Self-defense in an America where laws are disregarded
Emboldened by the lack of consequences, the political left in this country has escalated from yelling at people in restaurants, to physical assaults, property destruction, and even murder. Senator Rand Paul’s account of the harrowing events of the leftist mob following the last night of the Republican convention serves as another reminder for Americans to consider their personal safety.
Self-defense is often an uncomfortable topic for many. A friend recently asked what he should do in a circumstance if he and his wife were accosted in public. Setting aside the grief that this is even a topic in our country, he referred to his own health issues as an impediment to self-defense. My response was, “the question needs to be asked and answered long before any altercation.”
“What are you prepared to do?”
Now in my 35th year as a caregiver for my wife who lives with severe disabilities, I clearly understand the need for her protection -- and mine. While she cannot be left defenseless, she also cannot be left without a caregiver. Both of her legs are amputated below the knee and fleeing on prosthetic legs is not an option in an assault. When flight remains impossible, fight is the only option.
If while in an urban area (which I have no plans to ever visit again), a mob approaches our vehicle, the decision is already made. The vehicle becomes the instrument of self-defense and the mob endures the consequences. When the choice is to trust one’s vehicle versus the benevolence of a mob, the car wins every time. Being pulled from a vehicle could be a death sentence for either of both of us, so one prepares for the worst. Preparation always beats “luck.”
YouTube screen grab
Living defenselessly in an America allowing lawlessness in urban areas is like playing Russian roulette. Doing so while caring for an impaired loved one approaches suicidal. Part of self-defense often involves owning a firearm. Since an unloaded and inaccessible weapon is useless, a gun owner bears the responsibility of learning to properly wield and secure the firearm. Furthermore, if one is a caregiver, that weapon must never be accessible to an impaired loved one (or child).
When violent assault is upon you and a loved one you care for, self-defense remains paramount. Yet, the fear of legal charges leads many down an erroneous path of passivism. If attacked by lawbreakers, caregivers themselves may be required to become law-enforcement. The legal consequences cannot be as important as survival in those moments. At the beginning of my martial arts instructions, my instructor often stated, “I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.”
While some may cringe at such statements, serving as a caregiver provides clarity and perspective about self-defense. Self-defense is not about bloodlust or rage. Standing between an assaulter and a loved one in a wheelchair is not about hating the one in front of you, but rather loving the helpless one behind you.
The challenge is to prepare for those moments long before they arrive. For an increasing number of Americans, those moments are here.
The left continues the absurd desire to defund the police -- which of course makes pillaging and plundering much easier. Yet, in a world where elected officials fail to discharge their responsibilities while receiving cover from a compliant media, one cannot solely depend upon the protection of even fully funded police officers. Ironically, the same terms used to describe law enforcement also describe the role of a family caregiver: to serve and protect.
Family caregivers are often the first -- and last -- line of defense for the most vulnerable among us. Now, more than ever, we have a responsibility to be prepared.
Peter Rosenberger is the host of the nationally syndicated radio program, Hope for the Caregiver. Peter is a 2nd Dan in Hapkido. www.hopeforthecaregiver.
We Haven’t Seen Political Violence Like This in America Since… the Civil War
The murder of Trump supporter Jay Bishop by Black Lives Matter rioter Michael Reinoehl in Portland Saturday night was a watershed moment, an introduction of the political violence that has been common in many other countries but has seldom been seen in America. However, it does have antecedents: the heated runup to the Civil War is the most exact analogy, which is not all that surprising given that we may now be careening toward a second one.
The political violence broke out in the Kansas Territory. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois was the main architect of the principle of popular sovereignty, the idea that slavery would be approved or outlawed in the new territories by popular vote. Douglas, who had presidential aspirations, drafted the Kansas-Nebraska Act to establish new territories by those names in part of the land that had been acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and was still unorganized. The act stipulated that Kansas and Nebraska would decide by popular sovereignty whether to allow slavery or not. Since both territories lay north of the 36°30' parallel, slavery should have been outlawed in both of them, according to the Missouri Compromise.
