We all know that social media can be a societal cesspool. The sniping and back-and-forth keyboard warrior actions are enough to stress out the sane person. No arguments are ever settled. Each person has set up a tent in his or her camp and anyone who dare enter said camp – even with facts and figures to present a logical and different viewpoint – will be viciously attacked. Of course, you may be as nasty as you want to be since you’ll never see the person you are harpooning with sharp words.
But at times there are nuggets of wisdom in social media if you follow the right sources. I saw this post which reflects my own thinking on what’s happened in our country in the last several months:
“Scare people with a virus. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses. 40,000,000 out of jobs. Peak unemployment. Remove entertainment: parks, gyms, bars, restaurants, sports. No dating. No touching. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches. Create a vacuum. Let depression and anxiety and desperation set in.
“Then... ignite hatred and civil war. Civil unrest. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot. Attack law enforcement, but tell government to order a stand-down. We are all being baited by adversarial governments who want to destroy America – China, Iran, Russia. Have the Far Left abuse the racial wars to fuel the fires. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President.
“Can’t take America in a war, destroy it from within.
“We are being conditioned, manipulated, and programmed by multiple agendas as never before.....time to DO OUR OWN RESEARCH and MAKE UP OUR OWN MINDS rather than eating everything being spoon-fed to us!”
“Think freely America!”
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What would make me happy would be to see more people leave the Democrat Party. Let’s face it, the party of today is nothing like it was in the days of Sam Rayburn, Harry Truman and John Kennedy. Democrat Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley gave orders for police to shoot to kill looters who overtook his streets in 1968.
I used to be a Democrat when I was in college. I thought Democrats were for the little man. I started wising up to what was going on around 1991. I saw that the Democrat Party was not concerned with bettering the lives of Americans and getting them to self-sufficiency. They desire people to depend on government because, let’s face it, if you do well on your own powers, you don’t need their social programs and promises of utopia. A Democrat needs the unhappy person to keep them in power. And you know what? Nothing ever changes about poverty. Even the Bible suggested that there will always be poor – but I would say that because of our existing social network the poorest person in Indiana is “rich” compared to a poor person in India or Indonesia.
As I heard U.S. Senator Kamala Harris on TV and then Ceres protesters speak about the need to defund police across the land, I couldn’t help but think what Channce Condit might be thinking. The Ceres councilman was present at that protest at Whitmore Park (handing out campaign cards I heard.) Condit has constantly beat the drum for more police and fire funding and yet people in his party – those protesters weren’t Republicans, folks – were clamoring for no police funding because in their distorted world view that all white cops are itching to kill all minorities.
I suggest Condit leave his party of his grandparents. It’s been hijacked by far left fanatics.
Listen to Senator Harris’s own words: “We have to reimagine public safety in America. You know, the status quo has been to determine and create policy around the idea that more police means more safety and that’s just wrong.”
So Channce, according to the failed presidential candidate in your party, people like you are wrong for calling for strong public safety funding. She also suggests that more money thrown as public education will make crime of the inner city go away. It’s easy to see why voters outside of California couldn’t hold down the swill she was force-feeding them.
Harris said creating jobs was part of the solution to crime yet they glad-handedly shut down the economy which was booming under Trump, disguising it as necessary to stop the virus. None of the Democrats want a strong economy going into November.
Harris suggested well-to-do neighborhoods don’t have cops sitting on the corner. (That’s because there is not the level of crime in those cities). Funny how Harris and other liberals ignore the biggest factor contributing to poverty and crime in the black inner cities is fatherlessness. I’ve noted before that according to the National Center for Fathering, 57.6% of black children, 31.2% of Hispanic children, and 20.7% of white children are living absent their biological fathers. Children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems. Boys are more likely to become involved in crime, and girls are more likely to become pregnant as teens.
Harris talks about doing what is “morally right.” Gosh I hope she’s not referring to withholding funding for the last line of defense between those who chose to flunk out of school and steal and plunder and kill – the police.
Harris said funding police was “old thinking, it is outdated and it’s actually wrong.”
Hollywood liberals like Jane Fonda, John Legend, Joaquin Phoenix and Natalie Portman also want to defund the police. That’s terribly hypocritical since many of these rich elites use hired former police officers to protect them. They may be fine but the rest of us have to arm ourselves or wait until the guys with guns come before we get victimized.
Fortunately there are common sense actors too. Dean Cain, the guy who played Superman on TV and who is a reserve police officer in St. Anthony, Idaho, is one of them. He told Fox News: “You want to defund the police? You’re asking for anarchy, you’re asking for vigilantism.” More money is needed, he feels, to better train police officers so they don’t end up like Derek Chauvin killing people like George Floyd.
Most Americans have common sense that liberals lack. We know what would happen if you evacuated the peace makers from the American landscape.
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I saw a meme that suggested that if we defund police because of some bad cops that we ought to defund Congress because of many bad representatives. You might as well defund Hollywood by withholding from buying movie tickets because some bad actors like Bill Cosby, Rob Lowe, Charlie Sheen, Harvey Weinstein, Cuba Gooding Jr., Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin, Jussie Smollett, Robert “R” Kelly and Robert Downey Jr.
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Are Facebook and Google suppressing conservative messages? Some people think so.
A Georgia Republican candidate for Congress said Facebook removed her campaign ad because they said her video message aimed at Antifa was encouraging violence. The message was a little eyebrow raising as Marjorie Taylor Greene held a weapon and warned Antifa to “stay the hell out of northwest Georgia … you won’t burn our churches, loot our businesses or destroy our homes.”
She pointed out that as a legal gun owner she has every right to protect life and property from thugs. She also has the freedom of speech – just not on social platforms.
So if Facebook feels the ad incited violence, why wasn’t Antifa International’s message bragging about physical violence used to fight their idea of fascism?
As you know Twitter recently deleted a message of the president’s but lets other inflammatory comments stand.
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I get into a lot of heated discussions with my liberal son – he hates that I call him a liberal despite all of his leftist ideology floating around in that brain molded by the elitists at UC Davis – because I call him out on his views.
We even got into an argument about my use of the word “thugs” when commenting on all the rioting across the land. He claimed that the word has become racist, that it refers to black people.
I am 59 in two months and I consider myself well educated. I recognize BS when I see it. Liberals are even trying to redefine terms. The word thug applies to anyone who meets the definition regardless of race. According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, thug means “brutal ruffian or assassin.”
It’s just like how people like Maxine Waters who constantly parrots a patently false narrative that the president is “dog-whistling to the white supremacists, the KKK, and the dangerous people.” Last October Waters complained that she has death threats against her. While I don’t condone threats, I can see why her inflammatory rhetoric leads to that. She speaks as if she has no common sense so she can play to her constituency. I’d say at her age (81) it’s time to retire. The same goes for Nancy Pelosi, who is now 80.
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The M.O. of the drug pusher and the Democrat progressives is the same. Get people hooked and dependent. The drug pusher wants people hooked on drugs, helplessly addicted, to sell product. The Democrat wants people addicted to government subsistence, become helpless and dependent upon them in office. To that end, the Democrat is constantly striving to find – indeed create “victims.”
Here is an example. Dolores Huerta, the labor unionist, is now screaming that the drugs (tax money) is being cut off to her group of “victims.” Here, let’s read from her Thursday press release sent out by the Service Employees International Union calling for “investment in people, services, and infrastructure to get our state back to work and begin to heal structural racism and economic inequality, rather than balancing the budget on the backs of Black and Brown families, children, and seniors.”
To use the code of the liberal, she is “dog-whistling” to tax the crap of successful people. You know, the one who risked, who used their brains and talents to build successful businesses that employed those seniors and brown and black, even white people.
Huerta is making the victims double victims. It’s not enough they are victims but now they are victims of a state wanting to balance “the budget on the backs” of her select group of special-interest groups.
This year Huerta and her types have a new battle plan: claim budget cuts will kill more people because of COVID-19. Her union suggests that black people die from COVID-19 in numbers that are nearly twice their share of the population; and that 76 percent of COVID-19 deaths in California are individuals 65 and older. The inference is that the virus is itself racist, or we are because we’re not spending enough.
People are more susceptible to COVID-19 if they have “less-than” health, such as diabetes, heart disease, smokers, the elderly and those with other health problems. We know the solution is to social distance, or so we have been preached about. So why are blacks hit harder? According to the CDC, 20 percent of black men smoke; 37.5 percent of black men are obese and 56.1 percent of black women are the same; 40.5 percent of black men have hypertension and 44 percent of black women do. So apparently all the education in the world (read that money) hasn’t fixed that problem.
The solution to America’s ills is not in more government debt and taxation. It’s in getting out of business’ way so they can create jobs and family sustainability.
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I’m telling you right now, folks. The Democrats are gunning for Prop. 13, the only thing that is keeping property taxes in check.
They are trying this fall to repeal Prop. 13 on commercial properties. If the bleating masses of sheeple fall for it, they will be gunning next for the entire thing to be repealed and this California homeowner will be selling, retiring and moving to Idaho.
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I repel from the groupthink narrative that every time police shoot a black person that somehow the police are in the wrong. I would concede that, in seeing what little video I have, that the George Floyd death was wrong and unnecessary. But I can’t be the only person who looks at the growing list of persons who died from police bullets in recent years and wonder why the media fails to lay any blame on the actions of the subject leading up to it.
The media is having a field day making out police to be the bad guys. Take the recent police shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. An intoxicated Brooks passed out behind the wheel of a car in a Wendy’s drive-thru. He was asked to move his car and given a sobriety test. When he was being lawfully arrested for drinking and driving he fought officers and grabbed their Taser. Brooks, who served time for family violence, cruelty to children, false imprisonment and receiving stolen property, ran off and as police chase him, turns around and points an object at the police. Police opened fire.
Brooks bears all the responsibility on that one. Otherwise, we’d best just hand out “Commit Any Crime Free” cards out.
Albert Thompson died in similar circumstances when he reached into his waistband and pointed an object at Ceres Police in 2016 and was fatally shot.
Sandra Bland resisted arrest in a traffic stop and died in her jail cell.
Stephon Clark was breaking into houses and cars when he was shot and killed in Sacramento in 2018.
Want police shootings to end? Here’s a simple solution: Don’t do crimes. Don’t resist when being arrested. Nobody dies.
This column is the opinion of Jeff Benziger, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Ceres Courier or Morris Newspaper Corp. of CA. How do you feel about this? Let Jeff know at jeffb@cerescourier.com
