INSURRECTION

The U.S. Supreme Court has taken an appeal from the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court banning Donald Trump from the Colorado presidential primary because he engaged in insurrection on January 6, 2021.  Colorado held a “trial” of sorts to determine that an insurrection occurred and that Trump engaged in it.  The state of Maine came to the same conclusion by an executive decree, without a trial or other legal process.  Other states are considering barring Trump from their ballots as well.  Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court will be made on February 8, and it is expected a decision will follow soon thereafter.

 

My initial reaction to the news that SCOTUS would take up the issue was that this was likely to be a 9 – 0 ruling in favor of Trump.  To my mind, the idea that the protesters on January 6, none of whom had guns, could be said to have engaged in an “insurrection” was a sort of Trump-Derangement-Syndrome fever-dream.  When a case like this gets to the Supreme Court, as it does on rare occasions, the one or two leftwing partisan hacks will sometimes see how useless it is to assert, reflexively, their progressive ideals.  At that point, they join the majority.  This gives them a piece of evidence they can later assert.  “See.  I’m an actual judge.  I sometimes read and follow the law.” 

 

This is why there was a unanimous ruling in McDonnell v. United States, 579 US 550 (2016), overturning the conviction for fraud and bribery of Robert F McDonnell, Republican Governor of Virginia.  His political career was over anyway, so even Ginsburg, Kagan, Breyer and Sotomayor joined in dumping the ridiculous charges against him even though he was a Republican.  Another famous instance was the 9 – 0 reversal of Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States, 544 US 696 (2005).  The firm had been (absurdly). convicted of obstruction of justice for covering up the fraud of their client, Enron.  Again, the accounting firm had already been destroyed by the case by the time it got to the SCOTUS, so even the partisan lefties on the Court could join in the decision with no harm to their political agenda.

 

That’s why I initially assumed this Trump case would be decided unanimously.  The other possibility, I thought, was 7 – 2 for Trump with Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown in dissent simply because they would break out in boils and rashes if they were ever to rule in Trump’s favor for anything.

 

But now I’m not so sure.  

 

The relevant sections of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution state:

Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 5

The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

 

         On first reading, several bits of text jump out immediately.  First, if the intention of Section 3 was to bar an insurrectionist from running for the office of President, why didn’t they specifically list “president” as one of the offices an insurrectionist could not hold?  They say “Senator.”  They say “Representative.”  They say “member of any State legislature.”   Why didn’t they say “President?”  Instead, we have to infer that Trump, by running for President, is 1) running for “any office, civil or military, under the United States” AND that 2) his previous presidential oath in 2017 was taken as “an officer of the United States.”

         In other words, is the President an “officer of the United States?”  Why make this so complicated?  Why make this something for us to argue about 160 years after the Amendment was passed instead of just specifying “President?”

 

         In fact, this was the central issue in the Colorado case.  A lower-court judge had found that Trump had engaged in an “insurrection,” but decided that Section 3 did not apply to him because Section 3 did not specify it applied to a President.  The Colorado Supreme Court reversed the lower court on this point, ruling 4 – 3 that Trump, as President, was an “officer of the United States.” 

         I’m not going to analyze this question for you.  To decide what “officer of the United States” means, you have to go back and figure out, from arguments in Congress in the 1860s, what the term meant to them.  And that depends, to some extent, on what “officer” meant during the arguments on the original Constitution, drafted in 1788.

         Personally, I take what I think is the more obvious and likely path---that you can’t assume “President” when they could easily have specified “President” but chose not to.  However, there is a legitimate argument about what was meant.  There have been law review articles written on this question and they were not written by AOC and Kamala Harris.  This is not like finding a “right to abortion” in the Constitution that was sitting there for 200 years but nobody had noticed it before.  They’re not just making it up as they go along.

         The next question that arises is the meaning of the “self-executing” provision in Section 5.  This same provision appears in the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th, 18^th, 19^th, 23^rd, 24^th, and 25th amendments, and is generally held to mean that these amendments need fleshing out with rules and procedures, so Congress has the power to do that.  In the case of the “insurrection” clause in Section 3, the argument on Trump’s side is that a court in Colorado cannot simply decide that what Trump did was “engage in an insurrection.”  (And neither, presumably, can an executive officer in the Maine government.)

         Even here, though, there is a legitimate argument to be made that no such congressional assistance is needed.  Following the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was used for about four years (until an amnesty was declared in 1872), and a number of men who had served in the Confederacy were barred from holding office in southern states.  The procedure for doing this was---well, there was no procedure and no legal process.  They were summarily dismissed from the ballot by election authorities.  At the time, of course, there was no real factual issue about who had been engaged in an insurrection, and no real need for “due process.”  The extent of it would be, “Yo, Beauregard.  You were a colonel under General Lee, weren’t you?  Well, sorry.  You can’t run for sheriff.”

         The effect of this history is that, during the period Section 3 was actually used to keep some insurrectionists off the ballot, the provision was self-executing.  Nobody looked to Congress for definitions or procedures, so if some local official in 2024 wants to rule that Trump engaged in insurrection, there’s precedent for him having the power to do that.  Leftist partisans on the Supreme Court will be aware of this argument and will use it to justify Trump being declared an insurrectionist without a helluva lot of procedure or testimony or debate.

