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Students Protest: Bring Back Officer Who Got Physical With S.C. Girl

Selwyn Duke

Deputy Ben Fields has been condemned in the media and called names. He has been fired from the Richland County Sheriff's Department. And the federal government has launched a civil-rights investigation into his apprehension of a defiant student who was disrupting her class last Monday. Yet some of the people who know him best are rallying on his behalf: students at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, where Fields was the school resource officer.

On Friday, approximately 100 students walked out of class at around 10:00 a.m. to protest the termination of Fields. They were back in their classrooms after about 10 minutes in response to a diplomatic request from their principal, but not before their voices were heard.

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S.C. Cop Who Got Physical With Girl Was Right, Says Expert

By Selwyn Duke

Officials have used terms such as "outrageous,” "reprehensible," and "shamefully shocking" to describe what they see in a video about a police officer who enforced rules on a girl. But do such reactions best characterize the cop’s behavior — or the girl’s?

By now millions of people have seen the viral video of Senior Deputy Ben Fields using physical force Monday on an unnamed Spring Valley High School student in Columbia, South Carolina. As the initial footage shows, the officer tells the 16-year-old girl to come with him, she refuses, and after a couple more requests he drags her out of her chair to enforce compliance. And the public reaction was swift. There was condemnation across the Internet for using such actions on a “child” and a “girl”; Fields’ boss, Sheriff Leon Lott, said that the initial “snapshot” of the incident made him want to “throw up”; the DOJ and FBI are conducting investigations into the event; and Fields has been accused of racial bias (he’s white, the girl is black). Moreover, it has just been reported that Fields has been terminated by the Richland County Sheriff’s Department. But has common sense also been terminated?

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President’s Lies Matter: Obama Defends Black Lives Matter Movement

By Selwyn Duke

It’s a phenomenon that has led to riots and the killing of police officers. But that didn’t stop Barack Obama from defending the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement last Thursday at a White House criminal-justice forum. It was an action that, critics say, reinforced divisive misconceptions — ones that have contributed the murder and mayhem.

While Obama paired his defense of BLM with praise for the “overwhelming majority” of police who want “to do the right thing,” he also spoke of “a specific problem that's happening in the African-American community that's not happening in other communities.” Yet he wasn’t referring to the black community’s 72 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate or that blacks are approximately 50 percent of the United States’ homicide victims (while only 13 percent of the population) — or that 90 to 93 percent of these victims are killed by other blacks. Rather, referencing the notion that an inordinate number of black suspects are shot by police officers, the president said, "We as a society, particularly given our history, have to take this seriously. And one of the ways of avoiding the politics of this and losing the moment is everybody just stepping back for a second and understanding that the African-American community is not just making this up. It's not just something being politicized.”

The truth, however, is that made up and politicized describe BLM’s claims perfectly.

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Hillary Clinton Unchained: Gun Ban “Worth Looking at”

By Selwyn Duke

Would Hillary Clinton ban guns in the United States? She apparently supported the idea last Friday, but then supposedly dismissed it three days later. It’s the difference between an on- and off-Teleprompter candidate.

During an October 16 town hall meeting at Keene State College, a questioner asked Clinton if we could follow Australia’s lead and ban handguns. She replied that the nation’s confiscation of firearms was a “good example” and was “worth looking at” when formulating U.S. gun policy. Here's more of her unguarded-moment answer....

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Ahmed the “Clock Boy” Meets with Obama and War Criminal

By Selwyn Duke

The media has dubbed him “Clock Boy,” but critics have pointed out that he’s really just Crock Boy. This hasn’t prevented Ahmed Mohamed (shown), the 14-year-old Texas student arrested for bringing to school a device that could be taken for a bomb, from making the rounds as a celebrity and meeting world leaders. This included an encounter Barack Obama at the White House’s Astronomy Night last evening, even though the meeting was left in doubt after Mohamed met last Wednesday with an African president wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

The boy’s dubious meeting with Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir — accused of orchestrating genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur — put the White House in an uncomfortable position. Obama had already committed to the now-discredited narrative that Mohamed was a fertile-minded inventor victimized by “Islamophobia,” and revoking his Astronomy Night invitation would have been a blow against that victim narrative. Ultimately, the administration decided to walk a fine line. Press Secretary Josh Earnest played down Mohamed’s visit at a press briefing yesterday, saying he didn’t believe Obama would “have an opportunity to meet one-on-one with Ahmed” as “several hundred people” would participate in the event. And so it transpired: Obama met with the high-school student while mingling with the attendees, but didn’t showcase his visit.

Unfortunately, Mohamed’s tale is an example of how, as Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…” And a tall tale Mohamed’s is.

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The Evil of Gun-free Zones

By Selwyn Duke

One thing worse than supporting bad policy is knowingly supporting bad policy.

Worse still is knowingly supporting bad policy and shielding yourself from its destructive effects — while visiting that policy on children.

There has been much debate recently surrounding so-called “gun-free zones,” places such as schools, where law-abiding people won’t carry guns. But really there should be no debate. This is because it’s plain that even the zones’ defenders — liberals — don’t really believe they’re a good idea.

For evidence, consider a largely forgotten video made in 2013 by Project Veritas (PJ) after The Journal News in Westchester, N.Y., printed the names and addresses of registered handgun owners in its coverage area. Posing as "Citizens Against Senseless Violence," PJ operatives visited the homes of Eric Holder and various liberal journalists to ask them if they’d “support the cause” and post on their lawns a sign stating "THIS HOME IS PROUDLY GUN FREE."

Harvard Gun-control Study Destroys Gun-control Agenda

By Selwyn Duke

Buy a gun, folks — do it for the children. That could now be the message after the revelation that a Harvard University study has thoroughly refuted the gun-control agenda. The research, conducted in 2007 but suspiciously ignored until now, is enough to make a grown man cry — if that grown man happens to be Piers Morgan.

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Christians Need Not Apply

By Selwyn Duke

“Haters of humanity” was the charge leveled against Christians in early first-millennium Rome. Thus impugned because they didn’t want to participate in the empire’s pagan festivals, they suffered a plight common to those swimming against their civilization’s tide: persecution. Of course, even in a nation that appreciates freedom of speech and religion, stigmatization of certain groups is inevitable. For as someone once pointed out, stigmas are the corollaries of values: If certain things are to be valued, it follows that their opposites will be devalued. As an example, you cannot value economic freedom highly without devaluing communism. Ergo, stigmas are necessary. And since they’re the flip side of values, what a civilization chooses to value is of utmost importance.

So when Rome valued paganism, it quite naturally devalued Christianity. But this would change. Jesus’ faith was legalized in 313 A.D., and in 380 it would become the empire’s official religion. And it would so infuse and shape the West  that the Occident would become known as Christendom and the United States’ first president would say, “To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.” For, in fact, Christian character was once considered integral to everything.

But a change has been afoot in America. It has been happening quickly, so quickly that few people, even most astute culture warriors, fully appreciate what’s occurring.

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Obama’s Military Told Soldiers to Ignore Afghan Sexual Abuse of Boys

By Selwyn Duke

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it.” So lamented Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr., reports the New York Times, about young boys being sexually abused by Afghan allies on his own military base. Buckley had made the startling revelation to his father, Gregory Buckley Sr., prior to being shot to death in 2012 — by an abused boy who, the elder Buckley and others suspect, viewed the Americans as complicit in his rape.

And while Rudyard Kipling said of East and West, “Never the twain shall meet,” Eastern and Western moral corruption is a different story. As Buckley Sr. also related, when he counseled that the abuse should be reported to superiors, his son informed him “that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

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Black Man Beats Black Man; White Professor, Media Cry Racism

By Selwyn Duke

There was a time when racial incidents required, at the minimum, actual racism. Now all that’s necessary is the prism of ideology. And a case in point is a recent altercation at the Whole Foods Market in Oakland, California.

“Witness Says Black Customer Bloodied After Attempting to 'Buy Groceries with his EBT Card,'” wrote San Francisco Weekly last Friday.

“Black Man Brutalized by Security Guard at Whole Foods for Trying to Buy Food,” reported Yahoo! News the same day. It was another example of “violence against black citizens,” as a witness on-scene put it, in, apparently, irredeemably “racist” America.

Except that the security guard was also black.

A clerk the beaten man had conflict with was black.

And the on-site store manager was black.

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