued that it doesn’t constitute violence.

“Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body,” she said. “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.”

An op-ed published in the Times titled “What kind of society values property over black life?” made a similar point. Several other left-wing media outlets have also promoted this argument.

For example, one recent article in The Nation headlined “In Defense of Destroying Property” drew viral attention for openly arguing in defense of vandalism.

“People are not objects; broken windows and burnt cars are simply not commensurate with the violence of state-sanctioned murder,” wrote Columbia University Ph.D. R.H. Lossin. “Plateglass windows don’t bleed. They don’t die and leave loved ones grieving. They don’t contribute to the collective trauma and terror experienced by their communities. They just break, and then, at some point, they are replaced by identical sheets of glass.”

“Disavowing property destruction and even theft because of a spurious attachment to a reified notion of nonviolence is a mistake,” Lossin concluded.

similar piece in the left-wing journal Current Affairs likewise argued that “Destroying property is not in and of itself a violent act.”

“The word ‘violence’ should be reserved for harm done to people,” editor Nathan J. Robinson wrote. “Otherwise, we risk making the term conceptually incoherent and—much more importantly—conflating acts that do very serious physical harm to people with acts that have not physically harmed anyone.”

It is, of course, true that a rioter smashing a window is not morally equivalent to a police officer standing on an innocent man’s throat, but this is a strawman argument. (No serious person ever suggested otherwise). Moreover, these arguments rely on a false distinction between grave acts of vandalism and violence.

In reality, destruction of property does real harm to innocent people. And if allowed to continue, the collapse of rule of law that started with property destruction begets a cycle of lawlessness that will inevitably descend into bloodshed. Indeed, it has already. As famed Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises put it, “It is in the nature of every application of violence that it tends toward a transgression of the limit within which it is tolerated and viewed as legitimate.”

Not convinced yet? Just consider the sad news reports detailing how police officers found the remains of a burned body in a Minneapolis pawnshop that was torched during riots as demonstrators cheered. Vandals may have thought what they were doing was “just property damage”—in reality, it was murder.

Sadly, this isn’t a one-off example. During the riots in the wake of Floyd’s death, at least 15 people were killed. How? What started as merely “broken windows” and “torched cars” escalated into mass violence that left police officers, private security guards, and peaceful protesters dead.

It’s simply impossible to keep a collapse of the rule of law constrained to “just property damage.” Moreover, it is deeply immoral and intellectually bankrupt to suggest that property destruction does not constitute “harm done to people.” Vandalism is also itself a violent act that violates human rights.

And remember, it wasn’t just big corporations or CEOs whose properties were destroyed in these riots. Many of the post-Floyd riots destroyed minority-owned small businesses.

Former firefighter KB Balla used his life savings to open a sports bar in Minneapolis. With the grand opening initially delayed by COVID-19 shutdowns, his dream was left in tatters after rioters looted, vandalized, and destroyed the property. Something tells me Balla—and the thousands like him whose livelihoods were destroyed in riots—wouldn’t accept the naive argument that property crime doesn’t hurt anyone.

It’s not just the owners of the property themselves who are impacted by wanton vandalism. Consider the way one African American woman broke down on camera while asked about the destruction in her community.

“They went straight to OfficeMax, the Dollar Store, and every store over here that I go to,” she said through tears. “I have nowhere to go now. I have no way to get [to other stores] because the buses aren’t running.”

The economic and emotional costs imposed by the destruction of property are borne by real people—and the reason why is quite clear. Influenced by the work of John Locke, economist Murray Rothbard explained why property rights are human rights:

Much is heard these days of the distinction between human rights and property rights, and many who claim to champion the one turn with scorn upon any defender of the other. They fail to see that property rights, far from being in conflict, are in fact the most basic of all human rights.

The human right of every man to his own life implies the right to find and transform resources: to produce that which sustains and advances life. That product is a man’s property. That is why prop­erty rights are foremost among human rights and why any loss of one endangers the others. (Emphasis mine)

What Rothbard meant was that lives depend on livelihoods—and livelihoods depend on property. Property is necessary for life itself and for survival. A mother cannot feed her child without property rights that protect her income. An entrepreneur and father cannot shield his children from homelessness if his business is torched to the ground.

The open assault on property taking place in cities across the country is clearly a campaign of violence. After all, a standard dictionary definition of violence is “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.” That’s right, not just “someone,” but “something” too. That’s not just some technicality: it’s what people generally mean when they use the word “violence.” The term has long encompassed things like burning someone’s house down. Leftist commentators are basically trying to redefine “violence” as a synonym of “assault.”

Why the word games? It could very well be for political ends. After all, much of the hard left is heavily influenced by Marxism. And one of the tenets of Marxism is the rejection of private property rights in favor of communal (in practice, state-) ownership of the means of production. By excluding the seizure and destruction of private property from the meaning of “violence,” they are able to smuggle a key Marxist presumption into our very language.

This is an ominous path. The track record of Marxism is a litany of tyranny, famine, and murder, precisely because of its hostility toward private property.

Property rights are human rights, and we discard them at our own peril.

COLUMN BY

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and the Eugene S. Thorpe Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education. He was previously a Media and Journalism Fellow at the Washington Examiner and an editor at the libertarian media nonprofit Young Voices. His work has appeared in outlets such as USA Today, National Review, the Daily Beast, and the Boston Globe, and he has also appeared on Fox News and Fox Business.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Here is Why the Media WILL NOT STOP Terrorizing and Misinforming America about Coronavirus

Look at the numbers. COVID resurrected failed media outlets. The numbers are unprecedented. People who never watch news were forced to tune in every day – and tune in they day.Previous non-watchers turned to notoriously left wing news outlets unware how utterly corrupt and compromised they are. It’s take a couple of months but people are waking up to the malevolent motives of media.

The end of COVID would end the legacy media’s grip on the narrative. So don’t expect an end any time soon no matter if the fatality rates have never been lower.

