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June
09
2020

Just Like That, Gun Control Support and COVID-19 Died This Week
Clarice Feldman

After watching hundreds (including Michigan Governor Whitmer and other political figures who placed the rest of us in lockdowns) marching, screaming shouting -- without social distancing and often without masks -- it’s going to be hard to persuade us that even normal social contact will infect us and those around us with COVID-19. After watching the police hamstrung by these same politicians as their cities were looted and burned and they and civilians were severely injured and killed, gun sales are soaring. Without law and order it’s each man for himself. With our biggest cities boarded up and devastated, flight out to red states, where people understand that without respect for law life is too brutal to endure, will snowball.

1. The Purported Trigger: The Death of George Floyd

George Floyd was arrested in Minneapolis for passing a counterfeit bill. He was a big man with a record of assaults and drug use. A video of his arrest shows he was handcuffed and seems to have resisted being placed in the squad car. We see him being pinned down on the ground by Officer Chauvin’s knee. He seems to be wrestling about on the ground and talking. Soon after he stops moving an emergency medical van appears and he is removed from the scene. He was reportedly dead by the time they arrived. At least one report says the officers called for medical assistance early in the arrest when Floyd said he couldn’t breathe. Is the video the best evidence of what occurred? No. The best evidence is the footage taken from the body cams worn by the four officers on the scene; evidence Minneapolis authorities have failed to disclose. If your impression from the video or Dr. Baden’s interview (the examiner hired by the Floyd family) is that Floyd was asphyxiated, the only forensic evidence shows that he was not. The medical examiner, who was the only person to have conducted an autopsy, indicates Floyd was not asphyxiated. Here are the key findings in his report.

He had

1. Arteriosclerotic heart disease, multifocal, severe

2. Cardiomegaly (540 g) with mild biventricular dilatation

3. Clinical history of hypertension

There were

“No injuries of anterior muscles of neck or laryngeal structures" and “No facial, oral, mucosal, or conjunctival petechiae” (These are tiny red marks that are important signs of asphyxia caused by airway obstruction. If there had been any, it might indicate death by strangulation, hanging or smothering. )

He also tested positive for COVID-19.

Even more striking are the autopsy toxicology findings. In his system they found:

1. Fentanyl 11 ng/mL.

2. Norfentanyl 5.6 ng/mL

3. 4-ANPP 0.65 ng/mL

4. Methamphetamine 19 ng/mL

5. 11-Hydroxy Delta-9 THC 1.2 ng/ml

6. Cotinine positive

7. Caffeine positive

In sum, he was high on drugs at the time of his death. The fentanyl itself was four times the level known to cause fatalities, reports Paul Sperry, and on top of that he had speed and marijuana in his system. The arresting officer said he was foaming at the mouth and a close look at the video indicates this was so. Interestingly, none of the charges against any of the officers claim Floyd’s death was intentionally inflicted.

Given the huge drug load in Floyd’s system, we might also look at what is called “excited delirium” about which Officer Chauvin expressed concern when he restrained Floyd. Mark Wauck explains:

The Western Journal of Emergency Medicine says that

“Excited delirium is characterized by agitation, aggression, acute distress and sudden death, often in the pre-hospital care setting. It is typically associated with the use of drugs. Subjects typically die from a heart attack and the majority of the patients die before hospital arrival.”

“All accounts describe almost the exact same sequence of events: delirium with agitation (fear, panic, shouting, violence and hyperactivity), sudden cessation of struggle, respiratory arrest and death.”

Once again, the body camera footage showing the initial encounter, discussions among officers and the call to paramedics about the issue of excited delirium will be a major factor in this case.

I don’t relate these things for you to judge what happened. That’s why we have trials and why we don’t, like ancient Romans, condemn men based on their performance in the coliseum (now replaced by the media circuses). That’s the very point of our legal system. People demanding instant retribution are simply modern-day advocates for lynching. Pundits right and left calling his death “murder” might take some time to look at the autopsy report and wait for the body cam footage. These things will certainly be evidence at trial, a long time after the perfervid reporting and the response to it.

2. Stirring the Pot

It’s hardly a secret that the left promotes the idea that all of the problems in the world are caused by others and unfairness to you. It has been their leitmotif for decades to move black voters away from the Republican Party, which has been their staunchest support for equal rights, and into the Democrat party that worked hard to keep them in bondage. What they once accomplished through the Ku Klux Klan, Democrats now manage through a complicit press and corporate and academic elites. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at Stanford tweeted June 4 as the urban carnage began, “That notion was the royal road to unbridled power for Hitler, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot -- which is to say, millions of human beings paid with their lives for believing it.”

We’ve seen once again how the left has spread the lie that there is systemic racism in the U.S. -- the least racist country -- and a leader in western civilization. The West, after all, was the first place slavery -- which still exists in many parts of the world -- was eliminated. The statistical evidence disproves the myth of systemic police racism.

So far, we haven’t paid with millions of lives, thank goodness, but the damage has been considerable. In New York City, looters in very expensive cars smashed windows up and down Fifth Avenue, in one case stealing $2.5 million dollars’ worth of Rolex watches. It was organized theft up and down the avenue according to eyewitnesses. But one assumes most of those losses are covered by insurance and we will pay only by increased prices to cover increased coverage payments. The financial damage has been greatest to the most disadvantaged, homeowners and small shop businesses. The Wall Street Journal notes:

Some of these businesses are raising funds to help put the pieces back together. Some might have insurance to cover at least a portion of the losses. But others might not survive, and many companies will go bust quietly, without making the newspapers. Contrast this heartache with the cavalier attitude shown by at least some intellectuals, who seem to think that firebombing a local South American restaurant is merely the persuasive language of the unheard.

Reporting on the mayhem, Melanie Phillips calls out the racism of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, with their demonstrable racism against whites. The notion that black people are always victims and can never be perpetrators of racism is both false and noxious.

Detailing the mayhem directed against Jews by the rioters in Los Angeles underscores her point:

Masks. Hoodies. Sledgehammers. Crowbars. Baseball bats.

These are the descriptions Jewish business owners cited when talking about how their stores were looted and ransacked, and synagogues were vandalized with graffiti after peaceful protests spiraled out of control in Los Angeles beginning on Friday night and continuing into the weekend…

Many of the business owners whose stores were looted in the Beverly Hills, downtown Los Angeles and the heavily Orthodox Fairfax district, are observant Jews who had shut off all electronic devices and connection to the outside world on Thursday night in observance of both the two-day Shavuot holiday and Shabbat. Calls from alarm companies and multiple text messages and phone calls from non-observant friends, family and nearby store owners jolted them out of their safe bubble…

But the economic damage is far from all unleashed by this propaganda-fueled rage.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers have been injured, more than a dozen murdered. In Buffalo, 75 special riot squad officers, hamstrung by local officials, quit. In Los Angeles, mayor Eric Garcetti set off a police union rebellion when he announced the cops who were a thin blue line against the savagery there this week were going to have their budget cut by $150 million dollars, which would be part of a $250 million grant toward “health and education" in the black community. The left in Portland (epicenter of Antifa) and elsewhere is demanding that police forces everywhere be disbanded. How nice! We can be like the Third-world countries where the rich and powerful have private security forces and everyone else scrambles to hide from robbers and murderers. Gun sales here are shooting through the roof. Understandably opposition to gun control is also rising.

3. Weak Knees all around

The Internet is full of groveling masochistic whites begging forgiveness of blacks, many on their knees. My email folder is full of contrite apologies from educational institutions and big businesses from Walmart to JP Morgan. It’s the same virtue signaling we got a few weeks ago “We’re all in this together” as mayors and governors decidedly ignored their own shutdown rules, rules as varied, inconsistent , arbitrary and constantly changing as a massive game of Simon Says. The Spectator calls this “woke capitalism”. When you read the pabulum these weak-kneed institutions are churning out you probably could use Michael Walsh’s translating service:

Your guide to Leftspeak:

"White supremacy" = Western civilization

"Fundamental change" = total destruction

"Legitimate grievances" = "complete bullshit"

Have a conversation about..." = agree with us or die

"Rights" = things not in the Constitution we want

4. And Yet This Time it does not Seem to be Working

Many blacks are not buying this nonsense any longer. Rasmussen reports black male likely voters’ approval of the President is over 40%.

If media coverage makes you doubt that they have caught on that they are being played as pawns, take a look at this video of a young black woman angrily shoving back the brick they had handed out to foment the riots at rich white rioters in an expensive car.

People like this woman, Thomas Sowell and Candace Owens are not alone in seeing through the cant. Read this plaint by a black cop attacking the notions espoused by BLM. He puts his life on the line to protect people who have been fooled into thinking he’s their enemy:

I realized that some of these people, who say Black Lives Matter, are full of hate and racism. Hate for cops, because of the false narrative that more black people are targeted and killed. Racism against white people, for a tragedy that began 100s of years ago, when most of the white people today weren’t even born yet. I realized that some in the African American community’s idea of “Justice” is the prosecution of ANY and EVERY cop or white man that kills or is believed to have killed a black man, no matter what the circumstances are. I realized the African American community refuses to look within to solve its major issues, and instead makes excuses and looks outside for solutions. I realized that a lot of people in the African American community lead with hate, instead of love. Division instead of Unity. Turmoil and rioting, instead of Peace. I realized that they have become the very entity that they claim they are fighting against.

I realized that the very reasons I became a cop, are the very reasons my own people hate me, and now in this toxic hateful racially charged political climate, I am now more likely to die,... and it is still hard for me to understand…. to this day.

5. Some Good News at the End of the Week

The New York Court of Appeals overruled an absurd lower court ruling that granted bail to two lawyers who had flung a Molotov cocktail at a police car and were handing out others to rioters. They were ordered returned to federal custody. (Bail had originally been guaranteed, by the way, by a third lawyer, Salmah Rizvi, who had worked for the Departments of State and Defense under Obama and who is connected to CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.)

The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine had rushed into print articles from a sketchy outfit, Surgisphere. These studies had not been peer-reviewed and seem to have been pure poppycock. In the Lancet, it was about the effectiveness of hydrochloroquine and chloroquine, anti-malarial drugs the President had suggested might be effective in treating COVID-19 and which grandma-killer Governor Andrew Cuomo had banned as a treatment in New York. Both once-prestigious medical journals have long been losing credibility, and this will certainly drive their authority down even further.

 

 

 

 

Clarice Feldman is a retired litigation lawyer who lives in D.C. She's a news junkie addicted to the internet.

 

www.americanthinker.com