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.

 A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears no different. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again.

Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs.

Jerusalem's wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi'in. Maccabee.

And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish resistance fighters from a small town in the hinterlands and the Hellenized elites of the big city, between those who wished to be Jews and those who wanted to be pawns in an empire, between the tradition of the priests and the progress of a new order, between the Maccabees and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations.

The Syrian Greek armies were among the best of their day. The Maccabees were living in the backwaters of Israel, a nation that had not been independently ruled since the armies of Babylon had flooded across the land, destroying everything in their path. 

In the wilderness of Judea a band of brothers vowed that they would bow to no man and let no foreigners rule over their land. Apollonius brought his Samaritan forces against the brothers, and Judah, first among the Maccabees, killed him, took his sword and wore it for his own.

General Seron of the army of Coele-Syria, brought together his soldiers, along with renegade Jewish mercenaries, and was broken at Beit Haran. The Governor of Syria dispatched two generals, Nicanor, and Gorgias, with forty thousand soldiers and seven thousand horsemen to conquer Judea, destroy Jerusalem and abolish the whole Jewish nation forever. So certain were they of victory that they brought with them merchant caravans to fill with the Hebrew slaves of a destroyed nation.

Judah walked among his brothers and fellow rebels and spoke to them of the thing for which they fought; “My fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping God.

"Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle. Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory.

"Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning." 

Though the Maccabees were but three thousand, starving and dressed in bare rags, the God for whom they fought and their native wits and courage, gave them victory over thousands and tens of thousands.

Though, worn from battle, the Maccabees did not flee back into their Judean wilderness, instead they went on to Jerusalem and its Temple, to reclaim their land and their God, only to find the Temple and the capital in ruins.

The Maccabees had fought courageously for the freedom to worship God once again as their fathers had, but courage alone could not make the Menorah burn and thus renew the Temple service again. Yet it had not been mere berserker’s courage that had brought them this far. Like their ancestors before them who had leaped into furnaces and the raging sea, they had dared the impossible on faith. Faith in a God who watched over his nation and intervened in the affairs of men. And so on faith they poured the oil of that single flask in the Menorah, oil that could only last for a single day. And then having done all they could, the priests and sons of priests who had fought through entire armies to reach this place, accepted that they had done all they could and left the remainder in the hands of the Almighty.

If they had won by the strength of their hands alone, then the lamps would burn for a day and then flicker out. But if it had been more than mere force of arms that had brought them here, if it had been more than mere happenstance that a small band of ragged and starving rebels had shattered the armies of an empire, then the flames of the Menorah would burn on. 

The sun rose and set again. The day came to its end and the men watched the lights of the Menorah to see if they would burn or die out. And if the flame in their hearts could have kindled the lamps, they would have burst into bright flame then and there. Darkness fell that night and still the lamps burned on.

For eight days and nights the Menorah burned on that single lonely pure flask of oil, until more could be found, and the men who for a time had been soldiers and had once again become priests, saw that while it may be men who kindle lamps and hearts, it is the Almighty who provides them with the fuel of the spirit through which they burn.

120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of Rome's Arab governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom.

The revived kingdom had been a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander's empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness.

The fall of the Roman Republic and the civil wars of the new empire, its uncontrollable spending and greed made it hopelessly corrupt. Caesar repaid Jewish loyalty by rewarding the Arab-Edomite murderers of Jewish kings, and his successors saw the Jewish state as a way to bring in some quick money. Out went the Jewish kings, in came the son of Rome's tax collector, Herod.

The promises made by Senate to the Maccabees ceased to matter. Imperial greed collided with Jewish nationalism in a war that for a brief shining moment seemed as if it might end in another Chanukah, but ended instead in massacre and atrocity. The exiles went forth once again, some on foot and some in slave ships. Israel became Palestine. Jerusalem was renamed and resettled. The long night had begun.

But no darkness lasts forever.

Two thousand years after the Jews had come to believe that wars were for other people and miracles meant escaping alive, Jewish armies stood and held the line against an empire and the would be empires of the region.

And now the flame still burns, though it is flickering. Seventy-one years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea. And the children of many of those who first lit the flame no longer see the point in that hoary old light. 

But that old light is still the light of possibilities. It burns to remind us of the extraordinary things that our ancestors did and of the extraordinary assistance that they received. We cannot always expect oil to burn for eight days, just as we cannot always expect the bullet to miss or the rocket to fall short. And yet even in those moments of darkness the reminder of the flame is with us for no darkness lasts forever and no exile, whether of the body of the spirit, endures. Sooner or later the spark flares to life again and the oil burns again. Sooner or later the light returns.