Weaponizing COVID against Trump in concert with this new business model is but the latest leftist malignity we have to defeat. How? Truth.

As TV Audiences Turn To News Networks In Droves, A Dive Into Viewer Behavior In The First Half Of 2020

Coronavirus Pandemic Causes Climate Of Anxiety And Changing Routines In America

By: Forbes, August 1, 2020:

Although ranking third in ratings among cable news networks, CNN continues to be a destination …

It comes as no surprise that television newscasts have become a programming destination and a source of information for tens of millions of Americans this year.

As you may remember, the year began with political news, including several presidential debates among Democratic candidates vying for the nomination; at the same time, there was the impeachment trial of President Trump in the U.S. Senate, only the third in U.S. history. In mid-March, the coronavirus pandemic began to spread and the stock market plummeted as millions of workers were either furloughed or lost their jobs, setting unemployment records. Near the end of May, the police killing of George Floyd triggered a wave of protests.

Hence, it came as no surprise that in the second quarter of 2020, Fox News, MSNBC and CNN were the three highest-rated cable networks in both prime time and total day. In fact, in the second quarter, all three cable networks had their highest-rated quarter ever.

To provide further insights into when and where viewers tuned to television news, VideoAmp, an ad tech company, analyzed TV viewership using Audience Content Recognition (ACR) data from a panel of 9 million smart TV devices across every market in the U.S.

For the analysis, VideoAmp divided the first 23 weeks of the year into five date ranges based on the news events. VideoAmp then measured the week-to-week changes in TV newscasts, using the entire 23 weeks as a baseline average. The five date ranges were:

  • Pre-Quarantine: January 6-March 8 (9 weeks)
  • Early Quarantine: March 9-April 12 (5 weeks)
  • Mid Quarantine: April 13-May 3 (3 weeks)
  • Late Quarantine: May 4-May 24 (3 weeks)
  • Protests: May 25-June 14 (3 weeks)

In the nine-week, pre-quarantine range, which lasted until early March, total linear TV ratings (cable and broadcast) started out strong with the first two weeks (January 6 and January 13) generating above the baseline average by 5% and 1%, respectively. For the remaining seven weeks of the pre-quarantine period however, tuning to linear TV fell below average.

In the early pandemic period, as shelter-in-place took effect, linear TV tuning was at its highest. It was during this time that live sporting events, movie theaters and retail outlets were all shut down and quarantined viewers tuned to news networks and other news content, seeking the latest information about the coronavirus from scientists and government officials. Linear TV ratings peaked during the weeks of March 16 (+10% above average), March 23 (+10%) and March 30 (+9%). Above average ratings continued for the following three weeks at 7%-8% above average.

According to VideoAmp’s analysis, linear TV viewing began to drop starting the week of April 27 (0%). Flat ratings continued throughout the three-week late quarantine period, caused by a combination of viewer fatigue, warmer weather and some states gradually reopening for business. The ratings decline though was temporary.

Viewing surged again with the death of George Floyd on May 25, which ushered in a wave of protests across the U.S. and around the world. With news outlets providing wall-to-wall coverage of protests, overall ratings surged to 6% above average during the week of May 25. The ratings surge however, was not as enduring as the pandemic. By the week of June 8, ratings had dropped to 6% below the 23-week baseline average.

The analysis also found that all three major 24-hour news networks had a spike in ratings. CNN had benefited the most, with the highest increase in audience once the pandemic hit. Although CNN typically ranks third in ratings behind rival news channels, the 40-year-old cable network has for years been a destination channel for casual and light news viewers during heightened and late breaking news events. During the pandemic, CNN’s audience more than doubled.

Digging Deeper into Audiences

VideoAmp also segmented households into terciles based on time spent. Segments were created for light, medium and heavy news viewers, with baseline averages established for each group. Light news viewers averaged 33 minutes per week, medium news viewers averaged 163 minutes per week, and heavy news viewers averaged 700 minutes per week. As news fatigue did occur, households took a respite and also tuned to other cable networks during the three-week protest period. When compared to the nine-week pre-quarantine period, heavy news viewers also watched lower-rated niche cable networks, such as Great American Country (+100%), Country Music Television (+61%), WGN America (+48%) Destination America (+40%) and DIY Network (+38%). Among news networks only CNN (+48%) and CNBC (+10%) had a sizable increase.

During the same three-week period, light news viewers were, not surprisingly, most likely to watch news networks, with CNN (+419%), MSNBC (+283%), Fox News (+255%) and Fox Business (+155%) being the four biggest beneficiaries.

Light news viewers also tuned to many of the same niche cable networks that heavy news watched: Great American Country (+99%), WGN America (+46%), DIY Network (+41%), Destination America (+38%) and CMT (+32%).

During the three-week protest period, VideoAmp also looked at heavy and light news viewing by programming genre and compared it to pre-pandemic viewing. When not watching newscasts, heavy news viewers watched more game shows (+39%), how-to programs (+26%), interviews (+23%), variety shows (+18%) and science programs (+14%). The most popular programming genres for light news viewers were somewhat different, led by politics (+222%), news (+86%), game shows (+45%), talk shows (+31%) and variety shows (+27%).

Josh Chasin, chief measurability officer at VideoAmp, explains, “While there is a cohort of Americans who spend a lot of time — on average, almost 2 hours a day — with news programming, during times of national crisis, even light news viewers flock to the 24-hour news channels for the latest information. During the recent period of protest and civil unrest, light news viewers’ time spent with CNN increased over fivefold, with MSNBC and Fox News almost fourfold. Clearly, linear TV in general, and cable news in particular, remains a vital source of information for the American public when major and ongoing news breaks.”

In all probability, in the second half of 2020, news channels will continue to be a source for millions of viewers. The pandemic continues to receive widespread coverage. In addition, there will be a contentious election, which means rallies, virtual rallies, three presidential debates, one vice presidential debate, two conventions, perhaps a few “October surprises,” followed by election day and its aftermath. Millions of viewers will stay tuned.


