(2018) California’s leaders are promoting the idea that the state’s in a “new normal” of more extreme wildfire, but fire scientists say it doesn’t have to stay that way, even in the face of a climate that’s getting warmer.
I posted previously on related topics for the interested:
(This is mainly a government issue – federal and state) John and Ken interview Congressman Tom McClintock (4th District of California) discussing the issue of forest mismanagement, and how since the 1980’s 80% less logging has been allowed.
Some good articles are these:
How Misguided Environmentalism Is To Blame For California’s Wildfires (THE FEDERALIST, 2018)
California Has Always Had Fires, Environmental Alarmism Makes Them Worse Than Necessary (FORBES, 2020)
Wildfires Caused By Bad Environmental Policy Are Causing California Forests To Be Net CO2 Emitters (FORBES, 2019)
The Same Old, Same Old California Suicide (NATIONAL REVIEW, 2020)
Western Wildfires Are Due to Arson and Stupidity, Not Climate Change (AMERICAN THINKER, 2020)
PRAGER U
The following video is done by John Kobylt of the The John and Ken Show 640AM-KFI: “This is appalling. And not nearly enough people have been given this information.”
Corrupt politics overriding California wildfire prevention efforts, Republican John Cox says (SEE AT FOX NEWS)
(I have uploaded this thinking many times to my YouTube by Larry Elder, but it was fortuitous that this short video was made after a discussion waiting for wood at Phillip’s Wood) Maybe if we told people to comply with police orders with the same fervor that we encourage people to wear face masks we would save lives…
I sometimes ask myself, “Why is the New York Times allowed to exist?” And I don’t mean: “Why doesn’t the government ban the paper?” because that’s not how I roll. But why is it that this roiling cesspool of lies continues to be supported after decades of outright lies, propaganda and just plain bad reporting. This is the paper that gave us Walter Duranty, for crying out loud. This is the paper that constantly warns of the dire threat of weather, whether warming or cooling, as this great roundup from American Thinker shows. (Notice how many other “respectable” journalistic institutions get in on the act that also still exist.)
— ACE OF SPADES
That’s the gist of an amazing chronology of the last 120 years of scare-mongering on climate, assembled by butnowyouknow.net and reprinted by the estimable Anthony Watts in Wattsupwiththat, who updates it to the present.
1902 – “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
1923 – “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
1923 – “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
1938 – Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
1938 – “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
1939 – “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post
1954 – “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” – U.S. News and World Report
1954 – Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
1959 – “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
1969 – “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
1969 – “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ — Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
1970 – “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
1974 – Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
1974 – “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” –Washington Post
1974 – “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
1974 – “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times
Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age
1975 – Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
1975 – “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
1976 – “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
1981 – Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
1988 – I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote andHis superior’s objection for context
1989 -“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,Discover magazine, October 1989
1990 – “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
1993 – “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report
1998 – No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
2001 – “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
2003 – Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
2006 – “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
2006 – “It is not a debate over whether the earth has been warming over the past century. The earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree…” —Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT
2006 – “What we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always…warming or cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a half billion years.” —Philip Stott, emeritus professor of bio-geography at the University of London
2006 – “Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.” –Senator James Inhofe, Monday, September 25, 2006
2007– “I gave a talk recently (on fallacies of global warming) and three members of the Canadian government, the environmental cabinet, came up afterwards and said, ‘We agree with you, but it’s not worth our jobs to say anything.’ So what’s being created is a huge industry with billions of dollars of government money and people’s jobs dependent on it.” – Dr. Tim Ball, Coast-to-Coast, Feb 6, 2007
2008 – “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” – Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program atNASA, see above for Hansen quotes
Section updated by Anthony:
2009 – Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters. Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis – “Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” – Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London, – The Guardian, Sep 2009.
