How vulgar and falsehood-laden was Biden's Howard University commencement address?

 Joe Biden has long had a penchant for taking the low road. For instance, think about the 2012 speech in which he, by way of attempting to demonize Paul Ryan's budget proposal and Mitt Romney's support of it,  took a protectionist stance ("We're going to give a tax break to any company that unbolts their factory stuff and brings it back to Danville") that, ironically, later became a core element of Trump's economic "policy" and further gave it a Trumpist flavor by demonizing Wall Street and then letting loose with the big line clearly aimed at those in the audience who happened to be black that has followed him through the years:

Romney wants to let the  — he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.

 He's still at it.

In his recent commencement address to Howard University graduates, he claimed, with a straight face, that white supremacy was the country's most dangerous domestic terrorist threat. 

Wilfred Reilly, writing at National Review, makes clear that this is a lot of disingenuous divisiveness uttered solely to burnish his identity-politics boon fides:

. . . according to the centrist and well-respected Center for Strategic and International Studies, the average number of annual deaths caused by all American-based terrorists between 2014 and 2021 was 31.

 Even this represents a jump from the period between 1995’s Oklahoma City bombing and 2013, during which the domestic terror toll topped eight only twice. Saying that white supremacists are the biggest “home front” threat means in practice that all of them combined kill perhaps 20 American citizens annually, versus a toll of maybe ten for antifa/black bloc, the “Not F***ing Around Coalition,” and the like. CSIS records 38 white-supremacist and “like-minded” terror attacks in the fairly typical year of 2021, versus 31 for “anarchists” and so-called anti-fascists.

Let’s put this in more context. Obviously, almost all serious terrorist groups are international in range, and very many are specifically Islamic — the stereotype of the Arab terrorist has been around for decades and didn’t come from nowhere. At present, al-Qaeda, the group responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, has cells worldwide and controls a considerable amount of territory in Mali, Somalia, and Yemen. ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is based in those troubled nations where once Eden lay. New player Boko Haram is Nigerian and in practice controls much of the northeast of that rising Motherland power.

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Obviously, none of these truly major terror organizations — some of which, in practice, come frighteningly close to being unrecognized nations — qualifies as a U.S. domestic actor. And, speaking frankly, terrorism overall is probably no longer a top-five security threat to the United States — when compared with the rapid rise of China, the opiate and fentanyl epidemic (which killed 110,000 Americans last year), surging crime(murders hit 20,000 annually back in 2020), and so forth.

So, why the national-level focus on the rather niche problem of white supremacy — on 20 deaths per year as vs. 20,000? I sincerely think it’s because what some see as white conservative perfidy can safely be targeted in modern America, with little fear of “cancellation” or political backlash, at least from the Left. Since the civil-rights era of the 1960s, working-poor white Yanks have been very much cemented into liberal mythos as an enemy group: the whey-faced, dirty-handed rioters screaming abuse at sainted MLK. And, unlike other groups that may sometimes be unpopular — “hood” black dudes, “slut-walking” feminists, Muslim Islamists, the over-the-top Pride partiers we’ll all see in a month — they form a population that can generally be attacked without significant social risk. They are the Default Villains of the Prevailing Narrative.

This reality helps explain a phenomenon that is facially baffling to my Asian and West African friends: the constant near-beatification of unsympathetic black criminals killed during violent conflicts with whites or the police. My recent column on this topic discusses this phenomenon in the context of the death of Jordan Neely, a vagrant with 42 previous criminal arrests who was tragically killed during an incident on a New York City subway train. However, the trend dates back more than a decade, encompassing the cases of Jacob Blake, Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, and dozens more.

On the surface, objectively, this pattern is genuinely hard for many citizens to understand. Any death or serious injury is unfortunate, to be sure. But most or all of the deaths just listed seem legally justified. Jacob Blake, for example, had been accused of sexual assault and returned to the home of his purported victim despite her protests (the charge was later dropped). He was non-fatally shot by police after he fought them for several minutes. For his part, Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown, was cleared of any wrongdoing on self-defense grounds by multiple agencies — including the Obama Justice Department.

