When you remove the government’s monopoly on the use of force, in essence you privatize the police. The free market that these leftists do NOT want for anything else is what we get now for physical protection. It’s a free for all. You might call on one police force or gang to protect you; I will pay another. My private police force might be at war with yours. The gang mentality of any urban jungle becomes the normal way of life for everyone. THAT’S what BLM, Antifa and the Democratic Party mean by “social justice”.

If we can’t find a private police force or gang that we like and trust, we simply walk around with guns and protect ourselves. I realize guns will be illegal (under the left-wing banana republic many cities are now becoming), but if my gang (or gun) is stronger than your gang (or gun), then I win. THAT’S how it works when you “defund the police”.

It’s anarchy. Anarchy is as irrational as unlimited government. Anarchy and Communism or Nazism are two sides of the same coin. In each case, force and brutality win over the rule of law, individual rights, private property and private sovereignty over one’s life, body and mind.

Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the Democratic Party — each one a terrorist group, so far as I’m concerned — want anarchy. The mayor of NYC is a Democrat. He’s now seeking to gradually defund the police. How is the Democratic Party any different than a mob terrorist group? Joe Biden, even though he hasn’t a clue as to what’s going on outside his head most of the time, is clearly just a puppet.

It’s not a misguided means of freedom. It’s a way for radical leftist anarchists to seize control. The rudest, crudest and most extreme radical leftist groups that created violence on college campuses back in the 1960s are now in charge of America’s major cities — for all practical purposes. They’re confident that in a state of anarchy they can seize the control they always wanted, and they will rule by force.

Minneapolis is the first step. If Minneapolis falls, you can expect other left-wing cities and bastions to fall as well. Even Democratic voters — the ones who still like a little money and private property — will be forced to flee.

We now know what Civil War II looks like in America. It’s happening.

Michael J Hurd

A protester raises a fist next to a Black Lives Matter.
A protester raises a fist next to a Black Lives Matter placard.

While it might not be popular to say in the wake of the recent social disorder, the true plight of black people has little or nothing to do with the police or what has been called “systemic racism.” Instead, we need to look at the responsibilities of those running our big cities.

Some of the most dangerous big cities are: St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Newark, Buffalo, and Philadelphia. The most common characteristic of these cities is that, for decades, all of them have been run by liberal Democrats. Some cities — such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark, and Philadelphia — haven’t elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century. On top of this, in many of these cities, blacks are mayors, often they dominate city councils, and they are chiefs of police and superintendents of schoolsIn 1965, there were no blacks in the U.S. Senate, nor were there any black governors. And only six members of the House of Representatives were black. As of 2019, there is far greater representation in some areas — 52 House members are black. Nine black Americans have served in the Senate, including Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, Carol Moseley Braun and Barack Obama of Illinois, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kamala Harris of California. In recent times, there have been three black state governors. The bottom line is that today’s black Americans have significant political power at all levels of government. Yet, what has that meant for a large segment of the black population?

Democratic-controlled cities have the poorest-quality public education despite their large, and growing, school budgets.

Consider Baltimore, Md.
In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state’s math exam. In six other high schools, only 1 percent tested proficient in math. Only 15 percent of Baltimore students passed the state’s English test. That same year in Philadelphia, only 19 percent of eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 16 percent were proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 4 percent of its eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 7 percent were proficient in reading. It’s the same story of academic disaster in other cities run by Democrats.

Violent crime and poor education is not the only problem for Democratic-controlled cities. Because of high crime, poor schools, and a less pleasant environment, cities are losing their economic base and their most productive people in droves. When World War II ended, the population of Washington, D.C. was about 800,000; today, it’s about 700,000. In 1950, Baltimore’s population was almost 950,000; today, it’s around 590,000. Detroit’s 1950 population was close to 1.85 million; today, it’s down to 673,000. The population of Camden, New Jersey, in 1950 was nearly 125,000; today, it has fallen to 74,000. St. Louis’ 1950 population was more than 856,000; today, it’s less than 294,000.

