As if Communist China’s frenzy to suppress criticism of Xi Jinping’s bid for a lifetime in office was not weird enough already, users of the Twitter-like Weibo social media platform report that the letter “N” was briefly classified as an “illegal” search term.

As Business Insider explains, plenty of other terms were banned for more obvious reasons, including anything that might suggest a user wanted to see mockery of Xi, support for term limits, or a desire to emigrate from China. From Sunday through Tuesday morning, searching for the letter “N” also returned a “Content Is Illegal!” response from Weibo.

Several theories were floated for why “N” was suddenly treated as an unacceptable symbol of dissent:

The letter is used in China to represent unknown numerical values, like the letter X in algebra.

Professor Victor Mair, a China expert at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a Monday blog post it was “probably out of fear on the part of the government that ‘N’ = ‘n terms in office,’ where possibly n > 2.”

CA Yeung, a Perth-based China blogger, also posited that “N = infinity.”

It could also represent “no” in Y/N select items. As Twitter user Kasumi Shen said: “You can’t choose N in a (Y/N) select item as long as you are still living in China.”

Business Insider quotes China’s state-run Global Times mocking Western “hysteria” over China’s authoritarian speech codes, although the Global Times is rather coy about their reason for needling Western media. The gist of the editorial is that Westerners do not understand China’s need for stability and social harmony as it carries out a world-historic program of modernization:

Leading billions of people toward a moderately prosperous society within a short time and then toward a high-income society is almost equivalent to recreating another Western world. Such tremendous change will bring about shocks, controversies and challenges.

Solidarity is a necessary precondition for China to successfully complete the second half of its modernization. It is the cornerstone of China in the new era. The CPC [Communist Party of China] has made us Chinese all closely connected to each other. Over the years, the authority of the CPC Central Committee and the prosperity of our Chinese society have both risen. The authority of the Central Committee is the most outstanding part of China’s competitiveness. It is the source of the country’s efficiency and ability to mobilize people and make adjustments. It is the thing the outside world most envies about China and the target of Western anti-China rhetoric.

Chinese society must strengthen its resolve. We must be aware that the world is full of competition. Solidarity is for Chinese the nation’s most crucial political resource and firm support for the CPC Central Committee is the lifeline of China’s long-term unity.

And of course, silencing everyone who disagrees is an efficient method of manufacturing “solidarity,” provided the resources are available to swiftly enforce standards as particular as blocking searches for a single problematic letter.

If China really wanted to zing Western media for hypocrisy, they would point out that at roughly the same time Beijing was shooting down searches for emigration, autocracy, the letter “N,” and Winnie the Pooh, users of Google Shopping suddenly found themselves unable to search for anything containing the word “gun,” including Guns & Roses albums, water pistols, and burgundy. They could also point to the mysterious or frankly biased standards for banning users from some social media outfits, and say Beijing is simply more serious about pursuing the widely embraced goal of controlling speech in the name of social harmony.

Nikolas Cruz’s psychosis ended in a bloody massacre not only because of the stunning incompetence of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. It was also the result of liberal insanity working exactly as it was intended to.

School and law enforcement officials knew Cruz was a ticking time bomb. They did nothing because of a deliberate, willful, bragged-about policy to end the “school-to-prison pipeline.” This is the feature part of the story, not the bug part.

If Cruz had taken out full-page ads in the local newspapers, he could not have demonstrated more clearly that he was a dangerous psychotic. He assaulted students, cursed out teachers, kicked in classroom doors, started fist fights, threw chairs, threatened to kill other students, mutilated small animals, pulled a rifle on his mother, drank gasoline and cut himself, among other “red flags.”

Over and over again, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School reported Cruz’s terrifying behavior to school administrators, including Kelvin Greenleaf, “security specialist,” and Peter Mahmood, head of JROTC.

At least three students showed school administrators Cruz’s near-constant messages threatening to kill them — e.g., “I am going to enjoy seeing you down on the grass,” “Im going to watch ypu bleed,” “iam going to shoot you dead” — including one that came with a photo of Cruz’s guns. They warned school authorities that he was bringing weapons to school. They filed written reports.

Threatening to kill someone is a felony. In addition to locking Cruz away for a while, having a felony record would have prevented him from purchasing a gun.

All the school had to do was risk Cruz not going to college, and depriving Yale University of a Latino class member, by reporting a few of his felonies — and there would have been no mass shooting.

But Cruz was never arrested. He wasn’t referred to law enforcement. He wasn’t even expelled.

Instead, Cruz was just moved around from school to school — six transfers in three years. But he was always sent back to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in order to mainstream him, so that he could get a good job someday!

The moronic idea behind the “school-to-prison pipeline” is that the only reason so many “black and brown bodies” are in prison is because they were disciplined in high school, diminishing their opportunities. End the discipline and … problem solved!

It’s like “The Wizard of Oz” in reverse. The Wizard told the Scarecrow: You don’t need an education, you just need a diploma! The school-to-prison pipeline idiocy tells students: You don’t need to behave in high school, you just need to leave with no criminal record!

Of course, killjoys will say that removing the consequences of bad behavior only encourages more bad behavior. But that’s not the view of Learned Professionals, who took summer courses at Michigan State Ed School.

In a stroke of genius, they realized that the only problem criminals have is that people keep lists of their criminal activities. It’s the list that prevents them from getting into M.I.T. and designing space stations on Mars. Where they will cure cancer.

This primitive, stone-age thinking was made official Broward County policy in a Nov. 5, 2013, agreement titled “Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline.”

The first “whereas” clause of the agreement states that “the use of arrests and referrals to the criminal justice system may decrease a student’s chance of graduation, entering higher education, joining the military and getting a job.”

Get it? It’s the arrest — not the behavior that led to the arrest — that reduces a student’s chance at a successful life. (For example, just look at how much the district’s refusal to arrest Nikolas Cruz helped him!)

The agreement’s third “whereas” clause specifically cites “students of color” as victims of the old, racist policy of treating criminal behavior criminally.

Say, in the middle of a drive to cut back on the arrest or expulsion of “students of color,” how do you suppose the school dealt with a kid named “Nikolas Cruz”? Might there be some connection between his Hispanic last name and the school’s abject refusal to do anything about Cruz’s repeated criminal behavior?

Just a few months ago, the superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, Robert W. Runcie, was actually bragging about how student arrests had plummeted under his bold leadership.

When he took over in 2011, the district had “the highest number of school-related arrests in the state.” But today, he boasted, Broward has “one of the lowest rates of arrest in the state.” By the simple expedient of ignoring criminal behavior, student arrests had declined by a whopping 78 percent.

FOOTBALL COACH: “When I took over this team a year ago, we were last in the league in pass defense. Today, we no longer keep that statistic!”

When it comes to spectacular crimes, it’s usually hard to say how it could have been prevented. But in this case, we have a paper trail. In the pursuit of a demented ideology, specific people agreed not to report, arrest or prosecute dangerous students like Nikolas Cruz.

These were the parties to the Nov. 5, 2013, agreement that ensured Cruz would be out on the street with full access to firearms:

Robert W. Runcie, Superintendent of Schools

Peter M. Weinstein, Chief Judge of the 17th Judicial Circuit

Michael J. Satz, State Attorney

Howard Finkelstein, Public Defender

Scott Israel, Broward County Sheriff

Franklin Adderley, Chief of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department

Wansley Walters, Secretary of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice

Marsha Ellison, President of the Fort Lauderdale Branch of the NAACP and Chair of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board

Nikolas Cruz may be crazy, but the parties to that agreement are crazy, too. They decided to make high school students their guinea pigs for an experiment based on a noxious ideology. The blood of 17 people is on their hands.

COPYRIGHT 2018 ANN COULTER

President Trump asked Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to add her “assault weapons” ban to the overarching school safety bill during a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers on Wednesday.

Feinstein’s bill, which is an enhanced reintroduction of a bill she has put forward again and again, bans over 200 different firearms.

During Wednesday’s White House meeting, Trump showed support for the gun control pushed by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA). The Manchin/Toomey bill is a gun control bill that the Democrat-controlled Senate rejected on April 17, 2013. But Trump chalked that failure up to Barack Obama’s lack of leadership, and talked of using the Manchin/Toomey bill as a base to which other bills could be added.

The goal was to create a body of gun legislation, ubiquitously for the purposes of school safety.

Sen. Feinstein talked about her bill and described the AR-15 as one of “the latest and newest weapons” to hit our streets. However, Eugene Stoner designed the AR-15 in the 1950s and Armalite began producing the gun during the 1960s. Are weapons from 60 years ago now considered “latest and newest”?

Nonetheless, Trump listened to Feinstein, heard from a few more gun control proponents—including Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL)—then looked back at Feinstein and told her she should add her bill to the Manchin/Toomey bill for consideration.

Feinstein’s reaction when Trump says she should add assault weapons ban to Manchin-Toomey pic.twitter.com/7dlKxwa1KO

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) February 28, 2018

AWR Hawkins is an award winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for the Breitbart News.  He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.