Monday, January 31, 2022

No Wonder People Are Confused

No Wonder People Are Confused

This story may be the most misleading, poorly written, agenda driven pile of nonsense I have read yet. It’s from Newsweek which I realize has long since stopped being a serious news outlet, but it nonetheless is poor even by their current poor standards.

The headline:

Anthony Fauci Loses Trust With Americans as Confidence in CDC Plummets—Poll

“OK,” says my brain, “Polling data to back up the current working hypothesis,” this should be worth the effort of reading it.  The first paragraph:

Conservative media attacks on the country’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, have eroded the confidence that Americans have in what he says about COVID, a poll has found.

WHOA!  Back up the truck here a minute.  That’s not quite what the headline implied was in the piece, but maybe that’s what the polling said?  Let’s keep reading….

Unfortunately, no such luck.  The piece then goes on to kind of report the findings of an Annenberg poll, without link or footnote or even formal title of the poll, that reports on confidence in the public health agencies.  Followed by an accounting of a few instances where conservative media has questioned the credibility of the public health establishment, supported only by links to other Newsweek pieces.  No evidence from the poll of a causal relationship between the two things and no way, short of a lot of googling, to verify anything the author represents in the piece.

This is a bad blog post, but it in no way represents journalism.

It is also blame shifting.  Being so, it makes plain that the Left has aligned itself with bureaucratic overreach – the administrative state.  And the question that continues to plague me is, “Why?”  What kind of person, other than the rule makers and enforcers, find life in this maze of arbitrary, pointless and oppressive rules an improvement?  How have we gone from being a nation founded in an effort to escape precisely such a regime to having a significant portion of our society panting for it?

There is, of course the “churchy” answer – we lost our faith in God and therefore placed our faith in the nearest thing we could grab onto.  There is a lot of truth there and I think I will explore it tomorrow.

But this morning I am thinking about how this state of affairs has arisen because we simply want the complaining, whining and kvetching to stop.  Think about this for a minute.  The “soft lockdown” that is being experienced in some parts of the country right now is mostly about teachers unions.  They refuse to work without some set of “covid protections” which then limits the availability of schooling, which then limits the parental ability to go to work and it all just spins out from there.  Our current state of affairs exists because we are unwilling to say, unequivocally, “Sorry, you’re upset, but your fear is not my problem – Get to work!”

Let’s be honest. For quite some time now conservatives have simply wanted to go about their business and have found it easier to give the liberals what they want so they will go over to the corner and play by themselves.  But liberals have caught on, so they whine for more and they whine louder, and we give them more, and their corner grows until now it threatens to fill the room.

In yesterday’s Hillsdale Dialogue, the host and Matthew Spalding carried on about the current session of the Supreme Court.  The host is quite optimistic that the current court will start to once again set some reasonable boundaries around the Left.  One would hope so, but I fear for what will happen next.  Conservatives will just go back to work, but the Left is going to throw a major temper tantrum – maybe even violently major.

SCOTUS has no enforcement power for its decisions – that’s up to the executive branch.  The court has moved left over my lifetime and the Left has relied on it as the imprimatur of its desires.  Should the Left lose that legitimatization of its agenda, I fear it will not respect it.  I also fear that the current administration will concede to the tantrum and simply refuse to enforce the rulings.

The result of SCOTUS making the decisions any decent conservative hopes for might not be a restoration of reason to our nation – it might be the kind of erosion of confidence in government generally we are seeing in the public health arena as mixed messages and inconsistency abound.  The result could be more confusion, not less.

https://hughhewitt.com/no-wonder-people-are-confused/

Biden's Pittsburgh Speech a Gafftastic Success

Biden's Pittsburgh Speech a Gafftastic Success

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

If the success of Joe Biden’s speeches were measured by the number, frequency, and the outrageous stupidity of his gaffes, the president’s Pittsburgh speech would rank as one of his finest.

Hours before Joe Biden went to the city to talk about infrastructure, Pittsburg’s Forbes Ave. bridge over Fern Hollow Creek collapsed. The timing of the bridge collapse was suspicious. Could White House aides have snuck into Pittsburgh the previous day and caused the bridge collapse to make Biden look like a prophet?

Given the president’s standing in the polls, anything is possible.

Red State’s Nick Arama documented several laughably inexplicable gaffes uttered by Biden during the speech. It seems Mr. Biden has had difficulty remembering names — something I can sympathize with as I am also a doddering old fool who’s losing my mind.

Maybe one of the reasons that they don’t want to meet with Biden or have him in to help with their campaigns is he might not be able to even remember their names or what positions they hold.

When talking about Rep. Conor Lamb (D-PA), Biden got his position wrong, referring to him as a senator.

Then Biden spoke about his infrastructure czar, in charge of the distribution of dollars, former mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu. Biden couldn’t seem to remember his name and then called him “Mayor of Louisiana.”

Is there anything creepier than when Biden does than lean-forward-into-the-mic-and-whisper thing?

Very weird.

Related: The Hits Just Keep on Coming for Joe Biden

I think Joe Biden might have taken an economics course when he was a freshman in college 60 years ago. He thinks he knows something about the subject, although as he shows in the next clip, my pet cat Midnight knows more about economics than he does. Watch him try to explain inflation:

Mr. Arama is not impressed:

Huh? That’s like saying high costs cause high costs. Does he not understand what inflation is?

What Biden was trying to say was that one-third of the increase in the rate of inflation is from the price of used cars — a meaningless statistic that shows his speechwriters are as ignorant about economics as he is.

All costs are up across the board.

He loses it on the question of the cost of insulin. This makes me think again about the fact that uncontrolled anger is often part of dementia.

Sadly, Mr. Arama is correct. The left really loves their politicians to emote, throwing tantrums and yelling like little children when they don’t get their way. In some dim and distant part of his mind, Biden must remember that, and every once in a while he lets loose with a completely unrelated, incoherent rant.

Biden has now returned to the White House where he has no doubt been put to bed with a warm glass of milk and told his bedtime story. Meanwhile, the nation and the world are blowing up and the president is unwilling or unable to do much to stop it.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/01/29/bidens-pittsburgh-speech-a-gafftastic-success-n1554200?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&bcid=15803c7fc8c68b6fd1f0a5e7f4b59fc49df45d48335d4339ad60f7b0a0c7404d&recip=28668535

SUPPRESSING “MISINFORMATION”

SUPPRESSING “MISINFORMATION”

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CORONAVIRUSFREE SPEECHLEFTISM

It was the left that initially came up with the phrase “fake news,” but that faded out when Donald Trump made the phrase his own, capitalizing on the grotesque inaccuracy of the liberal media. Then we have the “Big Lie,” which for liberals means the claim that Trump actually won the 2020 election; or, in its milder version (which I think is true) that the election was conducted in such a lax manner that it is impossible to tell who *really* won, if only legal votes were counted. But these days the focus is mostly on “misinformation,” and that misinformation usually relates to covid.

The left loves covid because it is a disease, and as such, a “matter of life and death,” regardless of survival rate. Liberals say that misinformation about covid should be suppressed, as for example Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who suggested on MSNBC that social media companies should censor individuals like Joe Rogan who spread “misinformation.”


Here is some of the dialogue:

“What do you think are the best ways to push back on misinformation about COVID that continues to be aggressively pushed, whether it be Joe Rogan’s podcast or all over Facebook?” asked Brzezinski.

“We can have the best science available, we can have the best public health expertise available. It won’t help people if they don’t have access to accurate information,” responded Murthy. “People have the right to make their own decisions, but they also have the right to have accurate information to make that decision with.”

This is disingenuous. Obviously, people have “access to accurate information.” No one is preventing them from listening to the Surgeon General, the CDC, state departments of health, etc., all of which have vast resources to get their messages out. What Murthy is really saying is not that people should have access to accurate information, but that “inaccurate” information (like that promulgated by Joe Rogan, identified in this interview) should be censored, and that censorship should start with social media companies.

This interview is consistent with many other calls for censorship, in identifying 1) advocacy of “unproven” treatments for covid and 2) questioning the need for, or efficacy of, vaccination as the key misinformation that must be suppressed. Frankly, I find this censorship effort puzzling.

Doctors treat covid. Ivermectin is a prescription drug. Some doctors have found ivermectin, hydroxochloroquine or some other medicine to be effective in reducing covid symptoms. Liberals view such clinical results with horror and demand that they not be publicized. This is antithetical to the scientific method; physicians need to exchange information about what treatments are effective in what circumstances. Yet their efforts to do so have largely been suppressed.

One of the weirdest aspects of the covid epidemic, in my view, is the lack of official attention to treatment of the disease. I have no idea whether, or when, drugs like ivermectin and hydroxochloroquine can mitigate covid symptoms, but public discussion of this question is good, not bad.

As for vaccination, the CDC currently reports that 80% of Americans have gotten at least one shot of vaccine. I don’t know how anyone could have expected a more positive response to the vaccines, especially after politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris cast serious doubt on them. It is also hard to understand how the resurgent covid epidemic can be blamed on the fact that a small minority have chosen not to be, or are medically unable to be, vaccinated.

Meanwhile, vaccines can have side effects, and the covid vaccines are no exception. Adverse cardiac effects are most common in young men, who are also at essentially no risk from the disease. I was among the first to be vaccinated, but if I were 19 years old, I would forgo vaccination and take my chances with the very mild omicron variation.

Here, as always, the public is best served by diversity of views and open debate. It is ironic that public health officials are now insisting that covid orthodoxy–whatever it is at the moment–be enshrined, and that all questions, doubts or contrary views be censored, given that public health officials have been consistently wrong about covid, and as a result have frequently had to change their opinions and advice.

I suspect that the current war on covid “misinformation” is largely an effort to deflect attention from the fact that Joe Biden ran on a platform of crushing the covid virus, and instead has presided over a worse epidemic than what existed when he took office. The powers that be have to blame someone; why not Joe Rogan?

But there is more to it than that. The left doesn’t only want to censor information about covid. It also wants to delete everything relating to the “Big Lie,” which in practice means any expression of concern about election integrity, which most Americans agree is a major issue. If we allow the left to censor conversation about covid because it is a “life and death” issue, what follows? Every foreign policy issue is a life or death issue, so should all criticism of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy be suppressed?

In a country of 330 million people, pretty much everything is a life or death issue, at some level. Immigration, the federal budget, the composition of the Supreme Court–you name it, lives are arguably at stake. Those who believe in free speech think that the more important the issue, the more vital is vigorous debate. The left sees it otherwise: vigorous argument is perhaps admissible over the most trivial question–maybe which “woke” movie should win an Oscar–but on any important issue, the party line is determined first, and all discussion of it is thereafter to be censored.

That is the future we are heading toward if we give in to the left’s war against covid “misinformation.”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/01/suppressing-misinformation.php

Sunday, January 30, 2022

WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE CHILDREN?

WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE CHILDREN?

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN DEMOCRATSEDUCATIONSOCIAL SCIENCE

When Democrats aren’t trying to keep children out of school and (not) learning online, or requiring them to wear masks when they’re (not) learning in crappy union-run public schools, they’re trying to warehouse them in government-run universal child care programs.

Universal child care is one of the centerpieces of the Democrats’ BBB Bill (better known as “Biden’s Big Blunder”). Yet the people who scream “follow the science” never seem to take in what several social science studies of early preschool have found. Let’s start with the American Economic Journal:

The Long-Run Impacts of a Universal Child Care Program

Abstract

Past research documents the persistence of positive impacts of early life interventions on noncognitive skills. We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introduction of universal child care in Quebec. We find that the negative effects on noncognitive outcomes persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life. Our results reinforce previous evidence of the central role of the early childhood environment for long-run success.

(Here’s a good news summary of the study.)

And just out this week from Developmental Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association:

Effects of a statewide pre-kindergarten program on children’s achievement and behavior through sixth grade.

Abstract

As state-funded pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs expand, it is critical to investigate their short- and long-term effects. This article presents the results through sixth grade of a longitudinal randomized control study of the effects of a scaled-up, state-supported pre-K program. The analytic sample includes 2,990 children from low-income families who applied to oversubscribed pre-K program sites across the state and were randomly assigned to offers of admission or a wait list control. Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention. The implications of these findings for pre-K policies and practices are discussed.

And from the conclusion:

Our results are robust and contrary to the claims made by many advocates for the universally positive effects of pre-K participation. Children from poor families who attended a state pre-K program did not, for the most part, become proficient readers in third grade. On the contrary, their performance on all measures of achievement through sixth grade was significantly below that of comparable children who did not attend.

The findings are not new. There have been repeated studies showing that the Great Society-era program Head Start has little or no effect after a few years, which this latest study mentions. But who in Congress, even among mean Republicans, is going to vote to scale back something called “Head Start”?

The authors of this study work hard to try to put the best face on early childhood programs and come up with explanations for their negative findings, most of which surprised them:

Apart from the lack of positive effects on achievement, an unexpected finding important to explore further is the negative behavioral outcomes. . . Our findings of higher rates of school disciplinary infractions for pre-K participants provide further support for this as an issue that warrants serious attention. . . Searching for possible explanations of this common outcome, however, has not been immediately fruitful.

Maybe, just maybe, young children are better off staying at home with their mothers. But this is heresy to leftists today.

Of course, what Democrats care about most is shoveling more money to their client groups in the “caring professions,” which get recycled in the form of campaign contributions.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/01/why-do-democrats-hate-children.php

Pushback: Blacklisted doctors opposed to present Biden/CDC/FDA policies testify to Congress

Pushback: Blacklisted doctors opposed to present Biden/CDC/FDA policies testify to Congress

Do not comply: A large group of highly qualified doctors and nurses, almost all of whom have been blacklisted, fired, suspended, or prevented from treating patients simply because either they opposed the COVID shot mandates or wished to treat their patients as they saw fit, testified on January 24, 2022 in Congress, describing in horrible detail the many times they were forced to watch as their patients died because their hospitals had forbidden them from providing the treatments they knew would work.

Below is a 38 minute-long video showing the most dramatic testimony during the five hour hearing. If you want to watch the full hearing, go here.

I beg my readers to at least watch the edited version above. It will tear your heart out. As Dr. Pierre Kory noted at one point in describing what the government health agencies have been doing in the last two years, “This is corruption, plain and simple, this is corruption.”

Another doctor described how the hospital personally forbid him from prescribing the very medicines he had found had consistently worked, so much so that his patient survival rate was 50% higher than his colleagues. “I had to stand by idly watching these people die.” He was subsequently fired.

Many of the doctors testifying have already been featured in my daily blacklist column. Most however have not. When asked by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), the organizer of the hearing, how many had “experienced censorship, intimidation, or professional reprisal, or damage,” almost every hand went up.

Not only were these doctors outraged and horrified by the decision of hospitals and the government to block treatments they knew were working, they described the absurdity of giving healthy children the experimental COVID shots, even though their chances of dying from the Wuhan virus were practically nil. They further noted the even greater idiocy of giving these risky shots to children who have already had COVID and thus had natural immunity. All the shot could accomplish at that point was to subject the child to the very real risk of an adverse reaction, including some actual cases cited at the hearing one of which that led quickly to death.

Will anyone listen? I guarantee to you that no one in the Biden administration, the CDC, or the FDA will. Nor will the various manufacturers of the COVID shots. Representatives from these entities were invited to this hearing. All refused to testify.

There is only one solution that will work. The voters need to fire every elected official who is supporting these bad policies, and then the new legislators must move to fire the bureaucrats. The immediate removal of the entire upper management at the CDC, NIH, FDA, and all other federal health agencies should then follow.

I emphasize the word “immediate” because too often legislators like to stall from of their typical fear of controversy, or because despite their campaign promises they are wholly captured by the bureaucratic establishment in government. Stalling is not acceptable at this point. If the Republicans take control of Congress in November and do not immediately move to make this happen, they will prove that they are no different than the corrupt Democratic Party. At that point our entire Constitutional system will have been shown to have failed, leaving the general public with chaos, anarchy, and violence as its only remaining option.

And that option is really not something anyone should want, especially those in charge in DC.

https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/pushback-blacklisted-doctors-opposed-to-present-biden-cdc-fda-policies-testify-to-congress/

Why Socialism Cannot Work

Why Socialism Cannot Work

BY JOHN SCHROEDER

I find the great shift that has happened regarding Covid fascinating.  Two years ago this was all about saving everybody else and not overwhelming the medical care system.  We masked not to protect ourselves from the disease, but to prevent the disease from spreading.  We locked down for “two weeks to stop the spread.”  (Of course, it turned into months….)  In many ways it was an expression of socialist thinking – we were all in this together, etc. etc. etc.  The primary reason, I think, covid policy is largely a matter of left v right is because the Left viewed it as an opportunity to usher in the socialist state they dream of.

Today Ben Shapiro writes about something called “expressive individualism.”  He defines it, “According to Bellah, we are expressive individualists — meaning that ‘each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.'”  As an example, “We see this phenomenon most obviously in the bizarre insistence by transgender advocates that not only are they men trapped in women’s bodies or vice versa, but that society mirror that incorrect self-perception.”  He then says about Covid:

But there will be no normalization for those who have made pandemic paranoia a feature of their identity. That’s because the public health establishment has now successfully cultivated a large group of people who measure their moral value by just how compliant and panicked they remain over COVID-19:

The socialistic thinking that began all this has morphed, almost completely, into a matter of selfish concern.  That’s what always happens with socialism, and that is why it never really works.  We are entirely too self-centered.  Thus, socialism always breaks down into cutthroat competition that leaves the entire socialist entity scarred.  This is true of the socialist community described in the first few chapters of Acts in the Bible and it is true of the Soviet Union. Until Christ returns and we are fully perfected, it will not work.

The socialistic ideals of the early lockdowns have long since transmogrified into an oppressive expression of feigned moral superiority from those that consider themselves our betters.

The time has come for all of it to end.

https://hughhewitt.com/why-socialism-cannot-work/

Saturday, January 29, 2022

FLASHBACK: 2018 Dems Said President Must Wait Until After the Midterms to Replace a Supreme Court Justice

FLASHBACK: 2018 Dems Said President Must Wait Until After the Midterms to Replace a Supreme Court Justice

Screenshot via C-SPAN

In 2018, when Justice Anthony Kennedy retired, Democrats went into full panic mode. As Kennedy was the key swing vote on the court, any nomination by Trump would likely result in a reliably conservative justice replacing him, moving the court to the right.

Democrats tried everything they could to force Trump to delay nominating Kennedy’s replacement. They claimed that Trump couldn’t nominate someone to the Supreme Court while he was “under investigation” for Russian collusion by Robert Mueller. They claimed that they needed more time to review documents, even though they had more time to review Kavanaugh’s record than the past three Supreme Court nominees.

They also claimed that Trump couldn’t nominate someone to the Supreme Court until after the 2018 midterms.

“Our Republican colleagues in the Senate should follow the rule they set in 2016 — not to consider a Supreme Court justice in an election year,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at the time. “Senator McConnell would tell anyone who listened that the Senate had the right to advise and consent. And that was every bit as important as the president’s right to nominate.”

He wasn’t alone.

“It’s absolute hypocrisy for the majority leader to move forward on a vote now when he wasn’t willing to move forward on a vote ahead of the 2016 election,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said.

“There should be no consideration of a Supreme Court nominee until the American people have a chance to weigh in,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said at the time.

Another Senate Democrat who weighed in was Kamala Harris. “Given the stakes of this seat which will determine the fate of protected constitutional rights, the American people, who are set to vote in less than four months, deserve to have their voice heard. We should not vote on confirmation until they have voted at the ballot box,” Harris said in a statement.

McConnell had indeed refused to take up Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016. But that wasn’t the Republican’s rule; it was actually Joe Biden’s. Back in June 1992, then-Senator Biden gave a speech arguing that, should a Supreme Court vacancy occur, a successor shouldn’t be picked until after the presidential election that November. “[I]t is my view that if a Supreme Court justice resigns tomorrow, or within the next several weeks, or resigns at the end of the summer, President Bush should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not — and not — name a nominee until after the November election is completed,” Biden said.

Of course, Biden wasn’t talking about a midterm election; he was talking about a presidential election and whether a president who might lose his election should potentially get to make a nomination to the Supreme Court before his fate was certain. Republicans cited the Biden Rule in 2016 to block Garland, but it didn’t apply to Kavanaugh in 2018.

Nonetheless, Schumer claimed the rule did apply to Kavanaugh when Republicans had the presidency and a majority in the Senate — as Democrats do now. In 2018, Democrats hoped to win back control of the U.S. Senate in the midterms and thus wanted Trump to wait until after the elections took place, to make it impossible for Trump to confirm someone they disapproved of.

Related: AOC’s Ugly Delegitimization of SCOTUS

Trump didn’t give a hoot about Schumer’s rule, but Schumer still tried to say Trump was obliged to follow it. Today, Joe Biden finds himself in the same circumstance as Trump was in 2018. Of course, Democrats only insisted on Trump following the “rule” because it was politically convenient for them at the time. But, if Democrats — who so passionately insisted that Trump needed to wait until after the midterms to nominate a replacement for Kennedy — don’t want to be hypocrites, they’d insist Biden wait until after the midterms as well.

But then, when have Democrats ever cared about being hypocrites?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/01/26/flashback-2018-dems-said-president-must-wait-until-after-the-midterms-to-replace-a-supreme-court-justice-n1553286

Biden's DOJ Thinks BLM Criminals Deserve Lesser Sentences

Biden's DOJ Thinks BLM Criminals Deserve Lesser Sentences

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Earlier this month, a BLM rioter was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for burning down a Minneapolis pawn shop during the George Floyd riots in May 2020.

Sentencing guidelines, however, recommended a sentence of nearly double that. It turns out that Joe Biden’s Justice Department recommended a lesser sentence because the rioter, Montez Terriel Lee Jr., of Rochester, New York, committed his crime in the name of Black Lives Matter.

According to a memo from the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Minnesota, even though Lee “committed a crime that cost a man his life,” his motives for committing the crime merited a lesser sentence.

“Mr. Lee’s motive for setting the fire is a foremost issue. Mr. Lee credibly states that he was in the streets to protest unlawful police violence against black men, and there is no basis to disbelieve this statement,” the memo reads. “Mr. Lee, appropriately, acknowledges that he ‘could have demonstrated in a different way,’ but that he was ‘caught up in the fury of the mob after living as a black man watching his peers suffer at the hands of police.'”

“As anyone watching the news world-wide knows, many other people in Minnesota were similarly caught up,” the memo continues. “There appear to have been many people in those days looking only to exploit the chaos and disorder in the interests of personal gain or random violence. There appear also to have been many people who felt angry, frustrated, and disenfranchised, and who were attempting, in many cases in an unacceptably reckless and dangerous manner, to give voice to those feelings. Mr. Lee appears to be squarely in this latter category.”

Because supporting Black Lives Matter is apparently the key to a reduced sentence in Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorney’s office requested Lee get 144 months instead of the recommended 235-240 months. Instead, the Obama-nominated Judge Wilhelmina M. Wright sentenced Lee to 120 months.

So, if you’re in legal trouble, just say you support Black Lives Matter, and the Biden Justice Department will give you one of these:

Courtesy of the author
https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/matt-margolis/2022/01/27/bidens-doj-thinks-blm-criminals-deserve-lesser-sentences-n1553701