(Posting this article has become an annual tradition for eight years now. It's a reminder that the end of each year ushers in terrible unknowns, but also opportunities for heroism. History does not stand still, and we should never assume that we know how it will come out. History tells us otherwise.) 

The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.

While the year makes its first pass around the world, even if it doesn't feel like there is much to celebrate, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.

December 31, 1912.

The crowds are large, the men wear hats, and the word 'gay' means happy. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year has fallen on a Sunday. 

There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today's urban metropolis.

The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York's Finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.

On Ellis Island, Castro, a bitter enemy of the United States, and the former president of Venezuela, had been arrested for trying to sneak into the country while the customs officers had their guard down. Gazing at the Statue of Liberty, Castro denied that he was a revolutionary and bitterly urged the American masses to rise up and tear down the statue in the name of freedom.

Times Square has far fewer billboards and no videos, but it does have the giant Horn and Hardart Automat which opened just that year, where food comes from banks of vending machines giving celebrating crowds a view of the amazing world of tomorrow for the world of 1912 is after all like our own. 

When George Gascon ran for DA of Los Angeles County on a platform of protecting criminals from cops, Hollywood money put him over the top. Once Gascon got into office, he began dismantling protection for victims of violent crimes. Even for the littlest victims.

The beneficiaries of his pro-crime policies funded by Hollywood included a monster who beat a 6-month-old baby girl so badly that her skull shattered leaving her with brain damage.

The little girl is now blind and can only eat through a feeding tube.

This is the pro-crime program that major Hollywood donors like Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Steven Spielberg, Warner Bros' first black TV head Channing Dungey, and other industry figures, had paid for. Hollywood has been a major source of cash for pro-crime politicians and legislation that helps criminals at the expense of their victims. Except in one particular area.

You can crush a baby’s skull, mug an 80-year-old woman, or break into the home of any ordinary person, but what you can’t do is infringe on Hollywood’s copyrights. And that’s why the same industry that champions muggers, rapists, and killers also embedded felony streaming into the omnibus bill that threatens offenders with anywhere from 7 to 10 years in prison for the "unauthorized" rebroadcasting of movies, shows, and sports over the internet.

This comes from the same industry that also funded the ‘legalization’ of shoplifting.

Proposition 47 essentially ended prosecution for thefts of under $950, replacing them with meaningless citations. The proposition, backed by Gascon, turned stealing anything under $950 into a misdemeanor instead of a felony. It was backed by major entertainment industry figures including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Brad Pitt, Judd Apatow, Edward Norton, and a roster of other stars, two of whom have since been accused of sexual abuse, under ‘Artists for 47’.

But while fighting to make stealing hundreds of dollars worth of products from stores a misdemeanor, the entertainment industry was also fighting to make streaming a felony.

Rob a grocery store and you get a citation, but streaming an NFL game is a felony.

“All creative people want the same thing – to share their vision with the world and make a living doing it,” Creative Future argues. That’s a laudable thing, but why shouldn’t a store owner in Oakland expect to be able to earn a living without being robbed every day? Or are property rights reserved only for “creative” people working in an industry where plagiarism is the norm?

The industry trade group lobbying for felony streaming boasts a coalition that includes AMC, the Chinese Communist owned theater chain, CBS, Disney, the DGA, HBO, Lionsgate, Miramax, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Warner, and the cream of the same industry lobbying to free criminals.

One Creative Future letter barked that it “is long overdue to ensure that large-scale perpetrators of all forms of digital piracy may face meaningful criminal penalties”. The letter was signed by assorted industry trade groups including the DGA, of which Spielberg is a member, and SAG, of which most of the 'Artists for 47' and a number of Gascon’s backers are members.

There are to be “meaningful criminal penalties” for piracy, not for crushing a baby’s skull.

The DGA’s position is understandable considering its members include Victor Salva, a director convicted of sexually abusing the 12-year-old star of his first movie, but who went on to make horror movies produced by DGA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Francis Ford Coppola before going on to make a Disney movie with the child he had abused protesting outside.

The DGA ran an interview with Roman Polanski, who had drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, sensitively asking the auteur, "could you conceive of ever working in America again or would the media circus just be too much to deal with?"

The entertainment industry prioritizes the money of its members, not the bodies of children.

Just ask DGA members John Landis and Steven Spielberg about the deaths of 7-year-old Myca Le and 6-year-old Renee Chen on the set of The Twilight Zone Movie while trying to portray the evils of America ‘bombing’ innocent Vietnamese children by fighting Communism.

The felony streaming bill is pushed by Senator Patrick Leahy, whose ties to the industry and Warners are so blatant that he had cameo roles in multiple Batman movies, and who favors all kinds of decriminalization measures for actual crimes like drugs and prostitution by minors.

But the industry likes legal drugs and minor prostitution, and hates illegal streaming.

Leahy’s press release for going easy on drug traffickers claims “we cannot afford to waste more and more taxpayer dollars on over-incarceration.”

Unless it’s incarcerating the enemies of the entertainment industry that holds his leash.

Hollywood, its trade groups, and the legislators they funded insist that their 7 to 10 years in prison for video streaming is all about "large-scale piracy" and won't affect ordinary people. There's obviously no reason to be skeptical that the government will abuse that power. Government never does. Just like Hollywood and the politicians they bought never lie.

And the same industry which tried to ban the VCR while claiming that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone" can be trusted not to overreach its power in order to maintain its grip on Americans.

"86.8 percent of all these owners erase or skip commercials," the Motion Picture Association boss had once ranted at a congressional hearing.

"The average number of cassettes per household… 28 cassettes. Now, if… all you are doing is you are away from home and you are taping something... you don't need 28 cassettes. You need one cassette or at the most two. Why do you have 28?"

The same industry that treated the number of VCR tapes Americans had in their homes as evidence of a criminal conspiracy can be trusted to write reasonable and sensible laws.

“We have the best congress money can buy,” Will Rogers supposedly once joked. Complaining that industry trade group lobbyists and lawyers write laws is like pointing out that water is wet.

This is the ordinary everyday corruption of our political system that resulted not only in felony streaming, but the CASE Act, a system to take copyright litigation out of courts and to arbitrators, allowing the industry to hit ordinary people with $30,000 judgements, along with assorted tax breaks that were rolled into the omnibus spending bill. And then there's a five year tax break for Hollywood that allows producers to expense $15 million in production costs.

But when the same industry that criminalizes those who infringe its intellectual property rights also decriminalizes robbery, rape, and assault against ordinary people, it’s too much.

“At the age of 6 months, this little child was bludgeoned over the head by a babysitter. She suffered traumatic brain injury; she had a skull fracture, multiple hematoma in her head, she’s now permanently blind and now the District Attorney wants to drop the great bodily injury allegation which would mean this defendant would be eligible for probation, she would serve no time for a heinous, heinous crime,” Sam Dordulian, the pro bono lawyer for the family, warned.

This is the outcome that Steven Spielberg, Netflix, Warner’s TV boss, and other industry power brokers paid for when they bought the DA election for the Black Lives Matter candidate.

Now Warner Bros, Spielberg, through the DGA, and the rest of the industry want to send people to prison for 10 years for streaming videos while crushing a baby’s skull gets you probation.

“The DA of Los Angeles County has stated that all allegations involving the Great Bodily Injury of a child (ex: burns, fractures, blindness, or broken bones) shall be dismissed," an LA Deputy DA warned.