         All of which suggests to me that some context needs to be taken into consideration if we wish to avoid absurd results.

         Let’s start here: the “insurrection” they were thinking about when the 14^th Amendment became law was a four year conflagration in the American republic where more than a million men suited up for battle against their countrymen, and where more than a million Americans were killed in battle, in accidents, by disease, in prison camps, and by all the other horrific ways people die in an all-out existential war.  For this, the Amendment barred insurrectionists from the Confederacy from holding elective office, for a while.

         By contrast, the “insurrection” that Trump is alleged to have engaged in occurred on one day, January 6, 2021, and sought to delay the certification of electoral votes in Congress from the 2020 election.  The insurrectionists, none of whom brought firearms, did damage to property and injured several police officers, though none fatally.  Several of the rioters vandalized office areas of elected officials they believed had stolen the election, and one of them put his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk.

         Beyond the vastly differing nature of the “insurrections” of 1861 and 2021, the other point to be made about the self-executing nature of the 14^th Amendment is that Congress eventually did exercise its “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”  It did so by passing the Insurrection Act in 1948, which is found in the U.S. Code at 18 USC 2383. It is a criminal statute which provides for fines and prison for anyone found to have engaged in an insurrection.  It also provides that a person convicted may not run for elective office.  Neither Trump nor any of the thousand people charged with crimes in connection with the January 6 riot have even been charged with violating the Insurrection Act.

         This argument was made by one of the dissenting justices on the Colorado Supreme Court, and it will be the grounds on which the case is decided at the Supreme Court.  In a 6-3 or 5-4 decision, the Court will rule that Congress passed the Insurrection Act in order to enforce the provisions of Section 3, so a conviction under the Insurrection Act is a prerequisite for barring someone from running for office.  This is the easiest possible ruling for the majority on the Court.  It is also the smallest possible ruling in the sense that it will have the least possible effect on other existing laws.  The Supreme Court never likes to make more law than it has to.

         (The other issue that is an ice-cold winner for the Trump side is the free speech argument it presented in Colorado, asserting that the First Amendment permitted Trump to say what he said about stolen elections.  The Colorado Supreme Court opinion on this point is based on the “imminent danger” doctrine of Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), and they get Brandenburg so wrong you have to wonder if they even read it.  Since the SCOTUS does not have to reach this issue, however, they won’t bother.)

         The Supreme Court will overturn the Colorado decision and it will do so in such a way that all the other challenges to Trump in other states will disappear as well.   They can do this by ruling that insurrectionists are only those people who have been convicted under the Insurrection Act---in other words, nobody. 

         But the lefties on the Court will not go along for the ride.  They have decent arguments they can make in dissent, and more importantly, this is not the McDonnell case or the Arthur Andersen case, where the Left had no real investment in the issues by the time those cases got to the SCOTUS.

         Here, there’s Trump, and their heads will explode if they participate in a Trump victory in any way.

         More importantly, there’s an even larger issue at stake here.  For the elites on the Left, the assault on dissent of all kinds is a global campaign.  We first witnessed it in COVID “misinformation” campaigns around the world, where respected epidemiologists and other scientists were censored and de-platformed and had their professional licenses revoked for challenging the official pandemic narrative.  We have also seen opposing voices silenced by the transexual-medical industry, and by the DEI forces in industry and on campus.  Most recently, we have seen any opposition to Jew-hatred met with violence by pro-Hamas demonstrators and academics.  Our old-fashioned ideals of free speech were designed merely to prop up the fascist establishment, we are told.  Dissent from accepted leftist views is “dangerous,” and one thing Trump regularly does is dissent from accepted leftist views, so he must be silenced.

         The insistence that only “approved” candidates be permitted to run for office is part of this campaign.   We would all be so much safer, you see, if only decent, non-colonialist, anti-racist progressives (preferably people of color) could be elected to office.   Getting Trump thrown off the ballot would send an unmistakable message: “We’ll pick our candidate and we’ll pick your candidate too, and that’s how it’s going to work from now on.”  That’s why the Left is fighting this battle.

Copyright2024MichaelKubacki      

The 2023 EAGLES NIGHTMARE---A Playoff Prequel

         As I write this, the last games of the 2023-24 NFL regular season are two days away, and my Eagles are in full meltdown.  Many explanations have been offered for why this has happened, and many of them are at least partially true.  This is my explanation.

 

On December 2, the Philadelphia Eagles were 10 – 1, with wins over Dallas, Miami, Kansas City, Buffalo and the LA Rams.  One month later, on January 2, they had lost four out of five, and had been blown out twice.  They had appeared to be on a path to the Superbowl, or at least to the NFC Championship game, but now they seem much more likely to be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.

 

         The Philly demise would seem to be a sudden and monumental collapse, and that is how it is being treated in the local papers and radio.  “The league caught on.”  “Hurts is injured but is trying to keep it together.”  “Head Coach Sirianni has been unable to adjust to the way other teams are playing the Eagles now.”  Most commentators have blamed the team’s defense, and the Defensive Coordinator was relieved of his play-calling responsibilities two weeks ago.

