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I’ve pointed out many times over the years that the strongest proponents of gun control laws seem to know the least about guns. They’ve found their ultimate representative in David Chipman, President Biden’s nominee to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. His Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday at times looked more like a shoot to create video for future NRA commercials.

For instance, he wants to ban “assault weapons,” but couldn’t define what one was (to be fair, nobody can: that’s a nebulous term created by gun control advocates, and many of the characteristics they list for an “assault weapon” are actually cosmetic or safety features.)

https://www.westernjournal.com/watch-bidens-atf-nominee-says-law-abiding-gun-owners-often-commit-violent-crimes/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

Chipman also admitted he wants to ban the AR-15, the most popular rifle in America, even though a letter from 21 state Attorneys General urging Biden to withdraw Chipman’s nomination points out that the AR-15 is used in fewer murders than “sharp objects.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-atf-nominee-admits-wants-ban-popular-rifle-america/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

Then there was this bizarre moment, about the alleged threat of violent crime by law-abiding gun owners.

https://www.westernjournal.com/watch-bidens-atf-nominee-says-law-abiding-gun-owners-often-commit-violent-crimes/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

Chipman conceded that most gun owners are law-abiding but said someone may buy a gun legally, then go on to do something illegal with it. But if that’s the criteria, then we should probably ban cars, too. Most career criminals, such as drug gang members, prefer to get black market guns that aren’t traceable and don’t require a background check.

And when they use those guns, you should hope and pray that there’s a law-abiding gun owner close at hand.

I can hardly believe anyone is still flailing this dead horse, but some Democrats have been pushing for a memo to be released that would reveal why then-Attorney General Bill Barr declined to prosecute President Trump for obstruction of the Russia Collusion investigation. They were certain it would show that he ignored advice to prosecute Trump.

Well, it’s finally out. It shows that the Office of Legal Counsel advised him against prosecuting Trump because, aside from the issues about whether you could prosecute a sitting President, there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute him even if he weren’t President. So another cherished anti-Trump narrative goes up in smoke.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/05/25/another-left-wing-hoax-about-trump-blows-up-n1449498

Personally, I’d think that all the evidence you’d need that Trump didn’t obstruct the investigation was that it dragged on for years, cost taxpayers $30 million and found absolutely nothing. It was based on partisan lies, falsified evidence and imaginations fired by the fever of Trump Derangement Syndrome. America would have been better off if it had been obstructed by an outbreak of common sense in DC, but that’s not likely to happen in our lifetimes.

A big salute to Texas for standing up once again for common sense and laws that protect public safety. The state just passed a law increasing penalties for protesters who block traffic and making it a felony to obstruct emergency vehicles.

https://www.westernjournal.com/red-state-moves-put-brakes-protesters-block-traffic/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

This was a bipartisan measure, passing the House 90-55 and the Senate 25-5. Gov. Greg Abbott said he will sign it into law, tweeting, “Peaceful protest doesn’t include blocking roadways & preventing emergency vehicle access. That chaos won’t be tolerated in Texas.”

Naturally, leftist media decried the bill, claiming Abbott would have arrested the Rev. Martin Luther King for marching in the streets. Not mentioned: King engaged in peaceful, planned, pre-announced marches, and to my knowledge, none of his supporters surrounded cars and threatened the drivers, shot at them, or deliberately blocked entrances to hospital ERs, all behaviors we’ve seen from leftist “protesters” in the past year.

It's sad that we live in a time when it’s necessary to pass strict laws to prevent things that anybody with two brain cells to rub together used to know better than to pull. But then leftists started claiming a right to sleep on sidewalks and in other people’s doorways, or to “protest” by walking out in front of traffic or blocking ambulances and police cars. I agree that we shouldn’t have to pass laws ordering people not to walk out in front of oncoming traffic. But we wouldn’t have to, if leftists had more sense than God gave an armadillo.

Remember that time when Joe Biden went off the rails and told a black audience that Republicans “want to put y’all back in chains”? (Fun fact: The Republican Party was founded to end slavery, and it was Democrats who fought a war to preserve it.) Well, Joe is back to slandering Republicans again, only this time, the lie is even easier to debunk. You don’t have to look up what happened in the 1860s, you just have to be able to remember back as far as last year, which maybe Biden can’t.

https://www.westernjournal.com/insanity-biden-cooks-false-claim-trump-campaigned-idea-black-folks-taking-job/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=empowerconservatives

Among many unmoored-from-reality statements Biden made in an interview with the Atlantic magazine was the stunning claim that Trump ran for reelection by telling voters, “The reason you lost your job is because of an immigrant; the reason you lost that job is because those black folks are taking your job.”

Wow, where to begin untangling that ball of fantasy? First of all, Trump ran on the fact that his policies created jobs, sparking the lowest unemployment numbers ever in nearly all demographics (at least until a virus from China and endless lockdowns in blue states cratered the economy.) Trump actively campaigned to minority voters on how he had created jobs and rising wages for them for the first time in decades, and boasted of achieving the lowest poverty rate ever for African-Americans. They rewarded him with larger shares of the black and Hispanic vote than he or other recent Republican candidates had received before.

Biden also commits the common Democrat fallacy of using the term “immigrant” when what he’s really talking about is illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration does depress wages for low-skill American workers. That’s something that even union icon Cesar Chavez understood. Trump’s border security measures were part of the reason why those US workers’ wages were finally rising until Biden came in and opened up the cheap labor floodgates again.

Is it really any wonder why, under Biden, the black unemployment rate is rising even as the pandemic is ending? Telling lies about Trump isn’t going to create jobs for anyone, but reversing all of Trump’s policies is proving very effective at destroying jobs. Once again, he’s proving that today’s Democrats have only one arrow in their quiver: When their policies inevitably fail, accuse the Party with the successful policies of being racists. It's a shopworn lie that minorities are starting to see through. The Atlantic magazine interviewer didn’t challenge him on any of his wild claims, but I pray that the voters will be smarter than that.

About a month ago, a concerned father named Andrew Gutmann was dismayed at the indoctrination his daughter, a student at the prestigious Brearley School in New York City for the past seven years, was receiving in “antiracism,” which is, of course, racism. (Just as Orwell said that Ignorance Is Strength and War Is Peace, so Racism Is Antiracism.) Gutmann wrote a remarkable letter to the administrators, which, if you didn’t see it then, is available on Substack and linked to here, in a column by Bari Weiss.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/you-have-to-read-this-letter

A lot has happened since Gutmann sent the letter. It went viral. We wrote about it. Fortunately, it has played a huge role in bringing attention to the problem of toxic “Critical Race Theory” as it is being taught in schools --- not just in New York, either, but across the country.

Parents pay $54,000 a year to send one child to Brearley. And before their child may be considered for enrollment, parents must take an “anti-racism pledge.” Now, one might think there’s nothing wrong with this; who's for racism, right? But “anti-racism” means something else entirely, which is to say it is the most racist doctrine that’s been seen in America since the Jim Crow days. The difference is that the racism is turned on white people --- even white children, who are taught that they are “privileged” and that they should be ashamed of their “whiteness.” As for children "of color," they're taught that white people are racist and, deep down, hate them. There is hardly anything more damaging one can say to any child. It is straight-up child abuse, to both black and white kids.

Mr. Gutmann let the administrators have it: “If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity” [equality of outcomes, as opposed to equality of opportunity], it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was truly concerned about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students and their families to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”

Of himself and his wife, he said that “we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened and civic minded adult.” Needless to say, he was pulling his daughter out of the school. Father of the year!

“...Brearley’s obsession with race must stop,” he wrote. “It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way.” He went on to craft what might be the most spot-on indictment of Critical Race Theory that has ever been written. Again, if you haven’t seen this, it’s an absolute must-read.

And now, a month later, Gutmann has followed up his explosion into the media spotlight with another letter, intended to “dispel several common misperceptions pertaining to this movement [CRT].”

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/555194-one-fathers-stand-against-critical-race-theory-were-indoctrinating-our?rl=1

He says the perception that opposition to CRT comes just from the political right is incorrect. (This should be welcome news to us on the right.) “...I have received several thousand supportive emails and messages from people throughout the country,” he says, “including many from self-described Democrats and liberals. The tone of most of the messages is not at all political in nature; instead, the tenor is one of desperation and powerlessness.”

Parents and grandparents can’t stand to see their kids being taught “to feel guilty solely because of the color of their skin” and “being brainwashed to turn against their own families.” Even teachers, he says, have written to him to say they have tears in their eyes “because they are required, day after day, to teach fundamentally divisive, racist doctrines and being forced to demonize their own students.”

He relates letters --- the ones he considers the most frightening of all --- from people who came here from the former Soviet Union or from formerly Communist countries in Eastern Europe. (He doesn’t specifically mention Communist China, but that would apply as well.) These first-generation immigrants tell him they have “seen this movie before.” The chill we get when we see our children being indoctrinated in school, or when we’re censored by social media for daring to deviate from approved “facts,” or when we hear about people’s careers being “canceled” over something as innocuous as a tweet from a decade or two ago, is uncomfortably similar to what these immigrants experienced in the land of the not-free.

“Simply put,” Gutmann writes, “they cannot believe this is happening here.”

He goes on to warn that this indoctrination isn’t happening just in schools, but in major corporations and organizations across America. We’ve talked about some of the examples he cites: the anti-racist training forced on employees by Coca-Cola and the Walt Disney Company, the hiring quotas for pilots at United Airlines, the American Medical Association’s roadmap to “social justice” (displaying an obsession with anti-racist jargon that would likely drive the most dedicated members of the medical profession to madness), and even the push within our own Defense Department.

One reason this concerned dad decided to write again, he says, was to clarify that his original letter wasn’t primarily about race. His first concern was that the school wasn’t even willing to talk to parents or engage in any debate about their “anti-racism” initiatives. That “touches the heart of democracy itself,” he writes. Democracy won’t work unless we can debate freely the most difficult issues of our time. “We have allowed a very small but vocal minority, amplified by the power of social media, to shut down nearly all debate on the topic of race and critical race theory,” he writes. “The simple cry of ‘racist’ or the threat of that cry will nearly always do so. This cannot be allowed to continue.”

I would add that race isn’t the only topic being mishandled in this way, to deliberately shut down debate. And though Mr. Gutmann stresses that the issue of Critical Race Theory transcends politics, the people shutting down debate on this and other issues are doing it for political reasons. Any question of global warming gospel or the safety of new vaccines makes one a “science denier.” Any question of the election results or the origin story of COVID-19 makes one a “conspiracy theorist.” Never mind that right now, even the “fact”-checkers who tried to censor any mention of the Wuhan virology lab are scrambling to deal with what is very likely the truth about that.

Gutmann writes, “We must begin to have a national conversation about the story we want to tell our children and about the future we want for our country.” That is true, but for much too long, the conversation has been one way, and we can’t permit that any longer. While some are working overtime to extinguish America’s founding principles and make skin color our defining feature, we have to push back against this evil, at the ballot box (from President down to school board) and in every area of life, to reaffirm our principles of individual freedom and make sure they apply to all Americans.


The Supreme Court issued another surprising unanimous decision this week. The SCOTUS overturned the notoriously liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling that a criminal illegal alien from Mexico had no right to challenge his SECOND deportation following a DUI conviction. His lawyer claimed DUI wasn’t sufficient grounds to deport him, even though it’s considered an aggravated felony.

https://www.westernjournal.com/scotus-unanimously-rules-criminal-illegal-alien/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=empowerconservatives

Read the article for all the full legal reasoning on why he failed to make his case, which, interestingly, was written by liberal Justice Sonya Sotomayor. Then ask yourself how in the world we got to the point where it takes the Supreme Court to decide whether DUI is a serious enough crime to warrant deporting an illegal alien who was already deported once before and sneaked back into the US illegally again. I must be getting old, but I remember when that alone would’ve been sufficient grounds for deporting somebody.

Recently, Van Morrison, Roger Daltrey and Johnny Rotten have all spoken out against the curse of “wokeness.” Now, add another name from the rock world: Sean Ono Lennon, the musician son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/05/24/sean-ono-lennons-scathing-takedown-of-wokeness/

He posted some very insightful comments on Twitter about how the “woke” left’s obsession with race and dividing people into oppressed and oppressors is setting back race relations and making things worse. He says he’s now getting far more racist attacks on his Japanese heritage than he did before all the “anti-racists” came in. And I love his observation about the “least interesting interesting thing”: that someone’s arbitrary birth status such as race might seem interesting at first, but once you get to know who they really are inside, it becomes the least interesting “interesting thing” about them.

If people are going to listen to celebrities on Twitter, far better that they follow Sean Ono Lennon than the “C-list celebrities” who are promoting violence against Sen. Rand Paul and his family, and yet who, remarkably, have not been banned from Twitter.

https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2021/05/24/sen-rand-paul-hammers-twitter-for-doing-nothing-as-c-list-celebrities-encourage-violence-against-him-and-his-family/