HAVE A TIP WE SHOULD KNOW? YOUR ANONYMITY IS NEVER COMPROMISED. EMAIL TIPS@THEGELLERREPORT.COM


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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

American Flag, Bibles Reportedly Burned In Portland Riots


Rioters in Portland were caught on camera putting bibles and an American flag into a fire outside of the federal courthouse, which has been a focal point in the protests that have been ongoing for more than a month and a half, numerous sources reported.

Peaceful protests during the day reportedly transitioned into fires being set Friday night, largely without the presence of police or federal officers, according to KOIN.

A Ruptly video shows someone with a “Black Lives Matter” sign beside them adding objects to a fire, where a Bible is seen amid the flames.

What appears to be a separate bible is seen charred in the streets, still burning.

Less than a week prior, protesters in Portland were setting fire to a Trump flag that was hanging on the fence of the federal courthouse, cheering as it fell to the ground.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler attended the protests and was hit with tear gas after rioters reportedly set the courthouse on fire.

The courthouse has been set on fire several times during the riots, which were prompted by the May 25 death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody.

Gabriel Agard-Berryhill, 18, was charged with arson for allegedly setting the courthouse on fire Tuesday.

COLUMN BY

MARLO SAFI

Culture reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Breitbart: ‘Hardcore Communist Bass’ Tops Biden’s VP Shortlist


Breitbart News has written a lengthy profile of Rep. Karen Bass, who reportedly is now a top contender for the Democrat VP choice.

Former Sen. Chris Dodd, who serves on Joe Biden’s vice presidential search committee, reportedly has urged the hapless candidate to choose Bass because “she’s a loyal No. 2. And that’s what Biden really wants.”

She’s also a loyal radical leftist. As Breitbart notes, “a deep dive into Bass’s background reveals that her influences were not just socialist, but hardcore communist.” For example, in a statement following Fidel Castro’s death in 2016, Bass referred to him as “Comandante en Jefe” and described his death as “a great loss to the people of Cuba.” “[T]hese comments are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Bass’s long and troubling association with communism and the communist regime in Cuba,” writes Breitbart.

“These are not accidental or incidental connections whatsoever,” Freedom Center founder David Horowitz was quoted in the article. To get the complete picture of Bass, check out her profile at Discover the Networks.


Karen Bass

24 Known Connections

Bass’s Ties to Communist Cuba & the Venceremos Brigade

In 1973, Bass began a long-term involvement with the Venceremos Brigade (VB), a Cuban Communist front group founded in 1969 by Fidel Castro and the radical members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and administered by the Cuban intelligence service, the General Directorate for Intelligence (DGI). Portraying itself as a well-intentioned group of volunteers dedicated only to helping poor Cubans harvest sugar cane, VB’s real purpose was, as bestselling authors and political commentators David Horowitz and Peter Collier explained in their 2005 book Destructive Generation: “to meet Cuban and Vietnamese officials in Havana to map out strategies for the war in America, the ‘other war,’ which would ultimately defeat the United States in a way that the battlefield situation in Vietnam never could have.” Said Horowitz in a later interview with Breitbart.com: “The big propaganda was that the [American] imperialists had made Cuba a one-crop country, which was sugar cane. And under Castro the production of sugar cane went down dramatically. And so they called on American volunteers to help them harvest sugar cane. But they also trained them politically.” That training included, among other things, instruction in the use of arms, explosives, and guerrilla warfare techniques.

During a 1972 House Subcommittee hearing, an undercover American police deputy who had applied to join the VB testified about the vetting process through which he had been put. “To be a member of the brigade, you had to be confirmed as a Marxist‐Leninist,” he said, adding that admittance to the VB required applicants to fill out detailed paperwork, undergo interviews regarding their political beliefs, and attend twice‐a‐week indoctrination sessions for three‐and‐a‐half months.

A  1976 FBI report stated that the long-term objective of the Cuban intelligence officials who ran the Venceremos Brigade was: “the recruitment of individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. Government, which would provide the Cuban Government with access to political, economic and military intelligence.”

During the Seventies, Bass personally made eight trips to Cuba as a “brigandista.”

To learn more about Bass, click here for her profile.

RELATED ARTICLE: VIDEO: Karen Bass, A Potential Biden VP Pick, Praised Scientology At Church Opening In 2010


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EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Nearly Half Of Young Americans Say It’s Okay To Fire People Who Support Trump (Sounds Like Hitler Youth)

The left succeeded in the long march through the institutions, a term coined by Communist student activist Rudi Dutschke (inspired by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci) to describe the strategy for establishing the conditions for revolution: subverting society by infiltrating institutions such as the academia, media, entertainment et al.

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

Discarded like an old pair of shoes.

This surely sounds like Hitler-Jugend.

Nearly Half Of Young Americans Say It’s Okay To Fire People Who Support Trump

By Glenn T. Stanton, The Federalist, July 31, 2020

The Cato Institute just released a new report showing that 62 percent of Americans are inclined to self-censor what they say politically “because others might find them offensive.” Even moderate leftists report they feel increased fear of offending the offendable, while only the most “staunch liberals,” as Cato described them, feel free to speak their minds. The “very conservative” have been pushed deepest in the closet: they are most likely to refrain from saying what they think politically, at nearly twice the rate of the “very liberal.”

Buried deeper in the report, however, is a stunning data point that might be one of the most troubling current cultural indicators. Forty-four percent of Americans younger than age 30 believe a company is correct in firing an executive because he or she personally donated to President Trump’s reelection campaign.

The companion finding was also disturbing. Twenty-seven percent of people under 30 said they were fine with an executive being fired because he or she donated to the Joe Biden campaign. The means that of Americans under 30 years old, 73 percent think it would be wrong to fire an executive from a company for donating to the Biden campaign, while only 56 percent believe it would be wrong to do so for a Trump donation.

