From the very beginning of John DePetro’s coverage of last night’s protest at Democrat Governor Dan McKee’s house, it was clear the treatment of healthcare professionals who are protesting the governor’s vaccination mandate was going to be very different from what we’ve witnessed for Black Lives Matter and other progressive groups.
Remember when Black Lives Matter blocked a busy intersection on Federal Hill in the early evening? (See John’s video around minute 40, here.) No police broke that up; it was only when they went for repeat performances that the police put their foot down. Remember when they went to Governor Gina Raimondo’s house? (See John’s video interviewing neighborhood kids, here.) The protesters drove loud circles around the block then got out of their cars and set off firecrackers for around 30 minutes before any police showed up. Remember during the initial BLM protests, when police in uniform were making supportive speeches and even marching with them?
That wasn’t the experience of the healthcare workers last night.
When they showed up, they were told they couldn’t park on any nearby public streets. They had to park far away and walk 30 minutes or so — including small children and people in wheel chairs. When they neared the governor’s house, police initially told them they couldn’t go down the street but ultimately allowed them.
When they reached the governor’s house, the State Police had their zip-tie handcuffs on clear display, and they got to use them during a vigil for a man who had died after being vaccinated.
From John’s video, it isn’t entirely clear what happened to lead to the arrest of two men on charges of disorderly conduct, obstruction, and resisting arrest, but it looks something like this:
- Around the 50:50 mark, the crowd is trying to figure out how to continue their protest by keeping moving, as instructed by the police. Somebody says something, which incensed an officer who looked like he was in charge.
- He advances into the group at around 51 minutes, looking like he intends to detain somebody and confusion and shouting begins.
- At 51:03, you can see Tyler Bonin, one of the arrested men approaching the turmoil from the left.
- At 51:17, he points toward somebody and turns on his phone’s flashlight to point it at him.
- John gets the person he pointed at center frame at 51:22.
- At 51:26, that man, not in any uniform, approaches and edges him backwards as a uniformed police officer stands more or less between them. You can hear Bonin ask, “who are you?”
- The non-uniformed man begins to push him more forcefully toward the nearest police car. Freezing the frame during this time, with other officers now moving around him, it looks like Bonin is trying to explain something to them, as the non-uniformed man pushes him.
- Around 51:40, two uniformed officers whip another man, presumably Joshua Joseph, out of the melee. He may have been trying to help Bonin.
- At 52 minutes, John approaches Bonin, now pressed up against the hood of a car, and he calmly gives his name and says he pushed the man off him because he didn’t know who he was. “He did not identify himself.”
Reviewing the video, I didn’t see the non-uniformed man with the officers at any point before the conflict. He may have been laying low within the crowd (sort of undercover), which may have produced some misunderstanding and a tense moment. It looks like Bonin caught some of that and sought to intervene, at which point the police continually escalated with no apparent reason.
As John says repeatedly throughout the remainder of the video, this is not at all how he witnessed progressive activists being treated all of last year. As well as one can tell from the video, it looks like the police instigated the confrontation.
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Whenever we have the opportunity to watch some other country gradually be taken over by left-wing fascists (Venezuela comes first to mind), the headlines always have me shouting at the computer screen — like a movie-watcher might shout at the TV when the hero is ignorant that his friend is the villain and is acting as if the friend-rules still apply. That is to say that the people trying to save their nations are always, always too slow to speak openly what all know to be true: that their system of government is gone.
The legislators bravely face down thugs as they pass ineffectual legislation. The judges risk their lives issuing rulings that the regime isn’t going to follow. Meanwhile, the people continue peaceful protests that do little but confirm, incrementally, that the nation has fallen to dictators.
Now, I’m not encouraging folks to abandon lawful means for shoring up our representative democracy. The politics of this are an intricate art. Indeed, I’ve been learning from painful experience the risk of testing a regime’s slide away from democracy. There’s some value in having the villains pretending to be following due process, and when the people push for clarity in a court, say, they often do nothing more than lose the leverage of pretense.
I mention all this because the America First Legal Foundation (AFL) has requested an investigation into substantiated suspicions that the Biden Department of Justice worked with progressive Democrat activist organizations (teachers’ unions, notably) to plant the National School Boards Association letter requesting assistance with the “immediate threat” of angry parents:
AFL says the Biden administration was in on the unconstitutional effort to mitigate the “political impact of parent mobilization [at school board meetings] and organization around school issues [like CRT and mask mandates] in the upcoming midterm elections” all along. And who was that “outside group”? The good old National School Board Association (NSBA). Remember them and their September 29 letter calling America’s concerned parents “domestic terrorists”? I wrote about them here.