 

         And, well, it is true the defense has declined (largely as a result of injuries), but it was never world-class to begin with.  It was good enough to get to a Superbowl last year, however, though not quite good enough to win one.

 

         The strength of the team, however, both last year and this, has been the talent on the offensive side of the ball.  With Hurts, DeVonta Smith, A. J. Brown, Dallas Goedert, D’Andre Swift , and a highly-skilled, experienced offensive line, the Eagles had the best offensive squad in the NFL.  (“On paper,” as they say.)   This is not just me saying this.  It was the consensus view among those who know more about such things than I do.  Yet the astonishing thing is that Coach Sirianni and his Offensive Coordinator chose not to use the talent they had.

 

         It was apparent to me and to a few others that even when the Eagles were 10 – 1, they were heading for a fall, simply because the coaches refused to use the talent they had to score points.  The Eagles offense could have scored 40 points against most of the opponents it faced.  They were that good.  Instead, Sirianni and his OC became obsessed with merely possessing the ball.  They fell in love with 19-play drives that take 8 minutes off the clock, as if time of possession (rather than points scored), was the true measure of an offense’s proficiency.  A bizarre folly, but this was Sirianni’s first head-coaching job, and he is surrounded by other very young coaches.  There is no one there who has been around for thirty years and had the prestige to slap Sirianni upside the head.  (“Yo, Nick!  You have A. J. Brown.  Throw the ball to him forty yards down the field and see what happens!”)

 

         The result was that, of those first eleven games, the Eagles only won two of them by double digits.  The rest of them were close, a lot closer than they had to be.    Beat the Patriots 25-20.  Beat Minnesota 34-28.  Beat the Redskins 34-31 in OT.  Lost to the Jets 20-14.  Letting teams like this stick around was ALWAYS going to lead to disaster.  And now it has.

 

         When you have a superior offense, the LAST thing you want is 19-play drives that reduce the number of possessions in the game, yet that was Sirianni’s goal, week after week.  If you reduce the number of possessions, all you do is increase the chance that the weaker team will get lucky and win.  That is why reducing the number of possessions is an underdog strategy.  In the first round of the 1989 NCAA tournament, in the game between #1 seed Georgetown and #16 seed Princeton, it was Princeton that used every second it could (all 45 of them per possession), to slow down the game.  The result was a 50-49 G’town victory in a game in which they were 23-point favorites.

 

         For a football team, the case for speeding up the pace of play and increasing the number of possessions is even stronger than it is in other sports.  One reason for this is that, unlike basketball, the offensive unit and the defensive units are separate squads.  This means that you can, and should, shape the play of the game so as to protect your very expensive offensive skill players from unnecessary mayhem.

 

Put more simply, it is pure idiocy to give a 240-pound defensive lineman nineteen chances to separate your $300-million quarterback’s head from his body.  It makes much more sense to give that low-browed killing machine only three chances per possession to destroy your franchise.   The ideal offensive drive takes three plays, lasts one hundred seconds, covers eighty yards, and scores a touchdown.  There is a place, I suppose, for a three-minute drive that ends in a field goal, but there is a very strong argument that the BEST non-scoring offensive drive takes three plays and ends in a punt. You then sit your billion-dollar offense on the bench, feed them some Gatorade, give them foot massages, and advise them on how best to score when your team gets the ball back.

 

Sirianni, of course, is not the first NFL coach to fall in love with ball-possession football and misunderstand, fundamentally, the nature of the game.  It all started with Bill Parcells.

 

The game that made Parcells a certified genius occurred on January 27, 1991.  This was Superbowl XXV, in which Parcells’s Giants defeated the Buffalo Bills 20-19.

 

The Bills that year featured one of the first no-huddle offenses in the NFL.  They led the league in scoring offense with 428 points.  On the other side, Parcells had a solid team with a good defense, and no real superstars.  This is why the 1990-91 Giants always appear on any list of the “Ten Worst Teams Ever to Win a Superbowl.”

 

In the Superbowl itself, Parcells went full-out Princeton vs. Marv Levy’s Georgetown.  The Giants held the football for 40 minutes and 33 seconds of the game, and sent the Bills to the first of their four consecutive SB defeats when Scott Norwood went ‘Wide Right” in the closing seconds. 

 

(Trivia: a week ago, on December 31, 2023, the 98-year-old Marv Levy attended Buffalo’s 27-21 victory over the Patriots.)

 

The effect on the NFL was instant, and predictable.  It was as if Princeton had actually beaten Georgetown.  Every coach and every owner suddenly realized that the ONLY way to win a Superbowl was to hold on to the football, execute penalty-free and turnover-free 19-play drives, and beat all those other silly coaches and owners who wanted to score sixty points every game.  The fad faded in a few years as it became clear that Parcells had parleyed a unique collection of players and a lot of luck into a championship, and that what he had done was never going to happen very often, but there are still football guys (the ones who don’t really think things through on their own), who can be seduced by time-of-possession theories and do stupid things.  Nick Sirianni is one of those guys.