While this problem is most pronounced among those under 30, it isn’t exclusive to young people. Across all age ranges, 78 percent said it would be wrong to fire an executive for making a personal donation to Biden, while only 69 percent believe it’s wrong to fire one simply for being a Trump donor.

This means a remarkably high number of fellow citizens believe it’s virtuous to punish you for your personal political beliefs, even if you express them merely through one private political donation, with the loss of your family’s livelihood.

People throw the word “fascist” around today much too carelessly for it to be useful. If that word can be applied to an everyday person, however, someone who believes you should lose your job based on who you vote for is a pretty sturdy working definition. Of course, this has less to do with the names of the 2020 candidates and more to do with how an alarming number of Americans today seem to know precious little about what it means to live in a representative democracy.

This brings us to the second most disturbing revelation of this report: the declining cognitive and logical rigor of today’s youth. Would these findings have been any different if the question had been, “Would you support firing a business executive solely for holding political beliefs you disagree with?”

There is only one right answer among decent people. “Yes” and “It depends” are unacceptable. But a disturbingly high number of Americans think such a firing would be perfectly fine when triggered by specific politicians’ names.

To consider just how troubling this turn is, let’s improve the polling question to see if it sounds any better: “Would you support an employer, without any threat of job loss, trying to reason with and persuade by way of facts and data why executives should vote for one candidate over another?” It’s scary to think what the polling numbers for this might be.

It was not all that long ago that the liberal clarion value was the misattributed Voltairean principle, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Today that seems to have been replaced with the brutally authoritarian, “I disagree with what you believe, and I will make sure you lose your livelihood because I went digging and found out you made a private campaign contribution to someone I think is evil.”

If, God forbid, the autopsy of the American experiment is ever written, this growing expectation that political submission be a condition of one’s employment will certainly be noted as a significant stage in its demise. It demonstrates that the world’s most hopeful self-government is moving in a very bad direction, and that should profoundly bother us all.

VIDEO: Karen Bass, A Potential Biden VP Pick, Praised Scientology At Church Opening In 2010

  • A top contender for Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick appeared at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Scientology church in 2010, The Daily Caller News Foundation has found.
  • Rep. Karen Bass praised the Church of Scientology for its “commitment…to make a difference” at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a massive Scientology church in Los Angeles. 
  • The church has been at the center of numerous scandals in its 66-year history. Former Scientologists have accused it of operating as a cult, while others have detailed rampant sexual abuse and a culture of intimidation. 

California Rep. Karen Bass, who has emerged as a leading contender to be Joe Biden’s running mate, praised the Church of Scientology during a 2010 ribbon-cutting ceremony for one of the controversial group’s facilities in Los Angeles.

Bass, 66, served in the California General Assembly when she spoke at the event, held on April 24, 2010.

“This day and this new Church of Scientology is an exciting moment because I know your goal and your commitment is truly to make a difference,” Bass told the 6,000 attendees at the ceremony, which was led by Scientology president David Miscavige.

“The Church of Scientology I know has made a difference, because your creed is a universal creed and one that speaks to all people everywhere,” continued Bass, who went on to praise Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

“The words are exciting of your founder, L. Ron Hubbard, in The Creed of the Church of Scientology: that all people of whatever race, color or creed, are created with equal rights,” she said.

“It’s a remarkable credit to your church that this is part of your creed,” Bass said.

Other speakers at the event included Lee Baca, who served as sheriff of Los Angeles County through 2014. Baca pleaded guilty in 2016 to lying to the FBI about inmate abuse at county jails during his tenure. Paul Koretz, a Los Angeles city councilman also spoke at the event.

Bass has praised the church as a U.S. congresswoman as well. In November 2011, she submitted a letter read at the opening of a Scientology center in South Los Angeles. According to reports of the event, Bass praised the church for its “many humanitarian initiatives and social betterment programs for the benefit of South Los Angeles.”

While scrutiny of Scientology has increased in recent years, it was under consistent criticism at the time Bass praised the organization. Former Scientologists have said that church operates as a cult, and that members face pressure to disassociate themselves from non-Scientologists.

The church’s leadership has long been known for dealing aggressively with its critics.

One infamous Scientology document is a memo from 1966 in which L. Ron Hubbard suggested investigating critics or feeding blackmail material on them to the media.

“Start investigating them promptly for FELONIES or worse,” Hubbard wrote in the memo. He also suggested that the church respond to its attackers by “feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press.”

WATCH:

The church and Miscavige have come under additional scrutiny in recent years amid allegations of rampant sexual abuse within the organization.

The church settled a lawsuit in July 2018 with a woman who claimed she was forced to have an abortion and prevented from leaving the church.

Last year, four women who accused actor and Scientologist Danny Masterson of raping them sued the church, its president, Miscavige, and Masterson. The Huffington Post reported that the women accused the church and Masterson of stalking them and invading their privacy in order to keep them from coming forward about the rape allegations.

Bass, who is the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, is considered one of three or four women on Biden’s list of potential vice presidential nominees.

According to CNN, her star has risen due to an intense lobbying campaign on her behalf by California Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Biden has committed to choosing a woman as his running mate. He has also faced growing pressure to choose a woman of color, due in large part to the protests that have erupted in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May.

Other leading contenders to be on the Biden ticket are California Sen. Kamala Harris and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

Bass’s office was reached for comment but did not immediately offer a response.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

COLUMN BY

CHUCK ROSS

Investigative reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

24 People Have Died Since Violence Erupted Following George Floyd’s Death

During two months of protests and rioting over the death of George Floyd, 24 people have been killed.

Most recently, protests and riots in Portland have escalated in violence, with attacks directed at the courthouse and fires being lit, with officers responding by using tear gas and pepper bullets along with other crown control munitions.

Many cities are reporting crime surges, including Minneapolis, which is experiencing an increase in gun violence in the area where Floyd died.

