by Bob Barr | Jul 13, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller If there were lingering doubt remaining in the mind of any New York City police officer that the state’s elected leadership is biased against the NYPD, it would have been erased last week. On July 8th Letitia James, the Attorney General for the state of New York, issued a “Preliminary Report on the New York City Police Department’s Response to Demonstrations Following the Death of George Floyd.” The 57-page document makes clear that neither the governor (who requested the report) nor the attorney general “has the backs” of the largest civilian police force in the country. From start to finish, the report illustrates that the lens through which the state’s attorney general views the NYPD is one that presumes the department to be rife with racism, and which repeatedly responded to “peaceful” protests with unnecessary force. Even though the report is deemed “preliminary,” the attorney general exhibits no hesitancy in recommending long-term, systemic “reforms” to the NYPD. At its core, this report is designed to support pre-conceived changes to the NYPD, premised on obvious disdain for the department as it currently exists. The report punches all the right rhetorical buttons. The attorney general states that the office hopes to “reimagine” the role of the city’s police force, and thereby to “rebuild” the “trust” between it and the people of New York that the NYPD itself has destroyed. The report talks grandiosely of how its recommendations will, if implemented, fundamentally “redesign public safety and the role of police in society.” The wording throughout the report reveals its bias in favor of the protesters and against the police. References to...
by Bob Barr | Jul 9, 2020 | Uncategorized |
American Action News Five years ago, a single white man walked into Atlanta’s International Airport with a lawfully owned AR-15 rifle; simply making a statement that a law-abiding citizen should be able to lawfully carry a firearm in public places. Notwithstanding the benign nature of the stunt, the Atlanta and national media went into high alert, as did law enforcement, which questioned and followed the man closely to ensure he did not bother anybody (he did not). Nowhere was there reported a word of public support for the gun-toting citizen. Last weekend, between 100 and 200 black men marched along a major Atlanta road to Stone Mountain State Park. Virtually all the marchers conspicuously carried AR-15s or similar style rifles, were dressed in black and wore masks. Most sported ammunition bandoliers and many were festooned also in protective vests. There was nary a peep of criticism or concern expressed by the media or government officials, some of whom gushed over the fact that the armed phalanx was “peaceful” – well, sort of. How times have changed. Or is it something other than the passage of time that distinguishes the one man carrying a single rifle in a public place in 2015, from hundreds doing the same thing just five years later? Oh, did I mention that a number of this past week’s armed marchers engaged in intimidating verbal confrontations with white motorists? The July 4th marchers were led by a foul-mouthed masked man calling himself “Grand Master Jay” in an oh-so-clever play on the manner by which KKK big wigs referred to themselves as “Masters,” “Wizards,” and the like. The...
by Bob Barr | Jul 1, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Townhall.com Donald Trump should delete his Twitter account. He does not need it and it does him more harm than good; continuing to use it only improves the bottom-line for Twitter’s liberal CEO and boosts the credibility of the popular but left-leaning platform. Granted, Twitter is widely used, with more than 150 million active users each day, but is anyone who converses via Twitter really going to change their political views as a result? Some users may turn to Twitter to get their news; but face it, if someone is so shallow as to consider Twitter their news source, it is highly unlikely they would ever vote for Trump or any candidate with similar views. Twitters-gone-wrong can range from inconsequential typos, to real damage; such as the fallout from the President re-tweeting a video this past weekend that contained footage of a Trump supporter shouting “white power” at Black Lives Matter protestors. Some Trump supporters may argue that Twitter is one of the only channels through which Americans can hear from the President directly, without being filtered through the biased lens of the mainstream media. This is not the case, and definitely not a reason to continue using Twitter. The President is the most powerful person in the world, with access to every conceivable communications medium and resource. He can communicate with whomever he wants and whenever he wants — whether to one person or millions. Donald Trump does not need Twitter. In fact, Twitter needs him more than he needs Twitter. Continuing to patronize the site is actually hurting him. Credible polling shows that Trump’s combative tone on Twitter is...
by Bob Barr | Jun 29, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Daily Caller In 2008, Mark Bauerlein wrote “The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” Judging by events in the intervening dozen years (and especially in recent months), it appears that Bauerlein’s assessment was premature and perhaps even too kind. Bauerlein correctly identified overreliance on the internet and social media (then still in its infancy) as the primary culprits for Millennials losing their ability to think, learn and communicate coherently. What his analysis perhaps did not anticipate is the number of adults who have come to encourage, empower and support Millennials in these efforts. It is almost as if adults in government, the news media and academia are competing with Millennials for the title. Consider, for example, the issue of providing college students with “safe spaces,” where they can shelter from the horrors of people, ideas and principles they consider “offensive.” The students may be the ones pushing for these accommodations, but it is the adult college administrators who cave in and make it happen. Young protestors in Seattle may “occupy” a sector of that once-respected city; they may scream “police brutality” and call for the police department to be “defunded.” Their demands, however, would amount to little were it not for the city’s clueless Mayor Jenny Durken, who lauded the young occupiers as “patriots,” and her namby-pamby police chief, Carmen Best, who decided that barricades which had protected one of her department’s precinct headquarters should be removed as a “gesture of trust” to the mob. While adult elected enablers of today’s young mobs predominate in west coast cities such as Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Los...
by Bob Barr | Jun 24, 2020 | Uncategorized |
Townhall.com Virtue signaling in corporate America has become as much of a marketing strategy as television commercials and magazine ads. Most recently, the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) demonstrations have provided ample opportunity for corporations to demonstrate how “woke” they are, by donating money to BLM and issuing self-serving tweets trumpeting their generosity and “wokeness.” The ease with which groups like BLM are able to successfully pressure corporate leaders to bow to their demands may surprise some observers, but it is in fact nothing new. Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton honed the strategy to near perfection years ago. At its core, such corporate capitulation reflects a deep, if unexplainable corporate sense of racial guilt that can be triggered by outside groups pressing the right buttons. The strategy appears often to work even though the true goals of those exerting the pressure may have little, if anything to do with racial justice, and everything to do with funding an anti-capitalist movement designed to destroy these very corporations in the name of “social progress.” BLM’s leaders do not even feel the need to hide their true goals from their corporate victims. In a recent interview, BLM founder Patrisse Cullors identifies herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists.” This is no slip of the tongue. Such language reflects the Movement’s philosophical underpinnings and goals — the dismantling of America’s capitalist economic system as a “racist tool.” As with so many other contemporary “progressive” movements, such as “Fight for 15,” “Extinction Rebellion,” and “Occupy,” BLM starts with a superficially worthy niche to gain quick publicity and support. Many of the protestors...
by Bob Barr | Jun 22, 2020 | Uncategorized |
As the Supreme Court nears the end of its 2019-2020 term, it is becoming increasingly questionable whether the “conservative majority” that Trump appointees Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were supposed to have ushered in actually exists. Ever since his legally convoluted majority opinion upholding Obamacare against serious constitutional challenge eight years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts has provided conservatives plenty of reason to suspect he is not the “conservative” jurist in whom many had pinned hopes. However, a handful of decisions by the Court in the past two months have raised new red flags that the problems with the “conservative” majority run deeper than a single jurist. An additional concern is that recent public threats by leading Democrat senators directed against the Court’s Republican-appointed justices might well have intimidated some of them into tempering their views. The refusal in late April by a majority of the nine justices to decide a Second Amendment case out of New York City that was ripe for such action was the first of these red flags. It came as no surprise that Roberts joined the majority in refusing to decide the case. What was surprising, however, is that Brett Kavanaugh, the most recent Associate Justice, joined Roberts and the four “liberal” justices in punting the New York gun case. It was Kavanaugh who was the victim of an especially vicious confirmation battle in 2018, and who was specifically and publicly threatened by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in March. Just weeks later, the Court declined to accept another case that was ripe for decision. On June15, the Court refused to hear a challenge by...
