RFK Jr proves that he "gets it".

Nobody is Buying the Democrat's Race Hustling Excuses for Failure Anymore...

"White Supremacy" is the official Democratic Party code for scapegoating "others/ non-minorities" because they can't govern for sh*t.

Heather Mac Donald, "Daniel Penny is a scapegoat for a failed system"

He violated the code that regular workers and taxpayers are an afterthought in public policy

Jordan Neely was given a hero’s funeral in Harlem last Friday, eulogized by New York’s most prominent race activists before an audience of the city’s Democratic elite. Neely died on May 1 on a New York City subway car, after being restrained by a Marine veteran who was trying to protect his fellow passengers from Neely’s psychotic outbursts.

Neely has been turned into a symbol of a racist system of law enforcement and of civilian values that exaggerate the threat of mentally ill vagrants to keep minorities down. Three weeks after Neely’s death, on May 21, another homeless man in New York City slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, likely paralyzing her for life, if she even survives. Neely’s champions have been silent about this latest subway assault.

All the pathologies afflicting American cities were present in that fatal encounter and its aftermath: the grotesque parody of compassion that is conventional homeless policy; government’s elevation of the supposed interests of the anti-social and dysfunctional over those of the law-abiding and hard-working; anti-white race-baiting and racial bathos.

But the May 1 confrontation between the ex-Marine Daniel Penny and the mentally ill Neely stands for more than failed policy. Reaction to Penny’s intervention illuminates as well the war on manly virtues and their attempted replacement with a dependence on bureaucrats and social workers.

Jordan Neely was a standard product of New York’s homelessness empire. A thirty-year-old schizophrenic drug addict, Neely had cut a swathe of destruction and fear through New York’s streets and subways for fifteen years. Despite his predilection for assaulting the elderly, he had been repeatedly allowed to skip out of treatment and jail. In 2019, Neely punched Filemon Castillo Baltazar in the head as the sixty-five-year-old waited for a subway in Greenwich Village. In June 2021, he walloped Anne Mitcheltree in the head inside a deli in the East Village; she was in her late sixties. In November 2021, Neely broke the nose and fractured the eye socket of a sixty-seven-year-old woman as she exited a subway on the Lower East Side.

These physical assaults were accompanied by a steady stream of disturbing behavior. In June 2019, for example, Neely banged on the door of a subway ticket agent’s booth and threatened to kill her.

None of these attacks landed Neely in long-term mental health confinement, even though, as a mentally ill chemical abuser (MICA), Neely was certain to attack again. Drug use sharply increases violence in the mentally ill, but Neely’s heavy use of the synthetic marijuana K-2 should have been particularly worrying to his social worker contacts. Due to its strength and powerful psychological effects, K-2 was even more likely to trigger violent outbreaks. No matter. His forty-two arrests produced at best brief jail stints and his hundreds of encounters with outreach workers always left him free to return to the streets.

It was not as if he had no alternatives. For decades, New York taxpayers have been obligated to pay for shelter on demand for anyone who claims homelessness. This annual multi-billion-dollar mandate comes courtesy of an activist judge who in 1981 declared such shelter a constitutional right. Single mothers get private apartments; adults without children in tow are guaranteed a shelter bed. If a sheltered vagrant accepts services, he too will become eligible for permanent subsidized housing.

But here is the brilliance of the system from a homeless advocate’s point of view: while vagrants have a right to shelter, they have no obligation to use it. They are free to continue colonizing public and private spaces if they prefer. Taxpayers, meanwhile, have no choice in whether they pay for the scorned shelter; it must always be available to the finicky homeless, whether it is accepted or not. Conferring such choice on street colonizers guarantees that the street population will remain “unhoused,” since the vast majority of that population prefers the street lifestyle of uninhibited drug use and bounteous handouts to even the most nonjudgmental, anything-goes shelter. And, most critically, that unhoused population provides lifetime employment for government bureaucrats and private social service providers.