It is the miracle that we commemorate because it is a reminder of possibilities. Each time we light a candle or dip a wick in oil, we release a flare of light from the darkness comes to remind us of what was, is and can still be.

Obese rapists, insane serial killers, and child molesters over 55 years old could be on the loose in your neighbrohood if the Squad’s latest social justice bill becomes law.

The bill to free all the fat criminals, sponsored by Rep. Tlaib, Rep. Lee, and Rep. Pressley, and co-sponsored by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Omar, and eight other Democrats, and endorsed by Black Lives Matter, calls for a mass jailbreak to protect criminals from the coronavirus.

The existing wave of coronavirus criminal releases already helped boost crime rates in major cities with double digit increases in homicides. Robberies have shot up like a rocket with criminals stealing cars and looting businesses while knowing they won’t be jailed.

But that’s not enough for the Squad. They want to free all the criminals. Especially the fat ones.

The Dismantle Mass Incarceration for Public Health Act, introduced by Rep Tlaib, would “require States and units of local government to certify a commitment to release certain individuals from jails and prisons” and their list includes anyone who’s over 55 years old, unhealthy, or obese.

Or as the bill puts it, has been “diagnosed with obesity”.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, anyone with a body mass index (BMI) of 30.0 qualifies as obese. That means a 5'6 rapist who weighs 187 pounds, a 5'8 mugger who clocks in at 200 pounds, or one of those fabled 6'0 and 225 pound gentle giants specializing in home invasions would all be considered obese and in need of immediate release.

The official obese ranking doesn’t actually mean fat. The criminals that Tlaib, AOC, Omar, Lee, and Pressley want to unleash on communities already swimming in a wave of horrifying crimes are above a recommended healthy height to weight ratio. But maybe a good exercise regimen of muggings, carjackings, and sexual assaults will get them back to their fighting weight.

How many criminals would this actually set loose?

DOJ statistics show that about half of federal and state inmates have some sort of chronic condition: 15% have asthma, 10% have heart problems, and 9% have diabetes. All of these conditions are on the Squad’s jailbreak bill’s release list. With over 2 million prison inmates, if these statistics hold up, between 200,000 to 680,000 criminals could be set loose.

But wait.

The majority of prisoners, 74%, were overweight, obese, or morbidly obese. Over a quarter hit the obese BMI numbers. That would mean freeing at least half a million fat criminals.

In addition to freeing fat criminals, Squad members also want to free “seniors”. And by “seniors” they mean any criminal who has at least reached the tender age of 55 years old.

The unabomber, the BTK killer, and the Son of Sam, all of whom are still in prison today, and over the age of 55, would qualify. Sadly Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer are no longer alive to take advantage of Tlaib, AOC, and Pressley’s generous offer to free them all.

Even those serial killers who aren’t over 55 could take advantage of the mentally ill clause.

Fat rapists and pedophiles in their fifties are supposedly more at risk from the virus, but why are depressed muggers, anxious con artists, and schizophrenic serial killers more at risk?

This isn’t about saving criminals from an imaginary threat. Socialists like freeing criminals. Stealing private property and terrorizing the public is just socialism by another name.

In addition to freeing all fat criminals, any criminal over the age of 55, and crazy criminals, the Tlaib, Pressley, and Lee bill would also free any criminals who have moderate asthma or diabetes, or can be considered diabled. Since the disabled category covers everything from back injuries to depression to irritable bowel syndrome to dermatitis, that’s a free pass.

Some 30% of criminals in federal and state prisons reported hypertension. That alone would release 600,000 criminals from prison. At this rate a criminal would have to work not to be freed.

The Squad bill also provides for freeing any criminal whom a review board determines is "unlikely to pose a substantial risk of causing bodily injury or using violent force against another individual". That would cover any inmates who weren’t convicted of physical assault.

And that would free all the thieves, robbers, drug dealers, and looters.

Countless criminals have already been freed under this category to protect them from the virus leading to plenty of violent assaults even though the criminals were said to be low risk. Not to mention massive amounts of robberies, car thefts, and the wave of Black Lives Matter looting.

Even the most modest estimates of the criminal population released would be a million.

The Dismantle Mass Incarceration for Public Health Act would also free all illegal aliens being held on an ICE detainer because not all criminals can be considered free until the violent illegal aliens being held for deportation are also released to rob, beat, and kill Americans.

How long would AOC, Omar, and Tlaib like the country's criminals to be roaming the street? The bill would apply until the President declares the "end of the COVID-19 national emergency".

Americans get two national emergencies for the price of one. If the coronavirus doesn’t get you, the criminals freed by AOC, Omar, Tlaib, Lee, Pressley, and other House Democrats will.