Even if you disagree with applying the word “justified” on some case-by-case basis, it remains fair to ask why such a hysterical level of mourning invariably erupts around what empirically are unremarkable local crime stories. Frenetic national media coverage of the Blake shooting, recall, helped kick off the Kenosha riots, which made Kyle Rittenhouse a household name. Objectively speaking, why should George Floyd — and not, say, hero cop David Dorn — be buried in a golden casket after four televised funerals? Why are there statues of Floyd in several cities?

The answer is that certain deaths and harms feed into a preexisting narrative: that the United States of 2023 is a white-supremacist country, where the political Left continues to struggle alone against this entrenched evil, and where those killed by the “white power structure” should be presumed to be heroes or at least martyrs. Biden, by searching out some technical category within which he could call white supremacy our greatest national foe, served this self-same narrative during his Howard speech.

The big problem here, bluntly, is that the story line Mr. Biden just promoted on the national stage has been false for decades. Per the proud HBCU faculty of Tuskegee Institute, the last recorded U.S. lynchings took place in 1964. Violent crime involving both blacks and whites is today just 3 percent of all serious “Index” crime . . . and it slants 80–90 percent black on white. What of the police “genocide” we keep hearing about, from presumably serious people? Well, in the most recent year on record, the total number of unarmed black men killed by on-duty U.S. law-enforcement officers was twelve.

The country would be better off if the president spent the rest of his term just being a doddering empty suit and lay off the activist schtick. We'd be less inclined to base policy on lies. 

 

 

Van Jones slathers an unneccesary layer of race consideration onto a truly horrible incident

 For a while, I was really inclined to give Van Jones the benefit of the doubt. He behaves civilly on panels with conservatives. I have even aligned with some of his observations in recent times.

But he slammed it into reverse with his chiming-in on the Memphis beating death of Tyre Nichols by five police officers. He went to the most vulgar, Kendi-esque level, and left himself open to the charge of lobbing a cheap shot by saying "it could be a factor."

It? Come on, you know damn good and well what "it" is:

. . . racial animus can still be a factor, even when the perpetrators are all Black. And that’s especially true if these actions are a part of a broader pattern and practice within the Memphis Police Department. 

It’s a sad fact, but one that’s old as time itself: People often oppress people who look just like them. The vast majority of human rights abuses are committed by people who look exactly like the people they are abusing.

Thomas Chatterton Williams gets right to the heart of what is so poisonous about such brazen speculation:

Thomas Chatterton Williams

@thomaschattwill

What if, stay with me, these five men were actually agents responsible for their own reprehensible actions and not merely hapless puppets being manipulated by the invisible hand of inescapable and omnipotent white supremacy?

Exactly.

An arrested suspect in a reckless-driving incident died and the five police officers who handled the incident are under arrest for second-degree murder.

Any further prattle about what happened is a naked attempt to foment societal trouble in order to increase the chances for influence and power among those doing the prattling. 

And it reduces all those involved to the status of agency-deprived individuals. Distilled to its essence, it's feigned pity, calculated to perpetuate the racialist sludge in which certain elements want to see us permanently mired. 

The Georgia Senate-seat choices: a microcosm of post-America's general situation

 You're surely at least acquainted with the Herschel Walker situation. Just to make sure the table is set, here's the basic story:

After a woman revealed that Republican senatorial candidate Herschel Walker had urged her to have an abortion, Walker adamantly denied the story and claimed he had no idea who this woman could be.

But there’s a good reason the woman finds that defense highly doubtful: She’s the mother of one of his children.

When the woman first told The Daily Beast her story, we agreed not to reveal certain details about her identity over her concerns for safety and privacy. But then Walker categorically denied the story and said he didn’t know who was making this allegation.

On Wednesday morning, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked Walker whether he had figured out the woman’s identity, based on details in the original report.

“Not at all,” Walker replied. “And that’s what I hope everyone can see. It’s sort of like everyone is anonymous, or everyone is leaking, and they want you to confess to something you have no clue about.”

He's claiming he doesn't know her from Adam, but along with the child he convinced her to snuff, they have a kid who has since grown to adulthood.

The mom says Walker talked like a Christian when it was advantageous:

Asked about the role faith played in Walker’s life, the anonymous woman, who identifies as a Christian herself, said even though Walker often talked about Christianity, he uses it “when it works for him.”

She said Walker frequently talked about being a Christian, but never once expressed any misgivings about abortion generally—or any regret about the one that they had. When she got pregnant again years later, the woman says she made a different choice, even though Walker said it still wasn’t “a convenient time” for him.

“He didn’t express any regret. He said, ‘relax and recover,’” the woman recalled, alluding to the message on the “get well” card Walker sent her along with the abortion payment.

“He seemed pretty pro-choice to me. He was pro-choice, obviously,” she said.

“I don’t think there’s anywhere in the Bible where it says ‘Have four kids with four different women while you’re with another woman.’ Or where it praises not being a present parent. Or that an abortion is an OK thing to do when it’s not the right time for you, but a terrible thing for anyone else to do when you are running for Senate. He picks and chooses where it’s convenient for him to use that religious crutch,” she said.

Another Walker son spills some beans about what kind of dad the candidate wasn't"

After Walker denied the report, one of his three sons, conservative social media influencer Christian Walker, released a series of angry statements and videos condemning his dad as a liar, and alleging that the University of Georgia football hero had threatened to murder him and his mother—Walker’s ex-wife.

“I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us,” Christian Walker tweeted after the abortion story broke Monday night. “You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence.”

A clip from Dana Loesch's podcast is also getting widely disseminated. The link is in the excerpt below, if you're up for getting thoroughly disgusted:

. . . many Republican backers and media personalities—including Walker himself—have seized on the woman’s anonymity to dismiss the report. On Tuesday, former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch called her “one broad” and a “skank.”

Dana's one of those media righties whose on-air persona should have provided clues as to how the Trump phenomenon would affect her. Before the Very Stable Genius came on the scene, she was already honing the "I'm-a-gal-from-the-hills-of-southern-Missouri-who's-handy-with-all-kinds-of-firearms-and-I-don't-take-any-s--- -from anybody" image that became her stock in trade. Her contribution of an essay to National Review's 2016 Against Trump issue was seen, by me, at least, as a surprise. Rowdy radio personalities didn't - and still don't - generally find the VSG objectionable.

But in this era in which the head of their cult is out of office, Trumpists and Neo-Trumpists are leaning heavy into this drag-the-brand-across-the-finish-line mentality. That's how they justified their enthusiasm for Trump, taking the I-don't-care-how-dastardly-he's-been-in-his-personal-life stance, because they thought their policy aims required a desperate clinging-to. 

The vomit-inducing Kurt Schlichter has a column at Townhall today expressing much the same point, saying, in essence, "So the Left thinks it bothers me that it's calling me a hypocrite? Don't flatter yourselves." Sorry, no linky-love. You're a busy person anyway; you don't have time for such garbage. Trust me, it's the usual hell-yeah-I'm-proud-of-my-positions bluster.

But what of Walker's opponent in the Georgia Senate race, the incumbent, Raphael Warnock?

He's a leftist in good standing, checking all the correct identity-politics-militancy boxes, which wouldn't qualify him as much more than a garden-variety modern Democrat, except that when he played the race card in the case of his half-brother, it required him to omit some inconvenient facts that eventually came to light:

When he talks about racism in the U.S. justice system, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) often cites the case of his older brother—a "first-time," "nonviolent" drug offender who was sentenced to life in prison due to a "pandemic of racism," according to the senator.

Warnock has compared his half-brother, whose full name is Keith Coleman, to black victims of police shootings, attributed his imprisonment to the "stigma of color and criminality," and praised his early release in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a day of "hope" for the justice system.

But hundreds of pages of court records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon tell a more complicated story: Coleman was a cop with the Savannah Police Department when he was convicted of facilitating a cross-country cocaine trafficking operation in 1996 and 1997—and once warned that he could send a drug dealer’s "black ass" to prison if the dealer didn’t pay Coleman more money.

