The names of small children don't often appear on monuments, but Edward Baumler's name is there among those of many other children who were murdered in the massacre at Milford.

Edward was only 3 years old when he was shot to death by Dakota raiders. His brother, Heinrich, who died alongside him, killed with a tomahawk, was 7 years old.

Their baby sister was murdered with an arrow.

The Baumler children were among a dozen other children, and twice as many women, killed by the tribal child murderers and rapists who assaulted the immigrant German township of Milford.

Now a statue of President Lincoln was toppled in Portland and the University of Wisconsin-Madison student government voted to remove his statue because he punished the killers of Milford’s children and the killers of the other seventy children under 10 years old.

The massacre at Milford was not unique. Entire communities were wiped out by bands of Indians pretending they had come asking for water. Women and girls as young as twelve years old were raped, mutilated, and murdered. Little boys were beaten to death. Survivors hid in piles of corpses, awaiting death while surrounded by the dead bodies of their loved ones.

Minnesota settlements in the 1860s were a haven for German, Norwegian, and other immigrants who had fled political oppression and limited opportunities to come to America. They had little to do with the causes of the conflict between the Dakota and the United States.

The Dakota massacres were so easily accomplished because the German and Norwegian settlers, unlike the English settlers of another era, were unarmed and weren’t ready to fight. That’s why the “warriors” initially avoided attacking the local fort and instead went after them.

When Little Crow’s War ended, trials were held and 303 fighters were sentenced to be hanged.

President Lincoln was uncomfortable with the speedy trials and the large number of tribal fighters who would have been executed. Despite heavy political pressure from survivors and Minesottans, he personally decided to review the trial records for every single case.

Lincoln had been a talented lawyer, but he was in the middle of the Civil War, and there were 303 cases. The Union depended on the support of Minnesota, and of the German immigrant community, who played a major role in the fighting, to pursue and win the war with the South.

Nevertheless, Lincoln personally reviewed the trial records for each case, and commuted the sentences of 88% of the convicted tribal fighters, agreeing to hang only 39 of them.

The men whose hanging Lincoln approved were both the worst of the lot and those whose guilt he believed absolutely proven. He discarded those who had participated in the general fighting and selected those who had attacked small farms and committed atrocities against individuals, especially women and children. In this, he relied on the testimony of survivors and other fighters because the perpetrators had boasted of the crimes committed against women and children.

As he told the Senate, he had first ordered “the execution of such as had been proved guilty of violating females” and then those “proven to have participated in massacres”.

Even though Lincoln had been as liberal as he could possibly be and more, the hangings still weighed on him. He offered a last minute pardon to another of the condemned men, issued a special warning not to hang yet another man, and warned that the other prisoners should not be subjected to “unlawful violence”. And in the end, only 38 of the convicted were hanged.

Lincoln’s liberal approach met with outrage in Minnesota. 1862 was an election year and Republicans paid the price. Told that the election would have gone better without his pardons and commutations, he retorted, “I would not hang men for votes.”

Now in Portland, leftist rioters declared an “Indigenous Day of Rage" for Columbus Day and tore down a statue of President Lincoln, along with one of President Theodore Roosevelt, and smashed up the Oregon Historical Society.

They spray painted "Dakota 38" on the Lincoln statue in support of the child-killers and rapists.

A member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's student government has claimed that President Lincoln's statue should be removed because "he ordered the largest execution on American soil: 38 Dakota peoples."

In truth, Lincoln limited the scope of the executions as much as possible. He resisted political pressure from survivors, the military, abolitionists, his own party, and the entire state. In the middle of the most decisive war the country had ever known, he personally spent time poring over transcripts of court records and commuted and pardoned every one he could.

But no amount of liberalism is ever enough for the radicals and racists who hate America.

The campaign against Lincoln isn’t new.

Even before the Emancipation Monument had been taken down in Boston, the 38 rapists and child killers had been used by leftists to attack Lincoln’s legacy. Black Lives Matter racists had vandalized statues of Lincoln in Buffalo, New York, Sioux City, Iowa, and other Democrat cities.

This isn’t about litigating a conflict that took place over a century and a half ago.

Little Crow’s War was typical of many such conflicts, the familiar factors, greed, rage, and radically different worldviews, were all there and led to deadly results. Lincoln, in equally familiar fashion, deplored the violence, but had trouble grappling with the reality of the military conflicts he was repeatedly thrust into, and unable to make the reforms that had caused him to run for public office, substituting for them with speeches and gestures that were both grand and hollow.

That was the tragedy of his career and of the entire awful era that claimed so many lives.

Lincoln was morally serious in the granular, but incapable of bringing that moral seriousness to bear on the tactics and resolution of the Civil War. The Dakota trials was typical of Lincoln at his most morally granular, weighing the lives of the accused men heavily while so many died elsewhere. But, looking at those court records, Lincoln felt a sense of control. In a massive conflict that was raging beyond any control, he could do justice to these particular lives.

The Lincoln statue vandals claim that they want “justice”. But that would include justice for Edward Baumler, his brother and his baby sister. And the many other children killed then.

It would include justice for a young mother who carried the decomposing corpse of her child for over two months, for children who watched their brothers and sisters beaten to death before their eyes, and for every horror and atrocity committed in Little Crow’s War.