A similar story of population decline can be found in most of our formerly large and prosperous cities. In some cities, the population decline since 1950 is well over 50 percent, and that includes Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.
Academic liberals, civil rights advocates, and others blamed the exodus on racism — “white flight” to the suburbs to avoid blacks. But blacks have been fleeing some cities at higher rates than whites. The five cities whose suburbs have the fastest-growing black populations are Miami, Dallas, Washington, Houston, and Atlanta. It turns out that blacks, like whites, want better and safer schools for their kids and don’t like to be mugged or have their property vandalized. And like white people, if they have the means, black people cannot wait to leave troubled cities.

White liberals and black politicians focus most of their attention on what the police do, but how relevant is that to the overall tragedy?

According to Statista, this year, 172 whites and 88 blacks have died at the hands of police. To put police shootings in a bit of perspective, in Chicago alone in 2020, there have been 1,260 shootings and 256 homicides with blacks being the primary victims.

That comes to one shooting victim every three hours and one homicide victim every 15 hours.

Three people in Chicago have been killed by police.If one is truly concerned about black deaths, shootings by police should figure way down on one’s list — which is not to excuse bad behavior by some police officers.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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Despite many serious scholars’ denunciations, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has enjoyed phenomenal success since its publication in 1980: 2.6 million (!) copies sold, incorporation into the curricula of innumerable schools, and the achievement of almost iconic status in popular culture. Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America performs a valuable service by examining Zinn’s polemical volume and revealing “just how distorted, manipulative, and plain dishonest” it truly is.

A tireless left-wing activist with a Ph.D. in history, Zinn (1922–2010) urged fellow historians, as Grabar relates, to eschew “disinterested scholarship” in order to bring about “a revolution in the academy.” Not all radical academics agreed with his anti-capitalist take on history. Eugene Genovese declined to review Zinn’s opus, which he privately described as “incoherent left-wing sloganizing.” Michael Kammen called it “a scissors-and-paste-pot job” that devoted too much attention to “historians, historiography, and historical polemic” and hence provided “little space for the substance of history.” Kammen acknowledged the need for “a people’s history; but not single-minded, simpleminded history, too often of fools, knaves and Robin Hoods.”

Eric Foner disapproved of Zinn’s “deeply pessimistic vision of the American experience” that emphasized how “stirring protests, strikes and rebellions never seem to accomplish anything.” Zinn’s approach to “history from the bottom up” was “necessary as a corrective” but was “as limited in its own way as history from the top down.” Michael Kazin credited Zinn “with virtuous intentions” but concluded that his book was little more than a “Manichean fable” and a “polemic disguised as history,” a book “grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s website than to a work of scholarship” and “unworthy of [the] fame and influence” it won. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., regarded Zinn as “a polemicist, not a historian.”

In a 2012 survey conducted by the left-leaning History News Network, asking readers to identify the “least credible history book in print,” A People’s History won second place (just behind David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies [2012]). Some respondents condemned Zinn’s work as “cheap propaganda” and “the historians’ equivalent of medical malpractice.”

* * *

Grabar’s book systematically reviews A People’s History, comparing it unfavorably to reputable scholars’ works. Born in Slovenia but raised in the U.S., Grabar earned a Ph.D. in English and taught at a number of colleges and universities in Georgia before becoming a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. She starts with Zinn’s influential account of Christopher Columbus, much of it plagiarized from Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth (1976), a crude work written for high schoolers by his friend and fellow activist Hans Koning. The leftist London Guardian described Koning’s work as “a highly polemical biography” that told “a dark story of exploitation and fanaticism” tantamount to genocide. Zinn also plagiarized from Edward Countryman, a fellow radical historian.

In addition to copying without attribution from secondary sources, Zinn cited primary sources like Bartolomé de Las Casas’s 16th-century History of the Indies, from which he quoted passages in a disingenuous manner that misrepresented their significance. Zinn maintained that Columbus thought the tribe he first encountered (the Taíno, whom Zinn calls the Arawaks) was fit for slavery, when in fact the explorer speculated that the wounds sustained by the Bahamian island’s natives had been inflicted by mainlanders who sought to enslave them. Zinn ascribed the impulse behind Columbus’s mission to greed, ignoring the strong religious motivations of both Columbus and his royal sponsors. He anachronistically depicted the tribes that Columbus encountered on his four voyages—and, in addition, North American tribes that interacted with European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries—as peaceful feminists, environmentalists, democrats, and communists avant la lettre.

* * *

Zinn portrayed the colonial wars between Native Americans and colonists as battles between inoffending tribes and rapacious settlers. Though acknowledging that both sides committed massacres, he tended to explain away Indians’ slaughter of whites and to condemn colonials even when they were resisting attacks, as in King Philip’s War during the 1670s. He relied heavily on Gary Nash’s politically correct Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America (1974), but failed to quote Nash’s gesture toward historical evenhandedness: “[i]t would be mistaken to romanticize Iroquois culture or to judge it superior to the culture of the European invader.” The Iroquois and Pequots were as aggressive as any Europeans in their attempts to subdue (and enslave) neighboring tribes.

Just as Zinn romanticized life in precolonial America, he romanticized African society before the Atlantic slave trade. In his view, African feudalism had a “communal spirit” and “more kindness in law and punishment” than its European counterpart, while African slavery was more humane than in the Western hemisphere. Zinn suggested that one third of the slaves conveyed across the Atlantic died at sea, though the most recent scholarly investigations indicate a mortality rate only half that high. He failed to place American slavery and white racism in world and historical context by ignoring or soft-pedaling slavery and racism in the Muslim world and the complicity of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade.

Zinn’s sympathetic biographer, the leftist historian Martin Duberman, noted that “Howard’s version of our past has been justly criticized as leaving out too much, of presenting a partial and thereby distorted account.” A good starting point, Duberman suggested, is the book’s treatment of Abraham Lincoln. Zinn presented “a one-dimensional view of a complex, cautious man,” he said, ignoring “the fact that unlike most people, Lincoln’s capacity for growth was impressive,” that he “stood at a substantial distance from the outright racism that dominated Northern opinion,” and that Lincoln “was in a decided minority in believing that natural rights belonged to all human beings.” Duberman concluded that Zinn’s “disparagement of Lincoln is part of a general problem with the way he assigns motivation to individuals. With few exceptions, only members of the working class or minorities (or their champions) are allowed to represent human nobility and selflessness.”

* * *

Zinn failed to note that William Lloyd Garrison, the country’s foremost abolitionist spokesman, had been a fierce critic of Lincoln but over time mellowed, insisting toward the end of the Civil War that the president should be judged on the basis “of his possibilities, rather than by our wishes, or by the highest abstract moral standard.” Lincoln’s

freedom to follow his convictions of duty as an individual is one thing—as the President of the United States, it is limited by the functions of his office; for the people do not elect a President to play the part of reformer or philanthropist, nor to enforce upon the nation his own peculiar ethical or humanitarian ideas, without regard to his oath or their will. His primary and all-comprehensive duty is to maintain the Union and execute the Constitution, in good faith.

Garrison expressed his “firm conviction” that “no man has occupied the chair of the Chief Magistracy in America, who has more assiduously or more honestly endeavored to discharge all its duties with a single eye to the welfare of the country, than Mr. Lincoln.”

In 1865, Frederick Douglass hailed Lincoln as “emphatically the black man’s President: the first to show any respect for their rights as men.” Lincoln “was the first American President” who “rose above the prejudice of his times, and country.” If during the early stages of the Civil War the president had favored colonizing the freedmen abroad, Douglass asserted, “Lincoln soon outgrew his colonization ideas and schemes and came to look upon the Black man as an American citizen.” Evidence supporting the latter statement was Lincoln’s speech of April 11, 1865, two days after Robert E. Lee surrendered, when the president, for the first time, publicly endorsed black voting rights, prompting one member of the audience—John Wilkes Booth—to exclaim to some friends, “That means nigger citizenship. Now by God I’ll put him through! That is the last speech he will ever make.” So it is proper for us in the 21st century to regard Lincoln as a martyr to black voting rights, as much as Martin Luther King, Jr., or any of the others killed as they championed the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.

Grabar argues that deplorable as was Zinn’s misguided treatment of the discovery of America, slavery, and the Civil War, worse still was his treatment of World War II, which she calls “obscene.” Zinn compared internment camps for Japanese Americans to the death camps of Nazi Germany, suggested that the U.S. provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, insinuated that Franklin Roosevelt’s failure to take special steps to protect Europe’s Jews made him as morally culpable as Hitler, argued that America’s policy of having its army segregated meant that the country was little better than Nazi Germany, and contended that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki rendered the U.S. as guilty of war crimes as the Japanese, who perpetrated atrocities on a vast scale (e.g., the rape of Nanking).

