Is It Possible?! What If All Southern Whites Weren't the Equals of Nazis During the Civil Rights Era and What If the South Had Not Been a Total Racialist Nightmare Before the 1960s?!

THE SCUTTLEBUTT has taken a confrontational photo from the 1960s, comparing it with the memorial statue of the event and calling it propaganda, putting some harsh truths into the history of the era (thanks to Sarah). 

It’s not that the Media is lying to you today, it’s that the media has NEVER told the truth. It’s just that by the time the truth comes out, usually, it’s decades later, and no one cares.

In that perspective, and speaking of the Civil Rights movement, this is as good a time as any to bring up a post — almost a book review — I did 13 years ago on a biography on Martin Luther King which I read, perhaps, in the 1990s, and which had me do one double take after another. (Another double-take moment: learning that the real Civil Rights movement did not take place in the 1960s, but in the 1860s.)

Is It Possible?! What If All Southern Whites Weren't the Equals of Nazis and What If the South Had Not Been a Total Racialist Nightmare?!

It seems that nothing can happen on this planet without leftists the world over, and especially in America, immediately drawing a parallel with America itself (minus its leftist, progressive element, needless to say). 

Thus, a decade after Germany murdered millions of people in concentration camps, and all the while the Soviet Union still was murdering millions of people in the Gulag, black Americans in the South were living the same type of horrifying circumstances.

Are we allowed to do the unthinkable and say the (painfully) obvious? Uh, actually, they were not?

Are we allowed to do so without immediately being accused of being racist, of defending Southern whites, and of being brainwashed simpletons and KKK sympathizers pretending that everything was hunky-dory for blacks in the old South?

From Ann Althouse — via Instapundit — we hear that the New York Times is again taking on the dark times of segregation. This, while we get "history" lessons from Oliver Stone on what a swell guy Stalin was, and how the Cold War was all America's fault…

What if the New York Times were told, what if you were told, that, generally speaking, the civil rights movement in the South of the 1950s and 1960s was met not by violence but by, if not respect, if not a lack of violence, certainly by a lack of generalized violence?!

And what if, alternatively, someone — a black leftist?! — were to cry out: "Thank God for Chief Bull Connor"?! (Although, of course, according to THE SCUTTLEBUTT, Chief Bull Connor and his dogs weren't that ferocious and antagonizing to begin with, adding that No Matter How Much You Hate the Media You don't hate them enough. …)

Wouldn't the New York Times, wouldn't you, wouldn't the black leftist, wouldn't leftists the world over, be offended? Shake your/their head? Guffaw? Shout racism?  Scream bloody murder?

And yet, that may be closer to the truth than to the it-was-all-so-horrible-and-invariably-akin-to-Mississippi Burning narrative…

I was as surprised as anyone when, some two decades ago, I read Let the Trumpet Sound (A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr) by Stephen B. Oates, obviously a (rightly) positive, indeed heroic, biography of MLK with a (correctly) sympathetic picture of the civil rights movement.  (Oates has written a myriad of books regarding champions of civil rights over more than a century in America — John Brown, Nat Turner, Clara Barton… — including my favorite biography of Abraham Lincoln, With Malice Toward None. And for the record, I've been working, with Dan Greenberg, on my own biography of Honest Abe.)

As it turns out, however — get ready for a shocker — MLK, blacks in general, the movement, and (in the final analysis) America itself were all lucky to get Chief Bull Connor (a Democrat) in Birmingham, Alabama — for the truth is that what happened in Albany, Georgia, may have been more descriptive of the (white) Southern mentality and of how MLK's movement was usually treated… 

From Let the Trumpet Sound (A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr) by Stephen B. Oates:

[In 1962] King's movement, for all its fervor, [was going] nowhere.  As fast as his nonviolent columns reached their targets, [Albany's] Chief Pritchett put them in paddy wagons and dispatched them to jails in other counties.  Movement leaders could never muster enough recruits to fill all the jails at his disposal.  Then, too, Pritchett treated the marchers with unruffled decorum; he had done his homework on King, studied his Gandhian speeches, and planned to overcome nonviolent protest with nonviolent law enforcement.  

When demonstrators knelt in prayer, Pritchett bowed his head, then arrested them with a puckish smile.  He never clubbed anybody, never called anybody names, and never let his men do so either.  Consequently, reporters who covered the Albany campaign saw no brutality on the part of local police to photograph and report.  …

Pritchett also placed King under round-the-clock police protection, which irritated him and sent him complaining to the chief.  But Pritchett was taking no chances.  If King was attacked or killed, "the fires would never cease."  As the campaign progressed, King and Abernathy developed a grudging respect for him.  Once King even canceled a demonstration so that Pritchett could spend the day with his wife.  It was their wedding anniversary.

 … King and Abernathy came to trial … and several associates, expecting them to be convicted and returned to jail, scheduled mass protest marches.  But the city wanted to get rid of King and Abernathy and ax the movement once and for all.  The court therefore suspended their sentences and ordered their release.  They were free, thrown out of jail again.

By now, King had lost all control of the Albany Movement. … it was no use.  The Albany Movement was over.  … "We ran out of people before he [Pritchett] ran out of jails." 

 … [MLK] was steeped in anguish.  So many of his own people seemed not to care about the struggle; so many whites were hostile or indifferent.

Many readers, white or black, will scream bloody murder (and racism racism racism!) as they read this, but still, the conclusion is inescapable — over and over again, the civil rights movement went nowhere because many times, and in many places, demonstrators (white or black) were not harmed, since many times Southern whites (for reasons good or ill) did not overreact, and since authorities refrained from arresting members of the movement.

Needless to say, all of this is not to pretend, nor to imply, that everything was hunky-dory in the South, for blacks or for others, or that Southern whites were not hostile or indifferent to blacks and to their (very real) civil rights — they were — nor is it meant to pretend, or to imply, that all men, whatever the color of their skin, should not enjoy the same rights, civil, voting, or other — they should — nor is it meant to believe.  But it is to deflate the left's self-serving narrative of Americans, or at least Southerners, as incorrigible Nazis, and of the South, or of America in general, as a nightmarish hellhole of weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

Members of the civil rights movement are invariably depicted as victims of such a nightmarish society, as are, say, the poor, women, Latinos, gays, etc, etc, as well as those who "fell afoul" of Senator McCarthy.

By contrast, what took place in the same years — the Soviet oppression of people (and peoples), the Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe and (attempted) takeover of China, and the communist assassination of millions and millions of citizens (all reasons, obviously, why McCarthyism arose in the first place) — is ignored or downplayed, or often accompanied by the words "Oh yes, terrible, terrible… But! But: we have to make an effort to understand the Soviets… Plus, you know, they had good intentions"!

Related: Is this sounding familiar? Obama's Predecessor of Sorts at the Helm of New York City

The Obama presidency has been like [New York's] David Dinkins mayoralty all over again, with utter incompetence being papered over with appeals to white guilt. 

Update: A Few Black People in the 1960s Not Being Martyrized by White America

RIP Catherine O'Hara, Doyenne of SCTV (HER FUNNIEST SKETCHES ON VIDEO including one that could never be filmed today)

 

Brooke's new variety show. Brooke interviews celebrities Tip O'Neill and Kirk Douglas.

These days, even inside North America (and certainly abroad), many people don't know or never knew about SCTV or Fridays, both weekly comedy shows which I watched while in college and which I found far more entertaining than Saturday Night Live. 

And yet, Second City Television launched the careers of several comedians, from John Candy to Rick Moranis through Harold Ramis. Not to mention Catherine O'Hara.

Today's topic is divorce, and the guest is newly divorced Patricia Donovan, who has redecorated frequently in the past few months. They gain strength from each other. Host 'Chris' - Andrea Martin Patricia Donovan - Catherine O'Hara

Three of my favorite sketches that had me in stitches and which I have never forgotten, three to four decades later, were Catherine O'Hara as the titular actress on the Brooke Shields Show (see if you can recognize who plays Brooke's mother); the feminism parody Only For Women (utterly unfilmable in the 21st century); and O'Hara in the Ingmar Bergman parody, Whispers of the Wolf (1:30-6:56). (I never forgot Count Floyd's line, "Alright, it wasn't scary!" and "WE ARE WOMEN! WE ARE ONE!", as well as Brooke's line, "Tip! That's a really stupid name! Do you mind if I call you Tip Toenail?")

If you have more time, also check out Catherine as another Kate, Katharine Hepburn; English for Beginners; and the TAXIDERMIST Sketch with John Candy.

 

 

Count Floyd presents Whispers of the Wolf.

Widespread failure across nearly every level of leadership in Minnesota: Public programs fraud on the scale we see today— of which Ilhan Omar is Somali Fraud Exhibit A—indicates a leadership class that has either forgotten or no longer takes seriously the idea that public office is a public trust

 

Over at Hillsdale College, Power Line's Scott Johnson treats its Imprimis readers to Learning From Minnesota’s Somali Fraud Scandal. For more than ten years this "fellow of the Claremont Institute … has covered Minnesota Fifth District U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar and three major trials in Minnesota involving Somali defendants." (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.) Read the excerpts below or read the whole thing.

The massive public programs fraud committed almost entirely by Somali perpetrators has recently exploded in the national news. The controversy is centered in Minnesota, where the amount of money bilked from American taxpayers could prove to be as high as $9 billion. But the scandal is spreading to other states as well.

 … Long known for having a largely Scandinavian population, Minnesota is now home to the largest Somali population in North America, numbering roughly 100,000, most of whom are congregated in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. The seeds of this community were planted in the early 1990s, when the State Department directed thousands of refugees from Somalia’s civil war to Minnesota. Except for a dip in 2008, the immigration of Somalis into Minnesota has continued unabated, augmented by Somalis arriving from other states. The latter likely has to do with Minnesota’s generous welfare and charity policies. As Professor Ahmed Samatar of Saint Paul’s Macalester College was quoted as saying in a 2015 Washington Times story, Minnesota is “the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state.”

The massive fraud currently in the news was not the first controversy surrounding the Somali immigrant community. Around 2015, it proved to be a fertile source of ISIS recruits. … Of ten Minnesota Somalis charged with seeking to join ISIS in Syria, six pleaded guilty and three were convicted at trial in June 2016.

During the trial of the three Somalis who contested the charges, it became clear, primarily from recordings introduced into evidence, that although they gave the outward appearance of American assimilation, they hated America. They took advantage of educational and employment opportunities and moved into and out of the workforce at will. At one time, all three worked at a UPS facility in a leafy Saint Paul suburb, where they enjoyed watching ISIS videos of beheadings during their breaks.

Foreshadowing the fraud scandals of today, the Somalis involved in terrorism showed themselves to be sophisticated in their creative use of social welfare benefits. Two of four Somali ISIS recruits intercepted at New York’s JFK airport while en route to Syria had used federal financial aid funds to pay for their travel. One financed his planned trip to Syria with a $5,000 debit card withdrawal on his student loan account.

In the decade since, the controversy over terrorist recruitment of Somalis has receded and the Somali abuse of social welfare programs has proliferated.

Child Care Fraud

The defrauding of Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program for day care services, although brought dramatically to national attention by Nick Shirley in late December, goes back more than ten years. Jeff Baillon, a Twin Cities TV reporter, reported on day care frauds in 2013 and 2015. A year ago this month Jay Kolls, another local reporter, went to two of the ten sites Shirley visited and reported that one of them was guilty of 95 violations—including “no records for 16 children”—between 2019 and 2023. But taxpayer funds continued to flow to these programs.

 … Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor issued a detailed report on child care fraud in 2019. On the question of how much had been stolen, the report restricted itself to amounts established in convictions. Because convictions were few and far between, that only came to between $5 million and $6 million. But the report concluded, citing the lax administration of the day care program, that the level of fraud was likely higher. Indeed! And the laxity continues. Jim Nobles, the legislative auditor at the time of the 2019 report, wrote a recent column in The Minnesota Star Tribune decrying the “permissive approach” of Minnesota’s state government that makes it “easy for fraudsters to steal” and questioning why nothing had been done over many years to “implement standard financial controls and oversight.”

Feeding Our Future Fraud

In that same Star Tribune column, Nobles wrote: “We now know that the fraud scheme used in the state’s child care program has been used frequently in other state human service programs.” A dramatic example of this is the case that has become known as the Feeding Our Future fraud.

Feeding Our Future is a nonprofit organization that served as a sponsor of sites like day care centers and restaurants that participated in two federal nutrition programs. During the peak Covid period, from April 2020 until January 2022, Feeding Our Future and its sites and their vendors found it remarkably easy to bilk these programs by filing false claims for reimbursement supported by false meal counts, fake rosters, and bogus invoices.

 … It is important to note that suspected fraud was often never fully investigated because government overseers were easily scared off by absurd claims of racism—charges that continue to be leveled even today. …

Medicaid Fraud

The Feeding Our Future fraud cases opened a window on scams involving several Minnesota Medicaid programs. After the FBI executed search warrants in one such case in July of last year, then-Acting United States Attorney Joe Thompson—who until very recently was leading both the Feeding Our Future and the Medicaid fraud prosecutions—called a press conference in September to announce criminal charges against the first eight Medicaid fraud defendants, all of whom are Somali.

 … Uncovering fraud in Minnesota is like playing with Russian nesting dolls. “Many of the owners of [the involved HSS] companies,” Thompson said, “had one or more other companies through which they billed other Medicaid programs such as the [Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention] program, the Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services program, the Integrated Community Support program, the Community Access for Disability Inclusion program, [Personal Care Assistance] services, and other Medicaid-waivered services.” The details of these cases were almost incidental to Thompson’s main point—that “Minnesota is drowning in fraud.”

“It feels never-ending,” Thompson said. “I have spent my career as a fraud prosecutor and the depth of fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.”

On December 18 of last year, Thompson called another press conference to announce charges against six more defendants in connection with Minnesota’s Medicaid programs. The new cases involved allegedly fraudulent claims in programs for housing, autism services, and assistance for disabled adults seeking to live independently. “Every day we look under a rock and find a new $50 million fraud scheme,” Thompson said.

The total amount of money disbursed through these programs since 2018 is $18 billion. Based on his ongoing investigations, Thompson estimated that as much as half that amount—$9 billion!—may have been paid out on fraudulent claims. “The magnitude cannot be overstated,” Thompson said. “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s a staggering, industrial-scale fraud.” Four of the six defendants charged in December are Minnesotan Somalis, and those involved in the uncharged cases under investigation are almost entirely Somali.

Political Responsibility

Two defendants from Philadelphia, Anthony Waddell Jefferson and Lester Brown, undertook what Thompson called “fraud tourism.” Having heard that Minnesota’s HSS program presented an easy mark, they set up in Minnesota to become fraudulent service providers. One wonders how word of this was able to make its way to Philadelphia but not to the State Capitol in Saint Paul, where the people’s elected officials are charged with protecting the public interest.

In a Star Tribune interview, Thompson cast the net widely in terms of responsibility: “This fraud crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the result of widespread failure across nearly every level of leadership in Minnesota: Politicians who turned a blind eye. Agencies that failed to act. Prosecutors and law enforcement who didn’t push hard enough. Reporters who ignored the story. Community leaders who stayed silent. And a public that wanted to believe it couldn’t happen here.”

Partly because it’s a problem that the people can solve directly, I would focus on the politicians. Three in particular.

The first is Governor Tim Walz. … Walz will never live down the frauds committed on the agencies under his jurisdiction.

The second is Attorney General Ellison … Like Walz, Ellison continues to refuse to sit for an interview with a serious reporter to answer questions about what he knew about the fraud and when he knew it. Nor has anyone in the mainstream media made an issue of that fact, which is a scandal in its own right.

The third is U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar. Even if we leave aside the fact that she immigrated to the U.S. as a fraudulent member of the Omar family and later married her biological brother in her own Elmi family for further fraudulent purposes, we could still fairly describe her as Somali Fraud Exhibit A. She sponsored the MEALS Act that facilitated the Feeding Our Future fraud, and her congressional district served as its epicenter. She was a friend of Salim Said, Aimee Bock’s co-defendant in the second Feeding Our Future trial. She filmed a promotional video at Said’s restaurant that was introduced by Said’s lawyer at trial, although it actually served to support the charges against Said. Yet despite these facts, Omar claims to have known nothing about the fraud.

***

Public programs fraud on the scale we see today in Minnesota—and to a lesser degree (so far at least) in other states—indicates a leadership class that has either forgotten or no longer takes seriously the idea that public office is a public trust. What more fitting time could there be than the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence to restore the moral power of that idea in irresponsible state governments like that of Minnesota?

