PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: If destroying property isn’t violence, then what is happening to this camera crew’s equipment?
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As Victoria Taft writes: If Only the Left and Right Had Come Together to Condemn Violence When It Counted.
The DNC-MSM has been actively egging on riots since at least Ferguson in 2014. And they’ll have zero introspection over whether their fawning over leftwing rioters has driven the far right to adopt the left’s tactics.
While the rest of Washington went apoplectic over impeachment proceedings that ultimately failed to put a single lasting dent in Trump’s reelection odds, the Arkansas senator was laser-focused on news of the novel coronavirus. In January, Cotton was bailing on impeachment proceedings to warn the White House repeatedly it was wildly behind on targeted travel bans, testing production, and vaccine development. He was also rightly pointing out that the Chinese Communist Party’s assertion that the coronavirus emerged from a wet market that didn’t even sell bats, the original carrier of the virus, was most likely a cover for its real source: China’s only maximum-security biosafety-level-four facility, which was known to conduct gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses.
And yet, like Cassandra warning Paris his actions would start the Trojan War, Cotton was roundly derided as a crackpot conspiracy theorist by most of the media.
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By late spring, a second crisis was emerging. Protests supposedly in the name of justice for George Floyd, the unarmed black man killed while kneeled on by a white cop, devolved into the sort of lawless riots anyone could see would spell doom, not productive lawmaking, for cities and businesses disproportionately of people of color. Cotton wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that military involvement was warranted to assist law enforcement in cities unable to quell riots, an opinion shared by nearly 3 in 5 registered voters, including nearly a majority of those who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives,” Cotton wrote. “Many poor communities that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still further.”
Members of the staff of the New York Times, who hadn’t raised a word of protest when the paper published direct op-eds from the Taliban, Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, or Hamas, were so enraged that not only did they accuse their employers of literally putting black people in danger by publishing Cotton’s opinion, but they also succeeded in upending the entire editorial structure of the opinion page and chasing respected editor James Bennet from the building.
Cotton wound up raising $200,000 in the week after his column was published, which he spent on ads in the New York Times railing against Joe Biden. (Cotton, who unseated a Democratic incumbent in 2014, went on to beat his Libertarian challenger in 2020 by 33 points, as no Democrat ran in the race.)
As Ann Coulter tweets in response to today’s DC riots involving Trump supporters, “New York Times to un-retract Tom Cotton’s op-ed.”
BRYAN PRESTON: Every City Needs a New York Post.
The other day I was researching for a piece or a show, haven’t decided which, about how the Democrats at the local level and now reaching all the way up, are abdicating the basics of governance. They literally no longer care about public safety, keeping the streets clean and free of garbage, or really any Government 101 duties. They just answer to radical activists and pretend their local homeowners and business leaders don’t exist. I went looking for the latest on New York City’s garbage collection issues. Mayor Bill de Blasio hasn’t just defunded the police and politicized the entire city government. He’s turned the streets over to the largest piles of garbage and the rats that live in them. This has been going on for a couple of years. He’d rather mouth off and run for president than do his actual job.
I ended up finding useful information in one place: the New York Post. Not the Times, the alleged paper of record. It’s too busy trying to destroy the nation to report on the destruction of its own city. Not the NY Daily News. Its local coverage is better than the Times but it’s still too often a mouthpiece for the Democrats.
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If I had a billion dollars or two and wanted to make a difference at the local level, I’d spin up versions of the Post in Austin, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, everywhere the captured papers bury serious stories and stifle discussion and debate. Outlets like this one need local reporters who know their cities and will honestly report on them and the consequences that flow from the policies that those who run these cities foist on them.
More importantly, the citizens of these imperiled and increasingly dangerous cities need them too.
As Kyle Smith wrote when veteran Post reporter Steve Dunleavy passed away in 2019 at age 81, “Then as now, you had to read The Post to figure out what was really going on in the city because the Times was slightly grossed out by how sordid it all was and tended to look the other way when things got ‘too tabloidy,’ meaning ‘too interesting.’ You could always go to the Times for a 3,000-word piece on ‘Whither the UN?’ But tabloid guys like Steve served up what was really happening in these parts, at 160 proof.”
H.L. Mencken wrote in the early 1940s that “it is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.” That line has been quoted by both the New York Times and the Washington Post, but curiously, Mencken’s advice goes unheeded by most newspapers once there is someone with a (D) after his name in the White House, the governor’s, or mayor’s mansion.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Link found between self-control in childhood and success later in life.
PROTESTORS STORM U.S. CAPITOL, HALT ELECTORAL COLLEGE CERTIFICATION. They are inside the Capitol, with reports of one person shot in the chest.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’ve been mostly offline this week as I recover, but this isn’t right, tempting as it is to call this “mostly peaceful” or somesuch after the past year’s sanctioned riots. Follow the PJ Liveblog for minute by minute coverage. Excerpt:
With 40% of the country thinking the election was stolen, this was to be expected — especially after the unified voice of the media saying for years that if you feel disenfranchised it’s okay to riot. Our ruling class, and particularly our media, have been playing with fire for years and I hope that this will be enough to shock them into more sensible behavior. But so far they’ve not lived up to my hopes.
ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Bumped. I’ll be interested to see who these protesters in the Capitol are.
Also: Expert Andy Ngo: It wasn’t antifa at the Capitol riots.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: This Year, Autonomous Trucks Will Take to the Road With No One on Board.
YOU WENT FULL WEIMAR. NEVER GO FULL WEIMAR: Denmark launches children’s TV show about man with giant penis.
IT’S TERRIFYING BECAUSE THEY’RE RIGHT: The Chinese Communist Party looks forward to Joe Biden’s presidency as a “new window of hope.” That’s terrifying.
I EAGERLY AWAIT THE PRECRIME UNIT AT CNN TELLING ME WHY THIS IS WRONG: Governor Ron DeSantis Announces Partnership with Publix to Open COVID-19 Vaccination Sites.
PJ MEDIA LIVE BLOG: Congress Meets to Certify Electoral College Vote.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: A healthy heart may help delay or prevent dementia.
CURVE, BENT: UK Woman Arrested For Filming Inside Empty Hospital.
ANOTHER LONG-ESTABLISHED MEDICAL TREATMENT CALLED INTO QUESTION: Study finds little benefit from supplemental oxygen during labor.
TRUMP SUPPORTERS CLASH WITH CAPITOL POLICE: “A source on Capitol Hill has confirmed to me that at least two buildings have been evacuated as pro-Trump demonstrators march toward the Capitol.”
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