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Liberal drug laws and government-funded interventions to make drug use safer normalize drug use and fuel the drug crisis.
Last year, 112,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, and American taxpayers are funding the crisis. Millions of dollars in Biden’s $1.9 Trillion pandemic Relief Bill went towards funding so-called “harm reduction” programs, which help people use drugs more safely but do not encourage them to stop using. This year, Biden-Harris allocated $39.4 million toward the President’s Unity Agenda, which includes harm reduction programs.
Meanwhile, a congressional committee discovered that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been subsidizing the companies that provide the precursor chemicals to Mexican drug cartels, who manufacture fentanyl, methamphetamine, and other drugs, which they smuggle through the Southern border. So, American taxpayers are not only funding the drug crisis but also funding China.
A backlash among liberals against the “war on drugs,” which they consider a racist failure, has caused a number of jurisdictions to take the opposite approach, liberalizing or decriminalizing drug use. Some have intentionally increased access to alcohol by allowing to-go sales and lowering taxes. Tax revenue has been one of the arguments Democrats use when trying to convince Republicans to legalize and tax marijuana, which is now legal in at least 37 states. But now, even those taxes are being removed because they were preventing some people from obtaining drugs.
Rather than trying to convince people that sobriety is the better way, liberal drug and alcohol programs have shifted their focus toward “harm reduction,” which seeks to mitigate the public health risks of drug use without stigmatizing users or requiring them to stop. By definition, removing the stigma means normalizing. It also nullifies the deterrent effect for first-time users who will believe that they can use drugs and still be a productive member of society, despite the evidence to the contrary.
As part of harm reduction, there has been increased funding for the distribution of Narcan and other overdose reversal medications, as well as programs that provide sterile drug paraphernalia and teach people how to use drugs safely “without requiring them to stop or reduce their use.”
Narcan is now available without a prescription, and last year, approximately 22 million doses were distributed in the US and Canada, at taxpayer expense. Narcan and other interventions only decrease the number of deaths, not the number of overdoses, which is many times higher.
Overdosing has been made “safer” by these drugs. They do not resolve the drug crisis. Even worse, by decreasing the number of deaths, the interventions allow the problem to disappear from the front page. Deaths remain on people’s minds; addiction doesn’t. Removing the lethality also removes the deterrent for young people.
The Democrats are disinterested in stopping drug use, so by legalizing drugs, they can claim to have reduced crime. In many American cities, irrespective of the law, progressive prosecutors refuse to prosecute what they consider low-level drug crimes.
A good example is the state of Oregon, which voted in 2020 to liberalize drug laws, decriminalizing possession of small amounts of even hard drugs. The measures were passed by the Democrat-led legislature, and the police stopped arresting offenders. Instead, officers gave users a ticket and a slip of paper with a phone number they could call to get into a treatment program. Records show that Portland police handed out 7,000 of these slips, but only a few hundred users ever made the call.
Marijuana was already legal in Oregon, so tax money from marijuana was put towards treatment programs. Three years later, the drug crisis in Oregon was worse.
Advocates for liberal drug policies argue, “the criminal justice system didn’t effectively treat addiction.” They also said it disproportionately harmed people of color. By ceasing drug arrests, they hoped to be able to decrease the racial disparity among prisoners. Decriminalization also brought down the crime rate by no longer counting drug offenses. However, other forms of crime increased, perpetrated by people trying to get money for drugs.
Before decriminalization, Portland’s violent crime rate was below the national average. By 2022, Portland saw a record number of homicides. This dropped off a bit in 2023, and there were claims that other crimes dropped as well, but traffic fatalities increased to record levels, while shoplifting arrests increased by 88%. Portland’s property crime rate is higher than the national average and rose steadily until 2023, when it came down slightly. But it is still higher than pre-drug legalization. And most predictably, from 2019 to 2022, the rate of opioid deaths increased by 241%.
While many sources claim that overall crime rates have dropped in cities that legalized drugs, the statistic is misleading. This is evidenced not only by Oregon, but also by other municipalities that decriminalized drugs or liberalized enforcement and have seen an increase in drug use, overdoses, and certain kinds of crime. This has been true in Seattle, where the claim was that overall crime was down, but there was an increase in homicides and auto thefts.
San Francisco has seen an increase in drug-related crimes, as well as the prevalence of dealers and violence. Crime is up in New York, where the liberal governor wants to deploy the National Guard to keep order in the subways. Philadelphia is now known as the capital of the Xylazine zombie drug crisis, and Los Angeles is a fentanyl hub, experiencing rampant shoplifting, theft, and an increase in property crime.
One way that the statistics are being misrepresented is that many of these cities are claiming a decrease in violent crime in 2023, and this may be true, but only because 2022 experienced a severe spike in crime. This may have been the final effects of lockdowns and COVID restrictions which, in some cases, were not completely eliminated until the middle or end of the year. However, in most cases, the 2023 numbers are not lower than 2020 or pre-drug-liberalization figures.
No matter how they try to spin it, drug usage and deaths are up. In 2020, 27 million Americans reported being drug users, including marijuana, opioids, or amphetamines. Last year, the number climbed to 37.3 million. About 10% of Americans now have problems with alcohol abuse, and 6% are drug addicts. Most heartbreaking, nationwide, 22 teens are dying each week of drug overdoses.
The post Narcan and Liberal Drug Policies Worsening Drug Crisis appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.
When he won reelection in a landslide, liberal media outlets ran headlines stating that democracy had ended in El Salvador and that the country had become a one-party state. However, El Salvador is not Cuba.
Bukele did not eradicate opposition parties, nor did he imprison them or seize control of the press. Instead, he delivered on his promises. He made the country safe by locking up criminals.
President Bukele claimed that his country went 365 days without a murder. And while the exact number has been called into question, it is an indisputable fact that the country now has the lowest murder rate it has seen in 30 years, plummeting by 70%, and now stands at only 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023, making it the second lowest in the Americas, just behind Canada.
In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.
Out of gratitude for restoring peace in the country, voters reelected him with 85% of the vote. Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.
But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.
They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.
In the U.S., it is not a crime to be affiliated with an organization, even a criminal one. To secure a conviction, there would need to be proof that the person committed a specific crime.
However, that system, while acceptable for a high-trust society, was being exploited in El Salvador, where repeat offenders and murderers were being set free by crooked judges and jailers.
So, Bukele decided to let logic prevail, arrest the gang members, and put them in prison. He was more concerned about the rights of street vendors, business owners, school children, working people, and ordinary citizens than he was about the rights of violent criminals.
The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.
According to reported data from human rights groups, since 2022, there have been 78,000 arbitrary detentions. This is likely because they consider nearly all of the arrests to be arbitrary detentions.
The rights groups are also upset that “approximately 102,000 people are now deprived of their freedom in the country,” disregarding the fact that these people are criminals.
Additionally, they are upset that the prisons are overcrowded by 148%, which is absolutely true. The prisons are not pleasant, and a sane person would avoid going there by not committing crimes.
They also lost sleep over 235 deaths in state custody. There is no mention of how many of these deaths represented prisoners being killed by other prisoners, nor have they stopped to consider that five times that number of innocent people would have died during the same time period if these gang members were not in prison.
Rights groups have claimed that Bukele’s New Ideas party winning 58 of 60 seats in the country’s legislature has turned the country into a one-party state, with a “dangerous” concentration of power.
They are missing the point that the country had a fair election and the people were free to vote for the horrible system they had before, or law and order, which is now making their lives livable again. And they chose the latter.
According to Gabriela Santos, director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Central America (IDHUCA), “Bukele’s popularity underlines how some Central American countries have struggled to launch sustainable democratic models.”
Again, there appears to be no flaw in El Salvador’s democracy. The critics just do not like the way the vote turned out. Santos went on to say that countries never recovered their democratic principles “in the aftermath of civil conflicts between left-wing guerrillas and U.S.-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes.”
There is no indication that the people voting for Bukele had any connection to the US or to right-wing regimes.
Liberals are claiming that there is a frightening move toward fascism in Latin America because 2 of 32 countries now have a president who is not a socialist. The other bright spot is President Javier Milei in Argentina, whom the liberals also hate.
He is cutting the government down to size, waging a war on debt and waste. He told school children that abortion is murder. He is pro-gun and is considering deploying the military to take on the gangs.
The shocking lesson we can all learn from El Salvador is that if you arrest all of the bad guys and keep them in jail, and if those who remain free are made to believe that crime has consequences and jails are horrible places, the streets become safer, and people can live their lives.
The other takeaway here is that if a president is tough on crime and wants to cut government spending and improve the lives of citizens, the liberals attack him.
It is also incredibly condescending that liberals in Europe or the US or elsewhere believe that 85% of Salvadorians do not know what is best for their country and voted for the wrong person.
The post 365 Days Without a Murder: Why Liberals Hate El Salvador’s President appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau testified before a probe into foreign election interference on Wednesday that China’s meddling in the past two elections did not change the outcomes.
The post Trudeau Insists China Meddling in His Party’s Favor Had Little Impact on Canadian Elections appeared first on Breitbart.
A Canadian intelligence commission concludes China “clandestinely and deceptively interfered" in both the 2019 and 2021 elections.
The post Canadian Intelligence Commission Finds China Interfered in Last Two Elections appeared first on Breitbart.
It was Scott who first referred to the sacramental view of abortion, some years ago now. Abortion (much like slavery over the course of the 19th century) went from being a regrettable but sometimes unavoidable evil to being a positive good–indeed, these days, the noblest good to which political life can aspire.
To see this perverse attitude in full flower, you almost have to live in Minnesota. Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, is a far-left Indian activist despite being, to all appearances, Irish-American. (To be fair, she has much more Indian heritage than, say, Elizabeth Warren.) Flanagan actually tweeted this:
I filled out my brackets based on whether those schools are located in a state that protects access to abortion care.
By this measurement, it’s only fair that Minnesota didn’t make the tournament because they’d have been a favorite for the title. pic.twitter.com/nFQ5FKwFHG
— Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan (@LtGovFlanagan) March 21, 2024
So she had UConn facing Gonzaga in the final. Who wants to be the first to tell her?
One more thing–Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, liked Flanagan’s bracket tweet.
Black college athletes do, according to the NAACP. The NAACP is urging black athletes not to go to college in Florida:
The NAACP asked Black student-athletes to reconsider their decisions to attend public colleges and universities in the state of Florida, in response to the University of Florida and other state schools recently eliminating their diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In a letter sent to NCAA president Charlie Baker and addressed to current and prospective student-athletes Monday, NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson wrote, “This is not about politics. It’s about the protection of our community, the progression of our culture, and most of all, it’s about your education, and your future.”
The idea that black athletes at major sports schools like Florida and Florida State need DEI departments to…what? Prevent them from being discriminated against? The idea is laughable, as is the NCAAP’s apparent suggestion that DEI bureaucrats are somehow helpful to a student’s education.
My guess is that not a single black athlete who otherwise wants to play for Florida, Florida State or any other public Florida college will be deterred by the NCAAP’s advice. What this episode really shows is how useless the once-relevant NCAAP has become. And also, how Florida has taken the lead in adopting common-sense policies that have put the state in the Left’s cross-hairs.
Joe Biden can’t get far enough left to satisfy his base. In last night’s SOTU, he referred to Jose Ibarra, the career criminal who *allegedly* beat Laken Riley to death, as an illegal immigrant. Which is exactly what he is, although the correct legal term is “illegal alien.” Bizarrely, liberals were outraged, not that Biden referred to Ibarra as a murderer, but that he called him an illegal immigrant. This roundup is from Alpha News:
Democrats in Minnesota and across the country are infuriated that President Joe Biden referred to a criminal, illegal alien as an “illegal” during the president’s State of the Union address on Thursday. Specifically, President Biden was referring to the illegal immigrant who has been charged with murder in the killing of Laken Riley.
***
In response, left-wing Democrats have expressed outrage that President Biden referred to this criminal, illegal alien as an “illegal.” Just after President Biden’s speech concluded, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota put out a social media post on X saying, “Let me be clear: No human being is illegal.”This message was parroted by Democrats all over the country. In Minnesota, state Rep. Maria Isa Perez-Vega, D-St. Paul, re-posted Congresswoman Omar’s message. Jason Chavez, a member of the Minneapolis City Council, also put out a statement saying, “No human is illegal.”
A myriad of other Democrats, including Congresswomen Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, and Delia Ramirez, put out social media posts with the exact same message. Last night, Nancy Pelosi went on CNN and said President Biden should have used the word “undocumented” when referring to the illegal alien.
Congressman Chuy Garcia, D-Illinois, put out a statement saying, “As a proud immigrant, I’m extremely disappointed to hear President Biden use the world ‘illegal.’”
Breaking the law is illegal. Is that really so hard to understand? And, oh–by the way–murder is illegal, too. Although liberals seem to care a lot less about a young woman who was beaten to death than they do about policing their wacko speech code. But I suppose there is nothing surprising about that.
Last week I observed in “Liberal Fragility” how liberal law professors supposedly break down in tears they are so depressed that the Supreme Court has taken a turn away from the palmy days of their beloved Warren Court (which, recall, Barack Obama once said did not go far enough in the direction of true “equality”). Just imagine how much Xanax is being ingested after yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that leaves Trump on the ballot.
I expected something like this from Keith Olbermann:
Dissolve the Court! Remind me again who is the threat to democracy and trasher of “democratic norms”? Almost makes you long for the good old days of court-packing.
But I hadn’t expected that a supposed conservative could be equally idiotic, but then the side-effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome, for which there is no vaccine, appear to be even worse that I thought:
Pope Francis says that all nations have a moral duty to disarm:
Pope Francis said Sunday that military disarmament is not optional but constitutes a “moral obligation” for all nations.
***
“How many resources are wasted on military expenditure, which, because of the current situation, sadly continues to increase!” he told the estimated 20,000 tourists and pilgrims gathered in the square.
Actually, I think it is a fact that a smaller proportion of resources is going to military spending, in almost all countries, than at any time in history.
He went on to express his hope that “the international community will understand that disarmament is first and foremost a duty, and that disarmament is a moral obligation.”
“Let’s get this into our heads,” he added. “And this requires the courage of all members of the great family of nations to move from a balance of fear to a balance of trust.”
But some leaders, and some nations, can’t be, and shouldn’t be, trusted. Francis’s foolish advice is reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most overrated men ever, who urged Jews not to resist the Nazis. Wouldn’t want to dirty your hands with weapons. Back to Francis:
In the past, the pope has suggested that if people are really serious about world peace, the solution is to “ban all weapons.”
This is gun control writ large: blame the inanimate weapon, which can be used either for good or for ill, rather than the evil regime of Hamas, Putin, or the Chinese Communist Party.
For decades, the Catholic church has criticized the arms race and consequent build-up of nuclear arsenals, but Francis is the pope to call for the banning of all weapons. If he were to be taken at his word, this would imply outlawing everything from rifles to hand grenades to the halberds carried by the Pontifical Swiss Guards in the Vatican.
Good point! People used to go to war with spears and swords, tools which were sufficient to kill vast numbers.
The existence of weapons leads humanity to live “in fear of war,” the pope declared, and the only way to remove this fear is to eliminate all weapons.
People live in fear of war for excellent reasons. They lived in fear of war two thousand year ago, too, when weapons were much more primitive. The way to remove fear of war is to be more powerful than one’s potential adversaries.
I suppose Francis’s defenders would say that his call to disarm is aspirational, and that he doesn’t really want countries like the United States and Italy to turn their swords into ploughshares tomorrow. But when you tell people they have a moral duty to do something that it would be stupid and even fatal for them to do, you forfeit any claim to moral leadership.
Francis is a fool. Happily, there is no chance that anyone will listen to his bad advice.
There was a time when, if you said that liberals suffer from Communism envy, they would deny it. Is that still true? Perhaps not, as to the Squad, two members of which were among a delegation that made a more or less secret trip to Cuba:
A delegation of the U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus traveled to Cuba last week in a trip that has not previously been disclosed by the legislators nor reported in Cuban state media.
The group of about a dozen people was led by Democratic U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal of the state of Washington and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. It included a congressional staffer from the office of California Rep. Barbara Lee’s office, sources with knowledge of the trip told the Miami Herald.
Jayapal and Omar, members of the informal left-wing group of lawmakers known as “the squad,” did not reply to emails and messages seeking comment. Lee’s office also did not reply to a request for comment.
After the Herald published this story, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, comprising more than 100 lawmakers and chaired by Jayapal, confirmed the trip.
Odd. No press releases, no Cuban state media trumpeting the support it is getting from American liberals. So what was up with the visit?
“Representatives Jayapal and Omar traveled to Cuba last week, where they met with people from across Cuban civil society and government officials to discuss human rights and the U.S.-Cuba bilateral relationship,” said a Caucus spokesperson.
Oh. Okay. But the Squad is not in favor of human rights, so it would be interesting to know what the discussion was about:
Jayapal and Omar have been vocal critics of the U.S. embargo against Cuba and have supported bills to normalize relations with the island’s communist government. They were among the 40 Democrats who voted against a symbolic resolution supporting peaceful demonstrators who protested against the Cuban government in July 2021 and “calling for the immediate release of arbitrarily detained Cuban citizens.”
Well, they don’t want arbitrarily detained American citizens released either, so I guess that is consistent. All in all, the story is a valuable reminder that, while the rest of the world has given up on Communism, it still has a certain cachet with American liberals.
The Great Sort is under way, as normal people move to red states and liberals move to blue states. (That last is hypothetical and hasn’t actually been observed.) When massive numbers began leaving blue states like California and New York for red states like Texas and Florida, many conservatives worried that those blue staters might bring their bad voting habits with them. Happily, that doesn’t seem to have happened.
This Wall Street Journal story is headlined: “Blue-State Residents Streamed Into South Carolina. Here’s Why It Stayed Ruby Red.” But it deals with more than one state:
A Wall Street Journal analysis of census data found that a third of [South Carolina’s] new residents between 2017 and 2021 hailed from blue states and a quarter from red ones, according to census data. …
Yet the new arrivals are disproportionately Republican. Estimates from the nonpartisan voter file vendor L2 suggest about 57% of voters who moved to South Carolina during that time are Republicans, while about 36% are Democrats and 7% are independents. That places them roughly in line with recent statewide votes in South Carolina.
It shouldn’t be surprising that when conservatives leave liberal states, they likely will move to conservative ones. The same thing is happening in states other than South Carolina:
The Palmetto State is a prime example of why a yearslong wave of migration to the South has largely failed to change its partisan tint. Many people who leave blue states are Republicans gravitating toward a more politically favorable new home.
In Florida, for instance, 48% of people who moved there between 2017 and 2021 came from blue states while 29% came from red states, Census figures show. Among those who registered to vote, 44% are Republicans, 25% are Democrats and 28% are nonpartisan, according to L2 data. Texas also has a heavier flow of newcomers from blue states but a greater share who L2 data estimates are Republican.
There is much more at the link; it is fun to see Democrats try to spin the numbers:
McDougald Scott and other South Carolina Democratic officials are working to target these new voters and persuade them to vote Democratic by focusing on issues like education…
I live in a blue state (for the time being, anyway) where the public schools are almost unbelievably bad. To be fair, though, the schools in New York and California are likely worse.
…infrastructure…
Have these people never driven on a highway in California?
and healthcare…
What about healthcare? Most people get health insurance through their jobs, and jobs are much more plentiful in red states. Blue states spend incomprehensible amounts of money on Medicaid, but that isn’t exactly a magnet for desirable new inhabitants.
…which she believes the Republicans are neglecting.
Apparently millions of Americans who are moving from blue to red states do not agree. Perhaps this is what it comes down to:
She said South Carolina’s limited access to abortion—which is banned at six weeks of pregnancy—is also something that crosses party lines.
Right. Hey, blue state economies may suck, crime may be rampant, taxes may be too high, government may be corrupt–but if the occasion arises, you can always kill your baby. This is the sales pitch my state’s liberal government is actually trying to implement: come here to get an abortion or a sex change operation, especially if you are a kid! Somehow, it doesn’t seem to be working.
The bottom line is that the Great Sort continues to benefit Red America. The question is, to what extent is the out-migration of normals locking liberalism into the blue states?
I wrote here about the Left’s current bugbear, “Christian nationalism.” Despite being a Christian and a nationalist, I have no idea what that phrase means, and have never met anyone who describes himself in those terms.
On MSNBC, a Politico reporter explained the meaning of “Christian nationalism.” You have to hear it to believe it:
Oh, my. 'They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…' https://t.co/R4L8HzKriJ
— Byron York (@ByronYork) February 23, 2024
These liberals are living in a state of utter ignorance. They literally know nothing. What I can’t figure out is, how can we be losing to people who are so unutterably stupid?
Vaunce News 