Break a child’s bones, blind or burn him, and get off with a slap on the wrist. But don’t you dare stream a movie. Hollywood has standards. Releasing criminals is a good thing. Muggers, rapists, and child abusers should be on the loose. But lock up everyone who prevents Hollywood from making as much money as it can from Frozen 3 or Big Bang Theory reruns.

It’s not that Hollywood opposes criminal justice on principle. Illegally stream its movies and it will fight to throw you into the same cell vacated by the rapists and murderers it fought to set free.

Prisons, it believes work. So does the criminal justice system. They must, otherwise Hollywood wouldn’t be pushing to send people who stream its products to prison for a decade.

It just doesn’t believe that thugs who break into your home should be sent to prison.

Much as it believes that guns work, when carried by its armed bodyguards, but doesn’t believe that you should be able to own a gun to protect your home from the criminals they set loose.

And that is the real crime.

The Left’s oligarchy is building a two-tier society under the guise of fighting for social justice. Crimes that violate its property and political propriety will be punished more ruthlessly than ever, but the crimes that destroy the lives of the working class and the middle class will be legalized.

In Hollywood’s America, there will be chaos in the streets, but its corporations will wield supreme power. No shopkeeper can be safe, but every studio will be covered. There will be police, but you won’t call them when you’re mugged: they will come when you make a meme.

There will be one law for the ruling class and another for the little people. And these laws will be administered by the handpicked appointees of the ruling class who will stop prosecuting violent crimes, but aggressively prosecute infringements on the financial interests of the ruling class.

That’s not some future dystopia. It’s LA.

And it’s coming to all of America.

In March, Governor Cuomo's administration ordered nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients and prohibited even testing incoming patients for the virus. The same month that Cuomo began the process of infecting countless nursing home residents with the virus, he also began freeing thousands of criminals from prison to protect them from the virus.

Over 3,000 criminals have been freed from New York State prisons to protect them from the virus, and New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio freed 1,500 criminals, and they swiftly began committing a variety of crimes, but despite the media hype claiming that prison was a death sentence and a campaign by woke celebs like John Legend, criminals were not at risk.

Only 19 inmates in New York State actually died of the virus.

Meanwhile an estimated 11,000 nursing home patients have died of the virus statewide.

Unlike the prison numbers, which are easily accessible, the Cuomo administration has stonewalled and refused to provide the actual number of deaths, instead offering only an incomplete listing of only those nursing home residents who died in the actual facilities.

While Governor Cuomo took great care to protect criminals, very few of whom died of the virus, he condemned thousands of nursing home patients to a slow and miserable death. And the media and celebrities who advocated for rapists and killers showed no interest in their fate.

But it wasn’t just Cuomo.

In California, Governor Newsom ordered skilled nursing facilities to accept infected patients. The next month, 3,500 criminals were freed. By the fall, over 9,000 criminals had been freed, with a plan to release as many as 17,600 criminals. After an ACLU lawsuit, Orange County was ordered to free 1,800 violent inmates whom Sheriff Barnes described as "people in for very serious offenses -- murder, attempted murder, domestic violence."

96 California State prison inmates have died in the pandemic alongside an official death toll of 5,940 nursing home residents.

But the lives of nearly 6,000 nursing home patients mattered less than the lives of 96 criminals.

New Jersey released 2,258 criminals in one day to slow the spread of the virus.

“Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, our administration has worked tirelessly to save as many lives as possible,” Governor Phil Murphy falsely claimed. Then he bragged that, "the population in State correctional facilities has decreased by nearly 3,000 people."

This wasn’t good enough for Senator Booker who demanded that Murphy release more criminals, claiming that he could “save the lives of tens of thousands” of criminals.

Just not of their victims.

Only 52 criminals in New Jersey custody have actually died of the virus.

The former Goldman Sachs executive who started his career in politics by buying an ambassadorship from Obama was far less compassionate to the elderly than he was to his own kind. His administration signed a death sentence for thousands of senior citizens by ordering nursing homes to accept infected patients and banned them from using coronavirus tests.

Over 7,400 nursing home residents died of the pandemic in New Jersey. Some of the hardest hit residents were veterans living in nursing homes managed by the New Jersey government.

Governor Pritzker in Illinois released around 4,000 criminals from prison, including 64 murderers, using the same Disaster Proclamation that he used to lock residents in their homes, while failing to notify their victims. Only 50 prison inmates actually died in Illinois.

But recently 605 nursing home residents died in Illinois… in just 7 days.

7,559 nursing home residents have died in the pandemic in Illinois amounting to over 50% of the state’s death toll. Criminals only account for 0.3% of the state’s death toll. But while Pritzker was freeing criminals, he funneled infected coronavirus patients into nursing homes.

Democrat officials repeatedly prioritized criminals over nursing home residents, releasing the former to protect them from getting the virus while locking up the latter with the virus.

Had the Democrats set out to deliberately kill 100,000 senior citizens, they couldn’t have done a better job than the policies enacted by the Cuomo, Newsom, Murphy, Whitmer, Wolf, Pritzker, and other Democrat administrations.

And now that the vaccine is being rolled out, the welfare of criminals remains a top priority.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a member of the socialist squad, vowed to fight, "for incarcerated men and women to be prioritized in the distribution of the vaccine."

A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine being utilized by the CDC recommended placing criminals and homeless vagrants in phase 1b, the second phase, alongside nursing home residents, as if their risk or moral standing were equivalent.

D.C. and a number of states are indeed putting criminals ahead of much of the population.

But after all the agonizing from Democrats, activists, and the media over outbreaks in prisons, 149 federal inmates out of 124,538, and 551 state prison inmates out of some 1.2 million died.

In 2016, 4,117 criminals had died in federal and state prisons.

The only prison coronavirus crisis was caused by the release of criminals back onto the street.

The plight of criminals facing coronavirus in prison has led to celebrity awareness campaigns, protests with lefty activists chanting, “Free Them All”, massive media coverage that describe every prison death as another “grim milestone”, and special interventions by governors, mayors, and judges on behalf of the worst people in our society outside of politics and the press.

Meanwhile the deaths of 113,981 nursing home patients, a true grim milestone, have passed unnoticed with no word from any celebrity, no protest, and hardly a whisper.

Democrat governors not only haven’t intervened on their behalf, but helped kill them.

New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and California, the states run by Cuomo, Murphy, Wolf, Pritzker, and Newsom, who pushed infected patients into nursing homes, account for some 40,000 deaths among nursing home patients. These numbers are incomplete because of the deliberate obstruction of some of these administrations, notably those of Cuomo, Murphy, and Pritzker, when providing accurate and comprehensive statistics of these deaths.

While Democrats fought to help criminals, they neglected and killed the elderly.

The media has run more high profile coverage of the deaths of a few hundred criminals in custody, out of millions, than of the deaths of 113,981 nursing home patients. And even now it urgently warns that the criminals are in danger and must be freed before they all die. Certainly, it insists, they should be early in line for the vaccine even though very few criminals have died.

The true story of the pandemic’s grim milestone is that the Democrats freed the criminals to protect them from the virus and locked nursing home patients, who were the most vulnerable, in with those infected with the virus. Now they want to prioritize criminals for the vaccine.

And that stands to reason.

As pro-crime felon voting laws sweep the nation, the Democrats are fighting to keep their voting base of criminals free, while killing the elderly who are more likely to be conservative.

