By Diane Scherff
Congratulations Mayor Bill de Blasio, you’ve succeeded in handcuffing crime fighters, giving criminals free reign in what was once one of the greatest cities in America. Even as the crime rises in New York City, de Blasio continues to capitulate to the heavily-financed, cop-hating, liberal terrorists, acquiescing to their demands. In June, he reduced NYPD funding by 17 percent, disbanded NYPD anti-crime units and this week signed the “NYPD accountability package,” better known as the “chokehold” law, which constrains an officer’s physical interaction with suspects who resist arrest.
While the Mayor sits on his throne of denial, a bounty has been put out on his own officers’ heads fueled by the Soros-funded Deep State acted upon by willing illiterate anarchists armed with guns, bats and earpieces in a coordinated attack. According to Fox News, “surveillance video from outside City Hall shows protesters receiving a small shipment of bats before anti-cops activists clashed with officers on the Brooklyn Bridge Wednesday morning.” This brutal bat-bashing attack on several high-ranking officers occurred during a “unity” rally which included clergy, law enforcement and community activists.
According to an article in the New York Post, “In all, four cops, including Chief of Department Terence Monahan, the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, and one civilian were injured in the clash and 37 people were arrested.” These people should be put in prison and indicted for domestic terrorism.
The day before these horrific NYC attacks occurred, the Massachusetts state Senate also passed a police reform bill which bans chokeholds, allows the State Police leader to be chosen from outside the department, and reduces the use of qualified immunity for individual officers. Qualified immunity is designed to protect all government officials including law enforcement when their actions do not violate a clearly established statutory or constitutional right. Qualified immunity does not protect the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law. To abolish the law, would mean that an officer could potentially go to prison for breaking the law unintentionally.
In our Trump Club Zoom Meeting regarding Police Reform earlier this week with Chief of Police St Augustine Beach Rob Hardwick and former Jacksonville Sheriff and Congressman John Rutherford – FL stated that “qualified immunity covers officers as long as they are following the law and proceeding by the book. You can’t always control the circumstances.” Quite frankly, the attack and abolishment of the police officer’s qualified immunity defense will leave them, well, defenseless against excessive lawsuits.
Due to pressure from the George Floyd death, the fight for police reform on the federal level produced and passed a bill in the House last month, brought on by Democrats who refused to work with Republicans for a bi partisan bill. Fortunately, the ‘George Floyd Justice in Policing Act’ which regulates law enforcement at the local, state and federal levels, appears to be dead on arrival in the Senate. Senate Republicans opposed the bill because it would result in more crime and fewer people willing to serve in law enforcement, lowers the standard for men’s rea (or criminal intent) and virtually eliminates qualified immunity for officers.
Independent Congressman Justin Amash – MI and Democrat Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley – MA wrote a letter to their colleagues about ‘ending qualified immunity,’ stating, “this pattern [of police misconduct] continues because police are legally, politically and culturally insulated from consequences for violating the rights of the people whom they have sworn to serve.” What they don’t realize is that police officers must have immunity because they have to make life and death split-second decisions on the line every day and there must be room for unintentional error.
What does all this police reform mean for law enforcement officers today?
In the first half of 2020, 30 officers have been killed in the line of duty. Only nine black criminals and 25 white criminals were killed by officers while resisting arrest in all of 2019. The anti-police rhetoric and paid-for liberal anarchy has led our country down a slimy slope to total destruction by the Left and NYC is just the beginning. If anti-police ambushes and police reform continue, few people will want to serve in a job in which they are attacked, underpaid, overworked and most notably could be charged with a crime for doing their job.
The Sanctity of America’s Founding
By Robert Blau
Much of the news regarding protests against our founding fathers tends to focus on the fact that some of them owned slaves. On the one hand you can say that all people, even the great ones, are flawed. On the other hand it is not entirely fair to judge 18th century Virginia landholders by the values of the 21st century. And of course the remarkable accomplishments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have few equals in all recorded human history. Not to mention that the very values enshrined in our founding documents paved the way to the eventual abolition of slavery—after a bloody war that claimed the lives of over 600,000 young men. No other country has put itself through that.
But more significantly than the argument over slavery is the protestors’ attempt to negate the religious aspect of our nation’s founding. Judeo-Christian values motivated the Pilgrims and other New World settlers and are key elements in the most important documents in American History:
· The Mayflower Compact begins with “In the name of God,” and continues in the next few lines with “having undertaken for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.”
· The Declaration of Independence famously says that “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”
· The First Amendment to our Constitution enshrines the right of religious freedom.
And of course the Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase “…One nation, under God,” and our dollar bills all say “In God We Trust.” Every 7th Inning Stretch at Yankee Stadium begins with the song “God Bless America,” and we all know the verse from America the Beautiful that says “God shed his grace on thee.”
Additionally, settlement of territories during America’s westward expansion was typically led by religious leaders: Think of the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Mormons in Utah, and the founding of California under the leadership of Father Junipero Serra.
Today’s progressives try to negate the religious origins of the U.S.A. because in most cases they are completely devoid of religious faith themselves. For example, New York Mayor De Blasio recently used the pretext of COVID-19 to ban religious services, while simultaneously permitting, even encouraging protests in the streets by leftist mobs. This week the news reports that statues of the Virgin Mary have been defaced in Boston and New York.
The very far left is inspired by Karl Marx, whose ideology considered religion to be “the opiate of the people;” Communist countries based on that ideology have either banished or strictly circumscribed organized religion, replacing God with dictators who turned out to be little more than gangsters with a cover story about social justice. Genuine religious faith and communism cannot easily coexist; note how the papacy of John Paul II rekindled Catholicism in Poland and was the key factor in ending the communist regime there.
Introduce religious faith into the conversation and the mantras of the leftist mobs are completely undermined. A religious practitioner knows in his heart that we are all God’s children, regardless of color, gender, or national origin. It is not necessary for such a person to be lectured that Black lives matter, since he already believes that, as it says in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal.” Religion teaches “Thou shall not kill,” providing the lens through which we can all see the injustice in George Floyd’s death in police custody.
The cultural war that seems to be all around us is, most basically, a schism between those who seek to destroy the religious underpinnings of American society and those of us who seek to preserve it. Douglas Murray’s “The Strange Death of Europe” offers a cautionary tale. In this book the author describes how Europeans are losing their cultural identity, not just because of large-scale immigration, but because they have ceased believing in and practicing their own Christian religion. Muslim immigrants, contrastingly, tend to be fervent believers in their faith. The former have few children, while the latter are fruitful and multiply.
Although these demographic trends do not threaten the United States, our abandonment of faith is similar to what has happened in Europe. According to a poll published by Psychology Today, Twice as many high school seniors, and three times as many college students, described their religion as “none” in the 2010s—as compared to the early 1980s. Pew research reports a similar decline in religious affiliation and concomitant increase in those who identify themselves as atheist or agnostic: 26 percent now as compared to 17 percent in 2009. Clearly what is taking the place of organized religion for these young people is a set of values inculcated by our left-biased public schools and universities—breeding grounds for social justice warriors, socialists and the cancel culture. As such, the 2020 campaign needs to include an element of religious revivalism. Just as in the horror films where religious symbols scare away monsters like Count Dracula, in real life religious faith undercuts the appeal of socialism and mobs, while also reinforcing the sanctity of our country’s founding principles.