Nearly entire families, many of them immigrant, were wiped out through treachery. Others left behind descendants that are keeping their stories and their fight for justice alive today.

History is complex. There was a great deal of unfairness in the collision between the settlers from the east and the west who had both crossed an ocean and found a bountiful new land.

The simplistic narrative pitting “indigenous people” against “settlers” is wrong and was always so. The German settlers massacred in Minnesota were the same sort of immigrants that leftists claim to advocate for today, and their killers were sometimes not even Indian, but like so many “Indians” today, descendants of settlers, slaves, and immigrants who could pass for Indian.

Unarmed immigrants, many of them fleeing persecution, came to the door for Indians asking for water. And then the butchery began. Men who called themselves warriors beat little boys to death, the bodies of little girls were found stripped naked, and that is what the Left celebrates.

That is what the toppling of Abraham Lincoln’s statues is about.

The topplers claim that President Lincoln represents injustice. They would rather not discuss the sort of justice they have in mind. The fallen children can speak to that as well as the fallen statues. They want to tear down Lincoln, and put up 38 rapists and child killers in his place.

The problem isn’t just the China Virus. It’s that we adopted the China Model to fight it.

Public health experts adopted China’s draconian lockdowns without knowing how well they really worked and in a country that, fortunately, lacks the power to truly enforce them.

China’s deceptiveness and lack of transparency meant that we did not know how well anything that the Communist dictatorship did to battle the virus that it spawned actually worked. Despite that, our public health experts, and those of most free countries, adopted the China Model.

We don’t know how well the China Model worked for the People’s Republic of China, but it failed in every free country that tried it. Lockdowns eventually gave way to reopenings and new waves of infection. This was always going to happen because not even the more socialist European countries have the police state or the compliant populations of a Communist dictatorship.

Desperate, the public health experts adopted China’s compulsive mask wearing, a cultural practice that predates the virus, as if wearing a few flimsy scraps of fiber would fix everything.

It hadn’t and it didn’t.

But by then the public health experts and the media that had touted them were moving fully into the scapegoat portion of the crisis. The China Model had failed, all that was left was shifting the blame to more conservative and traditional populations, and away from the cultural elites.

In New York City that meant falsely blaming Chassidic Jews for the second wave. From Maine to San Francisco, Democrat leaders and their media blamed conservative Christian gatherings. Their national counterparts loudly blamed President Trump for not wearing a mask all the time.

A New York Times headline captured the cynical broad spectrum cultural scapegoating with, "N.Y.C. Threatens Orthodox Jewish Areas on Virus, but Trump’s Impact Is Seen."

The uncomfortable truth was that the lockdowns had failed economically, socially, and medically.

Even blue states and cities were no longer able to carry the impossible economic burden much longer. The Black Lives Matter riots and the onset of summer broke the #StayHome taboos, and medically, the lockdowns had been useless efforts to meet a fake crisis of hospital overflows.

America, like too many other countries, put the experts in charge and they failed. Miserably.

Democrats claimed that they were superior because they were “listening to the science”. They weren’t listening to the science, which is not an oracle and does not give interviews. Instead, they were obeying a class of officials, some of them whom weren’t even medical professionals, who impressed elected officials and the public with statistical sleight of hand. And little else.

The entire lockdown to testing to reopening pipeline that we adopted wholesale was a typical bureaucratic and corporate exercise, complete with the illusion of metrics and goals, that suffered from all the typical problems of bureaucracy, academia, and corporate culture.

The system that determines reopenings and closings is an echo chamber that measures its own functioning while having little to do with the real world. Testing has become a cargo cult exercise that confuses the map with the world, and the virus with the spreadsheet. It gamifies fighting the pandemic while dragging entire countries into an imaginary world based on its invented rules.

When the media reports a rise or decrease in positive tests, it’s treated as if it’s an assessment of the virus, rather than an incomplete data point that measures its own measurements.

The daily coronavirus reports have become the equivalent of Soviet harvest reports. They sound impressive, mean absolutely nothing, and are the pet obsession of a bureaucracy that not only has no understanding of the problem, but its grip on power has made it the problem.

The smarter medical professionals understand that the theories have failed, while the administrators who put the theories into practice confused their system with science. The politicians listen to the administrators and when they tell us to trust the science, they mean the bureaucracy. The medical professionals can’t and won’t backtrack now. It’s too late.

The best and brightest spent the worst part of a year shuffling rationales like a gambler’s trick deck, wrecked the economy, and sent tens of thousands of infected patients into nursing homes to infect the residents, accounting for at least a third of the national coronavirus death toll.

Like most national leadership disasters, it was a combination of misjudgement, understandable mistakes, tragic errors, and acts of incomprehensible stupidity or unmitigated evil.

A lot of people are dead, a lot more are out of work, and the problem is far from solved. Someone will have to be blamed and they certainly don’t want it to be themselves.

The lockdown and the rule of the public health experts has become too big to fail.

Mistakes were made, as the saying goes. Projections were built based on bad and incomplete data. Everyone followed the path of least resistance by doing what China had done. And everyone in the system, from the experts to the administrators to the politicians to the media, is complicit. That makes the massive error the world has been living under too big to fail.