These are the people who’ve died as of July 30.

David Dorn, 77, died June 2 while trying to protect Lee’s Pawn Jewelry from looters. He served 38 years at the St. Louis Police Department before retiring. He died in the middle of a street after being shot in the torso by suspected rioters, according to the police incident report. The slaying was caught on Facebook Live, according to the St.Louis Dispatch.

Barry Perkins, 29, died after getting stuck on the converter dolly between a FedEx truck’s trailers while the driver of the truck pulled away. The driver, who was rerouted because of the protests, said he didn’t know the man was there. People began “removing items” from the truck and two men standing on the passenger side showed the driver they had guns, so the driver feared for his life, honked the horn and started driving until he was stopped by police. By the time police stopped the truck, Perkins had gotten caught by the trailer tire and was run over, according to KSDK.

David McAtee, 53, the owner of a barbecue restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, was killed June 1 after police and National Guard members opened fire at a protest. The National Guard was sent to disperse a crowd and said they were shot at, which prompted them to return fire. McAtee’s sister told WAVE 3 News that the crowd gathered at the scene of the shooting did not relate to the protests, and was there meeting at his restaurant.

Dorian Murrell, 18, was shot and killed May 31 by Tyler Newby, 29, in Indianapolis. Newby and his friend told police that they were walking around Downtown after the protests, found a gas canister on the ground and picked it up. They said after doing so, they were approached by a group of about 10 males who asked them what they found. Newby said he was pushed to the ground, pulled out his gun and shot the person standing over him. Murrell’s family member at the scene said there was no physical altercation, according to Indy Star.

Marquis M. Tousant, 23, was shot and killed June 1in Davenport, Iowa after police responded to reports of a suspicious vehicle, before their car was fired upon multiple times, according to WQAD. Police found a semi-automatic handgun underneath Tousant’s body and multiple shell casings surrounding his body. Tousant was also seen on video with a gun at a shooting outside a jewelry store that night. It’s unclear whose weapon fired the shot that killed him, according to QC Times.

Calvin L. Horton Jr., 43, was fatally shot near the police department’s Third Precinct in Minneapolis in what is believed to be the first killing since the protests began according to Minnesota’s CBS affiliate.

James Scurlock, 22, was fatally shot by a bar owner during a fight with several people May 30 in Omaha, Nebraska, amid protests, according to Buzzfeed News. Charges weren’t brought against the shooter, Jake Gardner, who was determined to have acted in self-defense. Gardner’s father had pushed several protesters when asking them to leave the bar.

Victor Cazares, 27, was shot and killed in Chicago during rioting, which was ruled a homicide by the Cook County medical examiner’s office. The town spokesperson said the shootings were caused by “outside agitators who were driving through Cicero seeking to cause trouble,” according to the Chicago Sun Times.

Patrick Underwood, 53, was an officer in the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service who was gunned down May 29 as he stood guard outside the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Oakland, Calif. amid protesting.  A second federal officer was shot with him but was not killed. Oakland police chief said the shooting was most likely deliberately targeting uniformed officers, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Jorge Gomez, 25, was shot and killed by Las Vegas police during June 1 protests near the federal courthouse in downtown Las Vegas. Gomez was wearing body armor and armed with three weapons during the protests, and raised his weapon toward officers, LVMPD said according to News 3 Las Vegas.

Tyler Gerth, 27, was allegedly shot and killed by Steven Lopez, 23, a frequent participant in the protests in Louisville. Lopez allegedly shot into the crowd at a protest and killed Gerth, who was a vocal supporter of the protests, according to USA Today.

Summer Taylor, 24, was killed by a man who drove his car into a closed Seattle freeway into a crowd of protesters July 4.

Robert Forbes, 55, died June 6 after being struck by a car while protesting in California City.

Jose Gutierrez, 28, was an innocent bystander allegedly killed by Zion Haygood, who was involved in the widespread looting that was taking place in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.

John Tiggs, 32, was shot and killed in Chicago while walking into a Metro PCS May 31 to pay a bill during widespread looting. Someone in the store opened fire, killing Tiggs.

Marvin Francois, 50, was shot and killed May 31 while picking up one of his sons from a protest when 3 carjackers tried to steal his car in Kansas City.

Antonio Mays Jr., 16, was shot and killed in a shooting near the Seattle Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) June 30. Mays was shot after driving his Jeep Cherokee near the barriers of the CHOP, where witnesses said they saw several people begin to fire into the vehicle, according to the NY Post.

Secoriea Turner, 8-year-old girl: Turner was shot and killed on the Fourth of July after at least two people in a crowd opened fire on the car she was in with her mother and her mother’s friend near the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed and became a site of protest in Atlanta.

Garrett Foster, 28, shot and killed July 25 in downtown Austin after allegedly approaching a car that turned onto a street where protesters were gathered while holding an assault rifle. The driver fired multiple shots out of his window after Foster pointed the rifle at him, according to Austin Police Chief Brian Manley.

Not yet named: 29-year-old Chicago man was shot and killed in what was ruled a homicide and attributed to “outside agitators” during the riots.

Not yet named: Unidentified male in his 20s was shot and killed by the owner of a gun store in Philadelphia while trying to loot his store.

Not yet namedPhiladelphia man tried to blow up an ATM to loot it and was killed, according to a CBS Philadelphia affiliate.

Not yet named: Detroit man was shot and killed during protests, and police are searching for a woman identified as a person of interest.

To collate this list, the Daily Caller searched public news reports of deaths that occurred following the eruption of violence during protests, which included shootings and looting that were linked to mass unrest.

COLUMN BY

MARLO SAFI

Culture reporter.

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‘That’s A Myth’: Democrats Downplay The Violence In Portland

‘I Was Stabbed For Being A Conservative Journalist’: Videographer Injured At Portland Protests

Federal Agents Set To Deploy In Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee To Curb Rising Crime

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Dear World: Florida Is Doing Fine

We have a friend who lives in London and has checked in on us to make sure we are OK. Why? Because we live in Florida and the international media, taking their cue from the national media, continues to report that Florida is boiling over with Covid cases and the state is overwhelmed. It’s one big triage.