Democrats and their media have spent the duration of the pandemic shouting that prison inmates were most at risk of catching the virus and had to be freed immediately. If they had dedicated a fraction of the same effort to protecting another vulnerable institutionalized population, nursing home residents, the pandemic death toll would be a fraction of what it is.

Instead, New York, California, and other states freed massive numbers of criminals to protect them from the virus, while forcing nursing homes to take in infected patients resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of nursing home residents. The Democrats who claimed that keeping inmates locked up would be a death sentence, delivered an actual death sentence.

And the Democrats are still shouting we have to save the criminals before they all die.

“This pandemic should not be a death sentence for anyone,” Rep. Tlaib clamored.

"This virus should not be, and doesn’t have to be, a death sentence for incarcerated individuals," Rep. Lee whined.

So far 149 federal inmates, out of 124,538 total, have died from the virus.

Or as CBS News called the 100th federal prison death back in July, a "grim milestone".

The Los Angeles Times breathlessly reported last month that the 79th prison inmate had died of the virus in California. As of now, the number appears to be up to 88. Another “grim milestone”.

Governor Newsom's latest shutdown order closes down small businesses and warns residents to stay at home if their area's number of available beds in intensive care units drops below 15%.

“By invoking a Stay at Home Order for regions where ICU capacity falls below 15 percent, we can flatten the curve as we’ve done before and reduce stress on our health care system," Governor Newsom, fresh from partying at the French Laundry, declared.

Spring had given way to summer and then to autumn and winter, and California Democrats are still using the pretext of preserving “ICU capacity” and “flattening the curve”. The rationale of shutting down an entire state, not so much for the sake of stopping the virus, but for keeping enough beds open in intensive care units, never made much sense even back then.

It’s insane now.

What did Governor Newsom and California Democrats do to increase ICU capacity?

In April, California had 7,345 ICU beds. Now, in December, it has 7,881.

In under eight months, the wealthiest state only managed to add 536 ICU beds. Or 7%.

In April, Newsom was bragging that California was so prepared that it began donating hundreds of ventilators to other states.

“Let me just make this clear, we are preparing for a scenario where we need 50,000 beds," he boasted.

Fast forward to December and the entire state has to be shut down (except for certain privileged industries, like Hollywood) because Newsom only managed to increase ICU capacity by 7%.

In June, the Democrat State Senate proposed a $200 billion budget. By the summer, California had received $71 billion from the federal government. So much federal money poured into the corrupt Democrat machine that the state’s auditor warned it was at high risk for fraud and waste.

In March, Newsom had announced that $500 million would be spent to do everything from increasing bed capacity to buying medical equipment to protecting nursing home residents.

And, of course, the top priority in California, care for the homeless.

Later, $600 million in federal funding would be spent on yet more housing for the homeless.

By the spring, California hospitals were claiming $14 billion in losses because they had to clear out the hospitals and postpone elective surgeries to maintain enough beds. Some of those elective surgeries were actually urgent and the death toll from postponing them is unknown.

That same policy led to Governor Newsom signing an order, which was described by nursing home advocates as a “death sentence”, forcing skilled nursing facilities to accept infected patients. So far, 6,709 coronavirus deaths have taken place at California nursing homes.

Nursing home patients have accounted for 34% of coronavirus deaths in California.

And, after all that, Governor Newsom has done next to nothing to increase ICU bed capacity while imposing another series of lockdowns, businesses going out of business, and people who can’t feed their families, while Newsom lectures them like children about washing their hands.

Democrats keep claiming that the shutdowns are happening because people don’t follow the rules. But their own metric, ICU capacity, makes it abundantly clear that they failed miserably.

Governor Newsom and the Democrats based everything around ICU capacity, and gifted with incomprehensible amounts of money and the better part of a year, they only raised it by 7%.

It’s almost as if they wanted a pretext for another shutdown. Or they’re corrupt and incompetent.

This is after all the same Democrat government that was spending $746,000 per unit on housing for the homeless after raking in billions to solve the problem of housing the homeless. It’s also the same government that does nothing to increase water capacity, but regularly declares a drought, reduces power capacity to save the planet, and then lets the blackouts roll.

But, unlike California’s refusal to do anything about the water and power situation, there’s no environmental pretext for doing so little to increase ICU capacity. Not a public one anyway.

Nor has the media found the time to actually cover that obscenely absurd 7% number.

But it has plenty of time to cover every single viral video of a person walking into a store without a mask, and every sanctimonious politician’s speech about the importance of masks.

