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Ruth King

In France, Police Tactics Are Less Lethal—but Still Stir Controversy Officers’ restraint in Dijon during recent violence draws praise as well as criticism By Matthew Dalton and Benoit Morenne

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-france-police-tactics-are-less-lethalbut-still-stir-controversy-11592777408?mod=hp_lead_pos13

PARIS—When armed Chechens descended on the provincial city of Dijon this month and occupied a predominantly North African neighborhood, the French police broke up fighting with locals when they could and called in reinforcements—but kept their guns in their holsters.

Over several days, the armed men—seeking revenge for a Chechen teenager allegedly beaten in the area—fired their guns as they assaulted people and damaged businesses. When the violence subsided, police began to detain suspects, including Dijon residents and Chechens in cities across France.

The strategy outraged local officials, who accused the police of allowing ethnic groups to settle scores on the street.

“These are rival gangs, armed groups, that are taking justice into their own hands under the eyes of the state, with no reaction,” said Thierry Falconnet, mayor of a Dijon suburb hit by violence.

But French authorities and policing experts have defended the response as a textbook case of police restraint. No one died during the unrest. On Friday, Bernard Schmeltz, prefect in charge of the Dijon region, including police forces there, said officers faced “high-tension situations that could at any moment devolve into even more serious trouble.”

Three Dead in Terrorist Stabbing Attack By Libyan Man in a Park Near London By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/06/21/three-dead-in-terrorist-stabbing-attack-by-libyan-man-in-a-park-near-london-n558484

British police are saying that a Libyan refugee, Khairi Saadallah, is responsible for the terrorist attack in a park in Reading about 40 miles outside of London. Three people were killed and 3 injured.

The attack occurred on Saturday night where people were mingling in Forbury Gardens after the government lifted lockdown provisions. The attacks were apparently random and brutal.

CNBC:

The attacker seemed to strike his victims at random, police and witnesses said. One witness, speaking to the BBC, described the man moving from group to group stabbing people who were talking and drinking with one another in the park.

The police say the attacks were not connected to the Black Lives Matter protests held earlier in the day in the park.

Neighbors of Saadallah say he was recently released from prison and that he had no known mental health issues. Sources told Sky News that he had been granted asylum.

Is this another “known wolf” attack?

Saadallah’s full background has still to be revealed, but early indications are that he did come to the attention of security services last year.

He was briefly assessed and deemed to be low risk and no formal investigation launched.

A bystander described the horror.

Laurence Wort, 20, who was visiting Reading for the day, told the BBC he was about 10m away when the attack started.

Teddy Roosevelt statue to be removed from Museum of Natural History By Ben Feuerherd

https://nypost.com/2020/06/21/teddy-roosevelt-statue-to-be-removed-from-museum-of-natural-history/

The Rough Rider will soon dismount.

The statue of President Teddy Roosevelt at the entrance to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan will be removed amid widespread protests over racial inequality and police brutality in the United States, The New York Times reported Sunday.

The statue, depicting the former president on horseback while flanked by a Native-American man and a black man, has stood at the museum’s entrance since 1940.

The museum — which is privately run but sits on public land — requested the statue be moved and the city agreed, according to the report.

“Over the last few weeks, our museum community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd,” the museum’s president, Ellen Futter, told the Times.

“We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism,” she added. “Simply put, the time has come to move it.”

The Berman Resistance The grandstanding former U.S. Attorney is no political martyr.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-berman-resistance-11592757973?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

So here’s the plan. We need to remove a U.S. Attorney because he’s investigating associates of the President. Let’s wait until four months before the election, and let’s do it on a Friday night so it looks suspicious and the guy can refuse to step down and make himself a martyr to the Resistance. Yeah, that’ll fool everybody.

That’s what the media and Democrats want everyone to believe about President Trump’s weekend dismissal of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman. It’s more accurate to say this looks like a fiasco of bungled execution by the Administration and self-indulgence by Mr. Berman that is being overplayed as an abuse of power. In other words, it’s your average Trump melodrama.

Mr. Berman has been U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for more than two years under a judicial appointment but was never nominated or confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Trump has every right to fire Mr. Berman as an inferior officer in the executive branch. Attorney General Bill Barr was negotiating with Mr. Berman over a transfer to another senior job on Friday when the Justice Department issued a statement that Mr. Berman is “stepping down,” which is standard Justice Department language in these cases.

The Agents and Instruments of Decadence Antony Carr

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/the-agents-and-instruments-of-decadence/

“Given the academic poison that has permeated and rotted so much in schools and universities in recent years, the waves of protesters parading their ignorance on our streets as hard-core revolutionaries smash windows and defile statues is no surprise. Far more shocking would be the existence of elected officials prepared to cry ‘Enough!'”

Right now, all around the world, people’s lives and livelihoods continue to be devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. If you are young and healthy, the Wuhan flu’s impact is generally mild and recovery almost certain, the casualty numbers confirming it is the elderly and those already suffering from other medical conditions for whom it is a deadly threat. It is, however, highly contagious, and it is this characteristic, together with the modern revolution in globe-girdling travel, that has led to its rapid spread around the world — a spread driven first through Chinese deceit abetted by World Health Organisation’s connivance and subsequently boosted by incompetently administered, or non-existent, national border controls.

Recent events have brought to light another contagion, this one let loose by the killing of George Floyd  beneath the knee of a white policeman in Minneapolis on May 25. It spread rapidly — virally, as they say — around the world, thanks to the internet and revolution in communications.  That the circumstances in Minneapolis don’t necessarily apply elsewhere remains of no account. Facts don’t matter. Floyd’s death has been a pretext, the stated concern largely fraudulent, for blacks murdered by other blacks are of little concern and whites killed by blacks not worth mentioning at all.  The demonstrators believe social distancing rules are for others, not themselves.

Apart from the enjoyment of looting and destruction, what those in the rampaging crowds who actually have a serious social intent are really campaigning for is the destruction of Western civilisation, which they regard as primarily responsible for every evil known to man – racism, oppression, exploitation, misogyny, sexism, slavery, ‘catastrophic’ climate change. The list is endless. They believe that only by destruction  can  a new era of peace and enlightenment come about. Taking their cues from the French and Cambodian revolutions, they seek a societal re-set, starting from a new Year Zero.  Monuments must be destroyed, places and institutions renamed, books burned, films and TV programmes banned, historical figures forever condemned, history itself rewritten, anyone not fully with the programme “de-platformed” and a new power structure implemented.  It’s reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 in which the  all-powerful Party understands that “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

The rioters are not just ignorant vandals; they are following an ideology, a venomous cult every bit as insane as that promoted by Mao Zedong which led to the trashing of Chinese history and culture by the Red Guards in 1966. In contrast to COVID-19, this contagion most seriously afflicts the young rather than the old and experienced.  It is a virus of the mind.

‘Dirty Tricks’ Sabotage Trump Tulsa Rally By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/06/21/democratic-dirty-tricks-sabotage-trump-tulsa-rally-n557476

Tik-Tok and K-Pop users are claiming they reserved hundreds of tickets for Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally, never having any intention of showing up. The result was a half-empty arena in Tulsa for the president’s post-coronavirus restart of his campaign.

In fact, Twitter is alight this morning with reports that dozens of teens reserved thousands of rally tickets to sabotage the optics of Trump’s speech.

Trending on Twitter this morning is #EveryoneLaughingAtYouDonald and #TrumpRallyFail.

Steve Schmidt

✔ @SteveSchmidtSES
My 16 year old daughter and her friends in Park City Utah have hundreds of tickets. You have been rolled by America’s teens. @realDonaldTrump you have been failed by your team. You have been deserted by your faithful. No one likes to root for the losing team. @ProjectLincoln https://twitter.com/parscale/status/1272191356845391875 …

Brad Parscale

✔ @parscale

Just passed 800,000 tickets. Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x.
Saturday is going to be amazing! https://twitter.com/parscale/status/1271581845910704128 …

Steve Schmidt was John McCain’s campaign manager and a driving force behind the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

Daily Mail:

He then added: ‘This is what happened tonight. I’m dead serious when I say this. The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump. All across America teens ordered tickets to this event. The fools on the campaign bragged about a million tickets. lol.’

The gloating is absolutely nauseating. The Trump rally was sabotaged by political “dirty trick” worthy of the Nixon campaign and Democrats are celebrating?

What If I Trust Science and Don’t Trust Dr. Fauci? By Stacey Lennox

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2020/06/20/what-if-i-trust-science-and-dont-trust-dr-fauci-n551584

I wanted to trust Dr. Anthony Fauci. I really did. Early in the pandemic, I took the advice of Dr. Drew Pinsky and listened to what he said. Maybe I listened too closely. Lockdowns leave a person a lot of free time, and a Google machine and keyboard are an excellent way to pass the time.

This week on a Department of Health and Human Services podcast, Dr. Fauci made the following comment:

“One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are — for reasons that sometimes are … inconceivable and not understandable, they just don’t believe science, and they don’t believe authority,”

My head almost exploded. He made this comment in the same week he admitted the nation’s Health Experts™ lied to Americans about the effectiveness of masks. They decided to tell us masks didn’t work rather than tells us they were effective in preventing the spread, but please refrain from buying them until we have an adequate supply for healthcare workers.

Having worked as a Registered Nurse, I was pretty confident that was what they were trying to do at the time. However, that is not why I have lost confidence in the nation’s Health Experts™. Instead, the findings of the research I did on my own during the initial months of the outbreak have me questioning their honesty, effectiveness, and rejecting their authority.

The Models and Lockdowns

Do I need to say anything more? We crashed the economy based on a model from the Imperial College. All other models were ignored, even when the modeling had predicted the experience in other countries. Voices not calling for extreme response measures were silenced.

Even at that point, it was clear that large swaths of the population would likely weather the illness with few if any, effects. People under 65 and without chronic diseases should never have been forced to stay home. This pandemic is the first time we have quarantined the healthy. It was an insane premise to start with. The real kicker was finding out a high school science project informed the lockdown policies.