There are only two choices left. Admit the magnitude of the mistake or find someone to blame.

The establishment that touted the experts is blaming its political and cultural enemies, the people it has been priming the public to see as strange, selfish, irrational, and dangerous. And also the very people who have been the loudest opponents of lockdown culture.

Given a choice between admitting the system was wrong or blaming the system’s failure on its critics, the establishment has followed the same pattern as every authoritarian leftist regime.

The lockdowns didn’t fail, they were failed by conservative Christians and Jews, by President Trump, by people who were too selfish to give up their lives, businesses, and religion for the greater good. And if only they had, the coronavirus would be gone and everything would be fine.

The China Model promised something that its proponents quickly knew it couldn’t deliver. Everything since then has been a scam to cover up the original quackery and hackery. The louder they blame critics and dissenters for the failure, the more obvious the coverup becomes.

Lockdown culture needs patsies to take the fall for why it didn’t work. Like every leftist social and economic experiment, its defenders are left to argue that it was never properly tried. If only it weren’t for Trump, and for the dissenters, for the Chassidic Jews in Brooklyn, for Christian weddings in San Francisco and Maine, for gyms, bars, and beaches, it would have worked.

Yet the simple truth is that the China Model hasn’t worked in any country that isn’t China.

It doesn’t matter who the leader or the ruling party are, whether the public wore or didn’t wear masks, the resurgence is not a political phenomenon, science doesn’t speak, and the virus doesn’t listen. But of all the countries in the world, America was especially ill-fitted to adopt an authoritarian public health model. The sheer size, openness, and diversity of the country makes us unique and should have made it abundantly obvious that no such system would work.

Anyone but an expert or administrator would have understood that these plans were doomed.

But what the system failed to accomplish in battling the virus, it made up for by providing the leadership that had enacted it with a wonderful opportunity to settle its political scores.

The lockdowns don’t exist anymore as a prophylactic policy, but as a political vendetta. The more people die, the more businesses are ruined, the more everyone suffers, the more vicious the vendetta grows as it hunts for scapegoats, political and religious, for the great error of terror.

Leftist regimes turn to political terror as their policies fail. When the idealism dies, and the theories fall apart, the organizers pursue misery for the sake of misery, using fear, deprivation, and hate to maintain their grip on power while crushing the political threats to their rule.

The rule of the experts isn’t fighting the virus. It has become the virus.

Every year, Shiite Muslims in Flushing, Queens conduct the Arbaeen, a procession in honor of Mohammed's grandson whose death at the hands of a Sunni caliph marked the pivotal break between Shiites and Sunnis, slapping their faces and chests for their beheaded Imam Hussein.

Queens now has a large Muslim population, and regular fall processions of wailing crowds.

Black Lives Matter 757, a Virginia ally of the national racist hate group, has spent four months trying to send a black man to jail.

Even though the racist organization had demanded the dismantling of the Virginia Beach Police and its judicial system, it had dedicated its Shut Down the Oceanfront 2.0 rally on Independence Day to demanding that the police, whom they wanted to eliminate, arrest Manny Wilder.

“We are calling for Hampton Police & Virginia Beach Police to get this menace off of the streets IMMEDIATELY!” the hate group had posted.

“I have to say to the Orthodox community tomorrow, ‘If you’re not willing to live with these rules, then I’m going to close the synagogues.’” Governor Andrew Cuomo told religious Jews.

His basis for the decree was a photo of mourners who weren’t practicing social distancing at a funeral. But the photo of a crowd of Orthodox Jews on Cuomo’s slide was from 2006.

It was a very different message than Cuomo’s condemnation of bigotry when he had insisted, “There is zero evidence that people of Asian descent bear any additional responsibility for the transmission of the coronavirus." The new message is, don’t blame the Asians, blame the Jews.

They did go to a funeral in 2006.

The media is dying. Its business model is defunct. Its bias has alienated most of the country. In the latest Pew survey, the only group that still trusts the media are Democrats.

And while so many millions are out of work, Democrats are bailing out the media.

The wave of consolidations and bankruptcies is sweeping like a fire through major papers. Cable news will be a casualty of demographics and the end of bundling. The end of network television is less than a decade away. Brand names like CNN and MSNBC will soon be where Time, Newsweek, and other news magazines ended up once subscriptions collapsed.

The media is dying, but it’s not about to die gracefully. It just needs to find money. Lots of it.

Big Tech billionaires have bought classic newspapers and magazines like Time, The Washington Post, and The New Republic, but those are vanity projects and even Jeff Bezos doesn’t have enough money to subsidize the entire ossified infrastructure of the media.

But the only people who have more money than the Amazon CEO are the American people.

The media’s Plan A has been sponging off Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook, pressuring them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into its operations. Its Plan B is blurring the line between lefty activist non-profits and its newsrooms with organizations like Report for America being funded by Facebook and Google to embed activists into local newspapers.

Is that going to pay the media’s bills? No. That’s why there’s Plan C. And Plan C is you.

H.R. 7640: The Local Journalism Sustainability Act was introduced in Congress, backed by a coalition that includes Report for America and the National Newspaper Association, and would offer tax credits for newspaper subscriptions and tax credits for paying the salaries of the radical activists working there. There's also a $5,000 tax credit for advertising in newspapers.

At a time when millions of Americans are out of work, when families are faced with losing their homes and businesses, Democrats have decided that they should aggressively subsidize a dying industry at the expense of everyone else whose jobs are seen as “non-essential”.

The countless stores, gyms, bars, salons, and other small businesses going out of business in the epidemic of Democrat lockdowns and lootings could use this kind of bailout. But the Democrats insist that their media messaging operations are vital and should be subsidized.

While Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who introduced the bill, claims that it will fund “local newspapers”, those local newspapers are largely owned by national operations and hedge funds. While actual local businesses go out of business, Democrats are proposing a bailout for media investors.

Rep. Kirkpatrick’s press release touts support from from the News Media Alliance whose board is stacked with the heads of McClatchy and USA Today, huge national chains with a combined thousands of papers, not to mention the CFO of the New York Times, and a VP at the Washington Post. Are these the local small businesses Democrats want to subsidize?

The Local Journalism Sustainability Act has over 40 Democrat sponsors and nearly 20 Republican sponsors. Democrat sponsors include some of the House's most extreme figures like Rep. Ted Lieu, Rep. Raul Grijalva, Rep. Eric Swalwell, and Rep. Andre Carson.

H.R. 7640 would be an outrage at any time, it’s a particular outrage when so many Americans are out of work and so many small businesses are going under that Democrats and some Republicans want to provide a $250 tax credit for newspaper subscriptions, a tax credit covering half of $50,000 salaries for media hacks, and $5,000 credits for advertising in newspapers.

Companies that own dozens, hundreds, and thousands of papers are lobbying Congress.

They keep claiming that the bill will help save “local journalism”. But how does the Local Journalism Sustainability Act define local journalism? Not based on the paper, but the readers. As long as 51% of the paper’s readers live in the same state, it’s considered a local paper. Even if the paper is a subsidiary of a national chain whose real headquarters is in New York or D.C.

Or alternatively, they live within 200 miles of each other. Depending on how you measure, Washington Post readers in New York and New York Times readers in D.C. would be “local”.

That’s some “local” journalism. And it’s no accident that it was written this way.

There’s nothing local about this bailout. It will mostly go to subsidize the huge newspaper chains that are lobbying for it, while bribing businesses and readers to fund their failed business model.

Even while Democrats are destroying businesses with viable business models, they’re trying to keep the media alive by exclusively offering tax credits for their political allies.

It’s sleazy, it’s slimy, and it’s just the beginning.

Democrat organizations like Acronym’s Courier Newsroom have been setting up fake local papers while Report for America has been hollowing out papers by embedding radical activists into newsrooms. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act is testing the business model for converting the media into a bunch of political non-profits backed by taxpayers and lefty donors.

Beyond media associations, backing for the Local Journalism Sustainability Act comes from Report for America, and the American Journalism Project, which is advocating the transformation of the media to a non-profit model. Report for America is an initiative of the GroundTruth Project which is backed by the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation is a leading backer of Black Lives Matter.

While these donors already back a network of radical messaging operations, proposals like the Local Journalism Sustainability Act allow the media to ease into the transition by having it both ways, maintaining corporate ownership, while having their operations subsidized by tax credits.

As the Left sets up new complex interplays between corporate media and its non-profits, the line between journalism and political advocacy blurs into a strange twilight zone in which non-profits subsidize media operations and taxpayers subsidize corporate chains as if they were non-profits, while creating something that looks very much like a state media operation.

The internet has been slowly digesting the separate parts of the media, and it doesn’t pay the bills. The ads and subscriptions that funded local newspapers were wiped out by the internet. Streaming dooms cable channels and local news, leaving behind a lot of online video. But even digital media is being crushed by social media. Vox, Vice, the Huffington Post, and all the digital lefty outlets were hit with layoffs after facing the impossibility of actually turning a profit.

The media can’t survive on its own terms. Its business model is defunct. Its shakedown strategies aimed at Google and Facebook have silenced countless conservative voices, while pushing social media to spam its content, but won’t preserve the media as a viable institution. The hedge funds and private equity firms that own the media will cut costs, consolidate, and dump. The tech and communications firms that come into possession of media outlets will shrink and then dispose of them. That doesn’t mean that the media will die. It will ‘Pravdaize’.

CNN, MSNBC, and the Huffington Post will be deemed “essential” forms of journalism that must be protected by subsidizing their operations, much as newspapers would be subsidized.

The media will become a public institution. Its funding will come from taxpayers in a thousand different ways and the Local Journalism Sustainability Act is the least of it. Media activists have been cooking up a large package of tax credits, subsidies, law changes, tax code restructurings, and assorted proposals to transform the media from corporate properties into state media.

Imagine PBS and NPR multiplied by a million.

Congress should not be bailing out media tycoons while Americans go hungry. If Americans want local papers, they can buy them. And if they aren’t, maybe it’s time that the big chains asked why they’re losing subscribers and why Americans aren’t buying what they’re selling.

A majority of Americans don’t like and don’t trust the media. They’ve divested from it. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act wants to bribe Americans to read the paper with their own money.

A better idea might be to have the media pay its taxes and let Americans keep their money.