They didn’t mismanage a pandemic. They managed a political genocide.

"We know people may have made mistakes over the Thanksgiving time period," Dr. Birx scolded the nation on CBS’ Face the Nation. "If you're young and you gathered, you need to be tested about five to 10 days later. But you need to assume that you're infected."

Then Birx made her own “mistake”.

After urging people not to "go near your grandparents and aunts and others", and to stick to "your immediate household", she headed off to her vacation home on a Delaware island along with members of a multigenerational family that encompasses three households across three states.

Americans have been told to follow the science, when they ought to be following the scientists.

Neil Ferguson, the British epidemiologist whose Imperial College model led to the UK lockdown, was forced to step down after having an affair with a married left-wing activist in violation of the lockdown guidelines, not to mention the currently much less important Judeo-Christian morality.

Ferguson claimed that he thought was immune from the virus.

And Dr. Fauci, after throwing out a pitch at a game between the Yankees and the Nationals, was photographed hanging out, mask lowered, in the stands next to a friend.

Fauci’s defense was the familiar one offered by Birx and Ferguson.

"I was literally negative for COVID the day before," he snidely replied.

Ferguson had argued that he met up with his lover after testing positive and isolating for two weeks. Birx claimed that she had stayed safe by getting tested on a regular basis.

Easy access to tests, especially early on in the pandemic, was a privilege that not that many had. Elites saying that they could do as they pleased if they had been tested foreshadowed the vaccine debates in which some people will be able to live their lives freely while others will not.

But coronavirus tests are not bulletproof, as Fauci and Birx, better than anyone, ought to know. It’s possible to test as negative and still have the virus. And that’s especially true within the first few days of being infected. Fauci authoritatively declaring that it was fine not to wear a mask because he had tested as negative the day before was either really stupid or really dishonest.

Politicians have spent the pandemic telling us that we have to “follow the science”, but they’ve been following the scientists. And it might be time that the rest of the country did the same.

Birx, Fauci, and Ferguson calculated their own risks, and decided that their personal priorities, winterizing a house before a sale and spending time with family, sipping some water while hanging out with a friend at a baseball game, or having an illicit affair were worth the risk.

Americans, Britons, and the people of the rest of the world ought to be able to do the same.

Managing the risks of viral infections, unlike researching the coronavirus, is not an esoteric field of study. It does not require a PhD or twenty years of work talking down to politicians. And having the degree doesn’t mean making good decisions. Just ask Neil Ferguson.

The essence of a free country is that people are able to make their own decisions. Everything else is boilerplate. It doesn’t matter how much governments pontificate about human rights, the rights of man, and the legacy of the Magna Carta and the Constitution, if they don’t actually let people make the most basic decisions about how to lead their own lives on an everyday basis.

The pandemic lockdowns didn’t come out of nowhere.

Long before the sad grim farce of loudspeakers blaring, "We're All In This Together" to the proles while the elites headed off to their vacation homes and French Laundry dinners, the business of public health was about closely controlling what the masses did with their lives.

The war against smoking, then fat, salt, and soda, were all based on the unspoken assumption that people were too stupid to behave responsibly and someone had to do it for them. The CDC was utterly inept at managing pandemics, but it spent much of its budget fighting obesity.

The critical difference between fighting obesity and a pandemic is that the former is a behavior while the latter is a virus. Fighting a virus requires actual knowledge, skill, and ability, but fighting a behavior just means spending a lot of time scolding people and penalizing them.

Controlling a virus is hard, but controlling people seems a lot easier.

Faced with a deadly virus, the people whom the taxpayers had been paying a small fortune so that they can have houses in three different states didn’t fight the virus, they fought behaviors.

When Democrats attack President Trump’s handling of the pandemic, they aren’t criticising the amazing dispatch with which Operation Warp Speed produced vaccines, but his refusal to join them in scolding Americans for not wearing masks and for spending time with their families.

President Trump is being blamed for not being a Newsom, a Whitmer, or a Cuomo: a hypocrite.

Democrats aren't impressed by the vaccines because for all their talk of following the science, the only sciences and diseases they're interested in are the social kind. Medical science developing vaccines at rapid speed doesn’t impress them. Getting people to obey does.

The Trump administration treated the pandemic as a medical problem while the Democrats and their media treated it as a behavioral problem. That’s why they’re still obsessed with getting everyone to wear masks long after the vaccine is here. That’s not a triumph for medical science, but it is a tremendous victory for the social sciences of any aspiring Communist dictatorship.

The very term ‘public health’ is revealing of this deeply distorted set of political priorities.

The scientific universe with its infinity of galaxies and microbes may appear to be a cold and inhuman place, but it has the virtue of offering perspective, while the pseudoscientific echo chamber of social science assumes that the universe revolves around human social inequities. Its practitioners spout jargon, but are unequipped to tackle the problems of objective reality.

The problem is never objective reality, whether it’s the finite numbers of economics or the biology of a pandemic, instead the problem is always getting people to listen to their betters.

Einstein didn’t believe he was immune from the laws of the universe, but the contemporary experts in the public eye tend to see social problems rather than objective universal laws. And they are convinced that they are above those social problems on account of their superiority and therefore they can take risks that the rest of society is too ignorant to properly calculate.

Public health’s contempt for the good sense of the public led to this totalitarian two tier system.

A Ferguson, a Fauci, or a Birx should be able calculate their risk of having a fling, flinging a ball, or vacationing after Thanksgiving, like the rest of the country. All Americans should be able to gauge the risk of spending time with loved ones, of having a sandwich and a soda, of exercising or not, and of living their lives without the constant scolding of hypocritical public health experts.

The public health industry has spent generations insisting that Americans can’t be trusted with what they eat. Is it any wonder that they believe Americans can’t be trusted to leave the house?

The Founding Fathers did not overthrow the divine right of kings to replace it with the divine right of experts. Instead they replaced the divine right of kings with rights given by God. An epidemiologist, a plumber, or a lawyer all have specialized knowledge and skills, but specialized knowledge and skills don’t mean better judgement. As Fauci, Ferguson, and Birx demonstrated.

When it comes to money, love, and other people, we are all flawed human beings. A free society recognizes this basic human fallibility. Only a totalitarian system insists on denying it.

America is not a nation of experts. It’s a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Every American has the same right to live their lives that Fauci and Birx do. We won that right in the 18th century. It would be a great tragedy if we were to lose it in the 21st century.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the CDC was too busy fighting racism to do its job. As the vaccine rolls out, the CDC decided to build the vaccine waiting list around affirmative action

Who gets to live or die? Much like in Nazi Germany, it helps to be a member of the right race.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has announced that the priorities for distributing vaccines are to prevent death, preserve society, and help those facing "disparities", and then maybe, "increase the chance for everyone to enjoy health and well-being."

Vaccine distribution is to be guided by four principles, one of which is to fight "health inequities" and another is to "promote justice". It's not the CDC's job to fight for social justice, but to fight viruses. Having failed miserably at its one job, which it chose not to do, it's instead pursuing racial equity eugenics by tackling "health inequities" for "racial and ethnic minority groups".

The CDC and NIH had turned to the National Academies to produce A Framework for Equitable Allocation of Vaccine for the Novel Coronavirus which falsely claimed that "COVID-19 illnesses and deaths are strongly associated with race" due to "systemic racism" and that a "vaccine allocation framework" had to reduce these "health inequities" with affirmative action.

The report noted that the "committee anticipates that the criteria will, in practice, tend to give higher priority to lower-income individuals... and Black, Hispanic or Latin, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities."

A government agency had paid for and was making use of a report which would decide who was to live or die based on race and income. And no one was willing to say a word about it.

Tennessee's Department of Health had already announced that it would be using the National Academies report and intended to dedicate 10% of the vaccines to SVI "vulnerable" areas.

The eugenics strategy of public health had been baked in long before the pandemic with the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index. SVI was supposed to help rush aid during a natural disaster to those who might need it the most, but SVI added race as a "vulnerability" to create affirmative action disaster relief. During a hurricane, your odds of getting help increased if you were in a minority area. And it decreased if you ranked higher on the SVI because you had more income.

This was bad enough. But now vaccine distribution will be driven by the SVI’s numbers.

At least 26 states are going to be using SVI for the vaccine rollout. Not all of them are planning to use it to decide who gets the vaccine based on their race. Some intend to use it, as originally intended, to spread awareness, but other states are going all in on racial equity eugenics.

Ohio’s vaccination plan indicates that state health authorities will focus on "equity" and will use federal guidance to "ensure equity in distribution" and address "racial and ethnic disparities".

In Tennessee, "priority will be given to areas in the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index".

Minnesota's vaccine distribution guidelines put promoting justice in second place and warned that vaccine doses will be allowed based on the needs of health care personnel, nursing home residents, and SVI areas. The Minnesota guidelines define “other attributes to be considered in prioritization” as including, “people from certain racial and ethnic minority groups who are

disproportionately affected by COVID-19”: treating minority status as a medical vulnerability.

That’s how ‘health equity’ medicalizes minority status and turns it into a medical disability.

States that don’t use the SVI may actually be using even more outrageously racist guidelines. California’s Community Vaccine Advisory Committee began with proposals to have groups that were the victims of "historical injustices" be first in line for the vaccine. The committee consists of medical groups, as well as radical leftist groups like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, several unions, and assorted minority activist groups. CVAC put “equity” second on its priority list.

Vaccine equity eugenics hit the public eye when a New York Times article quoted Harald Schmidt, a German academic who had worked for Germany’s Ministry of Health and the European Parliament, and acts as an adviser to UNESCO and the World Bank's Population and Reproductive Health Unit, suggesting that minorities should go ahead of older people.

“Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt was quoted as saying. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”.

"Dr. Schmidt" has an MA in Philosophy from the University of Munster, the academic home of one of the most notorious Nazi eugenicists who worked under Mengele, and also boasts a PhD in Health Policy from the London School of Economics.

Like Jill Biden, he’s not a doctor, but that didn’t stop the Journal of the American Medical Association from publishing a paper co-authored by Schmidt titled, “Is It Lawful and Ethical to Prioritize Racial Minorities for COVID-19 Vaccines?” which gamed potential affirmative action eugenic court cases by focusing on factors like "geography, socioeconomic status, and housing density that would favor racial minorities de facto, but not explicitly include race."

While Schmidt has gotten the bulk of the attention, the paper was also authored by Michelle A. Williams, the dean of Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Larry Gostin who heads the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Schmidt, as well as his co-authors, took part in the Vaccine Allocation and Social Justice event, along with Philadelphia's Deputy Health Commissioner, a strategic adviser to the Davos-based Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiatives, along with top state health officers from Tennessee, California, and Illinois.

And Nancy McClung: a former nurse who serves on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ Ethical Principles for Allocating Initial Supplies of COVID-19 Vaccine.

The research materials included a paper co-authored by Ezekiel Emanuel, an Obamacare architect and a prominent proponent of triage, who had already co-authored another paper, which had warned that while directly prioritizing race "would likely be ruled unconstitutional", the better approach would be "considering vulnerabilities that, while possible for people of all races, are commonly produced by racism".

Finally, Emanuel noted that, "disparities could be further reduced by avoiding prioritization strategies, such as age-based preference, that risk widening racial and socioeconomic disparities."

The paper co-authored by the man who wrote Why I Hope to Die at 75 was saying the same thing Schmidt had said, but coded in the ambiguous language of public policy. The elderly should not get access to the vaccine earlier because they are on average more likely to be white and wealthy and saving their lives first would widen “racial and socioeconomic disparities”.

A decade after Obamacare opponents were ridiculed for warning about death panels,national and local governments are following triage measures that decide who lives or dies by race.

The CDC evolved and deployed this policy while Republicans were at the helm, and did nothing.

It’s not too late to stop it.

President Trump can clean house at the CDC and take as many of the decisions about vaccine policy out of its hands as possible. Republican governors and legislatures should stop letting the same experts who have botched the pandemic every step of the way use SVI for the vaccine.

Whatever happens this time around, using tools like SVI creates a horrifying legal and medical precedent in which medical treatment gets allocated based on minority status. As socialized medicine digs deeper into medical decision making, this will become the norm.

Beyond the pandemic, waiting for a kidney transplant, hip replacement surgery, or a scarce medication will be determined by medicalizing privilege and treating minority status as an illness in greater need of care and ‘whiteness’ as a sign of health privilege that requires less care.

Affirmative action is merging with death panels to transform equity into triage. If we don’t stop it, it will kill us. Reverting to the worst abuses of segregation will kill our souls and then our bodies.

When the NHS, Britain's socialized medicine system, debuted its contact tracing app, six million eagerly rushed to download it. After a few days, 10 million had downloaded and installed the app, and after a month, around 40% of smartphone users had put a monitoring device on their phones that would trace their social interactions and could tell them to isolate at any moment.

In October, Governor Cuomo launched a New York contact tracing app based on technology from Google and Apple, and some assistance from Bloomberg’s organization.

"It’s going to not only bring contact tracing to a new level," Cuomo boasted, while claiming that it wouldn't violate anyone's privacy.
Few New Yorkers seemed to believe him. Despite being available in Spanish, Chinese, Bengali, Korean, Russian, Haitian Creole, and, even more unexpectedly, English, the app hasn’t taken off and Cuomo’s regime has refused to reveal the data that would actually show if it’s tracking positive cases. The lack of data transparency has been the second biggest story about Cuomo’s mismanagement of the pandemic, after the deaths of 11,000 nursing home residents when his administration forced nursing homes to accept infected patients. The numbers are likely higher, but the Cuomo administration, in its typical fashion, is refusing to release the data.

After a month, only 5% of New Yorkers have downloaded Cuomo’s spy app. That’s far short of the 60% that’s needed for contact tracing to work.

Even Europeans haven’t hit that 60% target. Few outside Communist China have.

Apple and Google claimed that they needed at least 15%. Only a few states in America hit that bar and they tend to have small populations that lean leftward. Most Americans have opted out.

Governor Murphy launched his state’s contact tracing app to great fanfare, urging a, “shared sense of personal responsibility to support our contact tracing efforts”. Only 4% of New Jersey residents decided to take up the former Goldman Sachs tycoon on his modest proposal.

Murphy, like Cuomo, had forced nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients. Some of the state’s deadliest outbreaks had also taken place in state hospitals for veterans.

Pennsylvania's Governor Wolf and Secretary of Health Richard Levine, debuted their contact tracing app in September.

“We won’t know who has downloaded the app, who has received notifications and who used symptom check,” Richard (Rachel) Levine, who had taken his mother out of a nursing home and into a hotel, while forcing nursing homes to take in infected patients, assured Pennsylvanians.

Only 4% of Pennsylavanians were convinced. Richard Levine has begun pleading with 13-year-olds to download the app. If there’s anything that’s bound to reassure state residents, it’s a strange man in a blonde wig urging their children to download an app to monitor them.

Contact tracing app adoption in America isn’t likely to get much better even with more time.

Governor Northam rolled out a contact tracing app in Virginia back in August. After half a year, the state has passed Google's 15% bar with an estimated 19% of smartphone owners having installed the app.

But few people are actually using it.

Only 553 people submitted their positive results out of 100,000 positive tests in the state.

While Democrat governors and their European counterparts have brandished download figures, many people download apps and then uninstall them. Or leave them on and then pay no further attention to them. The actual utilization of contact tracing apps is laughably miniscule.

Virginia’s 800,000 plus downloads figure still only comes out to 553 people submitting results.

That’s why Governor Cuomo in New York and the NHS in the UK refuse to release their impact numbers. Considering the performance of contact tracing apps in Europe, it’s not hard to guess what they’re hiding.

Italy's Immuni app was downloaded by 14% of the population, but only had 155 positive results submitted in three months. In France, after 2.3 million downloads, only 72 risk contacts were flagged.

A lot of people can be badgered into passively downloading an app, but when it comes time to upload their results and have the system notify everyone they’ve been around, they just as passively choose not to do it and the system fails.

After a year of touting contact tracing as the answer, the assault on privacy has stalled.

Contact tracing apps have failed miserably in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. California only got around to launching its contact tracing app now. The numbers are worse in much of the rest of the country with only 8 million Americans actually using contact tracing apps.

Trust is the biggest factor in the adoption of contact tracing apps. And very few Americans trust Big Tech, the government and its public health experts with tracking their lives and the lives of those around them. The NHS app intends to start asking users about their personal lives to "score" their lifestyles for coronavirus risk. It's easy enough to see this sort of thing as not only a privacy violation, but as an echo of China's public surveillance and social credit system.

In a socialized medicine system where people are already penalized for their risk factors by being denied access to medical care, leaving them with few options except emigration or death where age or obesity can mean a denial of medical care, and where babies can be killed because saving them is not deemed to be the best use of resources, a “score” isn’t just a score.

Few people want to be denied medical treatment because they failed the social credit system.

Conservatives are the most likely to see the downside of such calculations and the more conservative parts of the United States have the lowest utilization rates of contract tracing apps.

Nevada's contact tracing app was only downloaded 70,000 times, as of last month, and zero exposures were registered in September. In Wyoming, its app only managed 5,000 downloads.

South Carolina’s legislature banned the use of contact tracing apps by government agencies.

But all of that may be about to change if the Democrats succeed in their plan to place Biden in the White House. Biden's team is filled with Big Tech lobbyists and strongly favors a national contact tracing app infrastructure. While the Trump administration allowed states to define their own policy, the Democrat plan has been to nationalize the crisis and control the response.

Key to their plans is the creation of a national server that would store information across state lines, and allow national authorities to monitor everyone’s movements even if they leave a state.

Ten states have already moved their codes to Microsoft’s National Key Server maintained for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. Another five are following suit. As of now, virtually every state and area, such as D.C., with a contact tracing app, is on the National Key Server. That includes heavily populated states such as California, New York, and Michigan.

The hodgepodge of apps and approaches will be replaced by one system to rule them all.

Scott Becker, the CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, has also been touting Biden’s plans for app contact tracing. A national server will make a national contact tracing app much easier to implement. Google, which is also involved in the national server using its own cloud system, has, along with Apple, rebranded “contact tracing” as “exposure notification”.

Big Tech decided that people were leery of “contact tracing” so they gave it a new name.

Meanwhile, Biden’s people have been coordinating with the Rockefeller Foundation on testing plans.

"Policy makers," the Rockefeller Foundation had urged, must "allow the infection status of most Americans to be accessed and validated in a few required settings and many voluntary ones."

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recently warned that the "pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty".

Despite that, under President Trump, Americans have still enjoyed an oasis of human rights compared to the brutal restrictions and measures in the rest of the world. Red states were able to choose less restrictive and abusive routes for tackling the pandemic, even while blue states relentlessly violated civil rights under the guise of a public health emergency.

All of that may be coming to an end.

The near future may be a mandatory national app based either on the existing Apple or Google architecture embedded into virtually every smartphone, or, worse, GPS tracking like Norway’s app which was withdrawn after being panned by Amnesty International, linked to the National Key Server, which will serve as a key element of a national pandemic social credit system.

Americans rejected contact tracing, but a Biden administration won’t take no for an answer.

Two of the most notorious bigots in the House of Representatives signed a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding that he “eradicate anti-Muslim bigotry from Facebook”.

The three-page letter signed by Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, as well as 28 other left-wing House members, spends a great deal of time demanding the removal of what it calls "anti-Muslim content" without ever specifically defining it. That's convenient considering Omar and Tlaib's own history of racism and antisemitism, and support for the sorts of Islamic bigotry and violence that groups like CAIR, which supports the letter, have become known for.

The letter spotlights one violent incident, but then goes on to call for a ban on "anti-Muslim content", "anti-Muslim animus", "anti-Muslim bigotry", and finally, "anti-Muslim content and organizing" on the platform, without ever explaining what exactly they want to ban.

Considering the letter’s call for, "100 percent proactive detection and removal of anti-Muslim content", the safe assumption would be that they want to ban everything critical of Islam.

That's a disturbing attack on the First Amendment coming from 30 House members.

Democrats have repeatedly pressured Facebook and other social media companies to remove speech they politically disapprove of, whether by President Trump or other conservatives, eroding the thin line between private companies acting on their own initiative and government officials conspiring to violate the First Amendment by banning certain kinds of political speech.

After multiple hearings, legal proposals, and legislative threats, it’s no longer possible to view Facebook’s censorship of political speech as anything other than government censorship. When enough pressure by government officials has been applied to a company to censor certain kinds of speech, the company’s decision to censor speech becomes government censorship.

30 House members would now like Facebook to censor criticism of Islam and political protests against Islamic terrorism. One of the few examples of anti-Muslim content in the House letter was a political protest against the Islamic Society of North America’s 2019 conference.

That was the conference which included an appearance by two Democrat presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Julian Castro, whose forum was moderated by Salam Al-Marayati, the head of MPAC, who had defended Hamas and Hezbollah. Also participating in a round table at the conference was Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing, who has defended the Islamic mandate to kill gay people.

This is the sort of information that AOC, Omar, and 28 other House Democrats, want banned.

House Democrats trying to shut down protests targeting their own candidates is a blatant violation of the First Amendment which was meant to prevent exactly that kind of thing.

And the party of social justice wants to stop Americans from protesting against an Imam who says things like, ”Brothers and sisters, you know what the punishment is, if a man is found with another man? The Prophet Mohammad said the one who does it and the one to whom it is done to, kill them both.” What happens when ‘anti-Muslim content’ meets anti-gay content?

The 30 House Democrats don’t want to talk about any of this which is why their letter doesn’t.

Even Omar and Tlaib can’t quite openly call for blasphemy regulations for social media, but they conveniently leave terms like “anti-Muslim content” undefined and then demand that Facebook outsource the suppression protocols to "senior staff focused on anti-Muslim bigotry issues" backed by diversity training on "civil rights issues and common words, phrases, tropes or visuals used by hate actors to dehumanize and demonize Muslims".

And if that's not enough, there's an independent third-party review of Facebook’s compliance.

CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood groups would be brought in to define what “anti-Muslim content” is and then senior staff, approved of by CAIR and its allies, would set moderation policies to suppress “tropes” used by “hate actors” like Jihad, Sharia, Taqiyya, and terrorism.

Cartoons of Mohammed, mentions of blasphemy, hate, and terrorism would all be censored.

It's not hard to spot what sort of content they're after.

The House Democrat blasphemy and terror letter has been endorsed by CAIR and the Islamic Networks Group, but beyond these traditional Islamist groups, it has the backing of pro-terror groups like Code Pink and JVP, and assorted anti-war organizations. These groups are less concerned with blasphemy, but very focused on preventing America from fighting terrorists.

CAIR had demanded the removal of Mohammed's image from the Supreme Court, and more recently compared magazines publishing cartoons of Mohammed to ISIS. A board member of the Muslim Brotherhood group had insisted that, "[t]he right to free speech is not absolute."

The Founding Fathers and the Constitution disagreed.

The letter also cites a Muslim Advocates report which listed examples of "anti-Muslim content" that they wanted Facebook to censor that included President Trump's call for a ban on migration from Islamic terror nations, and a Trump campaign ad which described AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley as socialists who had made "anti-Israel, anti-American, and pro-terrorist remarks".

AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and other Democrats have signed a letter demanding that Facebook censor political speech critical of them. That’s a grotesque assault on the First Amendment.

Another example of “anti-Muslim content” from the Muslim Advocates report was an Israeli Facebook user who had written negatively about Omar, Trudeau, and Corbyn.

Omar responded to this by ranting that "foreign interference – whether by individuals or governments – is still a grave threat to our democracy” and that “malicious actors operating in a foreign country, Israel”, were “spreading misinformation and hate speech to influence elections in the United States." Even though there’s no evidence that elections were actually influenced.

But, once again, the kind of “anti-Muslim content” that Omar and her political allies seem to want to ban involves criticism of her and of them. The “grave threat” here is coming from Rep. Omar.

The letter claims that its signers also want Facebook to remove “any hate content directed at a religious or ethnic group”, but Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the letter’s signers, has been the House’s worst offender, tweeting antisemitic content, including her infamous “Benjamins” tweet.

If House Democrats were serious about removing hate, they would have removed Rep. Omar.

Facebook already engages in extensive monitoring and censorship. This isn’t about taking down bigotry, but about removing political speech and content that Islamists consider blasphemous. It’s also about suppressing the political organizations that combat Islamist hate and violence.

It’s no coincidence that the type of political speech that Omar, Tlaib, Carson, and other House members want to censor casts a negative light on their own political alliances with Islamists, their bigotry, and their ugly views. And they would like Facebook to do the censoring for them.

The more Democrat officials lay out the kind of censorship they would like internet platforms to perform, the more the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech becomes a dead letter. And this letter, signed by 30 House Democrats, is a new threat to our freedom of speech.

America does not have blasphemy laws. And politicians are not allowed to ban speech they don’t like. The letter to Facebook makes it more urgent than ever that our elected officials find ways to protect the marketplace of ideas from political censorship by Democrats and Facebook.

It was a cold December day in Washington D.C. and Neal Katyal, Obama’s Solicitor General, was arguing with Justice Clarence Thomas, the great-grandson of a freed slave, about slavery.

Katyal was representing Nestle, the American subsidiary of a Swiss multinational, being sued by freed African child slaves for profiting from slavery, and Justice Thomas wasn’t having it. The two men, the consummate Democrat legal operative, who had been there for Bush v. Gore and defended ObamaCare before the Supreme Court, and the court’s only black justice descended from slaves, debated corporate liability for child slavery for a social justice company.

Nestle USA had responded to the Black Lives Matter race riots with "mandatory unconscious bias training" for its employees before going on to defend the company’s cocoa business from a lawsuit by freed child slaves who had been forced to work on plantations between the ages of 12 and 14, and were brutally beaten when they tried to escape.

The leadership of Nestle's UK branch had urged, "I want people talking about race, about inequality and about why it should ever be called into question that black lives matter."

Nestle’s version of black lives mattering allegedly meant African child slaves working fourteen hours a day on cocoa plantations, given "scraps of food to eat", "beaten with whips and tree branches", "forced to sleep on the floor", and to "drink urine" if they tried to run away.

Coca Cola, which met the BLM riots by pouring money into black nationalist groups and rolling out a, “Together We Must” slogan, joined in the defense of Nestle by filing its own brief. Coke was also recently caught lobbying against a bill that would crack down on slave labor in China.

Black Lives Matter means Obama’s former lawyer lecturing a descendant of freed slaves about immunity for African child slavery and a corporation forcing its employees into humiliating critical race theory struggle sessions while benefiting from slavery, not in 1619, but now.

Katyal’s defense of Nestle depended, among other things, on Nazi gas chambers.

Nestle’s Supreme Court brief argues that, “even the firm that supplied Zyklon B gas, which the Nazis used to kill millions, was not indicted.” That's fortunate for Nestle which didn't make Zyklon B, but did pay out $14.6 million over the use of Jewish slave labor during the Holocaust.

"As the legal successor of such corporations, Nestle nevertheless accepts its moral responsibility to help alleviate human suffering," Nestle declared in a statement.

That’s big of Nestle, which had helped finance the Swiss Nazi Party and became an exclusive supplier of chocolate to the Wermacht. Helmut Maucher, Nestle's longtime CEO and honorary chairman, had served in the Wehrmacht. But that’s all water under the national socialist bridge.

Nestle went from profiting from Jewish slave labor it claimed it couldn’t do anything about to profiting from African slave labor it claims it can’t stop.

But Obama’s lawyer, who’s being touted for a position with Biden, is an even better story.

The Supreme Court brief on behalf of the former slaves notes that a study “conducted by Tulane University and funded by the U.S. Department of Labor found that the total number of children engaging in cocoa production, child labor, and hazardous work in cocoagrowing areas in West Africa increased more than thirty-eight percent from 2008–2009 to 2013–2014.”

Those dates overlap with the glory days of Katyal’s former boss: Barack Hussein Obama.

Why would child slavery have dramatically increased under Obama? The slaves in the Nestle case were trafficked from Mali to Côte d’Ivoire, the country at the center of the cocoa business and child slavery, which underwent a Muslim-Christian civil war in Obama’s first years in office.

When Muslim rebels, many of them illegal migrants, rigged the 2010 election, Obama backed the Muslim north over the Christian south. The French and the UN intervened militarily to subjugate the indigenous Christians to Muslim rule. Since then, Alassane Ouattara, a descendant of Muslim rulers, dubiously won the latest presidential election by 83%.

And Côte d’Ivoire is slowly being Islamized and is turning into a slave nation.

Côte d’Ivoire’s indigenous population was concentrated in the richer forests of the south, allowing the migration of Islamic tribes to occupy the drier north. Cocoa is the black gold of the Ivory Coast with most of the economy being geared around exporting the lucrative crop.

Allowing the Muslim forces to take over Côte d’Ivoire was just a brief interlude for Obama before launching the Arab Spring, and invading and removing Libya’s ruler. The resulting war allowed the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and later ISIS to gain a foothold in Libya. Tuareg Islamists, who still held a grudge over losing their slaves, invaded Mali and brutally imposed Islamic law.

