According to Merriam-Webster, a dragnet is a network of measures for the apprehension of criminals.  Of course, those of us over a certain age associate the word “dragnet” with the old TV show, and later the movie, Dragnet.  On the TV show, Jack Webb, as Sergeant Joe Friday, doggedly pursued his quarry, and told witnesses, “Just the facts, ma’am.”  The point is that Sergeant Friday was pursuing real criminals.  Former President Trump has been the focus of a dragnet, not just from Friday, but 24/7, 365, ever since he came down that escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015.  Trump has been insulted, disrespected, and defamed by a Leftist media that, at first made light of him, then feared him, then grew to hate him.  They’ve committed and are committing journalistic malpractice, and they should know better.  Worse, Trump has been pursued relentlessly by our so-called law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which have treated him, from day one, as a criminal target, rather than as a presidential candidate or a President of the United States.  This is an outrage because these bastards do know better.  And it’s doubly outrageous given the fact that all elected officials other than Donald Trump, get cut considerable slack from the justice system when they do things like, make fortunes from insider trading (nearly the entire Congress); make fortunes by trading with enemies like China (Pelosi, Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, McConnell, Swalwell, and a cast of hundreds); send pallets of cash to Iran, guns into Mexico that get people killed, and openly promise the Russians to go easy on them after reelection (Obama); ignore subpoenas, destroy evidence, take money from foreign nations, and buy phony evidence from the Russians to affect an election (Hillary); or blatantly run a crime family for 50 years, skimming money worldwide (you know who).  They do all those things and nobody cares.  Donald Trump has done none of those things, and he’s public enemy number one.  Why?  The establishment crooks run the system, and Trump was the outsider who threatened their phony-baloney jobs and vast illicit incomes.  Sergeant Friday might begin a show by saying, “We were working fraud, out of the Bunko Division.”  A bunko artist swindles his victims by gaining their confidence.  Politicians from both Parties are bunko artists, running our government as a swindle.  Trump proved he could outperform the fraudsters.  He showed them up, so he had to go.  A number of jurisdictions are trying to indict Trump.  Biden, Obama, and Hillary took classified documents – no problem.  Trump is a criminal.  Democrats burned down the country in 2020 – mostly peaceful.  Protest on 1/6/21 – insurrection.  Hillary says the 2016 election was stolen – righteous complaint.  Trump legally challenges the 2020 elections – a crime.  But this week, the worst offender, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, moved into the spotlight.  New York has been openly out to get Trump.  Attorney General James got elected on a promise to indict Trump.  Ditto Alvin Bragg, and his “case” is ludicrous.  Bragg has resuscitated the Stormy Daniels fiasco.  In true Sergeant Friday fashion, here are “just the facts.”  This sordid tale goes back to 2006, when porn star Stormy Daniels tells 60 Minutes she had sex with Donald Trump, who was then a TV personality, not a politician.  Trump denied it.  In 2011, Daniels repeats her claim to a magazine in return for $15,000.  Trump attorney Michael Cohen threatens to sue her.  In October 2016, Daniels is trying to sell her story to The National Enquirer.  Trump is now running for President.  Cohen negotiates a $130,000 non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to keep Daniels from retelling her story in public.  Cohen pays her the money, and is reimbursed by the Trump Company for the $130,000, plus $290,000 legal fees.  In 2018, Trump denies a newspaper report about an affair with Daniels.  She hires Michael Avenatti, and he sues Trump to cancel the NDA, permitting her to sell her story for even more money.  Anyone remember the Bill Clinton campaign’s “Bimbo Eruption” squad?  It dismissed claims by Paula Jones by suggesting “that’s what happens when you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park.”  No Democrat criticized that.  May 2018 – Trump says Cohen was on a retainer for legal work, was not connected to the campaign, and no campaign money went to Daniels.  In August 2018, Cohen pleads guilty, and goes to prison, for tax evasion, lying to a bank and a supposed election law violation relating to the 2016 $130,000 payment, which supposedly was made “to affect an election.”  Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit fails.  She’s ordered to pay Trump $293,000 for legal fees, and her lawyer, Avenatti, later goes to prison for being a liar and a thief.  Federal Election Commission (FEC) members later say there was no election law violation by Trump, because the payment was one which would have been made regardless of the election.  This was investigated by federal prosecutors, who concluded there was no case.  It was investigated again by former Manhattan D.A. Vance, who did not charge a crime.  Trump-hating prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, who has compared Trump to John Gotti, was brought into Manhattan because “he tended to lean into creative theorizing and novel ideas about potential articles of indictment.” [Translation – create a crime where no crime exists, ala KGB Chief Lavrenty Beria, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”]  When no indictment was brought by Bragg, Pomerantz quit.  Bragg then announced, “the investigation is continuing.”  Bragg is said to be looking into whether the Trump Organization falsified business records of reimbursement payments to Cohen.  Bragg’s star witness?  Convicted felon and liar Michael Cohen.  That’s right, a 5 year investigation to concoct a case involving a bimbo and a liar, or is it lawyer?  Cohen’s former lawyer has told the grand jury that Michael Cohen has lied to them, because the testimony he described in public conflicts with his previous statements.  And it gets worse.  Bragg’s case is based on a NY law that’s usually not an indictable crime, and the statute of limitations has run on it.  It’s a felony only where it’s done with the intent to commit, aid in, or conceal another crime.  What crime?  The election law violation, that the FEC says isn’t a crime.  Oh, and by the way, the 5 year statute of limitations has run on the felony too.  The $130k was paid in October 2016, and even if you count the 5 years from the last payment by Trump to Cohen, that was the end of 2017.  Unless Alvin Bragg has something else in mind, this stinks.  A Texan might say, this is a dog that won’t hunt.  As this is written, two scheduled grand jury hearings have been mysteriously cancelled.  Stay tuned.

What never ceases to amaze me are the lengths to which Leftists will go to push their perverted ideologies.  We’re all well acquainted with Leftist efforts to alter reality.  In 2020, the FBI embedded agents in the social media companies and directed them as to what should be remain posted, and what should be removed and suppressed.  Their object was to affect the outcome of the election.  They succeeded.   In 2021, Biden tried to install Nina Jankowitz, a/k/a Scary Poppins, as the head of a Homeland Security Disinformation Governance Board, charged with deciding what was true and what was to be banned as “misinformation.”  In 2023 things haven’t improved.  In the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failures Democrat Senator Mark Kelly asked representatives from the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC) if they had a way to censor information on social media to prevent a run on the banks.  Typical Leftist response.  No matter how dark it gets, keep pulling down the shades.  It’s too bad FDR didn’t have the internet, the entire Great Depression could have been avoided.  Trying to alter reality is bad enough.  But not satisfied with that, the Left is now rewriting fiction.  They don’t want to burn the books, mind you, just rewrite them.  Recall they tried this with poor Dr. Seuss.  See, FOF 3/12/21, How the Left Stole Childhood.
They tried to change or cancel Seuss’ message that all kids possess the ability to achieve, to avoid what they imagined as racist content, content which only a psychotic Leftist could detect, and which conflicted with the Left’s message of victimhood and dependence.  Due to their brain damage, Leftists have developed the belief that they alone can determine, not only what’s good and what’s bad, but also what’s true and what’s false.  They tried their crap with the  Harry Potter books, but luckily J.K. Rowling has enough money to tell them to go pound sand.  And now they’re coming for British author Roald Dahl, who of course is dead, and can’t defend his work.  Dahl wrote such books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox.  All are prized children’s books and popular movies.  But now, the books are being edited “to remove words that could be deemed offensive to some readers.”  This is being done at the behest of an organization named Inclusive Minds, that works for inclusivity in children’s books.  Can someone please explain to me why all written or spoken material must be inclusive?  If any and all statements must be engineered to give no offense to anyone, including lunatics who go through life offended by everything, we will become a race of illiterate mutes.  We’re well on our way to that now.  Decades ago, the Supreme Court provided the remedy for words that offend the reader, “avert your eyes.”  It’s a simple solution.  We’re not protecting children by attempting to shield them from anything that might give offense.  The world is not a perfectly hospitable place you might have noticed, and sooner or later these kids are going to have to decide for themselves what’s good or bad.  Free speech is guaranteed, and there’s no requirement that it be approved of, or of comfort to the hearer.  Plus, am I the only one who finds it odd that the people who seek to censor literature in the name of child protection are the same people who won’t lift a finger to stop kids from being gunned down in our cities, who find no problem with bombarding kids with rap music lyrics that rhyme every line with “Glock” or “Bitch,” and who promote drag shows and gender reassignment surgery for 5 year olds?  In any event, the Roald Dahl books are being “edited” in order to appease the Woke imbeciles.  Among the hundreds of changes, language not written by Dahl has been added.  In Dahl’s 1983 book The Witches, he writes that witches are bald beneath their wigs.  A newly added line says, “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”  We wouldn’t want to upset the witches, and have the entire cast of The View after us.  Now that I think of it, my first grade teacher, Miss Kirsten, was bald.  Then again, she may have been a witch.  The character Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is no longer called “fat.” Instead he’s described as “enormous,” as though that’s somehow more “inclusive.”   Face the facts.  Augustus was a fat bastard, and I can say that because I’m a fat bastard myself.  Instead of being called “small men,” the candy-making Oompa-Loompas are now “small people.”  I’m surprised they’re not being removed entirely for having the same complexion as Donald Trump.  The morals of the Chocolate Factory story, and indeed of all the Dahl stories, lay in exposing the Bible’s seven deadly sins, including gluttony, wrath, envy and greed.  That’s probably why they’re under attack.  Traditional morality has no place in Woke Wasteland.  And this nonsense goes far beyond just children’s books.  Movies and movie characters are being wokified, or is it inclusified?  James Bond books are in the process of being rewritten to remove Bond’s nasty habit of rampant heterosexuality.  What we need is a kinder gentler Bond.  Maybe even a gay or transgender Bond.  Agent 00-Wierdo steps up to the bar and orders, “A kale smoothie.  Shaken, not stirred.”  I can see the rewritten script for Goldfinger.  “Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?”  “No, [Mr., Ms., He, Him, She, Her, They] Bond, I expect you to twerk.”  And the name of  the female lead will be changed from Pussy Galore to Androgyny Galore.  That’ll be popular.  If the Roald Dahl edits are the new normal, then I guess movies should avoid use of the word “Man.”  From now on, the word “Man” may be used in a movie title only when the man depicted is George Floyd.  Otherwise, “Man” is out.  The Man Who Knew Too Much will be The Man Who Forgot Everything – Joe Biden.  The Music Man will be The Rapper.  And while we’re at it, let’s mandate that all music in movies, television shows, and commercials must be rap.  We’re pretty much there already.  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence will now be The Savages Who Shot Everybody in Chicago.  And why stop at “Man?”  How about Sex and the Single Girl?  I guess it will have to be Sex and the Non-Binary Birthing Person.  If all this sounds ridiculous, it’s because all attempts to rewrite history, to turn truth into lies, and to pervert artistic expression to bow to Woke idiocy are ridiculous insults to our constitutional rights.

After subjecting the country to nearly two years of Star Chamber proceedings known as the January 6th Committee, Democrats, some Republicans, and the lapdog media are apoplectic over the decision of House Speaker McCarthy to give the full set of Capitol surveillance video to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.  Congressional hearings are supposed to be conducted for the purpose of uncovering the truth.  The January 6th Committee charade was anything but that.  The results of the hearings were decided before the first hearing was held.  “We told you Trump was bad and dangerous, and here’s the proof.”  Repeat after us, “January 6th was the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”  To publicize these predetermined findings, the Committee (a/k/a the Democrats) took carefully tailored testimony only from those witnesses whose stories they approved of, and aired carefully selected video clips from some 41,000 hours of surveillance video.  Now, before I get into this, let me say, as I’ve said before, what happened on January 6th was shameful, in that what should have been a perfectly legitimate protest went out of control.  More than 1,000 people have been hunted down and charged with crimes.  Many of the criminal charges were appropriate.  Anybody who broke down barriers and broke into the Capitol needed to be arrested and prosecuted.  Anybody who put his hands on a police officer or did violence needed to be jailed.  Violators should have been taken promptly to court, fined, and sent on their way.  Simply put, there was no insurrection.  Yet more than two years after the fact, prisoners remain in pretrial lockup in the D.C. jail.  In short, the January 6th Committee performance was a farce, because it highlighted only the reaction of the crowd, ignored the events that motivated that crowd to be on Capitol Hill that day, and covered up the incompetence that permitted the protest to get out of control.  What culminated in the January 6th protest resulted from the three concepts at the heart of the law of official misconduct: misfeasance, nonfeasance, and malfeasance.  An official commits misfeasance when he does or permits others to do things they are not supposed to do.  Examples would be illegally changing election laws without the action of the State legislature, which is unconstitutional, and stuffing, or permitting allies to stuff remote ballot boxes with spurious paper ballots in the dead of night.  These actions might well tend to convince people that the election process was corrupt and motivate them to protest that corruption.  And so it did.  It was well known to dozens of law enforcement agencies that massive protests would occur on January 6th.  Not rebellion or insurrection – protests.  And here is where nonfeasance occurred.  Although forewarned of the protests, although President Trump repeatedly offered 10,000 military troops to bolster security, and although the head of the Capitol Police begged for help, Nancy Pelosi rejected the offers.  This resulted in the Capitol Police being woefully understaffed on January 6th.  This could have and should have been prevented, witness the iron-clad security measures put in place for the Biden inauguration.  The Democrats’ failure to act doesn’t excuse the excesses of January 6th protestors, but it explains how the situation went out of control.  The Committee permitted no mention of this official negligence.  It conflicted with their preordained conclusions.  Malfeasance occurs when an official acts with malicious or evil intent.  An example would be smearing others to cover up one’s own illegal acts or omissions.  Many people had good reason to question the conduct of and the result of the 2020 election.  No, this doesn’t mean that I think it was stolen or that it could be proven to be stolen.  Elections are notoriously difficult to overturn in court, and they should be.  However, representatives of any Party have an absolute right to challenge an election in court, or in Congress.  We have a long history of such challenges.  For instance, Lyndon Johnson lost a 1941 Senatorial election in Texas when his opponent belatedly “found” enough ballots to win.  Sound familiar?  Running for the Senate in 1948, LBJ was prepared.  He delayed reporting the vote from Duval County till he was ahead by 87 votes out of nearly 1 million cast, earning him the name “Landslide Lyndon.”  His opponent went to court, noting that the last 249 voters in Duval County had voted in alphabetical order.  A friendly judge killed the lawsuit and the rest is history.  Democrats who like to call others “election deniers” forget they delayed the reporting of electoral votes in 2001, 2005, and 2017, claiming fraud.  Yet in 2021, all protests, or even lawsuits about the 2020 elections are labelled as seditious, insurrectionist threats to “our democracy.”  Note that democracy is at risk only when they win.  When Democrats broke windows, overturned and burned cars, and assaulted police on January 20, 2017 during the Trump inauguration, that wasn’t “an attack on democracy.”  In 2020, when Democrats burned cities, assaulted more than 1,000 cops, killed dozens of people, ruined businesses, caused billions in damage, and took over police stations and courthouses, in protest over the murder of a career criminal, that wasn’t “an assault on democracy.”  It was “a mostly peaceful protest.”  And on May 31, 2020, when rioters in Washington, D.C., attacked the White House, burned St. John’s church, the Church of the Presidents, which had stood since 1816, and forced President Trump into a security bunker, that wasn’t “an attack on democracy.”  On January 6th, the only death was the murder of unarmed Ashley Babbitt by a Capitol police officer.  He wasn’t prosecuted, or even investigated.  Democrats gave him a medal.  But a nitwit with dopey horns on his head, who dared to enter the Senate Chamber threatened our democracy.  Don’t get me wrong, he deserved to be prosecuted, but back to the videotape.  Democrats are decrying the fact that Tucker Carlson is airing video that proves the January 6th Committee was uninterested in the truth.  The video proves many people were let into the Capitol by police, and some, including the idiot with the horns, were escorted through the building by police, instead of simply being arrested on the spot.  This video was denied to the January 6th defendants who have been tried or pled guilty.  This is a blatant violation of their 6th Amendment rights, and the convictions may now be overturned.  The point is, Democrats wouldn’t be screaming about the video release if they didn’t have something to hide, and they have plenty to hide.  The January 6th mess was not an attack on our democracy.  It was a challenge to the self-important,  privileged bastards entrenched in Washington, who pretend to be the guardians of our freedom, but who, in reality, guard only their own phoney-baloney jobs, while our freedom ebbs away.  The January 6th protests dared to disturb the comfort of the fat cats.  That can’t be tolerated.  If your place of business is burned to the ground, they call it just the mostly peaceful price you have to pay for the First Amendment.  If the schedule of their place of business is merely interrupted, they call it an insurrection.  I call it all bullshit.

The title of this week’s offering comes courtesy of The New York Post.  I couldn’t think of a better one.I hate to say “I told you so,” but frequenters of these pages will recall that the notion that Covid-19, a/k/a the Wuhan virus, unleashed a plague on the world after it was released from the laboratory in Wuhan, China, has not come as a revelation.  I claim no medical expertise, nor do I claim prescience.  One didn’t need to be Nostradamus to know where the virus came from.  One merely had to be honest enough to accept the truth that was staring him in the face.  In the Fall of 2019, a new virus broke out in Wuhan.  In early 2020, at the time of the Chinese Lunar New Year, the virus spread from China to every part of the globe visited by Chinese travelers.  For example, after the New Year celebrations, the thousands of Chinese engaged in the fashion industry in Northern Italy returned to that country.  Lunar New Year was January 25, and in February, hundreds were hospitalized in Milan and the city was shut down.  I noticed this, and it wasn’t just me.  In June 2021, liberal Jon Stewart took flak for suggesting the lab was the source of the virus.  “Oh, my God, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do?  Oh, you know who we could ask?  The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab.  The disease is the same name as the lab.  That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?”  Wuhan is the site of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory used by the Chinese military for “gain of function” research to engineer new viruses.  Contrary to Dr. Fauci’s denials, the U.S. government provided some of the funding for this research.  This is neither speculation nor a conspiracy theory.  It was well known to the U.S. government throughout the period when Democrats hid the truth and tried to destroy anyone who suggested the virus came from the lab.  I came across a stunningly honest Fact Sheet from the U.S. State Department dated January 15, 2021.  You can read it yourselves at https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html.  It says that workers in the Wuhan lab contracted Covid and spread it in Wuhan, and posits that it was the result of a lab accident, noting that such accidents had happened before.  It also noted the use of the Wuhan lab by the Chinese military for “classified experiments.”  I guess it was safe for the State Department to issue the Fact Sheet in 2021, because they had managed to get rid of President Trump by then.  It must be recalled that throughout 2020, and even after the State Department report in 2021, Democrats, including those entrenched in the Deep State bureaucracy, were dismissing any suggestions of a Wuhan lab leak as “racist conspiracy theories.”  Plus, of course, whatever Trump said had to be denounced, even if it would cost American lives.  When President Trump halted flights from China to the U.S. he was called xenophobic.  Medical professionals who dared to accept reality were sanctioned.  Dr. Fauci and his allies took steps to silence and defund dissenters.  But suddenly, this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Energy and the FBI have concluded that the Wuhan virus came from the lab in Wuhan.  Better late than never, I guess.  FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed that the FBI, “for quite some time now, assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”  Wray added, “the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here … and that’s unfortunate for everybody.”  Doing harm and then covering it up is what’s known in the law as consciousness of guilt.  The fact that Fauci and his cohorts who funded the Wuhan research are aiding and abetting the coverup raises a legitimate question as to their complicity with the Chinese.  The recent revelations go only so far as stating the likelihood of a “lab accident.”  Hong Kong virologist Dr. Li Meng Yan went further, telling Tucker Carlson, first in September 2020, and again this week, that the Chinese government intentionally manufactured and released the COVID-19 virus, leading to nationwide shutdowns and deaths.  Dr. Li added, “Of course, it was not an accident.”  The doctor said that she has seen evidence and has spoken to a source who claims the virus was intentionally brought out of the lab and released in the community.  She added, “I don’t think the outbreak in Wuhan was intentional.  I would say it was because CCP government and the military scientists underestimated the transmissibility.” “That’s why finally it got out of control and the cost [was] a local outbreak.  However, we should know that [the] CCP government intentionally let it go all over the world to kill millions of people.”  If you think this is farfetched, think again.  The U.S. government has done the same thing here.  From the 1950’s to 1969, the Navy sprayed bacteria, including serratia mascarans over San Francisco to study the possible affects of a biological attack.  The bacteria, thought to be harmless, caused rare infections.  And the revelations just kept coming.  The British medical journal,  The Lancet, which had been participating in the medical smear campaign against doctors who doubted the effectiveness of Covid vaccines, finally has admitted that a review of 65 world-wide studies proves that natural immunity from Covid infection is at least as good as two doses of the vaccine.  Too bad we fired all those police, firemen, medical workers, and military personnel who had the Wuhan but refused the vaccines.  And there’s more.  Another review of studies on the usefulness of face masks (both cloth and N-95 masks) concluded that wearing any kind of face covering “probably makes little or no difference” in reducing the spread of respiratory illness.  The study summed up, “There is just no evidence that they make any difference.  Full stop.”  Again, I hate to say “I told you so,” but I made this very point on these pages in April 2021, in a FOF entitled, Covidiocy.  “There’s no science supporting universal masking.  Dr. Jim Meehan, a surgeon and editor of a medical journal says the premise that surgeons wearing masks proves that ‘masks must work to prevent viral transmission’ is false.”  But Bill Maher said it best, “We have to cover our faces so others can cover their asses.”  Well said.  All in all, I hope that this recent spate of honesty about the Wuhan plague continues.  It’s high time people knew the truth.

Last week we were treated to headlines about riots in a city that had chosen to defund the police.  There were rowdy crowds, blazing fires, and people vandalizing police cars.  You know, just good, clean fun.  The headlines didn’t identify the location of the rioting.  Was it Seattle, Washington?  Portland, Oregon?  No.  Surprisingly, the rioting took place in Texas.  More specifically, in that portion of the State of Texas where the Woke imbeciles are in charge.  The State’s capitol.  Austin, in Travis County.  Austin, the liberal backwater of Texas, decided to defund the local police department by taking away one-third of its budget.  Add to this a George Soros funded district attorney, who spends his time prosecuting police officers instead of criminals, and you’ve sown the seeds for the unrest we saw last week.  The riot has been variously described as a street racing incident, or a street closure incident.  In truth, it looked like open warfare.  A screaming mob threw rocks and bottles at police, attacked police cars, and shot lasers and fireworks at the police.  Several officers were injured.  Meanwhile, in a scene that resembled what might happen if all the residents of an insane asylum were released and issued smart phones, maniacs drove cars at high speed, round and round in circles, while asylum patients inside the circles shot videos of the mayhem.  Occasionally, the cars went out of control and struck one of more of the mental defectives, sending them sailing into the crowd.  At least two of the numb-sculls were set, or managed to set themselves, on fire.  What else is there to do on a Saturday night?  Take a look.

The scene brought to mind the words of a fictional Texas law enforcement officer.The street festivities blocked traffic on major roads in Austin, and spilled out onto Interstate 35.  Austin Mayor Kirk Watson called the incidents “illegal and outrageous” (you think?) and said “they will result in arrest.”  The Austin police must have given significance to the fact that the Mayor said “arrest” instead of “arrests” because, despite the fact that there were hundreds of rioters, many of whom were carrying phones containing video footage proving their guilt, Austin police arrested only two people.  The Mayor went on to say he was relieved that property damage was limited, but the real damage to life and property cannot be calculated, as 911 call volume went up dramatically, and the rioting prevented police from responding to emergencies.  The larger problem isn’t the fact that a crowd in Austin went berserk and created a dangerous spectacle, the problem is that the participants no longer think that they’re doing anything wrong, and actually believe that it’s their right to do as they please, the public be damned.  One of the rioters who was interviewed afterward said it all when he advised the Austin police to “just stay in their lane.”  Can you imagine that?  In Texas no less?  Let’s hear again from Sheriff Buford T. Justice –

And that’s the point.  If this can happen in Texas it can happen anywhere, and the combination of rioters who think it’s their right to run amok, impotent police, and prosecutors who refuse to enforce the law sets the stage for the complete breakdown of society.  I’m once again reminded of the 15th Century words of Thomas Hobbes, who described the breakdown of civil law and society as a return to “the state of nature,” resulting in a “war of every man against every man.” “In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  Hobbes could have been describing the current condition of every major city in this country.  But we don’t have to let Hobbes’ dystopia be our future.  There’s still time to put the inmates back in the asylum.  Texas Governor Abbott has been criticized for failing to step in to stop the chaos in Austin.  He has the resources.  The Austin police may be unable to take action, but Texas has the Texas Rangers, and the Texas Highway Patrol (State Police).  In truth, there are fewer than 100 Texas Rangers, but that’s enough.  A legend from the 1890’s recounts a town calling on the Rangers to put down an impending riot.  The local Sheriff met the train, and only one man got off.  The Sheriff asked, “They only sent you?”  The Ranger replied, “One riot, one Ranger.”  There are, however, nearly 3,000 State Police, and this nonsense needs to be stopped.  It won’t be easy, it won’t be pretty, and the usual Woke suspects will scream bloody murder, but screw them.  If law enforcement cowers in fear at the prospect of being criticized for merely enforcing the law, then we’re through, and get ready for Hobbes’ state of nature.  The Woke imbeciles make the mistake of believing that they represent the majority of public opinion.  They don’t.  Woke idiocy is not the mainstream, its just louder than the majority of people who simply want a peaceful, safe, and orderly environment in which to earn a living and raise their families.  We used to say, “the law’s the law.”  Lately, in a world where looters are allowed to empty retail stores without fear of arrest, we’ve clearly lost our way.  It’s time for the silent majority to stand up, speak up, and put an end to the chaos that threatens to destroy society in the name of equity, whatever the hell that means.  Permitting criminals to run amok, and the homeless to crap in the street is neither equitable nor compassionate.  And forcing the law-abiding people who are the ones funding this insanity to live in fear is an outrage.  If we wait to restore sanity, we are playing with fire.  As Thomas Hobbes also noted, “Hell is truth seen too late.”  And if any of the Woke imbeciles object to the restoration of law and order, I direct them to Sheriff Justice, who will overrule their objections very succinctly –