Summer of Murder, Mayhem, and Madness

Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday the 7^th day of August 2020.¹ Which means that this week I just passed my tenth anniversary of doing the Castle Report. Ten years and more than 800 Reports later I am still doing them each week. This week the Castle Family is doing fine with no positive tests for the virus. The family daughter remains on her small island and is pretty good now at opening coconuts with a machete.

Summer of murder marks author’s 72^nd birthday

Here in the USA I am now headed toward my 72^nd birthday which will occur in October or about 2 and ½ months from now. I mention my age only for the purpose of emphasizing how precious each moment of life is. This is one of the summers that I have been allotted by God to have and it has been lost. It was taken from me by the:

1. Virus,
2. Response to the virus, and
3. Summer of madness, created for the most part by politicians and their cohorts.

Mayor of Seattle confuses summer of love with summer of murder

Reality, however, is not always what I would like it to be. But in any case, I must deal with it as it is, not as I would like it to be. The summer of love as Seattle mayor Jenny Durkin described it,² looks a lot like the summer of murder and mayhem. The murder rate in America’s cities has skyrocketed since Democrat Mayors:

1. Declared the summer of love, and
2. Set about abolishing or defunding their police departments.

Murder replaces the virus

It all makes me nostalgic for the good old days of March and April. Then, all we had to worry about was dying from the virus. The defund the police movement apparently doesn’t sit well with the average American. But murderers, carjackers, and street thugs seem quite enamored with it. Politicians who lead movements to defund or abolish the police apparently know nothing of human nature. Furthermore, they seem to have trouble understanding that without police we are all nothing but a locked and loaded mob fighting for survival.³

Summer of murder examples: Chicago …

In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot again blamed the increased murder rate on guns from non-gun law states. As if the street thugs and lack of law enforcement have nothing to do with it! I don’t want to hammer Chicago too badly this week since I do it each week. But its hard when a city has 107 murders in a single month and the mayor just shrugs and says, well its not my fault, its all those guns. It’s more than murder though, mayor. It’s also carjackings, street robberies, and armed assaults all soaring.

… and New York …

New York City just cut one billion dollars from the police budget thanks to Mayor De Blasio. And for June gun violence went up 130%. The number of shootings rose in every borough, and the number of people dying from murder rose by 30% citywide. Burglaries went up 118% and auto thefts went up 51%. So all types of criminals are on the defund movement train. I wonder whether the victims of De Blasio’s defund movement will get any of the billion dollars he cut from the police budget. Probably not.

… and Minneapolis

In the once great progressive city of Minneapolis, we find ground zero of the defund movement. The city council just voted 12-0 to completely abolish the police force.⁴ Minneapolis crime numbers are climbing to get into the New York and Chicago status. Homicides, street robberies and assaults, and carjackings are all soaring in numbers. Only 15% of Americans polled said they favor defunding the police. But unfortunately those people don’t run any of our Democrat cities. Who cares what taxpaying citizens want when you have a woke army in charge?

Summer of murder – and summer of surrender

In the third precinct of Minneapolis where most of the violence occurred, more than 100 robberies and 20 carjackings were reported to the police in the last month. Then the police spokesman made a very helpful suggestion for the residents of his city. Prepare to be robbed and carjacked, he said. Prepare to lose your cellphone and purse so don’t carry much money. That’s the Minneapolis, progressive way I guess. But here in the south the advice would probably have been different. I can imagine a sheriff advising his citizens to arm yourselves and prepare to defend your lives.⁵ Here in the south we try not to look at each other as sheep to be sheared, but as fellow residents who have a right and duty to defend ourselves and our families.⁶

Other cities do the same

Most large Democrat cities have followed the lead of Minneapolis and given themselves over completely to the mob. To appeal to the new woke mob the Democrats must keep going further and further to the left. When you think it can’t get any worse, any more insane, you are wrong because it always does. It always will until we the people finally decide that it has reached bottom.

Leading to the summer of murder – the pressure groups

Minneapolis then, has given itself to the mob led by pressure from:

• Radical leftists,
• Communist revolutionaries,
• Criminals,
• Hollywood celebrities, and
• Much of the media.

Demands of the mob give city governments a way to explain the deteriorating conditions in their cities such as:

• Rising crime,
• Plummeting education results, and
• Deteriorating infrastructure

that is “not their fault.” Those things which are primarily indicative of large Democrat run cities can all be explained by blaming their failure on:

• White supremacy,
• Racial injustice, or
• Some other such woke mob nonsense that might get them through one more election.

City governments allow the summer of murder …

Governments do their residents no favor by such attitudes. If they would be honest with people, they could tell them the truth and that is that it will take proactive police work, which will occasionally make mistakes, in order to reverse this downward spiral. The residents of our cities will have to start voting for full grown adults to exercise government authority. That means people with the courage to do what it takes to protect their residents. Isn’t that what some of the extremely high property taxes that many of us pay are supposed to be for?

What kind of government:

• Takes the fruits of peoples’ labor as a tax on property they already own, and then
• Returns nothing to them except accusations of racial injustice?

Why, the governments of most of the once great cities of this country of course.

… and take no responsibility

The media and the elite of Hollywood are no help because they are always protected and sheltered from the harm they cause. They are free to suggest and demand policies that are ruinous for the average city resident but does not affect them at all.

Police are now left with few options. Except to tell people to surrender their property and hope the criminal doesn’t kill them anyway.

Wait! George Floyd did not die of an act of murder

I wonder what will happen when the four police officers who will stand trial for murder in the death of George Floyd win release from custody. As they will eventually, most likely. Why? Because It’s hard to convict someone of murder when there was no murder. A judge ordered the release of the full video plus enhanced audio from the arrest. And that, together with the medical examiner’s report make it obvious that George Floyd’s death was more in the nature of accidental suicide than murder. His cause of death was apparently a drug overdose caused heart attack and not murder.

But does that matter?

That may or may not matter to people around the country who are constantly programmed to believe certain things no matter what the evidence reveals. But prosecutors have to have evidence to convict and it doesn’t appear that evidence of murder is there. So, we will prepare for another long hot time in this country when those four officers win release. The citizens of Minneapolis should prepare for mayhem in any event, because the police have given up there. Criminals run the city, not the government. But at least the city council members have private security at taxpayer expense.

The President wouldn’t pay for the Minneapolis summer of murder

The rioters and looters burned much of the city of Minneapolis, at least a 3 mile stretch of it.⁷ The Democrat governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, even though he did nothing to quell the riots, thinks that it would be a good idea for the rest of us who pay taxes in this country to pay to repair what he allowed to burn. He asked the federal government for disaster aid to repair the damage from looting and rioting. But President Trump, to his credit, said no you bought it and you can pay for it.

From summer of murder to summer of profligacy

The federal government has its own set of troubles right now in trying to deal with the economic fallout from the virus lockdown and resulting economic destruction. In the second quarter of this year the economy contracted by about one third. That’s the largest amount in one quarter in history. In one three month period the United States produced one third less than before. It’s a staggering amount and won’t be sustainable for long.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and SpaceX, put it well when he said:

If you don’t make stuff, there is no stuff.

That is well said. Because GDP is what the country produces for sale in each time period. When not enough stuff is being produced, the government tries to replace the stuff with government spending. So, the people in charge of the government, believe that they have no choice but to give away money they don’t have, to people they put out of work with their lockdown policies.

Miracle money?

It seems like quite a miraculous system, this transfer program. Because although money is being transferred, no one seems to miss it. There was a time before the gold standard was lifted in 1971 that Americans earned at least 90% of what they received. But by 2019 some government program or other transferred one third to them. When a person works and makes stuff, we have stuff to buy and stuff to sell. But a transfer from the government is dead nonproductive money.

All this transferring of money takes away from saving in favor of borrowing. A reliance on credit has changed the just in case savings to just in case borrowing. So we rely on government transfer non-money to fund our steadily accumulating debt load. Can’t or don’t want to pay your mortgage or rent this month? Don’t worry about it the government won’t let them foreclose or evict. Lost your job? Don’t worry about it; the government will transfer more than you earned working.⁸

Summer of murder – because the loonies run the asylum

Now back to our cities for just a moment. It seems that they are being run by deranged groups of radicals unrestrained by anyone including politicians and even encouraged by them and the media.

The police forces are no longer reliable since they are demoralized and passive. So, our choice is to gun up and get ready for the chaos coming in the cities. Quite on cue, thieves stole more than 1000 guns from gun shops in one July week.

The police exist only to clean up afterward

In the best of circumstances, the police act like janitors who come to clean up the mess and act as a partial deterrent. They are there to protect criminals from us to ensure they receive due process rather than what they deserve. If not for the police, we would have to confront violent criminals on our own and take responsibility for our own lives. The people causing these defund movements and demoralizing those who go out each day to risk their lives to maintain order are so often not those at the mercy of violent criminals. They remain safe behind their walls with their private security forces.

Finally, folks, is this really the kind of society we want to live in? All my life certain people, usually politicians, have been working night and day to make peace of mind for the people under their bootheel impossible. Maybe we could get along without them.

At least that’s the way I see it.

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle.

About the image

“Cub Foods Damage – Minneapolis Riots” by Tony Webster is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Editor’s Notes

1 As ever, CNAV received this radio transcript for editing three days after broadcast; hence the discrepancy in dates.

2 Her Honor might have borrowed that phrase from the hippie concert in Haight-Asbury, San Francisco, Calif. in 1967. If so, she forgot about the other meaning of the summer of 1967, the Long, Hot Summer. The riots she tolerated in her city far more closely resemble the latter event than the former.

3 See the obvious reference: Hobbes T., The Leviathan. In it Hobbes described the natural state of humans as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

4 Not so fast! The Minneapolis Charter Commission voted not to place the charter amendment proposal on the ballot.

5 The sheriff of Polk County, Florida said just that. So also have several other sheriffs, including one in Ohio.

6 Residents of Portland, Ore. and Seattle, Wash. are voting with their feet. According to this video, moving truck rentals tell the tale. One-way inbound rentals do not exist. So one-way outbound renters must pay extra for deadhead caravans to supply the moving-truck dealers. This sort of thing happened once before, to Houston, Texas in 1986.

7 And killed a man trying to defend his business. Arson investigators found his remains.

8 Frances Fox Piven must be waxing ecstatic whenever she visits the grave of her late husband, Richard A. Cloward. They proposed a regime quite similar to this!