Today I was trying to get together my tax forms while the news was breaking about the shooting at a bank in Louisville and, as usual when such incidents happen, was wondering: “One of ours or one of theirs?” While most mass shootings have no real political angle, everybody has become accustomed to the blame game surrounding such incidents, and my hunch (once it was reported that the target was a bank) was this had to be one of theirs, because Republicans generally like banks.
The suspect in a Monday morning massacre at a Louisville bank has been identified as a 23-year-old former varsity hoops star and finance grad-turned-banker who livestreamed the horrific attack.
Louisville Police Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel identified the suspect as Connor Sturgeon, who worked at Old National Bank’s downtown Louisville branch.
Gwinn-Villaroel said Sturgeon was livestreaming as he opened fire at about 8:38 a.m. in the Old National Bank Building, which houses the bank and a variety of other businesses, killing four people and injuring nine more, including two police officers. Sturgeon was killed after exchanging gunfire with officers, she said, but it’s unclear if he was killed by police or by self-inflicted gunshots. . . .
Two now-defunct Twitter accounts that appear to belong to Sturgeon included tagged photos of him on the athletics track and the basketball court as a 6’5’’ junior on Floyd Central’s basketball team. More recently, he hosted a basketball-focused podcast with two buddies and tweeted about the NBA in between posts in support of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, as well as some criticism of police violence and of then-President Donald Trump.
Citing sources, local network WAVE3 reported that Sturgeon was fired from Old National Bank last week.
Sturgeon’s friends say he suffered multiple concussions while playing sports, and wondered if that might have had something to do with his descent into murderous madness. And speaking of mentally damaged people, Joe Biden quickly issued a statement:
How many more Americans must die before Republicans in Congress will act to protect our communities? It’s long past time that we require safe storage of firearms. Require background checks for all gun sales. Eliminate gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability. We can and must do these things now.
A strong majority of Americans want lawmakers to act on commonsense gun safety reforms. Instead, from Florida to North Carolina to the U.S. House of Representatives, we’ve watched Republican officials double down on dangerous bills that make our schools, places of worship, and communities less safe. It’s unconscionable, it’s reckless, and too many Americans are paying with their lives.
You see how this works? Regardless of the fact that the killer was clearly a Democrat, still Joe Biden must always blame Republicans.
Yeah, I know what you’re saying: “Pretty sure I saw Teen Psycho Tranny open for the Talking Heads in 1983.”But all joking aside . . .
A 19-year-old former student has been accused of threatening to shoot up multiple schools and churches in Colorado Springs, Colorado, according to an affidavit from the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s (DA) Office.
The Elbert County Sheriff’s Office filed formal charges against William Whitworth, who identifies as “Lilly,” on April 1. An arrest affidavit obtained by the Daily Caller refers to Whitworth as Lilly, but checks off his sex as “male.” Whitworth is charged with two counts of criminal attempt to commit murder in the first degree, criminal mischief, menacing, and interference with staff, faculty or students of educational institutions, the affidavit shows.
Whitworth’s sister called the sheriff’s office to their home, reporting multiple threats Whitworth had allegedly made against schools in the area. Deputy Mike Watters asked Whitworth if he intended to shoot up a school, to which Whitworth nodded his head “yes,” according to the affidavit. Whitworth said Timberview Middle School, which he allegedly attended for fifth, sixth and seventh grade, was one of his “main targets,” but that he also intended to shoot up churches, according to the document. . . .
Whitworth offered to show Watters his manifesto, but in the process of looking for it police found several notebooks with drawings of desk setups and floor plans, including a drawing of a clock apparently to use as a detonation device, according to the affidavit. The notebook also listed the name of conservative Canadian activist Lauren Southern, calling her “pathetic,” and Donald Trump, whom he called a “con-man.” Police also retrieved a copy of “The Communist Manifesto” as evidence, according to the document.
Another notebook police believed to be the manifesto contained “a list of firearms and how to 3D print them,” “detailed lists of numerous named individuals to be killed and their indented casualty versus injury rate,” “information detailing the creation of improvised explosive devices” and “the Finalization of locations being Timberview Middle School, Prairie Hills Elementary, and Pine Creek High School,” according to the affidavit.
Not just a teen psycho tranny, but a Communist, too!
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s chief prosecutor, Meg Reiss, bragged about letting violent criminals and felons off the hook – including a murderer – using her restorative justice approach to help them avoid incarceration, Fox News Digital found. “We know incarceration doesn’t really solve any problems,” Reiss said during a Peace Institute event in May 2021. Fox News Digital has previously reported that Reiss said criminals are not “bad dudes” while simultaneously blasting juries for believing police officers facing misconduct allegations deserve the “benefit of the doubt.”
Reiss went on to describe how the Manhattan district attorney helped a murderer get out of jail time for a homicide victim who had very few relatives. . . .
Reiss also blasted the idea that criminals in New York illegally possessing firearms should amount to jail time.
She said the office has a “gun diversion” program for criminals illegally possessing firearms. . . .
Criminal possession of a firearm in New York is a Class E felony, and carries up to four years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office did not answer whether it is their general practice to divert Class E felons and violent criminals from the criminal justice system.
There is a word for Meg Reiss’s attitude: insanity.
In 2016, Reiss was appointed as the first Executive Director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution (IIP) at CUNY’s John Jay College. She was described at the time as a “Brooklyn and Nassau County prosecutor with more than two decades of high-profile experience in the courtroom and in efforts to reform the criminal justice system.”
The phrase “reform” implies that the criminal justice system in New York wasn’t working. We may then ask, for whom was it not working?
As you can see, over the course of two decades, there was a drastic decline in the number of murders in New York City, from a peak of more than 2,000 per year in the early 1990s, to fewer than 500 by 2007. By the time Reiss was appointed to head the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution in 2016, NYC’s murders had decreased to fewer than 350 a year.
From a standpoint of public safety, then, there seemed to be no need for “reform” or “innovation” in New York’s criminal justice system, but once you start such “reform” measures — e.g., eliminating cash bail, and declining to prosecute “low-level offenses,” as Alvin Bragg has done — it’s amazing how quickly criminals discover that there are no real consequences. After 2017, when there were only 272 murders in New York City, the homicide rate increased 67% percent by 2021, when there were 488 murders in the city. “Incarceration doesn’t really solve any problems,” we are told by Meg Reiss. We know this, she says, but if she explained how we know it, I must have missed the explanation.
What Meg Reiss and other “progressives” generally fail to acknowledge is the problem of recidivism. Criminal behavior, like most other patterns of human behavior, is largely a matter of habit. The person who, at a young age, develops a pattern of criminal behavior is likely to continue committing crimes:
Bureau of Justice Statistics studies have found high rates of recidivism among released prisoners. Examines the recidivism patterns of former prisoners during a 9-year follow-up period. The researchers found that:
— The 401,288 state prisoners released in 2005 had 1,994,000 arrests during the 9-year period, an average of 5 arrests per released prisoner. Sixty percent of these arrests occurred during years 4 through 9.
— An estimated 68% of released prisoners were arrested within 3 years, 79% within 6 years, and 83% within 9 years.
— Eighty-two percent of prisoners arrested during the 9-year period were arrested within the first 3 years.
— Almost half (47%) of prisoners who did not have an arrest within 3 years of release were arrested during years 4 through 9.
— Forty-four percent of released prisoners were arrested during the first year following release, while 24% were arrested during year-9.
One way of looking at this data is to conclude, as does Reiss, that “incarceration doesn’t really solve any problems,” i.e., even after serving a prison sentence for their crimes, criminals continue committing crimes. The possibility of being sent back to prison doesn’t seem to have as much deterrent effect as we might wish. But another way of looking at the data is to conclude that, when we do send criminals to prison, we need to keep them there as long as possible, in order to protect society from their habitual criminality. Oh, but that’s “mass incarceration,” the progressives scream, with no regard to the factor of public safety in such matters.
The people who elected Alvin Bragg as District Attorney deserve every bit of the violent anarchy they have unleashed on New York City. More Democrat voters getting murdered? Oh, what a shame!.
The best way to understand how liberal media bias operates is to think of it as a heavy wind, blowing into the faces of Republicans — at least a 10-point disadvantage from this hostile headwind — while providing Democrats with an equally powerful tailwind. Everything Republicans do is made to seem wrong and scandalous, while everything Democrats do is noble and courageous. There are occasions when this is so obvious that it’s like the media are serving up Democrat Helper™ — a steaming dish of one-sided bias. Just add a Democrat politician and stir.
Let us stipulate that a stroke as severe as the one Fetterman suffered could damage every aspect of his neurological function, including mood regulation. But the real problem — the reason Fetterman should resign, to allow Pennsylvania to have functional representation in the Senate — is that his cognitive abilities (which perhaps were never stellar) have been so impaired as to leave him unable even to speak coherently or process information. And what CBS did to conceal this was to carefully edit Paulie’s interview with Fetterman, using an obvious trick: Two cameras were used in the interview, one with a tight close-up of Fetterman, and the second with a wider shot, and whenever Fetterman speaks, they cut between the two shots, as if this is being done to add visual interest to the interview, rather than to edit out moments of babbling incoherence.
There is never any segment during the interview where Fetterman is shown speaking in a single shot for more than five or 10 seconds consecutively. And if you watch carefully, these interview excerpts constitute a fairly small share of the 10-minute piece, much of which is filled with Paulie narrating a tale of Fetterman’s “struggle,” intended to frame this as the saga of a hero courageously overcoming misfortune.
As much as anyone might lament Fetterman’s misfortune, however, it is certainly not evident that he has overcome the brain damage he suffered from his stroke last year, and Jane Paulie’s interview cannot be regarded as an honest depiction of Fetterman’s current condition. The CBS segment is propaganda, the whole point of which is to help Democrats maintain the fiction that Fetterman is capable of functioning as a U.S. Senator, so that they can avoid the risk and expense of a special election to fill the seat, if Fetterman were compelled to resign.
The scholars and theologians assembled under royal commission to produce the official English translation we know as the King James Bible were working with Hebrew and Greek original texts, and when it came time to decide what word to use for women who have sex for money, settled on the word whore. If that word was good enough for the finest scholars of 1611, it’s good enough for me, but the folks at CNN have chosen the phrase “adult film actress” to describe Stormy Daniels, as if sleazy porn videos deserve to be classified as “film,” as if it is “adult” behavior to watch such sleazy videos, and as if acting was her claim to fame. Or infamy, to be more exact. The fact that Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford) is having her “15 minutes of fame” extended we owe to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who was elected two years ago on a simple platform: Prosecute Trump. (We are not supposed to say “Soros-funded” in connection with Bragg, although he was in fact funded by Soros, because it’s anti-Semitic to call attention to this.)
Bragg has made it a policy not to prosecute crimes he deems “low-level offenses,” and crime has skyrocketed out of control in New York, but what Bragg does prosecute is the very serious crime alleged against Donald Trump: Paying a whore to shut up.
This is only a crime if it’s committed by a Republican. Basically, being a Republican is a crime unto itself, according to Alvin Bragg.
“A whore is a deep ditch” (Proverbs 23:27) and Bragg has stumbled into this ditch by his own foolish choice, apparently ignoring the omen of Michael Avenatti’s downfall. Avenatti gained national fame as attorney for Stormy Daniels, and where is he now? Fourteen years in federal prison is a harsh lesson, and one might think Bragg would be forewarned by this example, but he is heedless of the danger, “relying on debatable facts and untested legal theories to transform minor misconduct into a felony,” to quote Jacob Sullum (hat-tip Instapundit). But I did not start this post with the intent to engage in punditry about the Stormy Daniels case, because what’s the point? Every pundit on the planet is babbling about this case, and why should I add my voice to that cacophony? No, I started this post with the intention of making fun of CNN:
Primetime ratings for CNN have fallen 61% this month — the steepest dip in viewership among the big three cable news giants, according to the latest figures released by Nielsen.
The drop in ratings is a bad omen for CNN, which has struggled to right the ship since parent company Warner Bros. Discovery tasked Chris Licht with the job of turning the news channel around more than a year ago.
Despite the poor ratings, Licht has the support of his boss, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who gave a pep talk to network managers urging them to steer clear of politically oriented commentary and partisanship.
The Manhattan grand jury hearing evidence in the Stormy Daniels “hush money” investigation on Thursday voted to indict the former president, two sources with knowledge of the case told The Post.
The vote sets the stage for the first ever criminal prosecution of a former US president.
The grand jury that returned the unprecedented indictment had since January been hearing evidence and witness testimony related to a hush-money payment made on Trump’s behalf to porn star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign.
It comes as Trump, 76, is attempting to regain the White House for a third time, running for the 2024 Republican nomination.
He has blasted the investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as a “political Witch-Hunt trying to take down the leading candidate, by far, in the Republican Party” and insisted “I did absolutely nothing wrong.”
Trump, who announced he expected to be arrested March 21 and called on his supporters to protest, also accused District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, of “prosecutorial misconduct,” and claimed any charges brought against him would be barred by statute of limitations.
In the lead up to the 2016 election, Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair she had with the New York real estate mogul in 2006.
Trump denies the affair.
Cohen pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court in 2018 and was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes related to the Daniels payment and another to model Karen McDougal he helped arrange prior to the election.
Trump, who was president at the time of Cohen’s guilty plea, did not face charges by federal prosecutors over the payments.
The Manhattan DA’s office then launched its probe into the Republican, with the case gaining momentum in recent months.
Bragg had reportedly been building a case based on the Daniels payment being made with the intent to conceal or commit another crime. . . .
You can read the whole thing. Basically, Democrats want to outlaw opposition. Trump’s real crime — why he’s actually being prosecuted — is that he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. So now they’ve gotten one of their reliable party henchmen, Soros-funded DA Bragg, to convene a grand jury in Manhattan (where Hillary got 87% of the vote in 2016) to indict Trump on the basis of a far-fetched theory that the payment to Stormy Daniels was somehow felonious. Question: How many other men has Alvin Bragg prosecuted in Manhattan for paying money to whores?
Because I’m pretty sure this payment to the whore Stormy Daniels is only being treated as a felony by Bragg because a Republican is accused of it.
OK, so forensic psychologist Dr. Helen Smith did not say those exact words during her appearance today on Fox News, but we can read between the lines as she discusses Audrey Hale’s murder spree:
“When I did studies in the late ’90s on girls who kill or girls who are violent, I found that girls who feel very lonely, girls who dislike school, and girls who hold in a lot of anger … tend to lash out at other people.”
The 28-year-old former student who killed three children and three adults at a Christian grade school in Nashville on Monday was under a doctor’s care for an “emotional disorder” and had purchased seven guns ahead of the shooting, the city’s police chief said on Tuesday.
(What is the point of federally mandated background checks, when a transgender freak being treated for “an emotional disorder” can acquire an arsenal like this? That is to say, you can pass all the laws in the world, but without rigorous enforcement, the laws will never prevent such incidents. What we need to do is go back to locking these kooks up in lunatic asylums. But I digress . . .)
New details about Audrey Elizabeth Hale emerged hours after police released harrowing video showing officers storming the Covenant School and conducting a room-to-room search before confronting and fatally shooting the assailant.
Hale employed two assault weapons and a handgun during the assault on the elementary school, the latest in a long string of U.S. mass shootings that have turned guns into a hot-button political issue.
(Liberals want to make guns a “hot-button” issue, rather than making psycho trannies the issue, probably because psycho trannies vote Democrat.)
Those three guns were among seven Hale bought legally from five area stores, Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters on Tuesday.
Hale’s parents did not know that Hale was in possession of seven guns, the chief said, adding that they were under the impression that the suspect had owned only one gun but had sold it. . . .
Hale left behind a detailed map of the school showing entry points as well as what Drake described as a “manifesto” indicating that Hale may have planned to carry out shootings at other locations.
Drake previously said Hale self-identified as transgender. He referred to Hale using female pronouns on Tuesday, though Hale used male pronouns on a LinkedIn page that listed recent jobs in graphic design and grocery delivery.
(Oh, she killed six people including three kids, but the IMPORTANT thing is to make sure we use the “correct” pronouns. Gotcha.)
The chief said investigators still have not established a motive.
The newly released six minutes of footage, edited together from the body-worn cameras of two responding officers, starts with an officer retrieving a rifle from his trunk as a staff member tells him that the school is locked down but that two children are unaccounted for.
“Let’s go! I need three!” the officer yells as he enters the building, where alarms can be heard ringing.
The video shows officers passing by bulletin boards and cubbies as they clear one room after another before heading upstairs, where one says, “We’ve got one down.”
Amid the sound of gunfire, the officers race down the hallway — past what appears to be a victim lying on the ground — and into a lounge area, where the suspect is seen dropping to the floor after being shot.
Officer Rex Engelbert and Officer Michael Collazo — whose body cameras provided the footage — both fire several rounds at the suspect. The video shows the assailant still moving on the ground as another officer repeatedly yells, “Get your hands away from the gun!”
?BREAKING: Nashville Police release bodycam footage showing officers neutralizing trans shooter of Christian school pic.twitter.com/XUIhSceGiq
Those officers are heroes, and we can be thankful for their efficiency in killing the psycho tranny, thus sparing taxpayers the expense of a trial. Meanwhile, we have DM messages between the killer and one of her acquaintances, a former middle-school basketball teammate:
The transgender school shooter who killed six people including three innocent children yesterday before being gunned down by police sent a message to a friend moments before the rampage, telling her: ‘I’m planning to die today… you’ll probably hear about me on the news.’
Audrey Hale, 28, shot and killed three students and three teachers at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, shortly before 10.30am yesterday.
Audrey – who was transgender and also went by ‘Aiden’ – was then shot and killed by police.
Before traveling to the school, the killer sent a haunting final message to Averianna Patton on Instagram.
They had played middle school basketball together and remained friends. . . .
During an appearance on CNN on Tuesday morning, she said Hale had been suicidal in the past. ‘Audrey has shared with others that she had been suicidal in the past and I knew to take this serious.’
She also revealed that she was on hold for seven minutes before someone answered her call to the non-emergency police line.
‘I called Nashville’s non-emergency line at 10:14am and was on hold for nearly seven minutes before speaking with someone who said that they would send an officer to my home.
‘An officer did not come to my home until 3:29 pm,’ she said.
The first 911 call of a shooting came in at 10.13am.
By 10.27am, police were at the school and had killed Hale on the second floor of the building.
So, it’s the blaze-of-glory fantasy: “My life is worthless and I want to kill myself, but I’ll do a mass shooting and get the cops to kill me instead.” This is a theme we’ve seen more or less routinely in such incidents going back to the Columbine High School massacre. Sometimes there is a quasi-political motive, and sometimes it’s just incomprehensible rage. So while Joe Biden turns it into yet another opportunity to mumble about banning “assault weapons,” the rest of us can find no meaning to the atrocity other than the most obvious: Crazy People Are Dangerous.
You can't constantly demand to be highlighted and recognized… then complain when you're highlighted and recognized… pic.twitter.com/Llldgx50Cp
A source close to the Hale family told The Daily Beast on Monday night that Hale was autistic, but high-functioning.
“And relatively recently announced she was transgender, identifying as he/him,” the source said, asking to remain unnamed so as to avoid additional family strife.
Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at a press conference Monday afternoon that Hale was transgender.
A search of Hale’s home turned up “maps drawn of the school, in detail, so, surveillance, entry points, et cetera,” Drake said, as well as a “manifesto” and “some writings that pertain to this date, the actual incident… of how this was all going to take place.” Inside a Honda Fit that Hale drove and parked at the school campus Friday morning, cops found “additional material written by Hale,” police said in a tweet.
Drake said investigators have a working theory on a possible motive, but that it’s not confirmed. Covenant was “the only school that was targeted,” according to Drake, who added, “[t]here was another location that was mentioned.”
“But because of a threat assessment by the suspect, too much security, they decided not to,” Drake said. . . .
A LinkedIn profile says Hale started a freelance illustration and graphic design business last year after attending, and working for, Nossi College of Art in Madison, Tennessee. At Nossi, Hale won an award for “most improved” in 2015, according to the school’s site.
Hours after the shooting, police searched a home just three miles away from the school. A neighbor, Sandy Durham, who is also a family friend of the Hales, said the ATF told her they were there “to see what was going on next door [at the Hale house].”
“I do know Audrey, I’ve known her since she was a baby. I had just gotten out of the shower when all of this started happening. I didn’t really know anything more than that. Something was going on next door. It’s just tragic for everybody. The sweet children that were hurt, killed, the adults. All of it,” she told The Daily Beast.
Asked if there were any warning signs about Hale, Durham responded, “Never. She was very sweet. I don’t know what happened. It’s very scary.”
Until police release the manifesto (or at least, describe its contents), we don’t have a lot to go on, in terms of piecing together a motive, and I think conservative commentators should be cautious about using connect-the-dots guesswork. We know that Tennessee recently passed a state law outlawing transgender treatment of minors, and that there has been a lot of angry rhetoric from transgender activists around this issue, so it seems logical that this atrocity was somehow connected to or motivated by that public controversy. Yet a logical deduction is still merely speculation, absent some clear evidence — social media posts or whatever — showing that Hale was acting on such a motive.
#Nashville Police revealed that the #trans shooter who murdered children & staff at a Christian school had left behind a detailed manifesto & maps of the murder plan. Audrey "Aiden" Hale ("he/him") killed Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, & William https://t.co/cjewpV3gmQ…