An army of feckless “outreach workers” pads around after the vagrants, politely inquiring as to whether this time, they might deign to accept services and shelter. They almost always don’t. Neely was an inaugural member of the Top Fifty list, consisting of New York’s most intractable vagrants. The list, created in 2019, is monitored by a body known as the Coordinated Behavioral Health Task Force, with representatives from the city Departments of Health, of Homeless Services, and of Hospitals, as well as representatives from the archipelago of city-subsidized nonprofits. An encounter between task force members and Neely on April 8, 2023, shows just how ineffective this intergovernmental body is. Several outreach workers had come across Neely in a subway car at Coney Island, flashing his genitals and urinating on the floor. (April 8, in other words, was just another typical day in the city’s subway system.)

Neely had been AWOL since March from a treatment program to which he had been assigned after the November 2021 skull-bashing. There was a warrant out for his arrest, a particularly futile gesture since outreach workers don’t check for warrants as a philosophical matter and the police don’t either, since that would be “criminalizing homelessness.” Therefore, though the outreach workers had summoned the police to respond to Neely’s disorderly conduct, the officers simply let him go, having failed to discover the open warrant and ignoring his other infractions against public order.

One of the case worker’s follow-up notes embodies the system’s willed passivity: “Due to client’s [i.e., Neely’s] aggressive behavior, he could be a harm to others or himself if left untreated and not assessed by a mental health professional.” And yet leave Neely untreated is exactly what the case workers did. (The ubiquitous label “client” for vagrants is one of many fanciful aspects of the homelessness charade, treating a drug-addled lunatic as having the capacity to enter into a professional agency relationship.)

So it was that this walking time bomb got on the F line at the Lafayette and Broadway station in Manhattan’s SoHo, threw his jacket on the floor, and screamed that he was hungry, thirsty, and willing to die. One police source has reported that Neely was throwing things at passengers. The “freelance journalist,” as the press identifies him, who filmed the next steps in the incident has given several versions of Neely’s rant. “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die,” goes one version. “I’m tired already. I don’t care if I go to jail and get locked up. I’m ready to die,” goes another. The Daily Mail reports a third version from another eyewitness: “I would kill a motherf***er. I don’t care. I’ll take a bullet. I’ll go to jail.”

Whatever the exact phraseology, the current claim that this tirade is anything but a clear warning signal of potential violence is absurd. Untreated MICA vagrants have been pushing people under and into subway trains for years, besides beating up on pedestrians and subway passengers. Neely’s echo of the “death by cop” gambit, whereby the mentally ill try to goad police officers into shooting them, was particularly ominous.

Most of the passengers on Neely’s car tried to get away from him, rightly believing that he posed a patent threat. Daniel Penny, however, put his arms around Neely from behind and took him down. At this point, the video begins. As Penny lay on the ground with a thrashing Neely on top of him, another man tried to grab hold of Neely’s wrists (demonstrating the difficulty of cuffing a resisting suspect, a reality always overlooked by the anti-police press).

Penny and his fellow Good Samaritan held Neely down for several minutes and then rolled him over on his side in a recovery position. The video does not suggest that Neely was in a chokehold during that entire time. (A chokehold applies pressure to the carotid arteries in the neck to induce temporary unconsciousness.) Rather, Penny appears to be restraining Neely with a bear hug until the police can arrive.

New York’s medical examiner ruled that Neely died from compression of the neck. But because Neely’s autopsy report has not been released, it is impossible to know whether drug intoxication, exacerbating stress on the heart, or other complicating factors may have contributed to Neely’s death.

The most striking aspect of the video is how impassive Penny is. Nothing suggests that he was motivated by animus or that he wanted to inflict damage, much less lethal damage, on Neely. Nevertheless, as soon as the video became public, a glad cry must have gone out at the headquarters of Race-Baiting, Inc.: Penny was white, and Neely was black! Therefore, white supremacy killed Neely, just as it has allegedly killed so many other black homicide victims. (Never mind that Penny’s assistant throughout the ordeal was black.)

A New York state senator called Neely’s death a “lynching.” Yusef Salaam, a New York City Council candidate, announced at Neely’s funeral that the public had “witnessed the lynching, a lynching, a lynching in the public square, a lynching of a Black man who was never given a chance by the system that was designed to keep him oppressed.” (Salaam was one of five teenagers accused of brutally assaulting and raping a jogger during a nocturnal reign of terror in New York’s Central Park in 1989; Salaam and his fellow marauders’ rape convictions were overturned in 2002.) The fact that Penny was not immediately arrested and indicted showed the “systemic racism that robs us of our basic humanity in life and death,” according to the speaker of the New York City Council. New York Mayor Eric Adams echoed Barack Obama’s statement that if Obama had had a son, that son would have looked like Trayvon Martin (the Florida teenager fatally shot by George Zimmerman in 2012). Adams noted that his son was also named Jordan and that Neely was “black like me,” facts of dubious relevance to the case. “No family should have to suffer a loss like this,” Adams added. “And too many black and brown families bear the brunt of a system long overdue for reform.”

A second social pathology killed Neely, according to race activists and Democratic politicians: individual and collective lack of compassion towards the homeless. That lack of compassion was also motivated by racism.

Karim Walker, an “outreach specialist” with the left-wing advocacy group, the Urban Justice Center, complained that “there was no empathy on that train car.” (Walker means empathy for Neely, as opposed to empathy for the terrified passengers facing real physical risk.) “Lack of empathy” became a favorite phrase of the anarchists and activists who shut down and defaced the F subway line. Roxane Gay, an endowed professor of media, culture, and feminist studies at Rutgers University, sniffed in a New York Times op-ed that the passengers on that car “prioritized their own discomfort and anxiety over Mr. Neely’s distress.” Gay provided no examples of how she had intervened in the past to help similar MICA patients in distress.

Penny’s critics were certain that Neely posed no threat. “It became very clear that he was not going to cause harm to these other people,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said. How Hochul had gained such psychological expertise from the safety of her chauffeured SUV was unclear.

Neely was just another subway “passenger.” “Passengers are not supposed to die on the floor of our subways,” Neely’s family said, speaking through their lawyers. (Neely was 100 percent likely a fare beater and not a paying passenger.) Saying that subway passengers are not supposed to die is like saying that pedestrians are not supposed to die crossing the street, after one of them has run into oncoming traffic in the dark. Context is all.

Penny’s detractors romanticized an earlier phase of Neely’s subway intrusions. Neely used to beg for money on the subways by imitating Michael Jackson. The New York Times called him a “gifted Michael Jackson impersonator who captivated commuters with his fluent moonwalking.” Perhaps Times reporters are captivated by illegal subway “performers,” but many riders experience their barely veiled extortion as a lesser degree of assault.

The race avengers offered intervention scenarios that have probably never once been implemented over the course of billions of passenger rides. “Passengers should have asked Neely, ‘What’s wrong? How can I help you?,’” Neely’s family suggested. “No one said, ‘Here, sir: Let me meet your need.’” Like Roxane Gay, Neely’s family provided no examples of how they have implemented that strategy. An assistant professor of social work lamented that “had someone simply offered the homeless man a bottle of water or a snack, he might have been able to calm down, re-engage his rational brain and would still be alive today.” And if this offering of treats does not work? This social work professor does not say. She also, like Roxane Gay, gives no examples of how she has used her treat strategy.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg eventually charged Penny with the felony of second-degree manslaughter, which is defined in the New York State penal code as “recklessly causing the death of another person” — i.e., acting in a manner that created a high risk of death though not intentionally killing someone. (To date, Bragg has not charged Penny’s black assistant with a crime.) Penny will argue that his use of force was justified, since he “reasonably believed” that Neely was about to use unlawful force.

The most astonishing aspect of the left’s narrative is not the tired racism conceit. The most astonishing claim is that it was Penny who lacked compassion and not the engineers of a status quo that left Neely free to decompose on the streets. We are supposed to believe that a system that has hundreds of contacts with a mentally ill vagrant and that allows him to continue his destructive lifestyle is caring.

This status quo is the result of two upheavals in social policy, one regarding mental illness, the other regarding the proper focus of government. Civil libertarian Thomas Szasz argued in the 1960s that mental illness was an arbitrary concept designed to snuff out nonconformity to bourgeois norms of behavior. While Szasz’s deconstruction of the distinction between sanity and insanity was not widely embraced to its full radical extent, he did succeed in making the standard for long-term involuntary commitment nearly impossible to meet. Mental institutions were shut down and their inhabitants released to “the community,” a movement aided by those facilities’ high cost and sometimes inhumane conditions. But the cost savings from deinstitutionalization were illusory, easily dwarfed by the costs of crime from untreated MICAs, the destruction of usable public space, the loss of urban vitality, the economic burden on businesses whose customers and employees were unwilling to navigate the vagrant gauntlet, and the growth of the homelessness bureaucracy. All this for the privilege of walking around with feces in one’s pants, while raving at demons.

The deinstitutionalization movement could not have continued in the face of its patent failures, however, without a more profound recalibration in public policy: the rights revolution. Starting in the 1960s, government’s focus shifted from serving the law-abiding to vindicating the newly conceived rights of the dysfunctional and the anti-social. Thousands of self-appointed advocates purport to represent these new constituencies, who are not even aware that they are being represented or by whom. The advocates’ ideological counterparts in government agencies are only too happy to recognize these carpetbaggers as the legitimate agents of vagrants, the mentally ill, criminals, illegal immigrants, or any number of new victim groups, because the advocates can be counted on to press for expanded government services and spending, thus increasing the bureaucrats’ empire.

Meanwhile, hardworking taxpayers are treated simply as ATMs for funding the rights revolution. No once advocates for their interests. They are expected to silently tolerate whatever discomfort or danger that the rights revolution spawns.

The desire for urban cleanliness, order and safety — all are now understood as petty hang-ups of the overprivileged. Indeed, progressive residents of vagrant-heavy neighborhoods tout their compassion in stepping around comatose drug addicts without raising a political outcry.

The idea that there is a right to colonize city streets would have been unthinkable for most of the twentieth century. Public space existed to enable commerce and the activities of civil society; government existed to protect those functions. Police officers moved derelicts along, rather than allowing them to use sidewalks and business premises as toilets and shooting galleries. This no-colonization rule served as a deterrent to adopting a street lifestyle. When people did slide into social disaffiliation and dysfunction, Skid rows offered cheap single room occupancy housing, now priced out of existence due to the advocates’ unmeetable demands for improvements like private baths and kitchens.

That world of unapologetically enforced public order is gone. Nevertheless, the first time that an unconfined lunatic pushed a commuter under or into a subway car, the official enablement of untreated mental illness should have ended. Yet nothing changed, so strong is the idea that it is the alleged rights of the “homeless” that should guide public policy, not the rights and interests of normal working people.

When government abdicates its responsibility to maintain public safety, a few citizens, for now at least, will step into the breach. Penny was one of them. He restrained Neely not out of racism or malice but to protect his fellow passengers. He was showing classically male virtues: chivalry, courage and initiative. Male heroism threatens the entitlement state by providing an example of self-reliance apart from the professional helper class. And for that reason, he must be taken down.

A homicide charge is the most efficient way to discourage such initiative in the future. Stigma is another. The mainstream media has characterized the millions of dollars in donations that have poured into Daniel Penny’s legal defense fund as the mark of ignorant bigots who support militaristic white vigilantes.

But just to be on the safe side, the New York Times provided a how-to guide on “How to Respond to a Stranger in Mental Distress” that negates everything that Penny did and stands for.

The first rule of response: run from the threat. “If you are concerned for your safety, the best course of action is usually to leave the situation as soon as possible,” the Times advised its readers. “If you’re on the subway, for example, change cars, or get off and wait for the next train.” Many passengers already follow this rule, nervously biding their time between subway stops when a deranged vagrant gets on their car and then dashing down the platform at the next station to hop on the adjacent car.

The director of the Psychiatry, Law, and Society Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital told the New York Times that after “walking away” from a threat, “calling for help is the most important thing you can do in those moments.” But there is no one to call inside a subway car and not enough police officers on subway platforms to provide aid at the next stop, given the volume of MICAs in the transit system. No police officers showed up for the duration of the Neely-Penny video, despite regular announcements in the station calling for their presence.

None of the Times experts so much as hinted at trying to protect one’s fellow passengers. If the male instinct to help others is once and for all criminalized and snuffed out, the degree of predation as the government continues to side with the antisocial against the social will reach epic dimensions.

The idea that Neely’s race-baiting exploiters care about black lives is as ludicrous as the idea that the homelessness status quo that Penny disrupted was compassionate. On May 10, a sixteen-year-old girl was shot in the head at a playground in the New York City borough of Queens. Claudia Quaatey had just gotten into a fight with other girls; as she sat in an SUV, three gunmen approached and fired off multiple rounds. They fled and are still at large.

At Neely’s funeral, no one said a word about Quaatey, who was on life support in a Queens hospital. No one urged witnesses to come forward to help the police solve the shooting.

Quaatey died three days later, on May 22. Still not a word about black lives mattering. The reason for that silence is that her killers are very likely black. She is thus of no value in furthering the anti-white narrative. No dignitaries will show up at her funeral. Al Sharpton will not deliver her eulogy.

Contrary to the anti-white narrative, white on black homicides are almost nonexistent. Blacks commit 87 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites and whites and blacks; blacks are roughly thirty-five times more likely to commit violent offenses against whites than whites are to commit violent offenses against blacks.

Existing while black is more dangerous than existing while white, but not because of white supremacy. In the first eighteen months of the pandemic, black juveniles were shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. (That shooting spike began only after the George Floyd race riots.) Had any of those black juvenile gun victims been shot or killed by whites, we would have heard about it. Instead, the rule for deciphering crime reporting is as follows: if the race of a crime suspect is not provided, the suspect is black. That rule applies when the victim is black and even more so when the victim is white.

If a crime suspect is white, however, that fact will usually be reported and it will always be the lead in any story in the rare instance when the victim is black.

Sharpton’s funeral oration summed up the hypocrisy of the racial bathos surrounding Neely’s death. “When they choked Jordan, they put their arms around all of us,” Sharpton announced. “All of us have the right to live.” A Good Samaritan helps those in trouble, Sharpton said. “They don’t choke them.” Penny, in other words, stands for the entirety of a white supremacist system — a “they” that chokes a victim “we.”

To the extent that Sharpton and the attendees who gave him a standing ovation frequent New York’s business districts and its transit system, they walk by untreated MICAs on a daily basis. There is no record of Sharpton “helping those in trouble.” The passengers on Penny’s subway car were potentially in as much trouble as Neely was.

The brutal subway pushing on May 21 is just the latest proof of that danger: the suspect grabbed the head of 35-year-old Emine Ozsoy in both hands and slammed her into a moving subway car at the Lexington and 63rd Street station in Manhattan. Ozsoy was instantly paralyzed. She also had “the right to live,” in Sharpton’s words. (The suspect’s attorney has demanded that he be freed on bail, like Penny who committed “even . . . the most heinous of crimes.”)

Penny violated the code that regular workers and taxpayers are an afterthought in public policy. For that he must be made a scapegoat for a homelessness system that treats both its purported beneficiaries and the scorned bourgeoisie with callous indifference.

Democrat's New Rock Star - Dan Goldman

Only the Best People are on Ukraine's Kill List...

Never Forget...and Always BE Angry!

 

On 22 May 2017, an Islamist extremist suicide bomber detonated a shrapnel-laden homemade bomb as people were leaving the Manchester Arena following a concert by American singer Ariana Grande.

Twenty-three people were killed, including the attacker, and 1,017 were injured, many of them children. Several hundred more suffered psychological trauma. The bomber was Salman Ramadan Abedi, a 22-year-old local man of Libyan ancestry. After initial suspicions of a terrorist network, police later said they believed Abedi had largely acted alone but that others had been aware of his plans. In March 2020, the bomber's brother, Hashem Abedi, was found guilty of 22 counts of murder and attempting to murder 1,017 others, and was sentenced to life in prison.

The incident was the deadliest terrorist attack and the first suicide bombing in the United Kingdom since the 7 July 2005 London bombings.

Bonfire of Teenagers

Which is so high in May north-west sky

Oh, you should've seen her leave for the arena

On the way, she turned and waved and smiled: "Goodbye"

Goodbye

And the silly people sing: "Don't Look Back in Anger"

And the morons sing and sway: "Don't Look Back in Anger"

I can assure you I will look back in anger 'till the day I die

Bonfire of Teenagers

Which is so high in May north-west sky

Oh, you should've seen her leave for the arena

Only to be vapourized

Vapourized

And the silly people sing: "Don't Look Back in Anger"

And the morons swing and say: "Don't Look Back in Anger"

I can assure you I will look back in anger 'till the day I die

Go easy on the killer

Go easy on the killer

Go easy on the killer

Go easy on the killer...

What Democrats have Forgotten since 1968... Skepticism.

The Democratic Party is Filled with Left-Wing Wannabe FRAUDS!

...and the Republican Party is Filled with Right-Wing Wannabe FRAUDS!

On the Globalist Coordinated MSM Psyops Targeting the American People

Democrats, Suckers for Big Lies...

Democrats Rule the Swamp with Impunity

Panicking Elitism? Or more Confident in their continued success?

Roger Kimball, "Deliver Us from Reality"

The only silver lining in this minatory storm cloud is the fact that such movements, though unconscionably cruel, arbitrary, and destructive, are also astonishingly fragile.

"Because he can.”

That’s the answer one has to give to those who ask how Alvin Bragg, a local district attorney in office by the slimmest of margins—and then only because of a huge subsidy from the anti-American billionaire George Soros—can get away with antics like indicting Donald Trump, a former (and, possibly, future) president of the United States, and, now, with charging former Marine Daniel Penny with manslaughter because he (along with at least two others) intervened to stop Jordan Neely from attacking fellow passengers on a New York subway.

Because he can. As a friend remarked when digesting the spectacle of Penny being led away in handcuffs, totalitarian movements often start slowly, almost timidly, but as they gain power, they become more brazen. After a certain point, they do outrageous things just to intimidate the public and demonstrate their power.

We now know that the FBI, the CIA, and other elements of America’s security apparatus intervened directly in the decision making of Twitter and other social media companies to influence the course of the 2020 election. One part of that intervention had to do with organizing 51 senior former intelligence figures to sign a letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That was a lie. They knew it was a lie. It didn’t matter. They did it because they knew they could get away with it.

The United States is on the verge of being inundated with thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens. Many are from South or Central America. Hundreds are from China, even though they are crossing that notional line we used to be able to call, without irony, our southern border. Why did the Biden Administration decide to enact a real-life Camp of the Saints invasion of the United States? Because it could. There was no immediate price to pay.

In her classic study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes several observations that bear on our current situation. “There is no doubt,” she observes,

"that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frightened respectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it. They were not particularly outraged at the monstrous forgeries in historiography of which all totalitarian regimes are guilty and which announce themselves clearly enough and totalitarian propaganda."

It’s not only the compact between the elite and the underclass that is relevant to our experience in the United States today. There is also the incontinent deployment of the word “democracy,” not as a term describing a specific form of political organization but rather as a cognitively empty but talismanic vocable around which political animus can be nurtured and set to work. The latest variation is Our DemocracyTM, dragged out whenever the process of political demonization needs a boost.

“It has been frequently pointed out,” Arendt notes, “that totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them.”

The reaction to the January 6, 2021 jamboree at the Capitol—an event egged on and at least in part organized by (alleged) state actors like Ray Epps—is a case in point. As he showed last week in his exchange with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Donald Trump began trying to diffuse the potential for violence at that protest the day before, on January 5, and he continued through the day on January 6. No matter. The script called for him to be the villain of the piece, so the villain he is publicly accounted to be.

So many things in our social and political life today seem surreal. The prospect that “misgendering” someone might be against the law—i.e., a tort that did not even exist yesterday is now illegal; the whole phenomenon of so-called “transgenderism,” a revolt against reality if there ever was one; the bizarre obsession with race, involving the demonization of whites and the fabrication of an imaginary sin called “white supremacy,” on the one hand, and the groveling obeisance of phantasmagoric “reparations” to blacks, on the other. You can’t tune into the internet these days without being confronted with scenes of blacks rampaging through fast-food restaurants, school corridors, or shops like Target and Walmart. They smash and steal and smash and what happens to them? Nothing. All this and more is part of what Arendt called totalitarianism’s “experiment against reality.”

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,” she pointed out,

"totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations."

“The shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings.” That is what our masters are pretending to insulate us from with their fantastic lies about human nature, economic reality, and empirical truth.

The only silver lining in this minatory storm cloud is the fact that such movements, though unconscionably cruel, arbitrary, and destructive, are also astonishingly fragile. The last word goes to Arendt. “Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general, and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced.”

The "Protect You from Disinformation" Power Grab Gone Global

The Eugenicists and Euthanasiaists Are Coming for the Elderly in Maryland

 

Melissa Ortiz, "Success story: Legalized killing shot down in Maryland"

In one of the most epic U.S. Senate hearing exchanges in modern history, then-secretary Hillary Clinton practically yelled at her questioner, "What difference, at this point, does it make?!"

While she was being questioned about a specific event, I found myself wondering how many people think that what they do has no consequence or impact. Some would say my job, crafting and forwarding policies supporting human flourishing for people with disabilities, is boring and inconsequential — possibly even futile. It is not. As a wonk and an advocate, I have an opportunity to make a positive impact daily.

As proof, I recently testified before members of both chambers of the Maryland state Legislature about a proposed bill that would be harmful to people with disabilities and chronic illness. Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD), a term that includes physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia, is legal in eleven jurisdictions and under consideration in eleven states. It very nearly became law in Maryland.

Wrapped in eloquent prose, the Maryland legislation was presented as being about bodily autonomy and shortening the suffering of the terminally ill. But the law had several problems. There were no safeguards to prevent family coercion or the targeting of vulnerable patients, including those with disabilities. It puts confidence and trust that should exist between a patient and health care provider at risk. Essentially, life is devalued — not considered worth living if a person was in pain or had a condition seen as diminishing the quality of his life or of those around him.

The intended and unintended consequences of MAiD, especially for those who cannot self-advocate in their moment of need, are frightening.

One supporter told me: "Families need to be able to do what is best for them." I asked if that meant caring for her sick great uncle was too much of a burden, and it would be more convenient for him just to die. Without flinching, she nodded her head vigorously.

We have become a nation of people who don't want to deal with hard things like suffering and death, so we seek to hide or dispatch them as quickly as possible. We see no value in sitting with a dying loved one and sharing those final moments with him. We see no purpose in suffering and have no interest in the strength of character it can build in the patient and those around him. These are lessons and beautiful experiences we are choosing to miss.

If the law were only about ending the suffering of someone already in the final stages of dying, I might be persuaded about some MAiD allowances. But it isn't, and I am not. Even if it were, hospice care is better than ever — with pain management being a top priority until death of the patient.

In places where euthanasia is already law, the parameters of eligibility are being widened to include such things as depression and anorexia. In Canada, a man even applied for the MAiD program because he was homeless! None of these things is terminal if treated properly. And it can get worse as doctors are beginning to order lethal medications through telehealth consultations. Insurance companies are leaning more toward paying for it than for treatments that could extend or save lives.

Because of the advocacy of many people who seem to have had nothing in common before, Maryland's MAiD bill failed to pass out of committee. Those who understood the dangers banded together. Their advocacy mattered. I was proud to be a part of that group.

With many more disability policy debates on the horizon, it is critical that we stay banded together to advocate for what is right, for what is moral, and for what honors the valuable lives some are so eager to snuff out.

Able Americans is a program of the National Center for Public Policy Research. We believe in the same inalienable rights that are enshrined in our founding documents: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We work daily on policies that support people with disabilities in America to live, be free, and chase their dreams. Advocacy like this matters — especially in Connecticut,

Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, where pending euthanasia laws are putting more lives at risk.

Best Town Hall in History

The Disinformatzia Hoax