Articles by Herschel Smith

Idaho.

Upon rumor that violent protestors and rioters were considering descending upon Coeur d’ Alene, a small city in Idaho with a population of about 45,000, with intent to loot, vandalize, and otherwise cause unrest, the local militia men and women took action. Gearing up, they descended upon the downtown core to guard businesses and major intersections. They came out in mass, hundreds of people who were almost all armed, to ensure that the citizenry would be kept safe.

Some store owners were boarding up their windows in preparation of Antifa, but many of them carried on, as usual, comforted by the armed sentinels that stood guard.

Thankfully, the evening was uneventful, with at least one Law Enforcement officer allegedly saying that the intel was good and that the groups intent on causing harm backed down once they heard of the deployment.

There are more pictures at the link.

Next up Boiling Springs, South Carolina.  Of all places on earth where Antifa wouldn’t feel welcome, it has to be Boiling Springs, South Carolina.

Roughly 100 protesters slowed traffic Friday evening on Highway 9 in Boiling Springs as they marched in a cluster from the Zaxby’s to the Walmart Supercenter.

Accompanied in the front and the rear by the flashing lights of sheriff’s patrol cars, many of them covered a distance of about 6 miles on foot with signs held high.

Among the crowd, Thomas Broome held a sign that read: “Protect black lives the way you would protect this dog.”

His dog, Maya, stood at his feet wearing a sign around her neck: “Black Dogs Matter.”

At one point, a motorist behind the wheel of a pickup truck rolled down his window and shouted profanity at the group as he drove by.

What the news report didn’t say, that my intel source does, is that business owners were lined up in front of their places of business armed.

News from Chicagoland.

CHICAGO — Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the city will not tolerate vigilantism after groups of mostly white men patrolled the streets of the Bridgeport neighborhood on Wednesday night in response to a nearby city protest.

Multiple streets were blocked in the Bridgeport neighborhood Wednesday night as nearby protests dispersed. Near West Pershing Road, water gushed from an open fire hydrant as small groups gathered on corners. Some of the men held bats. One wore a shirt that said “All Lives Matter,” one sipped a beer and another waved at an officer as he drove by. Additional groups of people, some armed with bats, lined West 31st Street.

Asked about the situation in Bridgeport, a diversifying neighborhood that served as an Irish American power base for the Daley political family, Lightfoot said, “It is absolutely not appropriate for people to take up arms, bats, pipes, whatever in patrolling neighborhoods.”

“We’ve seen that end with tragic results across the country and we’re not about to allow that practice to happen here in Chicago. If there’s an issue, call 911,” Lightfoot said. “I absolutely support neighbors being vigilant as to what’s going on on the streets and in their blocks but taking up arms, that leads to chaos and we’re not supporting vigilantism in the city of Chicago under any circumstances.”

Bet you thought these people were anti-cop, didn’t you?  Nope.  They are anti-you.

The criminals, rioters and thieves get to do what they want.  You cannot defend yourselves or your property, so says the governor of chaos.

You see, if any in our community really believes that after all of this goes down there will be an end to no-knock raids and police overreach will be reigned in, you are a naive fool.

They intend to evict the few remaining relatively good people left in law enforcement, those who still believe in some semblance of the constitution, replace them with others (MAVNI recruits, La Raza, etc.), and turn the police against you.

That will ensure that (a) you don’t fight back when they confiscate your 401K and retirement accounts, (b) you don’t fight back when they try to confiscate your weapons, (c) you don’t fight back when they enact a bill to tax inheritance, (d) you don’t fight back when they enact a bill for reparations, and (e) you don’t fight back when they socialize medicine.

Do you see?  You didn’t really believe any of this was about the cops, did you?  Tell me you saw through all of this?

Reason.

[1.] In all states, you can use deadly force to defend yourself against death, serious bodily injury (which can include broken bones and perhaps even lost teeth), rape, or kidnapping, so long as (a) your fear is reasonable and (b) the danger is imminent (requirements that also apply to the doctrines I discuss below).

[ … ]

But in nearly all states, you can’t generally use deadly force merely to defend your property. (Texas appears to be an exception, allowing use of deadly force when there’s no other way to protect or recapture property even in situations involving simple theft or criminal mischief, though only at night,  Tex. Penal Code § 9.42; see, e.g., McFadden v. State (Tex. Ct. App. 2018).) That’s where we get the conventional formulation that you can’t use deadly force just to defend property.

[2.] This conventional formulation, though, omits an important limitation: In basically all states, you can use nondeadly force to defend your property—and if the thief or vandal responds by threatening you with death or great bodily harm, you can then protect yourself with deadly force. So in practice, you can use deadly force to protect property after all, if you’re willing to use nondeadly force first and expose yourself to increased risk.

[A.] In about half the states you can use deadly force against robbery, which generally includes any theft from the person that uses modest force or a threat: “Even a purse snatching can constitute a robbery if the victim simply resists the effort to wrest the purse away.” Some robbery of course does also create a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury, but in these states such a fear is not required.

[B.] In some states, there is a rebuttable presumption that you reasonably fear death or great bodily harm—and may thus use deadly force—if the target is (to quote the Iowa statute),

Unlawfully entering by force or stealth the dwelling, place of business or employment, or occupied vehicle of the person using force, or has unlawfully entered by force or stealth and remains within the dwelling, place of business or employment, or occupied vehicle of the person using force.

I think Missouri is like Texas in this regard even though he didn’t mention it.

In the Colonial era, horse theft brought harsh punishment, including branding, torture, exile and even death.  This is so because theft of the means of plowing the ground on the frontier meant relegating your family to death for lack of food.

It’s complicated.  Be sure to know the laws of your state.  For me, it comes down to this: If the person is entering the premises of your home or business with a weapon or intent to commit theft, you simply cannot trust that he will stop there.

There are thousands of instances where a thief took what he wanted and then killed the people who saw him do it.

There is also his article on The Duty To Retreat In The Founding Era.  Read this as well, and as always, none of this constitutes legal advice.  You have to pay for that.

NY Times Op Ed.

The Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, says the following: “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.”

Follow the Lord and live.  Follow the NY Times and perish, in time and eternity.  It’s your choice, boys and girls.  But don’t say you weren’t warned.  I’ve done my job.

Many are familiar with this video.

Fewer have seen his explanation of the event.

Science.

In the first big research scandal of the COVID-19 era, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) today retracted two high-profile papers after a company declined to make the underlying data for both available for an independent audit, following questions being raised about the research. The Lancet paper, which claimed an antimalarial drug touted by President Donald Trump for treatment of COVID-19 could cause serious harm without helping patients, had had a global impact, halting trials of one of the drugs by the World Health Organization (WHO) and others.

Three authors on the Lancet paper requested the retraction, after initiating an independent review of the raw hospital patient data summarized and provided by Surgisphere, a small Chicago-based company operated by Sapan Desai, the fourth author of the study. Desai had previously said he and his co-authors—cardiac surgeon Mandeep Mehra of Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Frank Ruschitzka of University Hospital Zürich, and Amit Patel, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Utah—were getting such an audit of the data, but the agreement apparently fell apart.

[ … ]

NEJM published only a short statement from the paper’s authors, which included Mehra, Patel, and Desai, as well as SreyRam Kuy of Baylor College of Medicine and Timothy Henry of Christ Hospital in Cincinnati. “Because all the authors were not granted access to the raw data and the raw data could not be made available to a third-party auditor, we are unable to validate the primary data sources underlying our article,” they wrote, with apology. By including Desai, the note perplexingly suggests he has no access to the raw data generated by his own company.

The link title is tongue-in-cheek.  There is nothing scientific about what’s going on, and this is certainly not the “first big research scandal of the Covid-19 era.”  The entire thing has been a research scandal, and the retracted study is no more scientific than the claim that masks are effective.  What kind of a “researcher” doesn’t validate the models and conclusions from the raw data?

No one to date has even approached what I said I need to conclude that wearing a mask is a good and necessary protective against a virus.  No one has even proposed such a study.

Link. [I cannot make WordPress accept the embed code, so go to the link]

But that’s not the way the international media reported it.  Consider this headline: “Vigilante residents wield their rifles as they block their street in Florida to guard against looters.”  Here is the URL.

The video of the guarding residents was filmed by a family in a passing car.

They are seen driving past them before using a roundabout to drive back the other way.

The group, who number at least 12, are standing next to their cars and some are holding rifles.

One man is wearing a military-style helmet, combat boots and pants and is holding a rifle.

As the family pass the residents, an older woman in the car says, ‘he has a gun in the black shirt’ as she refers to the man in the helmet.

A girl in the car then adds: ‘This is in Belleview.’

As she turns the car back around, the older woman then says: ‘Look at all these white people. Look at them with their guns.’

Although it isn’t clear from the video, she claims a teenage boy is also standing with a gun.

‘Look at that little boy, he’s a young man with a gun. He’s like 16,’ she says.

Vigilantes, they are.  Bad people, according to the media.  She’s too ignorant of American history to know that the vast majority of the fighters at King’s Mountain were under the age of 18.  The “Over Mountain” men were primarily boys.  Their families had to bring in the crops and do chores.  So to families singing hymns through the streets as the left on horseback, they left for an arduous journey over many days and nights to meet up with the loyalists at King’s Mountain and win what might be the most decisive battle of the war of independence, because it demonstrated to Cornwallis that his reliance on loyalists to win his war was mistaken.   But there’s more.

In Indiana, peaceful protesters demonstrating against police brutality and racism following the death of George Floyd were met with vigilante locals who were armed with weapons.

[ … ]

Video taken on Saturday in Valparaiso and posted to Twitter shows a line of protesters marching — as homeowners stand guard along a white picket fence nearby.

The tweet said the protesters were walking back to their cars along a bike trail, as advised by police “because of the amount of people standing by the street with their bats and guns.”

Vigilantes.  They used that word again.

So the thugs who throw bricks, break windows, block streets, liter the roadways, beat people over the head with boards and shoot people, are “peaceful protesters.”  The peaceful citizens who want to protect family, home and hearth, are “vigilantes.”  The vigilantes should wait on protection from the cops and National Guard troops who are taking a knee all around the country.

Light is darkness and darkness is light.  So claims the evil one.

Actually, seeing these pictures of patriot citizens holding rifles and ready to defend home and hearth makes me more confident in the trajectory of America at the moment.

America has been stomped out of its slumber and some of it, at least, seems ready for self defense against the communists.  They meet the definition of militia in the truest sense of the word and concept expressed by the founders, who opposed a standing army.

“Practice Things Like an Eye Gouge, it Takes Very Little Pressure to Injure Someone’s Eyes.”  Swell folks, they are.

I’ll tell you what though.  That boy had better not go back around those people.  His life will be in danger if he does.