In June, Speaker Pelosi called for a national mask mandate forcing everyone in the country to wear masks. That same month, she tweeted a photo of a Congressional meeting with the brother of George Floyd, the ex-con whose death after a struggle with police led to nationwide race riots, and numerous injuries and deaths, while her nose and mouth remained uncovered.

In July, she ordered that any member of the House not wearing a mask be forcibly removed.

The media had spent the summer touting her “fashionable” and fashionably pricey masks from a small boutique in Virginia using fabric imported from Venice as the makings of a “style icon”.

In September, Pelosi was caught in a salon that was supposed to be closed without a mask.

The biggest mask hypocrites wear masks. As long as they think the cameras are on and people are paying attention. The moment they’re not signaling their virtue, the masks come off.

"Why don’t the NYPD wear masks? What signal does that send?" Governor Cuomo ranted.

The New York governor, whose order forcing nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients may have killed as many as 11,000 seniors, had previously accused President Trump of being "a co-conspirator of COVID" for not wearing a mask.

Meanwhile, at the height of the pandemic in New York, Cuomo signed an anti-police bill, closely flanked by Al Sharpton and police opponents, with nobody wearing masks.

“If you leave home, you should wear a mask," Mayor Bowser announced. “This means, if you’re waiting for a bus, you must have on a mask. If you are ordering food at a restaurant, you must have on a mask. If you’re sitting in a cubicle in an open office, you must have on a mask.”

The only people exempted from the Washington D.C. mask mandate were children under 3 and government employees.

“It's simple: Wear a mask. Save lives. Stop the spread,” Bowser insisted. Except it wasn’t.

Even though Bowser’s order had exempted district and federal employees, she dispatched investigators to the Trump International Hotel over a photo of President Trump not wearing a mask.

Meanwhile Bowser could be seen at numerous press conferences not wearing a mask.

At a George Floyd rally, Bowser was closely surrounded by black nationalist activists wearing masks, while she had her mask down.

In Oregon, Governor Kate Brown rolled out a statewide mask mandate, declaring, “The choices every single one of us make in the coming days matter.” Then she warned, “If you want your local shops and restaurants to stay open, then wear a face covering when out in public.”

A few months later, she, her family, and her security detail were caught in public without masks.

Senator Dianne Feinstein had demanded that the FAA issue "mandatory mask requirements for all aviation employees and travelers". Some months later, she was photographed walking through an airport without a mask on.

Governor Northam implemented a statewide mask mandate in Virginia, and was photographed without a mask, and in close proximity to people, while at the beach.

“Hypocrisy has become the hallmark of Ralph Northam and his administration," Republican legislators stated in a press release.

The Democrat politician explained that he had left his mask in the car.

This sort of behavior by politicians has become so commonplace that it’s almost hardly worth commenting on. Politicians scold the public about wearing masks and then get unmasked.

The media has repeatedly been caught pulling the same stunt.

CNN's Jim Acosta complained that President Trump wasn't wearing a mask, only to be caught not wearing a mask. The same thing happened with CNN's White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins. An MSNBC reporter, pretending to be outraged that no one at Lake Geneva on Memorial Day was wearing masks, had his shot interrupted when a passerby noted that the cameraman and half the MSNBC crew weren't wearing them either.

Mask virtue signaling and outrage happens in front of the cameras. It’s easy to spot plenty of talking heads and their crews without masks when the cameras turn the other way.

Public health officials, from Dr. Fauci down to state officials have been caught at it too.

Masks are inconvenient and unpleasant. But they’ve also become a political and social symbol. Like most leftist social statements, it’s important to be seen practicing it, rather than to actually practice it. Masks, like going vegan, driving a Prius, or issuing a statement about this country’s structural racism, show that you are morally superior because you “care” about an issue.

And showing that you care means that you don’t actually have to care except when showing off.

Democrat governors imposed lockdowns on other people while they flagrantly violated them.

Governor Pritzker preached to Illinois residents about the importance of "staying home for the good of each other and the good of our state" while his family traveled to their horse farms and mansions in Florida and Wisconsin, and while workers from Chicago labored to construct his mansion in Wisconsin.

Why should the relationship of Democrat politicians to masks be any different than their behavior in getting haircuts and opening up the salons they closed, taking the vacations they banned for others, and eating at restaurants that people in their states aren’t allowed to do.

Governor Whitmer had banned just about everything in Michigan and then her husband wanted a boat for a Memorial Day jaunt, and inquired, "I am the husband to the governor; will this make a difference?"

Obviously.

People are used to political hypocrisy from politicians, but the politicization of everything has made political hypocrisy as ubiquitous as any other vice masquerading as a virtue. In a society that is losing its religion, politics offers identity and moral values to an irreligious country.

And the mask is one of the caring facades that the cult of correctness and awareness wears.

The difference between virtue and virtue signaling is the same as the contrast between a face and a mask. The former conveys the truth about a person, while the latter seeks to mask it.

In a society where virtue is what you wear, rather than what you are, the masks are everywhere.

Masks, like virtue signaling, can be put on and taken off again. They don’t require any meaningful commitment. Like the t-shirt with a slogan about the environment or a bumper sticker for a political cause, they can be easily removed once the virtue has been signaled.

Virtue is inconvenient to people who lack it. That’s why virtue signaling is better. And it’s also why those who preach about masks the loudest are the biggest mask hypocrites. Virtue signaling is for self-righteous hypocrites who want the facade of morality without the morals.

A virtue that they remove at will, that is visible, but can be taken off when no one who matters is looking, is the culmination of a morality that confuses caring with spreading awareness. Putting on a mask says that you care, when you really don’t, and it lets you take it off when the camera isn’t on you, when you’re among friends, and when the point that you care has been made.

Democrat politicians aren’t wearing masks because they care, but because they want to reduce caring to wearing a mask, so that no one asks uncomfortable questions about the thousands of elderly people who died in nursing homes that they forced to accept coronavirus patients.

When you peek behind the mask of caring, a murderous amorality is there looking back at you.

Saving lives is hard. Wearing a mask for the cameras is easy. The politicians and the people who spend the most time trying to confuse caring and masking don’t care about human life.

The tragic truth that the Greeks knew well is that the mask of virtue is no substitute for virtue.

The media shot back at public disgust with Cuties, a Netflix film, with sneers about QAnon.

Dismissing objections to Cuties, a movie sexualizing young girls that would have been illegal to film in this country, as a right-wing conspiracy sums up a poisoned marketplace of ideas in which nothing is so unacceptable that it can’t be normalized by associating it with the other side.

Not even pedophilia.

The normalization of pedophilia is usually accompanied by references to QAnon, as if only conspiracy theorists could possibly object to the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.

The release of Cuties comes as California, where Netflix's headquarters and that of the entertainment and tech industry that it intersects, is located, turned SB-145 into law.

Unlike a lot of California bills which have dramatic names, SB-145 carries a bland tag: “Sex Offenders: Registration.” Its digest curtly states, “This bill would exempt from mandatory registration under the act a person convicted of certain offenses involving minors if the person is not more than 10 years older than the minor.”

A 24-year-old year-old sexually abusing a 14-year-old would qualify.

"This bill has no application to anyone under the age of 14," Senator Wiener assured.

Count your blessings.

The bill, introduced by Senator Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco in the State Senate, was passed by its Democratic majority, while the media sympathetically presented it as fighting anti-gay discrimination, and Weiner, as being targeted by QAnon harassment.

It’s not just fictional pedophilia that can be normalized through ideological tribalism.

SB-145 passed the California State Senate by 41 to 25, and Governor Newsom signed it into law even while massive wildfires were turning the skies of San Francisco an ominous red.

Modern leftists, like members of any fundamentalist faith, are capable of seeing a message in a firestorm, but only the one that accords with their theology in which sexually abusing children is a step forward for civil rights, while failing to set up enough solar panels is a grave sin.

"Mother Earth is angry. She's telling us -- whether - she's telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is, that climate crisis is real and has an impact," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC while playing oracle to her imaginary goddess.

Democrats can hear Mother Earth, they can’t however hear the cries of abused children.

Normalizing pedophilia is the inevitable outcome of the leftist shift from individual rights to identity politics. Children are only protected from abuse by the vestiges of a criminal justice system that is being dismantled by leftists because it oppresses those groups who disproportionately engage in criminal behavior. In a worldview in which criminals are victims and victims are criminals, the rights of pedophiles are more morally compelling than their victims.

Children are not an oppressed group and their rights are often sacrificed to the demands of identity politics, whether it’s Somali Muslims engaging in female genital mutilation in Minnesotta, a bill tackling the question was opposed by Ilhan Omar, or chemically castrating young boys to make them identify as girls, there are always collective issues of identity politics, the assertion of some oppressed group’s rights, that are more important than the bodies and lives of children.

When ideas are more compelling than people, then people are sacrificed to ideas. And a society that is increasingly uninterested in the old family structures is sacrificing children to its ideas.

Modern Molochs have many ideas for saving the world by passing children through the flames.

Environmentalists insist that people shouldn’t have children to save the planet. Feminists argue that people should abort children for gender equality. Activists who claim that there is no gender are tinkering with children to demonstrate their ideas. Critical race theorists are indoctrinating children with their poisonously racist ideas in kindergarten. Why not throw in a little pedophilia?

Two parallel moral systems are inhabiting the same country, the vice of one is the virtue of the other, and only one of those moral systems is shocked and horrified by the abuse of children.

After the United States attempted to extradite filmmaker Roman Polanski for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl, an army of famous celebrities signed a Free Roman Polanski petition.

The list included everyone from Martin Scorcese, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Natalie Portman, Harrison Ford, and, obviously, Harvey Weinstein, with the sexual predator calling Polanski’s rape a “so-called crime”.

"In Roman Polanski case, is it Hollywood vs. Middle America?" the Los Angeles Times asked.

That’s the Cuties situation again. And Hollywood has a way of winning these fights. Roman Polanski may have successfully avoided extradition from France to America, but Harvey Weinstein has spent the better part of the year fighting extradition from New York to LA.

Due to the pandemic, the extradition hearing has been delayed until December.

And by the time Harvey gets shipped over to Los Angeles, California Democrats may find a way to change the law to make it more accommodating toward these so-called crimes.

Culture is more compelling than law. It’s why Harvey Weinstein was able to get away with it for so long. Rape might be on the books as a crime, but in an environment in which no one thinks it’s a crime, no one will report it, and hardly anyone one will enforce the laws if they do.

And the entertainment industry is at least as abusive toward children as it is to women.

Netflix, with a market cap in the neighborhood of $200 billion and 200 million subscribers, has far more power than any mere studio, and Cuties is a test of that power in the same way that Harvey Weinstein tested his power. After a certain number, money becomes meaningless. The degeneracy of absolute power comes from powerful men pushing their appetites to the limit.

And there’s no place where the ruling elite push their power to the limit as much as California.

The average person, even perhaps the average Netflix subscriber, may be disgusted by Cuties, but a brief history of the entertainment industry and the nation’s morals shows that Americans have been adapting their tastes and tolerances to those of their entertainers for 70 years.

Not the other way around.

Complaints like “Shut up and sing” or “Don’t preach to us” are hollow protests when pitted against the power of someone like Netflix CEO Reed Hastings or Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

We live in Hollywood’s world where marriage, family, and religion are on the decline.

Mere law, as California showed us, won’t stop the normalization of pedophilia, and public revulsion won’t either. Is there reason to think that the same cultural machine that convinced a majority of the country to support men showering with young girls will fail for the first time?

In 2016, a majority of Americans opposed the idea. By 2017, a slim majority supported it, and by 2019, a majority were in favor of a law that would force transgender bathroom use.

That's the rate of speed at which these battles are fought and lost these days. The Bostock decision, in which Gorsuch and Roberts joined the leftists in inverting the meaning of sex, was inevitable if you were paying attention to the polling, not in rural Arkansas, but in New York, D.C. and San Francisco, and the major cities that act as incubators for the ruling class.

(And if you want conservative judges, try looking in rural Arkansas, not the Ivy League.)

How fast can actual pedophilia be normalized? We may find out sooner than we think.

America is undergoing a catastrophic clash between two incompatible moral systems, one of which, as Yeats wrote, lacks conviction, while the other is full of passionate intensity. Both moral systems are highly detailed ways of explaining the world and the place of human beings in it.

But only one of them believes that what we do as individuals, apart from the group, matters.

Only one finds value in the existence of a child, not as a prop for an idea, but as a person.

A religion with a personal God makes personal morality innate and inescapable. But the secular religion of the wokes has no god, no personal morality and no sins except the social kind. A religion that encompasses the universe can be localized in the confines of the human soul, but the social religion of leftists is enmeshed with charts and graphs about the social status of all.

Their messianism of the collective liberation of all has no room for individual rights or morals. Decadence isn’t a sin, it’s revolutionary. Liberation requires the destruction of the old mores, and, even when practiced on a child, sweeps away the old repressive order with its false ideas about sexual morality and replaces it with the creative destruction of the endless revolution.

That’s why prominent figures in the German, French, and British Left openly endorsed pedohphilia in the seventies, only to have the awkward fact swept under the rug afterward.

The Left is not a mere ideology. It is a belief system with its supernatural elements, like Mother Nature, with redemption, damnation, and a crusade whose value system is being perpetuated through government institutions, schools and universities, and through the entertainment industry that has become the common culture of a country whose people have little in common.

It’s not enough to cancel Netflix, turn off the NFL, or skip the latest movie. We must restore the soul of a nation, its values, purpose, and meaning that popular culture displaced and replaced.

Or we will find out that what’s coming up next is a thing worse than we can even imagine.

After the recent toll of mostly peaceful Black Lives Matter rioting wrecked cities and tilted the polls toward Trump, Joe Biden and even Kamala Harris began condemning “violence”.

Biden has said meaningless things like "we condemn the violence", and "I condemn this violence unequivocally" as if violence were an independent entity. Condemning violence, like condemning war, is either pacifism or evasion. Since Biden isn’t a pacifist, he’s evading.

Violence is a concept. You don’t condemn a concept: you condemn its perpetrators.

The Democrats embraced Black Lives Matter, they even fundraised on behalf of the rioters and looters. Senator Kamala Harris tweeted out a link to the Minnesota Freedom Fund which bailed out rioters and looters, and Jaleel Stallings, who was accused of shooting at police officers.

According to police officers, Stallings had crouched near a car during the riots and opened fire on them. He faced two counts of attempted second-degree murder and the bail fund backed by Kamala Harris and several Biden staffers still bailed out the alleged wannabe cop-killer.

When federal investigators showed up at the Xie family home in Basking Ridge, there was a courtesy Porsche loaner in the driveway. The pleasant New Jersey community has become the place where successful Chinese immigrants move after they’ve outgrown places like Fort Lee.

Like the earlier generation of Jewish residents, they came for the schools and suburban living. The neighbors of the Xie family on the tree-lined street are mostly Jewish and Asian upper middle class professionals employed by Fortune 500 companies and living the American dream.

The Xie home with its soaring gables, its two car garage, and the Porsche out front, signaled that they had made it. And with access to good schools, their children would outdo them.

Jonathan Xie probably never will. His guilty plea to one count of concealing attempts to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization puts an end to the case against him, and likely to the future his parents might have planned for him: a degree from an Ivy League college, a prestigious profession, and another big house like theirs in a leafy suburb.

Two years after Jonathan graduated from high school, federal investigators were going through the familiar and humiliating process of carting boxes past the loaner Porsche and the two car garage. Something had gone very wrong. Like a surprisingly diverse number of American teens, Jonathan had decided to convert to Islam, become an Islamic terrorist and kill lots of people.

Especially Jews. And possibly anyone in Trump Tower. Including President Trump.

While Islamic terrorism in America is still mostly the hobby of first and second generation immigrants from Muslim countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Egypt, Xie was far from the first non-Muslim teen to pick up the basics of Islam and try to join a terrorist group.

But there were two unique things about the Xie case.

Jonathan came from an immigrant group with a strong sense of familial identity. When he declared that he had become a “revert” to Islam, he turned his back on his family, his culture, and his family’s Christian faith.

And then there was his choice of terrorist organization.

Teens who convert to Islam in some quiet suburb used to choose Al Qaeda, and these days pick ISIS. But Jonathan wasn’t drawn to any of the flashy globalist jihadist newcomers.

He chose Hamas. And the Muslim Brotherhood.

"As-salamu alykum. My name is Jonathan and I reverted to Islam a few weeks ago," his first letter to Hamas, a year after graduating high school, went. "I was wondering if non-Palestinians/non-Arabs would be allowed to join the Al-Qassam Brigades."

In another email, he mentioned, “As a Muslim living in the US, I would like to support the Palestinian resistance as much as possible.”

It was the sort of polite letter that Jonathan must have been taught to write when applying for internships or colleges, but he was instead applying to join the military wing of a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group known for firing rocket launchers at school buses and blowing up entire families in pizzerias.

While Xie was using the correct Islamic language, his roster of political terminology, referring to Israel as an “apartheid” state, ranting about “neo-liberalism”, and building a YouTube playlist of videos supporting Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad, both Arab Socialist Baath Party regimes, North Korea’s Communist Party, and Iran’s Shiite Houthi and Hezbollah terrorists, was strongly suggestive of a particularly radical strain of leftist politics easily available online.

Xie’s hatred for Israel and Jews vied only with his hatred for President Trump.

"Donald Trump, he should be hung from the gallows!" he ranted in one post. "I went to NYC today and passed by Trump Tower, then I started thinking about bombing it and I was imagining that the explosion would kill Trump."

While Xie's Instagram rantings could be mistaken for posturing, he tried to follow through on his plans.

"I'm joining the army," he claimed. "Not to fight for Jewish internets (sic)... but to learn how to kill."

And he actually did apply to join the military.

He boasted of donating money to Hamas, and he actually did donate to the terrorist group.

Meanwhile he was fantasizing about becoming a terrorist.

"I want to shoot the pro-israel demonstrators," he pondered in one, referencing a 4chan meme about vehicular attacks. "Maybe I should rent the truck of peace."

On a video, Xie brandished a gun and showed off a Hamas flag while denouncing "Zionism" and threatening, “I’m gonna go to the f____ pro-Israel march and I’m going to shoot everybody.”

"I should do lone wolf," he speculated elsewhere.

“Watch their blood and dead bodies litter the streets,” he fantasized in yet another message.

After all that, much of it public on social media, combined with showing an undercover FBI employee how to donate to Hamas, his guilty plea concedes the obvious. Xie did little to conceal his plans or attitudes. And while his defenders have attempted to blame mental illness, that excuse has been employed so often for Islamic terrorists that it has lost all its credibility.

But what drove a Chinese-American teen to convert to Islam and try to join Hamas?

The same year that Xie graduated from high school in Basking Ridge, likely chosen by his family because it has the 2nd and 3rd highest ranked high schools in New Jersey, the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge, with the assistance of the DOJ, won a victory allowing it to build a mosque, despite zoning issues, and collecting over $3 million in fees and damages.

The DOJ’s lawsuit was one of the closing acts of the Obama administration.

Basking Ridge, home to the country’s oldest white oak tree that George Washington once picnicked under, has been slowly trending leftward. Hillary Clinton narrowly won its home area. It’s a place where some of the NYPD and FDNY firefighters who commute to New York City live, and where the multicultural employees of multinational corporations buy homes, so that American flags and Black Lives Matter signs can alternate as you drive through the township.

Even before the DOJ’s intervention, Muslim prayers were being held in a municipal building and Islamic lessons were being taught in a public school cafateria.

Xie’s parents may have come to Basking Ridge for its schools, but Islamization had arrived first.

The Islamic Society of Basking Ridge is said to be affiliatedwith the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA is in turnrooted in the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I support the Hamas faction of the MB,” Xie had posted, referring to the Muslim Brotherhood.

What role did the growing Islamization of Basking Ridge play in a Chinese-American teen converting to Islam and plotting the murder of Americans? It’s hard to know. The same DOJ that enabled the Islamic Society’s mosque also prosecuted Xie for taking Islamic teachings literally.

The pleasant township with its excellent schools had become another American training ground for Islamic terrorists.

"I am not afraid to die," Xie stated.

On the old site of the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge were the teachings of the Koran about the "character of non-believers".

“Seize them and slay them wherever ye find them,” one verse coolly mentioned.