‘Historian’ Declares Second Amendment Is Racist
Carol Anderson, a leftist historian, recently released her latest book titled The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Obviously, the provocative title indicates her preconceived conclusion. “One of the things that I argue throughout this book is that it is just being Black that is the threat,” she asserts. “And so when you mix being Black as the threat with bearing arms, it’s an exponential fear.” She dubiously adds, “This isn’t an anti-gun or a pro-gun book. This is a book about African Americans’ rights.”
As Shakespeare once put it, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
While Anderson may claim her book is not an anti-gun tome, her thesis — that the Second Amendment is “racist” — belies such denials. Anderson attacks the Second Amendment by arguing that its language was intentionally crafted to ensure that slave owners had access to firearms in order to put down any potential slave rebellions, while slaves were denied the same right. She insists that the Second Amendment was “not some hallowed ground but rather a bribe, paid again with Black bodies.”
That’s spurious and ahistorical conjecture. Anderson fraudulently injects nefarious racial motives into the creation of the Second Amendment that are not supported by the plain language of the text, or by recorded debate at the time.
As David Harsanyi puts it, “This is wishful thinking. The Second is an attempt — much like the 1619 Project — to reimagine history in purely racial terms. The result is [a] tendentious polemic that suffers not only from a paucity of historical evidence, but from a dishonest rendering of the facts we do know.”
Anderson is not presenting any serious scholarship. Instead, she’s pushing a clearly biased and erroneous rewriting of history, all through the lens of “wokeness.” The result is nothing more than pure leftist propaganda passed off as “scholarship.”
Furthermore, the historical record shows that it was not Second Amendment advocates who have a history of advocating racism, but rather the proponents of gun-control. As our own Louis DeBroux notes, “Lost in all of the race-baiting recriminations is the fact that gun control laws have racist origins.” White Democrats didn’t want even free blacks to own guns, so they made it illegal.
Besides, one famous gun-toting Republican slave-freer was certainly not opposed to the Second Amendment. As her biographer Kate Clifford wrote, “Harriet Tubman carried a small pistol with her on her rescue missions, mostly for protection from slave catchers.”
The historical record is clear. The intention of the Founders in creating the Second Amendment was to codify in the Bill of Rights what was the long-held belief regarding an individual’s rights based upon English common law, including the right to bear arms to defend oneself and one’s property. This was understood to be a universal human right.
Not only is Anderson’s book dismally lacking historical accuracy, it is in fact an attack against the very concerns she claims to be seeking to protect. ~The Patriot Post
ProPublica Billionaire Tax Story Serves Dem Narrative
Sometimes billionaires don’t pay income taxes. That’s an overstatement, but not by a lot, at least according to a supposedly blockbuster report by ProPublica. It’s a sordid tale of hypocrisy and illegal activity that seems to be as juicy a news story as one could hope for, and ProPublica aims to slow-drip the information over the coming weeks — in a transparent effort to keep generating traffic and revenue for itself.
The nonprofit journalism site reports that it “obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.”
The top-line information is indeed astounding:
In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.
Predictably, the conclusion ProPublica reaches is that the Democrat narrative about taxes is correct:
Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.
Oddly enough, however, the billionaires strung up by ProPublica advocate Democrat policies, and spend loads of their own money to bring them to fruition. Warren Buffett in particular has advocated higher taxes while doing everything the law allows to avoid them himself. Or, as ProPublica wryly puts it, “No one among the 25 wealthiest avoided as much tax as Buffett, the grandfatherly centibillionaire. That’s perhaps surprising, given his public stance as an advocate of higher taxes for the rich.”
The hypocrisy is certainly jarring. “The difference between conservatives and progressives,” says Bill Whittle, “is conservatives say we should be paying as little tax as possible, progressives are saying we should be paying as much tax as possible, and then both sides go out and try to pay as little tax as possible.”
More than the hypocrisy, though, these socialist billionaires hate America as it was founded and are funding the destruction of Liberty.
There’s no love lost here for these guys, but let’s point out the real illegal activity — obtaining these records. ProPublica’s journalists know this, though they try mightily to cast aspersions on the billionaires instead. “The ultrawealthy,” they say, “avoid taxes, exploit loopholes and escape scrutiny from federal auditors.”
But those deductions are perfectly legal, and there’s nothing to indicate truly illegal activity on the part of these tax-filers. It is, however, against the law for the IRS to expose this private information, so either someone in the IRS illegally leaked it or someone outside the agency illegally hacked it. The IRS says it’s investigating. Either way, ProPublica swears the source was truly anonymous, and the organization has no idea about the motives of its source.
“Allow us to fill in that last blank,” write the editors of The Wall Street Journal. “The story arrives amid the socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden Administration’s effort to pass the largest tax increase as a share of the economy since 1968. The main Democratic argument for a tax hike is that the rich should pay their ‘fair share.’ The ProPublica story is a long argument that somehow the rich don’t pay enough. The timing here is no coincidence, comrade.”
Indeed, the Senate Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday began with Ron Wyden (D-Taxman) using this very story to argue that “the country’s wealthiest … have not been paying their fair share.”
Remember too that Barack scumbag/liar-nObama weaponized the IRS to hurt his political opponents. Just because Lois Lerner took an early retirement doesn’t mean there aren’t deep state actors within the IRS still leaking this kind of information to wage political warfare.
What do Democrats want to do? socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden wants to further weaponize the IRS in order to crack down on fraud and tax avoidance. He claims $80 billion in greater funding for agency enforcement over a decade will help fund his radical leftist agenda with perhaps $700 billion in more revenue over that timeframe.
Senators dinky/liar-Elizabeth Warren and socialist/commie-Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, want a wealth tax to rectify the inequities highlighted by this conveniently timed ProPublica story. Something tells us, however, that the tax bill for the socialists named here won’t change much even under the dinky/liar-Warren/ socialist/commie-Sanders plan, though we also believe that plan is just the beginning of their effort to confiscate ever more money from ever more Americans.
In service to this agenda, the ProPublica story deliberately conflates income with wealth.
Ultimately, the real story boils down to the most basic motivation for the Left: envy. Leftists are perpetual victims, griping that someone else has more or better than they. If proving it means publishing illegally obtained private information, well, these fat cats had it coming. And the Democrats who want to extract the “fair share” from every American are just the ones to “fix it.” ~The Patriot Post
Judge Strikes Down CA ‘Assault Rifle’ Ban
Federal Judge Roger Benitez in the Southern District of California ruled last Friday that the state’s “assault weapons” ban was unconstitutional. He didn’t stop there. Benitez blasted the false and hyperbolic terminology of “assault weapon” that has been popularly and erroneously applied to commonly owned firearms like the AR-15. “This case is not about extraordinary weapons lying at the outer limits of Second Amendment protections,” Benitez wrote. “The banned ‘assault weapons’ are not bazookas, howitzers, or machine-guns. Those arms are dangerous and solely useful for military purposes. Instead, the firearms deemed ‘assault weapons’ are fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles. This is an average case about average guns used in average ways for average purposes.”
Benitez also criticized the role the mainstream media has played in furthering this false “assault weapons” narrative. “One is to be forgiven if one is persuaded by news media and others that the nation is awash with murderous AR-15 assault rifles,” he said.
He then essentially gave a lesson about tools used in crime. “The facts, however, do not support this hyperbole, and facts matter,” he wrote. “Federal Bureau of Investigation murder statistics do not track assault rifles, but they do show that killing by knife attack is far more common than murder by any kind of rifle. In California, murder by knife occurs seven times more often than murder by rifle. For example, according to F.B.I. statistics for 2019, California saw 252 people murdered with a knife, while 34 people were killed with some type of rifle — not necessarily an AR-15. A Californian is three times more likely to be murdered by an attacker’s bare hands, fists, or feet, than by his rifle. In 2018, the statistics were even more lopsided as California saw only 24 murders by some type of rifle. The same pattern can be observed across the nation.”