The details conflict with Warnock’s accounts, which omit that Coleman was a police officer and portray him as a victim of law enforcement corruption rather than a participant in it.

"[My brother] was a first-time offender, convicted of a nonviolent drug-related offense, in which no one got hurt, no one died, no one even got high because the federal government basically created the sting operation," said Warnock in a June 2020 speech to the American Jewish Archives.

Here are the details of how Coleman came to have a run-in with the law:

In November 1995, the FBI launched an undercover sting campaign called "Operation Broken Oath" to investigate whistleblower tips about dirty cops within the Savannah Police Department, according to a pretrial investigative report by the bureau. The probe ensnared nearly a dozen police officers who agreed to provide paid security for undercover FBI agents and informants posing as cocaine traffickers.

One of these officers was Coleman, who quickly became a ringleader in the illegal scheme, using his police-issued handgun and car to escort the purported drug dealers as they drove kilos of cocaine to airports, hotels, and warehouses, according to prosecutors.

Coleman "continued to push for more work and more money." He demanded higher payments after an undercover agent posing as a drug dealer offered him $1,500 for one cocaine-trafficking job.

"If I knowed I was fucking with a motherfucker off the corner who can't afford [to pay me] no more than $1,500, his black ass would be in prison," said Coleman, according to an audio recording cited in the court records.

Coleman later demanded that the purported drug traffickers place the payments in envelopes instead of handing him stacks of cash, arguing that this was a better way to avoid detection.

"No counting by the car," he told them. "[Some witness] might want to mail some shit to 60 Minutes. … ‘I saw police taking some money by a car. Why would he be doing that?’"

Prosecutors allege Coleman received $46,000 in dirty payments and helped traffic a total of 28.2 kilograms of cocaine between November 1996 and March 1997.

On Nov. 21, 1997, Coleman was convicted by a jury of conspiring and attempting to aid and abet the distribution of cocaine, and with carrying a firearm during a drug trafficking offense. He was sentenced to life in prison, and two of his co-conspirators were sentenced to 17 years and 19 years, respectively.

Court records cited Coleman’s possession of a weapon, his abuse of power as a police officer, and his recruitment of other cops as justification for a longer sentence.

And with regard to Warnock's short-lived marriage, most media coverage tends to focus on the fact that his wife's foot showed no signs of injury during the row in which she claims he ran over it with his car.

But that's not all there is to that story:

Georgia Democratic senator Raphael Warnock has been ordered to attend mediation for a custody dispute with his ex-wife, after she accused him of neglecting visitation with their two young children and failing to pay childcare expenses.

Fulton County Superior Court judge Shermela J. Williams said on Friday that there were "numerous unresolved issues" between Warnock and his ex-wife Oulèye Ndoye, and ordered the couple to try to reach a mediated settlement by May 7. A status hearing in the case was also scheduled for May 16, with both Warnock and Ndoye required to attend, according to a notice from the judge on Monday.

Williams did not rule on Ndoye's request that Warnock be held in contempt of court for failing to abide by the original custody agreement.

The allegations against Warnock could undercut his campaign branding as an advocate for women, children, and low-income families. But if the mediation is successful, it could allow Warnock to settle the feud outside of court—and away from the public spotlight—as he mounts a reelection campaign for one of the most hotly contested seats in the midterm elections.

In a court filing in February, Ndoye accused Warnock of leaving her "financially strapped" by refusing to reimburse her for childcare expenses. She said Warnock also "routinely neglects" to give her notice when he is traveling out of town during his visitation days, and instead has the children "picked up from school by friends and [leaves] them with various babysitters overnight" while he is away.

Ndoye claimed Warnock also refused to return personal items that were awarded to her in divorce agreement. She asked the court to hold him in contempt for violating the custody order and that it be revised to allow her to move the children to Massachusetts, where she plans to attend a program at Harvard.

Warnock is also on board with Stacey Abrams's claim that Georgia Republicans want to make voting difficult for particular demographics , a claim that has not been borne out by voter-turnout data.

But we all know why Georgia voters are faced with such dismal options. The Very Stable Genius inserted himself into the January 2021 runoff, telling voters to stay home. For someone who had a keen interest in conflating Republicanism with Trumpism, he sure fouled his own nest with that move. Not that Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue were any great shakes as candidates, but if the point was to advance the Pub brand, he achieved the opposite.

So the Peachtree State's dilemma is ours as a nation. We can either vote for the party of cowards, nuts and sycophants, or the party of wealth redistribution, identity politics militancy and climate alarmism.

Or we can refrain from voting and network with like-minded citizens who insist on a healthier political ecosystem. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The obligatory Kyle Rittenhouse post

 There are several layers to peel back in each of the racially charged police encounters in 2020 that each led to riots in the cities where they occurred.

Has enough time passed for us to concede that there was a pattern with regard to the individuals shot in those cases? That is, can we acknowledge certain facts about them without having the charge of racism lobbed at us? 

George Floyd was full of meth and fentanyl and resisted arrest. Among the convictions on his criminal record was one for holding a loaded gun to the belly of a pregnant woman whose home he'd burglarized. 

Rayshard Brooks was cooperative with police until he realized that an arrest on his fateful night would squelch his probation and send him back to prison. For what?

Rayshard Brooks drove drunk, resisted arrest, assaulted two cops, stole a taser, used that taser on a cop, and has a long and extensive criminal history. He’s been charged with false imprisonment, battery on a family member, cruelty to children, theft, receiving stolen property, interference with custody, obstruction of an officer, and a handful of other misunderstandings.

Even Breanna Taylor was making poor decisions right up to her death. She was the caretaker for her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend's finances even up to that day. 

Which brings us to Jacob Blake, the young Kenosha, Wisconsin man whose shooting and subsequent paralysis set blocks of that city ablaze - and brought Kyle Rittenhouse to town. He has pleaded guilty to two charges of disorderly conduct and domestic abuse stemming from an incident at his ex-girlfriend's home. 

Here's the pattern among these situations: these were people with long track records of unsavory behavior who were made martyrs and heroes by a sizable swath of the public by virtue of their having been shot by police. 

Now, let us summarize Kyle Rittenhouse's role in the aftermath of Blake's shooting. He lived in Illinois, but decided, upon hearing about the Kenosha riot, to cross the state line, transporting an AR-15 he was too young to legally possess. He didn't have a driver's license. He violated Kenosha's public-safety curfew. He behaved like a yay-hoo and a hot dog. What he did was extremely foolish.

But there are more layers of consideration to peel back. Jason Whitlock offers a glimpse into the background of the two guys - white guys - that Rittenhouse shot:

Rosenbaum was a convicted pedophile. A decade ago, a grand jury in Arizona indicted him on 11 counts of child molestation involving five boys ranging in age from 9 to 11. The charges included anal rape. He copped a plea and was convicted of two of the 11 counts. He suffered bipolar disorder. He attempted suicide. He was released from a mental institution hours before confronting Rittenhouse, threatening to kill Rittenhouse, and trying to take Rittenhouse's AR-15 rifle.

Huber was a serial domestic abuser. He pled guilty to strangulation, suffocation, and false imprisonment. He had been charged with disorderly conduct and use of a dangerous weapon. In the moments before Rittenhouse shot him, Huber clubbed Rittenhouse with a skateboard. 

Whitlock goes on to point out the irony of the attempt to confer martyrdom on these characters:

Rosenbaum and Huber are the new O.J. Simpson. They are the stars of "White Is the New Black," a docu-series airing on CNN, MSNBC, and across all social media platforms illustrating the utter lunacy of a "racial justice" agenda built around irritating conservative white people. 

That's the point of racial justice. Irritating white people. 

We, black people, are so confused, so misled, so lacking in strategy, leadership, integrity, and substance that we've reduced black progress to trolling white people. We replaced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with "Black Twitter." 

How does convicting Rittenhouse of murder for defending himself against the attack of psychotic criminals advance the cause of black people?

It doesn't. It's no different from the acquittal of O.J. Simpson. A handful of black comedians made money cracking O.J. jokes. Johnnie Cochran burnished his reputation as America's best trial lawyer. And black people got to giggle among themselves about how irate their co-workers were that O.J. walked. 

But nothing changed for the betterment of black people. The biggest winners were the cable news channels. O.J. launched TV careers and networks. Fox News and MSNBC launched in the aftermath of the Simpson trial. Greta Van Susteren, Geraldo Rivera, Dan Abrams, David Gregory, Nancy Grace, Harvey Levin, Jeffrey Toobin, and Eliot Spitzer all rode the Trial of the Century to fame and fortune. 

O.J. benefited the white people who were willing to go on TV and lie about what was happening inside the courtroom. The O.J. trial is the only trial I watched start to finish. Cochran and his dream team of attorneys destroyed the prosecution from voir dire to closing arguments. The TV experts pretended that prosecutors Marcia Clark and Chris Darden were holding their own. 

The same thing is playing out in the Rittenhouse trial. Corporate media are pretending the prosecution is proving Rittenhouse is guilty of murder, and black people are foolishly anticipating a moment of frustrated-white-people satisfaction.

Black people are Charlie Brown kicking a football that white people keep pulling at the last second. The frustration of white people does not improve the lives of black people. 

If we want to be taken seriously, we need a far more tangible goal. The current one is embarrassing and counterproductive. It makes black people look weak, illogical, and immoral. The current goal forces us to turn O.J. Simpson, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, Joseph Rosenbaum, and Anthony Huber into martyrs and heroes. 

A guy in Oregon hs used the situation to gin up and legitimize black fragility over this:

A Black Lives Matter clown from Portland, Oregon — Greg McKelvey — tweeted yesterday that employers should give their black employees a day or two off from work after the Rittenhouse verdict… regardless of the verdict. McKelvey says it's going to be hard for us to work and it isn't fair for our employers to expect us to.

The deaths of a white pedophile and a white domestic abuser have shaken black people to the point that we need time off work to recover? McKelvey is insane. He suffers racial dysphoria. He's half black and half white, born to a black dad and a white mom. He's married to a white woman. His children look whiter than Mike Pence in the dead of winter. 

McKelvey is the worst kind of half-white liberal. He absolutely loves the white fruit, but his blue-check public persona is based on pretending to hate the white tree that produced it.

Let's return for a moment to this matter of a pattern. As we all know, each of the 2020 situations resulted in block after block of the cities involved (as well as other cities) going up in flames.  

New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles was on the ground in Kenosha, but  her employer saw fit to sit on her story in a bit of shady timing:

Until quite recently, the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild. 

When I was at the New York Times, I went to Kenosha to see about this, and it turned out to be not true. The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots. It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered. Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.

Something odd happened with that story after I filed it. It didn’t run. It sat and sat.

Now it could be that the piece was just bad. I’ve sent in bad ones before, and I’ll do it again. A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.

There were a variety of reasons given—space, timing, tweaks here or there.

Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore. The old man who tried to put out a blaze at a Kenosha store had his jaw broken. The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign in June 2020 amid staff outcry for publishing a piece with the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.” 

If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.

To summarize:

•  Kenosha burned as an expression of rage over a guy with a domestic-abuse warrant resisting arrest and getting shot as a result.
• Kyle Rittenhouse was an overheated yay-hoo who shouldn't have been anywhere near Kenosha.
• He was rightly found innocent of charges of murder in the shootings of Rosenbaum and Huber.

What he would be wise to do is to go home, keep a very low profile and quietly rebuild his life.

But it doesn't look like that's the route he's going to take. He's scheduled to appear on Tucker Carlson's television program Monday night.

One hopes that he'll decline the gift of a brand-new AR-15 from Gun Owners of America, but let us not hold our breath. 

This is why post-America can't have nice things. Something happens that lends itself to an identity-politics angle, which is immediately exploited by hustlers, there's a reaction to that, and everyone hardens his or her position based on an incomplete presentation of facts.

There is no one who comes anywhere close to being a hero here. Not Rittenhouse, not Rosenbbaum or Huber, not Jacob Blake, and certainly not Tucker Carlson and most definitely not the chunks of dog vomit posing as human beings a rung below even Carlson. 

It is so very late in the day.