That should have been the end of the matter, with popular sovereignty definitively ruled out for Kansas and Nebraska. Instead, Douglas and his allies were determined to repeal the Missouri Compromise and won President Franklin Pierce over to the idea that doing so would be the best way to bring peace to the nation once and for all over the slavery question. Slavery would be voted up or down in various states and territories, and all would be well.
Congress approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Pierce signed it, and all was not well. As Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster explains, the fatal weakness of the principle of popular sovereignty immediately became obvious: proponents and foes of slavery rushed into Kansas and Nebraska in order to tip the vote in their direction. Armed conflict ensued and persisted throughout Pierce’s presidency; “Bleeding Kansas” became a symbol of the intractability of the slavery issue and the absolute ineffectiveness of President Pierce.
In a message on the unrest in Kansas dated January 24, 1856, Pierce claimed that “serious and threatening disturbances in the Territory of Kansas” had been “speedily quieted without the effusion of blood and in a satisfactory manner.” However, he admitted that “disorders will continue to occur there, with increasing tendency to violence.” In a proclamation on Kansas issued on February 11, 1856, Pierce called on outsiders “to abstain from unauthorized intermeddling in the local concerns of the Territory,” and warned that “any endeavor to intervene by organized force will be firmly withstood.”
Few paid any attention. Kansas continued to bleed. Three months after Pierce’s proclamation, pro-slavery forces in Lawrence, Kansas, attacked free-staters, destroying the offices of two abolitionist newspapers and a hotel that abolitionists frequented. The Pierce administration did nothing and could do nothing. The sacking of Lawrence was emblematic of its failure.
Likewise emblematic of the outrageously overheated state of the public debate, much like ours today, was an incident that unfolded on the floor of the Senate in May 1856. On May 19 and 20, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a lengthy speech entitled “The Crime against Kansas.” In it, he resorted to lurid imagery to make his case, saying: “Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of Slavery in the National Government.”
Sumner also mocked Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in terms that strongly hinted of the widespread belief among abolitionists that slaveholders were primarily interested in their female slaves for sexual use: “The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight; -- I mean the harlot Slavery.”
Rating America’s Presidents details how Southern honor was offended, and Southern honor would be avenged. On May 22, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, Butler’s cousin, entered the Senate chamber and made for Sumner’s desk. He told the senator: “Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” He began beating Sumner over the head with a heavy wooden cane and did not stop when Sumner began bleeding profusely and knocked his desk loose from the floor (it was bolted down) in an attempt to get away. Brooks didn’t stop until he had broken his cane. He later recounted: “I...gave him about 30 first rate stripes. Towards the last he bellowed like a calf. I wore my cane out completely but saved the Head which is gold.”
Both men were hailed as heroes. Southerners inundated Brooks with canes to celebrate his attack and replace the one he had broken over Sumner’s head. The cane was not the only thing that was broken. The Union was as well.
Sound familiar?
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Don't Be a Victim of Democrat Abuse and Voter Endangerment
Biden poked his head out of the basement Monday but saw his shadow and quickly retreated back into hiding. Bad news, America: six more weeks of riots and looting.
Democrats have a problem. It turns out they can't set cities on fire, destroy local businesses, and unleash rampant violence upon their residents and call it an election strategy. They can accurately call it domestic terrorism or anti-government insurrection, but those bumper stickers don't sell well when every car parked in Democrat zones of lawlessness from New York City to Portland has already been ransacked and torched.
What to do? Blame the whole Democrat operation on President Trump, of course. Somehow, the guy who has been standing up to the mob for four years is secretly leading the mob, too. Joe Biden's campaign may be bailing out the army of Marxist brownshirts toppling statues in city squares and beating people in the streets, and Soros-installed faux prosecutors may be setting criminals free to commit new and worse crimes, but it's the law-and-order candidate in the White House who is actually to blame.
I know it's a bedrock principle of American politics that Democrats achieve success by simply accusing their Republican opponents of whatever crimes or political transgressions they, themselves, are instigating, but this about-face takes the cake! After every Democrat fear merchant has spent months bending the knee in support of and allegiance to the enemy occupying forces taking over American towns, they now want us to forget their ties to the Marxist mobs entirely? That would be like asking Americans to vote for a candidate who is so well known to be suffering from dementia that...wait, scratch that simile.
Democrats do get away with murder, don't they?
This last Saturday, an Antifa operative walked up behind a Trump-supporter in Portland and shot him dead. There was no heat-of-the-moment fight leading to the murder. It was a cold-blooded political assassination, and Antifa immediately cheered the result and began fundraising for bulletproof vests while the victim still lay on the street. Both Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and "Joke" Biden immediately blamed President Trump, while giving Antifa and their murderous allies another pass. It was murder most foul, and Democrats took sides with the murderer. Only in Biden's America can a person be killed for his political views and immediately be blamed by the national press and Democrats before even being carried away. The lives of Trump-supporters just don't matter.
This type of Democrat political violence should have been highlighted and eradicated back in 2017, when a Bernie Sanders–supporter and frequent emailer of Democrat Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois attempted to carry out a mass political assassination that could easily have ended with two dozen dead Republican congressmen. That attack nearly changed the balance of power in Washington and the course of national history, but still Jeff Flake and other apologists found it easier to blame President Trump rather than call out the relentless Democrat campaign to tar his presidency as illegitimate and a national threat. Because the press and the Democrats ignored the violence breathing life into their political party, they implicitly sanctioned all the acts of violence that have continued to the current day. If Antifa and BLM someday achieve what the 2017 shooter did not, nobody in America will be surprised because nobody in America has seen any pushback against the Democratic Party's sympathies for acts of domestic terror.
There is no reason for Americans to accept Democrat terror as an inevitable "new normal," though.
If you have been surviving in a pocket of America where Democrats have forced you into unemployment over a virus that is proving less lethal by the day, robbed your kids of an education while using teachers' unions as political weapons, turned your elderly parents' nursing home into a death camp for disease transmission, fire-bombed your favorite restaurant or neighborhood drugstore because you've been deemed insufficiently "woke" and irredeemably racist, and now deprived you of any sports or entertainment shows that don't first take a moment to tell you how awful and evil you are, then you are a victim of Democrat abuse and voter endangerment.
American cities didn't kill themselves, after all. Democrats did that. All this mayhem and violence in the streets — the Democrats built that, too.
Democrats have had an absolute monopoly on the way most American cities are governed for fifty to a hundred years. They run those cities' police departments. They control the national news media housed in those cities. They sit on the boards of all the "woke" corporations that fuel their wealth. They've taken over the sports leagues and replaced entertainment with sermons from the perpetually aggrieved. They have the backing of the Chamber of Commerce, an organization that prefers Wall Street to Main Street and cashing checks from Chinese communists to aiding American workers. And the Democrats are Hollywood.
If there is "institutional racism" lurking in the heart of big "blue" cities, by golly it is wholly owned and operated by the Democratic Party. And if LeBron James thinks the "system" is still rigged against him, then he needs to wake up to who's doing the rigging. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti is a Democrat. Kenosha mayor John Antaramian is a Democrat. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey is a Democrat. New York mayor Bill de Blasio is a Democrat. Maybe it's time for athletes who insist that "black lives matter" to recognize that seeking help from the party that harms them will only get them more of the same.
For too many years, Democrats have destroyed American cities and gotten away with it. They've encouraged rioting and looting on the streets and called it "justice." They've looked the other way while police officers and Republicans are attacked and murdered, and their national politicians pause but a second before once again engaging in the kind of rhetoric that only provides legitimacy to future violence. If the highest-ranking Democrat in the United States, Nancy Pelosi, can call Republicans "enemies of the state" without thinking the recent political assassination in Portland is the natural result, she is mentally unfit to serve. If she and other national Democrats are well aware of the violence they help seed, then they aren't representing a political party anymore. They're just part of the revolutionary mob. Either way, it's time for all of them to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment