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As radical leftists attempt to create a utopian “police-free future” society and defund law enforcement across the country, terrified African Americans interested in buying guns have soared in the age of social unrest. 

The conversation about gun ownership among black folks emerged in early May when five armed men escorted African American State Representative Sarah Anthony from the Michigan State Capitol building following armed pro-Trump protesters gathered in the area for anti-quarantine demonstrations. 

In fact, in the age of President Trump, firearm retailers across the nation have reported a rise in the number of African Americans interested in purchasing guns. As of recent, especially with social unrest across many inner cities, and now, radical leftists are attempting to defund and disband police forces, gun ownership among blacks is quickly gaining popularity, which could prove disastrous for anti-gun Democrats come election season. 

The National African American Gun Association (NAAGA) has also reported an “explosion in the number of black gun owners nationwide,” said The Daily Beast. 

NAAGA started with one chapter in Atlanta in 2015 and now has over 100 chapters nationwide and 40,000 gun-toting members. The group said more than 10,000 of the members joined this year alone. 

Philip Smith, the president and founder of NAAGA, has been shocked by all the new growth in members. 

“Today, we’re getting so many different types of folks,” Smith told The Daily Beast. “Doctors, engineers, unemployed state workers, federal workers, policemen, military. We even have white, Latino, and Asian members. You can be gay, straight, loud, quiet, dorky, rich, or poor.” 

In early March, Asian-Americans were panic hoarding weapons and ammo in California as many feared the pandemic would trigger social unrest. 

Rik Stevenson, founder of the NAAGA chapter in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and now a Gainesville, Florida resident and teacher at the University of Florida, said, “black people are seeing that they are targets,” which is one of the main reasons the group has gained so much popularity, as of recent.  

Stevenson said he never expected to be a gun owner, but now he’s packing a “Glock 23.”

Mel Atkins, a firearms instructor and deputy for the Kent County Sheriff’s Department in Michigan, said expanding the gun culture to his community has been transformative. Atkins owns 30 guns and considers himself the lone black guy with guns in Michigan. 

“Black people still aren’t very social about their firearms,” Atkins told The Daily Beast. “Our state (Michigan) allows me to walk around with a firearm on my hip or strung across my shoulder as long as it’s visible to everybody. Black people never do that. Only damn fools and maybe some Republicans ever do that. And black gun owners are very quiet about it, because historically a black gun owner could get in trouble for it. There’s that stigma attached to it, that I’m going to get hassled by law enforcement for the mere possession of a firearm.” 

Black folks interested in purchasing guns before this year’s chaos was a well-defined trend. But now, more than ever, these folks are arming themselves as they see their communities, already devastated from decades of wealth inequality, on the brink of even more disaster as social unrest, the disintegration of law and order, and high unemployed could result in a turbulent period where a firearm is a necessity for survival. 

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told people Sunday to avoid using weapons in self-defense and call the police…  

Chicago Mayor tells citizens to not use guns to defend themselves during riots…urges them to call police instead

ha… pic.twitter.com/yaIJ3f0cyx

— Lola Netty (@TXTrumpette89) June 7, 2020

Folks in inner cities see the writing on the wall. Their politicians, mainly anti-law liberals, are pushing hard to collapse America’s police forces, which would transform communities into lawless warzones where gang warfare would dominate the streets (already happening in Baltimore City and Chicago). The push for guns by black residents is the result of America’s inner cities imploding. It’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. 

Authored by Alex Kimani via OilPrice.com,

When public oil and gas companies are doing relatively well, many are happy to adopt a pay-for-performance model to reward CEOs and executives.

However, the tables are quickly turned when things go to the dogs. When these companies go bankrupt, the misery is shared by employees who lose their jobs; retirees see their benefits and pensions go up in smoke, while shareholders and bondholders get wiped out. In sharp contrast, it’s very common for blue-chip executives who have run their companies to the ground to receive multi-million dollar golden sendoffs. Indeed, top executives of oil and gas companies going through Chapter 11 frequently receive very fat payouts in the form of cash bonuses, stock grants, and other benefits that often exceed payments during the good times.

It’s not any different this time around. 

At a time when hundreds of thousands of employees in the U.S. shale industry have lost their jobs, Bloomberg has reported that some 35 executives at Whiting Petroleum Inc.(NYSE:WLL), Chesapeake Energy Corp.(NYSE:CHK) and Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc.(OTCMKTS: DOFSQ) are set to receive nearly $50 million after their companies declared bankruptcy or are on the verge of doing so.

Rewarding Failure

It’s the manner in which these head honchos continue to award themselves fat bonuses despite federal legislation to crack down on the practice that really grates.

The board at Whiting, an oil and gas producer that filed for Chapter 11 in April, approved a $6.4M bonus for CEO Brad Holly just days before the company went under, exceeding his previous annual compensation package by nearly a million dollars.

In May, California Resources Corp. (NYSE:CRC) warned investors about “…a substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern…” but still went ahead and guaranteed company executives their 2020 bonuses.

So, what’s the justification for this egregious, bizarre, and perverse practice? 

According to Kelly Mitchell, an analyst at corporate watchdog group Documented, companies do it so as to incentivize these executives to stick around because they understand the company better and, ostensibly, have better odds of pulling them through. Never mind the fact that their decisions are very often to blame for the company’s sad situation in the first place. They also do it in a bid to cut costs and maximize value for creditors using tools such as tax credits or untapped resources.

No Accountability

You could argue that this practice is not unique to the energy industry and is, in fact, common in corporate America–and you would be right. 

Last year, former Equifax CEO Richard Smith, walked away with a very generous ~$19.6 million in stock bonuses, $24-million pension and $50,000 in tax and financial planning services after the credit agency suffered one of the worst data breaches in the history of the U.S. Interestingly, none of Smith’s compensation was docked under the company’s clawback provision meant to hold top executives accountable for their actions or inactions, which was negligence in this case. 

In 2014, American retailing giant, Target Corp., paid ex-CEO Steinhafel more than $30 million after he handed in his resignation following another massive hacking attack that saw millions of customers’ personal records stolen.

You can also rationalize that energy executives are not individually responsible for the oil price collapse that has adversely impacted their companies (though they share collective responsibility for the overproduction that triggered the collapse).

But whichever way you slice it, it’s clear that oil and gas companies go too far with their bonus payments to executives. Over the past decade, the leaders of 15 large E&P companies collected more than US$2 billion in aggregate compensation despite their companies posting total returns of -15% compared to a 150% gain by the S&P 500 Index over the timeframe.

It’s hard to justify the hefty rewards being awarded to executives of fallen energy companies. In the case of Equifax and Target, their respective stocks did suffer big selloffs after the hacks but quickly recovered and have actually outperformed their peers by quite a wide margin since the events. In contrast, WLL shares are down 89% in the year-to-date; CRC has lost 83.5%, CHK has returned -91.5% while DOFSQ is down 95% YTD, much worse compared to the sector benchmark, XLE, which is down a more modest 30.5% YTD. Bloomberg has reported that energy companies use their peers, not the broad market, as the benchmark, and executives of companies that perform less badly than others tend to be rewarded–bankruptcy is the ultimate underperformance, meaning these guys should not be getting such huge bonuses.

Energy companies need to have some level of accountability for their executives when things go awry. They have a willing accomplice, though. According to Patrick Hughes, judges tend to sign off on these fat payouts more often than not despite laws introduced in 2005 to limit their size.

Significant spikes in hospital traffic and Baidu internet searches for terms related to COVID-19 suggest that the virus hit Wuhan, China “beginning in late Summer and early Fall 2019,” according to a new study by Harvard Medical School. 

Commercial satellite imagery reveal “a dramatic increase in hospital traffic outside five major Wuhan hospitals beginning late summer and early fall 2019,” according to Harvard’s Dr. John Brownstein who led the research, adding that the increase in traffic “coincided with” increased queries on Chinese search engine Baidu for “certain symptoms that would later be determined as closely associated with the novel coronavirus.”

According to ABC News, Brownstein says that the study provides an important new data point regarding the origins of COVID-19.

Brownstein and his team, which included researchers from Boston University and Boston Children’s Hospital, have spent more than a month trying to pin down the signs for when the population of Hubei province in China first started to be stricken.

The logic of Brownstein’s research project was straightforward: respiratory diseases lead to very specific types of behavior in communities where they’re spreading. So, pictures that show those patterns of behavior could help explain what was happening even if the people who were sickened did not realize the broader problem at the time. –ABC News

“Something was happening in October,” said Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and the director of the medical center’s Computational Epidemiology Lab. “Clearly, there was some level of social disruption taking place well before what was previously identified as the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic.”

“What we’re trying to do is look at the activity, how busy a hospital is,” Brownstein added. “And the way we do that is by counting the cars that are at that hospital. Parking lots will get full as a hospital gets busy. So more cars in a hospital, the hospital’s busier, likely because something’s happening in the community, an infection is growing and people have to see a doctor. So you see the increases in the hospital business through the cars… We saw this across multiple institutions.”

Other hospitals showed up to a 90% increase when comparing traffic between fall of 2018 and 2019, according to the study. At Wuhan Tongji Medical University, the spike in car traffic was found to have occurred in mid-September 2019.

To ensure they were not reaching faulty conclusions, researchers said they took into account everything that could explain away traffic surges — from large public gatherings to the possibility of new construction at the hospitals. Still, they said they found statistically significant increases in the numbers of cars present. –ABC News

“If you look at all of the images, observations we’ve ever had of all of these locations since 2018, almost all of the highest car counts are all in the September through December 2019 time frame,” said RS Metrics CEO Tom Diamond, who worked with Brownstein’s team.

Of note, Chinese officials in Wuhan only confirmed cases of pneumonia of ‘unknown cause’ on December 31, however US intelligence officials knew about it as early as late November and notified the Pentagon, according to the report, citing four sources briefed on the confidential information.

Since emerging from Wuhan, COVID-19 has officially infected over 7 million people worldwide and killed over 400,000 according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.

Brownstein says that the traffic figures – while not conclusive, are telling.

“This is all about a growing body of information pointing to something taking place in Wuhan at the time,” he said. “Many studies are still needed to fully uncover what took place and for people to really learn about how these disease outbreaks unfold and emerge in populations. So this is just another point of evidence.”

Internet searches in the Wuhan region, meanwhile, surged for terms such as “cough” and “diarrhea.”

“While queries of the respiratory symptom ‘cough’ show seasonal fluctuations coinciding with yearly influenza seasons, ‘diarrhea’ is a more COVID-19-specific symptom and only shows an association with the current epidemic,” according to the study. “The increase of both signals precede the documented start of the COVID-19 pandemic in December.”

The ABC News report then quotes Peter Daszak – president of EcoHealth Alliance in Mahnattan – which notably had its funding pulled by the NIH when it was revealed that they were providing US funds for bat coronavirus research in Wuhan.

Daszak called the Harvard study “absolutely fascinating,” adding “You need to look at every possible bit of evidence, where it came from and when it emerged.”

“When we do analysis after outbreaks, we find that the diseases had been in circulation days, weeks, months, years before. I really believe that’s what we’re going to find with COVID-19.”

Spoken like a guy with a vested interest in the ‘natural origin’ theory that coronavirus emerged from an animal intermediary – and not the lab his organization was funding.

“We’ve done previous studies where we could show that what people search for online is an indicator of disease in the population,” Brownstein said. “And we actually saw people searching for symptoms that might be related to COVID: diarrheal disease, cough. That was even starting as early as late summer.

“Now, we can’t confirm 100% what the virus was that was causing this illness and what was causing this business in hospitals,” Brownstein said. “But something was going on that looked very different than any other time that we had looked at.”

Read the rest of the report here.

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?”

The line is from William Golding’s classic novel “Lord of the Flies,” but it might as well be emblazoned on the forehead of every American after last week — just as it universally must be asked of every person who is tasked with choosing between order and chaos.

The policeman who put his knee on George Floyd’s throat failed the test for humanity. His haughty disregard for Floyd’s precious life was more akin to the instinctive calm of an apex predator than to a civilized human being. It is no wonder that he provoked an angry response from not only the black community in Minneapolis but from the entire country, yet when protest morphed into riot it behooved everyone to ask of themselves — not of someone else — “What are we?”

Instead, many were asking a different question: “Who can we blame?”

Behind their convenient COVID-19 masks, people were able to disguise their shame and unloose their inner demons.

The parallels to “Lord of the Flies” were obvious as I watched America’s cities reenact the paranoia and tribalism that infected the novel’s disparate group of British school boys who found themselves stranded without parental supervision on an island following a plane crash. Their initial attempts to establish order eventually gave way to score-settling and a realization that power is not necessarily a function of righteousness.

“The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.”

That’s what happened in America last week when mob violence replaced police as the standard of authority.

When you saw white people taking a knee to prostrate themselves before looters and to renounce their “white privilege,” you also saw parallels to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Hitler’s Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

The Cultural Revolution began with an attack on the old order, the old “privilege” represented by shop owners and college professors. To avoid the mob’s rage, the victims were forced to humiliate themselves publicly and to utter self-denunciations, to confess their “crimes” against the mob’s ideology. But there was no escaping the demented wrath of the self-anointed protectors of virtue. Eventually millions of those intellectuals and entrepreneurs were put to death — sometimes buried up to their necks so that they could continue to abase themselves until their final breath.

Kristallnacht is the name given to a pogrom carried out against Jewish shops, homes, cemeteries and synagogues in November 1938 by Nazi paramilitaries known as Brownshirts. They were an exact parallel of the black-garbed stormtroopers that ravaged neighborhoods in dozens of U.S. cities the last 10 days or so. Don’t let the name Antifa fool you. These “anti-fascists” have adopted the tactics of the fascists as their own (and even the uniform of the Italian Blackshirts).

Just as Kristallnacht was intended to send a message to Jews, so too were the riots last week intended to send a signal to law-abiding whites. The words that journalist Hugh Greene wrote about Kristallnacht in 1938 could just as easily have been written today about the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd:

“Mob law ruled … throughout this afternoon and evening, and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. … Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people.”