Grabar’s work calls to mind Richard J. Evans’s estimable Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (2001), which debunked the work of David Irving. (The story was told in the 2016 film Denial.)

Zinn’s misguided message is conveyed not only in his book but through the Zinn Education Project, a popular website that educators consult with unfortunate frequency. They would be better advised to access the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History site, gilderlehrman.org, which features lectures and other materials by serious scholars.

* * *

In explaining the popularity of Zinn’s book among “the young and uninformed,” Grabar emphasizes what Stanford education professor Sam Wineberg called its ability to “speak to our inner Holden Caufield,” the sneering adolescent protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, to whom “our heroes are shameless frauds, our parents and teachers conniving liars, our textbooks propagandistic slop.” “They’re all phonies,” Wineberg concluded, remains “a message that never goes out of style.”

The appearance of Grabar’s book would be welcome at any time, but is especially relevant now that the New York Times has reincarnated the spirit of Howard Zinn with its “1619 Project.” It describes the U.S. as a country founded as a slavocracy with racism in its very DNA, an interpretation of the American past as misguided as Zinn’s attempt to characterize all of U.S. history as a tale of class conflict. Grabar offers valuable correctives to such grossly distorted versions of the past, similar to the corrective that leading historians of slavery, the Civil War, and the American Founding (among them Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, and Richard Carwardine) have presented in recent postings on, of all places, the World Socialist Web Site.

Howard Burlingame

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Black Supremacy is no better than White Supremacy. The only supremacy that counts is INDIVIDUAL supremacy. That’s why we have a Bill of Rights.

Somebody in my town posted, “Thank you Black Lives Matter protesters for having a peaceful protest.”

Thank you for not looting us? That’s insane!

If I joined the Ku Klux Klan but only had a peaceful protest, instead of a cross burning in someone’s yard, would you applaud me for being peaceful? Would you thank me for not doing a cross burning, or for not lynching someone? Of course not. You’d condemn me for associating myself with such an organization, and rightly so.

Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other Democratic Party/Soros-sponsored groups are literally wrecking America, right before our eyes. They don’t stand for individual rights or freedom. They stand for Communism, totalitarianism and the supremacy of one race over another. They’re now threatening to go to small towns and rural America next. They mean it, because they follow through on everything they say. And nobody tires to stop them, except for President Trump. Leftist celebrities and politicians are even bailing them out.

Antifa, Black Lives Matter, “peaceful” or not: they are all terrorists. We should not be thanking them when they occasionally choose not to burn things down or loot us. THEY should be afraid of US.

Michael J. Hurd

Tucker Carlson went live last night after a weekend of violent rioting and looting across many of America’s major cities. He took no prisoners in what was easily the most important monologue of his career. It’s a moment in media history that will still be talked about a decade from now. That’s how powerful it was, whether you agree with every conclusion or not.

Over the course of 30 minutes, Carlson laid out the case that our leaders have failed to protect us in this time of chaos. He played the clips of men and women being beaten, the videos of buildings burning, and the recordings of mobs stealing. He showed the complete lack of respect for human life and property. He named names of those enabling it and let no one off the hook. He laid out the core issues tearing the country apart and the nonsensical responses to them.

While I rarely expect people to watch clips I post all the way through, this is one you should really make time for.

While Carlson has long separated himself as a step above the other prime time hosts, both on his network and others, this cemented his status as an independent thinker not afraid to speak out. The abandonment of these cities by local officials? He nails them. Governors who pander to the violence? He nails them to. Yes, he even goes after President Trump.

The first requirement of leadership is that you watch over the people in your care. That’s what soldiers want from their officers. It’s what families need from their fathers. It’s what voters demand from their presidents.

People will put up with almost anything if you do that. You can regularly say embarrassing things on television. You can hire Omarosa to work at the White House. All of that will be forgiven if you protect your people.

But if you do not protect them — or worse than that, if you seem like you can’t be bothered to protect them — then you’re done. It’s over. People will not forgive weakness. That’s the one thing, by the way, that is not a partisan point. It is human nature.

Carlson notes that Trump finally promised action last night, but that doesn’t mean his critique and frustrations that it took this long aren’t correct. The President can follow through now or he can’t claim to be the law and order candidate, something I wrote about last night. There are lines that most of his even his most ardent supporters have drawn in the sand. Letting anarchy go unpunished is one of them.

President Donald Trump: If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.

Good for him.

Immediately after that address, the president walked over to St. John’s, which, we just told you, was burning fewer than 24 hours ago, and that provided a powerful symbolic gesture. It was a declaration that this country — our national symbols, our oldest institutions — will not be desecrated and defeated by nihilistic destruction. We fervently hope this all works.

Carlson also goes after many feckless GOP politicians, who instead of denouncing the rioting forcibly, chose to instead tacitly encourage it and deliver typical boilerplate platitudes. Further, he absolutely eviscerated Jared Kushner.

Jared Kushner, for one, has made that point out loud. No one has more contempt for Donald Trump’s voters than Jared Kushner does, and no one expresses it more frequently.

In 2016, Donald Trump ran as a law and order candidate because he meant it, and his views remain fundamentally unchanged today. But the president’s famously sharp instincts, the ones that won him the presidency almost four years ago, have been since subverted at every level by Jared Kushner. This is true on immigration, on foreign policy, and especially on law enforcement.

As crime in this country continues to rise, Jared Kushner has led a highly aggressive effort to let more criminals out of prison and back on to the streets. This is reckless. At this moment in time, it is insane. It continues to happen.

This goes on for half an hour, and there’s little I find objectionable in his words. Perhaps his attack on Nikki Haley was a bit tortured (I don’t think she was trying to say what he interpreted from her comment), but given all that’s happening and all he said, I struggle to focus on that.

Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in schools. And the person who dares to tell the truth is called a lunatic and a fool.

Plato

Antifa has been identified as the primary driver of the violent riots engulfing American cities. But there is a critical second arm of this unholy alliance that has been around longer and has deep roots, along with possible foreign connections. Communists.

It shouldn’t be shocking. Communists domestic and foreign have been trying to undermine and destroy America for many generations. And we’ve seen a disturbing rise in American public support for Socialism and Communism. That support translates into resources and manpower on the ground and it is being put to use.

And yet the Communist element in the riots is getting virtually no media coverage. They’re not as outfront as Antifa and Black Lives Matters, but their role may be as big — and longer lasting. Because while Antifa and BLM may fade, apparently we’ll always have Communists in our midst — at least as long as we have universities infiltrated the way they are.

But they’re not hiding the ball. They weave their Marxist-Socialist agenda in with racial tensions to fan the flames, create chaos and destabilize. We’re seeing them do this in cities across the country, and in smaller cities where there is no violence but the Communists still play on the racial tensions.

Let’s start where this started, in the Twin Cities, where the largest Communist organization has a solid foothold. The Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) in Minneapolis has been supporting the rioters with resources and organization while participating in the “protests.” They use the classic Marxist language, tweeting “support the ongoing mass working-class uprising!” and later tweeting: “For all community members, fuel up to fight the fascists & police state today, join us @ Lake & 30th Ave for free hot meals & groceries! Justice & nutrition for the frontlines.”

See how they conflate the two. Here’s their official statement:

“Racist police violence is not incidental to the capitalist system, it is necessary to maintain its operation. We recognize that as we fight for a better world, it will be the police who threaten our protests, the police who will break up our picket lines, the police who selectively wield their monopoly on violence against Black people and working-class people to protect those with power and privilege.”

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DSA is known to be involved in rioting in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle and Memphis. It’s highly likely they are in other cities also.

But they are only one Communist group.

The Workers World Party (WWP) is also in several cities as part of the chaos. The WWP openly supports China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea and Iran — essentially anyone that is an enemy of the United States. The Stalinist group has active chapters in 15 cities. WWP leader Monica Moorehead wrote May 28 an article with the headline, “Against police violence and capitalism, to rebel is justified:”

“Workers World salutes all the brave protesters in Minneapolis, currently ground zero against police terror. We also salute those activists in Los Angeles, Memphis and other cities who are organizing protests and braving the pandemic to be in the streets or in car caravans to show solidarity with the demand: Justice for George Floyd and all victims of police violence.”