 

Sirianni was nine years old when Superbowl XXV was played.  It may have been the first Superbowl he ever saw and maybe it had an oversized effect on the development of his youthful football brain.  Though I lack any evidence regarding why he thinks the way he does, that’s my theory.  And since I did have that one psychology course in college, I am fully competent to render such a judgment.

 

Copyright 2024MichaelKubacki  

THIS & THAT XXVII

 

         I didn’t hear “Baby It’s Cold Outside” once this season.  For the past few years, it has been discussed and argued about, but there were always a few rebels who would play it on the radio.  Now I think it has been quietly banned because it’s so unsafe and rape-y.

 

*

 

         There is a distinct odor of the 1930’s in the air.

 

         It’s impossible to see the celebrations of the October 7 massacres without thinking of the ships full of Jewish refugees turned away in New York by Roosevelt and sent back to Europe, to their deaths.

 

         When I see the quarantine camps and the COVID lockdowns, and the demonization of healthy citizens who have done nothing wrong, my mind wanders back to the Japanese-American citizens rounded up for internment camps.

 

         And when confused children are seduced into the transgender industry to be sexually mutilated through drugs or surgery, often with the enthusiastic participation of their parents, how can we not be reminded of the eugenics movement sterilizing tens of thousands of “inferior” people?

 

*

 

         Southwest Airlines has announced its new “person of size” policy, which gives free seats to people who need more space because their butt can’t fit in the one seat they purchased.  One way they can take advantage of the policy is to purchase two adjoining seats, fly to wherever, and then demand a refund of half their fare.

 

         Here’s my question.  What if I merely identify as a “person of size” but weigh 160 pounds?  Can I too pay for one seat and get two?  What if I am fat only in my mind?  What if I’m a fathead?

 

*

 

         COVID trivia: though the virus is not nearly as dangerous as it once was, there are still elderly people with serious illnesses for whom COVID can be life-threatening.  Some doctors prescribe nicotine pills for these patients.

 

         COVID enters the body through “receptors,” which are present on human cells.  The virus can bind with certain receptors and thus infect the person.  One type of receptor that the COVID virus typically uses is the ACE2 receptor, but there are others.

 

         For tobacco users, the ACLR receptor is how nicotine gets into the body.  These receptors can also accept COVID virus, but not at the same time.  This is why smokers tend to get fewer COVID infections and have fewer serious or deadly outcomes.  The advantage for smokers was apparent from the beginning of the COVID outbreak.

 

         This is also why nicotine pills are being used (experimentally) as a treatment for COVID in at-risk patients.  The nicotine occupies the ACLR receptors, leaving fewer opportunities for COVID to enter the body.

 

*

 

         A few months ago, I blogged my theories on the Democratic race for the presidential nomination in 2024.  To save you the trouble of reading it, my prediction was that Michelle Obama would be presented as the new figurehead President so that Barack could continue in his role as the national political leader.  He would continue to govern as he has under Biden’s four years, though with Michelle as the front man.  The pretense that someone other than Barack was president could thus be abandoned.  While there are people now who believe Biden is a real president who makes policy, nobody would believe Michelle was anything other than a stand-in.  Michelle in the Oval Office would simplify matters.

 

         There is still no question Biden will be replaced.  He’s like that 1993 Toyota that you love, that is full of memories, but is now beyond fixing.  Are you really going to put a third carburetor in the damn thing.  No.  You’re going to ditch that Tercel.

 

         And I’m not backing off my original prediction since Michelle remains the ideal choice for the Obama machine that rules America.  But Kamala also has a possible path to the top job.

 

         Nobody (or almost nobody) wants her there, and nobody likes her very much, but they chose her as VP partly to get Joe past the finish line, and now they are stuck with her.  She’s young and healthy, and they can’t just kick her out of national politics without some serious howling from the DEI crowd.  I mean, did she somehow STOP being a little bit black and a little bit Asian?  And doesn’t she still own a vagina?

 

         So if they can’t easily dump her, the question becomes how to use her.  Would she accept a secondary role and take orders from Barack?  She might.  Gavin Newsom would not---if he were made president, he would insist on being the boss---but Kamala might take the deal.  Kamala might realize the ONLY way for her to become president is to accept the state-dinner/ice-cream-cone role that Biden now enjoys.  It could work, and it would free Michelle Obama to continue hanging out with her girlfriends on Ibiza and Martha’s Vineyard.

 

*

 

         I understand it is typical for geezers like me to rail against today’s ignorant and misbegotten young folks.  In my defense I can only say that I don’t believe I have ever done that.

 

         Until now.

 

         When I see polls indicating that HALF of Americans aged 18-34 believe the massacres of Israelis on October 7 were justified, or blame the Jews for the killings, I am worried.  When I see tens of thousands of youthful Jew-haters filling the streets around the world violently demonstrating and chanting for the annihilation of Jews, I dread what the future may bring.  

 

         I knew that no real history was being taught to high school and college students, and I knew the group-identity-based indoctrination was taking place, but I had no idea how successful it was, or how many young people were affected, or how thoroughly the Left had purged any consideration of good and evil from the minds of the young. 

