To Bear Arms' Is Not a Right, Says Ninth Circuit
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” —Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
“There is no right to carry arms openly in public; nor is any such right within the scope of the Second Amendment.” —Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
Who are you going to believe, the Founders who wrote the Second Amendment or the lying despots seated on the Ninth Circuit?
The 7-4 en banc majority of the Ninth Circuit is apparently of the leftist school of thought that insists the Second Amendment is all about militias and not the people. In the original understanding of the Founders, however, the people are the militia, so these leftists are plainly wrong.
The judges added, “We can find no general right to carry arms into the public square for self-defense.” Instead, they insist, the Second Amendment applies only to the “defense of hearth and home.” They have reduced the word “bear” to utter meaninglessness.
Imagine this onerous restriction in light of any other constitutional right. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech [in the home].” Or even of faux constitutional rights like abortion or marriage. You can have an abortion, so long as the doctor comes to your home. You can marry a same-sex partner, but it doesn’t count once you leave your house.
The absurdity is self-evident. Yet that’s what passes for leftist logic when it comes to guns.
Moreover, the offending judges reach around the Constitution by appealing to 150-year-old Hawaii law. “In order to reach their conclusions,” notes gun writer Cam Edwards, “the judges in the majority decided that laws in place in Hawaii before it ever became a state take precedence over the clear and unambiguous language of the Second Amendment, which declares that the right of the people to both keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. According to the Ninth Circuit, those ‘longstanding traditions’ in Hawaii law matter more than the Constitution itself.”
That’s to say nothing of King Edward I, whom the judges also cite in going all the way back to English law in the Middle Ages. Didn’t we fight a war of independence from England in which the first shots were fired over an attempt at gun confiscation? Yes, yes we did.
This bizarre ruling also flies in the face not only of the Ninth Circuit’s own previous jurisprudence but of the Supreme Court’s important rulings in Heller and McDonald. Unfortunately, Heller largely focused on confirming that the Second Amendment is an individual right, while McDonald held that the Second Amendment is “incorporated” against the states. That narrow focus left the question of bearing arms outside the home a glaring example of the Supreme Court’s dereliction on the Second Amendment.
Perhaps that will change now that the Ninth Circuit has somewhat contradicted itself, as well as two other circuit courts. Three years ago, the Ninth struck down Hawaii’s “may issue” gun-permit regime. In Young v. Hawaii, Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, who dissented in this week’s case, wrote, “The Second Amendment does protect a right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense.”
The current majority nevertheless pointed to a 2016 ruling in which it “held that individuals do not have a Second Amendment right to carry concealed weapons in public.” Yet that ruling was itself an en banc decision overturning a previous ruling to the contrary.
The court, as O'Scannlain put it in his dissent, “has decided that the Second Amendment does not mean what it says.”
Obviously, it’s time for the Supreme Court to provide some clarity on an amendment that is abundantly clear to originalists but has been treated as a second-class right. ~The Patriot Post
lowlife/liar-Kamala Becomes socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden's
President-in-Waiting lowlife/liar-Kamala Harris may have just laughed off a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border, but that didn’t stop socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden from tapping her as his new border czar to lead the effort in tackling the “dangerous surge of migration” at the U.S. southern border.
Thousands of unaccompanied minors are now being held in cages facilities while the number of illegals entering the U.S. has reached the highest level in 20 years. Yet the White House continues to reject calling the massive migrant surge a “crisis,” despite the fact that current numbers are six times higher than what the scumbag/liar-nObama administration called crisis levels. Perhaps using lowlife/liar-Harris as a border fixer means socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden has finally recognized that he’s losing the PR battle and must at least appear to be doing something.
“This increase has been consequential,” socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden admitted. “I can think of nobody who is better qualified than this woman, who led the second-biggest attorney general’s office in America.” Yikes.
This time avoiding any laughter, lowlife/liar-Harris embraced the role by once again referencing the administration’s ridiculous “come but just not yet” message. “There’s no question that this is a challenging situation,” she said. “While we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law [emphasis added].”
The news of lowlife/liar-Harris taking the lead in dealing with the border crisis was certainly not welcomed by Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who blasted her as “the worst possible choice.” He highlighted an inconvenient truth: “At no point in her career has [ lowlife/liar-Harris] given any indication that she considers the border a problem or a serious threat. If President socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden’s intent was to show that he’s taking this issue seriously, he’s really done the exact opposite [and has] completely trivialized the issue by putting someone in charge who flat out just doesn’t care.”
Ducey noted that socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden is “totally divorced from the reality on the ground” and has yet to visit the border. “I’ve been governor under three presidents,” he said, “and this is by far the worst situation we’ve seen. Washington has never been more out of touch, and it starts at the top.”
Meanwhile, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden continued to deflect responsibility for the border crisis by, of course, blaming Donald Trump, this time by making the ridiculous assertion that Trump’s decision to opt against using a $700 million federal program targeting Northern Triangle countries was the causal factor. “The best way to keep them from coming,” socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden claimed, “is to keep them from wanting to leave.” He meant leave their home countries, we’re sure. Really.
However, even Mexico’s leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador knows that socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden, not Trump, is to blame. He recently stated, “Expectations were created that with the government of President socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden there would be a better treatment of migrants. And this has caused Central American migrants, and also from our country, wanting to cross the border thinking that it is easier to do so.”
Now lowlife/liar-Harris, who as a Democrat presidential candidate held a radical open-borders policy position — she advocated for the decriminalization of illegal border crossings — will now lead the border-enforcement effort. What could go wrong? ~The Patriot Post
The Filibuster Busters
The Democrats have come up with some pretty laughable excuses for why they want to get rid of the Senate filibuster, but their latest is a real gem: The filibuster must be done away with because it’s racist. With leftists seeing racism in everything from what we watch on television to what we buy at the grocery store, it was only a matter of time until the parliamentary procedure of our government would be considered racist, too, though that’s especially rich coming from Democrats.
As part of the Democrats’ strategy to do away with the filibuster, they have labeled it everything from “a mockery of democracy” to “a weapon of mass obstruction.” We’ve known since before the 2020 election that the filibuster was on the chopping block if the Democrats won control of the Senate. But labeling it a racist procedure is hypocritical in the extreme.
Massachusetts Democrat Senator dinky/liar-Elizabeth Warren has been one of the most vocal about the so-called racist filibuster. “The filibuster has deep roots in racism, and it should not be permitted to serve that function, or to create a veto for the minority,” dinky/liar-Warren said last week. “In a democracy, it’s majority rules.” (Fact-check: The filibuster isn’t racist, and we’re a republic.)
But what about all that Democrat lip service about being concerned for minorities? Oh well. Do whatever you gotta do on your path to absolute power. dinky/liar-Warren would know; she owes her whole political career to playing the race card.
And she’s not the only one screaming racism. The media has taken up the faux battle cry. CNN, USA Today, and The Atlantic, just to name a few, have equated the filibuster with racism in op-eds masquerading as manufactured news stories.
Warren may see the filibuster as racist now, but she certainly had no problem filibustering Republican Senator Tim Scott’s police reform bill in 2019. So, going by dinky/liar-Warren’s rationale, since Scott is black, does that mean that Warren is racist, too? Don’t be silly. Only white Republicans can be racist.
Nevertheless, let’s not forget the sordid history of Democrats and the filibuster. If the filibuster has any racist connotation attached to its practice, it is the so-called Party of the People that’s to blame. Democrats wielded the filibuster like a cudgel during the 1940s, ‘50s, and '60s to prevent civil rights legislation from passing the Senate. They did not want to see an end to their political dominance in the South, a dominance that was maintained by continuous violent suppression of blacks for a hundred years after the Civil War.
So-called recent compromises to dial back the filibuster offered by Senator scumbag/liar-Dick Durbin and President socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden are no compromises at all and should not even be entertained by Republicans. Democrats aim to wipe out the filibuster, then propose merely to neuter it and expect to be awarded for being magnanimous. It’s a time-honored tactic of hard-nosed politics, and the GOP shouldn’t fall for it.
Let no one be confused. The real reason for getting rid of the filibuster is to remove one of the final procedural roadblocks standing in the way of Democrats ramming their leftist agenda through the 50-50 Senate. Fed up to the gills with our republican form of government, the Left is doing what it does best — bending and breaking all the rules that stand in its path to converting America into a socialist “paradise.”
~The Patriot Post
America's 'Baizuo' Elitists
It’s no secret that everything the progressive Left embraces — from Critical Race Theory and open borders to the transgender agenda and the Cancel Culture to everything in between — is based on the self-aggrandizing notion that it owns the franchise on “superior” wisdom and morality. Those who disagree are not just wrong; they are bigots, deplorables, bitter clingers, irredeemables, supremacists, privileged etc., etc. ad nauseam. Yet there is one group of people that not only knows exactly who American progressives are but that won’t be the slightest bit intimidated by any blowback from them.
“Baizuo” is a derogatory term in Mandarin that refers to white leftist Western elites. It’s the Chinese version of “useful idiots,” and it has become increasingly popular among China’s netizens. Analysts attribute that popularity to the Chinese public’s resentment against what they view as a superiority complex that animates Western elites’ ideological agenda against China.
