NEWS YOU CAN USE: Buy a Pulse Oximeter in Case You Catch Covid. I was looking into why having a pulse oximeter at home in case you get Covid for the reasons discussed in the link isn’t strongly recommended by the public health establishment. Having read a bunch of articles that acknowledge the potential benefits but stop short of recommending purchase, medical professionals are afraid people with low levels for other reasons (like sleep apnea) will become convinced they have Covid, that people feeling really, really awful with Covid who may need medical attention won’t call them them if their blood oxygen levels are okay, and so forth. I.e., some people are too stupid to use it wisely/properly. Some people may in fact be, but why refrain from recommending it for everyone on that basis? I think it’s the same with Vitamin D–fear that instead of taking a reasonable dose to ensure no deficiency, people will conclude that if 2000 IUs daily is good, 200,000 (which is toxic) is better. We really shouldn’t be making medical policy based on the (perceived) lowest common denominator

HISTORIANS HEAL THYSELVES: There is perhaps nothing crazier in the modern historical profession than the refusal of people who really should know better to acknowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald, a Communist, murdered JFK for political reasons. (He was also unhinged, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive.)

Let’s review. Oswald was a Communist. He had previously defected to the USSR, but was allowed to return after growing disillusioned. He then became a partisan of the Cuban Revolution, and visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico, trying to defect to Cuba. He was very angry about hostile U.S. policy toward Cuba, and before he killed JFK tried to kill well-known anti-Communist Edwin Walker.

Yet somehow, every November, instead of reminding us of these facts, “mainstream” historians gaslight us with stuff like the tweet below, implying, and sometimes explicitly stating, that JFK was the victim of “right wing hate.” They then complain in other contexts about how conservatives purportedly won’t accept “reality.”

I have a theory about why liberal historians do this re JFK. The left spent the 1950s and early 60s decrying McCarthyism as a “witch hunt,” i.e., not just that McCarthy was a lying demagogue (which he was), but that there was no domestic Communist threat, whatsoever. Acknowledging that a domestic Communist, albeit a lone nut apparently acting on his own volition, assassinated a beloved Democratic president ruins the witch-hunt narrative. That narrative has been a huge propaganda advantage for decades, and they don’t want to let it go.

SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS AREN’T SECOND-CLASS RIGHTS: Lawprof John McGinnis: Gun Rights Delayed are Gun Rights Denied.

CONSERVATIVES ARE GOING TO REGRET BUYING INTO NONSENSICAL CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT THE ELECTION: Kevin Williamson: The Dumbest Coup. Please note that no amount of past Democratic lies, distortions, conspiracy theories, or refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election justifies buying into bogus conspiracy theories. Let me put this as simply as possible: Trump lost. There is no plausible set of facts based on any evidence that anyone has presented that would reverse the results in several states and give him a victory in the electoral college. If you want the lawsuits to continue to ferret out whatever fraud might have occurred to improve things for the future, fine. But if you actually believe, as Sydney Powell has publicly claimed, that “President Trump won by a landslide,” you are being a sucker for a con man.

HOLD ON TO YOUR SEATS: From a very informed source, not affiliated with either party–Trump wins Ohio, election comes down to Pennsylvania and Arizona.

NATE COHN CALLS FLORIDA FOR TRUMP and gives DJT an 85% chance of winning Georgia based on current data. So it looks like it’s going to be a lot tighter than the pundits were generally predicting. However, from what I can tell early results from the Midwest are not looking that promising for the Republicans.

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KEEP AN EYE ON MINNESOTA: Two new polls today out from Minnesota, which has been barely polled this cycle. Biden ahead 47-42 and 48-45. Even more interesting, the former poll, by Survey USA, shows Biden and Trump even in favorability, 44-44, with Trump way ahead in “extremely favorable,” 27% to 16%, suggesting greater enthusiasm for Trump. Seems to me these numbers put Trump in striking distance, and if I were going to expect any big surprise this year, it would be in the state that saw the worst summer rioting. Turnout is a huge wildcard, and Minnesota always seems to disappoint Republicans, but this is one to keep an eye on.

NPR–LYING LIARS WHO LIE:

Really? Then how do we explain these NPR stories, which were not just unverified at the time, but turned out to be outright lies?

STANDING UP TO STAND DOWNS: Me in the Washington Examiner: The Second Amendment is as necessary today as it has ever been. “In 2020, riots and looting broke out across the US. In cities from Seattle to New York, police were ordered to stand down. The lesson: You can’t rely on the police to protect your life and property from criminal aggression, writes @ProfDBernstein.” And read the academic article the op-ed is based on.
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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE GOVERNMENT TAKES THE SIDE OF RIOTERS AND LOOTERS?: The Second Amendment as a Guard Against Government-Sanctioned Tyrannous Factions

This is the seventh in the Scalia Law School Liberty and Law Center’s ongoing series of ten articles on the Second Amendment in a time of social disorder. I’m executive director on the Center, and if you’d like to support our work you can click here. We’d sure appreciate it, we have one of the very few liberty-oriented academic centers in the United States, much less at law schools. If you are interested in supporting our free speech clinic, new donations are currently being matched 1-2 ($25 gets us an extra $50), just make a note when you donate.

GOVERNMENT MONOPOLIES ARE THE WORST MONOPOLIES: From my colleague Robert Leider: The State’s Monopoly of Force and the Right to Bear Arms

I’M NOT SHOCKED, I’M REPULSED AND DISGUSTED: Bari Weiss: Stop Being Shocked American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology—one with dangerous implications for Jews. Telling quote: “Young Jews who grasp the scope of this problem and want to fight it thus find themselves up against two fronts: their ideological enemies and their own communal leadership.” I’ve had Jewish college students call me, begging for advice on how to deal with leftist antisemitism on campus, explaining that their Hillel (Jewish student group) professional, their Hillel rabbi, or whomever else they would normally turn to is telling them to sweep the problem under the rug, less it harm their relationship with the woke groups on campus.

RIGHTS DELAYED ARE RIGHTS DENIED: Professor John McGinnis:The Right to Prompt Access to Guns in a Time of Unrest. Another in the Scalia Law School Liberty & Law Center’s series of papers on the Second Amendment in a time of civil unrest.

I KNOW LOTS OF KIDS WHO ARE DOING FINE AT PRIVATE SCHOOLS THAT ARE OPEN DAILY, WHILE OUR LOCAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS REMAIN SHUTTERED. Hans Bader: Reopen the K-12 Schools Now Based on New Studies.

LOSING THE WAR OF IDEAS: Jewish (and Other) Schools Shouldn’t Assign Ibram Kendi’s Stamped: A Remix. My question for our conservative intellectual establishment: Putting ideological objections to one side, Kendi’s book is replete with errors that a competent historian could likely enumerate with citations in a couple of weeks. That wouldn’t extinguish the current ardor for the book, but it could dampen it as parents would have an objective, non-ideological basis for objecting to it being assigned in public and private schools. So why hasn’t anyone solicited such a takedown? I can think of dozens of much-less-important matters that flood my in-box daily from various right-leaning groups.

HOW DID THE BABYLON BEE GET SCOOPED BY THE TIMES?:

LIKE SCALIA, AMY CONEY BARRETT SHARES AN ‘ORIGINALIST’ VIEW ON SECOND AMENDMENT: At the Hill, from my colleague Nelson Lund.

BLEG–WINDOWS MOVIEMAKER WON’T CONVERT FROM WLMP FORMAT [SOLVED!]: Windows MovieMaker is an old, discontinued, easy to use program to make videos and slideshows. I used it two years ago, it was glitchy, but I was familiar with it, so I used it again to create a montage, mostly pictures with a few short video clips, about 9 minutes long. It made the montage (with some captions and a musical background) just fine, but absolutely refuses to convert the project into a usable format. I’m posting the problem here because I couldn’t find a solution, and an answer would help me and others. I am using Windows 7. I tried loading a new copy of the program. I tried deleting the video clips in case MM was having trouble with the .mov format. I tried saving to .MP4. I tried saving to .WMV. I tried saving to Facebook and Youtube. The program just acts like it’s going to do something, but gets stuck at 0/100%.

I tried downloading converters that claim, falsely, that they accept WLMP format. I tried an online program that did convert the file to .MP4, but not in a way that will actually allow it to play.

At this point, I’ve spent more time trying to resolve this than it would take to create a new montage with a different program. But if anyone has a solution, let me and the rest of the world know in the comments. Thanks.

THE SOLUTION: For whatever reason, MM didn’t like the music files I had added to the montage. Having deleted those files, I was able to save the montage in .MP4, and now I can put the the music back in via another program. UPDATE: I converted my .MP3 files to .WAV, and that solved the problem entirely. So, if you are reading this and have the same problem, first thing to do is to see if you are have any .MP3 files in your video, MM apparently doens’t like them.

4,700 AND COUNTING: My article on the importance of the Second Amendment right of armed self-defense in the context of widespread police “standdowns” during this Summer’s rioting has been download almost 5,000 times. But I’ve heard from some Instapundit readers that they have wanted to download the article, but not to create an SSRN account. Easy! After you click on “download this paper,” the next page has a link at the bottom right-hand corner, “download without registration.”

*REALLY* DON’T GET COCKY: Trump is losing. Badly. That’s what the recent polls shows. That doesn’t mean he will lose. There’s almost a month left, and if he can turn around 2.5% of current Biden voters, and thus get within around 4% of Biden, plus pick up a few “shy Trump” voters, he can win the electoral college while losing the popular vote by several points. But right now he’s losing, and it’s not because the polls are biased, not because of any conspiracy by the media to cover up his success. He’s basically getting the vote of every voter who approves of his job performance, and no one else. He’s more popular than he was in 2016, but Biden is much more popular than Clinton was. Worse yet, a lot of people think the race is much closer than it is right now, and are sending in early ballots voting for Democratic Senate candidates to “check” Trump. I’m telling it like it is, and I’m sorry that’s bad news for most Instapundit readers. And note that I am totally not averse to calling things for Trump against the media consensus when I see things going his way.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Really, don’t get cocky. You should be donating and working on this election, and putting out the max effort, because everything is up for grabs. And encourage your friends to turn out and vote too.

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A Facebook friend sends this:

Someone asked me what feedback I am getting with door knocking in Bristol/Levittown PA. I’ve been doing this 3 days/wk, for 3 wkends. Working class to upper middle neighborhoods, all registered voters, all ages, roughly equal by party.

1) if it’s Biden they usually say Biden, occasionally apologetically.
2) if they say I’m undecided but don’t close the door, if you ask what are your issues or how will you decide, they say Trump or give you clues it’ll be Trump (ex: “I’m pro life.”)
3) I always ask if anything in the debates changed their mind – so far always no, they already were going to vote for that person.
4) So far no mind changes at all, or they didn’t say.
5) sometimes they refuse to say, period, and close the door.
6) if Trump – they are going to vote in person.
7) if anti Trump – why? 2-3/day – emotional negative reaction to him (“he’s disgusting”) or media memes (“wants to be a dictator”)
8) I always get maybe 1 in 25 who are vociferously Democrat or pro-Biden and let me have it.
9) but most aren’t home or don’t answer the door.

10) this weekend I want to ask if Trump’s covid diagnosis and choices around that changed their minds.

Interesting.

THE BIGGEST SICK JOKE RIGHT NOW: Our old Stalinist friend Angela Davis has come to fame as a “prison abolitionist.” Which is strange, because she was perfectly happy to have dissidents in the USSR and East Germany, including Soviet Jews seeking to practice their religion, consigned to prison. It’s worth recounting this anecdote from Alan Dershowitz: Dershowitz appealed to Davis, with her very close relationship with the USSR (as she was a high-ranking member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party USA) to intercede on behalf of imprisoned Soviet Jewry activists. Dershowitz recounts, “Several days later, I received a call back from Ms. Davis’ secretary informing me that Davis had looked into the people on my list and none were political prisoners. ‘They are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism.’ Davis would urge that they be kept in prison where they belonged.” That anecdote is reasonably well-known, but I found a related anecdote from 1972: “Angela explained that the situation of Jews in Russia ‘has been totally blown out of proportion by the bourgeois press because they’re going to do everything they can to discredit socialism.'”

And here are a couple of pictures of her with her buddy Eric Honeker the dictator of East Germany, whose political prisoners Davis was at best indifferent do. I’ve searched for any evidence that Davis regrets these positions and her general support for Communist tyrannies and haven’t found any (and this source says it’s because she hasn’t expressed any remorse). Prison abolitionist my ___.

MORE ON SELF-DEFENSE AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT: From my colleague Joyce Malcolm: Self Defense, an Unalienable Right in a Time of Peril: Protected and Preserved by the Second Amendment. An excellent complement to my article.

A reminder that this series of articles on the Second Amendment (there will ten in all!) is brought to you by the Scalia Law School’s Liberty and Law Center. If you would like to help with our work, you can contribute here. We also have a match until October 15th for our free speech clinic, so if you would like to designate a gift for the clinic, it will be doubled.

DOWNLOAD IT WHILE IT’S HOT [bumped]: The Right to Armed Self-Defense in the Light of Law Enforcement Abdication.

This is my contribution to the Scalia Law School’s Liberty and Law Center’s series of working papers on the Second Amendment. It’s forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy.

The article notes that gun control advocates argue that to the extent the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms was meant to ensure people can defend themselves, that concern is anachronistic in modern times when we have professional police. I then argue that this claim is undermined by what happened in cities across the country this past Summer, when police were given stand-down orders by mayors and public safety chiefs, mostly for political reasons, allowing rioters and looters carte blanche to destroy significant swathes of urban America. Finally, I give examples of individuals and groups defending themselves and their property with firearms in the face of police abdication.

Among other contributions that the article makes, people who should know have told me that the article has by far the most detailed and extensive account of stand-down orders, police abdication, and attendant violence they have yet seen. I also point out that progressives who have taken up the “defund the police” mantra are in no position to argue that the police will protect us if people are not allowed to own guns. So what are you waiting for?

NEW FROM SCALIA LAW SCHOOL’S LIBERTY AND LAW CENTER: My colleague Nelson Lund on The Future of the Second Amendment in a Time of Lawless Violence. I’m executive director of the center, and we have several Second Amendment-related papers forthcoming in our working paper series, many if not all of which will be of interest to Instapundit readers. I will link to them as the working papers are published.

A REAL HUMAN RIGHTS HERO, RIP YURI ORLOV: Natan Sharansky: With Yuri Orlov’s bold vision, we lit a fire under the Soviet regime. While Orlov was being sent to a prison camp in Siberia, woke-hero-de jure Angela Davis was acting a shill for the USSR as a prominent member of the Soviet-controlled U.S. Communist Party. It’s worth recounting this anecdote from Alan Dershowitz’ book, Chutzpah. In the late 1979, when Jews in the USSR were being locked up for asserting their right to live Jewish lives, teach and learn Hebrew, and emigrate to Israel, Alan Dershowitz appealed to Davis, with her very close relationship with the USSR to intercede on their behalf. “Several days later, I [Dershowitz] received a call back from Ms. Davis’ secretary informing me that Davis had looked into the people on my list and none were political prisoners. ‘They are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism.’ Davis would urge that they be kept in prison where they belonged.” Yet somehow Ibram Kendi makes her the primary “anti-racist” hero of his book Stamped.