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) has organized protests in smaller cities around the U.S., including Columbia, S.C., Sarasota, Fla., Ashland, N.C., Richland, Wash. as well as San Antonio, Texas and several in the Los Angeles region. In a statement on its website May 26, the PSL said it cannot rely on the FBI for justice in the Floyd case: “The FBI is a violent state institution that has been wielded as a weapon against the liberation movement of black people in the United States.”

Interestingly, the PLS website does not have an About page, so they don’t spell out the radical revolutionary ideology, although the content of their site certainly does. They lament the Soviet Union is no more, celebrate the Chinese Communist revolution and mourn the death of Castro.

According to Wikipedia: “The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a communist party in the United States established in 2004 after a split in the Workers World Party (WWP).”

More from Wiki: “The party’s goal is to lead a revolution paving the way towards socialism, under which a ‘new government of working people’ would be formed.”

And finally, there is the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a self-identified Maoist Communist organization, is calling for “a movement for an actual revolution” on the coattails of the Floyd murder and is participating in riots. This group published a statement titled “To YOU who are sick and tired of the madness, and ready to be part of a movement for an ACTUAL REVOLUTION:

“If you’re sick of watching video after video of these murders by police… you need to join with a movement for an actual revolution, to prepare for a time when it will be possible to lead millions to bring this system down, and replace it with a new society based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.”

The RCP wraps itself in leftist causes with coalition groups such as the Stop Patriarchy, October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Stop Mass Incarceration Network and Refuse Fascism. Again, they conflate racial tensions with class warfare to leverage more chaos.

These four groups have long histories and are as radical as Antifa. They are not getting the headlines because Antifa is more blatantly violent. But they revel in the violence and burning cities and will continue to sew unrest and turmoil to overthrow America.

Rod Thomson is an author, former journalist, past Salem radio host, ABC TV commentator and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act.

“When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”—John Lennon

Brace yourselves.

There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

What is unfolding before us is not a revolution.

The looting, the burning, the rioting, the violence: this is an anti-revolution.

The protesters are playing right into the government’s hands, because the powers-that-be want this. They want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law. They want a reason to make the police state stronger.

It’s happening faster than we can keep up.

The Justice Department is deploying federal prison riot teams to various cities. More than half of the nation’s governors are calling on the National Guard to quell civil unrest. Growing numbers of cities, having just barely emerged from a coronavirus lockdown, are once again being locked down, this time in response to the growing upheaval.

This is how it begins.

It’s that dystopian 2030 Pentagon training video all over again, which anticipates the need for the government to institute martial law (use armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems) in order to navigate a world bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

We’re way ahead of schedule.

The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.

This way lies certain tyranny.

For just one fleeting moment, “we the people” seemed united in our outrage over this latest killing of an unarmed man by a cop hyped up on his own authority and the power of his uniform.

That unity didn’t last.

Indeed, it didn’t take long—no surprise there—for us to quickly become divided again, polarized by the misguided fury and senseless violence of mobs taking to the streets, reeking of madness and mayhem.

Deliberately or not, the rioters have directed our attention away from the government’s crimes and onto their own.

This is a distraction.

Don’t allow yourself to be so distracted.

Let’s not lose sight of what started all of this in the first place: the U.S. government.

More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the systemic violence being perpetrated by agents of the government constitutes a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

Case in point: George Floyd died at the hands of the American police state.

The callous, cold-blooded murder of the unarmed, 46-year-old black man by police is nothing new: for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, police knelt on Floyd’s neck while the man pleaded for his life, struggled to breathe, cried out for his dead mother, and finally passed out and died.

Floyd is yet another victim of a broken system of policing that has placed “we the people” at the mercy of militarized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

Daily, Americans are being shot, stripped, searched, choked, beaten and tasered by police for little more than daring to frown, smile, question, challenge an order or just exist.

I’m talking about the growing numbers of unarmed people are who being shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

Killed by police for standing in a “shooting stance.” Killed for holding a cell phone. Killed for holding a baseball bat. Killed for opening the front door. Killed for being a child in a car pursued by police. Killed for approaching police while holding a metal spoon. Killed for running in an aggressive manner while holding a tree branch. Killed for crawling around naked. Killed for hunching over in a defensive posture. Killed because a police officer accidentally fired his gun instead of his taser. Killed for wearing dark pants and a basketball jersey. Killed for reaching for his license and registration during a traffic stop. Killed for driving while deaf. Killed for being homeless. Killed for brandishing a shoehorn. Killed for peeing outdoors. Killed for having his car break down on the road. Killed for holding a garden hose.

Now you can make all kinds of excuses to justify these shootings, and in fact that’s exactly what you’ll hear from politicians, police unions, law enforcement officials and individuals who are more than happy to march in lockstep with the police. However, as these incidents make clear, the only truly compliant, submissive and obedient citizen in a police state is a dead one.

Sad, isn’t it, how quickly we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat us all like suspects and criminals?

This is not how you keep the peace.

This is not justice. This is not even law and order.

This is certainly not freedom. This is the illusion of freedom.

Unfortunately, we are now being ruled by a government of psychopaths, scoundrels, spies, thugs, thieves, gangsters, ruffians, rapists, extortionists, bounty hunters, battle-ready warriors and cold-blooded killers who communicate using a language of force and oppression.

The facts speak for themselves.

We’re being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers. It’s not just the police shootings of unarmed citizens that are worrisome. It’s the SWAT team raids gone wrong that are leaving innocent citizens wounded, children terrorized and family pets killed. It’s the roadside strip searches—in some cases, cavity searches of men and women alike carried out in full view of the public—in pursuit of drugs that are never found. It’s the potentially lethal—and unwarranted—use of so-called “nonlethal” weapons such as tasers on children for “mouthing off to a police officer. For trying to run from the principal’s office. For, at the age of 12, getting into a fight with another girl.”

We’re being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers—a standing army. While Americans are being made to jump through an increasing number of hoops in order to exercise their Second Amendment right to own a gun, the government is arming its own civilian employees to the hilt with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment, authorizing them to make arrests, and training them in military tactics. Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the government’s arsenal, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, and the speed with which the nation could be locked down under martial law depending on the circumstances. Clearly, the government is preparing for war—and a civil war, at that—and “we the people” are the perceived enemy.

We’re being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and cowards. American satirist H.L. Mencken calculated that “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.” By and large, Americans seem to agree. When you’ve got government representatives who spend a large chunk of their work hours fundraising, being feted by lobbyists, shuffling through a lucrative revolving door between public service and lobbying, and making themselves available to anyone with enough money to secure access to a congressional office, you’re in the clutches of a corrupt oligarchy. Mind you, these same elected officials rarely read the legislation they’re enacting, nor do they seem capable of enacting much legislation that actually helps rather than hinders the plight of the American citizen.

We’re being locked up by a government of greedy jailers. We have become a carceral state, spending three times more on our prisons than on our schools and imprisoning close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners, despite the fact that crime is at an all-time low and the U.S. makes up only 5% of the world’s population. The rise of overcriminalization and profit-driven private prisons provides even greater incentives for locking up American citizens for such non-violent “crimes” as having an overgrown lawn. As the Boston Review points out, “America’s contemporary system of policing, courts, imprisonment, and parole … makes money through asset forfeiture, lucrative public contracts from private service providers, and by directly extracting revenue and unpaid labor from populations of color and the poor. In states and municipalities throughout the country, the criminal justice system defrays costs by forcing prisoners and their families to pay for punishment. It also allows private service providers to charge outrageous fees for everyday needs such as telephone calls. As a result people facing even minor criminal charges can easily find themselves trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of debt, criminalization, and incarceration.”

We’re being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms. The government, aided by its corporate allies, is watching everything you do, reading everything you write, listening to everything you say, and monitoring everything you spend. Omnipresent surveillance is paving the way for government programs that profile citizens, document their behavior and attempt to predict what they might do in the future, whether it’s what they might buy, what politician they might support, or what kinds of crimes they might commit. The impact of this far-reaching surveillance, according to Psychology Today, is “reduced trust, increased conformity, and even diminished civic participation.” As technology analyst Jillian C. York concludes, “Mass surveillance without due process—whether undertaken by the government of Bahrain, Russia, the US, or anywhere in between—threatens to stifle and smother that dissent, leaving in its wake a populace cowed by fear.”