Benitez’s ruling came as a result of the Firearms Policy Coalitions 2019 lawsuit raised against California’s 32-year-old Assault Weapons Control Act (AWCA).
FPC President Brandon Combs celebrated the ruling, stating, “Judge Benitez held what millions of Americans already know to be true: Bans on so-called ‘assault weapons’ are unconstitutional and cannot stand. This historic victory for individual liberty is just the beginning, and FPC will continue to aggressively challenge these laws throughout the United States. We look forward to continuing this challenge at the Ninth Circuit and, should it be necessary, the Supreme Court.”
Benitez also took the state government to task for its failure to protect its residents’ constitutional rights, arguing: “You might not know it, but this case is about what should be a muscular constitutional right and whether a state can force a gun policy choice that impinges on that right with a 30-year-old failed experiment. It should be an easy question and answer. Government is not free to impose its own new policy choices on American citizens where Constitutional rights are concerned. … The Second Amendment stands as a shield from government imposition of that policy. There is only one policy enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Guns and ammunition in the hands of criminals, tyrants and terrorists are dangerous; guns in the hands of law-abiding responsible citizens are better. To give full life to the core right of self-defense, every law-abiding responsible individual citizen has a constitutionally protected right to keep and bear firearms commonly owned and kept for lawful purposes.”
Well, said, Judge. ~The Patriot Post
socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s Feckless Fall Girl
Passing out those creepy scumbag/liar-Kamala cookies certainly didn’t help.
“We will discourage illegal migration,” the border czar continued. “The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border. There are legal methods by which migration can and should occur but we, as one of our priorities, will discourage illegal migration and I believe if you come to our border you will be turned back.” Suuuuure they will, socialist/scumbag/liar-Kamala … sure they will.
One wonders whether she knows how ridiculous she sounds. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley knows, and she reminded us of the Jesse Jacksonian jingle scumbag/liar-Harris tweeted out in 2017: “Say it loud, say it clear, everyone is welcome here.”
“After years of telling migrants to come and bashing border security, scumbag/liar-Kamala Harris is now saying ‘do not come,’” Haley tweeted yesterday. “Too little, too late: over 170,000 migrants crossed our border last month. This is a crisis and her words helped create it.”
There’s an old saying — one we’re not allowed to utter any longer because of its all-too-obvious gynophobic, homophobic, and transphobic implications — that behind every successful man is a woman. But we wonder: What’s behind a doddering ol’ dolt of a man?
socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden is fast finding out. As political analyst Kyle Smith writes:
scumbag/liar-Kamala Harris is playing a historic role in 2021: the nation’s first black, Asian, female vice president to serve as a sacrificial lamb.
Like many other women before her, scumbag/liar-Harris has been tasked with coming in late to clean up a mess made by her boss. socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden probably wouldn’t do too well in a ‘Jeopardy!’ contest, or even on a circle-a-word puzzle, but he’s smart enough to know that when you’ve got a problem you can’t solve, you should grandly announce a plan to deal with it by … fobbing it off on someone else.
scumbag/liar-Harris, of course, was charged by socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden to stem the migrant surge at our southern border — a surge whose numbers are already the most since 2006, according to preliminary Customs and Border Protection data. So far, she’s failed miserably and predictably.
Perhaps it’d help if she actually visited the real estate she’d been charged with protecting. Yesterday, Harris said she plans to drop by the U.S.-Mexico border at some point, although it’s been 77 days — and counting — since socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden appointed her as border czar.
“Yes, I will and I have before,” she said during a media availability in Mexico City after meeting with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. “Listen, anybody, especially if you’re from California you know, I’ve spent a lot of time on the border both going there physically and being aware of the issues.”
That might be true. But not in her capacity as vice president. scumbag/liar-Harris is clearly over her head, clearly not ready for prime time. She couldn’t even handle a simple question from a friendly face like NBC’s Lester Holt.
“I want to be very clear,” said Harris yesterday in Mexico City, “that the problem at the border in large part, if not entirely, stems from the problems in these countries. I cannot say it enough.”
Oh yes she can say it enough.
The “problem at the border” isn’t “root causes,” as she’s been reflexively claiming of late. The problem is the open-borders immigration policies of socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden, scumbag/liar-Kamala Harris, and the Democrat Party. ~The Patriot Post
socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden Catches Up to GOP on Unemployment Incentive
Another relic of the COVID-19 outbreak may soon be on its way out.
Seeing the success of states that have opened up their economies and are putting the brakes on the federally backed enhanced unemployment benefits, socialist/ scumbag/liar-Joe Biden announced he won’t seek another extension to the program when it expires in September.
Speaking from the beach enclave of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware — a town where, much like the rest of America, employers are practically begging for applicants — socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden said that ending the unemployment program “makes sense.” Never mind that clearer heads have been saying this for months now.
Back in Washington, White House Press Secretary liar-Jen Psaki echoed her boss, saying Friday, “I think the question is, do you think Americans, given seven million are still out of work or more than that, could benefit from eight more weeks or 10 more weeks of these $300 unemployment benefits? Our view is they can and they should.” This was their reaction to a second consecutive month of disappointment on the jobs front, as expectations went unmet once again.
Seven million still out of work? Well, as The Washington Free Beacon reports, “U.S. job openings reached a record high [of 9.3 million] in April, a reflection of the ongoing labor shortage that economists blame in part on the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration’s enhanced unemployment benefits.”
Even Democrats are beginning to see the connection. Business owners “want to make money, they want to be open, but they’re having a problem getting people” due to expanded unemployment benefits, said Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) last month. “Every single business owner that I know that has reached out to me has talked about this as their number one issue.”
Perhaps that’s why socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden may be taking the cue of more than half the states, which have already announced an early end to the payouts. The plays to emotion and blaming of “cruel” Republicans notwithstanding, Americans seem to innately understand that we’re not fully recovered from the China virus until we regain full pre-pandemic employment — and we remain roughly seven million jobs short.
It’s likely, however, that the recalcitrant states that have Democrat governors are using the extra federal COVID funding to fatten their coffers and build their welfare system back better. As an added bonus to Democrats, this is artificially driving up wages toward their fanciful dreams of $15 an hour. In fact, The Wall Street Journal recently quoted three economists who came up with a shocking factoid: “Economists Casey Mulligan, E.J. Antoni and Steve Moore estimate in a new study that in 21 states households that qualify can receive a maximum wage equivalent of $25 an hour in cash without working. In 19 states, the maximum benefit is the equivalent of $100,000 a year in salary for a family of four with two unemployed parents. Not working is a rational economic choice.”
Needless to say, it’s a gravy train the Left would like to keep rolling.
Not only do the expanded unemployment benefits discourage people from returning to work, but they’re placing businesses already strained by the uneven recovery in an untenable position of trying to compete against generally non-taxable benefits with inflationary wages. Using the aforementioned Rehoboth Beach as an example, employers there are concerned about the sustainability of the recovery and the impact of increased wages on their bottom line. It’s a sign of a tight labor market when a convenience store chain resorts to both sign-on bonuses and free food to entice workers. (Or that they could work at a craft brewer nearby for a free case of a coveted variety of beer as a bonus.)
Come September, we’ll find out just how willing Americans are to work. By that point, schools should be back to normal and offices will be opening up to bring back the life we knew just 18 months ago. No more excuses, either for them or from an administration whose overall goals may have been thwarted by governors unafraid to trust the real science of common sense. ~The Patriot Post
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