by Bob Barr | Feb 2, 2023 | Townhall Article |
Townhall In 1971, left wing provocateur Saul Alinsky published Rules For Radicals, which remains even today, a half century later, a favored handbook for extremists intent on undermining our nation’s economic, civic, and legal foundation and rebuilding it in the image of a socialist society. For the radical disruptor in Alinsky’s worldview, “everything is relative and changing”; in other words, to succeed as a revolutionary, existing values and norms must attacked and unanchored. Only by so doing can the new, radical ideas take hold and replace existing principles. This is precisely what the “woke” movement is doing, most disturbingly to our legal system. At the most fundamental level, the “anchor” for our legal system is the Bill of Rights, which provides a set of substantive and procedural guarantees designed to ensure that fairness and objectivity attach to all aspects of the civil and criminal justice processes. These well-known standards include among many others, the right to counsel, the right to be tried fairly by a jury of one’s peers, and the right to be considered innocent unless and until proven otherwise beyond reasonable doubt. These are not “relative and changing” standards, and if they were thus unmoored, legal chaos would prevail. Yet this is precisely what the “woke” movement is attempting to do to our judicial system and the legal profession. How about the right to have a lawyer to represent you? The idea that even hated defendants have a right to be represented by competent legal counsel to ensure their rights are protected, predates the incorporation of that principle in the Bill of Rights. John Adams, one of our Founders and our second...
by Bob Barr | Jan 31, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller It sounded like a good idea. A new, reform-minded police chief in a crime-ridden city, coupled with a specialized, neighborhood-focused police unit to target crime “hot spots.” It even had a cool acronym – the “SCORPION” unit, short for “Street Crimes Operations to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods.” As with many similar specialized law enforcement units formed over the years in major metropolitan areas, however, the seeds of failure, if not disaster, were present as soon as the Memphis Police Department Chief Cerelyn Davis launched the SCORPION unit in late 2021. For starters, the mission for the 40 officers manning the special unit was ill-defined – basically to go into self-identified “hot spots” and make arrests. The strategy presumably would bring “peace,” even if it meant stopping individuals for minor offenses, such as suspected “reckless driving.” In fact, the initial predicate for the Jan. 7 SCORPION stop of the now-deceased Tyre Nichols was precisely that. In stopping Nichols, the officers appeared to be following a directive from Chief Davis herself when she set out her crime-fighting strategy shortly after assuming the department’s reins in 2021. At the time, she reportedly emphasized explicitly that “reckless driving” was to be a police department priority. By green lighting the practice of initiating police stops in “hot spot” areas for nothing more than “suspected reckless driving,” she set in motion a series of events that easily could, and did, spiral out of control. The now-disbanded SCORPION unit appears also to have suffered from a defect common to many specialized police units over the years – insufficient and poorly trained supervision. In fact, it...
by Bob Barr | Jan 26, 2023 | Townhall Article, Uncategorized |
Townhall During the 2020 election cycle, uber wealthy Mark Zuckerberg orchestrated much of Big Tech’s plan to ensure that more Democrat votes were cast and counted in key precincts across the country. In this, Big Tech was aided in large measure by three factors: the cover of COVID as an excuse to “facilitate” the voting process, lax election laws in many states, and the lure of “free” money for local officials (including Republican office holders) always eager to receive more of it. Three years later, some things have changed that will force these players to alter their tactics in manipulating election procedures, but Big Tech’s will to do so has not in the least diminished. Changes to voting procedures implemented in recent years, most notably widespread mail-in and multi-day voting, have become systematized to the degree that voters (and many courts) now consider it a right to be able to cast votes days if not weeks in advance of scheduled and lawful voting days. It has become the status quo. Granted, it has not always worked out the way Democrats hoped and planned; just ask Georgia Democrat super star Stacey Abrams, who lost decisively to incumbent GOP Governor Brian Kemp last November. On the other hand, Democrats have achieved several notable successes thanks to massive early and mail-in balloting. By all accounts, for example, Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate, and now sitting Sen. John Fetterman, benefitted greatly from having a huge number of votes cast for him in the days and weeks before his sole debate with his GOP opponent, during which he performed miserably. Much media attention was drawn...
by Bob Barr | Jan 24, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller In addition to writing one of the seminal novels of the 20th Century in 1984, British writer George Orwell was an accomplished linguist. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, he sized up the language of politics as the practice of designing something “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Lewis Carroll put it perhaps less eloquently, but no less accurately, in Through the Looking Glass – “When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” A perfect example of Orwell’s and Carroll’s pithy observations was displayed last weekend when a freelance write named David Peisner, described the torching of a police cruiser and smashing of bank and storefronts in Atlanta by a group of eco-terrorists angry about the construction of a public safety training center in a wooded area just outside the city, as something — anything — other than “violence.” His sophomoric rambling was defended by a pedigreed CNN national security analyst with gobbledygook of her own. Though not alone among media outlets in its pursuit of linguistic fluidity, CNN in particular has made a practice in recent years of describing scenes of destructive rioting as “mostly peaceful,” and in fact not even meeting the network’s threshold of being “violent” in the first place; as in its 2020 coverage of widespread disturbances in Kenosha, Wisconsin following a police shooting. CNN’s practice of torturously twisting language in order to avoid calling violence “violence” may be premised on the fact that the network disagrees with...
by Bob Barr | Jan 19, 2023 | Townhall Article |
Townhall The Hippocratic Oath, for centuries a foundational recitation of the objective goal of physicians to preserve life, remain ethical, and above all to serve their patients wisely, has, like so much of contemporary civil society, been largely cast aside as outdated – in the words of a dean at the Yale School of Medicine, it had become “impersonal, cold, and too pat.” In many medical schools, the oath now taken by graduating medical students is personal and subjective rather than objective, thus allowing each newly minted physician to decide for themselves what code they will follow in their career. The dilution of a common, universal code for doctors is one of many reasons why the practice of medicine in the United States, and even more so in our neighbor to the north, has become unmoored from the formerly sacred doctor-patient relationship, and more closely tethered to “equity” and the whims of patients, including facilitating abortion and even euthanasia. As with many troubling trends in the country, the beat-down of scientific inquiry and reasoned debate within the practice of medicine is being led by California, where the primacy if not the infallibility of the federal CDC (Centers for Disease Control) is now the law. The COVID pandemic opened the door to perhaps the most unscientific approach ever to public healthcare policy, reaching its nadir with the new California law that prohibits physicians from communicating information critical of federal COVID guidelines. Failing to adhere to this prohibitory statute can result in doctors losing their licenses. Interestingly, one prominent medical organizations, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) blames the federal government for much...
