Mike Huckabee
"Putting a national lockdown, stay-at-home orders, is like house arrest. It’s --- you know, other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint --- this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”
Attorney General Bill Barr made the above comment during a discussion at Hillsdale College on Wednesday. The lying and twisting of his words started immediately, along with the expected OUTRAGE!!! CNN accused him onscreen of “comparing stay-at-home orders and slavery” as Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina exclaimed, “I think that that statement by Mr. Barr was the most ridiculous, tone-deaf, God-awful things I’ve ever heard. It is incredible that the chief law enforcement officer in this country would equate human bondage to expert advice to save lives.”
Except that Barr DIDN’T “equate human bondage” to following lockdown advice. Read it again. He specifically EXEMPTED slavery from the comparison he was making. He was comparing the lockdown with all the other intrusions on civil liberties EXCEPT slavery, which he placed in a class by itself. When you take slavery (and surely he meant that to encompass the later Jim Crow laws as well) out of the discussion, as he did, it’s certainly arguable that widespread stay-at-home orders and the near-total lockdown of the American economy are exactly what he said they are, the worst and most large-scale intrusion on civil liberties we’ve ever had.
That doesn’t matter, though, because a lot of people aren’t smart or conscientious enough to look at what Barr really said and understand the difference. Of those who ARE capable of doing this, some of them deliberately twist his words to fool the less intelligent and/or informed.
CNN kept on with this, of course, with presidential historian Jon Meacham saying in an interview with Don Lemon that “...it’s incendiary hyperbole. If you think that this is akin to slavery, you obviously never suffered under the burden of slavery in real time or in its longtime, uh, longtime system of segregation...”
Except that Barr never said the lockdown was “akin” to slavery. To repeat: he exempted slavery from the comparison, as it was a “different kind of restraint” (indeed). Barr was comparing the lockdown to OTHER intrusions on civil liberties and finding it to be the most extreme of THOSE intrusions.
Barr was right. To cite just one example, I’ve written about the damage done to the great city of Nashville, right around the corner from where I produce my TV show. The tourist economy of Nashville has been destroyed by the closing of restaurants and bars by mayor John Cooper, along with the livelihoods of countless musicians. Shockingly, government officials have even tried to hide the data that show a relatively tiny number of people caught the virus at those restaurants and bars. The intrusion into people’s lives and livelihoods has been devastating.
As brilliant as Barr is, he should anticipate before the words come out of his mouth how they'll be twisted to say something he didn’t mean at all, and speak accordingly to head off incidents like this. But this time, sadly, he let the predictable happen. Because of the resolve he has to discover the truth about certain activities, he’s got a big target on his back. Attorney General Barr is seen by the left as a huge threat --- you know, not counting Donald Trump, who is uniquely loathed and despised --- and is perhaps the biggest threat to the left in American history.
See what I did in that last sentence? I did NOT compare Barr to Donald Trump or say that Barr is “akin” to Donald Trump. I set Trump aside in the discussion. I said if you DON’T INCLUDE TRUMP, then Barr is maybe the biggest threat the left had ever faced. Just as Barr was saying if you DON’T INCLUDE SLAVERY, then the lockdown was the worst intrusion on civil liberties Americans have ever faced.
See?
In another part of the same conversation, Barr said this of the organization Black Lives Matter:
"They’re not interested in black lives...they’re interested in ‘props,’ a small number of blacks who are killed by police during, uh, conflict with police, usually less than a dozen a year, who they can use as props to achieve a much broader political agenda.”
Again...OUTRAGE!! You’d think that Barr had said he personally wasn’t interested in black lives. No, he was exposing the ugly truth about an organization that is centered around a Marxist agenda and is using black lives –- and the pretext of racial “justice” –- to further that agenda. They ARE using tragic incidents with police to start riots, looting and burning that, ironically, destroy black lives and predominantly black neighborhoods. That organization apparently is NOT interested in the damage it causes those black lives.
Once again, Barr is correct.
Don’t think so? In a must-read article, here’s what you should know about the real BLM, the so-called “Black Lives Matter.”
Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza has another venture called the Black Futures Lab, and if you click to donate (for the love of heaven, don’t donate), you’ll be told to send the money to the “Chinese Progressive Association” explaining that the Black Futures Lab is “a fiscally sponsored project of the Chinese Progressive Association.”
By the way, the Chinese Progressive Association is organized as a 501(c)3, tax-exempt.
A 2009 paper from Stanford University that appears on the website Marxist.org describes it as a pro-People’s Republic of China organization whose “support for the PRC was based on the inspiration its members took from what they saw as a successful grassroots model that presented a viable alternative to Western capitalism.”
That's what this is really about. Again, read the article, and Barr will not only be seen as correct but as understating the threat of Black Lives Matter.