The Tuaregs were among the few to still maintain a very public trade in slaves. A State Department report from last year found that black slavery was still rife among the Tuaregs and that, “Malian children endure forced labor on cotton and cocoa farms in Cote d’Ivoire”. The freed slaves at the center of the Supreme Court lawsuit had originally been trafficked from Mali.

Cote d’Ivoire’s boom in cocoa production was built around slave labor under brutal conditions. The beneficiaries of that slave labor are the multinationals who preach social justice, as long as it doesn’t raise the price of cocoa. It’s one thing to chant Black Lives Matter and support the racist hate group burning and looting stores, and another to actually stop profiting from black children being sold into slavery for $60 and then watching them being tortured and beaten.

According to the allegations in the lawsuit, Nestle dispensed “personal spending money to maintain farmers’ loyalty as exclusive suppliers” to the men running the slave plantations.

But this nightmare was put into place by the former boss of the lawyer shilling for Nestle.

The fallout from the Arab Spring had devastated Africa. The Middle East was better able to correct some of the damage from Obama’s empowerment of Islamists. Africa, poorer and more wounded, suffered far more. Obama’s backing for Islamist takeovers in Cote d’Ivoire, Libya, and Nigeria was little short of genocide, and, among its other effects, led to a boom in slavery.

Obama had done more than any other politicians to mainstream both black nationalism and black slavery. That’s only a paradox for those who don't remember Malcolm X admiring Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi who brought back slavery, before heading to Sudan to embrace its Islamists, or Stokely Carmichael shilling for brutal Muslim dictator Ahmed Toure.

America’s black nationalists don’t admire democracy or freedom. They reserve their veneration for strongmen and thugs. And the regimes they admire oppress and kill other black people.

Black nationalism has a way of ending in Islamist rule and the enslavement of black people.

While Black Lives Matter leaders get cash from woke corporations, those same corporations profit from slavery in Asia, where lives don’t matter, but also in Africa, where they supposedly do. While the Times serve up the 1619 Project, and the statues of anyone who ever had anything to do with a slave centuries ago are toppled, real African slavery continues today.

And it goes on much the same way it always had. It just no longer takes place in America.

America was never built on slavery, but woke corporations, from Nike to Apple, from Coca Cola to Nestle, who force their employees to chant, “Black Lives Matter”, are built on slavery.

Their commitments to social justice, to equity and BLM, are a distraction from the real slavery.

“I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like ‘defund the police.’ But, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it," Barack Obama complained.

Obama was pretending that there had never been a serious push to get rid of the police, and after spending eight years mainstreaming black nationalism and the pro-crime politics of police defunding was trying to pretend it was just an edgy slogan calling for “criminal justice reform”.

That would have come as news to Minneapolis residents, the birthplace of the third wave of Black Lives Matter riots, where the city council had embraced police defunding, before backing off as the city tottered under an unprecedented wave of murders, assaults, and robberies.

"It’s not a slogan but a policy demand," Rep. Ilhan Omar, the antisemitic Islamist adultress accused of marrying her brother, snapped.

“With all due respect, Mr. President—let’s talk about losing people," Rep. Cori Bush, the latest member of the socialist squad, ranted. "It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police.”

The year isn’t over yet, but murders in Minneapolis are up 62%, twice as many people, over 500, have been shot this year as in 2019, and the city is on track for 5,000 violent crimes.

A women’s shelter opposed police defunding proposals and described women sleeping with their feet to the windows out of fear that a stray bullet will strike them in the head.

“I have relived that night many times, hearing the sounds of the bullets hitting my radiator and drywall spraying everywhere,” a South Minneapolis resident told councilmembers at a hearing, and called police defunding a, “sociology experiment that obviously doesn’t work.”

But you can say the same thing about virtually any left policy from soda taxes to Communism.

Councilman Jeremiah Bey Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, argued that police defunding wasn’t working because it had never been tried. His father had previously suggested that police shouldn’t respond to rape calls. But police defunding has indeed never been properly tried because the Minneapolis City Council failed to formulate any kind of plan.

Ellison blamed the huge surge in crime, including a 537% increase in carjackings in the birthplace of police defunding, on “conventional wisdom” and the “century-long failure to create a public safety system that is not police-only.” The public safety system isn’t ‘police only’. It already includes a huge component of social services. The reason we have the police is that the billions that are already thrown at social services rarely stop crime. Billions more won’t fix it.

The obvious problem with police defunding or abolition is that its proponents have no plan for dealing with crime beyond telling victims to suck it up and offering the perps social services.

Real police defunding calls for getting rid of the police, prosecutors, and prisons, before replacing them with therapy sessions for criminals under the name ‘restorative justice’. When the godmother of police defunding tried it out with a Black Lives Matter rapist, he kept on raping.

When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender who would respond to an active shooter, after repeatedly talking about replacing the police, she and her colleague responded that it would be the job of the police. There’s still no better answer.

Police defunders insist that crime is caused by an unjust society and will go away when enough money is invested into the welfare state, affirmative action, and critical race theory training.

Minneapolis Democrats can’t answer who would deal with an active shooter because their ideology tells them that active shooters won’t exist once they finish reforming society. This is a familiar enough argument from leftists explaining how Communism was going to function. Those same theoreticians would then go on to explain that real Communism had never been tried.

The Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, and Maoist China, were never true Communism.

The advocates of police defunding will go on holding up their imaginary utopia as an ideal while claiming that like Communism, it never failed because it had never been properly implemented.

Even if some city is insane enough to actually abolish the police and prisons, and put the entire budget into social services, it still won’t be enough because the entire system will still be centering whiteness. Get rid of all the white people and there’ll be internalized whiteness.

And defunding advocates, like Omar, Tlaib, and Bush, will go on arguing that it was never tried.

But no city will go that far. There are police union contracts and chambers of commerce to contend with. Instead police budgets will be cut leading to limited enforcement and crime spikes. That’s already underway in Minneapolis and in cities across the country. The police will keep their heads down until, as in Minneapolis, public outrage leads politicians to ask for their help.

America has been living on this policy seesaw for seventy years, as cities switched between permissive pro-crime policies to crackdowns on criminals without learning from the past. Once crime is under control, the pro-crime arguments about brutal police and the cost of mass incarceration start sounding reasonable to people who forgot what living with crime is like.

But the idea that crime springs from an unjust society, instead of a tainted mind, will never die.

Police defunding shows why a fundamentally stupid idea that is at the root of our social problems won’t go away because, like most utopian nonsense, it can’t be disproven. Or at least it can’t be disproven to the satisfaction of the sorts of lefties who look at millions dead in Russia and China, or a double-digit rise in homicide rates in major American cities, and shrug.

It hasn’t really been tried. Not properly. This time it’ll work.

Criminal justice is one of those areas where there’s a fundamental philosophical difference about the nature of humanity that translates into completely incompatible policies. The fundamental question here is the familiar one of free will. Are criminals free agents or victims?

Asking Minneapolis Democrats who supported police defunding what they plan to do about an active shooter is a meaningless question within their ideological frame of reference because it presupposes that the active shooter has free will and can be stopped by direct intervention. In their holistic view of society, violence causes violence, and the active shooter only exists because we have armed police, fight wars, and let little boys play ‘cops and robbers’.

But that’s much the same answer you get when asking a leftist why there’s alcoholism, wars, or hurricanes. The messianic response in all cases is that these are problems caused by society that will go away when lefties are given enough power to fundamentally transform society.

You don’t give political power to people who think that way or ask them to solve any problems.

Abolishing the police, like abolishing rent, student loans, free speech, religion, and private property, all ideas currently being advocated by the American Left, is just another way of saying that all of our problems are caused by society and will go away when our society goes away.

Police defunding, like Soviet collective farms or socialized medicine, is only the latest lunatic leftist proposal to run aground on the shores of reality while being defended as untested.

The police can never be defunded. They must exist, if only to arrest people who erase Black Lives Matter graffiti or fill in ponds on their own property, and their existence keeps police defunding alive as an enlightened ideal that has never been truly implemented. Like abolishing private property, its absurd impossibility makes it compelling, and keeps the nightmare alive.

Every now and then another attempt will be made to defund the police, leading to hundreds and thousands of deaths, and more assaults, robberies, and rapes than even the FBI can count. Like the Soviet Union or the Minneapolis City Council, the whole thing will fall apart on its own, but its memory will linger as an inspiration to the next bunch of radicals who will try it again.

And the bodies of the people sacrificed to that experiment will linger, forgotten, in cemeteries.

Google's YouTube announced that “supporting the integrity" of the election required it to censor anyone alleging that "widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election".

By historical presidential election, Google meant this one. Democrats are still free to allege that they would have won in 2000 or 2016, if it hadn’t been for the chads or the Russians.

A huge tech monopoly closely tied to the Democrats, which was sued by the Trump administration over its illegal abuses, censoring critics of the Democrat election fraud is protecting and supporting something alright, but that thing is very definitely not integrity.

Election integrity, like fact checking, is one of those curious terms whose meaning was ‘Orwellianized’ in the last decade. Fact checking used to mean media organizations checking their facts before they published a story. Now the media has mostly done away with internal fact checking and uses fact checking to describe its efforts to censor conservative media.

Election integrity traditionally meant verifying the integrity of the process, but is now being used to mean silencing anyone who questions the integrity of the election. In both cases a term that meant protecting the integrity of an internal process has been turned inside out to mean covering up for the corruption of the internal process by censoring its outside critics.

That’s the new integrity.

At last count, 72% of Republicans, and 1 in 3 Americans, don’t trust the election results. That means silencing a hundred million people to protect thousands of election workers.

Protecting the integrity of the election means clean voter rolls, voter IDs, and elections that take place under predetermined rules put into place by state legislatures. It does not mean telling critics that pointing out the lack of integrity in the election is a threat to election integrity.

The threat to election integrity is coming from inside the system.

One basic difference between free and unfree societies is that free societies have internal checks and balances, while unfree societies only have external ones. A free society assures the integrity of its elections and its facts by keeping its facts and elections open to examination, while an unfree society protects its processes against outside criticism by threatening its critics.

American elections now happen under the grim shadow of networks of organizations that vow to “protect election integrity” by making sure that Americans aren’t “misled” by “disinformation”.

Typical of these is the Election Integrity Partnership, funded in part by billionaire Biden donor Craig Newmark, which predictably claimed that “election disinformation” was coming from Trump supporters. Its list of “repeat offenders with large audiences” consists entirely of Trump supporters. Calling people you disagree with “repeat offenders” is typical of the lefty discourse that criminalizes dissent by describing opposing views as “disinformation” and then an offense.

It's easy for conservatives to laugh off such corruption, much like Poynter's Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership being embedded in the fact checking machine, whose head also doubles as NPR's public editor, but legally treating lefty views as embodying truth and facts and conservative views as representing disinformation has serious consequences.

Even beyond YouTube and social media censorship in the marketplace of ideas.

The entire election integrity industry whose work involves closely monitoring political speech by ordinary people is operating under the theory that the biggest threat to elections comes from people. The Democrat obsession with Russian bots in the last election was almost wholesome compared to their current obsession, not with bots, Russian or otherwise, but with Americans.

Election integrity now means a stasi-like focus on identifying and punishing public speech. The threat, as in most totalitarian societies, was never really from outside: it was from Americans.

In 2020, Dems mostly ceased pretending that the issue was bots or foreign agents, instead the election integrity industry amplified by the media claimed to be very worried about people sharing “disinformation”. Big tech firms approached the election boasting about their massive effort to stem all the “disinformation” in order to protect the integrity of the election from people.

But if people can’t be trusted to discuss political issues, how can they be trusted to vote?

Our elections are only as free as our ideas are. Any system that doesn’t trust people to debate ideas isn’t about to trust them to actually make the decision about implementing those ideas.

The suppression of questions about the integrity of the election is the best reason to question it.

A free liberal society defines integrity as the integrity of the process while illiberal ideologues define it as the integrity of the outcome. The shift from the integrity of process to integrity of outcome has destroyed the integrity of most of the country’s institutions and the public’s trust.

The highest principle of integrity of process is sticking with the facts and following the rules, but integrity of outcome’s only principle is a cause so righteous that none of the rules matter.

Shifting from process to outcome led to a media that was not just biased, but that has zero regard for the facts or the truth, but insists that it’s right because it has the right principles. This preference for picking the outcome you want and then forcing the process to follow pervaded not just the media, but every political and many of the non-political institutions in American life.

That corrupt willingness to dispense with the rules is why so many question the election.

In the last four years, conservatives have witnessed a string of government officials coming forward to undermine a sitting administration, while others leaked from behind the scenes. Before the election, Democrat state officials in charge of the election vented their hatred for President Trump on social media while promising that a Biden victory was forthcoming.

Now some of those same officials are furious that Republicans are challenging the integrity of the elections they supervised. Guns don’t kill people and elections don’t defraud themselves.

Tech companies and the media have reduced the election to a sacred idea whose integrity may not be challenged, but Republicans aren’t challenging an idea: they’re challenging public officials. And tech companies stepping in to protect “election integrity” are not, at this late date, preventing voters from being “misled”, but protecting the officials they support from scrutiny.

Only unfree societies protect the integrity of public officials from the outrage of the public. And only a corrupt oligarchy selectively intervenes to protect its officials in the name of “integrity”.

Election integrity isn’t achieved by suppressing criticism of election officials. That is how you get corruption. And how conspiracy theories, right or wrong, are spawned on an unprecedented scale. Real integrity comes when public officials are held to a high standard by the public.

Free countries can have contested elections. Unfree ones, by definition, can’t.

Contested elections are healthy things. As long as you contest them the right way. Throwing around accusations of election fraud is as American as apple pie. Even most liberal historians agree that there were at least two “historical” presidential elections, as Google puts it, whose outcomes were corruptly determined. And a number of others were legitimately in dispute.

The unhealthy way to contest elections is accusing the winner of being a Russian spy, and launching investigations of him and his associates based on that smear. That’s how elections are contested in places like, well, Russia. Just make sure to substitute American for Russian.

The oligarchy has spent every minute since the election crying that contesting an election is illegitimate, a threat to what it calls “democracy”, and must be stopped to save our country.

Free countries aren’t that fragile. Unfree ones are very fragile.

Every time you hear another media screed about the threat posed by “disinformation”, you’re hearing an admission that their rule over this country is totalitarian and very fragile. And when you hear them lecture about the need to protect “election integrity” by suppressing critics, you’re hearing an admission that they rig elections whenever they can and are afraid you’ll find out.

Any faction that spends this much time protesting its integrity, doesn’t have any to protest.