2010 – What Global Warming Looks Like. It was more than 5°C (about 10°F) warmer than climatology in the eastern European region including Moscow. There was an area in eastern Asia that was similarly unusually hot. The eastern part of the United States was unusually warm, although not to the degree of the hot spots in Eurasia. James Hansen – NASA GISS, August 11, 2010.
2011 – Where Did Global Warming Go? “In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development. – New York Times, Oct 15, 2011.
2012 – Global warming close to becoming irreversible-scientists. “This is the critical decade. If we don’t get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines,” said Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute, speaking at a conference in London. Reuters, Mar 26, 2012
2013 – Global-warming ‘proof’ is evaporating. The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way. New York Post, Dec 5, 2013
2014 – Climate change: It’s even worse than we thought. Five years ago, the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change painted a gloomy picture of our planet’s future. As climate scientists gather evidence for the next report, due in 2014, Michael Le Page gives seven reasons why things are looking even grimmer. –New Scientist (undated in 2014)
Larry Elder quickly notes the consequences of the MSM’s rhetoric about police killing blacks disproportionately, and, the death caused by such lies perpetuated by the media.
Larry Elder speaks with former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (who established Americans Against Antisemitism to bring together a broad cross-section of Americans who are prepared to combat growing antisemitism when and where it’s needed most: https://www.americansaa.org) regarding both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris meeting Jacob Blake Sr – who is a member of the Nation of Islam, a racist black nationalist New Age UFO cult and anti-Semitic group.
Tucker Carlson Scorches Biden, Media for Elevating Anti-Semite Jacob Blake Sr. as ‘Moral Authority’ – I added video from MRCTV where “Fox News host Tucker Carlson eviscerated Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and his media handlers last night, for continuing to promote and elevate an outspoken anti-Semite as the nation’s moral authority on racism.” (NEWSBUSTERS)
Larry Elder expresses amazement that The Atlantic article garnered so much attention when [at least] equally disturbing stories exist regarding Joe Biden. From saying Thomas Edison didn’t create the light-bulb (NEW YORK POST), to groping Secret Service agents girlfriends (PJ-MEDIA), to lying about how his wife died (MUSKEGON PUNDIT), to name just a few.
This is just another example of how the media can change peoples views by what they report on and what they do not report on:
Los Angeles Clippers Coach, Doc River’s, displayed some major myths as facts, and spreads these lies in emotive ways. Just another day in the neighborhood for The Sage of South Central.
THE HODGE TWINS as well commented on Doc Rivers tears:
This was a statement made on my Facebook by a very left leaning chap that visits this sites FB site here-n-there:
Putin’s puppet and lawlessly hacked in puppet tRump who conspired to kill over 180,000 Americans and insulted the U.S. armed forces at calling war heroes losers and suckers as a treasonous POS deserves to suffer the extreme punishment guidelines of U.S. Constitutional law and the extreme punishment guidelines of the U.S. armed forces that tRump betrayed as a way of amusing his pimp Putin.
Here was my response:
RPT RESPONDS
Ahh, where you been Walt? Missed your Lefty take on life.
COVID:
In 1969 the population was 207,659,263. 100,000 Americans died from the Hong Kong Flu (H3N2)… our country did not grind to a halt. We should not have sheltered in place but kept going like Sweden. But the main point is this:
According to the latest immunological studies, the overall lethality of Covid-19 (IFR) in the general population ranges between 0.1% and 0.5% in most countries, which is comparable to the medium influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1968. (SWISS POLICY RESEARCH)
In 1957 the U.S. population was 177,751,476, and 116,000. People were freer then than now apparently.
In 2019 the U.S. population was roughly 328.24 million.
LOSERS & SUCKERS:
I posted on the Atlantic article here (The Atlantic’s WWI Hit Piece — Anonymously Sourced Of Course). I updated it to show that 10-people have gone on the record to refute the main claim of the Atlantic about WWI. These people were either with the President when this conversation took place, or others were intimately involved with the facts of the case.
RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE:
USA Today examined each of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, the company that employed 12 of the 13 Russians indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for interfering with the 2016 election. It turns out only about 100 of its ads explicitly endorsed Trump or opposed Hillary Clinton. Most of the fake ads focused on racial division, with many of the ads attempting to exploit what Russia perceives, or wants America to perceive, as severe racial tension between blacks and whites…. (LARRY ELDER)
This is why people say the election was not changed by Russian interference. Ted Kennedy (the conscience of the Senate) approached Soviet Russia and asked for help to defeat Reagan. That is still one of the worse cases I have heard to date.
The vast majority of voters in a new Harvard CAPS-Harris poll released exclusively to The Hill say they believe civil unrest will be an important issue in the November election.
More than 9 in 10 voters surveyed in the poll, 92 percent, said they thought the issue would be important in the presidential campaign and election, including 52 percent who called it “very important” and 40 percent who viewed it as “somewhat important.” The survey was released Friday.
Windows of businesses and residential buildings being smashed on University Avenue — which were not preemptively boarded up. This Papa John’s employee asks protesters, “Do you want Trump to be elected?” pic.twitter.com/IbSubGfGs6
Four more witnesses have gone on the record to say that The Atlantic’s anonymously-sourced report claiming President Donald Trump called dead soldiers “losers” and “suckers” is false, bringing the total to 10.
I combined two segments of the Larry O’Connor Show responding to THE ATLANTIC’Sstory. One at his opening to the show yesterday, and the other is his interview with Sean David from THE FEDERALIST. I also add at the beginning a SPECIAL REPORT excerpt regarding Bolton’s assertion from actually being in the meeting (full video @FOX). As well as ending the audio by Larry O’Connor with an excerpt of THE FIVE. The point of this is to note that if a person who is a hostile witness to Trump – substantiates Trump’s claim, that goes a long way to making the point (WESTERN JOURNAL).
MAKE NO MISTAKE, there is an issue with anonymous sources in the media that is on steroids right now. I note this in a book review series I just started on my site (R-PT). But here you have four ON-THE-RECORD sources that rebut the anonymous sources (EPOCH TIMES). Five according to the DAILY WIRE, whom 4 were present and go on the record: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Hogan Gidley, Dan Scavino, Steven Miller, and Lt. General Keith Kellogg.
And in story-after-story you see this pattern, the Washington post or the New York Times or CNN and the like will have a breaking news story – that in the end cannot be substantiated.
What The Atlantic SHOULD DO is include with every story bashing Trump mention that it’s owner is a mega-donor to Biden’s campaign. Here is the DAILY CALLER’S bullet points:
Billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, the majority owner of The Atlantic, has donated over $1.2 million to former Vice President Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates and groups since 2019, Federal Election Commission records show.
Powell Jobs owns a 70% stake in The Atlantic, and she reportedly communicates often with its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.
So not only is The Atlantic apparently guided by the same bias CNN is driven by ([undercover video] BREITBART), but an ad that ran on Morning Joe’s MSNBC show was another factor in how well-orchestrated this was. The Atlantic story came out after the business day Thursday (“The story came out at night on the east coast” — video at TWITTER)”
…It is not just an ad featuring a dubbed-over voice, some scary music, and a few screenshots of the Atlantic article. This is a high-quality, sophisticated television spot featuring testimony from multiple Gold Star parents.
That is some amazing turnaround time — getting all those parents together overnight and then getting the ad into MSNBC’s hands, considering the Atlantic story had only just come out Thursday evening….
….We’ve been reporting on this story from The Atlantic from “anonymous sources” claiming the president didn’t go to an American military cemetery in France two years ago, because he called military members “losers” and “suckers,” an obvious and transparent lie. The story has now been debunked six ways to Sunday by real people who are willing to go on the record and who were there at the time.
But this story dropped late Thursday night on the east coast. So we find it rather curious that the anti-Trump leftist group, “Vote Vets,” had this ad up early this morning, talking specifically about what was in the article, using the particular alleged terms, “losers” and “suckers.”