An article, “The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult,” written in May 2017 by Zhang Chenchen, who has a PhD in political theory and science, gets to the heart of the criticisms. Zhang notes that Baizuo refers to people who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and who “have no sense of real problems in the real world.” Furthermore, they only advocate for peace and equality to “satisfy their own feelings of moral superiority” and are “obsessed with political correctness.”
Zhang further reveals the term “first became influential amidst the European refugee crisis, and [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel was the first western politician to be labelled as a Baizuo for her open-door refugee policy.” It was an accurate assessment. Merkel allowed more than one million “refugees” to enter Germany, and in short order, the nation endured a rape epidemic, a skyrocketing “migrant” crime wave, and a series of terror attacks that culminated in the 2016 Berlin Christmas market atrocity that killed 12 and injured 48, courtesy of Tunisian national Anis Amri, who came to Germany during the 2015 rush.
Today in America, we are neck deep in our very own “open door” refugee policy, driven by progressives’ own feelings of moral superiority that are so profoundly corrupt, the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration is providing illegal aliens with hotel rooms while hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans languish in tent cities in Democrat-controlled cities throughout the nation.
In 2017, Global Times columnist Qu Qiuyan explained that Baizuo “is not limited to referring to the white liberal elites, as former US president scumbag/liar-nObama was considered as an advocate of Baizuo ideology.” Qu further notes that on a Chinese question-and-answer website, Zhihu, the question “why are well-educated elites in the West seen as naïve ‘white left’ in China?” received more than 400 answers. One user said it’s because leftist elites are those “who advocate inclusiveness and anti-discrimination but cannot tolerate different opinions,” while another asserted that elitists’ opinions are so shallow they tend to maintain social equality by embracing ideologies that run against the basic concept of equality.
As if on cue four years later, the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration is instituting “equity” in lieu of equality. The “Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” is all about abandoning meritocracy in favor of government-mandated equal outcomes for those who are deemed “marginalized.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because Karl Marx wrote “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” in 1875, and that idea formed the basis of communist societies going forward. Societies that required massive levels of government coercion to enforce equity, even as the enforcers inevitably lived far better than those they were oppressing.
Yet far worse, equity will assure one outcome above all others: widespread mediocrity. As schools eliminate standardized testing and advanced placement classes, and businesses become entities that hire people based on the color of their skin and not the content of their character, there will be no incentive to work hard or aspire to excellence.
That institutionalized mediocrity would be wholly destructive to American society? For our Baizuo elitists, that is a far more preferable outcome than a meritocracy where “too many Asians” outpace other ethnic groups. That reality was made clear by Ivy League college admission “standards” such as those at Harvard that required Asians to produce higher SAT scores than other minorities to gain admission, or those at Yale where “race is the determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year,” as the DOJ stated last year.
Unfortunately, the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration epitomizes mediocrity, and nothing made that clearer than the recent meeting between Chinese and American diplomats in Alaska, where China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiech, revealed the self-debilitating mediocrity of America’s new secretary of state, Tony Blinken. When Yang asserted that many Americans “actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States, and they have various views regarding the government of the United States,” and that China doesn’t believe in “invading through the use of force, or to topple other regimes through various means, or to massacre the people of other countries, because all of those would only cause turmoil and instability in this world,” Blinken’s response bordered on sophomoric. “I have to tell you, what I’m hearing is very different from what you described,” he said. “I’m hearing deep satisfaction that the United States is back.”
Back from where? To what? Yang further noted that a nation that’s capitulated to Black Lives Matter, antifa, and other radicals is in no position to lecture China. And Blinken proved him right. Despite bringing up “deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States, economic coercion of our allies,” the coronavirus — along with the Chinese lies and stonewalling that facilitated its worldwide spread — wasn’t even part of the discussion.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson explains the enormity of that omission, noting that China’s stance with regard to the coronavirus “is a crime of enormous proportions.” What did socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden do about it? Carlson answered, “As one of his first acts as president of the United States, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden signed an executive action ordering federal agencies to stop making reference to the pandemic by the ‘geographic location of its origin.’”
Columnist Roger Kimball was even more direct. “Joe socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden has been in office for just two months,” he writes. “Has any US president had such a disastrous opening chapter on the world stage? None that I can recall.”
The most frightening words of that assessment? “Opening chapter.” How much damage — some of which may be irreparable — America’s Baizuo elites precipitate going forward is anyone’s guess. ~The Patriot Post
Heritage Foundation's Future
In 1996, when we launched The Patriot Post, we did so with sage advice from conservative protagonists William F. Buckley (National Review, Emeritus) and Ed Feulner, PhD (Heritage Foundation, Emeritus) — which is one reason our First Amendment exercise is now the longest-running news and policy publications on the Web. I had known Ed for a decade before our launch, and he became one of our earliest endorsers: “The best Websites wield remarkable influence in the marketplace of ideas. The Patriot Post is a ‘must read’ for informed conservatives.”
The Heritage Foundation is the nation’s premier conservative think tank. From its start in 1973 under the leadership of Paul Weyrich, Ed Feulner, and Joseph Coors, it became the primary institutional policy advisor for Ronald Reagan and has been that for Republican presidents and key conservative members of Congress ever since. With revenues of $5 million during the early Reagan years, Heritage grew rapidly and now has annual revenues in excess of $80-$100 million — which is to say its team of policy experts and influencers has likewise grown, and is now second to none. While Heritage’s annual revenues fluctuate by millions based on Legacy Gifts, baseline revenue, a combination of Membership and Major Gifts, remains stable.
In December of 2012, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), who had been instrumental in the successful 2010 Tea Party movement, returning the House to Republican control in order to combat Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s regime, resigned from the Senate to take the reins at Heritage after Feulner’s retirement.
Given the exigency of the times, Heritage took on a much more partisan tone under DeMint. Notably, however, by 2016, Donald Trump’s incoming administration hired hundreds of key people from Heritage’s list of most trusted conservatives — much as the Federalist Society provided Trump’s go-to list for his judicial appointments. The Heritage Foundation’s motto is, after all, “Leadership for America,” and DeMint’s “Reclaim America” initiative was a good template.
However, as a result of DeMint’s sometimes strident partisanship, in 2017 he resigned at the Board’s request and now heads up the Conservative Partnership Institute.
Heritage hired Kay Coles James in 2018, the former director for the Office of Personnel Management under George W. Bush. Thanks to her leadership, in February of this year, Heritage was recognized in Forbes as the top-ranked free-market think tank.
But James’s tenure at Heritage during the tumultuous Trump years proved challenging, and this week, she and her executive vice president, Kim Holmes, announced their resignations.
James noted, “When we came on board as the executive leadership team three years ago, we set several goals and told Heritage’s board of trustees that we would … see them through. We accomplished everything we set out to do. Now, it’s time to let someone else take the reins.” For his part, Holmes noted, “Heritage is strongly positioned to provide principled conservative public policy solutions to the current challenges facing America. I am deeply proud of our accomplishments and honored to have played a role in helping Heritage to be ‘True North’ for the conservative movement long into the future. I look forward to seeing the great successes yet to come.”
That is largely true, but James was also the subject of earned criticism last summer after the death of a black man while in the custody of Minneapolis police. She claimed in an op-ed: “Racism is America’s Achilles’ heel. It has been embedded into our culture for 400 years, since the first Africans were seized from their homes on the other side of the world and brought to colonial America in chains and enslaved. … It’s time America takes responsibility and expands human flourishing to all of its citizens — not just the majority of them.”
James sounded more like a race-bait apologist for the Left than a cornerstone of conservative principles, much less the head of the nation’s leading conservative think tank. I presume she was consumed in the moment, as were too many otherwise thoughtful Americans. But as cities were besieged with burning, looting, and murdering mobs, James should have repudiated the surging Democrat Party claims fueling those riots — that America is consumed with “systemic racism.”
What James failed to make clear at the time, long-time Patriot Post supporter and George Mason University scholar Walter Williams made abundantly clear: “The true plight of black people has little or nothing to do with the police or what has been called ‘systemic racism.’” And the fact that James’s primary defender was Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson speaks volumes.
Unfortunately, James did not recover from that unfortunate error, and I suspect in the end she was subject to a quiet vote of no confidence. She will retain her board position as a Heritage Fellow and remain in an advisory capacity through the transition.
Given the dramatic surge to the left under the socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden/ lowlife/liar-Harris regime, it is a good time for a transition of Heritage leadership — and we hope that includes a call to battle stations. We also hope that the selection of the next leader for Heritage will include a broader consensus of its membership and avoid the board room vacuums, which take too many good organizations down the wrong path.
~The Patriot Post
Rainbow Mafia Continues to Harass Christian Cake Maker
The reason we coined the term “Rainbow Mafia” as a reference to activist homosexual and “transgender” lobbyists is due to the fact that they work so hard to force public acceptance of their deviancy, with no individual objections allowed. It’s all too similar to the criminal mobs forcing concessions and payments from those they harass and terrorize.
One case that continues to demonstrate the validity of this assessment is the ongoing harassment of Christian baker Jack Phillips. Ever since the first lawsuit was raised against Phillips over his refusal to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding eight years ago, the Rainbow Mafia has targeted Phillips for cancellation.
Even after a U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had violated Phillips’s religious rights by failing to hold to a standard of neutrality in its anti-discrimination lawsuit against him, the Rainbow Mafia couldn’t take the loss and leave Phillips alone.
On the same day that SCOTUS agreed to take the first case back in 2017, Autumn Scardina, a “transgender woman” — in other words, a biological man — sought to set up Phillips by ordering a cake celebrating his gender “transition,” a request Phillips politely declined on the grounds that it conflicted with his deeply held Christian beliefs. But the animosity began long before that. Way back in 2012, Scardina sent nasty emails to Phillips calling him a “bigot” and a “hypocrite.”
On Monday, hearings began in this case. This clearly vindictive “transgender” activist aims to force Phillips out of business over his refusal to celebrate his identity choice. Scardina explained his reasoning in suing Phillips: “[Masterpiece Cakeshop] indicated that I was welcome back in their shop and entitled to the same treatment as every other customer that telephones or comes through its doors. … I found it sort of offensive and wanted to see if that’s true too. So I called and spoke with who I believed to be Mr. Phillips. He answered the phone this time. I think I indicated — I asked: ‘Do you serve religious cakes?’ Because I noted in his several examples, they had nothing regarding religious cakes. Mr. Phillips indicated that he did. I asked him, ‘Well, could you prepare a religious cake for me that had’ — I think a picture of Satan smoking a joint is the religious cake I asked for.”
Given the outcome of the last case, it’s likely that Phillips will win again. However, given the mentality of those in the Rainbow Mafia, it’s also likely they won’t stop harassing him for refusing to bend his Christian beliefs to satisfy their deviant demands. ~The Patriot Post
CAL THOMAS
'Baghdad Bob' Rides Again
When I heard Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas say last Sunday on “Meet the Press” that the southern border “is closed,” it immediately brought to mind claims by Iraq’s former information minister — dubbed “Baghdad Bob” and “Comical Ali” (aka Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf) — about Saddam Hussein’s superior military forces.
During the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, al-Sahaf said with a straight face that U.S. forces were “not even (within) 100 miles (of Baghdad),” as TV images showed the truth. It also reminded me of statements by some reporters that last summer’s riots were “mostly peaceful.”
Secretary Mayorkas is asking us to ignore what “our lying eyes” see. Television pictures show thousands of migrants crossing the border. Adding to the mess is the Biden administration’s authorization for ICE to spend $86 million to house migrants in American hotels. Will they also get hotel promotional points?
Predictably, Mayorkas defaulted to the administration’s position of blaming Donald Trump for not controlling the border. In fact, illegal border crossings declined substantially — more than 70 percent — during the final two years of Trump’s presidency. The Washington Times quoted then-acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan saying as economies in Latin American worsen from COVID-19, he expected “unprecedented” numbers to attempt to cross the border. “Get ready,” he warned. The socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration either wasn’t ready, or OK with the invasion.
When certain members of the media, who opposed the Trump presidency, start hammering President socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden for his administration’s failure to control the border you know the worm is turning. “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd said, “It’s fair to call the deteriorating situation at the U.S.-Mexico border a crisis — even if the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration refuses to use that word. But it’s more than that: It’s a political crisis for the new president, with no easy way out.”
Sure, there is. Finish the wall and electronic detection systems. Deport adult migrants, as President scumbag/liar-nObama did.
Adding to the warning signs for the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration was this comment from ABC reporter Martha Raddatz on “This Week”: “The number of unaccompanied children and teenagers in border patrol custody reaching record numbers. Children forced to stay longer in overcrowded facilities. The media not allowed inside. The administration restricting access despite promising transparency, citing COVID and privacy concerns. The issue that at times plagued the previous administration now presenting a challenge to the Biden administration, one that shows no sign of abating any time soon.”
One is even beginning to read criticism of socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden’s immigration non-policy in the editorial pages of The New York Times and Washington Post. When that happens, you know that claims by Mayorkas, Press Secretary liar-Jen Psaki and other administration officials are being seen for what they were from the start — lacking in credibility.
No country can long endure if it refuses to control its borders. Because of the pandemic, most European nations are closed to foreigners, as is Canada. Only the U.S. southern border remains porous.
To reject the obvious is the ultimate denial. Baghdad Bob said it best, though in a completely different context, as he admonished the American media in 2003: “Search for the truth. I tell you things and ask you to verify what I say…”
That is a challenge the supportive press, at least up until now, should adopt when examining statements from members of the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration. ~The Patriot Post
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