News from Modesto, California:

California city denies Straight Pride rally permit

A Northern California city has denied a request to hold a so-called Straight Pride rally at a park.

Modesto city officials on Friday denied an application by the National Straight Pride Coalition for an Aug. 24 event at Graceada Park.

Organizer Don Grundmann had estimated 500 people would attend. The group says it supports heterosexuality, Christianity and white contributions to Western civilization.

I want to make this clear, I am not anti-Christian or anti-White.  But the buzzwords here suggest this rally seems like the kind of thing that could attract white supremacists and the alt-right.

Opponents argued the rally would promote hatred of LGBTQ people and minorities.

Maybe.

City spokesman Thomas Reeves says the permit request was denied over safety concerns, because the group lost its liability insurance and the parks department determined the event wasn’t consistent with park use.

Oops…

See, it doesn’t matter what the message of the people rallying is, they still have a First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.

The Supreme Court decided that in 1977 in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie.

When the city stated that “the event wasn’t consistent with park use,” if lawyers for the Straight Pride group can show that the park has been used for other political rallies, especially a gay rights rally, then clearly, the city is giving out permits based on political ideology which is a First Amendment violation.

I can understand why Modesto wanted to deny this group a permit, but if this group takes them to court, this is what I see happening.  Modesto will lose, they will get a permit to rally, Modesto will have to pay damages, and the media frenzy from the trial will attract more people and make the rally even bigger.

I don’t want to support this group.  It seems like it’s going to be made up of the same kind of assholes who rallied in Charlottesville.  But they still have Constitutional rights and Modesto learning that lesson is going to be fun to watch.

It seems that pointing out graphically that other cultures are not the violence-free utopia that the US could be without guns is considered  “abuse and harassment.”

So apparently Snowflake got all traumatized by reality and called the Twitter Gestapo on my ass. I was expecting some sort of retribution because the images may violate Twitter rules about Sensitive Media. Nope, I got a 7 day ban for ” Violating our rules against abuse and harassment.” Basically I hurt her sensitive feelings with a dose of reality.

So, I’ll be taking a small vacations. If those of you who get me via Twitter are kind enough to spread the word I am incommunicado and occasional tweet the posts, J. Kb and myself will greatly appreciate it.

For those of you who don’t know who Larry Wilmore is, he was the host of The Nightly Show, which was the terrible The Daily Show spinoff that got canceled after two seasons.

He was somewhere doing the kind of something that failed comedians and D-list celebrities do to keep getting a paycheck when he decided to voice his stupid opinions on guns.

"I'm not coming for your gun motherfucker. I'm coming for your weapon of mass destruction." On #LovettorLeaveIt, @larrywilmore talks about why we need to change the language we use when talking about guns. https://t.co/y8eUNQCYha pic.twitter.com/h1pgilPmXQ

— Crooked Media (@CrookedMedia) August 11, 2019

There is a very detailed argument to be made why guns, regardless of the rate of fire, are not weapons of mass destruction.

Simply put, a gun is not an indiscriminate weapon.  It knows it may seem so to the non-gun person when somebody prays and sprays.  But guns are aimed devices, as opposed to explosives where you just assume everything within the blast radius is dead or destroyed.

But I really don’t want to dig into the minutia of that.

My concern is that he has decided that the desire to own an assault weapon (I don’t want to get into why an AR-15 is not an assault weapon, let them own the terminology, it doesn’t change the facts) is prima facie evidence that you shouldn’t be allowed to have one.

This is the anti-gun version of “Why do you want to see a warrant?  If you have nothing to hide why don’t you consent to a search?”

The Court decided long ago that refusing to consent to a search is not sufficient grounds for a search.

The desire to exercise a Right the Left disagrees with isn’t grounds for removal of that right.

We’ve seen this already where the Left has pushed the idea that the only people interested in free speech are bigots who want to say offensive things.  There have been articles published on how free speech advances white supremacy.

Of course, Wilmore is wrong.  There are many legitimate reasons to own these kinds of weapons that doesn’t make you an unhinged person with a desire to commit a mass shooting.  Least of all is to defend against a government that has decided that your desire to speak freely is evidence that you want to incite violence, your desire for privacy is evidence you have something to hide, and your desire to not to be tortured and forced to testify against yourself is an admission of guilt.

Lastly, about that part where he says that he shouldn’t have a gun that can kill 9 people and injure 20 in 30 seconds because you are not protecting yourself with that…

I wonder how a black man in Alabama during the heyday of the Klan would have felt about having an AR-15 with a 100 round drum mag when a group of two dozen men in white hoods showed up with some rope and a burning cross.

Or your house in 2020 when a bunch of Antifa show up on your lawn with Molotov cocktails because your Democrat Congressman posted your name, address, and $500 donation to the Trump 2020 campaign on his Twitter and Facebook.

Don’t tell me that weapons like that only belong on the battlefield.  Sometimes the battlefield can be your front lawn.

…with all the stupid stuff Joe Biden has been saying during and after the debates, will Alexandria Ocasio Cortes accuse him of Cultural Appropriation?

I saw Miguel’s post Perpetuating lies for the New Helter Skelter and it sparked something in my memory.

In the days before every tier one Democrat primary candidate decided to memorialize the shooting of Michael Brown with proven lies, Senator Kristen Gillibrand attempted to race-shame voters with the death of Trayvon Martin.

I think part of the issue was that she said M&M’s and not Skittles, so half the reference was missed.

Nevertheless, it was the same thing.  Gillibrand was attempting to promote the lie that a young black man was murdered because he was wearing a hoodie and had candy, and that the same thing would not happen to a white boy in the suburbs.

This is both horribly factually inaccurate to the Trayvon Martin case and horribly offensive to black and white people in general.

She was using a false narrative to stoke racial animus to boost her woke credentials and electability among the intersectional Left.

For all the complaints the Democrats make about Trump’s divisive rhetoric, the distance they are willing to go to exacerbate racial tensions with outright falsehoods is unbelievable.

From The Daily Mail (once again to a British newspaper for some real news).

Will Robert Maxwell’s daughter spill paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s secrets to FBI? Rumours swirl that Ghislaine Maxwell is ready to co-operate US authorities

Ghislaine Maxwell was last night reported to be ready to co-operate with the American authorities in their ongoing investigation into Prince Andrew’s late friend Jeffrey Epstein.

The socialite daughter of the disgraced late media tycoon Robert Maxwell has been accused of recruiting underage girls for the financier Epstein, her benefactor and sometime boyfriend.

When Ghislaine Maxwell turns up dead in a bathtub from a wine and sleeping pill overdose (woman rarely kill themselves violently), her death will be just as shocking as Epsteins.

I am not going to rehash my disgust at how eagerly some Gun Owners are doing the job of helping Michael Bloomberg destroy the NRA.

We have or had a mole deep inside the NRA. There is no way Bloomberg  got that information without the help of somebody deeply inside the organization. But I believe we are dupes in thinking that was the only information extracted from the NRA. What about documents explaining strategy: past, present and future?  How about congressional contacts that are not common knowledge? And how about the membership list? Is it safe or is it in the hands of Bloomberg?  Old heads will remember back in the 90s when Mayors of several cities tried to sue the NRA for the membership list so they could tax gun owners for ER expenses of gunshot victims.  We are in the 21st Century now and besides a lawsuit, that list can be released so we are Doxxed for our constitutional beliefs.

I don’t see anybody considering this (If there are, my apologies and please link in the comments) and that is just mental laziness. But again. Hating on Wayne is easier than actually think.