[….]
How were they able to find those six Goldstar families and do interviews over night? Really? And had all the production values? Then they were able to get it on Morning Joe first thing?
It even has a “secure blue” link to donate to on the video.
The Democratic Super PAC American Bridge already has another ad out on this too and launching a $4 million ad buy in Midwestern battleground states to try to pitch to the Midwest that Trump doesn’t like the military. The ad features an alleged former Trump supporter military person now claiming he’ll be voting for Biden.
But unfortunately the story doesn’t have to be true. All that the Democrats need is for any in the middle to think it might be and hold their vote from Trump. That’s what Democrats are aiming for here.
As one comment from the TWITTER thread linked above says:
If anyone wants to offer an explanation other than the media colluded with the Biden campaign, I’m more than happy to hear it.
Armstrong and Getty go over some referenced materials regarding the The Vid (Covid-19). This material comes from the Swiss Policy Research: “FACTS ABOUT COVID-19” (30-bullet points added below video). Pretty amazing stuff.
According to the latest immunological studies, the overall lethality of Covid-19 (IFR) in the general population ranges between 0.1% and 0.5% in most countries, which is comparable to the medium influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1968.
For people at high risk or high exposure (including health care workers), early or prophylactictreatment is essential to prevent progression of the disease.
In countries like the UK (with lockdown) and Sweden (without lockdown), overall mortality since the beginning of the year is in the range of a strong influenza season; mortality is higher in the USA (comparable to 1957/1968), but lower in countries like Germany and Switzerland. However, antibody values are still low in large parts of previously locked-down Europe.
In most places, the risk of death for the healthy general population of school and working age is comparable to a daily car ride to work. The risk was initially overestimated because many people with only mild or no symptoms were not taken into account.
About 80% of all people develop only mild symptoms or no symptoms. Even among 70-79 year olds, about 60% develop only mild symptoms. About 95% of all people develop at most moderate symptoms and do not require hospitalization.
Up to 60% of all people may already have a partial T-cell immune response against the new coronavirus due to contact with previous coronaviruses (i.e. cold viruses). Moreover, up to 60% of children and about 6% of adults may already have cross-reactive antibodies.
The median age of Covid deaths in most Western countries is over 80 years – e.g. 84 years in Sweden – and only about 4% of the deceased had no serious preconditions. In contrast to flu pandemics, the age and risk profile of deaths thus essentially corresponds to normal mortality.
In many countries, up to two thirds of all extra deaths occurred in nursing homes, which do not benefit from a general lockdown. Moreover, in many cases it is not clear whether these people really died from Covid-19 or from weeks of extreme stress and isolation.
Up to 30% of all additional deaths may have been caused not by Covid-19, but by the effects of the lockdown, panic and fear. For example, the treatment of heart attacks and strokes decreased by up to 40% because many patients no longer dared to go to hospital.
Many media reports of young and healthy people dying from Covid-19 turned out to be false: many of these young people either did not die from Covid-19, they had already been seriously ill (e.g. from undiagnosed leukaemia), or they were in fact 109 instead of 9 years old. The claimed increase in Kawasaki disease in children also turned out to be exaggerated.
Most Covid-19 symptoms can also be caused by severe influenza (including pneumonia, thrombosis and the temporary loss of the sense of taste and smell), but with severe Covid-19 these symptoms are indeed much more frequent and more pronounced.
About 10% of symptomatic people develop so-called post-acute (“long”) Covid and report symptoms that last for several weeks or months. This may also affect younger and previously healthy people with a strong immune response to the new coronavirus.
The often shown exponential curves of “corona cases” are misleading, as the number of tests also increased exponentially. In most countries, the ratio of positive tests to tests overall (i.e. the positivity rate) always remained below 20%. In many countries, the peak of the spread was already reached well before the lockdown came into effect.
In most Covid hotspots, including New York City, London, Stockholm and Bergamo, the infection rate dropped as soon as about 20% of people had developed antibodies against the new coronavirus. This value is much lower than the inital estimate of 60 to 80%.
Countries without lockdowns, such as Japan, Belarus and Sweden, have not experienced a more negative course of events than many other countries. Sweden was even praised by the WHO and now benefits from higher immunity compared to lockdown countries. 75% of Swedish deaths happened in nursing facilities that weren’t protected fast enough.
The fear of a shortage of ventilators was unjustified. According to lung specialists, the invasive ventilation (intubation) of Covid-19 patients, which is partly done out of fear of spreading the virus, is in fact often counterproductive and damaging to the lungs.
The main routes of transmission of the virus are direct contact and droplets produced when talking or coughing, but also indoor aerosols (small particles floating in the air). Outdoor aerosols and surfaces of objects appear to play only a minor role.
There is still limited scientific evidence for the effectiveness of cloth face masks in the general population, and most countries with mandatory masks couldn’t contain or slow the epidemic. Some experts warn that face masks may interfere with normal breathing and may become “germ carriers” if used repeatedly.
Many clinics in Europe and the US remained largely underutilized during lockdowns and in some cases had to send staff home. Millions of surgeries and therapies were cancelled, including many cancer screenings and organ transplants.
At no time was there a medical reason for the closure of elementary schools, as the risk of disease and transmission in children is extremely low. There is also no medical reason for small classes, masks or ‘social distancing’ rules in elementary schools.
A global respiratory disease pandemic can indeed extend over several seasons, but many studies of a “second wave” are based on very unrealistic assumptions, such as a constant risk of illness and death across all age groups.
US nurses described an oftentimes fatalmedical mismanagement of Covid patients due to questionable financial incentives and inappropriate medical protocols. However, in many places Covid lethality has dropped significantly due to better treatment options.
The number of people suffering from unemployment, depression and domestic violence as a result of the measures has reached historic record levels. Several experts predict that the measures will claim far more lives than the virus itself. According to the UN 1.6 billion people around the world are at immediate risk of losing their livelihood.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden warned that the “corona crisis” may be used for the permanent expansion of global surveillance. In several parts of the world, the population is being monitored by drones and facing serious police overreach during lockdowns.
A 2019 WHO study on measures against pandemic influenza found that from a medical perspective, “contact tracing” is “not recommended in any circumstances”. Nevertheless, contact tracing apps have already become partially mandatory in several countries.
The origin of the new coronavirus remains unknown, but the best evidence currently points to a Covid-like 2012 pneumonia incident in a Chinese mine, whose viral samples were collected, stored and researched by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
‘A republic, if you can keep it.” Benjamin Franklin’s 1787 quip about the government Americans would have is probably the most popular Founding-era wisdom still with us. Maybe not for long. As if to prove Franklin’s insight about the tendency of republics to self-destruct, a District of Columbia panel has identified Franklin, among other Founders, as a “person of concern,” and recommended his name be removed from D.C. property.
The astonishing proposals come from a Washington, D.C., government committee formed by Mayor Muriel Bowser to re-examine the names of schools, statues and parks in the wake of protests. The committee submitted its report Monday, and Ms. Bowser tweeted “I look forward to reviewing and advancing their recommendations.”
The committee says it hunted for historical figures with “key disqualifying histories, including participation in slavery, systemic racism, mistreatment of, or actions that suppressed equality for, persons of color, women and LGBTQ communities and violation of the DC Human Right Act.” The bureaucrats worked with uncharacteristic dispatch, taking six weeks to render the judgment of history on 1,330 properties named for people.
The committee doesn’t explain its case against Franklin, but we can assume he was judged for once owning slaves. He was later president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, but anyone who believes the report is a considered historical exercise and not an Orwellian effort in ideological reprogramming has been taken in…