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki  

DEI, Free Speech, and the Jews

 

         With the rapid spread of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) industry on campus, free speech principles have taken yet another hit in America.  Up until now, it has been little appreciated just how incompatible DEI rules are with the First Amendment, but events on campuses relating to the recent Israel-Hamas war have shined a light on the issue.

 

         The values embedded in the Bill of Rights of our Constitution begin with a presumption of equality.  EVERYBODY gets to say whatever they wish, everybody is protected from unreasonable searches, everybody gets to have a gun and defend himself, everybody gets to go to whichever church they desire, etc.  Further down the line, exceptions begin to appear: maybe felons don’t get to have guns, maybe pictures of children being sexually assaulted are not “free speech,” maybe the religion that practices ritual sacrifice of virgins doesn’t get the same deference as, say, Baptists.  But equality is where we start.

 

         DEI, however, starts not with equality, but with a hierarchy based on group victimhood. Muslims are at or near the top, then gays and transsexuals and blacks and people of color, and women and Hispanics and third-worlders, and so on.  At the bottom are white people and Jews (who are sort-of white and sort-of “colonizers”), and Asians who study hard and get perfect SAT scores.  The good people at the top of the scale can say or do whatever they want and it’s OK because they have been oppressed.  The whites and Jews and Asians can be silenced and ignored and beaten and have no right to even complain about it.  All rights flow from the accepted hierarchy of oppression.

 

         The reaction on American campuses to the October massacre of Israeli innocents is entirely derived from the DEI hierarchy, which is widely accepted at the most prestigious schools (e.g., Ivy League), in America.  Muslims, at the top of the list, are justified in doing ANYTHING to Jews because Jews are oppressors and scum and colonizers and sort-of white.  And that belief among the DEI-addled students would be just fine with the administrators and professors who run these places if the kids would just keep quiet about it.

 

But they can’t.  Not only do the leftists loudly blame Israelis for being massacred, they try to beat up Jewish students who object to it and they tear down posters of Israeli hostages the Jewish kids put up on campus.  If there were any respect for free speech and the First Amendment, Jewish students would at least be allowed to express their disapproval of the beheadings and torture, but any respect for the First Amendment is based in equality, and in the idea that anybody can speak, even Jews.  That idea is intolerable to anyone who has been indoctrinated with the tenets of DEI.

 

One problem that has arisen is that a lot of people who give a lot of money to these universities are Jewish, and they are now saying they don’t want to give any more money.  Presidents of universities have to answer to their boards and the board members want to know if the school is still going to get $100 million donations from this Jewish guy or that one.

 

The response to this from university presidents has been (almost) humorous.  They will NOT embrace equality and free speech because that would be incompatible with the DEI business.  They cannot conceive of Jews and white people having the same right to speak as Muslims and gays and others at the top of the pyramid.  Instead, their plan is to ban more speech, specifically antisemitic speech.  This is the scheme of Liz Magill, President of the University of Pennsylvania, which is currently experiencing a revolt by its most generous alumni.

 

I close with the letter I sent to the Philadelphia Inquirer about the problems at UPenn.

 

*

 

To the Editor:

 

    Penn will never get past its speech problems until it accepts its obligations under the First Amendment.

 

    The Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has put Penn on its list of America's 10 worst colleges for free speech.  Its national survey of students puts Penn second worst in the country (behind only Harvard), for suppression of student speech.  Yet President Liz Magill’s solution to Penn’s donor revolt is simply to add Jew-hatred to the list of things that cannot be expressed at Penn.

    The real solution is not complicated.  Allow people to say or chant whatever they want, no matter how loathsome or “threatening” it may be to the more delicate sensibilities on campus.  At the same time, anyone committing vandalism, real violence, or silencing of other speakers or speech should be expelled immediately and turned over to the cops. 

 

         *

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

NEVER AGAIN

The Harvard/Harris poll of October 18 asked a representative sample of your fellow Americans this question:

 

“Do you think the Hamas killing of civilians in Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?”

 

It was widely reported that a large majority said the killings were NOT justified.  What was not so widely reported was disturbing, however.  The youngest respondents were evenly split on the question.  Half of young Americans from ages 18 to 34 believe that the grievances of Gazans justified burning Israelis alive, shooting entire families, killing babies, mowing down hundreds of concertgoers, raping and torturing and killing young women, and dragging hundreds of civilians away as hostages.

 

Think about the 18-34-year-olds you know.  What do they think and how did they get that way?  Half of them in America believe the savagery and the massacres of Israeli civilians can’t be condemned, that it was to be expected.  Some of them think it was worth celebrating.  Who the hell are these kids?

 

Here’s my theory on who they are.

 

They are not your 24-year-old haircutter at the Haircuttery.  They are not the carpenter’s assistant building your shed.  They are not the 30-year-old produce clerk putting oranges in the bin at your supermarket.  They are not the young woman with two kids who just got her GED and is trying to get a job as a cop.

 

They are the barrista with the gender-studies degree who just frapped you a frappuccino.  They are the Bernie Sanders fan who just graduated from Cornell and is trying to get into law school.  They are the Ed-School student who thinks 14-year-old carjackers just need a little understanding.  They are the recent BA in sociology who works as an intern in a diversity office.  They are the young women who think it’s great that trans-women beat actual girls in swimming.  They are the young man with $35K in student debt who delivers Uber food and has a BLM sign in his apartment window.