A South Korean acquaintance of one of our children found out that we live in Florida and immediately had the same worries. Are you OK? They too had heard Florida is overwhelmed. Sigh.

Calm down, world. The media is, again, deceiving you. Florida is actually doing just fine, if you look at every single metric beyond new cases — which of  course are necessary in a pandemic.

Let’s start with some data at Worldometer, compiled from the CDC and WHO.

Report coronavirus cases

* – county website does not provide data

The chart above shows Florida ranks 24th in deaths per million among U.S. states at 273 per million residents, well under the U.S. average of 453 per million. The death rate in Florida is extraordinarily low. Note that this chart is tiny and hard to read because Florida is so far down the list of deaths.

That seems kind of relevant, doesn’t it? Good luck finding it in any “news” story. We need to start putting quotes around “news” because it is much more akin to Democrat operative spin than anything resembling news. Our friends in London don’t know this critical context because the reckless, partisan media in Florida and nationally only scream headlines on case count.

This chart above demonstrates clearly that Florida hospitals are nowhere near being overwhelmed by Covid patients. This is a far more relevant metric than case count.

Hospitalizations and medical facilities are not being overrun. Not even close. Hospital bed usage is very low and ICU bed usage is low. In fact, even taking the worst case projections at this point, usage remains well below capacity for hospital beds, and only at the very worst does it move beyond ICU capacity — which I identified in the chart — without hospitals making adjustments for surge capacity, which they would.

Even in the case rate, the only real scare tactic that can be used, Florida ranks 5th in the U.S., behind Louisiana, New York, Arizona and New Jersey. Anyone around the world terrified for friends in those states? The problem is that this metric is heavily dependent on testing. Florida is testing more than 100,000 daily now (it’s never clear if those are actual people or tests administered, but either way it’s a lot) and many states that had heavy Covid loads early missed untold thousands because testing was limited two to three months ago.

So the comparison is weak, yet still there are four other states worse than Florida.

Next we get to the totally screwed up death totals.

The chart above, compiled by Issues & Insights shows the totally wonked system of reporting deaths, as they come in late and in odd bunches, painting a ridiculously inaccurate picture of what is happening in Florida. There is definitely an increase in deaths in the state, but nothing like the spike being reported.

Part of the reason for this is that there was no system in place when Covid hit and so it fell to government agencies to quickly and efficiently create a system to help the medical profession in reporting deaths. Well come on, that was doomed to fail before it started. The reporting may be improving, but slowly.

Timely reporting of deaths must improve if they are going to be released daily. If they were released weekly even, it would be a much more accurate picture. But the media would howl about cover-ups and whatever other nonsense they conjured.

And finally, the much ballyhooed Rt factor is now below 1 in Florida, meaning the virus spread is on the decline, at least at the moment. The Rt factor is watched closely by geeks because it purports to be able to measure how quickly the virus is spread. According to the World Economic Forum, “The R number is a key factor in gauging the coronavirus pandemic. It refers to the ‘effective reproduction number’ of COVID-19. An R value of 1 is a crucial threshold.”

Being below 1 means the spread is under control. Again, at the moment, but remember, this is supposedly the moment when everything is going crazy in Florida.

And an interesting event happened yesterday. Another jurisdiction mandated face masks, this time the Republican-dominated Manatee County Commission, in Florida. During her presentation pushing for the mask mandate, Dr. Jennifer Bencie, director of the Florida Department of Health in Manatee County, told commissioners that the local medical community estimates as much as 48 percent of Manatee County residents may be asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic and spreading the coronavirus. That is an astounding assertion.

Bencie falls into the category of expert we are instructed to listen to. Since the experts say herd immunity is achieved at around 70 percent, although it varies from disease to disease depending on contagiousness and may be a little higher for Covid, then actually this is very good news. It would mean we are more than two-thirds of the way toward herd immunity already in Manatee County, which is by far not the hardest hit place in Florida. If true, this could explain both the “wave” of new cases (mostly just identifying what already is, or was) and the promising Rt factor.

Look, Covid is very dangerous for a very small part of our population. That is true with many diseases. The great thing is that we know exactly who is at risk and can protect them. Treatments are improving rapidly. For the vast, vast majority, it is another disease that is part of life. About half of people, apparently, don’t even show symptoms. Some feel sick, a few very sick. And a tiny, tiny percentage die.

But all of the data relayed here paints a picture of Florida that is wildly different than the media is feeding to the rest of America and the world. So to all of our friends around the world, Florida is doing fine, thank you.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Revolutionary Act column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

What does Antifa Want in Portland?

60 days of violence. Is there a way out?


Portland has been the scene of 60 consecutive days of violent protests by Antifa and their related allies, mainly other neo-Marxists and anarchists.

The protests in Portland began as a reaction to the unjust death of George Floyd at the hand of a Minnesota police officer and then centered on the narrative of police brutality and support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now they are focused on the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in the city’s downtown district.

Nightly footage out of Portland – a city with a copious history of violent Antifa activity (which has also historically been enabled by the mayor and police department) – shows masked protesters armed with bats, hammers, bottles and commercial-grade fireworks (among other weapons), attacking the courthouse with impunity.

he question is, why are the protesters now focused on the federal courthouse?

A little digging turned up an astonishingly sad and ironic fact that could mean that the current tearing apart of a once-thriving American city, and other cities like Seattle (now emulating Portland in solidarity), could actually be based on a simple misinterpretation of a work of art.

According to numerous reports, the protests against the federal courthouse started when Antifa activist Morgan McKniff saw the this poster (see right) in the window of the courthouse on July 11:

A video of the poster was uploaded by McKniff, who describes herself on Twitter as a “citizen journalist” and “[p]robably the general manager of Antifa.”

The video was immediately retweeted by other Antifa activists on Twitter, garnering thousands of views within hours. One of those accounts, the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front (an Antifa group) tweeted out an image of the hand, explaining, “Inside the Federal Courthouse in Portland: White Power symbol on a background of 3s— ’33’ being used to signify ‘KKK.’”

It would become the message behind the courthouse protests for Antifa and their allies.

In actuality, the artwork was a poster for the Trail Blazers, Portland’s NBA team – specifically, player C.J. McCollum, whose jersey number is three.

McCollum‘s forte on the court is shooting three-pointers, “so the OK hand sign in basketball represents a three pointer because of the three fingers,” noted the above Twitter user on a thread explaining the misunderstanding.

The back of the poster features a silhouette of McCollum. As the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oregon confirmed upon investigation, the artwork was indeed an NBA poster.

Without this knowledge of the background to the protests, the riots have now come down to an opposition to the federal troops, who were sent in to quell the violence after local authorities indicated they were unwilling to do so.

Commenting in The Wall Street Journal about the current optics and how the federal officers have been characterized as “’storm troopers’ or ‘secret agents’ bent on sending ‘peaceful protesters to concentration camps,” Ted Van Dyk, a Democrat who has been active in Democratic national policy and politics for 40 years, noted after watching the Portland riots in real time,

“The current round of violence isn’t being undertaken by civil-justice or other reformers but by radicals using Jacobin street-violence tactics. The idea is to provoke confrontation and violence with constituted authority so as to discredit it, counting on a few gullible local residents to see police as oppressors. The pretense of peaceful protest is rapidly disappearing. Deaths, serious injuries, arson, public and private property damage, and economic dislocation have resulted.”

Others agree with Van Dyk’s assessment, including Gabriel Johnson, a 48-year-old Black man and retired Marine, who finally decided that he had had enough of the protests in his hometown.

What he encountered when venturing into the protest crowd to talk to them one night about the concern for Black lives was truly shocking:

Sadly, the protests have devolved into a Catch-22 situation, summed up by the circular arguments expressed in the following cartoons. The question is, is there a way out of it?

COLUMN BY

Meira Svirsky

Meira Svirsky is the editor of ClarionProject.org.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Clarion Project column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

PODCAST: Doctor Video Suffers from Acute Censorship

The who’s who of Big Tech took a turn before Congress this afternoon — and not a moment too soon, considering the mess they’re making of free speech. The men behind Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon have a lot of questions to answer about censorship, if House leaders will let Republicans ask. And the first one, considering what happened this week with the frontline doctors’ conference ought to be: Why are you letting your political agenda get in the way of the coronavirus facts?

By the time Facebook had taken it down, their news conference on COVID had beaten out some of the biggest names on the platform. With 17 million views, even the group — America’s Frontline Doctors — was surprised at how desperate people were for information. They’d come to D.C. with one goal: to address some of the rumors about the pandemic and share their views on the best ways to fight it. As men and women who’d spend the last several months treating patients with COVID, their opinion was valuable — to everyone, it turns out, but Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg’s platform pulled the video, insisting it was full of “false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19.” Twitter and YouTube soon followed suit. Dr. Teryn Clark, one of the participants who joined me on Washington Watch yesterday, was “shocked.” First, because the event got so much attention, and then because it was considered controversial. Their intention, she insisted, was only to help answer people’s questions. “The numbers are starting to look like they don’t add up, people are living in fear. There have been a lot of deaths, but recently, more of the people who have … tested positive with this have not had symptoms, have been younger, healthier, and recovered more quickly. So I think there is really a curiosity in our society as well. ‘It’s not looking like in my community, like it’s supposed to look and like it looks on the news. So what’s the story here?'”

Their main goal, Teryn said, was to share what they’d see up close. “We had, as you said, millions and millions of viewers. And then we were equally surprised when we woke up and all of it had been taken down.” Even the website that hosted their conference was gone, along with all the links to the studies that have been done on hydroxychloroquine. That, she shook her head, is where so many people seem intent on shutting down debate. There are papers, she explains, from our own government talking about the drug’s effectiveness in treating other COVIDs. “I don’t know how it’s controversial that we’re looking at NIH paper [from] the time Anthony Fauci was at the NIH.”

The facts, Teryn argued, are being ignored. And she knows it, because she’s treated actual patients and watched them recover. “I was referring people to the CDC’s own website,” she said, which has a two-page fact sheet on the drug, and even that is cause for censorship. Look, Teryn argued, the medical community has studied this drug for years. “It’s been around a really long time… So it’s not a mystery. It’s not unsafe. It’s effective immediately… I just don’t know how it could be seen that we’re [advocating something] dangerous.”

These 20 physicians, from across multiple specialties, aren’t doing this for media attention. “We don’t have a dog in the fight. We have nothing to gain financially… We’re motivated because we want to help people and we want to [cut] through what some of the medical boards are doing with this medication.” It’s so out-of-control, she explained, that pharmacists refusing to fill the prescriptions. “I’ve never been questioned about a prescription,” she said. “[I could probably write a prescription] for a crazy amount of opioids and get less pushback than I get on this for 20 tablets of this medicine.” It’s unprecedented.

What’s driving this “unusual behavior” in the medical community? Teryn doesn’t know. What she does know is that these social media platforms are just as committed to covering up the facts as anyone. And it’s time to call them out.

RELATED VIDEO: Ron Paul on Why Did They Censor ‘America’s Frontline Doctors’?

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action podcast is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: ‘Mostly Peaceful Protests’

Democrats read Orwell like an instruction manual not a cautionary tale.

Orwell:

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

Peaceful protests don’t turn violent. Only violent protests do.

49 Chicago police officers were injured by rocks, pipes, and fireworks while trying to defend the statue of Christopher Columbus in Grant Park. Despite their valiant defense of the man who discovered America, Mayor Lori Lightfoot sided with the BLM mob and had the statue removed anyway.

