The Devil and Joe Biden

 

The Devil and Joe Biden

Bill O'Reilly, billoreilly.com

A front page article in the Wall Street Journal reminded me that a Roman Catholic priest in South Carolina denied Joe Biden communion just about one year ago.  Reverend Robert Morey blessed Mr. Biden but refused him the host, later saying the former Vice-President’s liberal position on abortion defies church teaching.

As with many Catholic politicians, Mr. Biden fell back on the rationalization that he could not impose his “private” beliefs on other Americans.  But in Biden’s case, that rings very hollow.

For decades then Senator Joe Biden supported the Hyde Amendment, which disallows federal money for the abortion procedure because that violates the religious rights of Catholics and other religious people.  There are exceptions for rape, incest, and serious medical danger to the mother.

The Hyde Amendment was fair because pro-choice Americans can easily donate money to fund Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers thereby assuring legal abortions can be made available to all.

There is no need for the federal government to force religious Americans to fund a life-ending procedure they reject on moral grounds.

But the new, progressive Joe Biden now repudiates the Hyde Amendment in a stunning reversal of conscience.  He also selected Kamala Harris, an aggressive pro-choice advocate, as his running mate.  Some describe the Biden-Harris ticket as the most pro-abortion political duo in history.

The Democratic platform is very clear: there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever.  A number of states have rebelled against that using “science” to justify regulations.  It is a medical fact that a baby is viable in the womb long before birth. Many legislators believe destroying a fetus after viability is a violation of human rights.

Joe Biden has not responded to that point-of-view and that’s his problem with the Catholic Church.  His political posture enables abortion at any time, for any reason. Just this week, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Vigano, warned Catholic voters that killing babies is “demonic.”

With almost 70 million Catholics registered to vote, Biden’s flip-flop on the Hyde Amendment and his political embrace of Senator Harris, could be a problem for him on Election Day.

However, the former Vice President is counting on the Catholic clergy remaining largely silent.  The church is frightened, intimidated, and under financial siege due to the clerical abuse of children.  Few American priests will speak out on anything.

After Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the nation’s most powerful Catholic voice, said the opening prayer at the Republican National Convention, he was brutally attacked on social and traditional media.  Some wealthy Catholic donors even resigned from church boards.  The message was heard loud and clear by Catholic clergy in America.

So Mr. Biden may well believe he has little to fear from the Church.

As for Joe’s faithfulness to the faith, who really knows?  In 1936, Stephen Vincent Benet wrote a short story entitled “The Devil and Daniel Webster.”  In it, a good man sells his soul for prosperity.  In real life, it would be unfair to suggest that any politician would ever do that.

Wouldn’t it?

The Problem with Cuties

 

This may be okay in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Paris, Sundance and Netflix, but child pornography is unacceptable. Netflix has taken odd positions before and I would encourage everyone to drop Netflix and state and national law enforcement take action. BH

The Problem with Cuties

Madeleine Kearns, National Review 

In critiquing the sexualization of children, the filmmakers sexualized children.

French director and writer Maïmouna Doucouré was rather taken aback to find that her film Cuties (Mignonnes) — an award winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — was so violently unpopular with the American public after it appeared here on Netflix. In response to promotional materials and clips from the movie (which showed eleven-year-old girls dressed and dancing like strippers), politicians, journalists, and celebrities complained that the streaming service was “basically distributing child pornography.” A petition calling for Netflix viewers to cancel their subscription gained 600,000 signatories. Yet the moviemakers were baffled, maintaining that “Cuties is a social commentary against the sexualization of young children.”

If this were a novel — or if the lead actresses weren’t minors — I might be inclined to side with the defenders. But Cuties isn’t a novel; rather it’s a visual medium, one in which actual eleven-year-old girls have been presented to millions of viewers in ways that, in any other context, would be considered reprehensible, if not criminal.

Since I suspect that many won’t watch the movie out of principle, I’ll try summarizing it.

Cuties explores the various ways that vulnerable young girls act out sexually. Set in modern-day France, it tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf), who moves with her family (her mother and two younger brothers) into a government-housing scheme. Amy, whose family are part of a strict Muslim community, soon discovers that her father intends to take a second wife, who will occupy the empty room next to hers. Owing to the conventions of her religion, her mother has no say in the matter and must even feign enthusiasm. Understandably feeling angry and confused, Amy internalizes her mother’s misery and seeks escape.

Before long, the “cuties,” a group of highly troublesome popular girls at school, attract Amy’s attention. The cuties lie, steal, fight, and (with unfettered access to hypersexualized pop culture through their phones) exhibit precocious sexual curiosity, particularly in relation to dancing. Having earned their acceptance, Amy is soon pressured into taking a video of a boy’s penis as he urinates in a school toilet. Soon, engrossed in her new double life, Amy slips beneath her hijab at a prayer meeting to watch adult women perform a raunchy stripper-esque dance routine. The cuties giggle at pornography in the school toilets; they strut, pout, and make crude sexual comments in order to attract the attention of older boys; they dress in skimpy and provocative clothing (Amy borrows her toddler brother’s T-shirt to use as a crop-top). And yet, all the while, the filmmakers remind us that they do not really understand what they are doing — that they are children. In one scene, one of the girls mistakes a used condom for a balloon, causing a chorus of prepubescent shrieking.

Angelica, the group’s ringleader, complains that she is neglected by her parents, but adds that at least “people like me.” Amy realizes during the most controversial scene in the movie — the cuties’ dance routine — that this isn’t who she is or wants to be and runs off the stage to find her mother. Thereafter, she changes into an age-appropriate outfit and plays outdoors with a skipping rope, a reminder of what girlhood ought to look like. But while the girls’ inappropriate behavior is not framed as liberation as much as a cry for help, and though depiction doesn’t equal endorsement, the nature of the depiction is harder to justify. During the dance sequence, the scantily clad girls grind, hump, and contort their bodies on stage in a way that would be gratuitously sexual for adults, never mind children. Even the (watered-down) IMDb “Parents’ Guide” fails to reassure:

A pair of tight leather pants on an 11-year-old girl are forcefully pulled down in the midst of a scuffle with another girl. . . .

11-year-old girls dance suggestively in front of a live adult audience.

Thus, whatever their artistic intentions, in making a social commentary about the sexualization of children, the filmmakers undeniably sexualized children.

Imagine if a movie, a social critique about cruelty to animals, depicted the literal burning and beatings of dogs and cats. Would it be morally convincing for filmmakers merely to replace the usual disclaimer “no animals were harmed in the making of this film” with a post-production protestation, “Oh but our whole point was to show that it’s wrong”? Obviously not. Besides, in the case of Cuties, there was an easy way around the artistic challenge that the script presented. Why didn’t they cast young adults who could be made to resemble minors?

Defenses of the film tend to start with the complaint that critics haven’t watched the film, but my complaint with those defending it is that they have watched it and yet still pretend there isn’t a major ethical problem. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes that “‘Cuties’ is a film of the center, and it’s aesthetically of the center — it depicts the unconsidered without advancing to the realm of the subjective, and it doesn’t allow its young protagonists much discourse, outer or inner.” Only a true intellectual could — when faced with the writhing, leather-clad bottoms and spreading legs of little girls — utter such besides-the-point nonsense.

I hate to say it but it’s not in the least bit surprising that this is a French film. In the 1970s, key thinkers of the French intelligentsia — Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Satre among them — published an open letter in Le Monde, a leading French newspaper, defending three men who had been charged with having sex with children under 15. For centuries, the French legal system didn’t classify sexual activity with children to be a criminal offense and, apparently, in some instances, it still doesn’t. In 2017, the French writer Valentine Faure summarized a recent case in a piece entitled “Can an Eleven-Year-Old Girl Consent to Sex?” (Ms. Faure thinks Not) for the New York Times:

The events, first reported by the website Mediapart, took place on April 24 in the Paris suburb of Montmagny. That afternoon, the child followed a man, who had already approached her twice in the previous days, telling her he “could teach her how to kiss and more.” They went to his building, where she performed oral sex in the hallway. Then she followed him to his apartment, where they had sexual intercourse. Afterward, he told her not to talk to anybody about it, kissed her on the forehead and asked to see her again.

On her way back home, the girl called her mother in a state of panic, realizing what had just happened. “Papa is going to think I’m a slut,” she said. The mother immediately called the police and pressed charges for rape. But citing Article 227-25 of the French criminal code, the public prosecutor stated that “there had been no violence, no coercion, no threat, no surprise,” and therefore, the man would be charged only with “sexual infraction.” That offense is punishable by five years in prison, while rape entails 20 years of imprisonment when the victim is under 15.

By comparison, the moral outrage of Americans at the first whiff of pedophilia is deeply reassuring. Yes, the filmmakers were on to something important: There is much at stake here, and in order to better protect children, we do have to explore unpleasant realities such as those discussed in the movie. Still, a clear line was crossed. The makers of Cuties didn’t merely simulate the cultural degradation and abuse of children, they became part of the problem they purport to protest.

American Idealism at its Birth

American Idealism at its Birth

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

Some American colleges and universities have received heat for posing in some form the question below:

Yes or no, the United States Constitution was designed to advance slavery? 

The question is great. The national disgrace is that so few students can muster a coherent argument for the obvious answer: No. Why? Because of the lousy history education too many received on the two subjects at hand: The Constitution and slavery.

At that great historic moment in the late 18^thcentury, a great many in the United States did not want the newly created nation to be just another country in the world and the issue of slavery struck at the heart of that dream. 

So what if the known world in the 1770s-1780s embraced the enslavement of people and in the case of many countries had done so for centuries upon centuries?

These American visionaries did not want to be just like everyone else. They wanted a country that continuously strove for a more perfect union of states. They wanted a nation that sought to be better in the future than they were today. 

For them it did not matter that slavery was the norm in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, West Africa, East Africa, South Africa, Southwest Asia, the Indian Sub-Continent, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. It did not mater to them that the planet, almost as a complete whole, embraced slavery.[1]

Unlike the rest of the world at that time, there was a deep and strongly rooted sense of American independence and exceptionalism. A great many that embraced American independence and exceptionalism stood against slavery from day one. The newly formed United States could not rid the world of slavery but brave Americans believed they could begin to end it. 

It was a hard fight to end slavery and proved far harder than many ever imagined. Undeterred, it began in the United States even before the War for Independence was won or the Constitution written.

Vermont put limits on slavery in 1777 and later banned it. Pennsylvania moved to abolish slavery over time in 1780. In Pennsylvania, after 1780 no new slaves could be added to the population and all children of slaves were born free. Massachusetts went even farther in 1783, ending slavery immediately and freed all slaves. New Hampshire also acted in 1783 to gradually eliminate slavery like Pennsylvania. New York did the same in 1788. 

By international standards, these truly were revolutionary polcies.

It was a divisive struggle to end slavery, nonetheless, and the fight was carried to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Amongst the delegates there, ending slavery was not universally accepted. 

There were many in America that accepted slavery – most obviously the overwhelming majority of slaveholders. What they advocated certainly was within mainstream international norms. Legal slavery was the politically correct worldview and the conventional wisdom of the day held that slavery was a fact of life.

Given all that, it is a wonder that so many Americans opposed slavery in the 18^thcentury. Slavery had been legal under British rule and if the rest of the world tolerated slavery then why did the United States have to be so exceptional? 

Why didn’t the Americans just obey the rules? After all, every country of importance permitted slavery and shouldn’t the new United States follow suit?  

The antislavery Americans fought back and ensured that no mention of slavery entered the Constitution. The war could not be won in 1788 but everyone on both sides knew that the fight against had just begun: The Constitution empowered each state to end slavery, and its amendment process opened the way to nationwide abolition.

Unique in the world, when the Constitution was ratified in 1788, the United States of America, almost alone in a giant slave-holding world, began the battle to end that great scourge on humanity. It met with success. 

As many new states entered the union, they eschewed slavery. Ohio became a state in 1802 and its state constitution explicitly banned slavery in all its forms. Many others followed suit. There even was some success at the national level when Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808. By 1860 most states (19 of 34) along with the backing of the large majority of America’s citizens had acted to end slavery.

When Abraham Lincoln of the abolitionist Republican Party was elected president in 1860, 11 of the 15 slave holding states went into open rebellion to protect slavery. 

That ushered in the great and bloody Civil War (1861-1865) and during that conflict, on 1 January 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery finally was abolished across the United States.

Yes, the United States of America was not the first country in the world to end slavery. Japan ended the practice in by 1615. Mexico ended slavery in 1829, England (to include Canada) in 1834, Denmark in 1848 and the Netherlands in 1861. 

 

But it is equally true that other countries lagged behind the United States. Portugal did not end slavery until 1878; Spanish Cuba did not act to end slavery until 1886 and Brazil, the country with the most slaves on the planet, held out until 1888. The Ottoman Empire officially ended slavery in 1890 but it took another decade to complete suppress its “legal” slavery and small-scale illegal slavery continued.

 

Thailand ended slavery in 1904, China only in 1910. It officially ended in Tanganyika and Namibia in 1919. And it is equally and importantly true that slavery still exists in both its ancient and modern forms in parts of the world today. It is a depressing and endlessly tragic history.

 

But in 1788 the United States of America, by adopting the Constitution, pushed against what the rest of world accepted as normal and fought the good fight – to form a more perfect union – from its inception. It continues to do so to this very day.

 

To use today’s international organizations as guideposts, you will find virtually every member state had institutionalized slavery in the late 17^thcentury: The UN, the OAS, the EU, OPEC, the G4/G7/G what have you. The same for military alliances like NATO and its opposition counterpart, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Go back a couple of centuries and you will find a vast mosaic of slave nations everywhere.

There is no international ranking of nations who did the most to end slavery but the United States of America, by relentlessly pursuing the end of slavery starting in the late 1700s, certainly ranks at or near the very top – and the instrument that made it possible was the Constitution.

It’s a Straight Line from Biden to BLM

 It’s a Straight Line from Biden to BLM

Andrew McCarthy, National Review. 

"The devil made me do it!” That was how funnyman Flip Wilson explained away his rogue moves in 1970s comedy bits. In 2020, it is Joe Biden’s rationalization of the Black Lives Matter revolution, with Baal taking on a decidedly orange cast.

An unmistakable correlation between the radical Left’s extortionate violence and the sudden tightening of polls has stirred the Democrats’ senescent standard-bearer to bolt the basement. He’d hoped to wait another week or so before emerging to read short speeches about President Trump’s erratic handling of COVID-19 (the government’s missteps during the Obama-era swine flu pandemic having apparently slipped Biden’s mind). But he’s got a tiger by the tail in the radical Left, which is turning electoral battlegrounds into smoldering battlefields. So now he’s hustling into the hustings with a narrative about what’s motivating his fellow travelers — who have just added murder to the mayhem they’ve wrought on America’s streets for the past three months.

Here’s the punchline: Trump made them do it!

That was the upshot of the former vice president’s speech in Pittsburgh on Monday. “Are you safe in Trump’s America?” His argument lays at the incumbent president’s feet the upheaval instigated by Democratic supporters in Democrat-run cities. In a weekend warm-up as the flames continued to rise in Portland, Minneapolis, and Kenosha, Biden claimed it is Trump who is “fanning the flames of hate.” By Monday, Biden was roaring about how, on Trump’s watch, the murder rate is up 26 percent in the nation’s cities this year (a shift from Democratic messaging of five minutes ago, which said surging crime was nothing to be concerned about because crime is still historically low — thanks to policing policies Democrats oppose, because, you know, racism).

As Rich Lowry relates, this is the Left’s blame-shifting response to violence from within its own ranks, which it lacks the will to counter. It is Trump supporters, we are told, who are “recklessly encouraging violence.” You could set your watch by it (if we still set watches): The Democratic nominee offered up the cartoon version of Trump backers, calling out “right-wing militias, white supremacists and vigilantes” as the worrisome “extremists.” And you could set your watch by this, too: no mention by Biden of the Marxist iconoclasts, the menacing Black Lives Matter activists, and the insurrectionist Antifa arsonists who are actually and quite deliberately tearing the country apart

Exactly how are the Trump deplorables to blame? How are they instigating the violence that Biden now “unequivocally” condemns (after remaining largely mum, while his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, was promoting a fund to bail out rioters)?

Why, by saying things that offend the Left’s hair-trigger sensibilities, that’s how.

If you are a conservative, a Republican, and/or a Trump supporter, you offend by backing candidates and policies the Left opposes. And don’t even think about doing it quietly because, it turns out, “silence is violence,” too — your very existence equates to offensive speech. There is only one way out for you: submission. You need to get with the program that capitalism is white supremacy, private property is colonialist exploitation, noticing the criminal records of criminals is racism, and supporting the arrest of those criminals when they forcibly resist is police brutality.

Wait a second, you’re thinking. Biden’s not with that program. He even says he’s no “radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters.” He’s a moderate, right?

Well, truth be told, he’s a hack. For half a century, he’s blown with the progressive gales, trying to stay on whatever seemed to be the popular side on a given day. In favor of using force in Iraq but against the Iraq war. For the “Russia Reset” after Moscow annexed parts of Georgia, but wannabe scourge of Russia after Moscow annexed parts of Ukraine. Back in 1994, he labored to brand tough Clinton crime legislation as the “Biden Bill”; now, with the Left decrying that law as the foundation of America’s racist “carceral state,” he’d prefer to forget the whole thing, and hopes you will, too.

We could go on . . . and on. But why bother? After all these decades, Biden, most of all, is the former vice president of the Obama administration. President Obama is the only reason he’s gotten this far. Pre-Obama, Biden’s presidential runs were a joke (written by somebody else); post-Obama, his patent weaknesses made even Obama-world lukewarm to his current bid to lead “Obama’s third term.”

The problem, of course, is that Obama got those two terms because of his charisma. His personal attractiveness was always leaps and bounds more popular than his progressive “Hope and Change!” agenda. His historical significance as the nation’s first black president tapped into the longing of Americans to transcend our racial divide — even as his manner of governance exacerbated tensions.

With Biden, you’d get none of that mystique. You’d get an Obama administration without Obama. You’d get the policy without the pizzazz.

And getting the policy means getting the Left’s radical revision of the First Amendment, codified in the Obama-Biden administration-backed U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. In a nutshell, it is the “heckler’s veto” — though would that the Left’s shock troops contented themselves with heckling.

I tried to warn about this eight years ago (and I’m grateful to my friend Dave Reaboi for noticing this week on Twitter). Resolution 16/18 is a blatantly unconstitutional provision the Obama-Biden government pushed to support Islamist regimes. Ostensibly, it is about religious liberty. In reality, it is the Left’s template for speech suppression.

The trick is to turn the once simple concept of incitement on its head.

The resolution purports to render unlawful any speech about religion that “constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence.” Its transparent purpose is to insulate Islamic doctrine from critical examination, notwithstanding that fundamentalists unabashedly exploit scripture to justify and promote terrorism.

In the Soviet style, the Left sustains its program with a combination of fantasy, indoctrination, and suppression. American history, for example, becomes the 1619 Project — the republic as an enterprise to perpetuate slavery. The Big Lie is cemented by Pulitzer prizes, K–12 curricula, and reparations bills; it is protected by attaching the smear of racism to naysayers who dare show that the project is farcical.

In the same vein, progressives have created their own fantasy version of Islam. Its defining tenet — indeed, its only known tenet — is anti-violence. You are to see terrorism as innately un-Islamic activity. Any claim that scripture justifies violence — i.e., any reading of what belligerent scriptures unambiguously say — is angrily rebuked as a distortion of the “true” Islam. Jihad itself is transmogrified into an internal struggle to become a better person, not a doctrinal command to wage war for the purpose of establishing the dominion of sharia (Islam’s law and cultural norms).

This is fraud. Obviously, it is not necessary for Muslims to construe their scriptures as a command to holy war in modern times, and most do not. Literally, though, the doctrine says what it says. To a greater or lesser extent, then, a not insignificant percentage of Muslims accepts this sharia-supremacist interpretation of Islam, which is backed by centuries of fundamentalist scholarship. Common sense says this is why there is so much jihadist terrorism. It is why many Islamic societies still hew to a literalist interpretation of sharia standards, endorsing discrimination, repression, and cruel corporate punishments that seem barbaric by today’s sensibilities.

That is reality. To acknowledge it as such is not to call for violence against Muslims. It is to resist violence by understanding both why some Muslims are committing it and why reformist Muslims need our support in their courageous work. Dealing with reality head-on is what adults do. It is critical thinking. The objective is to solve difficult problems, not tell stories about them.

The Obama-Biden administration rejected this approach. Their substitute is a fantasy, peddled tirelessly and protected by shutting down all debate — indeed, by making their opposition’s position unutterable, not just by intimidation but by the force of law.

Our free-expression right should make this impossible. At issue here is political speech, the exchange of ideas in examining a threat, in order to develop sensible security policy. That’s the First Amendment’s core. There have always been exceptions to free speech, however, and they include incitement: speech intended to spur people to violence and other lawlessness.

For years, the Left has been trying to reinterpret incitement (and if you can reinterpret jihad and reproductive health, how hard can incitement be?). How? By erasing the intent part. On this construction, monstrous in a free society that depends on accurate information to govern itself, I incite you not just by exhorting you to carry out violence and crimes, but by saying things that offend you.

In fact, things are now sufficiently daft that real incitement is no longer incitement if it’s done for The Cause. Joe Biden did not mention BLM in his speech because, for all his chest-beating about not being soft on violent radicals, he must give BLM immunity because, the dogma holds, BLM is fighting against racial injustice, America’s original — and apparently indelible — sin. By contrast, if you’re a conservative, or even a traditional, patriotic American liberal, you commit incitement not just when you actively offend the Woke Left by speaking up, but when you passively decline to affirm its delusions.

This contortion of incitement is the foundation of the Obama-Biden advocacy of Resolution 16/18.

Consider the following observation: There is a causative nexus between the commands to violence in Islamic scripture, the mediating influence of sharia-supremacist scholars, and the bombings of Western targets carried out by young Muslim men. When I made that observation in a courtroom in the mid Nineties, I was enforcing the law by marshaling evidence. If I made the same observation today, though, then according to Resolution 16/18, I would be violating the law by inciting hostility. The facts I’d be uttering would be as true as ever, but now, rather than informing you, I’d be framed as engaging in hate speech.

That’s the Left’s theory: It’s my fault if you can’t cope with news you don’t like. It’s not on you to control yourself; it’s on me to factor in your instability before opening my mouth. That I’m playing with fire is the offense; that you are the fire is to be overlooked, because you’re on fire over all the right things.

Back when Biden was in power, a few brave souls called the administration on the notion that our Constitution would ever tolerate a government-certified version of “truth,” insulated from dissent. It was left to Ol’ Reliable, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (the Democrats’ last presidential nominee), to defend Resolution 16/18. Unable to vouch for its constitutionality, she vowed that, if the coercive use of law were not an option, the government would “use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”

That’s where Biden and the Democrats are coming from. Are you surprised, then, to find BLM provocateurs screaming in the faces of pedestrians that they must accept the slander that the nation’s police forces are hunting down black men? To find BLM rabble-rousers menacing diners until they feebly raise a clenched fist in condemnation of our white supremacist society? To find BLM mobs shutting down roads, telling the frustrated motorists they mock that their best hope is to submit? How surprising is it to find BLM portraying police and Trump supporters as deserving of forcible attack? To find them simultaneously airbrushing the criminal histories of, and forcible resistance by, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Jacob Blake, as if police had no cause to arrest them — as if the effort to arrest them was motivated solely by their skin color?

The Obama-Biden approach to political opposition was: Try to make it illegal, use bureaucratic intimidation against it when no one’s looking, and if all else fails, resort to good old-fashioned peer pressure and shaming . . . whatever form that may take.

Black Lives Matter is not a reaction to Donald Trump. It is a subversive movement of loosely knit but lavishly funded chapters that exploded on the scene in the Obama years, amid the rioting over the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Demagogues turned those horrific incidents into racial controversies, despite the lack of evidence that racial animus led to the fatal confrontations, and despite the abundant evidence that the decedents were culpable. The Obama-Biden strategy was to embrace BLM as an ally, exploiting BLM’s agitation in order to suppress opposition to shared political goals.

It still is.

 

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy