General

New Covid Book Tackles Taboo Truths

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On Monday, April 10, President Joe Biden signed H.J.Res.7, officially terminating the national emergency concerning the purported Covid-19 pandemic previously declared by then-President Trump on March 13, 2020. The national emergency and a separate, but very much related, public health emergency had been reinstated repeatedly since they were first announced that fateful month, the beginning of the end of Trump’s first (and maybe only) term in office and the initiation of what can only be described as a color revolution in America that led to the likely theft of the 2020 election.

According to mainstream reporting on the official ending of the national emergency, along with the eventual end of the public health emergency on May 11, not much will actually change concerning health insurance policies and coverage as well as medical treatment and protocols. The moves are mostly symbolic, as were the original national emergency and public health emergency declarations themselves: public relations stunts designed to instill mass conformity in one of the most egregious and outrageous psychological warfare operations in the history of humanity known as the Covid-19 “pandemic.”

The legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s tyrannical overreach and unconstitutional policies will, however, likely stay with Americans and citizens the world over, most of whom were subjected to the global PSYOP that resulted in disastrous consequences for the vast majority of peoples across the planet while massively benefitting the world’s billionaire class in one of the greatest wealth transfers in history.

Governments at all levels—local, state, and federal—along with the various public health departments and “experts,” doctors and the broader medical establishment, the scientific community and academia more generally, and of course the mass media were all seemingly coordinated in their response to the purported “pandemic.” These forces and institutions certainly did not let the manufactured crisis go to waste, heeding the Machiavellian advice of Rahm Emanuel, a leading Jewish globalist who served as the Chief of Staff and official handler of former President Obama and, later, mayor of Chicago.

Covid-19 and the response to it were precedent-setting in the most profound ways. Never before in history have masses of people willingly suffocated themselves with useless face masks, adhered to absurd, contradictory, and asinine public health “guidance” and “recommendations” masquerading as legitimate law, and injected themselves with an unknown, untested, and truly novel form of vaccination using mRNA technology, which its designers and advocates, including Tal Zaks, the Israeli-born former Chief Medical Officer of Moderna, refer to as hacking “the software of life” and editing a person’s genetic code.

The fear- and trauma-based mind control programming concerning the purported Covid-19 “pandemic” disseminated by the mass media—which was reinforced and perpetuated by virtually the entire political, public health, and scientific establishment, all day, every day for over two years—proved to be extremely effective. There’s no telling when these same sorts of tactics will be used again in the future, especially now that it’s been demonstrated that the vast majority of people will willingly go along with almost every aspect of the insanity. Expect just such a scenario—or something similar—to unfold should a perceived political outsider or renegade make serious strides and gain serious traction in American politics.

While much has been written on Covid-19 and its aftermath, including much speculation and fear mongering equally as reckless as mainstream coverage of the alleged public health emergency, no book, to this writer’s knowledge, has addressed one of the most taboo aspects of the situation: the role that Jews have played throughout the entire scam.

While explicitly Jewish media outlets, such as The Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Telegraph Agency (see here), and the Jewish Daily Forward, have reported on the Jewish role in the Covid-19 pandemic—ranging from advising political leaders, serving as public health “experts,” and creating and selling vaccines—many in both the alternative and mainstream media have either ignored, dismissed, or outright ridiculed any discussion of Jewish involvement in the Covid-19 scenario as an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.”

Either too afraid to address such a taboo topic, entirely ignorant of the matter, or, perhaps even worse, actively gatekeeping the issue, many independent journalists, researchers, and investigators have simply never broached the topic, at least not in any great detail.

That has changed with the publication of Covert Covid Culprits, the first book authored by Karl Haemers, a regular contributor to The Barnes Review history magazine who maintains his own Substack page and who also writes for The Occidental Observer.


Pick up a copy today!

The book, available for purchase from The Barnes Review, focuses on two important and controversial topics, both of which are very much interrelated.

First, as the title suggests, the book focuses on the “covert culprits” involved in the Covid-19 scam. Of course, we’re referring to the Jews involved at key positions of power and influence in the federal government, public health agencies, academia, medicine, Big Pharma, globalist institutions such as the World Economic Forum (which arguably played the leading role in coordinating the talking points and global response to the alleged pandemic) and Council on Foreign Relations, and the mass media. These “covert culprits”—and the list is quite long—deserve to be highlighted and exposed to the public in a straightforward manner, and this book accomplishes that goal.

Secondly, the book addresses the concept of what has been historically described as the “Jewish Question” or, more derisively, the “Jewish Problem.” A handful of the 15 chapters address this topic specifically—easily the most taboo topic in modern Western society—from the author’s perspective and tie the discussion directly to the Covid-19 situation.

In the final chapter, Haemers effectively argues that it’s not merely a “question” or “problem” with a simple answer or solution humanity is dealing with when confronting the subversive role organized Jewry, professional Jewish activists (such as Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL), and highly ethnically conscious Jewish bureaucrats, politicians, academics, and journalists play in society. Rather, it’s a broader “Jewish Issue,” encompassing many different political, sociological, economic, and racial factors.

Overall, the book must be praised for its boldness in confronting these highly controversial topics in such a straightforward fashion. Haemers’ passion and devotion to the subject material is obvious to any reader. However, it should be pointed out that the book could have greatly benefitted from further editing, which would have helped smooth out some of the language, ensure uniformity in punctuation and spelling, and correct any misspellings or minor factual or grammatical errors. Independently publishing anything—let alone a detailed, fact-filled 275-page book—is never an easy task. That being said, any minor editorial oversights hardly detracted from Haemers’ bold approach in tackling the subject matter.

In this writer’s view, the single most important contribution this book makes to the broader Covid-19 skeptic community is the thorough documentation of the role that Jewish individuals have played throughout the alleged pandemic. Speaking or writing openly about Jews is not an easy thing to do in modern American society. In fact, as I’ve suggested previously, it’s the most taboo and controversial topic to articulate to the American public, largely due to the massive pro-Jewish propaganda and narratives endlessly disseminated by the mass media and educational establishment.

Simply pointing out basic facts about Jews—facts that are even documented and highlighted by explicitly Jewish news outlets and journalists—is more than enough to get yourself “cancelled” and censored, denigrated as an “anti-Semite” or a “conspiracy theorist” (or both!), and generally ostracized from polite society.

The Jerusalem Post openly reports on “the Jews behind the coronavirus vaccines,” but don’t you dare notice or comment on it!

I encourage readers to purchase the book for all of the background information and details of the many Jews involved in the Covid-19 scam, but just to give you an idea, here is a list of some of the most prominent individuals identified:

There are many others identified in the book, including some of the leading figures at the Council on Foreign Relations, a powerful globalist organization deeply involved in the Covid-19 scam, many of whom are Jewish, such as its President Richard Haass and Chairman of the Board of Directors David Rubenstein (mentioned above). Haemers takes care to provide citations from well-established sources to document the role Jewish individuals played throughout the Covid-19 scam.

While the Jewish Issue dominates the focus of the book, Haemers does devote two chapters to the role Bill Gates and his insidious foundation, bankrolled to the tunes of billions of dollars, played in the overall Covid-19 operation, and another chapter titled “Covid Evil: Satanic References in the Coronavirus Scamdemic” that deals with other sinister aspects of the purported global “pandemic” more generally.

That being said, Haemers’ treatment of the Jewish Issue, as he describes it, is a nuanced and interesting perspective, one that deserves contemplation and debate. Anyone familiar with his writing knows full well his knowledge of and passion for the subject. While the information and source material presented is highly credible, some of Haemers’ more polemical writing about Jews could too easily be dismissed as mere “anti-Semitism.” But since that is possible no matter how one writes about Jews (except in praise), and audiences are already changing to accept such views, this potential flaw may be forgiven. Detailed factual analysis presented in the book may even redeem it.

Generally speaking, Haemers would argue, and I would wholeheartedly agree, that addressing the Jewish Issue—confronting the reality of Jewish power and influence in society—is easily the most important topic facing humanity, particularly Whites worldwide.

In a nutshell, Jews have highjacked Western governments, media and entertainment complexes, banking systems, and academia. They have formed a hostile elite that is waging ethnic, demographic, and psychological war against formerly White Western nations. This process began decades ago, and Americans have been living under a Jewish-dominated regime and broader society for at least four generations now. Radical Jewish activists have entirely transformed our culture, attacked our traditions, weaponized narratives of Western history, instigated minorities against us, and in general have turned our society completely upside down—and the results have been devastating.

“Jews have engaged in extraordinary campaigns to change and degrade the moral foundations of their perceived enemies, while clinging intransigently to their own amorality,” Haemers accurately argues in the final chapter.

Jews have fundamentally transformed traditional American and European societies—demographically, sexually, socially, culturally, and politically—which have largely benefitted the organized Jewish community and its leadership to the detriment of the average White American.

While focusing on the “covert culprits” involved at the highest levels of the Covid-19 operation, Haemers’ recently published book also powerfully addresses the broader Jewish Issue. Addressing this taboo topic is critical to articulate any potential political solution not only in America, but the wider Western world.

NB: Author Karl Haemers joined me on the most recent edition of TBR History Hour, a podcast program featuring contributors to The Barnes Review history magazine and other special guests. You can listen to the entire program in MP3 format by clicking here.

The Post George Floyd Revolution; Roger Devlin reviews Heather MacDonald’s When Race Trumps Merit

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F. Roger Devlin’s review of Heather MacDonald’s When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives appeared at AmRen.

This review is far more informative than Ann Coulter’s review which was posted here recently. You probably won’t be surprised by a whole lot, but some of the examples are amazing.

Excerpts:

At present it is still possible, although dangerous, to challenge this fallacious idea by citing data on racial gaps in skills and behavior. But such data themselves are increasingly being attacked or hidden. This is the reason standardized test scores are being dropped from school admissions, for example. Such tests have never impeded the practice of racial preferences — different standards have simply been set for the different races. But they have continued to provide evidence of actual skill gaps. For that reason, nearly 2,000 colleges, including the entire University of California system, have now either banned the use of test scores or made them optional.

The next frontier is the rejection of the concept of accomplishment itself, since it leads inevitably to the realization that some people and groups accomplish more than others. The behavioral standards that make accomplishment possible cannot be left intact either. In the summer of 2020, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, declared that rationality, planning for the future, punctuality, delayed gratification, and being polite were aspects of white culture that “people of color” might not wish to internalize. We are sacrificing civilization itself to maintain the illusion of racial equality. …

An even fiercer reaction greeted Norman Wang of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in 2020 when he argued in the Journal of the American Heart Association for an end to racial preferences. Mr. Wang pointed out that years of research showed students admitted under quotas disproportionally drop out because of poor grades and have a harder time passing medical licensing exams. Miss Mac Donald quotes a president-elect of the American Heart Association who wondered out loud how such a paper could have been published, given its “unbalanced, unscientific, and untrue statements” — without citing a single example of such statements. The AAMC claimed Mr. Wang’s paper was factually inaccurate, also without examples. Another doctor denounced Mr. Wang’s “racist beliefs and paper” on Twitter. The editor of the journal apologized for publishing the article and retracted it [sounds familiar], assuring readers it would be “improving” its peer-review process to avoid such “missteps” in the future [in my case, the editor was fired]. Mr. Wang not only lost his position as director at the University of Pittsburgh Heart and Vascular Institute, but was banned from all contact with medical students and residents. A lawsuit is pending. …

Some of the incidents Heather Mac Donald describes, especially within the arts academy, are the kind that might have occurred a generation ago. However, certain novelties suggest that America’s racial revolution has entered a new phase. One such novelty already referred to is the growing impermissibility of mentioning racial gaps in skills and behavior, even when attributing them to “cultural” factors. Another is preemptive self-accusation: In the wake of the George Floyd riots, observers who thought they had lost the capacity to be surprised at America’s racial madness were bewildered to see eminent people and institutions rushing forward to confess their “racism” like the victims of Stalinist show trials. Miss Mac Donald has a noteworthy take on this:

The self-abasement common in the post-George Floyd era is actually a form of self-aggrandizement. Individuals and institutions blame themselves for inequalities for which they have no responsibility in order to claim a current impact they do not possess. [Thus they] position themselves as essential to the anti-racism crusade.

Under a regime of anti-racism, cultural authority can come from only two sources: “the assertion of victimhood or the acknowledgement of oneself as a victimizer.” Whites cannot adopt the first strategy, so “that leaves the vigorous assertion of racial guilt as the second-best means of retaining social capital.”

Frustrated by the failure of white and Asian men to fight back against the diversity juggernaut, the author asked one research scientist, “How much longer would they continue to allow their hard work and accomplishments to be disparaged and sidelined?” His reply:

We need our jobs. Our peers will turn on us. Speak out, lose job forever, be quickly forgotten and abandoned. I admire the bravery of those who speak out but they will be systematically exterminated until they are all gone. The system will have to rot from within and be reinvented, which will take 50-100 years.

The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Top 50 Organizations To Know

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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/censorship-industrial-complex-top-50-organizations-know

No Biggie, Just the End of Civilization

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No Biggie, Just the End of Civilization

Whatever you had planned to do for the rest of the day, please drop it and read this right now: Heather Mac Donald’s new book, “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.”

It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization — law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine — to make up for Black people not doing well on standardized tests.

Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to more fully dedicate themselves to the sole, driving purpose of our nation: boosting Black people’s self-esteem.

To consider just one arena, I don’t think you’re going to like the medical care you’ll be getting under the new regime. Just like in the wildly successful Soviet Union, science must be subordinated to politics, specifically “racial justice.”

The American Medical Association, the American Association of Medical Colleges and the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) have all agreed that medicine is racist.

The New England Journal of Medicine “presents a nonstop stream of articles on such topics as the ‘Pathology of Racism,’ ‘Toward Antiracist Allyship in Medicine,’ and ‘How Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities,’” Mac Donald writes.

And “Scientific American produced a ‘special collector’s edition’ on ‘The Science of Overcoming Racism.’”

(It’s fantastic that scientific organizations are finally dedicating themselves to something important like racism, and not something boring, like cancer or Alzheimer’s disease — Unpack your privilege!)

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) aired a podcast in 2021 in which the deputy editor, Edward Livingston, suggested that inequities in medical care be addressed without accusing doctors of “racism.” Both he and JAMA’s editor in chief were promptly denounced and fired, the editor replaced with a Black woman.

Black leaders now head the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center, the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center, the University of Pittsburgh Division of Medical Hematology/Oncology, the Wake Forest School of Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Pharmacy, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the Massey Cancer Center at VCU, the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and the Department of Medicine at UCLA’s medical school.

What could go wrong? Most of America’s largest cities have Black mayors, and everything is fine.

But at least your doctor will be able to diagnose your disease correctly and you won’t die on the operating table, right? … RIGHT? (Anybody else remember the affirmative action doctor who took Allan Bakke’s place at the University of California Medical School at Davis and ended up killing his patients?)

In 2021, Mac Donald writes, “the average score for white applicants on the Medical College Admission Test was in the 71st percentile. … The average score for black applicants was in the 35th percentile — a full standard deviation below the average white score.” [KM: Same for average Black-White differences on IQ tests, which are highly heritable. But of course, that won’t be mentioned here.]

Naturally, therefore, medical schools responded by dropping the MCAT for Black and Hispanic students, offering them admission on the basis of their “strong appreciation of human rights and social justice,” as the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai puts it.

Things don’t get better at medical school, where Black students again score a full standard deviation below white and Asian students on Step One of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE). This is the test given after the second year of medical school to evaluate students’ knowledge of anatomy, biochemistry, pharmacology, physiology and so on. It is multiple-choice and graded by computer.

Conclusion: The computer is racist. In January 2022, the USMLE dropped grades for Step One altogether and converted it to pass/fail.

On one hand, no one will get a bad grade. On the other hand, there will be no way to distinguish one medical student from another, whether Black, White or Asian. Research laboratories, residencies, hospitals and medical centers, like the Mayo Clinic, will just have to roll the dice. (Playing hide-and-seek with the most promising scientific minds should turbo-charge medical discoveries!)

Luckily, learning to identify and treat disease isn’t such a big deal at today’s medical schools, anyway. Instead, the faculty are charged with teaching about “systems of power, privilege and oppression.” More than half of the top 50 medical schools now require students to take courses in systemic racism, Mac Donald notes. I’m sure that will be a huge relief when doctors miss your brain tumor.

In 2021, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced that it would spend $2 billion … to find a cure for brain cancer? Parkinson’s disease? Heart disease? NO!!! The $2 billion would go to promoting “diversity and inclusion in science.”

In 2022, the National Cancer Institute, funded by you, taxpayer, decided to change its mission from conquering cancer — and really, who cares about that? FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS! — to guess what? Yes!!! Promoting diversity! Instead of Outstanding Investigator Awards being granted solely on the basis of merit, the gender and race of the researchers would have to be considered.

All this has done wonders for the morale of doctors. Mac Donald quotes one cancer researcher: “It’s the end of the road for me as a Jewish male doctor.” A UCLA doctor told her that the smartest undergraduates in science labs are saying, “Now that I see what is happening in medicine, I will do something else.”

In response to this dystopic future, Mac Donald asked an oncologist, “When would white and Asian male scientists fight back? How much longer would they continue to allow their hard work and accomplishments to be disparaged and sidelined?”

He emailed back: “We value our jobs. We need our jobs. Our peers will turn on us. Speak out, lose job forever, be quickly forgotten and abandoned.”

That’s why, Mac Donald says, it falls to the rest of us to never shut up about the tearing down of standards, to put forth “unapologetic defense(s) of color-blind standards,” [but see Thaddeus Z. Imas’s “The Conservative Commitment to Color Blindness Is Cowardice, Not Principle] and to “relentlessly provide the data that explain the lack of racial proportionality in meritocratic institutions.”

To paraphrase Orwell: If there is hope, it must lie in the uncancelable.

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER

How To Bribe The Supreme Court

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How To Bribe The Supreme Court
Having failed to destroy Clarence Thomas 32 years ago with preposterous sexual harassment charges (disbelieved at the time by 60% of Americans), now the left is resorting to attacking the ethics of a man vastly more honorable than the collection of degenerates reviling him.

The sole purpose of the media’s sudden fixation on the Supreme Court’s “ethics” is to morally intimidate conservative justices by reminding them that the left controls the culture. Since they lost abortion, liberals have been in a panic that the court will junk other liberal sacraments, like gay marriage and affirmative action, too. That’s the reason for the stream of calumnies directed at the justices.

As usual, the main target of the left’s rage is Thomas. We’re supposed to be appalled that Thomas’ billionaire friend Harlan Crow took the justice and his wife on a vacation that (the media claim) would have cost Thomas more than $500,000!!!

Well, yeah, but Thomas and his wife, Ginny, weren’t going alone. They hadn’t just won a cruise sweepstakes. They were joining Crow on a vacation he was taking anyway. Cost to donor: a few extra chicken cutlets and string beans.

Crow sounds like a great guy, but when you’re going on vacation with a benefactor, it isn’t like he’s handing you an expensive bauble. You are the expensive bauble.

We went on a cruise on my private yacht in Indonesia and served Jeroboam of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1945.[Meh.]

We went on a cruise on my private yacht in Indonesia and Justice Clarence Thomas was our guest. WINNER!!!!

Cui bono? Everybody!

The media want us to believe that generosity from personal friends is an ethical issue, but that’s because that’s not how liberals bribe government officials. They bombard their targets with the sort of public adoration that money can’t buy — or the sort of public hate that money can’t block. Your choice: Be beloved from every corner of society or be subjected to nonstop ridicule.

Adored: Anthony Fauci, BLM, Michelle Obama, Trevor Noah, transgenders, Ukraine, black people, pot, Elon Musk (pre-Twitter), Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Hated: Ron DeSantis, the Proud Boys, Melania Trump, Dave Chappelle, Christians, Russia, white people, cigarettes, Elon Musk (post-Twitter), Clarence Thomas.

Thus, during her quarter-century on the court, Ginsburg was showered with alms from the media, Hollywood, universities, television, publishing, the music industry, museums, clothing manufacturers, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Post Office and an array of nonprofits.

It’s a miracle she ever had time to write opinions with the constant procession of awards, retrospectives, portraits and honors — the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture; the LBJ Foundation’s Liberty & Justice for All Award; the World Peace & Liberty Award; a lifetime achievement award from Diane von Furstenberg’s foundation; the 2020 Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center; and the World Peace & Liberty Award from the World Jurist Association and the World Law Foundation.

I would wager that most people would prefer ceaseless public praise to a cruise, no matter how nice the yacht.

The U.S. Postal Service produced an RBG “Forever” stamp; the U.S. Navy named an oiler the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg”; Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center put on a large-scale exhibition on her life; the Cleveland Museum of Natural History named a species of praying mantis after her; she was slobberingly interviewed by Stephen Colbert; a Sam Adams beer was named in her honor; and she received honorary degrees from literally dozens upon dozens of universities.

Say, did any of these outfits have an interest in cases that might come before the court? Perhaps MSNBC could look into that.

It’s curious that the very cultural institutions bestowing all these goodies on liberals don’t see them as “gifts” at all. There are no somber invocations of “ethics” when the Sundance Film Festival features a North Korean-style documentary about Ginsburg. Nor when The New York Times gushes that Ginsburg was “a trailblazing feminist … [continuing] to point the way toward greater equality … she never wavered in her commitment to the court as a vehicle for a more just and more equal America. She was a dogged, tireless fighter … [gag, gag, gag].”

Try to imagine that string of accolades being given to Thomas, much less the Tiger Beat worship — the coloring books, documentaries, bobbleheads, and so on.

It’s inconceivable. In fact, the “honors and recognition” section on Thomas’ Wikipedia page contains a single item: “In 2012, Thomas received an honorary degree from the College of the Holy Cross, his alma mater.”

The only reward a conservative titan like Thomas will receive in this lifetime will be his friends spending their own money to enjoy his company. So the media have decided that’s a conflict of interest. Fawning media coverage worth millions of dollars: not a conflict of interest.

Let’s compare!

Value of private supporters’ gifts to Justice Thomas over the years: Maybe a few million dollars — and that’s according to liberals, although the donor was going on these vacations with or without Thomas, so the cost to him was minimal.

Value of liberal institutions’ gifts to Justice Ginsburg over the years: approximately $3 trillion.

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally have a Supreme Court that isn’t dying to impose faddish liberal ideas on the country by claiming to discover never-before-seen constitutional rights. If anything, the Dobbs opinion should have calmed lefties. Abortion is no longer a “constitutional right,” so now it’s up to the states. And guess what, liberals? Americans are voting to allow abortion!

But Democrats are mostly neurotic women, so “calm” is not their middle name.

Contrary to the left’s self-advertisements as huge fans of democracy — Democracy Dies in Darkness! — the last thing they want is people voting on their crazy ideas. That’s why they’ve got to discredit the current court.

If all goes according to plan, Trump will lose another election for the GOP next year, handing Democrats super-majorities in Congress, whereupon they will pack the court. Finally, liberals will have their magical Supreme Court back! How much is that penumbra worth to you, New York Times?

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER

Soros-Funded Prosecutor Pushes Dubious Tiki Torch Prosecutions for Political Reasons

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As the politicization of the American judicial system accelerates, emboldened prosecutors are navigating into uncharted waters to please wealthy donors, raise their national profile, and distract from the crime epidemic they have helped unleash.

Following the Unite the Right rally in August 2017, Albemarle County’s chief prosecutor Robert Tracci declined to bring charges under Virginia Code Section 18.2-423.01-B against nationalist protestors who marched with Tiki Torches at the University of Virginia, arguing that such cases would be difficult to prove in light of the First Amendment issues involved.

The Virginia law, a class 6 felony, prohibits the burning of objects in a public place with the intent of intimidating a person or group of persons. Few criminal charges have been brought under this statute, and when they have been applied, prosecutors have had mixed success. In Virginia v. Black, a 2003 Supreme Court case dealing with the constitutionality of a closely-related cross-burning statute, the Court upheld the statute in part, holding that given cross-burnings’ “long and pernicious history as a signal of impending violence,” they could amount to “true threats” not protected by the First Amendment. But the Court also struck down part of the statute, holding that cross-burning by itself, without additional evidence of intent to intimidate, could not support a conviction.

This is the formidable Constitutional obstacle Tracci cited in his decision not to pursue the Charlottesville marchers. But his prudent decision was attacked by his opponent, Jim Hingeley, during the 2019 Albemarle County Commonwealth Attorney race. Hingeley, who according to the Virginia Public Access Project received donations from George Soros ($5,000) and local activist billionaire Sonjia S. Smith ($114,000), was able to ride the avalanche of money to a commanding 56% to 43.5% victory over Tracci.

Four years later, Hingeley has overseen an overhaul in Albemarle County’s criminal justice system but the results have been problematic. In his first year in office, the murder rate in Charlottesville increased 30% year over year, according to data compiled by the Daily Progress. According to FBI crime data, there were no murders in Charlottesville in 2021. In the last seven months, however, the same city has suffered a surge of violence, already counting 14 homicides. The public safety situation for UVA students in Charlottesville has become so dire that university administrators are now supporting a task force of local, state, and federal law enforcement officials seeking to drastically increase police patrols around the campus and more stringently deploy no-trespass orders against mostly Black people from areas around the school, according to a report last month in the school’s paper, UVA Today.

Hingeley now finds himself on the defense against public discontent. But rather than taking firmer steps to protect UVA students and Charlottesville residents from violent crime, it seems he seeks to distract from his experiment’s failure by pivoting to the tiki torch prosecutions.

In recent months, Hingeley’s office began expending scarce resources during a crime wave by hunting down multiple Unite the Right protesters across the country under the “burning objects” statute. Three men, Tyler Dykes, Dallas Medina and Wil Zachary Smith, were surprised when five years after the Charlottesville march, they were arrested on out-of-state charges and transported to Virginia.

The men, all charged with the same crime, have so far been treated differently depending on the judges they have drawn. In the case of Medina, the judge allowed him to return to his home in Ohio until his next hearing in June. Smith, from Texas, has been held at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional jail without bond since January for a 2018 charge of pepper spraying a member of Antifa during the tiki torch march. Last February, a grand jury indicted him for the burning objects charge as well.

The most astonishing development has been Dykes’ experience. Dykes, of South Carolina, is only 25 years old, but has become a successful small business owner. During his bond hearing last week, the Assistant County prosecutor argued for Dykes to be held without bail by presenting a blog post from a group called “Atlanta Antifa” that purports to show evidence that he is still involved in nationalist political activity unrelated to the tiki torch case. Atlanta Antifa members are currently facing domestic terrorism charges for their violent actions seeking to prevent the construction of a police training facility in Dekalb County, Georgia, but this did not dissuade the prosecutor from entering their highly editorialized and largely irrelevant profile of Dykes as official evidence.

The judge, who is African-American, agreed with Dykes’ attorney that he was not a flight risk, yet granted the prosecutor’s request to hold him in custody until trial based on the opinion of an anonymous Antifa group on the internet.

The race, political views, or media diet of a judge, prosecutor, or defendant should not be allowed to play a role in the American criminal justice system, yet both in Albemarle County and the nation at large, these previously sacred rules that underpin the integrity of our justice system have been casually brushed aside. For those who cross the ideologies of wealthy campaign donors, freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate are no longer civil liberties that can be taken for granted.

Reprinted with permission from the American Free Press.
Glen Allen is an attorney and founder of the FREE EXPRESSION FOUNDATION, a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation dedicated to the defense of citizens denied their Constitutional right to free expression See more at Free Expression Foundation,org,  or write FEF, PO Box 65242, Baltimore, MD 21209-9998