When Governor Newsom and local Democrats claim that businesses have to shut down and children can’t play on playgrounds because of ICU capacity, no one in the media asks why, after all those billions of dollars, the state only added an average of 67 ICU beds a month.

Every California government agency tells the public to wear a mask more times a day than that.

The same Democrat politicians who kept warning that California would have to shut down if it hit ICU capacity did little to actually boost that capacity. It’s almost as if they wanted the shutdown.

California Democrats would rather pay out billions in unemployment than actually have thriving small businesses employing workers. That’s not a conspiracy theory: it’s a policy choice.

Just like letting Hollywood film crews eat outdoors while shutting down local restaurants, or keeping playgrounds closed and tennis courts open, or closing churches and synagogues while keeping pot dispensaries open, and keeping schools closed while BLM riots get a pass.

And these are policy choices that they should be held accountable for.

Once California Democrats made ICU capacity into the metric for a shutdown, they had the responsibility to increase that capacity. Instead they spent eight months shaking their fingers in the faces of the public, while partying at the French Laundry behind their backs.

Meanwhile they blew through the equivalent of Turkey’s national budget with little to show for it.

Californians, like people living under blue state rule around the country, were told that they had to flatten the curve to be free. Thousands of nursing home residents became human sacrifices to free up hospital beds for infected patients and maintain the metrics of ICU capacity.

But it wasn’t the public that failed to protect ICU capacity: it was Newsom and the Democrats.

Governor Newsom and Democrats keep trying to blame the lockdowns on the “irresponsible behavior” of the public. They were the ones who had month after month to prepare for a surge that they knew was coming, and all they have to show for it is a 7% increase in ICU beds.

Now they’re shutting down the state because it’s not meeting an artificial metric that they put into place and then did next to nothing to address while blowing through billions in cash.

It’s the old fable of the grasshopper and the ant. Except the grasshopper is bankrupting the ant.

The ICU capacity metric was built to fail. Just like California’s water and power, the ruling Democrats create disasters, and respond with rationing and misery, while blaming the public.

When there is a dry winter, as this one is likely to be, they don’t take the blame for failing to build dams, instead they blame the public for using too much water. When blackouts take down power across entire neighborhoods, they don’t take the blame for reducing reliable power sources and replacing them with worthless solar and wind boondoggles, instead they blame the public for not caring about the planet by running air conditioners in 110 degree weather.

Now, after almost a year of this circus, the same gang of corrupt clowns who did next to nothing to increase ICU capacity are blaming the shutdown on Californians not wearing enough masks.

California Democrats have stolen and squandered the natural wealth of an incredible state, and whenever a disaster happens, they scold the public for not being willing enough to live in misery.

The latest lockdowns may be flattening another curve: tolerance for these corrupt lying scolds.

The Jewish holiday of Chanukah has two major symbols: the menorah and the dreidel.

The menorah, a candelabra with eight branches, and one light above, memorializes the liberation of the Temple from the religious persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Syrian-Greek ruler who had outlawed Judaism, and the other a spinning top recollects how Jewish children learning the word of G-d in the banned ‘hedge schools’ of ancient Israel would take out tops and pretend to be playing games when Antiochus’ inspectors arrived.

American Jewish children had lit menorahs and spun their dreidels for generations without imagining that an Antiochus would arise in America. Let alone that he would arise in New York.

In 2020, Chanukah came early when another abominable tyrant, fresh from killing 11,000 nursing home residents by forcing facilities to accept infected coronavirus patients, decided to adopt the medieval habit of blaming the virus on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. A swarm of inspectors from every department were sent out to schools and then to the hidden schools.

And in 21st century America, children huddled in basements, afraid to make a noise, and then, if Cuomo’s men found them, were ready to claim that they weren’t in school, just playing games.

A month before Chanukah and Christmas, the Supreme Court's conservative justices, three of them appointed by President Trump, delivered a Christmas present in Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo and a Chanukah present in Agudath Israel of America v. Cuomo. Like his Syrian-Greek predecessor, Cuomo furiously raged at the restraint imposed on his power.

Cuomo’s hatred for religion is driven by the same mad idolization that had led Antiochus to take Epiphanes, ‘the visible god’, as part of his name. Antiochus had put idols in the temple, Cuomo had placed his self-idolizing coronavirus memoir into the windows of every bookstore.

That egotistical hatred of a G-d that isn’t a culture war idol, that isn’t named Cuomo, Obama, or Ginsberg, is why the battle for religious freedom is far from over in this longest of Chanukahs.

When the pandemic lockdowns arrived, I was still completing the mourning year for my mother. In Jewish tradition, losing a parent ushers in a year of grief. I did not listen to music or attend parties, and I spent an hour each day traveling to synagogue to lead prayer services in her memory. The recital of the Kaddish, praising G-d, is said to uplift the souls of the deceased.

And then all the synagogues were forced to close.

In a dark time when the New York Post dispatches undercover investigators to do Cuomo’s work for him and spy on Jewish weddings, when the media breathlessly digs up tales of secret prayer gatherings (“Post the names and addresses, expose them,” a quote in one Los Angeles article read, “If you have information and say nothing then you could be endangering lives”), few dare to speak of the underground prayer railroad. But what more needs to be said of the state of 21st century America than that there were underground churches and synagogues.

My mother was born in the Soviet Union. As a teenager, she had terrified her parents, who had witnessed their family members being imprisoned and executed, by rejecting Communism. After being expelled from school and barred from higher education, she had joined the Jewish underground networks that had gathered together in homes to sing Jewish songs, to illegally copy Hebrew dictionaries, commemorate the Holocaust, and covertly bake Matza for Passover.

Americans tend to think of such a loss of freedom as an alien and unimaginable state. This year taught us how thin the line that divides us from the age of Antiochus or the age of Stalin really is.

For now, the synagogues are open again and many of the religious schools in Los Angeles are teaching students though some, in an echo of the dreidel, are operating officially as day camps.

The Supreme Court decision that halted some of the declarations by the modern Antiochus and his Democrat peers that religion, unlike cannabis dispensaries and film shoots, is non-essential, would not have happened if President Trump and Senate Republicans hadn’t put Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. When religious freedom hangs by the fraying thread of a single justice, even as Democrats plot to seize Georgia Senate seats and pack the court, then it’s hardly there even if for the moment some of the worst Democrat depredations were halted.

The tragic truth is that if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were alive today, Chanukah would be cancelled. It would be cancelled with the connivance of her, and of Justice Breyer and Justice Kagan, much as Christmas would be cancelled with the connivance of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sotomayor. The irony of Tikkunolamists of Jewish descent lighting a menorah shaped like Ginsburg, to honor an activist who would have cancelled Chanukah escapes them, much as the problem with sacrificing pigs in the temple baffled Antiochus’ Jewish collaborators

Tikkunolamism is the modern Hellenism, a militant pagan secularism that idolizes utopian culture heroes while disdaining the intangible idea of the holy presence of an unseen G-d.

Antiochus placed idols in the temple and ordered that pigs be sacrificed because he only understood religion as power. To defile something sacred was to wield power over it. In their culture wars, leftists follow the same obsessive pattern of degradation, using elephant dung and urine on Christian symbols, draping naked women in the symbols of the Jewish faith, ridiculing Chanukah in the pages of the New York Times, and making the menorah into a mockery.

And when that doesn’t work, there’s always compulsion under the guise of a greater good.

Antiochus had taken the surname Epiphanes, meaning ‘the visible god’, to mock the invisible G-d. But the power of G-d had made a mockery of his armies, his blasphemies, and his rule.

The power of Chanukah, and of faith, is in the unseen, from the force that caused a single flask of oil to burn in the Menorah for eight days, to the covert Torah being studied by the children as they pretended to spin a top, to the hidden omnipotent might of an unseen G-d.

And this year, the suppression of public prayers made us appreciate them all the more.

Religious freedom and all that comes with it is all too often taken for granted. It can be difficult to relate to our ancestors who sacrificed so much for their faith when we don’t need to sacrifice. When the mandates, decrees, and lockdowns came down, we saw the unseen, the preciousness and precariousness of our religious freedom, that we had taken for granted.

Out of the dark times, we experienced the smallest taste of what our ancestors had endured to keep the faith, and through that renewed the meaning to be found in holidays like Chanukah.

Religious people respond to religious persecution by seeing the unseen. It is the unseen that is the source of faith in a world that places its confidence in material power above all else. And the insights and the might of the unseen make a mockery of the worst of that blasphemous power.

Another Chanukah arrives in a world in which Antiochus can be found in Albany, New York, in which the synagogues and schools open today might be forced to be shut tomorrow, and in which the ideological faction that makes a point of defiling Chanukah along with most religion, which would close most houses of worship if it could, plots to lay claim to the White House.

When George Washington visited the family of a Jewish officer, a story relates that he told them of first encountering the Menorah in the hands of a Jewish soldier at Valley Forge.

"Perhaps we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. I rejoice in the Maccabees' success, though it is long past,'' Washington had supposedly said. "It pleases me to think that miracles still happen."

Even in the darkest period of a dark year, we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. Neither the trials nor the triumphs of faith are long past. And miracles still happen.