3 law enforcement personnel with the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service may face permanent eye injuries after having lasers shined in their eyes by Black Lives Matter rioters.

These are some of the injuries suffered by large forces in a matter of days. By early June, I had tracked the cases of over 400 injured law enforcement officers in under two weeks of BLM riots.
A month later, there are too many cases and too little reporting to even begin assembling any kind of complete picture.
A week after I complied my list, over 350 NYPD officers had been listed as injured in the BLM riots. By the middle of June, 75 law enforcement officers had been injured in the Denver Black Lives Matter riots.

Rifles, explosives, lasers, power tools, and firebombs are routinely used at the mostly peaceful protests.

Law enforcement officers have come away from what the media continues to falsely describe as “mostly peaceful protests” with fractured skulls, eye and ear injuries, and broken bones. Officers have been hit with bricks, baseball bats, and broken bottles. They’ve been shot, stabbed, and run over by vehicles.

The full total is not in the hundreds: it’s in the thousands. That’s a war zone.

And that’s just the law enforcement officers. No count has been kept of the civilians assaulted by the rioters. No one has assembled a list of store owners beaten and robbed by Black Lives Matter rioters.

Rough estimates place the scale of damage in the billions of dollars. Walgreens alone suffered $75 million in looting damage. Minnesota estimated damage to 1,500 businesses totaling $500 million.

This is wildly inconsistent with the media’s repeated false claims that the Black Lives Matter riots have been “peaceful”, “mostly peaceful”, “largely peaceful” or any other weasel words and modifiers.

Protests that injure thousands of police officers and cause billions in damage are not mostly peaceful.

They are mostly violent.

Carnage on this scale is not an accident or the work of a handful of unrelated people, as the media continues to falsely insist. When riots wound thousands and cost billions, the violence is not the aberration, it defines what the protests are and what they are intended to accomplish.

When marchers at a peaceful protest bring along crowbars, fireworks, and baseball bats, it’s not a peaceful protest. A genuinely peaceful protest would not allow marchers to bring weapons.

“The violence and pain and hurt that’s experienced on a daily basis by black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white affluence,” is not what a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest organizer sounds like.

The calls for violence and the acts of violence that define Black Lives Matter are not peaceful.

If Black Lives Matter were a peaceful organization, it would not draw its inspiration from Assata Shakur, who is wanted for murder by the FBI, and was the first woman on the Most Wanted Terrorist List.

Nationwide riots by a group that draws its inspiration from a domestic terrorist are not peaceful.

The media has covered this up by making a mockery of cause and effect and offering ridiculous euphemisms for violence that explain how mostly peaceful protests have ravaged entire cities.

“Protesters in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified,” ABC News offered. According to the media, when a peaceful demonstration “intensifies”, buildings start burning and police officers are assaulted.

But if violence is the result of a peaceful protest “intensifying” then it’s not a peaceful protest. Intensifying a thing brings out its true nature, rather than transforming it into something it’s not.

“Boston’s Peaceful Protests Turn Violent at Night,” a Voice of America headline claims.

Are Black Lives Matter protests werewolves who turn violent when they see the full moon? Does the night have some magical power that turns formerly peaceful protests into violent assaults?

“What changes a protest from peaceful to violent? Aggressive law enforcement,” CNN falsely claims.

If a protest is inherently peaceful, aggressive law enforcement won’t change that. Reopen protests by conservatives faced aggressive enforcement without resulting in rioting and looting.

Some of the worst Black Lives Matter riots have taken place in progressive cities like Portland, Minneapolis, and Seattle, under the watch of lefty politicians and black police bosses. If aggressive policing led to violent riots, the worst rioting should be in the least progressive cities, while progressive cities should be experiencing the least violent protests. Instead it’s the other way around.

The violence of the riots correlates with the left-wing politics of the elected officials in charge.

Cities with the most left-of-center politicians are likely to experience the worst riots. It’s not aggressive law enforcement that causes violent riots, but the lack of decisive intervention against the rioters.

The media has tried to blame the police and the time of day for the riots, instead of the rioters.

A peaceful protest is not defined by the absence of violence, but by the presence of peaceful intent. The repeated false claims that the protests are peaceful completely distort the basic meaning of the word.

The media continually claims that every riot is really a peaceful protest that unexpectedly turned violent. But a peaceful protest wouldn’t turn violent. Only violent protests turn violent. A peaceful protest aims at peaceful change. A violent protest begins with hateful rhetoric and ends with violence.

A Neo-Nazi rally doesn’t turn violent. A Communist march doesn’t turn violent. Black Lives Matter was founded by self-described Marxists. The movement is interlaced with ties to the Nation of Islam. The rhetoric of its marches is violent, punctuated with obscenities, false claims of genocide, and racist taunts aimed at white people. These are not the components of a peaceful, but of a violent racist movement.

Black Lives Matter marches are mostly peaceful in the way that KKK marches were mostly peaceful.

Violent movements are not violent all the time. Not even the most violent fanatic is always violent.

The false claim of “mostly peaceful protests” rests on that strawman. But Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer were mostly not killing people. That didn’t make them mostly peaceful. A murderer can spend 99.0% of his time not killing people, only to be deemed evil for the 0.1% of the time during which he happens to be killing people. Mostly not killing people isn’t peaceful.

Rioting, burning, looting and throwing explosives only at night or on the weekend is not peaceful.

Racial nationalist groups, whether it’s the KKK or BLM, have a First Amendment right to protest. They have a right to threaten violence in the abstract, to brandish weapons, and to otherwise engage in posturing. But once that posturing turns into real violence, they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

And they certainly don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when their hate rallies repeatedly degenerate into violence in cities across the country leading to thousands of injuries and billions of dollars in losses.

The only people who think otherwise are their political allies among Democrats and the media.

Their mostly peaceful protests have devastated cities and they mostly won’t stop lying about them.


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