 

In other words, the young people who think it’s OK sometimes to cut babies heads off (if they’re Jewish babies), were taught that in school.  There’s no way normal young people think that unless they had it drilled into them in high school and college.

 

This indoctrination has been going on for decades, behind closed doors, disguised as “compassion” and “anti-colonialism” and “acknowledging white privilege” and “social justice” and “fairness.”  And now it has emerged, in 50% of our gen-whatevers, as tolerance for pure evil and a belief that there is some political grievance that can excuse the gleeful slaughter of innocents.

 

Who is to blame for what has been done to these young people, to turn them into moral monsters?  There is no lack of villains here, beginning with the leftist academics who erased any understanding of right and wrong in these children and replaced it with tribalism and identity politics and Jew-hatred.   But what of the rest of us who didn’t see it coming, or perhaps did sense there was a problem but didn’t understand it posed a threat to Western civilization?  Yes, I feel responsibility for this, a sense I could have done more, a sense I should have seen what was happening.

 

One group that must be called out as having dropped the ball is American Jews.  Sorry.  I know you’ve had a bad October, but a lot of this is on you.  “Never Again,” we were told over the years.  That was the slogan and the rallying cry.  Never again would endemic Jew-hatred be allowed to metastasize into another Holocaust.  “Never Again” meant “we got this.”  Jews accepted the duty to tell the world (and especially the children) about the evils of identitarianism and genocide, as well as the story of five thousand years in their homeland, from Judea to modern Israel.

 

And they failed.  They got distracted.  They were too busy.  And the result is that millions of young people in America know nothing about the horrors of genocide or the history of the Middle East.  In fact, they share the absurd belief the Israelis are colonizers in the land where Abraham and Moses walked.

 

There is really no excuse for this.  American Jews are well-represented in academia, and there were always political, cultural, and financial resources available to tell the story.  Yet they handed these ignorant young people over to the Herbert Marcuses and Angela Davises and Noam Chomskys of the world, and now look what we have.

 

For some reason, the focus of Jewish political attention in America has always been on the five hundred guys who live in shacks in Kentucky and Montana, who wear swastikas on their shirts on the weekends while they drink beer, shoot rats, and wonder why they don’t have girlfriends.  These idiots don’t run movie studios or television stations, and they don’t lecture at universities.  Occasionally they put up a sticker with a Star of David on a picture of a pig.  Once every five years, they march to celebrate a statue of a Confederate General everybody else had forgotten about.

 

 Nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to what these skinheads say, yet they have been the sole focus of the Abe-Foxman/anti-discrimination industry for decades.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Jewish Voice for Peace members show up to demonstrate for Hamas and Gazans and “Palestinians.”

 

With their own children marching in support of the slaughter of Israelis, will this finally be the moment when American Jews stop supporting, with money and votes, the people who hate them?  Is it finally time to abandon liberal Democrats, leftist academia, and the “progressive” agenda?

 

Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely referred to Jews as hebes and kikes, and yet both took 70% of the Jewish vote when they ran for president.  Barack Obama not only hates Jews, he hired people as top advisors who had long histories of Jew-hatred, and he personally treated the Israeli Prime Minister with contempt, but he somehow was rewarded with three-fourths of the Jewish vote in both of his elections.  Joe Biden cannot stop throwing billions of dollars at Iran, which uses it to fund Islamic terrorism on a number of fronts.  Eleven days after the slaughter of Israeli civilians, Biden sent $100 million in supplies to Gaza where the goods are  currently being diverted by Hamas for their own purposes.  If Biden is on the ballot again in 2024, will 77% of Jewish voters choose him, as they did in 2020?

 

This is now serious.  This is now a threat to our existence.  An America that cannot distinguish between good and evil will not survive.  All of us must help, but Jews in America bear a large responsibility to teach the world ethics and morality.  It’s a job that was originally given to them by God.   We forget sometimes, but it’s why they were “chosen.”    

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

THE AISPURO AFFAIR

          On September 15, 2023, shortly before a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign event was about to begin, a man attempted to enter the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles through a non-public entrance.  Dressed as a U.S. Marshal, in tactical clothing with a fake Marshal badge and other fake ID, Adrian Paul Aispuro had a .45 ACP pistol in a shoulder holster and was carrying a 9mm semi-automatic in a gym bag along with multiple loaded magazines for the two weapons.

 

         (Fun fact: the Wilshire Ebell Theater is about two miles from the site of the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel, Where Robert F. Kennedy was murdered on June 6, 1968.)

 

         When approached by Kennedy’s private security team, Aispuro said, “Take me to Kennedy immediately.  I have to see him right now.”  Upon questioning, he insisted he was “with the Marshals” and had been sent to see Kennedy.  When his story fell apart, he was arrested.

 

         Later that day, Aispuro was charged with one felony weapons charge and bail was set at $35,000.  A warrant to search Aisporo’s home was also issued, and other weapons were found---a shotgun, an AR-15 and two other sniper-type rifles with high-end scopes and plenty of ammunition.

 

         Three days later, defense counsel expressed doubts about his client’s mental competence and criminal proceedings were suspended pending a psychological evaluation of Aispuro.

 

         Then, on September 21, the lone charge against him was reduced to a misdemeanor and bail was reduced to $10,000.  The next day, one week following his attempt to approach Kennedy at the theater, Aispuro was released on bail.  There are no conditions to his release, and there is no GPS monitoring of his whereabouts.  Also, this happened before any psychological evaluation took place.  To my knowledge, he still has not had a meeting with a psychiatrist or other professional.

 

         Though his firearms were taken by the police, he has no criminal or mental health record (and is not even being charged with a felony), so there is nothing to stop him from legally replenishing his arsenal.

 

         Aispuro could easily be charged with impersonating a federal agent as well as carrying loaded weapons without a concealed carry permit, (and probably twenty other charges).  But all criminal proceedings are being handled by the L.A. District Attorney’s office, which has taken a more laid-back approach.  Also, the FBI has never shown any interest in the case.

 

         In 1968, the same day Bobby Kennedy was shot, LBJ extended Secret Service protection to all substantial presidential candidates.  Every president since then has continued this tradition, which has now been in place for more than fifty years.  The lone exception is the current administration, which has refused to provide protection for RFK, Jr. even though he has asked for it. 

 

         It is sometimes said that candidates are entitled to protection 120 days before an election, but there seems to be no legal basis for that.  Certainly, many candidates get federal protection well before that.  Barack Obama, because of perceived dangers, got Secret Service protection almost two years before his election.

 

         Just imagine how many death threats RFK Jr. gets as a presidential candidate.  In fact, he got them regularly even before he announced his candidacy.

 

         And speaking of Obama, I will close with my own theory about this.

 

         I have written that Biden is our figurehead president while Obama is the real one, and I think that is the reason RFK Jr. is getting no federal protection.  It seems unlikely Joe Biden is even aware of the September attempt on Kennedy’s life, and the denial of federal protection doesn’t strike me as the sort of nastiness he would revel in.  However, it is exactly the sort of snarky vindictiveness Obama was famous for.  Denying routine federal protection to a presidential candidate Obama dislikes, whose father was murdered when he was a presidential candidate, is just the sort of inside joke that Barack, the smartest-kid-in-the-back-of-the-classroom, would find amusing.

(NOTE: Thanks and a hat tip to "Courageous Discourse,” a blog run by John Leake, where most of this information comes from.) 

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki   

 

 

         

THIS & THAT XXVI

         Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced his candidacy as an “Independent” rather than as a Democrat.  This is a political mistake and will only serve to further marginalize him and the issues he has been talking about.

 

         RFK Jr. was always going to be a sideshow.  He has been a crank for years, a climate-change maniac, an anti-vaxxer before it was cool to be an anti-vaxxer, a death-penalty-for-the-Koch-Brothers enthusiast, and the only person on earth who believes the 2004 election was stolen from John Kerry.  Then he was absolutely correct, from the first moment, about everything concerning the COVID madness and the deadly mRNA vaccines.  (That’s why I like him.)

 

         The problem is that NOBODY wants to talk about the COVID security state or the vaccines or the masks or the mandates or the lockdowns or the school closings.  The Left doesn’t want to discuss that stuff at all, and only a small percentage of conservatives want the architects of it held responsible in any way.  There are just too many people on both sides of the aisle who never objected to shutting down churches, forcing an experimental drug into hundreds of millions of arms, silencing dissenters, and destroying the lives of anybody who objected. 

 

         This is why he has been largely ignored by the government-run media to the extent possible.  As the only real Democrat officially running against Biden, and because of his famous name, he can’t be ignored completely.  People ladmire Kennedys, or they are fascinated by Kennedys, or something.  So his campaign gets some news coverage.  He is just not allowed to talk about politics, or his views. 

 

         But as long as he was a Democrat, his name would be on the ballots in Democratic primaries and he would get a certain number of votes and those results would be reported.  And IF he happened to get a significant percentage of the votes somewhere, speculation would arise over Biden’s popularity, and how enthusiastic Democrats were about the ancient drooling fool, and maybe something interesting would happen.  Maybe Democrats would dump old Joe.  Maybe somebody else on the Left would run.  Maybe RFK Jr. would get some opportunity to speak to the electorate.

 

         But removing himself from the Democratic “field” and declaring himself an Independent will make it possible to ignore him completely.  And that’s what the Leftist media will do.   He may wind up getting one or two or three percent in the general election, like dozens of other irrelevant candidates have done, but his views will never break through.  The COVID crimes of Fauci and Biden and Trump and Newsom and Cuomo and a thousand others will never be discussed.

 

*

 

         In an interview a couple weeks ago, Maryan Zablotsky of the Ukrainian Parliament was asked about the state of the world and the problems he faces, and he described the enemy of mankind as an “Axis of Assholes.”  The phrase stuck with me.  Bush’s “Axis of Evil” always made me feel like we were giving the monsters too much credit.