As the lockdown progressed in other countries, there was little to no correlation between the nature of the lockdown and the experience with the virus. Maybe because they eventually had to admit that surface transmission was not a thing. And asymptomatic transition might be, but they aren’t sure.

Hydroxychloroquine

The debate over this generic drug that has been in use for decades is one of the most puzzling and ridiculous things about the entire pandemic. The medicine was politicized and became controversial. After researching it myself and listening to practicing physicians who were using it, I expected Dr. Fauci to step up and clarify why there was a reason to believe it may work in conjunction with the mineral zinc. He never did.

Joe Biden and Friedrich Nietzsche How the “resounding tinkle of virtue” has poisoned our politics. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/20/joe-biden-and-friedrich-nietzsche/

According to Joe Biden, the basement candidate for president, ending “systemic racism” in the United States is “the moral obligation of our time.”

Too late, Joe! Systemic racism in the United States ended with the Union victory in the Civil War. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. On June 19 of that year, Union General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, Texas, that all slaves in the state were free—Texas being that last state to comply with the Emancipation Proclamation. That is the date that the latest Kwanzaa-like manufactured racialist holiday, “Juneteenth,” is intended to celebrate and that Joe’s minders intended to capitalize on by writing “Juneteenth: A Reminder Of Black America’s Long-Fought Fight For Justice.” 

The institution of slavery, which ended nearly 150 years ago, has no bearing—zero—on the plight of American blacks today. What does affect them, mightily, is the destruction of the black family, a project brought to us by more than five decades of Democratic welfare policy. 

The PR surrounding Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program told the world that its aim was to abolish poverty. It’s actual effect was to institutionalize poverty and promulgate an endless agenda of dependency, which all but guaranteed black subservience to the governmental overlord. It also institutionalized the gigantic network of government workers charged with servicing—and, by extension, perpetuating—the welfare state. The metabolism of this establishment was expertly anatomized by Christopher Caldwell in his latest book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It makes for a mournful story. 

The New Iconoclasm

Also mournful is the spectacle of violence and destructive iconoclasm sweeping the country in the wake of the death of the career criminal George Floyd while in police custody. 

For the last few of weeks, we’ve seen stores looted, police stations and police cars torched, and all manner of public monuments defaced or destroyed. As we know from (in the words of Laplace) expériences nombreuses et funestes, it is one thing to start a revolution, quite another to bring it to an end. Those gleefully riding the tiger at the beginning often wind up inside it before the journey comes to an end. 

Why Are University Students So Stupidity-Friendly? By Robert Weissberg

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/why_are_university_students_so_stupidityfriendly.html

The contemporary political landscape is mired in a tsunami of bad ideas. Who would have ever anticipated that defunding police departments, emptying out prisons, eliminating cash bail, free health care, free college, looting as a legitimate form of social protest politics, among other screwball ideas would go mainstream?  Socialism? How did views resting on blatant falsehoods jump from the academy’s ideological wet markets to the New York Times?

A full explanation must wait until passions cool, but in the meantime let me offer a personal account based on decades of university teaching where this nonsense initially metastasized from a few quirky campus ideas to a conquering idiocy.  

I began teaching government at an ivy league school in 1969. Yes, the students were exceptionally bright, but the faculty were unafraid of pushing them hard and an occasional Marine drill sergeant mentality was necessary. Stupidities were immediately confronted, often sarcastically and grading was tough. Some colleagues especially relished slicing and dicing fools, and students years later, would praise these martinets for “making me think and work hard.” Survivors could boast of a world-class, rigorous education.    

Matters began shifting in the ’70s as some faculty conflated easier grading (which facilitated student draft deferments) with opposing the War in Vietnam. Affirmative action admission now appeared and while these admittees lagged far behind regular students, most faculty anticipated no long-term harm, believing that blacks would eventually catch up. In any case, faculty still confidently dominated, students were still considered ignorant, and periodically informed of their failings. 

On capitalizing ‘Black’ but not ‘white’ By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/on_capitalizing_black_but_not_white.html

As we descend farther into more racial balkanization, it is noteworthy to point out that in 2015, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) ushered in a discussion about how to capitalize the words “white” and “black” when referring to groups of people.  Back then, they stated:

Language can reflect and foster bias and even invite violence, so respectfulness should always trump style or linguistic ambiguities.  There may be contexts where bias is appropriately intentional, but absent that, equality should rule.

To start with, let us stipulate that any discussion involving race is fraught: Even thinking there is such a thing as race is controversial, since many anthropologists believe that people cannot be so grouped biologically.

In fact, according to the Newsweek article that the CJR cites, “[w]hat many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality.  Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race.  There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human ‘racial’ characteristics.  Many of our basic policies of race and racism have been developed as a way to keep these leaders and their followers in control of the way we live our modern lives.  These leaders often see themselves as the best and the brightest.  Much of this history helped establish and maintain the Spanish Inquisition, colonial policies, slavery, Nazism, racial separatism and discrimination, and anti-immigration policies.”