You could make the case that the riots last week represented only a fraction of Americans, whether black or white, and that we should not ascribe too much importance to them. But that was true also in Nazi Germany and Mao’s China. The actual revolutionaries and radicals carrying out the acts of domestic terrorism are always few, but if they are not condemned forcefully and convincingly, then they are emboldened to strike again and again.

So-called “good” Germans celebrated the lawless attacks on Jewish citizens in 1938, giving tacit permission for the death camps that would kill millions. Many in the power structure of the United States are likewise giving a green light to current and future violence by sanctioning riots as “protests” and by excusing looting and murder as a reasonable response to Floyd’s death.

Tucker Carlson, who has become a modern-day Cassandra, warned us that “[w]hat we are watching is not a political protest; it is the opposite of a political protest. It is an attack on the idea of politics. The rioters you have seen are trying to topple our political system. That system is how we resolve our differences without using violence. But these people want a new system, one that is governed by force: Do what we say or we will hurt you!”

The rioting wasn’t about race or justice; it was about power. You saw people beat a woman in Rochester, N.Y., with a two-by-four; smash in the head of a man seeking to defend his store in Dallas; kill a retired 77-year-old policeman in St. Louis who was protecting a friend’s pawnshop; burn and destroy thousands of stores; and loot everything from Rolex watches to automobiles as if they were the Visigoths sacking Rome.

When such wanton destruction is occurring, normal people have no choice against overwhelming force. If there is no army or police force to protect them, they will either die or surrender and hope that obsequious fawning will buy them — or at least their families — safety. Perhaps that survival instinct is what has led our governing class to kowtow to the looters. The Democratic Party of Fairfax, Virginia, tweeted, “Riots are an integral part of this country’s march toward progress.” Hillary Clinton’s former spokesperson Brian Fallon sent a message to “Defund the police” – as if a nation without police could be anything but a barbaric lawless mess.

If you want more dead George Floyds, take away the police and the justice system and you will have thousands of them, ultimately millions. The point that the rioters and their enablers miss is that when police become criminals, there is a way to hold them accountable, but when criminals become police, they are a law unto themselves, with no court of appeal and no hope for justice.

Who knows what will happen to people in American cities going forward if they don’t denounce their so-called white privilege and bend a knee to those who have power and are willing to use it? A few boys on the island of “Lord of the Flies” resisted the tyranny of the mob and tried to maintain order by an appeal to reason. One boy, Ralph, had been elected as the group’s leader because he seemed to symbolize decency, kindness and honor. But slowly he was displaced by boys who valued action over honor, power over principle:

“The rules!” shouted Ralph, “you’re breaking the rules!”

“Who cares?” came the response from the children.

If that is the same response we accept from our mayors, our governors, our generals, and our media elites, then we have not only lost our honor; we have lost our country.

It appears the days of “liking the way you look” are over as the forced work-from-home lockdowns mean the average working man in America is now only visible from the shoulder up on his Zoom calls.

This new normal of (in)formal meetings seems to have been the last nail in the coffin of America’s most iconic menswear retailers as Men’s Wearhouse and Brooks Brothers are reportedly preparing for bankruptcy.

NJ.com reports that the 202 year-old clothing retailer Brooks Brothers is in talks with banks about raising financing for a potential Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report by CNBC.

Brooks Brothers Chief Executive Claudio Del Vecchio, told The New York Times this week that while he was not “eager” to consider a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, he would not rule it out. 

The bankruptcy filing could come as soon as July, the report said.

Brooks Brothers has more than 250 stores in North America and 500 worldwide.

And Bloomberg has just reported, Tailored Brands Inc., the owner of Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank, is considering a potential bankruptcy after the coronavirus lockdown kept America’s office workers at home, putting a damper on demand for new suits.

The retailer and its advisers have started reaching out to interested parties about reworking its debts of more than $1 billion, Bloomberg reports according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The filings, should they occur, follow other retailers who sell men’s workwear (JCPenney, Neiman Marcus, and J.Crew) who have all filed for bankruptcy during the pandemic.

Of course, given the utter farce we have seen in the stock of bankrupt HTZ and CHK, it’s probably time to buy TLRD stock with both hands and feet…

No, that is not a suggestion, because if it files, it’s a ZERO, “I guarantee it!”

Via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Suddenly there is no talk about coronavirus.

Reputable doctors in Italy, the UK, and elsewhere are claiming the virus hardly exists any longer.

Just over a week ago much of America faced jail if they dared break the “social distancing” rules put in place by tyrannical governors and other public officials. Now tens of thousands gather to protest a police killing with impunity. And the spikes they warned about in areas where restrictions were eased are not happening. So what is happening?

Also, what to make of the Trump/Mattis/Esper spat over US troops deployed against rioters in the US?

Watch today’s Liberty Report: