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crime and punishment responsibility

Race to Fatherlessness

“Attention is a limited resource,” Josh Oldham tells fellow Good Kid Productions co-​founder Rob Montz, “and in a moment of crisis,” after the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “a lot of Americans” accepted a “race narrative” about the incident.

In a new documentary, The Broken Boys of Kenosha: Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the Lies We Still Live, Oldham and Montz present “7 sacred tenets” of the race narrative advanced by the media that were verifiably false. 

Those bogus beliefs “inspired thousands of protesters to descend on Kenosha” so that the city was “incinerated by a lie,” leading to 17-​year-​old Kyle Rittenhouse’s infamous visit to protect people and property, wherein he shot three men, two fatally … in self-​defense

Yet, the filmmakers don’t stop there; they offer “a deeper story.”

“Burn away the media-​manufactured fiction about Jacob Blake and what do you see?” asks Montz. “You see a bad man,” he acknowledges, “but you ought to also see an abandoned boy.”

Montz calls Jacob Blake “just one tiny data point in a mass trend” of “an unspoken catastrophe … the explosion in the number of boys who grow up without dads.” One of every three Americans boys is growing up without a father in the home.

Blake was hardly alone — Rittenhouse and both assailants he killed were were also fatherless.

“The thing that actually correlates most closely to whether a kid is going to go into a life of crime,” former Attorney General Bill Barr points out, “is whether or not they had a father who was involved in their lives.”

The moral plague that follows — of “unanchored” men — is a problem government seems mostly to have exacerbated. Only we dads can solve it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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media and media people

Lynch Mob at Eleven

The facts in the Kyle Rittenhouse case were never the focus of the bulk of news reporting. What was? Constructing a rationale for progressive Democrats to ceaselessly wax eloquent on the strawman of their choice. Or worse.

Trapped in legend, the conclusion of the trial could only appear to them as something utterly alien and malign.

“The Rittenhouse Verdict is Only Shocking,” Matt Taibbi headlined his Substack media takedown, “if You Followed the Last Year of Terrible Reporting.”

The jury’s decision “was hardly a surprise to many of us who watched the trial rather than the media coverage,” wrote Jonathan Turley at USA Today.

“Two Americas are hearing two entirely different stories about this case,” GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson noted on Meet the Press, “and neither of them is the full view that that jury got over the days and weeks of that trial.”

We were repeatedly told that young Rittenhouse “crossed state lines” (still perfectly legal*) looking for trouble (any evidence of that?) and had “no business being there.”

The truth? Kyle Rittenhouse had a constitutional right to be in Kenosha. 

Notice I did not say “showed good judgement,” however, neither did Rittenhouse fit the legacy-left-media’s or Joe Biden’s “white supremacist” vigilante stereotype.

Thank goodness, the Kenosha jury got it right. The media nearly universally got it wrong — largely on purpose — as well as missing the biggest issue of all, identified concisely by former Democratic Party presidential candidate and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard: “This tragedy never would have happened if the government had simply carried out its responsibilities to protect the safety, lives and property of innocent people.”

Government failed to do its job, and a lynch mob press corps failed to report it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* Sadly, even the ACLU joined the chorus harping on Rittenhouse having “traveled across state lines.” The group also rightfully ripped the Kenosha Police Department and the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office for “an outrageous failure to protect protesters.”

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crime and punishment ideological culture

Democrats: Dissonance on Self-Defense

The Kyle Rittenhouse case, which I talked about on my podcast, This Week in Common Sense, reveals a deep divide.

One side thinks young Mr. Rittenhouse is guilty because he clearly sided with property-​owners by cleaning up graffiti, putting out fires, caring for the riots’ victims … and carrying a big, scary-​looking rifle; the other points to the facts of the altercation between Rittenhouse and the three men he shot, judging the shootings self-defense.

On Monday, the lead prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger, insisted that “You lose the right to self-​defense when you’re the one who brought the gun,” despite that not being Wisconsin law. Rittenhouse also wasn’t the only one with a gun.

While the prosecution tried to undermine self-​defense by declaring that Rittenhouse had instigated the whole scene, the media relentlessly feeds a general prejudice against the idea that citizens should be armed and for the notion that we must rely upon the police alone. 

Dissonant with this, however, were the months of leftists excusing, when not cheering, “protests” turned violent in which not only property was destroyed, but people were killed. To top off this cultural license to mayhem, progressive mavens pushed the opposite of state protection: let the mob run riot.

Followed by “defund the police.”

The leftist/​statist argument seems to be: You mustn’t protect yourself with deadly force, instead relying upon the state — except when we (the left) riot, then no protection for you!

This is a recipe for civil war or tyranny or both. 

Not civil peace.

Meanwhile, as Rittenhouse’s jury deliberates, everyone assumes that leftists itch to take an acquittal as another excuse to riot.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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