Read the whole thing 

Related — Law Enforcement Officers and Police Shootings: 

Try Comparing Those of January 6 to Those in Minnesota

Word of the Day: GIMMIGRANT

(Bumped) After a spokesman for Republicans Overseas France appeared in a debate on French TV which "goes completely off the rails as they relish in their mob-like mocking behavior and all signs of intelligent life leave the room", another ROF member watching the show on his Parisian TV reacted thusly to the "the TDS affected panel":

They are not just white liberals, they are scheming democratic operators who want to gather votes from undocumented gimmigrants!

Kudos to Barry for inventing an awesome new word: 

Gimmigrant! 

(Which spelling do you prefer, dear reader? Gimmigrant or Gimmegrant?)

Law Enforcement Officers and Police Shootings: Try Comparing Those of January 6 to Those in Minnesota

The MSM's Treatment of the January 6 Police Forces and of the Victims That Day

One aspect about the January 6 Protest that has not been popularized enough is the extent to which the claim that half a dozen policemen died that day turns out to be utterly preposterous. 

Both Joe Biden and Hakeem Jeffries held speeches during the former's term in which the occupant of the White House and the House minority leader stated that five Capitol policemen were killed on January 6, 2021 and Hakeem Jeffries having family members solemnly come up and read the names of "the officers who are no longer with us."

But just think — the obvious questions arises: among all the protesters who were prosecuted (persecuted?) and jailed during the next four years, where were the murder cases? Why wasn't any of them charged with murder? Why has nobody seen any murder trials (five? more?)? Why do we know about all the members of the "mob" rioting at the Capitol but nothing about the people involved in the far worse problem of assassination? (Thanks for the Instalinks, Ed and Sarah.)

The Left cares nothing about individuals — see Mamdani — it always reverts to collectivism, in this case to collective guilt, such as the conservatives of the entire state of Texas all sharing the blame for the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas (whose killer, by the way, was a Soviet-admiring communist).

Ashli Babbitt's mother at CPAC in 2023

Had I been in the buildings on the days (no matter for which party, but let's say Republican) that Joe Biden and Hakeem Jeffries made their speeches, I would have stood up to say as follows 

"We are firmly on the side of the Democrats in this matter. As you know, the GOP is known as the party of law and order and we Republicans have always stood firmly behind the boys in blue. We want to help in any way we can and we should like, therefore, to have the exact names of the policemen martyred and (as far as possible) the exact times of the afternoon of January 6 in which they were killed, as well as the videos thereof. Most of all, we demand the name of the killer(s) of each of these five men, in order to prosecute these murderers to the full extent of the law. Indeed, we are determined to demand the death penalty in every case." 

Of course, while we know the names of the five law officers who are dead, nobody can determine at what time they died on January 6 or who killed them on January 6, for the obvious reason that not a single one of them died on January 6 or was murdered on January 6 or on any other day. 

Some of them died weeks, if not months, later, and all died of unrelated causes (the one who died earliest, Officer Brian Sicknick, was from two strokes the following day). (Of course you could claim that the suicides of Howard Liebengood, Jeffrey Smith, Kyle DeFreytag, and Gunther Hashida was caused by depression due to the January 6 riot, in which case some of us will ungraciously retort that such a person should perhaps not have belonged in the police business in the first place.) 

Meanwhile, not a tear is shed by the Left for Ashli Babbitt, whose name indeed is dragged through the mud and whose death is deemed to be nothing but her own fault — if not outright mocked — by leftists galore. (See also Charlie Kirk, Andrew Breitbart, etc, etc, etc…)

• Related: The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence

Intermission: The Reader's Digest's Hard Turn to Wokeness

In a passage from a book authored by "one of Reader’s Digest International Edition’s top reporters" — which shows how far left even that monthly has gone (a 10-page summary of the book was published in the November 2002 issue, just in time to influence the mid-terms of that year) — that is hardly believable, Anita Bartholomew proves that The Digest has gone full woke. 

(NOTE: If you have no time for this lengthy "intermission", skip to the below the picture of the Minneapolis riots in the snow…)

Guess whose name is not mentioned anywhere in Anita Bartholomew's Drama in Real Life article about the "Siege at the Capitol": Ashli Babbitt's. Nowhere is Rosanne Boyland mentioned. They are mentioned in her book, Siege: An American Tragedy, but with such a different tone of voice than that for the brave policemen besieged by "the MAGA horde’s storming of the building" that is so eye-popping it sounds like a Babylon Bee satire. 