We’re being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and professional pirates. The American people have been repeatedly sold a bill of goods about how the government needs more money, more expansive powers, and more secrecy (secret courts, secret budgets, secret military campaigns, secret surveillance) in order to keep us safe. Under the guise of fighting its wars on terror, drugs, domestic extremism, pandemics and civil unrest, the government has spent billions in taxpayer dollars on endless wars that have sown the seeds of blowback, surveillance programs that have subjected all Americans to a surveillance society, and militarized police that have turned communities into warzones.

We’re being robbed blind by a government of thieves. Americans no longer have any real protection against government agents empowered to seize private property at will. For instance, police agencies under the guise of asset forfeiture laws are taking property based on little more than a suspicion of criminal activity.

And we’re being forced to live in a perpetual state of emergency. From 9/11 through the COVID-19 lockdowns and now the threat of martial law in the face of growing civil unrest, we have witnessed the rise of an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

What we have is a government of wolves.

Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, which is no real recourse at all.

The penalties for civil disobedience, whistleblowing and rebellion are severe. If you refuse to pay taxes for government programs you believe to be immoral or illegal, you will go to jail. If you attempt to overthrow the government—or any agency thereof—because you believe it has overstepped its reach, you will go to jail. If you attempt to blow the whistle on government misconduct, there’s a pretty good chance you will go to jail.

For too long, the American people have obeyed the government’s dictates, no matter now extreme. We have paid its taxes, penalties and fines, no matter how outrageous. We have tolerated its indignities, insults and abuses, no matter how egregious. We have turned a blind eye to its indiscretions and incompetence, no matter how imprudent. We have held our silence in the face of its lawlessness, licentiousness and corruption, no matter how illicit.

We have suffered.

How long we will continue to suffer depends on how much we’re willing to give up for the sake of freedom.

America’s founders provided us with a very specific explanation about the purpose of government and a roadmap for what to do when the government abuses its authority, ignores our objections, and establishes itself as a tyrant.

We must choose between peaceful slavery (in other words, maintaining the status quo in servitude to the police state) and dangerous freedom. That will mean carving out a path in which we begin to take ownership of our government, starting at the local level, challenging the status quo, and raising hell—nonviolently—whenever a government official steps out of line.

We can no longer maintain the illusion of freedom.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we are at our most vulnerable right now.

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People is available at http://www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at

Attorney General William Barr said Saturday that violence in many places around the country appears to have been planned and carried out by “far-left extremist groups using Antifa-like tactics” in the wake of riots over the death of George Floyd. [Breitbart News]

No kidding. Thank goodness President Trump sees through it, and is willing to say so. Democrat voters — and I now mean every last one of them — are the moral and literal equivalent of these thugs. I challenge you to find one Democrat who will denounce them. Just another reminder that we are ALREADY in a Civil War. Like it or not.–Michael J. Hurd

The powers that be proclaim that the George Floyd riots are “protests” — not riots. But protests are peaceful and principled. Think Martin Luther King. THOSE were protests. Riots are destructive. They’re also contradictory. If you care about the rights of an innocent man murdered by an overzealous police officer, then you don’t burn down buildings, destroy small businesses and leave a pile of rubble behind you. You don’t attack police stations when you’re counting on the GOOD police to protect you. You don’t attack CNN (as much as they may deserve it) when it’s one of the networks on YOUR side. It’s rioting. It’s looting. It’s destruction for its own sake.

They’re counting on us not knowing the difference. Or they’re counting on us not being willing to state the difference. If you call them riots, not protests, then you’re called a “racist”. It’s part of the madness of the times in which we live. Conceptual thinking is dead, at least among the people who sit in news anchor chairs or in government offices and act as if they’re the rational, civilized and intellectual ones.

Look at the wreckage left behind in the cities. Then focus on the fact that Mayor de Blasio of New York City, the kooky mayor of Minneapolis, Hollywood/corporate leftists, and all the others tell you: “That’s a protest.” They are lying to you about everything. And they wish to train you to lie to yourselves.—-Michael J. Hurd