 

         You know who they are without me telling you.  There’s Putin, of course, and Xi Jinping, and Kim Jung-un, and the ayatollahs and a dozen other excrescences, and they don’t all work together on evil plots and they probably don’t agree on much and they don’t often plan things together, but they will cooperate if they can get away with it because death and destruction and genocide and prison camps and pain anywhere in the world is not only good for business, it’s something that seems to make them feel good inside.  And since they have nothing that normal people would call morals, there’s only a limited number of ways you can deal with them.  You can scare the crap out of them or you can kill them.  Of course, that doesn’t stop idiots in our government or other governments from trying to negotiate with them or appease them or buy them off. 

 

         And now there’s Hamas and Hezbollah and a bunch of others.  There’s room in the Axis for them too.  There’s always plenty of room. We forgot about them for a while because they were quiet for so long, but now they’re not quiet anymore.

 

         And why should they be?  Putin does what he does and we stop drilling for oil so he will even get rich from doing it.   Absolutely no one cares about the Uyghurs in the Chinese prison camps.  Kidnap people’s kids in Ukraine?  In Israel?  Why not?  Exactly nobody is worried we will show up and make them stop.  Ever. 

 

 I wonder what it feels like to live in Taiwan these days. 

 

*

 

Dr. Peter McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and a professor of medicine at Texas A&M College of Medicine in Dallas. He also has a master's degree in public health.  He is one of the most-published medical researchers in the United States and is the editor of two medical journals.

 

He has been a consistent critic of COVID vaccines, particularly the mRNA vaccines.

 

Because he is so often asked to summarize the evidence regarding mRNA vaccines, he posted the following statement of facts on a website he often contributes to.

 

 

 

Note of Concern to Colleagues

As of August 25, 2023, the CDC has recorded 18,015 deaths reported to them in VAERS by healthcare professionals or pharmaceutical companies who believe the vaccine is related to the death.   Approximately ~1100 deaths have occurred on the same day of vaccination.  The largest autopsy study published to date indicates 73.9% of deaths after vaccination are a direct cause or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.   There are >3400 peer reviewed manuscripts in the medical literature concerning fatal and nonfatal COVID-19 vaccine injuries including those recognized by regulatory agencies around the world such as myocarditis, neurologic injury, thrombosis, and immunologic syndromes.  The World Council for Health, June 11, 2022, has produced a pharmacovigilance report which is factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven calling for global market withdrawal of COVID-19 vaccines based on lack of safety.  Dr. Peter McCullough, a widely regarded expert on COVID-19 and vaccine safety, on December 7, 2022, in the US Senate, and on September 13, 2023, in the European Parliament, has called for, with expert panels, removal of all COVID-19 vaccines from the US and EU markets for excess risk of death.  On March 21, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons issued a factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven statement calling for all COVID-19 vaccines to be removed from the market based on lack of safety and efficacy.  The National Citizens Inquiry, a Canadian citizen-led and citizen-funded organization chartered to investigate governments’ COVID-19 policies, on September 14, 2023, called for market removal of all COVID-19 vaccines.  These observations and sources of evidence indicate the COVID-19 vaccines are not safe for human use.  No large-scale, conclusive, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials have demonstrated reduction in infection transmission, hospitalization, or death as primary endpoints.  Thus, the COVID-19 vaccines are not proven to be effective in reducing important clinical outcomes.

Please consider these developments if you have taken or supported COVID-19 vaccination.

* 

     “Everybody is basically the same.” “People are fundamentally good.”    “Everybody wants pretty much the same things.”

     How often have you heard people say these things?

     They are simply not true.  There is evil in the world and there are people who do not think the way you and I do.  It is easy to forget that, but it is dangerous to forget it.  Our safety and our well-being and even our lives can depend on seeing the reality of the world, though it can be very unpleasant to do so.

     About ten years ago, a book came out (followed by a movie), called “Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.”  It concerned Kermit Gosnell, an abortionist is West Philly who, for more than twenty years, performed hundreds of late-term abortions under squalid and dreadful conditions.  Some women died.  Late-term babies were routinely born alive and then murdered with a blade to the spinal cord. State authorities intentionally overlooked Gosnell’s activities because they did not want to provide political ammunition to anti-abortion groups.

     It was not fun to read that book, or to see the movie, but I forced myself to do it.  It had nothing to do with the nuances of pro-choice or pro-life politics (which frankly do not much interest me).   I did it because we must occasionally remind ourselves that people like Kermit Gosnell exist, that things normal people regard with horror are not regarded with horror by everybody, and that, yes, evil exists in the world and it will win if good people do nothing. 

     Go find the images of the Hamas attacks in Israel beginning on October 7.  Look at the broken bodies, the slashed bodies, the bodies lying in the streets, the bodies burned beyond recognition.  Look at them.  The pictures are still available on the internet though they are being scrubbed by Hamas itself or by others who initially took pleasure in seeing and celebrating them.

     At this moment, the “Politics of the Middle East” is not the point.  There will be plenty of time for “The Politics of the Middle East.” What matters is the horror, the pain, the lust to exterminate a group of humans, the glee in administering that death and mutilation and destruction.  What matters is the evil.

     See it.  Know it.  

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki