Recently, the widely respected science writer Nicholas Wade published an article in Medium pushing the idea that — contrary to what “the scientists” assured us — COVID-19 might have come from the Wuhan virology lab, not the wet markets.

According to Wade, the virologists attacking the lab theory were claiming scientific certainty for something unknowable, and at least one of them has a gigantic conflict of interest. Even at a time when “TRUST THE SCIENCE!” has become a liberal mating call, I’m shocked at the deceptions of these guys.

Wade cites two groups as leading the attack on the lab theory.

Kristian G. Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in California, was the lead author of a paper published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, claiming: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

Talk about influential — not only did The New York Times cite Andersen, but I did!

Now, a year later, Wade says, “Dr. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.” While Andersen claimed that two of the virus’s characteristics couldn’t be made in a lab, Wade describes exactly how they could be.

The second group of experts denouncing the lab theory was led by Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak got two dozen other scientists to sign a letter to The Lancet that portentously declared: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Scientists, the letter said, “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”

Well! No uncertainty there!

But Wade notes that Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had helped fund the Wuhan lab.

I have a problem when a guy with a financial and reputational stake in a lab organizes a group of scientists to say, It’s absolutely not from the lab!!! Daszak’s letter concluded with what only the deeply cynical might suggest was a lie: “We declare no competing interests.”

In response to the obvious question, WHY DIDN’T ANY OTHER SCIENTISTS SPEAK UP?, Wade says: “Perhaps because in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.”

If we could give them a truth serum, I wonder what these experts would say about transgenders, IQ, the COVID shutdowns and any number of pressing social issues we’re all supposed to shut up about because of “science.”

And of course there was the fact that Trump had floated the lab theory. Before a liberal will answer any question, he needs to know:

1) Has Trump ever offered an opinion on this?

2) What is the 180-degree opposite position?

Wade claims to have no preference for one theory over another — he’s just laying out the facts! But it’s pretty clear that he is coming down on the side of the lab theory.

He doesn’t mention that 27 of the original 41 Chinese people who contracted COVID-19 had been to the Wuhan wet market, known the world over for its delectable porcupine anus and snake innards. Several other carriers were family members of those infected there. By contrast, no one from the Wuhan lab appears to have been infected.

No, Wade’s argument is a purely scientific one. Not my bailiwick. But I can see when experts disagree, and, oh my gosh, do they disagree!

One of Wade’s main points is that COVID-19 is the only coronavirus with a furin cleavage site. (You don’t need to know what it is — substitute the words “chocolate bunny.”) “So,” Wade concludes, “it’s hard to explain how the [COVID] virus picked up its furin cleavage site naturally.”

Last month, the World Health Organization released a major report on the origin of the coronavirus, so I checked to see what its scientists said about this “furin cleavage.” They say COVID-19’s “furin cleavage” is, in fact, like that in another bat coronavirus, RmYN02, “providing evidence that such insertion events occur naturally in animals.”

I can’t evaluate the science, but I can line up words, and those conclusions don’t match. In fact, they are direct opposites.

Like you, I’m inclined to believe Wade over the WHO, but that’s not the point. Do you see how absurd this is, trying to ascertain a scientific fact as if we’re assessing the credibility of witnesses in a sexual harassment case? Well, he lied about the lingerie, but she seems to have been stalking him …

We’re talking about SCIENCE, our new religion! Wear a mask — it’s “SCIENCE”! There’s no such thing as race — it’s “SCIENCE”! Global warming is incinerating our planet — it’s SCIENCE! The mere invocation of “SCIENCE” is used to slam the door on any argument.

This week on MSNBC, a host actually said, “There are no bad apples at the CDC.” Every hour of every day, I have to hear about the “bad apples” in policing. But at the CDC? Nope! They’re SCIENTISTS.

Whether the virus that destroyed the world economy and has already killed more than 3 million people came from a Chinese lab or a Chinese wet market, or a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side (unlikely), it’s China’s fault. What is mind-boggling about Wade’s article is the overweening and baseless pomposity of our high priests of SCIENCE.

QUESTION: “Who will loads of Republicans support for president in 2024?”

I know this because … I am Carnac the Magnificent!

Also because Republicans have latched onto a black candidate for president every four years, pretty much throughout my entire adult life.

I’m one of those Republicans, having enthusiastically supported Alan Keyes in at least one of his three presidential runs, Herman Cain in 2012 (9-9-9!) and Ben Carson, as my backup to Trump, in 2016.

Other black Republicans who were — in the words of Michael Kinsley — “drooled over” by the GOP include Colin Powell (the Weekly Standard‘s choice for the 1996 contest), Condoleezza Rice (supported by Dick Morris and Rush Limbaugh as our 2008 nominee), and Allen West (Glenn Beck’s choice in 2012).

The rational reason for this is that no black person in modern America casually rolls into being a Republican. I never really gave it much thought, but all my friends and family are Republicans, so I guess I am, too.

That doesn’t happen. By the time any black person decides to announce to the world that he’s a Republican, a lot of thought has gone into it. There will be no hagiographic profiles in The New York Times, Pulitzer Prizes or hosting gigs on MSNBC.

That’s why black Republicans, on average, are a lot ballsier than white Republicans (and 147% smarter than black Democrats).

But there’s also a ridiculous reason Republicans make goo-goo eyes at any black Republican. As the Social Justice Warriors say, they’ve “internalized their oppression.” Oh, you call us “racist,” media? We support (Fill in Name of Black Republican Here)! What do you say now, media?

Media: Yeah, he doesn’t count.

Even Sen. Scott has internalized his oppression, acting as if he has to constantly prove that he’s not “racist” and that he’s really black.

Sen. Scott’s big cause — and, indeed, about the only congressional legislation being discussed other than President Biden’s spectacular list of free goodies — is a bill to reform policing. And not a sane “reform,” like putting more officers on the street. Oh no, Scott’s bill, this year and last, is premised on the loony belief of Black Lives Matter that cops are too aggressive and desperately in need of more supervision.

This has succeeded primarily in giving liberals yet another basis for attacking Republicans, sneering, as Vox put it, that Scott has the “unenviable task” of “talking to … Republicans” about race and policing.

Last year, Scott promoted his “Justice Act” with an op-ed in USA Today that opened with this:

“At the age of 21, I was pulled over for simply having an improper headlight, and yet the officer felt the need to place his hand on his weapon and call me ‘boy.’ Even today, while I have the privilege of serving as a United States senator, I am not immune to being stopped while driving at home in South Carolina or even while walking onto the grounds of the Capitol.”

I’VE NEVER HEARD ABOUT BLACK MEN BEING STOPPED BY THE POLICE! Who knew? Except anyone not in a coma for the past 20 years.

I don’t doubt that it’s awful to be perceived as a possible criminal by the police. But there are worse things. Like being killed.

Thanks to the anti-police BLM movement, the year after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, the murder rate spiked 12.1% — the greatest year-to-year increase since 1968.

After BLM exploded last year in response to Saint George’s martyrdom in Minneapolis, the 2020 gun murder rate shot up by an astonishing 31% compared to 2019. It was the biggest year-to-year increase in history. And consider that the murders in honor of George Floyd didn’t even begin until sometime after May 25 last year.

The majority of those doing both the murdering and the dying were black. (As I’ve often pointed out, in addition to everything else, criminals are lazy. They might prefer to commit crimes against other ethnic groups, but don’t want to leave their neighborhoods.)

Just two weeks ago in Chicago, a 7-year-old girl was fatally shot as she sat in a McDonald’s drive-thru line with her father. Some would say that’s even worse than Sen. Scott being stopped by the police.

Wouldn’t a great cause for any U.S. senator — especially a black senator — be to oppose the effectively pro-criminal, aggressively anti-police BLM, instead of catering to them?

Unsurprisingly, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is now signaling its intent to address this problem in the time-honored Democrat way — by “investigating” local police departments, so it can then announce the foregone conclusion that “systemic racism” abounds.

The next step in that playbook is a “Consent Decree,” where local police departments, under threat of crippling and endless Dickensian litigation, agree to hand over their keys to the feds. And yes, this nifty move is executed under color of law, though it’s not entirely different in spirit from the way Captain Phillips lost control of his container ship on the high seas, if you happened to catch the Tom Hanks movie.

Conservatives are girding for battle. In the past, Consent Decrees have been used to kneecap police departments, compelling them to waste millions of dollars on paperwork, and focus on concerns notable for not being “Keeping the Public Safe.”

Maybe in the interest of comity, we shouldn’t abandon Consent Decrees so fast. So here’s my stab at one. Below, I have enumerated 16 bullet points that I believe we can all agree on.

1) When motorists see flashing police lights behind them, they consent to pull over. (See what I mean? Nothing but common sense!)

2) Upon being asked for their license and registration, drivers will consent to produce those documents and not to fight with the officer, drive off or reach for a gun. (Again: Comity!)

3) As a general rule, it is advisable that drivers not engage in a game of Do I have a gun — or is it a cellphone? with the officers, but when asked to show their hands … well, I guess you’d say, “consent.” (Beginning to see the pattern?)

4) For citizens holding the drug money for a major fentanyl ring in Louisville, Kentucky, if the police knock on your door at midnight, you consent not to shoot at the officers, but to open the door and say, “Yes, may I help you?” (Observation will reveal that this point cannot fail to produce the safe policing that we all desire.)

5) In fact, in any door-knock situation, you consent not to shoot at the police.

6) We may further strike the “in a door-knock situation” from that last point. In all circumstances, anywhere, anytime, citizens consent not to shoot at police officers.

7) While it is preferable that assailants not burst from their homes carrying 8-inch knives and screaming, “I’m gonna stab the f*ck out of you,” when those circumstances arise, and responding officers have requested that the knife be put down just prior to the actual stabbing commencing, the assailant will consent. (This will be music to #BlackLivesMatter’s ears, inasmuch as they believe that, you know, black lives matter.)

8) When sprinting through an alley at 2:30 in the morning holding a recently fired gun, with police in hot pursuit demanding that the suspect stop, the fleeing suspect will consent to stop.

9) If a further request is made that the suspect drop the gun, the fleeing suspect will provide his consent. (Police officers tend to be very strict about this sort of thing.)

10) Consent similarly will be given when a police officer directs pedestrians strolling in the middle of a street to use the sidewalk.

11) Middle-of-the-street pedestrians will consent not to punch the officer or try to steal his gun.

12) Citizens will additionally consent not to turn and charge at the officer.

13) When picking up children from a woman who has a restraining order against you and has just called the police on you, and the responding officers order you to drop a knife, you will consent to drop the knife.

14) If the officers ask you to stop walking around the car, do not keep walking, do not open the car door and do not reach inside for something out of sight of the officers. Instead, you will consent to stop.

15) In parked-car scenarios, when you’ve just passed a counterfeit bill and ingested several speedballs, and a policeman asks to see your hands, consent to show your hands.

16) It is especially important to consent when officers ask you to climb into the back of a police van and not to fight with them.

A Consent Decree for our times! And as you can see, these 16 points are the very definition of unifying, hands-across-the-ocean, common-sense proposals. If we as a country can agree to these simple rules, maybe this will light the way forward on other contentious issues.

But let’s start here, because brave cops deserve to be protected. And because black lives matter.

One man is dead and another will be spending up to 40 years in prison. How about Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison show a little dignity, with something like: “We had the trial; we’ve got a verdict; I’m not taking any questions”?

Nope! We got a one-hour spirit rally for the championship team. The key was teamwork. Our guys practiced every night — staying even after the gym had closed! We couldn’t have done it without the fans.

There wasn’t this much triumphalism when Ted Bundy was convicted! He murdered 30 women, escaped from jail twice, and killed again before finally being brought to trial. We didn’t have hours of gloating after they got the Green River Killer, and it took 20 years to catch him.

Maybe we’ve gotten less decorous in the past few decades. But how about celebrating the conviction of a gangbanger who killed an 8-year-old girl in a drive-by? Would the media be as giddy about that?

Not likely. Wild celebrations are in order only for the railroading of a cop.

The prosecutors must feel great! All it took was threatening the jurors with riots and personal destruction to get the verdict they wanted. Real Ciceros, these guys.

Chauvin was forced to flee his home last year, which naturally had been vandalized, requiring constant police presence. Barricades have recently been erected around the home of officer Kim Potter, who accidentally shot escaping violent gun offender Daunte Wright last week.

The day before Chauvin’s case went to the jury, a defense witness — a witness! — had his former home in California vandalized with pigs’ blood and a pig’s head.

So I’m sure the jurors reached their verdict purely based on the evidence, after a careful weighing of both sides in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

We’re told that this is only the beginning, big changes are in the air. Does that mean every case against a cop will come with threats of mob violence?

Here’s one big change in policing that will come out of the Chauvin trial: No longer will police use the least amount of force on vulnerable individuals, like George Floyd. From here on out, the safety of the perp will take a back seat to avoiding unflattering cellphone videos.

A key point brought out at trial was this: As soon as Chauvin arrived on the scene, he would have been within his rights to use a Taser or stun gun on Floyd. The prosecution’s use-of-force experts agreed!

Chauvin employed a less aggressive restraint that looked worse to bystanders. Big mistake.

By now, surely, all law enforcement officers realize that their one overriding concern must always be the optics, not the reality. Unlike other public servants, police have to do their jobs while under the watchful eye of cellphone cameras. What matters is how things appear to idiot onlookers.

Heart disease is rampant in the African American community. Combine that with drug use and behavioral problems — and there are a lot more George Floyds out there waiting to happen.

According to the medical examiner, it was the stress of being restrained — combined with Floyd’s heart condition and massive amount of fentanyl in his system — that killed him. If lying on the ground was too much stress on Floyd’s heart, how about 50,000 volts of electricity?

Again, according to the state’s use-of-force experts, that would have been A-OK.

Got a resisting arrestee? Zap him with the stun gun and heave him in the back of the police van. Whatever happens after that, at least you won’t have a chubby EMT screaming at you and taking videos.

True, Floyd stood a better chance of going on living by NOT being zapped with a stun gun. On the other hand, Chauvin stood a better chance of staying out of prison if he’d just gotten Floyd in the police van, pronto.

Nice work, Minnesota!

The other big change coming down the pike is that we are headed back to the 1960s in terms of crime. Already, 2020 marked the largest year-to-year increase in murders in the history of the country. In Minneapolis alone, the murder rate doubled. Get ready for a lot more violent crime, emboldened criminals and less aggressive police.

To the unwitting citizens of Minnesota who will soon have their lives snuffed out, just remember: The jurors were worried about their own personal security. It was your life or theirs, and they decided the better part of valor was to sacrifice yours.

Their motto: I regret that I have only dozens of other people’s lives to give for my virtue.

Even the prosecution’s “use of force” experts admitted repeatedly on cross-examination that a hostile crowd would justify Chauvin keeping Floyd restrained until an ambulance arrived. An officer’s duty to provide care is overridden by his duty to keep himself, the suspect and the bystanders safe.

As was evident from the videos (and admitted to by the bystander witnesses), they were shouting obscenities at the police, threatening them with bodily harm and, in a few instances, had to be held back from rushing the officers.

And of course, because of the presence of the angry crowd, the EMTs themselves did not stick around to provide care, but did a “load and scoot,” heaving Floyd into the back of the ambulance and driving three blocks to get away from the mob on the street. They didn’t even want to work inside an ambulance near this feisty group.

As it becomes increasingly obvious that the belligerent onlookers themselves may have gotten George Floyd killed by creating a dangerous situation for the officers, media commentators leap in to do backup work for the prosecutors by sneering at the idea that the officers might have felt threatened by a few rowdy teenagers.

Oh, the big pansies! So, a few teenagers yelled at the officers. Show me just ONE example of disaffected urban youth going from agitation to brawling!

Here’s one! One Saturday morning in May 2019, six teens beat the crap out of an off-duty firefighter on the Upper East Side because he stepped in to defend an elderly couple from the youths’ harassment.

And here’s another: A mob in Chicago attacked an older white man in 2016 for voting for Trump.

This one is outside a church in Memphis in 2016 after services. The instigating event is entirely unknown.

But the police were armed! Yeah, what are they going to do if one of the bystanders rushed them? Shoot him? Shoot them all?

Here’s a video of (armed) cops making an arrest in the middle of a crowd of rowdy teenagers at a carnival two years ago.

And here’s a 2019 video of a mob of students surrounding an (armed) police officer restraining a student. One student kicked him in the face.

Here’s a brawl that broke out in 2017 after a woman on a bus was bumped with a book bag. The mayhem continued with an attack on (armed) police officers called to the scene, who were bitten and spit upon. One boy tried to take an officer’s gun.

So, yes, I see your point, MSNBC, it’s completely crazy for the officers to have felt threatened by the agitated crowd of urban youth hurling epithets at them.

At least we can count on our media to report fairly on any case of a black man dying in police custody.

No, my mistake! For important news about America, we turn to the British press. It seems that Floyd had a long list of criminal convictions, including holding a gun to a pregnant woman’s belly during a home invasion robbery in Texas.

You won’t read about that in <em>The New York Times</em>! The <em>Times</em> briefly mentioned a “home invasion” in a single article about Floyd last June (27th paragraph — seriously). I guess they didn’t have space to mention Floyd’s pistol-whipping a pregnant woman.

Even the <em>Houston Chronicle</em>’s major retrospective of Floyd’s life skimmed past the violent home invasion in a few sentences about his period of “struggle”: “In 2009, Floyd went to prison after pleading guilty to aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon.”

That was it, in a deep dive article on Floyd’s life that was 1,500 words long.

It seems like an intriguing story to me. How about an interview with the victim, media? Anyone interested? Nah, let’s get to the story on Officer Chauvin’s taxes!

Yes, the Minnesota Department of Revenue and the Oakdale Police Department have done their part for BLM by poring over Officer Chauvin’s state tax returns and are now charging him with “tax fraud.” They claim that, over the past five years, Chauvin and his wife underpaid the State of Minnesota about $21,000 in taxes. There’s a real clickbait story!

There have been hundreds of news stories on Chauvin’s alleged tax fraud. (George Floyd, I assume, was always punctilious about his taxes. Probably an early filer.)

Rioting is good for ratings. Don’t expect the media to report the truth.

It’s quite the opposite. In fact, in less than a week, the prosecution’s theory of the crime has subtly shifted from MURDER! to “failed to provide what we would say, in retrospect, would be a full and complete duty of care during the one- to three-minute interval between Floyd’s resisting the police to his dying, as a hostile crowd screamed obscenities at the police officers.”

The defense hasn’t even begun to make its case, but the prosecution’s witnesses keep helping Chauvin. (The only exception to the wild media lying is Headline News, where the lawyer commentators go the extra mile by watching the trial.)

Week One was chock-a-block with weeping bystanders wailing about how they felt watching Chauvin restrain Floyd. This would be tremendous evidence if the charge against Officer Chauvin were “first-degree upsetting bystanders.” But that’s not the charge. That’s not even a crime.

One especially distraught witness, Charles McMillian, an elderly black man, testified to seeing “foam” coming out of Floyd’s mouth.

QUIZ: Is foam coming out of the mouth a sign of:

a) a head wound?
b) strangulation?
c) a drug overdose?

ANSWER: c) a drug overdose.

Apart from that crucial fact, McMillian’s evidence only pertained to “first-degree upsetting bystanders.” Which, again, is not a crime.

My favorite witness — and the media’s favorite, too! — was Genevieve Hansen, Feminist Hero. She appeared in court in her firefighter dress uniform and a belligerent mood — though not as belligerent as the day Floyd died, when she showed up in sweats and began shrieking at the officers.

The headlines are along the lines of “Firefighter: I Could Have Saved Floyd’s Life, But Police Wouldn’t Let Me.”

Yes, apparently, Genevieve would have invented a time machine, gone back, and stopped Floyd from ingesting three times the lethal dose of fentanyl. I take it back: Chubby girls make the best firefighters! (Don’t get snippy with me: It’s beyond outrageous that fire departments have abandoned all physical fitness requirements solely in order to hire more women.)

According to Genevieve, the police on the scene unaccountably refused to step aside and take direction from her, despite her full ONE YEAR of experience as a firefighter.

Genevieve was totally on top of the situation. In her statement to investigators shortly after the event, she described Floyd as a “small, slim man.” Floyd was at least 6-foot-4 and weighed 230 pounds. The largest police officer on the scene was Chauvin, coming in at 5-foot-9 and 140 pounds. Genevieve missed nothing!

Even in the calm setting of a courtroom, with no agitated bystanders yelling at her, here are the things Genevieve says she would have done to save Floyd’s life!

In order:

1. “I would have requested additional help.”

2. “I would have wanted someone to call 911.”

3. “I would have asked someone to run to the gas station and look for an AED [a defibrillator].”

Why didn’t the officers think to call for medical backup??? Oh yeah, they already had. Twice. Starting about 10 minutes before Genevieve even showed up.

4. “I would have checked his airway.”

5. “I would have been worried about a spinal cord injury.”

As we know from the autopsy, there was no problem with Floyd’s airway or spinal cord. (But, as long as you bring it up, his body did contain three times the lethal dose of fentanyl.)

6. “I would have checked for a pulse.”

Eureka! Why didn’t — oh wait, the officers had done this, repeatedly, as several bystander witnesses had already confirmed.

By now, Floyd was dead. That’s when she would have started chest compressions.

So Genevieve, the state’s star witness on what the cops did wrong, testified that she would have done pretty much everything the officers did. But she would have been a lot bossier about it.

As much as Genevieve’s one year with the fire department made her an expert on when a police officer should begin chest compressions, the Minneapolis Police Department’s own experts directly contradicted her this week. These were, again, prosecution witnesses.

On Tuesday, Lt. Johnny Mercil, the MDP’s use-of-force trainer, and Officer Nicole Mackenzie, the MPD’s medical support coordinator, testified that it would be appropriate not to provide care to a suspect who had just been fighting with officers, or in the presence of a hostile crowd.

Chauvin had both those circumstances.

Trying to do damage control, the prosecutor asked Officer Mackenzie to define a “hostile” crowd. She said, “a growing contingent of people around, if they’re yelling, being even verbally abusive to those trying to provide scene security.”

Hey — remember those weeping bystanders last week? Their own testimony confirmed that they were “yelling and even being verbally abusive to those trying to provide scene security.”

Donald Williams, for example, the bouncer and MMA hobbyist, admitted to continuously berating the officers — all of which is on tape — calling Chauvin a “fucking bum,” “bitch” and “a fucking pussy ass bitch.” In one of the tapes, Williams threatens Officer Tou Thao, saying, “I swear I’ll slap the fuck out of both of you!”

And of course, there was the lovely Genevieve screeching, “I have your name tag, bitch!”

Now you know why prime-time cable suddenly went back to covering COVID vaccination schedules this week.

The rest of us just keep our heads down and pray we won’t be next.

At least the Duke and UVA human offerings were sufficiently upper-crust to have a few journalists and lawyers defending them. But policemen, bar owners, military veterans and a Midwest teenager? Definitely not our crowd, darling.

Currently, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, as it appeared in cellphone videos. You may remember something about this: It’s why America had to burn in 2020.

But the chief medical examiner’s report establishes that, however else Floyd died, it wasn’t from Chauvin’s knee. Oopsie! I guess it wasn’t absolutely essential that our country go through eight months of looting, riots and mostly peaceful arsons.

In lieu of citing some B.S. media “fact check,” I shall quote directly from the autopsy report by the Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner, Andrew Baker:

“No life-threatening injuries identified —

“A. No facial, oral mucosal, or conjunctival petechiae

“B. No injuries of anterior muscles of neck or laryngeal structures

“C. No scalp soft tissue, skull, or brain injuries

“D. No chest wall soft tissue injuries, rib fractures (other than a single rib fracture from CPR), vertebral column injuries, or visceral injuries

“E. Incision and subcutaneous dissection of posterior and lateral neck, shoulders, back, flanks, and buttocks negative for occult trauma”

In short: No bloodshot eyes and no trauma to any part of Floyd’s neck.

And yet, day after day, prosecutors, witnesses and the media tell us that Chauvin “squeezed the life out of” Floyd. The medical evidence establishes that whatever else caused his death, it was NOT asphyxiation.

That’s the entire case against Officer Chauvin! But the howling mob isn’t giving up its holy religious observance because of one dork in a lab coat. The sun might not rise! The city of Minneapolis could be wiped out! Wait — that might actually happen.

The medical examiner also found that Floyd had enough fentanyl in his system — I don’t want to say “to kill a horse,” because that would be a cliche. But it would be enough to bump off an entire team of Budweiser Clydesdales. In technical medical jargon:

“A. Blood drug and novel psychoactive substances screens:

“1. Fentanyl 11 ng/mL”

That’s just the first few words of the “Toxicology” section. Also listed are norfentanyl, 4-ANPP, methamphetamine, cannabinoids, amphetamines, morphine and so on.

But the 11 nanograms per milliliter of fentanyl is rather important, inasmuch as the chief medical examiner called this “a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances,” saying, “deaths have been certified with levels of 3.”

Three. But George Floyd went up to 11.

Naturally, Baker was quick to add, “I am not saying this killed him.” Please don’t throw me to the woke gods! Leave me to my test tubes! (And you thought lawyers were craven.)

I have a feeling we’re about to see another example of the left not accepting science.

In addition to liberals refusing to accept the science of:

— DNA (the O.J. trial)

— AIDS (we’re still waiting for that big heterosexual outbreak!)

— Cancer clusters and breast implants (billions of dollars wasted and companies destroyed because of the left’s adherence to junk science)

— I.Q. (just watch the reaction to my mentioning this hate-science) …

… we can now add “pharmacology”!

You mean to say that just by sticking a syringe in someone’s arm you can tell if he’s been taking drugs? That’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo, just like the moon landing.

This trial is a total sham, but the entire power of the state, the media, the left-wing shock troops and the country’s finest legal talent is being deployed against Derek Chauvin.

In addition to Minnesota’s top prosecutor, the state has hired Neal Katyal, former solicitor general of the United States — an unheard-of maneuver in a case that doesn’t involve some highly technical specialty, like antitrust. A slew of lawyers are working pro bono for the prosecutor — also unheard of. The state has unlimited resources to pursue Chauvin.

Against this, Chauvin has one lone defense attorney, Eric “Atticus Finch” Nelson. The Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association’s legal defense fund will put up to $1 million toward his defense, and Nelson can talk to the other rotating attorneys whom the fund employs. But unless they’re working pro bono, too, $1 million runs out pretty fast.

The legal mismatch in the O.J. Simpson case wasn’t this one-sided.

In the middle of jury selection, the city of Minneapolis announced an eye-popping civil settlement of $27 million with the family of George Floyd. Liberals are still denouncing Richard Nixon for a 1970 speech in which he inadvertently described defendant Charles Manson as someone who was “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders” — leading to demands for a mistrial.

What does a $27 million settlement with the family of the alleged victim say?

Black residents of Minneapolis are threatening to burn the place down if Chauvin isn’t convicted — and the only reason anyone thinks a jury could possibly return a guilty verdict is that they believe them.

In the darkest days of Jim Crow, the entire country never ganged up on a single individual like this.

Please, gods of wokeness, we ask that his human sacrifice be acceptable!

Throw another virgin into the volcano.

I was at law school when I first noticed the phenomenon of liberal women pretending to be outraged as a cover for bragging. Average-to-ugly girls would work up feigned indignation about how a guy had “sexually harassed” them that day, then launch into a 20-minute retelling of some compliment they’d received. A man talked to me! I think he likes me … Let’s see, how do I work this into conversation for the rest of the week?

But it’s a peculiar reaction to mass murder.

Now that a white supremacist mass shooter (check that, turns out he was a radical Islamic Syrian refugee!) has committed a different mass murder in Boulder, Colorado, will we see hippies on TV, denouncing the assumption that Birkenstock-wearers are all sex gods?

No, of course not! Only liberals would think an appropriate response to an infamous crime is to talk about how sexually desirable they are. Liberalism makes everybody stupid.

Thus, for days after the fatal shooting of six Asians and two whites at massage-cum-sex spas in Atlanta, Asian activists and professors blanketed the airwaves to demand that white men STOP treating them like sex objects — whom they fantasize about, they want, they covet. Newspapers were chock-a-block with first-person accounts of Asian women being salivated over by white men.

Christine Liwag Dixon modestly began her tale of oppression for The Washington Post‘s “The Lily”: “When I was 16, a boy I thought was my friend said, ‘I can’t figure you out. Asian girls are either smart or hot. But you’re both.'” She’s older and married now, but still cherishes this comment from high school.

Amid her recitation of other compliments she’d received over the course of a lifetime — some stupid, some vulgar, and some, I’d wager, completely fictional — Liwag Dixon remarked, “It no longer surprises me, but it still hurts.”

Well, naturally. Who wouldn’t be hurt to be called both smart AND hot?

Among the distressing compliments detailed by Liwag Dixon, she reports that she was often called “exotic.” (I will NOT link to the scene in “NewsRadio,” where Beth explains the meaning of words like “cute,” “beautiful” and “exotic.”

Professors of color were prepared with scholarly opinions about how tantalizing Asian women are. Elaine Kim, professor emeritus in Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Associated Press that the Atlanta shooter probably had “an addiction to fantasies about Asian women as sex objects.”

However that may be, these particular spas were known as fronts for prostitution, which may also have put the idea of sex in the shooter’s head.

Another Berkeley professor, Catherine Ceniza Choy (Ethnic Studies), conveyed that the shooting “echoes a long-running stereotype that Asian women are immoral and hypersexual.” Ellen Wu, a history professor at Indiana University, confirmed that “from the moment Asian women began to migrate to the U.S., they were targets of hypersexualization.”

It all had a familiar ring …

HEY! Anybody remember the Duke lacrosse rape hoax?

Before the gang rape of a black stripper was exposed as a complete fraud — though well after three white families had their pockets emptied and their names dragged through the mud — an enormous amount of the commentary centered on white men’s lascivious interest in black women. (So of course the gang rape had to be true!)

The Duke lacrosse case “fed the stereotype that black women are hypersexual and readily available,” as the Associated Press put it. The article quoted a number of black coeds on how white guys just can’t keep their hands off African American ladies:

“The young black women can almost finish each other’s stories.

“They go to a party, a concert, a nightclub. Twenty-somethings of all colors are flirting and dancing. And then it happens.

“Inevitably, a woman says, a white man asks her to dance erotically while he watches. Or he grabs her rear end. Or asks for sex, in graphic detail, without bothering to ask her name.”

A black Duke coed, Audrey Christopher, complained to the Durham Indy that “at one of the quad parties, it was me and another black female friend, and these white guys immediately told us how they liked hanging out with black girls because white girls are sheltered and we’re more free …”

Again, the professors of color weighed in. Rebecca Hall (Surprise! Also Berkeley) said of the Duke gang-rape charges, a “black woman is somebody who has excess sexuality … it’s excess sexuality that white men are entitled to.” Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal said: “The message that men get about black women is these are women that are available to them, that they have easy access and their sole purpose is to serve their pleasure.”

To the extent that their argument isn’t simply that black women are hot, hot, hot, but that white men feel entitled to pillage black bodies, that’s not borne out by the data. According to FBI crime statistics, approximately 15,000 to 30,000 white women are raped by black men every year, while, on average, zero black women are raped by white men. (The department uses “0” to denote fewer than 10 victims.)

Nor, of course, was the rapacious white male theory supported by the facts of the very case they were discussing.

We don’t have a lot of women mass shooters, so it’s hard to flip the script. But maybe, in the future, whenever a white man is falsely accused of rape (Steven Pagones, the Duke lacrosse players, a fraternity at the University of Virginia) or murder (Darren Wilson, Jake Gardner, Staten Island police officers), white men should fan out across the airwaves to talk about how damn sexy they are.

Until then, I’m begging you, white men, please, for the love of God, STOP turning liberal women into your sexual fantasies!!!

So far, the Republicans’ response has been to propose their own amnesty, while throwing in some boob-bait for the rubes about border security.

Even the election of Donald Trump, a ridiculous creature who became president by promising to crack down on illegal immigration and build a wall (promises he ignored), hasn’t put a dent in Washington’s enthusiasm for overwhelming the country with the third world.

On this, the parties are united! The only difference is, Republicans lie to the voters about securing the border.

Under Biden’s immigration bill, a gigantic number of illegals will be given green cards immediately and will be eligible for citizenship in three years — just in time for the 2024 election.

That includes all Dreamers (who entered as minors — or say they did); those who came in as temporary agricultural workers (or say they did); and any illegals who have been granted Temporary Protected Status because of some disaster in their home countries.

Biden’s bill doesn’t even include the usual false promises of border security. That’s where Republicans come in!

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., is floating a bill that would grant amnesty to Dreamers in exchange for vague promises of a border wall system.

A border wall system should not be confused with a border wall. It’s easy enough to write “wall.” So why didn’t he do that?

Because a border wall system will not have a wall. It will fund a lot of meaningless nonsense, such as drones (so we can amuse ourselves by watching illegals sneaking into our country); “boots on the ground” (so we can employ many more government workers to assist illegals as they cross the border); and surely the inevitable “commission” (so we can employ yet more government workers to produce useless reports).

The only other difference between the Democrats’ and Republicans’ amnesty is that, in Sen. Scott’s bill, the amnestied illegals would get citizenship in 15 years, instead of three. By 2036, Sen. Scott will be 83 years old, enjoying the adulation of his corporate donors.

The two key flaws with any amnesty are:

1) Real border security must precede amnesty.

The two parts cannot be done simultaneously. A border fence must be started first — and completed first. Only after all the ACLU lawsuits and court rulings have run their course, and the border is still secure, do we move to Step Two. I happen to think we don’t do the amnesty part ever, but it’s tendentious even to discuss what to do with illegal aliens already here until we can prevent more from coming.

2) Despite low-ball figures being cited by immigrant grievance groups, the number of illegals eligible for the Dreamer amnesty is: pretty much all of them. I promise you, it will be in the millions.

Almost any illegal alien can profess to be a Dreamer. The only requirements are that the illegal alien be between the age of 15 and 39; claim to have illegally entered the U.S. before turning 16; not be a convicted felon (which will be ignored, as it was under President Clinton); and have a G.E.D. or equivalent (which will be waived).

Apart from the felony conviction (ignored) and G.E.D. (waived) — how can any of that be proved or disproved? With trick questions about “Baywatch” to determine the applicant’s age?

Reagan’s 1986 amnesty included a legalization program for illegals who’d performed agricultural work in the U.S. for a minimum of 90 days in the prior year. That seems pretty narrowly defined, right? At the time, it was estimated that only a few hundred thousand farmworkers would qualify.

In the end, more than a million people applied.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service determined that 888,637 of the applications were fraudulent: Alleged farm workers told interviewers that cotton was purple or claimed to have pulled cherries from the ground.

Of the 888,637 fraudulent applications, guess how many our government approved? More than 800,000. Not one, but TWO of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers were in this country because of the farmworker amnesty.

How much easier is it to lie about your age or date of entry, compared to lying about prior farm work? Of course, even if you’re somehow rejected, you can stay. (It’s not as if you’re going to be deported.)

Has the public ever been so overwhelmingly on one side of an issue — and politicians on the other?

In his first few weeks in office, Biden issued 28 executive orders, five of them pushing more immigration. According to a Morning Consult poll, all five of Biden’s immigration orders were among the seven least popular with voters.

But Republicans didn’t become a minority party by listening to voters! Sure, they’ll disgust Americans by pushing amnesty, but that will give them more time to talk about the deficit and “socialism.” How about privatizing Social Security or maybe burbling on about Iran? The GOP could return to a 1970s-style, microscopic minority status in no time!

As Talleyrand supposedly said of the restored Bourbon monarchy, re-creating the conditions that led to the French Revolution, “They’ve learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

As we have seen throughout the last year of antifa/BLM riots, in blue states, it’s now legal to commit arson, attempted murder, assault on a law enforcement officer and destruction of property — provided the perp is antifa or antifa-friendly. Andy Ngo’s smash bestseller “Unmasked” gives chapter and verse on antifa’s shocking violence untouched by criminal penalty.

On the other hand, if you’re a conservative, don’t commit a misdemeanor in a blue state. Proud Boys, Capitol Hill protesters, police and other presumed Trump supporters are getting more prison time than actual murderers for minor infractions. Even a couple of personal injury lawyers (liberals) are being criminally prosecuted in St. Louis for brandishing guns at violent looters coming toward their home. The rioters, you see, were BLM protesters.

In all these cases, local Democratic officials gleefully announce that they are locking up “white supremacists.”

Prepare yourself for a lot of witch-trial hysteria in the upcoming trials of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis and the Capitol Hill trespassers in Washington, D.C. We’ve already seen it with the Proud Boys in New York City.

In a nation of laws, a crime is a crime, and it shouldn’t matter whether it’s committed by Mother Teresa or Charles Manson, but, as long as they brought it up, OF COURSE THE PROUD BOYS AREN’T “WHITE SUPREMACISTS”!

The organization is a tongue-in-cheek men’s group, promoting masculinity and Western civilization in humorous ways. Most of what they tell members is healthy: Get out of your apartment, work out, get a girlfriend and don’t masturbate. Further aside that it annoys me to have to make: There are African Americans, American Indians, immigrants and loads of Mexicans in the Proud Boys. Pretty crappy membership drive for a “hate group.”

At least in the witch trials of the Middle Ages, you could prove you weren’t a witch by drowning after being tied up and heaved into a nearby body of water. Today, the “white supremacist” hex is indelible. The accusation is the proof. And once accused, stay out of the blue states, or you might end up in prison.

In 2018, the night before Proud Boys founder, Gavin McInnes, was scheduled to give a speech at the Metropolitan Republican Club on the Upper East Side of New York, antifa smashed the windows of the historic club with a brick, glued the lock, and spray-painted the anarchist “A” on the front door of the club’s townhouse, along with a threat that this destruction was “merely a beginning.” All that’s legal, too — provided it’s done by antifa.

The day of the speech, 80 masked antifa goons showed up at the club to attack attendees — women and children, young and old. But unfortunately for antifa, the event was being protected by the Proud Boys. McInnes’ speech went off without a hitch, and no attendees were injured at the event.

When it was over, New York police officers directed the Proud Boys to Park Avenue, and sent antifa in the opposite direction to Lexington. The Proud Boys followed orders, but a gang of six masked antifa circled around from Lexington over to Park to confront them, including, in antifa’s manly way, throwing a bottle of urine at them.

Two Proud Boys proceeded to kick six antifa butt.

The same thing happened a few blocks south. Again disobeying the police, another group of antifa cut over to Park Avenue to fight with the Proud Boys. They, too, received a solid ass-kicking.

So who was arrested? Ten Proud Boys and not one antifa. Oh darn. We couldn’t catch them. (Hey, NYPD! Send the Proud Boys next time.)

The police did manage to arrest three antifa thugs who followed one speech attendee leaving the event, punched him and stole his backpack. But it turns out that’s also legal in New York. The antifa were arrested for the violent attack … then immediately released with no charges.

The governor and attorney general of New York, the New York City mayor and a slew of council members rushed to social media to denounce the Proud Boys for “hate” and vow to prosecute them — for protecting Upper East Side Republicans who went to a speech. McInnes is funny, and if there’s one thing leftists cannot abide, it’s a sense of humor.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted: “Hate cannot and will not be tolerated in New York,” along with a brain-dead article from Buzzfeed News titled, “Members of a Far-Right Men’s Group Violently Beat Up Protesters and Weren’t Arrested. New York Police Won’t Say Why.” They’re WHITE, aren’t they? No? Well, they’re REPUBLICANS. Arrest them!

The prosecution had no victims and no evidence of injury. But two Proud Boys, John Kinsman and Max Hare, now sit in a New York state prison, sentenced to four years, after being convicted of attempted assault and attempted gang assault — for defending themselves from antifa, who showed up at conservative event, then disobeyed the police and stalked the Proud Boys. It wasn’t the Proud Boys disrupting an antifa event, and it wasn’t the Proud Boys defying the police to confront antifa.

Yes, you are correct: This was the same district attorney, Cyrus Vance, who allowed Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein to rape and molest young girls in his jurisdiction for years and years. But those guys were major Democratic donors, so no harm, no foul.

A third Proud Boy was headed to trial along with Kinsman and Hare — until the prosecution noticed he was East Indian and his presence would have hurt the narrative that Proud Boys are “white supremacists.”

Just no one mention Kinsman’s black wife and children. (And thus Democrats deprived three more black children of a father during their formative years.)

Much of the testimony elicited by the prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, concerned the defendants’ non-PC beliefs, e.g.: Kinsman’s support for guns, his opposition to antifa, and his attendance at a “fake news” protest outside CNN. Steinglass actually presented evidence of McInnes’ jokes from his comedy show. Inappropriate laughter in a blue state will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law!

What on earth does any of that have to do with whether Kinsman and Hare committed a crime at Park Avenue and 82nd on Oct. 12, 2018?

Nothing. In the blue states, there is no rule of law, only rule by left-wing lunatics.

Two years after McNeil chaperoned a group of high schoolers on a trip to Peru to learn about rural health care, The Daily Beast published an article detailing the students’ list of denunciations against him, including the career-ending claim that he’d used the “N-word.”

Days later, it came out that he had used the word in response to a student’s question about a high school girl who’d been suspended from school for using the infamous word. He repeated it in order to ask how she’d said it.

This paragraph, particularly the parenthetical, is all you need to know about McNeil’s misadventure in Peru:

“At some point, a student took issue with my having said the U.S. wasn’t a colonial power, saying something like: ‘Don’t you realize what the CIA has done? Don’t you realize that the United Fruit Company interfered in central America to protect its banana monopoly?’ … (This student herself was white, from Greenwich, CT and went to Andover but mentioned multiple times over the week that she had a Latino boyfriend and he had opened her eyes to a different view of the world …)”

None of the students on this resume-padding trip were black. There was one Asian, and the rest were white, dripping with white privilege. (Who else goes on a Princeton-bait trip to Peru in high school to learn about “rural health care”?) Twenty of the 22 students were girls. All appear to be complete idiots.

McNeil went on the exact same trip and gave the same lectures to a different group of high school students the summer before and got rave reviews. But the 2019 batch were in the advanced Spotting Racism class.

During McNeil’s struggle sessions with his interrogators at the Times, he was accused of an array of crimes against political correctness. Here’s a sampling:

Charlotte (Behrendt, associate managing editor for employee relations): “Did you say the word “n****r” on this trip?”

McNeil: “Yes, I did.” [Explains context.]

Charlotte: “Did you say there’s no such thing as white privilege?”

McNeil: “No. That’s ridiculous …”

Charlotte: “So you didn’t say there was no such thing?”

McNeil: “No. Absolutely not. That doesn’t even make any sense.”

Charlotte: “Did you say there is no such thing as institutional racism?”

McNeil: “No, I didn’t …”

Charlotte: “Did you say it was OK to wear blackface?”

McNeil: “No, I didn’t.”

Charlotte: “Did you say climate change didn’t matter because it only killed poor people?”

McNeil: “What? No, of course not.”

Charlotte: “Did you make fun of a student’s hometown?”

McNeil: “I don’t think so. What hometown?”

McNeil’s unprovoked attack on someone’s hometown consisted of his hearing that one student was from Boston, and saying, “Nice town … except for that baseball team.” [Yankees-Red Sox rivalry ensues.]

Charlotte: “Did you tell a joke about a doctor and a Jewish mother?”

McNeil: “A doctor and a Jewish mother …? I don’t think so … Do you know the joke?”

McNeil later remembered that he’d used a stock joke from his usual speech to doctors:

“I was pre-med for a year, but when I told my mother what I was thinking, she laughed and said: ‘Donald, you’re never going to be a doctor. You don’t have the patience to get through medical school.’

“So, if any of you are wondering what it’s like to NOT be raised by a Jewish mother, that’s pretty much it: You say you want to be a doctor, she laughs at you and says, ‘It’ll never happen.'”

The endless questioning of McNeil’s jokes and comments feels like a weird, stressful dream. But the little Nazi block watchers held a trump card: They’d asked him about the “N-word” and … HE RESPONDED!

Fired.

McNeil’s story goes far beyond him, a crotchety leftist, angry about people walking in parks during the COVID shutdowns. Way too much of his response consists of his submission to the woke overlords, admitting that maybe he IS a racist and denouncing his grandfather as an anti-Semite. So forget McNeil. It’s Iran-Iraq.

Nonetheless, his story gives readers a terrifying glimpse of the next generation of grim conformists being pumped out by the nation’s education establishment.

These holy terrors are tormenting newsrooms across New York City — at New York magazine, The New Yorker and The New York Times. They are true believers, not original thinkers — race-obsessed, gender-obsessed, anti-white, anti-American, and much, much stupider than reporters used to be. Just tell me what I’m supposed to think and I’ll think it. These are the sort of people who ought to be office managers ordering staples and mousepads, not people who report news.

This is why newspapers can’t be trusted anymore. Reporters need to have a normal person’s understanding of what words mean, so they can get on with the story.

If a field is described as “barren,” we don’t need to know the precise size, type and amount of vegetation per square foot. But if we find out that by “barren,” reporters mean “lush,” then every word becomes suspect, and we’re going to need six paragraphs detailing the precise amount of greenery in the field. Not one word they use can be believed.

More to the point, if reporters call someone a “white supremacist,” we need to know if the Times‘ definition of “white supremacist” includes a person who:

— questions race preferences in hiring and college admissions;

— believes most people are in prison because they committed crimes; or

— admires Western culture.

And if they say someone is “anti-Semitic,” we better not find out they’re talking about a guy who told a joke about his mother saying he’d never make it through med school.

These sourpuss zealots are in such a mad race to show their wokeness, they are useless as conduits for the news. What they do isn’t “reporting.” It’s terrorism.

So barring a bank suddenly popping up on the sidewalk and an antifa attempting to rob it, I had no official protection from 2,000 violent, mentally disturbed thugs.

Thank God I had the Proud Boys.

There had been no warning of the antifa mobilization against me until an hour before the event, when they showed up, with a thousand of them at each entrance to the building where I was to speak.

Luckily, I’d invited about 20 Proud Boys from northern California chapters to attend my speech. If I hadn’t, I might not have made it to the campus at all. (If antifa had won, at least you would have heard about my visit to Berkeley, because the media would have reported on it triumphantly.)

The College Republicans had booked a private room for dinner in an Oakland restaurant earlier that evening, so I invited the Proud Boys to meet me there 45 minutes before the students arrived. We all had to recognize one another, in case they were needed to help deal with any violence during my speech.

College Republicans are absolutely fantastic, but generally are about as prepared for hand-to-hand combat as I am.

By contrast, the Proud Boys are brawny, tattooed brutes. Many are ex-military. Some worked security for a living, so my bodyguard planned to use a few of them as auxiliary troops, and the rest would get VIP seats so they could be spread throughout the audience in case of pandemonium.

As I was taking pictures with the Proud Boys at the restaurant, a freakish transgender in combat boots, fishnet stockings and a man-bun snuck into our private room via a back staircase. It seems that a rainbow-haired waitress had spotted me during the 30 seconds I was passing through the public part of the restaurant, and had called in my location to her antifa pals.

Poor Fishnet Boy surely had expected to burst in on 99-pound me having a nice dinner with a group of sweet College Republicans. Instead, he (she?) walked into what must have looked like a Hell’s Angels convention.

Not so brave, now, eh, Fishnet Boy? He/She bowed his head, pretended to use the cash register, and quickly made his exit.

But by now, my whereabouts had been posted on the antifa Facebook page, and they were coming to the restaurant. We found out only because the post was spotted by the wife of a Proud Boy, who was monitoring antifa internet chatter from home. Thank you, Proud Boys’ wife!

I’d barely been seated with the students for 15 minutes when my bodyguard told me we had to go. Antifa were starting to gather outside the restaurant.

Unfortunately, our Suburban was in a parking lot four blocks away.

Again, thank God for the Proud Boys. About a dozen of them surrounded me as we made our way to the garage, so that I was free to wave and smile at the black-clad loons screaming that I was a Nazi white supremacist bitch. Which book have you read?

At the garage, the Proud Boys cleared the stairwells and elevator, and safely deposited me into our Suburban, all while I was being trailed by lunatics.

On campus, I strolled with my bodyguard by the 200-yard line of officers — ordered to make no arrests — with shrieking sociopaths just on the other side of the line. Once inside the building, the Proud Boys stood guard at my green room, behind the stage, in the hallways — already lined with cops — and in the audience, until the speech was over and I left. (It was a huge hit!)

I’m trying to imagine how I would have made it from the restaurant to our car without the Proud Boys. At the least, it would have been a nasty scene, and it’s not implausible that I, the College Republicans or restaurant patrons would have been physically assaulted. I certainly would not have been able to stride confidently onto the stage to give my speech without the magnificent Proud Boys there, keeping me safe.

Now you know why the left defames the Proud Boys. They want American citizens to be defenseless against antifa stormtroopers.

When have the Proud Boys ever started a fight? Answer: Never. Their motto is: “We don’t start fights, we finish them.” And they have, protecting me and the nice people coming to see me, all over the country — Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco, among other places.

Until you’ve been face-to-face with black-clad psychos who want you dead, you will never understand the undying devotion to the Proud Boys among those of us who have.

Here’s something the media won’t tell you: In a public statement on Dec. 22, 2020, the Proud Boys officially announced they would not be attending Trump’s Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C. (Video here: twitter.com/censoreddottv/status/1350873800133533697). And you know why? As founder Gavin McInnes said:

“It’s one thing when people want you dead. In this case you also have the politicians, and the justice system, and the media also wanting [the Proud Boys] dead. So when you get stabbed, it becomes: ‘FOUR PEOPLE STABBED AT PROUD BOYS THING!’… All of those factors together is a perfect storm for MUR-DER.”

A lot of good staying away did them! Of more than 5,000 Proud Boys worldwide, fewer than 10 entered the Capitol that day, and — according to the indictment — took selfies.

Media: “PROUD BOYS BEHIND CAPITOL HILL HOLOCAUST.”

Liberals want their antifa/BLM goons to be free to intimidate, hospitalize and — in at least two cases last year — murder their opponents. That’s why they must criminalize men who protect the innocent.

The Times desperately wants you to believe that there are actual cases of innocent people being put to death in America. Their current poster boy for the cause is Sedley Alley, executed in 2006. But the Criminal Lobby is hoping a post-mortem DNA test — on evidence that has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence — will allow them to howl that an INNOCENT man was executed!

I knew nothing about this case, but I knew the Times’ description of the facts was a lie. How did I know?

1) No jury would have convicted a man, much less sentenced him to death, much less had that sentence repeatedly upheld, on such a flimsy record; and

2) There is no credible evidence that a single innocent person has been put to death in this country for at least 75 years.

Here are the facts the about the Criminal Lobby’s latest baby seal.

On the night of July 11, 1985, two Marines from a naval base in Millington, Tennessee, reported a possible kidnapping after they heard a female jogger screaming, “Don’t touch me!” “Leave me alone!” They ran in her direction, but just as they got close, a station wagon peeled off the side of the road. A gate guard also reported seeing a station wagon, which he said was being driven by a man constraining a woman.

All three witnesses described the car as a late-model green or brown Ford or Mercury station wagon with wood paneling, Kentucky tags and a loud muffler.

Alley, who owned a dark green 1972 Mercury station wagon with wood paneling and a Kentucky license plate, was brought in for questioning at 1 a.m. that night. The Marines who’d reported the kidnapping identified Alley’s vehicle as the one they’d seen, both by sight and by the roar of the muffler.

But Alley and his wife gave a satisfactory explanation for their whereabouts and were released.

At 6 a.m. on July 12, the body of 19-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Suzanne Collins was found in a nearby park. Alley was arrested and promptly confessed to murdering her — claiming it was an “accident.”

He told his wife, “Yes, I killed the gal at … Orgill Park.”

In his lengthy, tape-recorded confession, Alley tried to soft-pedal his barbaric crime, claiming he’d hit Collins with his car by accident, and only decided to savagely beat her to death because, as he was driving her to the hospital, she threatened to turn him into the police.

Alley then took investigators to the precise spot where he’d murdered Collins and even showed them the tree where he’d broken off the branch that he’d jammed inside of her.

At trial, Alley admitted he did it, but pleaded insanity. The jury didn’t buy it, convicted him and sentenced him to death.

Here is what the Times’ Emily Bazelon tells that paper’s clueless readers about Alley’s case:

“[T]wo Marines … reported crossing paths with Lance Corporal Collins while she was running. They said that moments after they saw her, they dodged a brown station wagon with a blue license plate … [L]aw enforcement officers stopped Sedley Alley, then 29. He was driving a dark green station wagon with a blue plate.”

Times readers are led to believe that although witnesses said it was a BROWN station wagon, Tennessee yokels picked up a guy in a GREEN station wagon!

Except that’s not true. The BOLO alert (“be on the lookout”) put out by the Naval Investigation Service identified a “a brown or green Ford or Mercury station wagon with woodgrain on the sides.”

Bazelon:

“When the investigators began interrogating him, Mr. Alley, who had been drinking, denied knowing anything about Lance Corporal Collins and asked for a lawyer. But 12 hours later, he signed a statement confessing to the murder.”

Times’ readers are supposed to think these backwoods Nazis interrogated Alley without a lawyer for 12 hours until he confessed!

In fact, the only reason he signed a statement “12 hours later” was that, after being questioned the night of the crime, he was sent home. Alley wasn’t arrested until after Collins’ body was discovered the next day, whereupon he quickly confessed.

Bazelon:

“Mr. Alley’s admission, which he later said was false and coerced …”

Yes, “later” in the sense of “20 years later.” For two decades, Alley never denied he’d murdered Collins. He only recalled that his confession was “coerced” in 2004, when he was trying to delay the hangman’s noose.

Bazelon:

“But the location he gave for the collision didn’t line up with the witness accounts.”

There were no “witness accounts” for “the collision” for the simple reason that there was no collision. “My car hit her by accident” was Alley’s attempt to mitigate his barbarous crime.

You know what else, Emily? His car wasn’t seen driving in the direction of the hospital, either!

Somehow, his lies not matching the facts is supposed to be a point in Alley’s favor.

Bazelon:

“[Alley’s confession] did not match the physical evidence. … He said he … stabbed her with a screwdriver and killed her with a tree branch. … And the autopsy report showed that Lance Corporal Collins was not hit by a car nor stabbed with a screwdriver.”

Again: There was no collision.

I’m not sure what Bazelon’s point is about the screwdriver and the tree branch, but here’s the evidence presented at trial:

“The pathologist, Dr. James Bell, testified that the cause of death was multiple injuries, [many] of which could have been fatal. … He testified that the injuries to the skull could have been inflicted by the rounded end of defendant’s screwdriver that was found near the scene … He identified the tree branch that was inserted into the victim’s body. It measured 31 inches in length and had been inserted into the body more than once, to a depth of twenty inches …”

Bazelon:

“Tire tracks found at the crime scene didn’t match Mr. Alley’s car, shoe prints didn’t match his shoes, and a third witness who saw a man with a station wagon, close to where Lance Corporal Collins was killed, described someone who was several inches shorter than Mr. Alley, with a different hair color.”

Times readers are perfectly prepared to believe that a jury of toothless hicks looked at evidence overwhelmingly clearing Alley and convicted him anyway.

But that didn’t happen, because having seen the evidence for themselves, Alley and his lawyer decided his best course was to admit he did it and plead insanity. All this alleged evidence is post-hoc nonsense invented by defense lawyers that has not been admitted under the rules of evidence, has not been subjected to cross-examination, and would not prove his innocence.

Seventy-five years and counting with no credible evidence that a single innocent person has been put to death in America.

Trump is not going to run again anyway. In four years, he will be as viable a presidential candidate as Hillary was in 2020. You wouldn’t have guessed that, either, from all the gnashing of teeth about the MOST QUALIFIED WOMAN EVER TO SEEK THE PRESIDENCY immediately after she lost.

The reason elected Republicans, Fox News, OAN, Newsmax and a hundred talk radio hosts are terrified of supporting conviction is that they don’t want to look like Mitt Romney and incur the wrath of the Trump base (whatever remains of it).

Trading conviction for a wall solves that. It will remind Trump loyalists that he betrayed them on his central campaign promise, and also will actually fulfill that promise.

Democrats, if they have half a brain, will leap at the offer. They are about to destroy Biden’s presidency by defining themselves — as The New York Times’ Frank Bruni put it — as “antonyms to Trump.” Trump was for a wall. Ipso facto, Democrats are for open borders.

Trump was lying, liberals! Even President Obama was for border security. Great socialist hope Bernie Sanders has denounced open borders as a gift to the Koch brothers.

They don’t care. Trump supporters wanted a wall, so we’re going to punish them by throwing open the border!

If Biden continues with his tsunami of open border executive orders: 1) COVID-19 cases will multiply, as untested, unvaccinated third-worlders pour in at breakneck speed; 2) Black and Hispanic unemployment will go through the roof; and 3) crime — already reaching mind-blowing proportions — will become as potent a political issue as it has ever been.

Good luck in 2022, Democrats!

But if Democrats were to trade wall funding for the holy grail of a Trump conviction, they could save Biden’s presidency, humiliate Trump, and explain to their nut base, We know, we know — walls don’t work — but we had to trade it to convict Trump! Aren’t you happy?

It’s win-win-win all around.

Sitting on a nation-unifying idea like that, I never should have tuned into the impeachment trial. I knew the Democrats would somehow manage to turn me against conviction. I’m still not pro-Trump — that’s a tall order. But could Democrats please ease up on the hysterical weeping?

The president is not supposed to be organizing protests at all, much less against his own vice president. Isn’t that enough? You don’t need to juice up the story, Democrats.

Impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin:

“All around me, people were calling their wives and their husbands, their loved ones to say goodbye ….

“[My] kids, hiding under the desk, placing what they thought were their final texts and whispered phone calls to say their goodbyes. They thought they were going to die.”

Yes, being forced to listen to the Trump “shaman” gas on about organic food could have annihilated legions!

Trump is a selfish, ignorant child. But he is not responsible for the reactions of neurotic liberals.

It would be as if Raskin’s neighbor smashed into his parked car, then drove off. Raskin has a perfectly good case without having to wail, I WAS AFRAID HE WOULD COME TO MY HOUSE AND MURDER MY ENTIRE FAMILY!

Raskin’s most precious argument was this:

“Of all the terrible, brutal things I saw … watching someone use an American flagpole, the flag still on it, to spear and pummel one of our police officers ruthlessly, mercilessly, tortured by a pole with a flag on it that he was defending with his very life.”

First, give me a break, Democrats, pretending to give a crap about the American flag.

Second: “Tortured”?

Impeachment managers apparently used a thesaurus to write their speeches:

Siri, give me a synonym for “poke” or “strike.”
Siri: jab, punch, prod, thrust, wallop … TORTURE.
Really?
Yup, it’s right there in Roget’s!

Curiously, even the teary-eyed Raskin didn’t allege that Officer Brian Sicknick was killed by the protesters, a claim being made hourly on MSNBC.

Raskin: “People died that day. Officers ended up with head damage and brain damage. People’s eyes were gouged. One officer had a heart attack. One officer lost three fingers that day. Two officers have taken their own lives.”

Jeremy Bash, later that day on MSNBC: “They killed a cop, Nicole!”

If Officer Sicknick’s death truly resulted from injuries sustained at the hands of the mob, it would be the case in chief against the protesters. (We’re not counting heart attacks, much less suicides that occurred days, or weeks, later.) But no one in the media has been able to scare up a single eyewitness to the attack on Brian Sicknick?

Unlike defund-the-police liberals, I actually am heartbroken about the death of a Trump-supporting law enforcement officer.

But the media are lying about his death. First, they claimed he was hit on the head with a fire extinguisher. Then they said he was dragged into the crowd and beaten. All that is known for sure is that after Sicknick returned to headquarters, he collapsed and later died.

Last week, CNN nonchalantly inserted this into a story on Officer Sicknick: “Medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.”

There’s no hope for our media, who are irredeemable liars. But there’s still a chance for everyone else to come out a winner here! Trade conviction for a wall, Republicans.

To review, this included shoeprint evidence, footprint evidence, cigarette and tobacco evidence, blood evidence and DNA evidence, proving that this violent rapist and mental hospital escapee:

— hid out in a house next to Doug and Peggy Ryen’s Chino Hills, California, home for two days after escaping from prison;

— used a hatchet and hunting knife taken from his hideout to hack to death two adults and two children at the Ryen home and critically wound a third child;

— stole the family’s station wagon and later abandoned it in Long Beach, along with his DNA on prison-issued cigarettes, before escaping to Mexico;

— returned to California, where he raped a woman at knifepoint, leading to his capture.

This week, we’ll consider the specific claims made by The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof purporting to raise doubts about Cooper’s guilt.

Kristof’s special pleading proves that no one on death row is innocent. I didn’t pick this case. The anti-death penalty zealots picked it, splashing it across the “Newspaper of Record.” I have to believe they didn’t choose their worst example to showcase, so let’s look at the honesty of their arguments about Kevin Cooper.

KRISTOF:

“Although Josh [the 8-year-old who miraculously survived the hatchet attack] had indicated that the attack was committed by several white men, the sheriff announced just four days after the bodies were found that the sole suspect was Kevin Cooper …”

First of all, eyewitness testimony is the least credible evidence, particularly in the case of children — as the child molestation hysteria of the 1980s demonstrated — and even more particularly in the case of a child who’s found lying in a bloody mess surrounded by his murdered family members after having his throat slit and being attacked with a hatchet.

In any event, Josh never said he saw three men. He said he initially “thought” it must have been the three “Mexicans” who had stopped by the house looking for work earlier in the evening. But even in his initial interviews from his hospital bed, he said he only saw one assailant in the house: “a man with bushy hair.”

KRISTOF:

“Sadly, a tan T-shirt believed to have been worn by one of the killers didn’t produce enough DNA to provide a profile. …”

That IS sad. Luckily, it’s also not true. The Department of Justice DNA lab at UC Berkeley did find Cooper’s DNA on the tan T-shirt discarded near the murder house, which also contained partial DNA profiles of two of the victims, Doug and Peggy Ryen.

KRISTOF:

“Could the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office really have planted evidence, including placing Cooper’s blood on the tan T-shirt? We do know that the sheriff’s office had a history of going rogue. Floyd Tidwell, the sheriff, was himself later convicted of four felony counts for stealing 523 guns from the evidence room” … [further denunciations of the sheriff’s department].

The “planted evidence” ruse is a popular one for springing murderers, except — oops! — the T-shirt tested by the Berkeley DNA lab wasn’t in the possession of the sheriff’s office. The tan T-shirt, along with the cigarette butts from the Ryens’ station wagon, had been in the custody of the San Diego Superior Court Evidence Clerk from the end of the trial right up until 2001, when they were shipped directly to the Berkeley DNA Laboratory for testing.

KRISTOF:

“Likewise, hairs found clutched in the victims’ hands weren’t Cooper’s (no hairs from an African-American were found at the crime scene) but didn’t lead to a match with a suspect, either.”

While I love the idea of a 10-year-old girl ripping an African American’s hair out by the root as he came at her with a hatchet, the “clutched hair” nonsense has already been thoroughly investigated and dismissed by the courts.

A team of DNA experts spent weeks testing hairs from Jessica’s hands, as well as two hairs found on Doug Ryen’s right hand and one hair from Christopher Hughes’ arm. Their conclusion? “The testing failed to identify another assailant and confirmed that all tested hairs most likely came from one or more of the victims.”

As U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn L. Huff explained:

“This should not be surprising. The hairs adhered to the victims’ bodies, including their hands, because there was a large amount of blood on the victims and a large amount of hair on the debris-ridden carpet. Also, the victims each sustained hatchet wounds to the head, causing clumps of cut hair to fall to the ground. Both animal and human hair were recovered from the hands of the victims. Just as with the animal hairs, the cut and shed human hairs adhered to the bloodied victims’ hands because the victims came in contact with the carpet when they were dying on the floor.”

Finally, Kristof tries to pin the murder on other “suspects” (whom we know aren’t guilty or he’d be defending them).

KRISTOF:

“A different longtime suspect in the case recounted, not long after the murders, how he had killed the Ryens and Chris Hughes.”

I guess “confessions” are only questionable in the case of the Central Park rapists. Kristof doesn’t say who the confessor is specifically, but it sounds like the one repeatedly put forward by Cooper’s lawyers. Courts have characterized this so-called “confession” as “a mental patient’s secondhand version of a confession.”

KRISTOF:

“This other suspect is a white man whom I’ll identify just by his first name, Lee, for he must be presumed innocent …

“Lee came to the attention of the authorities during the investigation after his girlfriend, Diana Roper, fingered him as the killer: She reported that he had returned home late on the night of the killings wearing bloody coveralls, in a car that resembled the Ryens’ station wagon.

“Roper turned Lee’s bloody coveralls over to the sheriff’s office — which eventually threw them away without testing them. By then, the sheriff’s office had arrested Cooper, and deputies didn’t want a complication.”

Don’t be fooled by Kristof’s fake humility — “he must be presumed innocent” — all that blather about what Roper said was invented by defense attorneys.

Roper was not technically Lee’s “girlfriend”: She was his bitter ex. Far from “bloody,” the few red splotches on the coveralls were most likely paint (along with manure and dirt). Roper told investigators that she didn’t even know if the coveralls belonged to Lee.

But let me quote from the court that reviewed the coveralls evidence: “[I]ssues of guilt, innocence and sentence should never be decided on information obtained from persons who believe they are witches and believe an article of clothing is connected to a crime because of a ‘vision’ they receive during a ‘trance.'” (Emphasis mine.)

Yes, Roper’s evidence was based on a vision she had during a trance because she believed she was a witch. These facts are exhaustively detailed in court orders and opinions — but are entirely absent from the vast news coverage of Cooper’s case. Might distract from the claim that the sheriff’s office tossed the coveralls only to avoid “a complication” in their single-minded pursuit of the wrong man — as Kristof claims.

No one on death row, not one person, is innocent. Believe nothing you read in the media about their putative “innocence.” It’s always lies and nonsense, as with Kristof’s pet murderer, Kevin Cooper.