fox files

Having failed for decades to induce the voting public to back its draconian and unconstitutional agenda, the American gun-control movement has hit upon a pernicious alternative to persuasion and political argument: Fear.

To accomplish their goals of more gun bans and restrictions, gun-control groups are now focused on trying to convince Americans of things that are simply not true. Many in the mainstream media are helping them do this by printing their disinformation with few questions asked.

Thus, it has to come pass that many voters believe the number of crimes committed with firearms has risen over the last 30 years; they believe this even though, in fact, the number has fallen dramatically. This overall decline has occurred as the number of guns in private hands has more than doubled, as the number of concealed carriers has risen to around 20 million and as the laws governing the sale, ownership and use of firearms have been loosened almost everywhere.

Thus, many voters falsely believe that America’s schools were more dangerous in 2019 than they were in 1999, even though the opposite is the case.

Plus, many voters now think mass shootings—which, although devastating, remain mercifully rare—are happening every single day in the United States.

This lattermost lie—that mass shootings are ubiquitous rather than unusual—has gained particular currency since the launch, in 2013, of a shameless propaganda outlet named the “Gun Violence Archive” (GVA). The purpose of this so-called archive is to massively overstate the number of mass shootings and to launder that overstatement through media outlets that favor more gun-control laws.

Unfortunately, the GVA has been somewhat successful in its aim—that success has had disastrous consequences not only for the public’s conception of reality but also for public policy. On the basis of the GVA’s preposterous numbers, the press has been busy convincing children and parents that America’s public schools resemble the O.K. Corral; the mainstream media pushes this narrative even though, in fact, the U.S. is more peaceful than it has been in living memory.

To understand the extraordinary scale of the GVA’s dishonesty, consider that, for the year 2015, it counted 335 mass shootings. The FBI, in contrast, counted six that year. The open-source index kept by the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine counted just seven (and they counted the San Bernardino terrorist attack). As Mark Follman noted in The New York Times in 2015, the number of mass shootings since 1982 was then 73—which means that, by his count, there had been five times fewer incidents over the preceding 33 years than the GVA was claiming had occurred in a single year. In the U.S., a person is about as likely to die in a mass shooting as to be struck by lightning, but one would not know this from listening to the press.

The GVA arrives at its bloated figures by conflating a whole host of different sorts of crimes and pushing them into the same category, which not only gives Americans a false sense of reality—one does not think about a gang fight between criminals being a “mass shooting”—but also makes it much harder to construct countermeasures.

Clearly, not all violence is the same, which is why fighting gangs requires a different approach than does reducing domestic violence; also, preventing robberies necessitates a different set of legal tools than inhibiting terrorism.

By pretending that the rarest and most intractable problem in the U.S. is representative of all the others, the GVA and the mainstream media aren’t helping to solve the problem, but are, in fact, getting in the way. They aren’t just misinforming the public, but are actually hindering a rational search for solutions.

The immediate reaction was telling:

“Michael Bloomberg is making a bet about democracy in 2020—he doesn’t need people, he only needs bags and bags of money,” said one politician at a campaign stop in Iowa.

Another politician put it this way: “What I would say to Michael Bloomberg and other billionaires: ‘Sorry. You ain’t gonna buy this election.’”

Who were these voices criticizing Bloomberg’s intent to buy his way into our homes and the White House? These were not the criticisms of conservative politicians, but Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, respectively. That’s right—you no longer need to take our word for it; even some of the most anti-gun Democrats know the threat that Bloomberg poses to your freedoms in this election.

But how much notoriety can $34 million actually buy a politician in one week? The answer might surprise you. According to one ILA staffer, Bloomberg’s ads weren’t just running on your news stations; the staffer’s 15-year-old son saw more than a half-dozen Bloomberg ads running on YouTube channels aimed at teenage video-game enthusiasts. Think about that, Bloomberg is so desperate to control your freedoms, he’s bombarding teenagers who aren’t even old enough to vote with propaganda about how great he is (and how evil your rights are, of course).

We need no introduction to Mike Bloomberg. As the country’s leading pusher of gun control and spineless politicians, every patriotic supporter of the Second Amendment knows Bloomberg and his elitist agenda. New Yorkers like myself know Bloomberg for the nanny-state nonsense he imposed against large fountain sodas, trans fats and table salt.

My fellow NRA members in Appalachia may better know him for his campaign to close every coal-fired power plant in the United States.

Bloomberg has also wasted little time in announcing how he will restrict our Second Amendment Rights if he wins the White House.

Way to go, Bloomberg—instead of courageously prosecuting actual criminals and creating jobs, you just invented silly new crimes and destroyed American industry.

So how much will Bloomberg spend to restrict your gun rights? $1 million? $5 million? Not even close. He spent tens of millions on soda-tax campaigns across the nation, and he pledged $500 million towards his effort to shut down every coal-fired power plant in the country. Bloomberg has promised to spend “whatever it takes” from his $55 billion personal fortune to control you from our nation’s capital. 

For Bloomberg, pumping millions—and potentially billions—of dollars into his campaign to convince American families of his own greatness is merely pocket change.

Putting aside the acreage of ego that Bloomberg’s effort must require, watching this unfold made me wonder: If Bloomberg is really so “great,” and has such a long track record of “awesomeness,” why does he need to spend a massive fortune now to convince people of it? Wouldn’t all of the good people he supposedly helped already know about his supposed goodness and support him?

As we know, Bloomberg spends money to conceal the bad in order to lie about the good. Consider this fact, Bloomberg’s “straight news” media apparatus just announced that it will not be writing any investigative news pieces on Bloomberg, his family or his businesses. But wait, there’s more—to ensure the uneven playing field on which he relies, Bloomberg’s media outlets have agreed to extend their selective censorship to Bloomberg’s fellow Democrats, while retaining an “open season” against President Trump, conservatives and Republicans. For years, the NRA has warned America’s families about the threat of such oppression and coordination. As Bloomberg’s shenanigans have revealed, that threat is very real.

Here, Democrats and Republicans should agree. Bloomberg’s eagerness to suppress freedom should be disqualifying for reasonable people on both sides of the political aisle. The fact that Bloomberg’s first decision as a candidate for president was to muzzle the press should give any freedom-loving American pause. If candidate Bloomberg was so willing to restrict press freedom on day one, how far will President Bloomberg be willing to go in his war on our civil rights? 

When questioned in a CBS interview about his decision to curtail who and what his personal news outlet could cover, Bloomberg’s answer was simple: “They get a paycheck . . . with your paycheck comes some restrictions and responsibilities.”

As a husband and father, this insight into Bloomberg’s true character was more valuable than any airtime Bloomberg ever purchased. I knew that Bloomberg was an elitist coward who wanted to destroy the Second Amendment, but Bloomberg’s blatant, unrepentant trampling of the First Amendment surprised even me. Let this be another reminder of how entwined our civil liberties are; weakening one link weakens them all.

Fortified by a fawning press, deep pockets and desperate followers, Bloomberg and his armed bodyguards are already flying around in luxury to lecture voters against their gun rights. When he popped into Norfolk, Va., to meet all of the flunkies he funded into office by buying the Virginia elections last year, Bloomberg didn’t even know what city he was in. Poor guy—it must be hard when the “help” doesn’t remind you where your private jet just landed. 

Bloomberg also wasted little time in announcing how he will restrict our Second Amendment rights if he wins the White House.

After hearing them repeated this month, I can tell you this, Bloomberg’s proposals haven’t gotten less crazy with time. He wants to ban the most popular rifle in America and the magazines that many millions of law-abiding Americans use to defend themselves and their families. He wants to impose arbitrary age limits that would prohibit a young woman under 21 from buying a firearm to protect her family, even while her spouse is away on deployment or patrolling the streets in uniform. He wants to create a “central system” for all firearm records.

