Then I began researching Seattle, which led me to this video by Jonathan Choe of the Discovery Institute:
FIRST POST OF 2024: I think it’s only fitting that I start the New Year at the corner of 3rd Ave & Pike St in downtown Seattle. I gotta stay on brand. ?
It’s after midnight and the open air drug den/black market of stolen goods is thriving. All the regulars are here and people… pic.twitter.com/v1VtIRl5Yg
— Jonathan Choe Journalist (Seattle) (@choeshow) January 1, 2024
In Seattle, one of the richest cities in the world, entire blocks of downtown streets have become open-air drug markets, but — BUT! — you can’t get a plastic straw in a restaurant there.
Seattle is in King County, Washington, where Joe Biden got 75 percent of the vote in the 2020 election. King County had more than 1,000 drug overdoses involving fentanyl in 2023. These two facts are almost certainly related, but which is the cause and which the effect? Or could it be that both (a) the tendency to vote for Democrats and (b) the addiction to dangerous drugs are caused by some unknown factor? Without a careful analysis of the available data to identify that unknown background factor, is it wrong to hazard a guess that the overdosing dopeheads and Democratic voters in King County are just plain stupid?
Beyond sarcastic put-downs, it behooves those interested in public policy to take a look at what’s going on in places like Seattle, where Democrats dominate and “progressive” ideas therefore advance unhindered by any effective opposition. In the case of King County’s skyrocketing drug overdoses — which increased nearly 50 percent in just the past year — local officials have declared the problem “a public health crisis.” However, fentanyl is illegal, which means that the overdoses are also indicative of a crime problem, and progressives are against putting criminals in prison. . . . .
District Attorney Fani Willis improperly hired an alleged romantic partner to prosecute Donald Trump and financially benefited from their relationship, according to a court motion filed Monday which argued the criminal charges in the case were unconstitutional.
The bombshell public filing alleged that special prosecutor Nathan Wade, a private attorney, paid for lavish vacations he took with Willis using the Fulton County funds his law firm received. County records show that Wade, who has played a prominent role in the election interference case, has been paid nearly $654,000 in legal fees since January 2022. The DA authorizes his compensation.
The motion, filed on behalf of defendant Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official, seeks to have the charges against Roman dismissed and for Willis, Wade and the entire DA’s office to be disqualified from further prosecution of the case. . . .
Roman’s lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, said she reviewed the case file in Wade’s ongoing divorce proceedings at the Superior Court Clerk’s Office and made copies of certain documents. But the case file was later improperly sealed because no court hearing was held as required by law, the motion said. . . .
The filing alleges that Willis and Wade have been involved in a romantic relationship that began before Wade was appointed special prosecutor. It says they traveled together to Napa Valley and Florida, and they cruised the Caribbean together using tickets Wade purchased from Norwegian and Royal Caribbean cruise lines — although the filing did not include documentation of those purchases.
The motion said the checks sent to Wade from Fulton County and his subsequent purchase of vacations for Willis could amount to honest services fraud, a federal crime in which a vendor gives kickbacks to an employer. It is also possible this could be prosecuted under the federal racketeering statute, the motion said. . . .
Willis and Wade, the motion contends, “have been engaged in an improper, clandestine personal relationship during the pendency of this case, which has resulted in the special prosecutor, and, in turn, the district attorney, profiting significantly from this prosecution at the expense of the taxpayers.”
A problem with Wade’s appointment is that it was not approved by the Fulton board of commissioners as required by law, the motion said. The motion also questions Wade’s credentials, contending he has never prosecuted a felony case. . . .
Wade entered into his special prosecutor contract on Nov. 1, 2021, just one day before he filed for divorce in Cobb County, the motion said.
Do you remember the media hype around this Atlanta grand jury indictment? Do you remember how excited liberals were that a BLACK WOMAN was going to be prosecuting Trump? Oh, symbolic justice!
Sensible people, including attorneys of vast experience, looked at this case and saw a lot of obvious problems. Like, RICO? Are you kidding me with this? A presidential campaign trying to win a disputed election result is racketeering? All of these common-sense objections to the Fulton County case were ignored by the national media who were certain — as they had often claimed before — that this time, the “walls were closing in” on Trump. Because a BLACK WOMAN was prosecuting him!
Well, that’s really working out great for them, huh? Not only is this revelation about Willis and Wade’s “improper relationship” likely to cause the RICO prosecution to be abandoned, but it bids fair to get Willis driven out of office, disbarred and perhaps even sent to federal prison.
In October 2019 at the University of Minnesota, a student was studying in the medical library at Diehl Hall when he grew uneasy by Garcia watching him. After speaking with security, the student was stabbed in the leg from behind by a hypodermic needle.
The criminal complaint said when police found a man matching the description of the attacker, later identified as Garcia, he pulled out a long knife and fought with officers. One officer was wounded by the knife.
After it was learned Garcia was positive for Hepatitis C, the student and the officer were both prescribed preventative medications. . . .
After that incident, Garcia was temporarily civilly committed with a doctor pointing to “methamphetamine-induced psychotic disorder,” among other mental and chemical dependency disorders. A judge wrote Garcia “poses a substantial likelihood of causing physical harm” as a result.
Despite these grievous felonies, Garcia was discharged from probation in late 2022, just three years later. Nor was this an isolated incident. Garcia has had 46 separate criminal charges in the past five years, and that was before what happened in November:
Authorities have charged a Minneapolis man with murder, alleging he fatally stabbed another man at a bus stop in Edina last week.
Adam Garcia, 32, faces one count of second-degree murder in connection with the killing of 62-year-old Chris Lundegaard, according to court documents filed in Hennepin County. . . .
Edina police officers were at the Cub Foods on York Avenue when the stabbing occurred outside, according to a criminal complaint. They went to the bus stop to investigate and found Lundegaard “bleeding from multiple stab wounds,” the complaint states. Officers attempted to save his life before he was taken to a hospital, where he later died. A medical examiner identified five stab wounds, two to Lundegaard’s chest.
Officers found the suspect, identified as Garcia, at the scene and detained him while they reviewed surveillance video and spoke to witnesses.
The video showed “a confrontation” between Garcia and Lundegaard at the bus stop, the complaint states. Lundegaard tried multiple times to get away from Garcia, but Garcia allegedly would not leave Lundegaard alone. At one point, according to the complaint, there was a “scuffle” between the two that ended with Lundegaard “knocked to the ground.” . . .
Court records show Garcia has a criminal record that includes several convictions over the past four years for burglary, assault, trespassing and property damage.
How was this guy on the street? He should have been in a padded cell, strapped into a straitjacket and given twice daily dose of Thorazine for the rest of his life. What part of “substantial likelihood of causing physical harm” do I need to explain here? And now this:
The suspect in November’s seemingly random, deadly stabbing at an Edina Bus stop was back in court Monday. . . .
Adam Garcia asked the judge for a speedy trial on charges that he murdered Chris Lundegaard the night before Thanksgiving.
But judge Peter Cahill told Garcia, who has a long history of mental health issues, that he will first need to be evaluated to see if he’s competent to stand trial.
Padded cell, straitjacket, etc. This dangerous kook should never be allowed in public again. Crazy People Are Dangerous.
The unhinged vagrant accused of randomly stabbing two teen tourists at Grand Central Station was a stalker who suffered from paranoid delusions and was in dire need of psychiatric help, his ex-girlfriend told The Post Wednesday.
(Kind of like Hillary Clinton, in some ways.)
Charisma Knight, 37, said onetime beau Steven Hutcherson allegedly threatened to kill her “at least five times” in the past year and became increasingly deranged after he refused to take his meds for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
“I called the police all the time and said ‘he’s bipolar and schizophrenic, ‘he needs help, he needs help.’ These people actually do need help. If you’re just letting them go… he might just kill somebody,” Knight said from her East Harlem apartment.
(If only there were some phrase . . .)
“He should have been in a mental institution where he cannot come out and they can monitor him taking his medication,” she added.
Knight and Hutcherson, 36, met in elementary school and dated for three months in 2021 and then again for nine months, until October 2022, she said. . . .
Her ex had a penchant for conspiracy theories, watching videos on YouTube about Malcolm X, wars and “how to train to fight with a knife,” Knight said. “He swore the government was after him,” she said.
(Too bad they weren’t “after him.”)
“I knew this was gonna happen because if you look at his Facebook account with all the rants that he’s doing with the police, it’s crazy,” Knight added, referring to the Grand Central attack.
At one point, he thought mold growing in his bathroom was planted by the police, and also suspected a close friend of being an FBI informant, Knight recalled. . . .
Hutcherson was estranged from his mother but never recovered from her death some two decades ago — sparking a particular disdain for the holidays, Knight said.
She theorized that may have contributed to his alleged violent outburst on Christmas Day, when he is accused of stabbing the teen sisters, 14 and 16, in a French restaurant at the Grand Central dining concourse.
“He gets depressed around the holidays. Around October he starts thinking about his mom and thinking about how he has no one. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas he’s weird — extremely weird,” she said.
“Being that it was Christmas, it triggered something in him, whether he was mad that it was like a family setting that they were having and they was enjoying themselves,” she opined.
Prosecutors wanted Steven Hutcherson, 36, to be committed to a psychiatric program for randomly threatening a stranger on a Bronx street last month, but Judge Matthew Grieco instead gave the career criminal a conditional discharge that put him back on the street, records show.
Less than two weeks after that Dec. 12 hearing, Hutcherson allegedly went off the rails at a restaurant in the historic Midtown terminal, launching into an anti-white rant and knifing a 14-year-old girl and her 16-year-old sister, visiting the city from Paraguay with their family.
The image above is from a police dashcam showing the end of a pursuit in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. The SUV was driven by 18-year-old Demetrius Walker of Milwaukee, and the front-seat passenger, 18-year-old Nevaeh Beck of Milwaukee, had stolen about $300 worth of merchandise from Home Depot, where Walker had helped himself to some snacks and soft drinks. After a pursuit of about five miles that reached speeds over 90 mph, heading back into Milwaukee, the SUV crashed into a light pole, at which point five people — Walker, Beck, two other teenagers and a 5-year-old child — fled on foot before being apprehended:
According to the criminal complaint, Wauwatosa police responded to a retail theft at Home Depot on N. 124th Street on Friday, Sept. 22. Officers were told two females walked out of the store with cleaning supplies and loaded them into a black SUV with no license plate. The criminal complaint says the pair left the store with $308.93 worth of cleaning supplies without paying for them. The complaint also says the driver of the SUV, identified as defendant Demetrius Walker, also entered the store, “took two bottles of soda and a bag of chips and left the store without paying for the property. As soon as the females loaded up the (SUV) with the rest of the stolen merchandise, Walker drove away.” . . .
In an interview with police, Walker “admitted to shoplifting from Home Depot and that he took drinks and a snack without paying. Walker admitted to being the driver of the vehicle. Walker admitted that he knew the merchandise being loaded into the (SUV) was stolen because he was told by Beck that it was stolen as she was loading the (SUV) up. Walker admitted to fleeing from officers because he had been informed that the (SUV) was stolen,” the complaint says.
After watching this YouTube video in the wee hours, I read the comments, many of which were about the “usual suspects” nature of these criminals. Being a habitual viewer of police videos on YouTube, I am inured to this unpleasant reality. Why do some people feel the need to resist the law so strenously? You see the blue lights in the rear-view mirror, you pull over. You know you’re guilty. What are the chances you’re going to outrun the cops in your stolen SUV? And once you wreck out, with multiple cop cars in pursuit, why even try fleeing on foot?
Perhaps these young scholars from Milwaukee were so busy studying for their AP Physics exams that they didn’t have the leisure to watch YouTube videos and figure out they had no chance of escaping the law. Perhaps, but what I perceive — not just in this video, but in so many dozens of others I’ve watched — is that some people have an attitude of disrespect for the law and contempt for authority.
Gosh, I wonder how they got that attitude?
The anti-police rhetoric that flooded the TV airwaves during the summer of 2020, and the media coverage that excused the “fiery but most peaceful protests,” have helped foster a belief that resistance to law enforcement is some kind of heroic duty. So you drive the stolen car until it crashes, then you flee on foot and, if you happen to have a pistol handy, you get into a shootout with the cops, dying in the proverbial “hail of gunfire,” thus becoming a courageous martyr for social justice.
It would be easy to write a 5,000-word essay about this irrational and destructive mentality, but that’s not what got me going on this particular video. No, it was this comment that set me off:
“I’m so happy we’re protecting corporations profits”
“Your attitude — ignorantly deriding ‘corporate profit’ — is indistinguishable from that of the criminals. Why do you think businesses (large or small) exist, huh? Where do you suppose the profit goes? And what would happen if the business could not make a profit? You should be ashamed of yourself, but if you had any sense of shame, I suppose, you never would have said such a thing.”
Has this person never read Atlas Shrugged? Or do they just not understand how business operates? Here’s a simple formula:
Profit = Jobs
It’s really not much more complicated than that. The only reason any business exists is because the owners — whether sole proprietor, partnership, or corporation — hope to make a profit on their investment. If they fail to make a profit, they go out of business, and then they can’t employ anybody. No profit, no jobs. This is true both on the global and local level. Where any government creates conditions that are incompatible with profitable business activity, they will thereby drive jobs out of the community. (Hint: There are no CVS stores in Gaza.) You may say, “Well, Home Depot is a gigantic nationwide business that’s in no danger of going out of business anytime soon.” True, but any particular Home Depot location that doesn’t make a profit will be closed, costing jobs at the local level. And if a community tolerates lawlessness, there won’t be any Home Depot locations there. Like, there’s no Home Depot in downtown Baltimore; you have to go out on the east side, near I-95.
There are today many places in America where the local Democratic governments, by tolerating crime, have ruined the economies of their communities. The entire state of California is circling the toilet bowl:
There are many causes of California’s problems — Gov. Gavin Newsom enforced one of the most draconian and longest-lasting COVID-19 lockdowns in the country — but a lot of it has to do with the crime wave unleashed when the state’s voters approved Proposition 47, which reduced “most drug possession offenses and thefts of property valued under $950.00 from felonies to misdemeanors.” Well, guess what? The level of retail theft in California is now “beyond crisis level,” as the Sacramento County sheriff has said. Anyone who sneers at “corporate profit” ought to have second thoughts, if they’ll just watch a few videos about what’s happened in San Francisco — one empty storefront after another in what were once bustling commercial districts:
My friend Dianna Deeley, who used to live in the San Francisco area, was saddened when I sent her those videos. This economic destruction was entirely avoidable, and the voters of California who inflicted this destruction — electing people like Newsom, and voting for ill-considered “reforms” like Prop 47 — should be ashamed of themselves. But then again, if they had any sense of shame, they wouldn’t vote for Democrats.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in a 4-3 opinion that the Constitution’s “Insurrection Clause” prohibits former President Donald Trump from appearing on the ballot for the presidency in 2024.
“The court found by clear and convincing evidence that President Trump engaged in insurrection as those terms are used in Section Three” of the Fourteenth Amendment, the ruling reads.
The provocative ruling partially reverses a prior ruling from Colorado District Court Judge Sarah Wallace, who ruled in November that Trump is not an officer of the United States as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment and that the Amendment therefore cannot be used to disqualify him from appearing on the Colorado primary ballot.
In his dissent, Chief Justice Boatright wrote, “Dismissal is particularly appropriate here because the Electors brought their challenge without a determination from a proceeding (e.g., a prosecution for an insurrection-related offense) with more rigorous procedures to ensure adequate due process.”
In partially reversing Wallace, the Court all but dared the U.S. Supreme Court to step in by January 4, 2024.
“If review is sought in the Supreme Court before the stay expires on January 4, 2024, then the stay shall remain in place, and the Secretary will continue to be required to include President Trump’s name on the 2024 presidential primary ballot, until the receipt of any order or mandate from the Supreme Court,” the ruling says.\
The Court disagreed with Trump’s claims that his actions were protected free speech. “We consider and reject President Trump’s argument that his speech on January 6 was protected by the First Amendment,” the ruling reads, seemingly ignoring Trump’s calls that day for protesters to conduct themselves “peacefully and patriotically.”
A 28-year-old man was charged with the murder of Detroit synagogue leader Samantha Woll Wednesday after he allegedly broke into her house two months ago, prosecutors said.
Michael Jackson-Bolanos was charged in the stabbing death of Woll after a person of interest was taken into custody Sunday, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy said during a press conference Wednesday.
Jackson-Bolanos, of Detroit, was an apparent stranger to Woll, 40, Worthy said, adding there were “certainly no facts to suggest” it was a hate crime against the Jewish leader.
Instead, the fatal stabbing happened during a break-in, Worthy said. Woll’s front door “was ajar and unlocked, and a significant amount of blood was inside,” the prosecutor said according to the Detroit Free Press.
The suspect allegedly lied to detectives about the theft and attempted theft of cars the same day Woll was found dead outside her home on Oct. 21.
On top of the murder charge, Jackson-Bolanos was also charged with home invasion and lying to a police officer.
“This was an extraordinarily sad and tragic case,” Worthy said.
Because she was murdered just two weeks after the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, many at the time were concerned that Woll’s murder was a “hate crime,” even though police immediately emphasized that nothing was known about the motive, and then later ruled out anti-Semitism as a motive. My initial reaction: “However, knowing what we know about Detroit, I’m willing to hazard a tentative guess that the killer was probably not a Trump supporter.” This was a simple deduction. Detroit is a crime-ridden pesthole and, as in most such cities, Biden voters comprise the vast majority of the population. So if police did not immediately suspect Woll’s murder to be motivated by anti-Semitism — if there were no anti-Jewish slurs spray-painted at the scene, etc. — a simple process of elimination would lead one to guess that her killer was an ordinary local criminal. It is therefore not surprising to read this:
Jackson-Bolanos previously spent two years on probation after being convicted of receiving and concealing a stolen motor vehicle in 2019, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections. He also spent four years in prison for a similar offense in 2013.
If the killer had been a MAGA-hat-wearing Republican, this story would be 24/7 on CNN. Under the circumstances, however, we can expect the murder of Samantha Woll to disappear quickly from the news.
The episode also detonated a debate in Virginia and beyond about digital and sexual privacy in 21st-century politics. In a possible reflection of shifting social norms, Gibson nearly won the race anyway — she lost by less than 1,000 votes and has not ruled out a return to electoral politics in the future.
It “detonated a debate,” did it? Pray tell, what are the opposing sides of this alleged debate about “digital and sexual privacy”? Do the liberal editors at Politico expect us to believe that if a Republican candidate were exposed in similar behavior, they wouldn’t be on the story 24/7? Hell, the liberal media were all-in on the so-called “pee tape” allegations that were part of the “Russian collusion” hoax against Trump, but somehow a real sex scandal involving a Democrat requires a “debate”?
This is a perfect example of how the hivemind mentality takes hold in the media. Everybody employed at Politico is a Democrat, so there is never any pushback when someone comes up with obviously bad ideas like, “Hey, let’s try to rehabilitate this disgraced failure of a candidate.” The Q-and-A with Gibson includes dishonest statements, e.g.:
My entire life was rocked on Sept. 11, when the article ran. It ran, implying that I performed sex acts online with my husband for money. It was really written based on this Dropbox file that self-described Republican operatives shopped around. They had found these videos on the dark web and shopped them around to various news outlets. I didn’t have any idea that there were ever videos of me that had been made and uploaded to multiple sites. . . .
I hired an amazing attorney who worked around the clock and wrote them several letters, essentially saying: To be clear, Ms. Gibson never acknowledged or consented to videos being recorded, this is illegal pornography because it is illegal to record someone in a state of undress without consent. . . .
How can this be happening? How can a national news outlet decide to run a story about this? I think if I wasn’t a candidate, the Post probably would have been appalled at the invasion of my privacy. But because I was a candidate, they decided that it was a political story, rather than an invasion of my privacy and potentially a crime.
Susanna Gibson . . . was as recently as last year posting as “HotWifeExperience” on the website Chaturbate, where men could pay tokens to get her to perform specific sex acts. In one video recorded shortly after she launched her campaign last year, she told her husband, “I’ll let you f— me in the a– doggy style in a private room if someone wants to pay. That’s the deal.”
In another video, she appears to say that for the right price, viewers could watch her urinate. “Y’all can watch me pee if you tip me and some tokens,” she said. “Again, I’m raising money for a good cause.” “I like being choked. I like being hit. I do,” she said in one video posted exactly a year ago, on September 11, 2022.
“I just want a private room with somebody filming their [penis] so I can come looking at it, Jesus Christ,” she said. “Oh God I want to f—ing get railroaded by all of you.”
She said for 500 tokens, she would order room service in a hotel and cause the delivery person to see her naked, saying: “I’m definitely a slut… In order to leave the door cracked I need 500 tokens.”
Gibson said she has had sex with three men in one day, and “don’t tell my husband he was the third. I would say ethically nonmonogamous but I guess that three in one day was not.”
“I’m raising money for a really good cause and it’s my birthday so give me more please because it’s my birthday night and yeah so then I f—ed him in his house for the first time and then later that night I f—ed my husband,” she said.
In the videos, she appears to be filmed with her husband, lawyer John David Gibson, who ensured that the raunchiest acts were reserved for the biggest spendings, saying “no anal outside of private.”
Having posted such videos online, how can Gibson then claim to be a victim who was recorded “without consent”? She blabbers about “Republican operatives” and the videos being “on the dark web,” evidently thinking people are stupid enough to be deceived into thinking there was some criminal activity involved in the videos being discovered. The real story is that she was stupid enough to think she could post these videos online without anyone ever recognizing her.
Did she not realize that, when she and her husband livestreamed these videos, they were cached online? Probably that’s in the fine print of the user agreement that nobody bothers to read before clicking the box to sign up for a site like that. So she’s playing word games about not knowing the videos were recorded — i.e., she didn’t realize the site maintained archives of livestream videos, which is apparently how her performances came to the attention of “Republican operatives.”
Does the name Anthony Weiner ring a bell, boys and girls? At the time of the second #WeinerGate scandal in 2013, I remember reading my then-14-year-old son Jefferson the Riot Act about this: “Never say anything in a text or email that you wouldn’t want to see printed on the front page of the New York Times! The Internet is forever!” People who think they can engage in “private” or “secret” activity online are fools. You might want to ask Fred “Bubba” Copeland, a/k/a “Brittini Blaire Summerlin,” about this, except for the fact that “Bubba”/“Brittini” committed suicide after his/“her” online life as a “transgender curvy girl” was exposed.
Susanna Gibson thinks you’re so stupid you won’t figure out that she alone is to blame for her disgrace, and Politico wants you to think “shifting social norms” mean that Democrats should be allowed to get away with anything, including sex scandals that would destroy any Republican politician’s career. Don’t be stupid. Don’t vote Democrat. And remember: You’re not really “anonymous,” and the Internet is forever.