This is entirely in keeping with a decade or more of Democrat practice. We saw this with the IRS targeting of the Tea Party. We saw it with the intelligence agencies turning against President Trump. Now we’re seeing it with school committees, labor unions, and the Biden administration trying to prevent parent outrage from coalescing into a political movement that might threaten their power. Parents who come together to oppose critical race theory or radical gender indoctrination might not be as friendly at the contract negotiating table, too, and they might not be as bought-in to the progressive agenda.
That’s what it’s all about: power. Any development that might weaken the insiders’ chances in an election is a direct threat to all that they hold dear. It doesn’t matter if the people are defending their own children through the peaceful exercise of their God-given rights. Somehow, they have to be stopped, and making them feel as if they might be targeted, investigated, audited, and spied on will act as discouragement.
We have to recognize this reality. The hard part, though, is answering the question, what then?
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In an EconTalk episode, Russ Roberts evoked a fascinating response from University of North Carolina historian Bret Devereaux when he asked why, considering that the Spartans were so evil by today’s standards and also mediocre at warfare, they’ve enjoyed such a positive legend:
[Open full post]The Spartans get really good press in our ancient sources. And part of the reason is who is writing our ancient sources and why. Our first set of sources about the Spartans–we’ll put Herodotus to the side for a second–our first big set of them are written by Athenians. Of course, Athens is the enemy of Sparta, and so you’d say, ‘These guys will be hostile.’ But, who writes history in Athens? It’s the elite. It is the wealthy class. People who, in a Greek city that was as unequal as Sparta, would be in charge. But Athens is a democracy. And so, these men must serve the people; and they’re terribly sore about it. And so, Sparta becomes the go-to comparison point for Athenian oligarchs to complain about the democracy. Much the same way, by the by, modern autocracies are the sort of go-to point for American technocrats to complain about the democracy. Whether that is left-wing or right-wing modern autocracies, one sees that tendency.
Sparta naturally gets good press from these fellows. Xenophon stands out sort-of in front of them. Xenophon is quite hostile to the Athenian democracy, and he’s very friendly with Sparta because he sees it–Sparta, after all, is a place where an aristocratic warrior sort-of fellow like Xenophon would be in charge. And the Spartans were in charge in their society in a way that no other Greek was.
Providence Journal reporter Katherine Gregg has posted one of the social-media shares from state senator and Rhode Island Political Cooperative candidate for Lieutenant Governor Cynthia Mendes that has gotten her in trouble with her fellow progressives. All she did was share a post from somebody else linking to one of the famous undercover videos of Planned Parenthood employees “haggling over baby parts prices” and “changing abortion methods” for the purpose of extracting them.
Gregg’s post prompted National Education Association of Rhode Island communications officer Stephanie DeSilva Mandeville to opine:
It is not unfair to inquire about a candidate’s political evolution especially one so recent. In 2015, we were on the precipice of a tumultous presidential election and choice was under attack.
In addition to proving that teachers unions are really just progressive activist organizations that provide labor services as a fundraising source, Mandeville illustrates that Rhode Island progressives are so radical that they demand uniformity even on the extremity of cutting up unborn children to make a financial profit from their bodily organs.
Mendes has said that her opinion has “evolved,” but one must ask: How is it “evolving” to move toward support of this practice?
Not to be left out of the discussion, two-time Ivy League progressive Aaron Regunberg complained that:
… the Coop has been smearing longtime choice champs for a symbolic procedural vote, and that’s disingenuous AF from someone who shared propaganda attacking Planned Parenthood for “sell[ing] baby parts” as recently as 2015/16.
So what’s his position, here? Does Regunberg acknowledge that Planned Parenthood was selling baby parts or not? If so, then that’s outrageous. If not, then at worst one could fault Mendes for being misled by a headline, but not breaking from progressive orthodoxy.
The implication from Regunberg, Mandeville, and their fellow progressives appears to be that it’s disqualifying only to be pro-choice up to the point of tolerating the harvesting of organs. They either don’t mind the abhorrent practice or Planned Parenthood is such an important part of their coalition that they’re willing to look the other way while it’s done.
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One of (the many) aspects of our public arguments around COVID-19 and the vaccine is the confidence with which everybody is asserting their positions. This affects both sides, but I’m thinking in particular of the pro-vax people who assert that we know that naturally acquired immunity fades after a few months. Frankly, the virus hasn’t been around for long enough for us to know anything of the sort.
And as Tammy Hung reports for The Epoch Times, the same is true of the vaccine:
Antibody levels generated by two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine can undergo up to a 10-fold decrease seven months following the second vaccination, research suggests.
Totalizing arguments just aren’t serious. We should be talking about measuring individual immunity and discussing degrees of risk in different settings. Not issuing one-size-fits-all mandates.
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Jon Caldara makes an excellent point about energy in Colorado that applies in Rhode Island, as well:
[Open full post]… the Public Utilities Commission’s job was (key word there) to fight for the least cost energy while protecting our environment. That mission has been turned on its head. Least cost is the PUC’s very last priority. This suits the greenies and the corporate cronies just fine.
Energy companies, like Xcel, are guaranteed a “rate of return.” That’s guaranteed profit on whatever they do. Anything they do! Thus, their business model is not providing power. It’s building stuff. Any stuff!
Consequently, they love “environmental” mandates.
Don’t bother looking on your calendar as you attempt to interpret this headline on an Eli Sherman article on WPRI:
William Blackstone statue rally planned for Indigenous Peoples Day in Pawtucket
By “Indigenous Peoples Day,” WPRI means Columbus Day. It’s just that radicals looking to divide our nation have been insisting we change the name of the holiday, as Sherman sort of explains in the fifth paragraph:
Indigenous Peoples Day celebrates the original inhabitants of North America, and it’s observed instead of Columbus Day be [sic] some people in communities across the country.
It’s important to emphasize that this is being offered as a replacement, not a shared supplement that would invite us all to celebrate the continent’s earlier arrivals. This article represents a major, mainstream news organization facilitating the Balkanization of our country.
Note to the editors: The United States celebrates Columbus Day. That can and may change, but it hasn’t. These are government-created holidays, not religious observances with which it would be appropriate to say “some people” observe different ones. (And why isn’t that “some Americans,” by the way?)
With this sleight of hand, Sherman and WPRI help to paper over the progressives’ intention. Why would they protest a statue of Blackstone on Columbus Day? Because they oppose the very settlement of this country by people of European descent. An article from August about the statue made that clear. Every familiar colonialist name is indistinguishable from Hitler to these activists, no matter how much or little we know about their actual activities.
Indeed, that is the underlying meaning behind “observance” of Indigenous Peoples Day. Division, rejection, and replacement. Yet, WPRI glosses over this step toward civil war and persecution.
If our society were clear headed, these days, that would shock us.
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Rocky IV was iconic when I was young, and for decades I’ve heard what a let-down Rocky V was. I finally got around to watching it tonight (while cleaning the kitchen, lest you think I’m a couch potato or something). It actually wasn’t bad, and I think the promo summary has done it harm all these years by emphasizing the “Rocky the streetfighter” angle, which really only came in at the end. Had the movie ended better, it could have been iconic, in its way, back in 1990.
[SPOILER ALERT!] I don’t know what possessed the people who made the movie to think that Rocky had to win an actual fight as the closing scene. Early in the movie, the punk kid he taught to fight said that he always felt like he was hitting his father when he was in the ring. That was the perfect setup for Rocky not to fight him at the end, thus learning from his touchy relationship with his own son.
As it is, the ending feels so tacked on that one suspects some know-nothing suit must have insisted that it end with a fight scene. That would have made Rocky Balboa (which was Rocky VI) fit better in the series, too, as the proof that the champ could still hold his own, if it mattered.
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It’s not a good sign when vague, anonymous allegations on the Internet against an unnamed member of a group lead to violent attacks on that group’s residence:
Recent online sexual assault allegations against Theta Chi at the University of Massachusetts Amherst resulted in raucous protests that included flipping a car and injuring a member of the fraternity.
The rioters flipped a car, broke windows, and injured one of the fraternity members with a thrown bottle. Based on related reporting, the only criticism of the confirmable violence against the fraternity was a tepid statement from the chancellor that it “is not the answer.”
But, oh well. Fraternities are acceptable scapegoats on campus, so this is what they get.
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Paintings and Music by Mitchell Kaplan (9/27/21) from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Mitchell Kaplan talks about art and music.
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