Listen to how Ashli Babbitt is described: because she was a soldier (who ever thought, in their wildest dreams, that The Reader's Digest would come down to dissing the… United States Army?!), "most of Ashli Babbitt's adult life was training and preparation to do violence"! (How is that for an upgrade from "thank you for your service"?! What about, uh, the training and preparation of the main subject of your partisan article, then, Anita Bartholomew, i.e. … police officers?!) But it gets better (sic) — in her book, the author gives outright praise for the killing of Ashli Babbitt.

"Had a Capitol Police officer not thwarted [the violent mob's] pursuit [of escaping congressional representatives] by shooting Ashli Babbitt, how many lawmakers would they have taken down?" Isn't "taken down" a weasel word for killed — oh, but Anita didn't use the word killed!

Turn to Jack Cashill, the author of Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6 (The real question is not why thousands of women went to Washington on January 6; The real question is why the rest of us did not), to set the record straight:

No police officers were killed or seriously injured. No members of Congress or staff were molested.

As for Rosanne Boyland, Jack Cashill addresses her case in an American Thinker article called The ‘Through Line’ from Ashli Babbitt to Donald Trump:

[Michael] Byrd was not the only cop to panic. Metropolitan Police Department officer Lila Morris beat the unconscious Rosanne Boyland repeatedly over the head with a stick. Boyland subsequently died.

But in Anita Bartholomew's book (neither Michael Byrd nor Lila Morris are mentioned in its 220 pages), Rosanne Boyland turns out to be nothing but a drug addict who "was being trampled" (by whom is, again, never clarified, but please do notice the passive voice which, beyond being passive, suggests that the protestors were, or at least may have been, responsible). 

Never in my day as a fact-checker at the Reader's Digest, where I started my career, would an editor have let such a text pass, either in the book form or in the article. In my day, the article (not to mention the book) would have received a suggestion for a total "rewrite" or an outright "drop."

One question Anita Bartholomew never bothers with: What is Donald Trump's view (not to mention that of his supporters, i.e., half the country) of the 2021 "riot", or more importantly, of Trump's view of the 2020 election. However, Jack Cashill makes some good points regarding the race-baiting and defaming Democrats' scare-mongering, "toxic nonsense", and "mass psychosis":

If … Michael Byrd thought he “saved countless lives” by killing Ashli Babbitt, [Thomas Crooks] may well have thought he’d save millions [in July 2024] by killing that Hitler-loving white supremacist Donald Trump.

Moreover, there is no acknowledgemt in Anita Bartholomew's article that already by August 2021, the FBI was confirming that there had not been an insurrection some seven months earlier. Did it make it into the book? From the looks of it — an author who seems as objective as Nancy Pelosi — the answer is an unqualified No.

In her outstanding book, La Guerre Culturelle, Évelyne Joslain points out (with an ever-so-pertinent rhyme in French) that "Le Siège du Capitole" i.e., is really "Le Piège du Capitole", i.e., what the left calls the "Siege at the Capitol" is really the Trap at the Capitol, in other words, entrapment at the Capitol.

Notice Anything Different About the Left's Descriptions of the Minnesota Riots?

Which brings us to the current uprisings in Minnesota (in which we are repeatedly assured by the "mostly peaceful protests" crowd that they are neither riots nor an insurrection). 

Renée Good is described as nothing but a mother bringing her kid to school that day, while nobody in the MSM seems to mention that she had parked her car perpendicular in the middle of the road. Or that indeed when asked to step out of the car, she immediately hit Reverse, before lounging forward. 

Think for a moment about a common traffic stop, say for speeding, whether in America, in France, in Denmark, in Greenland, in China, or anywhere else — would any policeman look at you with gentle eyes if you parked your vehicle perpendicular across the road? How about if you ignored his order to exit the car, instead setting in reverse only to bound forward?

Good's intention may not have been to hit any of the law officers, but it seems straight-out denial of reality to dismiss the bodycam of Jonathan Ross which shows him being hit, or shoved if you prefer, while the ICE agent has since been described as being in hospital suffering from internal bleeding. You think that may be exaggerated? Maybe, but: how is that different to what the Left is doing with the Left's alleged victims?

Conversely, indeed, nobody seems to be worried about the health and well-being of the many thousands of law enforcement officers in Minnesota these days. 

Which, needless to say, seems to be par for the course when you keep describing that police force as fascistic and the Gestapo.

Related: • RIP Charlie Kirk — This Is What Is Bound to Happen When You Constantly Refer to Your Adversaries as "Fascists" and as "Threats to Democracy"  

By the way, I can assure you that no member of the Gestapo, whether in an occupied country or in Germany proper, ever had to deal with thrown snowballs, deafened with whistles, and treated to a barrage of car honks. They didn't need to cover their faces, either, for the simple reason that nobody in their right mind was out in the streets getting in the faces and organizing to doxx the families of these truly fascist people. No-one was resisting — openly — not if they wanted to live. "If you protest, and you don't expect anything to happen to you," as the meme puts it, "then you never truly believed we were living under fascism."

Ashli Babbitt family volunteers at CPAC in 2023

Question: How is what Ashli Babbitt did — jump through a broken window — any wors than what Renée Good did? Is a car not, can an automobile not be, a weapon?

• Ashli Babbitt and the left's first consequence-free taste of MAGA blood: Openly calling the Orcs to man the barricades, the Left's revolutionary cosplay is headlonging into homicidal politics

How about Alex Pretti?

As PJ Media's MATT MARGOLIS points out (in The Left Doesn’t Want You to Know This About Alex Pretti, the Man the Border Patrol Shot), 

The talking points are already circulating. Social media posts from the left keep hammering on Pretti's job as an ICU nurse, as if that somehow proves he was there with pure intentions. They are gaslighting you because they want you to believe federal agents gunned down a selfless healthcare worker for no reason.

That is not the case.

We already knew that Pretti was carrying a loaded handgun and two extra loaded magazines when he showed up at an active ICE operation targeting a violent criminal illegal immigrant. And like Good before him, Pretti wasn't some random citizen. He was part of an organized network dedicated to interfering with immigration enforcement.

And he brought a loaded gun.

 … Speaking on behalf of neighbors, [Jeanne] Massey says the community is "horrified" and "furious" about Pretti's killing. "Let me be clear: we are horrified, we are furious, and we are not going to pretend this is anything but what it is - another senseless act of violence carried out by federal agents in our city," she said.

What Massey conveniently leaves out is what Pretti was doing there in the first place. He showed up at an active federal law enforcement operation carrying a loaded weapon and extra ammunition. Video footage shows Border Patrol agents attempting to disarm him before the fatal shooting.

 … The left wants you to see this as federal overreach. The reality is that these networks have created a dangerous environment in which activists deliberately interfere with law enforcement operations. They track agents around the clock, follow them, confront them, and apparently sometimes show up armed. Then they act shocked when agents act in self-defense and things turn deadly.

Meanwhile — to restate the obvious — the protestors of January 6 did not bring any firearms to the protest. sometimes, we are told (with the utmost passion) that no no no no, this was not the case: "Oh yes, one of them did bring a gun! It was in the trunk of his car! Parked two miles away."

That's like saying that one of the peasants who attacked la Bastille in 1789 had every intention of murder; Indeed, Jacques owned a pitchfork. Oui, Monsieur! Yessir, he did. Jacques had a pitchfork in the haystack in his farm in Normandy.

In his debunking of the Left's fairy tale of the January 6 melodrama, Factcheck 's D'Angelo Gore examines all the charges against the protestors:

The mob of Trump supporters protesting his 2020 election loss brutally attacked officers with many types of weapons, including flag poles, pipes, bats, bricks and pepper spray, a bipartisan Senate report said. 

But why use pepper spray? Why use a flagpole? Why not simply bring a firearm? Especially when you — proudly — belong to the most gun-owning group of people on the planet?

But guns are what a lot of leftist protesters are bringing to the streets of Minneapolis — along with, believe it or not, bombing materials. 

This forces PJ Media's ERIC FLORACK to ask, How Is This Not an Insurrection? 

 … rule number one here seems a purely logical point. It's one that seems to be getting ignored by many: You simply do not pull a loaded gun on a federal officer doing his duty enforcing the law and expect to survive. 

When anybody brings up Renée Good and Alex Pretti in the future, don't hesitate to retort with Ashli Babbitt and Charlie Kirk. There is no more fitting description of their double standards.

RELATED: • What the January 6th protest actually reveals is the criminal determination of the Democrats to establish a one-party state at whatever the cost