In other words, he wants a federal firearm registry, something that has been expressly prohibited by federal law for four decades because of the danger it poses to our Second Amendment rights. And, he wants the registry because he knows it will pave the way for firearm confiscation.

He knows that because he already has experience using a firearm registry to confiscate firearms. As mayor of New York City, Bloomberg signed an ordinance that made it illegal for anyone to possess a rifle or shotgun that held more than five rounds. Then, he used the Big Apple’s existing registry to confiscate the banned firearms from his own constituents. While he has no qualifications to be our commander in chief, his record certainly proves he has the experience to be confiscator in chief.

There’s also the inconvenient truth that Bloomberg leaves out of all of his proposals: nothing dreamed up in his penthouse would have actually stopped the crimes he pretends to care about. For someone who claims to be so bright, Bloomberg always misses the most basic point: When you limit peoples’ ability to defend themselves, you make them less safe, not safer.

I will say this, Bloomberg is a master deflector. Regardless of the topic— his buying elections, suppressing the speech of his supposed “news” outlet, the harassment claims of his female employees, etc.—Bloomberg always pivots to another topic from which he can more comfortably peddle some billionaire-level virtue signaling. He does that a lot with us. Whenever a bad guy with a gun is stopped by a good guy with a gun, Bloomberg and his cronies can be counted on to deflect attention away from the criminal in order to falsely portray the NRA’s membership as the problem. Apparently, truth and leadership are among the few luxuries that Bloomberg can’t afford.

Why is this? What is it about your gun rights that so offends Michael Bloomberg? After all, he’s not really “anti-gun;” he and his wealthy friends are surrounded by armed bodyguards. The only guns he’s against are the ones possessed by you and your family for their protection. Personally, I suspect he hates our freedom because it’s the one thing that, so far, he’s been unable to buy. This is the year we’ll find out.

Want to know more about Bloomberg’s history of attacking our Second Amendment freedoms? Learn more at meetbloomberg.com.

America is, by explicit design, an exceptional place in which things are done differently. To its detractors, this difference is incalculably annoying: “This is the only country in the world,” Americans who envy others will gripe, “in which….” To its admirers, by contrast, America’s individuality is a source of both hope and pride. The United States remains the shining city upon the hill, the last great hope, the focal point for freedom around the globe.

And yet, America’s cherished idiosyncrasy yields a conspicuous risk: That, after a while, the country will forget why it was founded in the first place and fall carelessly into line with the others.

Champions of the United States like to ask what would happen if it should change beyond all recognition. And they are right to do so. What, indeed, would be the prospect for freedom if the U.S. Constitution should be overthrown or abandoned? What would happen to the individual if his or her basic liberties—which are protected here to a unique degree—should come to be watered down to the vanishing point?

As an immigrant who moved to the United States as an adult, I am often asked such questions. More specifically, I am often asked whether I consider it likely that my new country, the United States of America, will follow my old country, Great Britain, in abandoning some of the foundational liberties that, for a period at least, marked the two out. “How,” nervous natives inquire, “can we avoid the draconian gun-control regime under which the British have now lived, in one form or another, for decades?”

America is Fundamentally Different
There are many, many ways in which the United States is substantially different from Great Britain. It is true that the right of the people to keep and bear arms originated in its present legal form in Britain, most famously in the 1689 Bill of Rights. And yet it is also the case that this right did not permeate either the legal superstructure or the commonplace political culture in Britain in anything like the way it did in the United States.

The legal differences are substantial. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which was intended to serve as a permanent, super-majoritarian check on the ambitions of the governing classes, the 1689 Bill of Rights represented nothing more profound than a temporary, contingent set of promises that could be—and would be—washed away by the British parliament.

…in Britain…the lack of a written Constitution and an ever-changing set of national principles ensured that the right to keep and bear arms was neither set in stone in the law nor tattooed onto the hearts of the people.

Explaining the benefit of an American bill of rights in 1788, James Madison proposed that the liberties that it would contain would not merely be enforceable as a matter of contract, but as a matter of culture, too. The contents of a bill of rights, Madison explained, would “acquire by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free Government, and as they become incorporated with the national sentiment, counteract the impulses of interest and passion.”

This, without doubt, is exactly what has happened in the United States, where the Second Amendment is considered part of the national birthright. No such acquisition was made in Britain, however, where the lack of a written constitution and an ever-changing set of national principles ensured that the right to keep and bear arms was neither set in stone in the law nor tattooed onto the hearts of the people.

History, too, has made the gun a far more potent symbol of independence and liberty in America than in Britain. Unlike the British, the people of the United States achieved their independence by a revolution that was fought and won by the common man and his everyday weaponry. Unlike the British, the people of the United States were called upon from the beginning to settle, inhabit and then expand a continent so enormous and so hostile as to render the ownership of arms effectively mandatory.

Unlike the British, the people of the United States developed and then cherished a distinct frontier culture in which to be without a lever-action rifle or a revolver was to be catastrophically exposed. Unlike in Britain, many parts of the United States played host to a malignant racial tyranny in which, as Ida B. Wells has noted, the only chance of survival came from the barrel of “a Winchester rifle,” which “should have a place of honor in every black home” and “should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

Those who are familiar with George Orwell’s famous insistence that the “rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy” would be forgiven for assuming that, despite these historical differences, there existed at some point in British history a comparable enthusiasm for the right to keep and bear arms. But Orwell’s line, while absolutely correct substantively, must be understood within the context of what has always been a far more deferential and class-ridden society than the United States. Orwell, remember, was a self-professed democratic socialist who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and came away convinced that the radical advances in military technology would be used to crush the individual. As the world was about to learn, his fears were well-founded. But firearms were not necessarily common and neither was fear of a powerful national military in a country that owed its historical preeminence to its unmatched naval supremacy. Orwell’s leveling instincts notwithstanding, it remains the case that, for the average Briton, the archetypal armed hero is the knight, whereas, for the average American, it is the Lexington Minuteman and the cowboy.

Which is to say that, while the British have indeed been heavily armed at various points in their history, they have never developed quite the same democratic attachment to the ownership of guns as did their American cousins. In his famous treatise on Blackstone’s Commentaries,
St. George Tucker observed that, while the portion of the English Bill of Rights that dealt with the right to keep and bear arms “seems at first view” to resemble the Second Amendment, in practice it was far more restrictive, being limited to protestants and subjected to the whims of the aristocracy, which was able to head off any fear of insurrection by passing draconian laws that banned guns under the auspices of regulating poaching.

Which is why, when the British government began to crack down on private ownership in 1903, the public did not demonstrate the sort of concerted, aware and forward-thinking resistance that Americans have repeatedly shown.

Britons Gave Up Their Freedom Piece By Piece
It is unfashionable these days to offer a “slippery slope” argument against a particular policy, or to draw sweeping conclusions from an ostensibly limited set of aims. But I wonder how else one might reasonably characterize what happened to British gun rights in the twentieth century, other than as a slow and deliberate march toward abolition? To my eyes, at least, the pattern is clear. First, the guarantees contained within the 1689 Bill of Rights were abolished in favor of a strict licensing system. Next, that licensing system was used to shape who might own firearms and why. And then, having established that the whole area was up for grabs, the state began to ban various types of guns until, eventually, almost none were available for the public.

From start to finish, it took 94 years. Before 1903, British citizens had been subject to no laws governing the purchase of firearms and no laws governing the use or ownership of firearms on their own property. In 1903, that all changed with the introduction of the first licensing system in British history: a “shall-issue” certificate, available from the Post Office, that was made a mandatory part of the commercial purchase of handguns.

This police officer in London, England in 1940, is carrying confiscated firearms. Soon thereafter, with the United Kingdom under threat of invasion by the German army, the U.K. found itself so short of guns for defense that NRA members sent firearms to England.

That arrangement, which was seen as a moderate incursion at the time, lasted just 17 years until, in an explicit attempt to prevent the working classes from taking advantage of the influx of firearms that had come along with the end of the First World War, the “shall-issue” rule was nixed in favor of a new “firearms certificate” that applied to all guns except for shotguns, that limited the types of weapons and ammunition that each citizen was permitted to own, and, crucially, that could be denied to applicants by local police “for any reason.”

In 1937, the government took the final step in abolishing firearms ownership as a right, removing “self-defense” from the list of acceptable reasons for wanting a certificate and determining that “firearms cannot be regarded as a suitable means of protection.” In 1968, a “good reason” test was added.

The rest was inevitable. In 1988, the British government outlawed semi-automatic rifles, pump-action shotguns and shotguns with magazines; they developed a shotgun registry; and they extended police-reviewed, safe-storage requirements so that they applied to shotguns as well as to other firearms. In 1997, handguns of all types were banned completely and without exception. And that, as they say, was that.

Can it happen here? Sure, it can. The good news is that the United States has none of the aforementioned gun-control provisions at the federal level, and only a few of them in a handful of states. So if we are on that slippery slope, we are still at the far end of it eyeing it skeptically. The bad news is that there are many powerful people in the United States who would like desperately to see most—if not all—of these laws passed here, and that, as history shows, there is nothing magical about America that renders it immune to precisely the sort of “salami” tactics (slice by slice) that have led to the decline in freedom elsewhere. As is the case with free speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and so forth, one of the most powerful arguments wielded by the advocates of more government is “well, we already require a pistol license!”; “we’ve already imposed conditions”; “we’ve already banned rifles….”

The Second Amendment is, in all of human history, one of the only liberty-preserving provisions that has been partially lost and then mostly restored in the United States. Its renaissance serves as an inspiring example of what can be done politically when real grassroots movements push back. Nevertheless, we must consider the chances of a second comeback to be extremely slim indeed. Happily, not only are Americans the heirs to the greatest charter of freedom the world has ever seen, they have also inherited a wealth of knowledge about the playbooks that have been used elsewhere. How does a people fall into abject ruin? We know, thanks to the evidence from Russia, China and Germany. How is free speech slowly chipped away, even in a stable democracy? We know, thanks to the evidence from Canada and France. How does a country go from enjoying a de facto gun culture to passing an all-out ban? We know, thanks to the evidence from Britain.

Want to keep your firearms? Then fight for your freedom every step of the way.

Michael Bloomberg is the Grinch of modern American politics. Bloomberg lives a separate, elitist lifestyle guarded by men with guns. His snowy Mount Crumpit is, in sum, his many mansions and estates; including the Beaux-Arts limestone mansion in the Upper East Side of Manhattan that quickly became his presidential campaign headquarters last November.

Bloomberg looks down from his lofty offices and homes over Whoville (basically, everything between New York City and Hollywood) and hatches schemes about taking things away from all the residents (yes, you and me). When he was mayor of New York City, he banned sodas over 16 ounces, loud headphones, all sorts of tobacco products, trans fats, black roofs … and, of course, he has spent the last few decades—and enough money to bankrupt a small country—trying to take away your guns.

Now he is trying to buy the presidency.

Just after it began, Bloomberg’s campaign quickly began setting spending records. In the first few weeks after Bloomberg announced his run for our nation’s highest office, he spent or reserved about $60 million in television and radio ads. In comparison, “the top four polling Democrats in the race—former Vice President Joe Biden; South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Sanders and Warren—have spent about $28 million on similar ads all year,” reported the Washington Post.

This is pocket change to Bloomberg. Forbes estimated that his net worth was about $55 billion. Before he entered this race, the firm Advertising Analytics expected about $2.7 billion on media ads to be spent by all the candidates running in this election cycle. If Bloomberg were to spend $2.7 billion on media ads all by himself, it would still amount to much less than the interest earned on his fortune.

Still, it’s his money. Other Democratic candidates, such as U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have criticized Bloomberg’s attempt to buy his way up in the polls. But it has always been the case that money can be turned into speech in this free country, which is as it should be. We simply note the Scrooge McDuck fortune Bloomberg has amassed to point out that his money alone makes him a formidable foe to your freedom as he tries to buy his way in very late in the political game.

Bloomberg, regardless of his fortune, has long been an opportunistic politician. Though a lifelong Democrat, he conveniently ran as a Republican for mayor of New York City when it benefitted him. He later switched back. Bloomberg also supported a two-term limit for New York City mayor, but then successfully changed the law to win a third term, only to later support re-imposing the two-term limit after he was set to leave office. He also once announced that he would not return to running his company, Bloomberg L.P., when he left City Hall, but then went back on his word and did.

Bloomberg has been just as changeable with his decision to run, or not to run, for the presidency.

“What chance does a five-foot-seven billionaire Jew who’s divorced really have of becoming president?” Bloomberg reportedly responded when asked by New York Magazine whether he’d consider a race for the White House in October of 2007.

A month later, the cover story in Newsweek touted Bloomberg’s presidential chances. By December of that year, The New York Times reported that Bloomberg was “enchanted” with the idea of an “independent presidential bid.” Bloomberg again toyed with the idea of running for president in 2012, but eventually endorsed President Barack Obama’s re-election bid against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney just days before the election. Rumors of Bloomberg’s interest in the presidency in 2016 were floated once again, with the same result: an op-ed from the former mayor explaining that America had not yet come to its senses about the potential glories of a Michael Bloomberg presidency. In a move that surprised no one, he endorsed the Democrat, Hillary Clinton.

The predictable Bloomberg presidential campaign spin cycle kicked into gear right on time during the primary for the 2020 Democratic nomination, but this time with a major twist: on November 24, he officially announced his candidacy for the presidency (back in March, Bloomberg had regretfully announced, via yet another rueful op-ed, that he couldn’t possibly run this time).

Unlike candidates with natural bases of support and enthusiastic donors eager to bankroll their political futures, Bloomberg’s candidacy is solely powered by his massive wealth. Bloomberg made his fortune building a data platform for Wall Street traders. His computer terminals, and the instant financial markets data they provide, became a staple on every trading floor and behind every bond quant’s desk. The data services and terminals provided by Bloomberg are to financial information what Kleenex is to facial tissue and Google is to search. The brand and market power of the product is now the standard by which all other services are judged.

After graduating with an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, Bloomberg began his career in 1966 working on Wall Street for Salomon Brothers, the investment bank. He became a full partner at the firm in 1973 and was eventually tapped to head the bank’s equity trading desk. But Bloomberg’s star eventually began to fade, and he was slowly pushed out of the firm.

“In 1979, my career at Salomon reversed its magical upward climb,” Bloomberg wrote in his autobiography. He was told by his boss that he would no longer be trading stocks or overseeing the company’s equity traders. Instead of being a hotshot finance whiz, Bloomberg was consigned to managing Salomon’s I.T. operations, a significant demotion in an industry where the only people who mattered were the ones trading securities or underwriting lucrative mergers and acquisitions. He was finally laid off in 1981. It could have been an ignominious end for a one-time Wall Street star, but Bloomberg was handed a golden parachute before he was pushed out. Salomon Brothers gave him a $10 million severance payout, money that he would later use to start the company that eventually made him a billionaire. Years later, Bloomberg said that getting fired was “the best thing that ever happened” to him.

By 2018, the small IT and data services company had become Bloomberg L.P., and reportedly earned $10 billion in revenue. Forbes estimates that Bloomberg still personally owns close to 90% of the firm’s equity. Bloomberg has used that fortune on more than international mansions and helicopters and private jets (though he has plenty of those). His vast reserves of cash have been put to use peddling propaganda for his pet political issues: gun control, global warming and social engineering. While his party registration may have changed throughout the years, Bloomberg’s love of nanny statism—the use of government coercion and force to change the behaviors of his subjects—has remained stubbornly consistent.

As mayor, Bloomberg banned sodas larger than 16 ounces from being served at any restaurants, claiming that the ban would be a key weapon in the fight against a global obesity epidemic. His own philanthropic foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, claimed that taxing “sugary beverages and junk food” would make the world skinnier by “reducing consumer demand for unhealthy foods and beverages.” The ban was eventually struck down as unconstitutional by New York courts, which ruled that Bloomberg’s soda ban was “arbitrary and capricious,” would create an “administrative Leviathan” and would grant the city’s health department “virtually limitless authority” over the state’s food industry.

Rather than changing course after the overwhelming rebuke from legal authorities, Bloomberg doubled down by using the same playbook in his war on the Second Amendment. In 2004, he announced that he would spend $50 million to push gun control and counter the influence of the NRA. That funding eventually led to the creation of Everytown for Gun Safety, a political-advocacy organization that combined the efforts of several other Bloomberg anti-gun groups. Bloomberg told The New York Times: “We’ve got to make [the NRA] afraid of us,” he said. “And we’re never going to stop.”

In 2016, Bloomberg reportedly spent $25 million on several Senate races and anti-gun ballot initiatives. With Bloomberg’s help, anti-gun groups outspent gun-rights activists, pouring nearly $40 million into federal, state and local races and ballot initiatives throughout the country. Bloomberg’s Everytown has supported nearly every radical gun-control proposal floated since it was created, from bans on so-called “assault weapons” to support for unconstitutional “red-flag” laws to the 16-ounce soda ban of the gun-control world, a ban on “high-capacity” rifle and pistol magazines.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s efforts to get his way have had a disturbing taste of evil genius in them. “A New York University School of Law program funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg is placing lawyers in the offices of Democratic state attorneys general and paying them to prosecute energy companies and challenge Trump administration policies on energy and the environment,” RealClear Investigations reported in 2018. “Nine states and Washington, D.C., including New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, are participating in the multimillion-dollar program funded by the media magnate and ex-New York City mayor[.]” Under the program, the Bloomberg-funded attorneys were given official government authority to “work solely to advance progressive environmental policy” on Bloomberg’s behalf.

“The fellows have played a role in filing at least 130 regulatory, legal and other challenges to federal environmental policies since 2017,” RealClear Investigations found. The attorneys then used attorney-client privilege to keep their work secret and to shield their advocacy work from public scrutiny and accountability via public records and freedom-of-inform-ation laws. It is not hard to imagine Bloomberg using this same tactic to curtail Americans’ right to keep and bear arms.

At a 2018 event with the head of the International Monetary Fund, Bloomberg made his governing philosophy clear. He noted that the real purpose of taxation isn’t to raise money for the government to provide vital services to the populace, but to punish people for behaviors Bloomberg opposes. During his remarks, Bloomberg unashamedly extolled the virtue of regressive taxes—taxes that disproportionately target the poor—as a “good thing” because it’s easier to use taxation to alter the behavior of “people that don’t have a lot of money.”

“Some people say, well, taxes are regressive. But in this case, yes they are. That’s the good thing about them because the problem is in people that don’t have a lot of money,” Bloomberg said. “And so, higher taxes should have a bigger impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves.”

Bloomberg might have hesitated to leap into the race for president because running nationwide, especially in states like Iowa and South Carolina, is different than running in New York City, where Hillary Clinton received 80% of the vote in 2016. But then, his positions on the Second Amendment and more are hardly to the left of the other Democrats running for our nation’s highest office.