On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Conflict and doctored videos at the pro-abortion protest
- Abortion in RI
- Gun rights take a hit
- A shifting balance in the governor’s race
- New poll numbers for Biden and RI races
Featured image by Anton Steenbergen on Unsplash.
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Guest: Kate Duffy, Interventionist and Recovery Coach, Tipping Point Recovery, kate@tippingpointrecovery.com
Host: Darlene D’Arezzo Time: 30 minutes
Description: Duffy begins with a candid account of her own addiction to alcohol and its impact on her life, her family members and her current work as an intervention and recovery coach. She describes the trials, challenges, and failures of getting the help she needed. Over time and with greater self-awareness, she eventual succeeds in becoming sober and begun her transition to becoming a helpful agent of change for others. She now is President of Tipping Point Recovery and continues to work with persons with addiction problems and provides training to others to become effective mental health practitioners themselves. www.tippingpointrecovery.com
First things first: It is very difficult to imagine circumstances that entirely excuse the actions of Jeann Lugo in a five second clip from last night’s pro-abortion rally at the State House. Lugo is a muscular man with police training. Striking a woman — progressive candidate Jennifer Rourke — should not be something he would do except in extreme circumstances where it is unambiguously justified.
Along those lines, however, the second point is this: Bill Bartholomew, who is basking in the attention of this clip, is a far-left commentator and activist, and the clip is only five seconds long… and that’s with the speed slowed down. The real time that it reflects is probably more like one or two seconds. Even as short as it is, the facts of the video should raise red flags for any responsible journalist.
It’s clear, for one thing, that the action was under way and that Bartholomew carefully clipped the video to show the objectionable moment, slowing it down to further distort reality. Consider this, from WPRI:
12 News reached out to Lugo regarding the incident. Lugo said he was “in a situation that no individual should see themselves in” Friday night.
“I stepped in to protect someone that a group of agitators was attacking,” he said in a statement. …
Tensions appeared to reach a boiling point at Friday’s rally when counter-protestors entered the crowd and began shouting. The Rhode Island State Police confirmed two people were arrested, though neither have been identified.
Lugo was not arrested nor charged Friday night…
Given this limited information, the reality of the incident could be very different from what Bartholomew chose to portray, which national media has taken up enthusiastically, because it is so deliciously in keeping with their preferred narrative. They find it helpful to counterbalance insurrection-like rhetoric from abortion advocates and an attempt to assassinate conservative Supreme Court justice with an attack on a pro-abortion black woman.
It could be, for instance, that pro-abortion activists outside the Rhode Island State House (the large, bald man crouching next to Jennifer Rourke or the three large men behind her in the video, perhaps) were attacking a pro-life man or woman who was counterprotesting, and Lugo stepped in, as he says. Perhaps in the seconds before Bartholomew’s clip, Rourke was attacking Lugo, and the two swings shown were simply him defending himself.
We can’t tell. Bartholomew has chosen to keep America in the dark on this question, and Rourke is predictably casting the incident in the most politically helpful light for herself and her cause.
Bartholomew should release his full video. Frankly, a responsible state and national news media would be demanding that he do so before giving him all this attention. If, as seems likely, he deliberately cropped what he released, it would be interesting to see Lugo sue him for damages for a high-tech form of libel.
In any event, nobody should have any confidence that Lugo will get a fair hearing. Rhode Island is simply not that sort of place, anymore, which is a much more profound story that nobody is covering. As evidence, observe whether anybody else raises these points, whether anybody in the state airs my expression of them, and whether the only attention that such points receive is condemnation as if it is beyond the pale even to raise such questions.
ADDENDUM (11/19/22 8:49 a.m.)
Having had cause to revisit this incident, I note that clarification is necessary. The day before the clip in question, Bartholomew posted a clip of about two minutes of the incident ending just after Lugo and Rourke’s confrontation. He then clipped it and slowed it down for the post that went viral, which he pinned to his stream, as I recall, as the other video was pushed down. I may have missed the earlier videos because he started them with his podcast logo, so not reading the text, I thought they were just episodes.
In any event, the doctored short video was clearly cut too short and shouldn’t have been slowed down, certainly for an isolated tweet meant to stand on its own. Ethan Shorey of the Valley Breeze has insisted that Bartholomew’s action is no different than how TV news handles clips from time to time. The difference is that TV journalists will typically include extended clips side-by-side with the doctored one, to provide context. Bartholomew could have done the same. He could have provided a link to the earlier video right in the same tweet. At a minimum, he could have immediately added the full video as a comment to the clipped one, which he did not do for a week, when somebody asked for it, and after other people’s extended videos had been released.
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What did they change?
Well, there was a rule that said mommies had to be allowed to kill their babies before they were born everywhere in the country, and the court said states could decide whether or not to keep that rule.
Why would mommies want to kill their babies?
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Honestly, I never thought I’d see the day, but the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, which invented a Constitutional right to abortion across the country. To this day, many Americans don’t realize just how radical the judicial legislation was, making the United States much more extreme than most of the world, with abortion up to the point of birth and so on.
As if to provide an explanation for that lack of knowledge, the news reporters, as in this Associated Press article published by WPRI, are doing their part to support the party and facilitate division and hostility with raw propaganda. At least they’re continuing to make it easy to identify them for what they are. Americans should brace, however, for craziness and outbursts from the political Left, for whom abortion is something like a sacrament and whose party, the Democrats, is desperate for subjects to rile up their voters and distract from the catastrophe of their governance.
A reasonable assessment should begin with facts and the legal process. Overturning Roe means only that the decision must be made at the state level, and states will vary from total bans to a complete absence of restrictions, and even taxpayer subsidies for abortion. On this issue, people will once again be able to exercise the fundamental right of choosing the sort of society in which they wish to live. Allowing us to do that, while remaining one people working together, is the entire point of the American experiment. Along those lines, most states will probably fall somewhere in the compromise zone, setting some point of gestation at which unborn children may no longer be killed.
Moreover, one of the bulwarks of our Constitutional system has held firm, for now, albeit with a half-century delay. The Supreme Court should not simply be a mini legislature to enact policies that elected officials are unwilling to enact.
Unfortunately, the Left will push the opposite conclusion — that they must manipulate the political process until they control the court once again, almost certainly with an amplified madness.
So, the work falls to all of us. The Supreme Court has upheld the obvious conclusion that the Constitution does not guarantee the right to kill unborn children. Now, more than ever, we have to defend reason, the rule of law, and the reality of biology against the forces of destabilization.
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Voters (and other citizens) very often make claims about what attributes they want in elected officials that they do not substantiate with their support. They say they’d prefer public servants who are not career politicians and who are in it for “the right reasons,” by which they generally mean they are not merely seeking power or acting on behalf of special interests, whether economic or ideological, but they make no decisions that encourage the good or discourage the bad. Consequentially, we do not foster a political system with incentives for the people we say we want in office.
And so, hitting the inboxes of supporters and journalists this morning is a letter from Republican House Minority Leader Blake Filippi saying he will not seek reelection:
Now having served in the General Assembly for eight years, nearly 20% of my life, I have struggled about whether to seek another term in office. The time is now to step aside and for new public servants step up and serve our communities in the House.
While I will not run for reelection, I intend to remain deeply engaged in our beautiful corner of the world. The art of the politics, as is the art of life, is all about human connection and the friends we make along the way. I cherish our friendships and look forward to nurturing them in the years ahead.
There is nothing in Rhode Island politics for somebody whose principles align with the Republican Party. No infrastructure exists to make it financially reasonable for a talented person to stay in the game (let alone make a career of public service), such as the Democrats display when they shuffle their members from office to non-profit to union to government job to office. Meanwhile, the nifty experience of being in the news is severely tainted when a market’s journalists have uniformly adopted the narrative that you are on the side of evil by nature of the party to which you belong. Indeed, the culture and practice of demonization diminishes every ancillary benefit from the modest prominence that running for and winning elected offices provides.
Just as one cannot blame members of the “productive class” who’ve been leaving Rhode Island for decades because they will be better able to translate their talents and efforts into stable lives for their families elsewhere, one cannot be surprised that a competent man like Filippi has concluded his time is better spent on other endeavors as he enters middle age. Sooner than later, Rhode Islanders will come to regret that they have not maintained a system in which such people apply their talents and efforts to making our community vibrant, full of opportunity, and reasonably run.
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Shift your focus just a little bit from the standard narrative, and you can only shake your head at the conspicuous omission in Amy Russo’s Providence Journal article reporting that “racial disparities in homeownership are more severe than the national average” in Rhode Island:
The report, released Thursday and authored by Brown School of Public Health academics whose work was funded by United Way of Rhode Island, states that overall, 62% percent of the state’s residents own a home, yet only 34% of the state’s Black residents are homeowners. By contrast, across the United States, 64% of the population owns homes, while 42% of Black people are homeowners. The data dates back to 2019.
Rhode Island is a state run by and for insiders and special interests. By nature, such people protect their own advantages, and by logic, their practice will disproportionately affect groups that are not numbered proportionally among them.
The idea that the dividing line is fundamentally racial is laughable. Northeastern insiders would love, love, love to boast that the group of people with whom they associate have different skin colors and fashionable lifestyles. They just insist that those people think pretty much the same thoughts they do, especially about the importance of maintaining the insider system.
The problem for minorities (for anybody who starts off outside the clique) is that the insider and special interest priorities mean the State of Rhode Island is run very poorly, with limited economic opportunity and a mountain of rules and restrictions for what people can do for housing. To observe that the Ocean State’s “racial gap in… homeownership [is] wider than the national average” is simply to observe that this is not a good place to attempt to build an independent life.
Nobody has incentive to state this plainly, and plenty of people have incentive to amplify group allegiances and racist thinking, so advocates’ solution isn’t to make Rhode Island a good place to improve one’s lot in life, but rather to encourage minorities to act as a special interest. Helpfully for them, this solution will only create opportunity for insiders among the minority groups.
Along with that minor advance for a handful of people, we’ll get huge amounts of racial animosity, making non-insiders less able to work together and thereby cementing the control of the insiders. Little wonder they insist that we focus on race!
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Sabino Matos’s problem with the First Amendment
- Dan Yorke’s short sight on naked fat tests
- The General Assembly’s overreach on guns
- The budget’s overspending
- The RI GOP’s targeting of Ruggerio
- The soccer stadium’s grab for money
Featured image by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash, colorized by Anchor Rising.
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Guests: Louise Kiessling, Andrea Martin, and Susan Orban – Washington County Coalition for Children, www.washcokids.org
Host: Susan Orban Time: 30 minutes
Description: Dr. Kiesslink offers an overview of the mental health status of children. Unfortunately, there has been a trend of diminishing health and helpful treatment is not readily available nationwide. She cites some of the local efforts to find or create helpful treatment options; but supply of these falls short of the growing demand. Martin describes the use of literature (bibliotherapy) as a helpful approach to helping children of varying ages. She introduces a small sampling of books their efforts have found appropriate and helpful. Orban describes current programs
Naturally, the mainstream media is choosing to share video of Joe Biden falling on his bicycle in which you can’t see what actually happened. Barstool Sports has the good clip:
DOWN GOES BIDEN pic.twitter.com/yxHhRWOJyC
— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) June 18, 2022
It wasn’t even one of those stumbles that happens from time to time. The White House occupant just forgot how to get off the bicycle.
The people who installed this man have put the planet in cataclysmic danger.
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