The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Bee Stings, Cult Violence, and MAGA Hats

Posted on | February 25, 2019 | Comments Off on Bee Stings, Cult Violence, and MAGA Hats

 

Did you know this? “Seventy-one percent of the 387 ‘extremist related fatalities in the United States’ from 2008 to 2017 were committed by members of far-right and white-supremacist groups, according the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.” That was published in the New York Times, which failed to do the math — i.e., 28 deaths per year, which “is less than half the annual fatality rate associated with bee and wasp stings,” as David Catron explains at The American Spectator.

Catron further explains that even this 28-per-year estimate of “extremist related fatalities” for “far-right and white-supremacist groups” is probably inflated and, while it is wrong to minimize this threat, it is also wrong to exaggerate it. There have already been 31 black people shot to death in Chicago this year, and it’s not “far-right and white-supremacist groups” who are committing those Chicago homicides.

 

You may have forgotten Ethan Jackson, the green-haired “non binary” person who attacked a teenager wearing a MAGA hat in Seattle last year, because this kind of politically motivated violence doesn’t show up in “hate crime” statistics or get mentioned in the New York Times. Anything that doesn’t fit the progressive narrative is either ignored or forgotten by the liberal media and therefore most people know nothing about, for example, the “Black Hebrew Israelite” cult. Unless you’ve been reading conservative websites, you wouldn’t realize how this bizarre racial hate group played a role in provoking the incident last month where the Covington Catholic boys were confronted by Nathan Phillips. And you’d have to do a whole lot of Googling to realize that the “Black Hebrew Israelite” movement once spawned a cult that killed 14 people.

 

Hulon Mitchell Jr., a/k/a “Yahweh ben Yahweh,” made himself the leader of a racial cult — “Broadly classified as a branch of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement” — that became a multimillion-dollar empire in Miami in the late 1980s. “Yahweh ben Yahweh” was sentenced to federal prison in a racketeering case where witnesses testified he urged followers to “kill me a white devil and bring me an ear.” We don’t know how many white people the Yahweh cult’s followers killed. In 1999, a New Jersey man named John Armstrong was indicted for one such murder:

An indictment in Essex County charges that Attilio Cicala, a homeless white man murdered 15 years ago in what appeared to be a street crime, was actually sacrificed by the cult, which believes blacks are the true Jews. Armstrong, who also uses the name Yokonon Israel, allegedly stabbed Cicala repeatedly in the chest and abdomen in the early morning on July 3, 1984, about a block from the group’s former Newark temple on South Orange Avenue a few days before ben Yahweh visited the city.

Sydney Freedberg, a Miami Herald reporter who won a 1991 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the “Temple of Love” case, wrote a book about it called Brother Love: Murder, Money, and a Messiah, but all that knowledge has been memory-holed by the media in the Trump age, when everybody’s freaking out about “white supremacy” and red hats:

Terry Pierce was shocked this month when he found a man pointing a pistol in his face. “All this over a political statement over a hat,” Pierce told WBKO-TV, after a court hearing about the Feb. 16 incident at a Sam’s Club store in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Police say James Phillips was enraged because Pierce and his wife were wearing red “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) hats and, after a verbal exchange, Phillips pulled a .40-caliber Glock on Pierce. This was no idle threat. Phillips has a criminal record, including a 2013 charge of felony aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and there was a round in the chamber of his Glock, police say. The man in the MAGA hat was dismayed.
“Everybody has a right to believe how they believe,” Pierce said Friday of the frightening encounter, “but you don’t have a right to tell somebody they can’t believe a certain way.”
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about that incident is that it happened in Warren County, Kentucky, which President Trump carried by a 30-point margin in 2016. It’s such a Republican stronghold that the local GOP congressman, Rep. Brett Guthrie, had no Democrat challenger in 2016 and won re-election in 2018 with 67% of the vote against Democrat Hank Linderman. If anti-Trump rage can make it dangerous to wear a MAGA cap in deep-red Bowling Green, how much more dangerous must it be to show support for the president in deep-blue Democrat-dominated urban coastal enclaves? . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.




 

 

Category: Crime, Donald Trump, Racism

Comments

Comments are closed.