Category: United States

Groups the States

Idaho Breakthrough: A Serial Killer?

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My brother Kirby has been following the unsolved murder of the four university students in Idaho, and a few days ago, he said to me, “This is a maniac. This is one sick m****rf***er, somebody who’s obsessed with horror movies, like Friday the 13th.” Almost from the beginning, when this case first started making national headlines, Kirby has believed that this was not the perpetrator’s first murder.

Why should you pay attention to my brother’s hunches? Because he’s got an uncanny record of accuracy about such things. Do you remember the 2002 D.C. sniper case? Kirby solved that before the FBI did.

After it was made public that “profilers” believed the sniper was a white male, Kirby called me when I was working at The Washington Times to tell me the profilers were wrong: “Stacy, it’s got to be a black guy.” His explanation was that some of the shootings were in predominantly black neighborhoods. How could a white guy be going in and out of neighborhoods like that without attracting attention? I passed this idea along to my coworkers, who scoffed that “Stacy’s truck driver brother” knew more about the case than the geniuses at FBI headquarters, but of course, Kirby was right. So, yeah, pay attention.

Four young people stabbed to death in their sleep near the campus of the University of Idaho — everything about it is mysterious. Four days after the killings, the local police chief said the FBI had joined the case and “currently we have 25-plus investigators working this case.” That number has since grown, and by last Sunday, “more than 100 investigators, officers and support staff” were working to process the tips that were being received at a special phone number set up for that purpose.

Why is the FBI so interested in this case? Kirby points out that if, as some have suggested, the murderer was a disgruntled ex-boyfriend of one of the slain girls, such a merely local crime would not attract this much FBI involvement. What do we know about the killings? Six people were in the residence at the time of the murders, sometime after 3 a.m. on Nov. 13, and the four victims were on the second and third floors. Police say there was no sign of forced entry. So somebody managed to get into this house in the pre-dawn hours of a Sunday morning without waking anyone, stab four people to death and leave behind two others, apparently in the basement, who slept through the whole thing.

Nearly two weeks later, police still haven’t identified a suspect, so it seems that this knife-wielding killer must have been very careful in his plan to commit this crime and get away with it. This doesn’t seem to be some sudden act of impulsive rage, but rather an act that was methodically planned. And then we come back to Kirby’s belief that this quadruple homicide wasn’t the killer’s first crime:

The grieving mother of a 26-year-old man murdered in Oregon last year says she has been given “hope” that the case will finally be solved after police revealed they are exploring a potential link to the murders of four University of Idaho students in Moscow.
Myra Juetten told The Independent on Thursday that finding out who killed her son Travis Juetten in a brutal stabbing attack in his home in Silverton, Oregon – and also catching the killer of the slain students in Idaho – would be “the best Christmas present ever”.
“I want answers for all five of them,” she said of the victims.
“If law enforcement can work together and solve both cases that would be the best Christmas present ever.”
Back on 13 August 2021, Travis, 26, and his wife Jamilyn Juetten, 24, were woken at around 3am when a masked assailant broke into their home, entered their bedroom and stabbed them both multiple times with a knife.
Travis tried to fight off the attacker but was stabbed to death. Ms Juetten was stabbed 19 times but miraculously survived, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office said at the time.
Despite Travis’ family putting up a $50,000 reward for information leading to the killer, 15 months on, the case remains unsolved.
This week, similarities were drawn between the knife attack on the young couple and the 13 November stabbing murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, 400 miles away in Moscow.

Wait just a minute here — what day of the week was Aug. 13, 2021? It was a Friday. Just a coincidence, perhaps, but then you see that the Idaho victims were also killed on the 13th, and while it may be a bit of a stretch to connect these crimes, which happened 400 miles and 15 months apart, investigators don’t seem to have any other leads, so maybe this is more than a coincidence. Because one of the Oregon victims survived the attack, we know that the killer wore a mask, but they don’t say what kind of mask. Was it a hockey mask? Like Jason in Friday the 13th?

Could there be a third murder connected to this case?

As investigators skipped Thanksgiving celebrations to continue their search for a suspect in the unsolved slaying of four University of Idaho students, a third unsolved stabbing in the Pacific Northwest has resurfaced with eerie similarities. . . .
[Thursday] morning, the Idaho Tribune reported that a third nearby attack shared similar characteristics.
Sandra Ladd, 71, was found dead in her home in Washougal, Washington, on June 14, 2020, according to Oregon Crime Stoppers. Her death was ruled a homicide after the medical examiner found multiple stab wounds in her torso, Washougal police said at the time.
The two attacks [on Ladd and the Juettens] happened 14 months apart but within 70 miles of one another. The locations are roughly a five-hour drive west of Moscow, Idaho.
University of Idaho students Ethan Chapin, 20, Xana Kernodle, 20, Madison Mogen, 21, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, were stabbed to death in their sleep on Nov. 13, 2022 between 3 and 4 a.m. in a rental house just off campus, according to police.
Like the attack on the Juettens, the incident happened between 3 and 4 a.m. on the 13th of the month.

Map showing location of three crimes.

Had anyone previously connected Ladd’s murder in Washington State to the Juetten case in Oregon? Probably not, but then these four students were killed in Idaho, 400 miles away, and suddenly the coincidence — knife-wielding attacker, early-morning hours, 13th of the month — was maybe not so coincidental. And if indeed these crimes are connected, isn’t it apparent that the killer is very methodical in his planning? He first struck in Washington State, then moved across state lines to Oregon, which would reduce the likelihood of investigators making a connection between the two crimes, and then struck 400 miles away in Idaho. If he is deliberately choosing the 13th as the date of his attacks, then he must have spent some days or weeks ahead of time, scouting out his intended victims. All of this, of course, is contingent on the “if” factor; we don’t actually know that these crimes are all connected.

Notice that all three of these crimes occurred after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020. Did the killer find himself stuck at home — school canceled, or workplace shut down — and start binge-watching horror movies and serial-killer documentaries? Three or four months into his forced isolation, he decides to emulate one of his “heroes” by stabbing an old lady to death. He gets away with it, and more than a year later, decides it’s time to do it again. Gets away with that one, another year goes by, and he relocates to Idaho — new job? new school? — where he strikes again. All of these crimes happen on the 13th of the month, and if they are actually connected, the choice of a specific date (combined with the fact that the killer keeps getting away with it) suggests an intelligent perpetrator, capable of planning and organizing.

Of course, this is all just speculation. Unless and until the police apprehend a suspect, we don’t actually know that the Idaho murders are connected to these other cases. However, I cannot help but remark that these developments in the investigation tend to confirm Kirby’s hunch.

They didn’t send all those FBI agents out there for no reason, y’know.




 

Crazy People Are Dangerous: No Motive Yet in Colorado Springs Shooting
UPDATE: Shooter Is ‘Non-Binary’?

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Alleged gunman Anderson Lee Aldrich in June 2021.

In June 2021, Anderson Lee Aldrich was in an armed standoff with police at his mother’s home in Colorado Springs. He was charged with multiple felonies, but for reasons as yet unknown, the charges were dropped and records in the case were sealed. Seventeen months later, Aldrich was wearing body armor when he stormed into a local gay bar with a rifle and a pistol, shooting multiple people, five of whom died in the shooting rampage before bar patrons — one of them a former Army officer — tackled and disarmed him. People have questions:

Ring doorbell video obtained by the AP shows Aldrich arriving at his mother’s front door with a big black bag the day of the 2021 bomb threat, telling her the police were nearby and adding, “This is where I stand. Today I die.”
Two squad cars and what appears to be a bomb squad vehicle later pull up to the house, and a barefooted Aldrich emerges with his hands up.
Leslie Bowman, who owns the house where the mother lived and alerted police that day, said she was angry they didn’t do more to monitor Aldrich after the incident.
“If the justice system had followed through with something, anything … he wouldn’t likely have had access to be able to get a weapon and five people wouldn’t have died,” Bowman said.

Meanwhile, people are angry at Tucker Carlson for pointing out that we don’t yet know what the gunman’s motive was. It is easy to guess that some kind of anti-gay bias may be involved — he shot up a gay bar, OK? — but speculation is not proof. Unlike some other mass shootings, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of “manifesto” associated with the Colorado Springs shootings, and if Aldrich left any kind of clues to his motive on his social media accounts, we haven’t seen that yet. And given how eager the media seem to be to portray this as a “hate crime,” don’t you think somebody would have found evidence of Aldrich’s “homophobia,” if such evidence were posted somewhere on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.?

Meanwhile, we have some background on the killer:

Accused Colorado mass shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich had a troubled life growing up in California and Texas — one largely hidden by a complete name change before his 16th birthday.
Until he was 15, Anderson, now 22, was known by his birth name, Nicholas F. Brink, according to records obtained by the Washington Post. . . .
His parents, Aaron Brink and Laura Voepel, separated in July 2001 when he was still a baby, and he moved around between Orange, California, and San Antonio, Texas, before settling in Colorado, the records show.
His mom . . . also had several brushes with the law, including an arrest for arson in Texas in 2012, when her son was 12, the outlet noted. She also appears to have three outstanding warrants from earlier in California, according to the Gazette. . . .
When he was 15, Brink became a target of . . . “a particularly vicious bout of online bullying.” . . .
His grandparents also appear to have been central to his disturbing arrest in June last year when he livestreamed a four-hour standoff with police after being accused of threatening to blow up his neighborhood.
Relatives told the Gazette that Aldrich flipped after finding out that his grandparents planned to leave Colorado and settle in Florida.
In a livestream of the standoff — in which he threatened to “blow it to holy hell” — he also said, “This is the day I die. They don’t give a f–k about me anymore. Clearly,” the local outlet noted.

An emotionally volatile man-baby, it would seem. Which doesn’t mean he was not also a “homophobe,” but the real question is why he wasn’t prosecuted and sent to prison, instead of the charges being dropped.

Crazy People Are Dangerous.

UPDATE: Holy smokes!

“Nonbinary” is a synonym for crazy.




 

Lauren Boebert Reelected

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For some reason — I don’t know, I barely pay attention to this kind of stuff — Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert is the one Republican that Democrats most hoped to beat this year. And . . . nope:

Democrat Adam Frisch announced Friday that he had called GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert and conceded the race for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.
Although there will be an automatic recount done by the Colorado secretary of state’s office, Frisch said in a live Facebook speech that he did not ask for a recount, does not expect the results to change and does not want there to be fundraising done for an essentially fruitless cause.
“The likelihood of this recount changing more than a handful of votes is very small. Very, very small. It’d be disingenuous and unethical for us or any other group to continue to raise false hope and encourage fundraising for a recount,” Frisch said. “Colorado elections are safe, accurate, and secure. Please save your money for your groceries, your rent, your children, and for other important causes and organizations. I just got off the phone with Rep. Boebert. I called her to formally concede this election.”
Boebert acknowledged Friday that she had received Frisch’s concession call, tweeting, “I look forward to getting past election season and focusing on conservative governance in the House majority. Time to get to work!”
As of Friday morning, with almost all the votes tallied, Boebert led Frisch by only 551 votes in what had been considered a safely Republican western Colorado district. In Colorado, any race decided by a margin that’s 0.5% or less of the votes earned by the top finisher is automatically recounted.

Frisch was in a hard place because one of the reasons Democrats hate Boebert is that she’s an “election denier,” which is what they call anyone who doubts that Democrats got an 81-million-vote landslide for a brain-addled septuagenarian who never left his basement during the 2020 presidential campaign. So it would have been difficult for Frisch to claim he’d been cheated in a fraudulent election — pot, meet kettle.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, they say.




 

The Ka-Bar Killer? ‘Edged Weapon’ Used to Kill 4 Idaho Students, Police Say

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Sunday afternoon, police got a call about an “unconscious person” at a residence near the University of Idaho campus in Moscow, Idaho. It was soon reported that four people had been killed, but police wouldn’t say how they’d been killed or what the motive might be. Murders are very rare in the town of 26,000 permanent residents, and now here were four murder victims at once — two university seniors, seniors Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, both 21, junior Xana Kernodle, 20, and freshman Ethan Chapin, 20. Then on Tuesday, the local coroner let slip that the victims had all been stabbed to death, Police then said an “edged weapon” had been used in what they called a “targeted attack.” The owner of a local hardware store said police asked him if his store sold military-style Ka-Bar knives (made famous in the Rambo movies), which suggests they have some idea such a weapon was used in the murders.

Furthermore — and this is what’s freaking people out — police say that while (a) they don’t have a suspect in custody, (b) they don’t believe there is a threat to the community. Right. You’ve got a mass murderer at large, but don’t worry — there’s no “imminent danger.”

It seems obvious to me that police know a lot about the case they’re not saying publicly. Discussing the case with my brother Kirby, who’s pretty good with this kind of stuff, he thinks maybe the cops actually have their eyes on a main suspect, but are trying to get enough evidence or testimony to qualify as probable cause for a search warrant. This would explain why they believe there’s no “immient danger” to anyone else, because if police have a suspect under surveillance, and know why he did this “targeted” killing, then they also have reason to believe that the suspect isn’t just going around killing people at random.

All things considered, I’d expect police to announce an arrest within two or three days because (a) there can’t be many people who could possibly have a motive for such a “targeted” attack, (b) you don’t stab four people to death without leaving behind a lot of evidence, and (c) there’s got to be surveillance video somewhere showing somebody escaping the scene of the crime. Still, at this point, it seems very mysterious.

Stay tuned . . .




 

Further Proof the Washington Post Copy Desk Is Staffed by Incompetent Idiots

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As if further proof were needed. They quickly changed the headline and re-wrote the lead, but you have to wonder, what kind of hiring process results in one of the nation’s leading newspapers employing an editor who would click the “publish” button on something like that?

“A gunman has killed three people at a university — quick, somebody write an upbeat human interest feature on the killer!”

The re-written version of the story now leads with the fact that the suspect had two previous “incidents” involving weapons:

The 22-year-old University of Virginia student accused of killing three classmates and wounding two others on campus had previously been investigated by the school for claiming he owned a gun and was the subject of a separate incident in 2021 that involved a concealed weapon, police announced Monday morning. . . .
[Christopher Darnell Jones Jr.] had joined about 25 other students Sunday on a school trip to Washington, where the group watched a play and ate together, the university’s chief of police, Timothy Longo Sr., said at a press conference. When the students returned to campus, Longo said, Jones opened fire for reasons that remain unknown.
Jones, now charged with three counts of second-degree murder, had come to the attention of the school’s threat assessment team after they learned in September 2022 that Jones told someone he owned a gun, Longo said.
“The comment about Mr. Jones owning a gun was not made in conjunction with any threats,” said Longo, who told reporters that the office of student affairs “made efforts” to contact Jones and interviewed his roommate. That roommate did not report seeing Jones with a firearm.
Jones was at the center of “a prior criminal incident involving a concealed weapon violation that occurred outside the city of Charlottesville in February 2021,” Longo said, noting that, as a student, Jones was required to report the case to the school but never did.
The university filed administrative charges but the case was still pending when Jones allegedly gunned down his classmates Sunday night.

Heckuva job, “threat assessment team”! Nothing like filing “administrative charges” to deter armed violence. The three fatalities in the shooting were all UVA football players.

Lavel Davis Jr. was a particularly promising player, a 6-foot-7 wide receiver who caught 20 passes for 515 yards and five touchdowns his freshman season, and started six of eight games as a junior after missing his sophomore season due to injury. Now, here’s the “troubled childhood” angle that was the WaPo story’s original lead:

Once, Jones had been celebrated as a model of perseverance, overcoming a difficult childhood to earn his spot on a prestigious university’s football team.
He spent his early years living in Richmond public housing complexes, where it was often too dangerous to play outside, the Richmond-Times Dispatch reported in a 2018 profile. At night, while his mother worked, Jones was sometimes responsible for feeding his three siblings, walking to nearby grocery stores to pick up Ramen noodles or bologna. When he was 5, his parents divorced and his father left, a loss that he called “one of the most traumatic things that happened to me in my life.”
“When I went to school, people didn’t understand me,” said Jones, then 18, telling a reporter that he attacked other children who bullied him for being smart, leading to suspensions and stints in alternative school.
A woman who identified herself as Jones’s mother, Margo, answered a Washington Post reporter’s call Monday morning.
“I can tell you now that Chris was a good kid,” she said, before hanging up.
Brion Logan, his close friend and teammate in both middle and high school, recalled Jones being taunted as a child.
“Chris would wear outdated clothes and outdated shoes that a lot of people did not wear at the time, and they’d make fun of him because of his situation,” said Logan, a 22-year-old Navy enlistee. “He was always a nice person. He grew up in an unfortunate situation with his dad not being in his life too much and his mom not being the best-off financially.”
Despite the chaos in his life, Jones always made good grades.
“I would get upset because my intelligence was being insulted. Kids would pick on me — ‘Why did you do that? Why did you answer that question?’ ” Jones told the Times-Dispatch. “And in that world, disrespect means you should fight.”
When he reached sixth grade, his family moved to Varina, 10 miles outside Richmond. There, he found mentors, especially through football, but his relationship with his mother fell apart.
In search of a “new start” in 2016, he moved to Petersburg to live with his grandmother, Mary Jones. The Times-Dispatch story reported that over the next two years, mentors “helped him let go of his anger.”
“He always had strong goals. He was ambitious, but his anger simply got in the way,” one of those mentors, Xavier Richardson, said back then. “I try to help him understand that he has been able to succeed despite his obstacles, and he can thrive from them.”
Jones appeared to flourish in the years that followed. He played linebacker and running back at Petersburg High, earning honorable mention all-conference honors as a senior, according to a football biography on the University of Virginia website. He belonged to the National Honor Society and National Technical Honor Society and served as president of both the Key Club and Jobs for Virginia Graduates program.

Wonder if his high school yearbook entry mentions that classmates voted Jones “Most Likely to Murder Three People in Cold Blood”?

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)




 

‘… After Receiving a Call About a Suspicious Man in the Area …’

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Antonio Michael Rushford

Gosh, I don’t why anyone thought he looked “suspicious”:

A Belding [Michigan] man was arrested for possession of methamphetamine with intent to deliver after leading police on a brief car chase.
In the early morning hours of Nov. 10, a pickup truck was spotted running a stop sign on Deaner and Wyman Road in Home Township.
When a deputy with the Montcalm County Sheriff’s Office attempted to the pull the truck over, it drove off.
The driver, Antonio Michael Rushford, of Belding, was with a woman passenger who texted dispatch and claimed that Rushford was not allowing her to leave the truck.
The deputy lost sight of the vehicle, but the passenger informed dispatch that Rushford crashed the truck and took off on foot.
Officials said they found methamphetamine in the truck after searching the scene where it was abandoned.
Deputies were able to locate Rushford when daylight broke after receiving a call about a suspicious man in the area of the crashed truck.
Further investigation determined that the passenger was friends with Rushford and willingly rode in the truck before he drove off from the traffic stop, officials said. She was treated minor injuries and later released.
Rushford was arrested and taken to jail by the Montcalm County Sheriff’s Office.
He has been charged with possession with intent to deliver methamphetamine and fleeing and eluding police.

As a journalist, I’ve long been fascinated by the vast distance between (a) the way crime is portrayed in popular entertainment and (b) the reality of criminality. In movies and TV dramas, the criminal is always cunning — sometimes even a brilliant “mastermind” — and his crimes are a mystery which can only be solved by the most careful detectives.

This Criminal Super-Genius motif is very useful as a fictional plot device, but in the real world, most criminals are stupid, and their crimes aren’t usually mysterious. Imagine a show called CSI: Montcalm County, and this episode’s called “The Missing Meth-Head Mystery”:

(SCENE: Interior, Sheriff’s Office.)

SHERIFF: The suspect wrecked a truck full of meth and disappeared. I’ll put my best detectives on the case and . . .

(PHONE RINGS)

SHERIFF: Sheriff’s office.
DISPATCHER: We just got a call about a suspicious man not far from where that car wrecked.
SHERIFF: What do you mean, suspicious?
DISPATCHER: His face is completely covered with tattoos.
SHERIFF: Thanks. (Hangs up phone.) The mystery is solved!

See what I mean? This episode wouldn’t last 10 minutes.

Look, I don’t want to be accused of aiding and abetting criminals, but if you’re driving around with felony quantities of dangerous drugs, maybe it’s not a smart idea to be running stop signs. Just sayin’ . . .




 

Crazy People Are Dangerous: ‘Transgender Influencer’ Arrested After Getting Naked, Causing Disturbance at Miami Hotel

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Nicholas Nguyen, a/k/a “Nikita Dragun,” was arrested Monday and charged with felony battery on a police officer after causing a disturbance at a Miami hotel. According to reports, Nguyen/“Dragun” was naked in the pool area and had been engaging in disorderly conduct before police were called. When they arrived, police went to the room where Nguyen/“Dragun” was staying, and were spat on by the defendant. This was first reported by TMZ with the usual let’s-play-along-with-the-delusions female pronouns, and Time magazine is upset because Nguyen/“Dragun” was “misgendered” in the arrest affidavit.

Permit me to suggest that if you get naked at the hotel pool and thereby display your penis to the general public, the police who arrest you can be expected to presume you are male. Because, in fact, you are male.

Chances are that you have never heard of this person before, but we are living in an age when it is possible to become a “celebrity” even though the vast majority of people have no idea who you are. And so that you may be fully informed, here’s the boilerplate paragraph from Time:

The 26-year-old content creator, who is transgender, became popular in the beauty YouTube space in 2015. Since then, her candor about her transition and popular makeup videos have helped her to amass a following of more than 29 million combined followers on social platforms including TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Last year, Dragun revealed her struggles with her mental health to her followers on social media. The beauty influencer uploaded a post to Instagram in which she said that she was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility for eight days following a manic episode on Thanksgiving Day. She then uploaded a YouTube video—which has since been deleted—in May, where she revealed she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Oh, “her candor about her transition” attracted “a mass following” and Nguyen/“Dragun” is now a “beauty influencer” with 29 million followers.

The fact that this person is a dangerous psychotic? Like the man said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, and you’ve got to admit that weirdness is everywhere nowadays.

Nicholas Nguyen is a “woman” and Joe Biden is “president,” and it’s a hate crime to express skepticism about either of these assertions.

See? The before-and-after passport photos, helpfully posted to Instagram by the “transgender influencer,” demonstrate that the federal government is now playing along with these delusions. If you believe you’re a woman, you are a woman, as far as the U.S. State Department is concerned, and they’ll issue you a passport that declares this to be the case.

But a delusion is still a delusion, even if government agencies are willing to pretend otherwise, and then one day the cops show up because you’ve been parading around naked at the hotel pool — the unmistakable reality flopping around for all to see — and you end up in handcuffs at the county jail, pleading with a judge not to put you in a cell with other men.

Just so you know, Miami-Dade Corrections officials say that Nguyen/“Dragun” was never actually housed at the county jail:

“Inmate Dragun never made it beyond the booking process prior to release; therefore, she was never placed in a men’s unit,” corrections spokesperson Juan Diasgranados said in a statement. “All inmates undergoing our intake process remain in an open seating (open booking) area, in the presence of correctional staff.”
Diasgranados added Dragun was placed in a holding cell by herself due to her “high-profile status” before being released, and that she was escorted by an LGBTQ officer throughout her time at the facility.
“Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department (MDCR) is committed to protecting the rights of the transgender community and of all LGBTQ people,” the statement read. “MDCR has procedures in place for the appropriate intake, housing, and medical needs of transgender inmates, and we are committed to ensuring that all inmates in our custody, including transgender persons, are treated appropriately throughout our intake, classification and placement process.”

So they’re “treated appropriately” — although I suppose there are different opinions about what the appropriate treatment might be.

Speaking of treatment, TMZ reports Nguyen/“Dragun” is now “receiving professional mental health care in a facility”:

Nikita’s rep, Jack Ketsoyan, tells TMZ … “We want to thank everyone for the overwhelming love and support for Nikita during this time. She is in a safe environment addressing her mental health. We ask for continued respect for her privacy and the sensitivity of this matter as she seeks treatment and healing.”
We’re told Nikita began seeking treatment Wednesday evening.
The transgender influencer has been open about her mental health struggles — in May she shared on her YouTube channel that she had been diagnosed as bipolar.
Nikita said she has a family history of bipolar disorder, though she was initially surprised by her diagnosis, because she didn’t quite understand what it meant to be bipolar. As a result, she says she didn’t relate her own symptoms to the disorder.

And by being “in a safe environment,” of course they mean, strapped in a straitjacket, locked in a padded room and injected with Thorazine.

Can’t wait for Nikita’s next TikTok video, doing the Haldol shuffle.

Y’know, it just now dawned on me that I missed the opportunity to do a really clever “Florida Man” headline on this story. Too bad.

Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

‘Progressive Rock Star’ Katie Porter Spends $24 Million for Reelection

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California Rep. Katie Porter and her mentor, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Apologies for the lack of blogging Thursday, but because today is Veterans Day, my day job required me to do two days of work in advance, blah blah blah. Anyway, I happened to click on a Hot Air item by John Sexton, toward the end of which, this part caught my attention:

Finally, another race I’ve been watching is the one to decide who will be my representative in California’s 47th district. At the moment, progressive rock star Katie Porter leads GOP challenger Scott Baugh by a slim margin of 1,552 votes with 58% of the total vote counted. That’s a pretty impressive showing for Baugh so far who was massively outspent in this race. Porter ran ads nonstop for weeks spending over $21 million dollars to save herself.

For a “rock star,” she’s kinda fat, isn’t she?

Southern California used to be all about “the beautiful people,” and I can’t help but think that the election of this pudgy dumpling to Congress was somehow symbolic of how the Golden State has fallen into ruins in the 21st century. Porter’s district includes some of the most beautiful (and expensive) beach towns in Orange County, and it was once a Republican stronghold. The congressional districts have been redrawn three times since GOP Rep. Christopher Cox represented the 47th in 1990s. Katie Porter was first elected in 2018 to represent the 45th District, another former Republican stronghold that once sent the likes of Duncan Hunter and Dana Rohrabacher to Congress. After the most recent redistricting, Porter sought reelection in the 47th District.

Although I was vaguely familiar with Porter — I recognized her name — I didn’t know much about her, so I clicked onto her Wikipedia page:

Porter . . . grew up in the small farming community of Fort Dodge, Iowa. . . .
After graduating from Phillips Academy . . .

(Whoa! Stop right there! Phillips Andover is one of the most elite private schools in America, where the cost of attendance is currently $61,950 a year. How does a kid from small-town Iowa end up in this posh East Coast boarding school? But never mind . . .)

Porter attended Yale University, where she majored in American studies, graduating in 1996. . . . Porter also interned for Chuck Grassley during this time.
Porter later attended Harvard Law School . . . She studied under bankruptcy law professor and future U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, and graduated magna cum laude with her Juris Doctor in 2001. . . .

(Again with the expensive elite East Coast schools, you see.)

Porter was a law clerk for Judge Richard S. Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Little Rock, Arkansas. She practiced with the law firm of Stoel Rives LLP in Portland, Oregon . . .
Porter was Associate Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Law. In 2005, she joined the faculty of the University of Iowa College of Law as an associate professor, becoming a full professor there in 2011. Also in 2011, she became a tenured professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. . . .
In March 2012, California Attorney General Kamala Harris appointed Porter to be the state’s independent monitor of banks in a nationwide $25 billion mortgage settlement.

This is why people spend big money to send their kids to elite schools, to put them on the fast track to wealth and power. I don’t know if you kept track there, but Porter was already a law professor at UNLV prior to joining the faculty at Iowa at age 31, and six years later she got tenure at UC-Irvine. Become a tenured law professor before age 40? Man, you got it made in the shade. Porter is fiendishly clever. According to this article, she went to Phillips Andover as some sort of psychology research project about gifted kids after she got a perfect score on the SAT in seventh grade, but I don’t know if that’s actually true, because Porter is so fiendishly clever that I suspect some of her life story has been embellished, or at least dramatized, for the sake of presenting a useful narrative. For example, this article says, “The daughter of an Iowa farmer-turned-banker, Porter grew up during the farm crisis, watching ‘the entire economy around me go to hell.’” Wait a minute here — “farmer-turned-banker”? How common is that career track?

Then I check that against the other story, which says that, in attending Yale, “Porter broke away from a family tradition of going to Iowa State University.” Oh, so there was a “family tradition” of university education? How many generations of college-educated Porters were there before Katie broke the “family tradition” by choosing Yale over Iowa State? Because I’m guessing that her “farmer-turned-banker” father wasn’t just some random rural clodhopper, y’know? Anyway . . .

As an expert in bankruptcy law and a “consumer advocate,” Porter made a point of not accepting PAC money in her 2018 campaign, but I’m looking at her reelection campaign and she’s spent $24 million.

Man, I remember when even $1 million was considered a lot of money for a congressional campaign, but now Democrats — you know, The Party of the Working Man™ — are rolling in so much big money that Porter’s Republican opponent raised $2.7 million and was outspent 9-to-1 by the incumbent Democrat. That’s not counting whatever “dark money” outside groups may have spent to defend Porter’s California seat. And this pattern of Democrats vastly outspending their GOP opponents has been repeated in many races across the country. It has been said, for example, that the race in Michigan’s 7th District is the most expensive congressional campaign in American history. The Democratic incumbent, Elissa Slotkin, raised more than $9 million while her Republican challenger raised about $2.5 million, but that’s just a fraction of the total spending in MI-7. In the second week of October, more than $27 million had been spent on the race, more than half of which was from outside groups. The most recent count shows outside groups spent about $12 million on each side in MI-7, including spending by the party national campaign committees, so that the final tally is going to be more than $35 million for this one House seat. Meanwhile, in the eight most competitive Senate races (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio and New Hampshire), a combined total of $858 million was spent by outside groups, and in none of those states did the Democrats get outspent by the Republicans.

Well, guess what? Money matters: “Of the House races called so far, 96% were won by the biggest spender, a new OpenSecrets analysis found.”

Every conservative blogger and pundit is pointing fingers of blame for the failure of the GOP to produce a “Red Wave” this year. Some are blaming Trump and others are blaming the Republican establishment, but the reality is that the “Red Wave” was stopped by a Democratic “Green Wave” of campaign cash. And, by the way, I noticed something almost immediately after Joe Biden was “elected” (nudge, nudge), namely that the liberal media started talking about the 2022 midterm before Biden was even inaugurated. That is to say, having seen big losses in the 1994 and 2010 midterms, Democrats and their media friends knew very well what they’d be facing this year, and one of the things they did — it is now obvious in hindsight — was get an early start feverishly raising money for this year’s midterms, and organizing “dark money” operations to help support their effort to stem the anticipated midterm backlash.

It now appears that the progressive pudgeball’s $24 million has bought her another term in Congress, and while the Super Genius™ Pundits are busy with all their big-brain “What Does It Mean” post mortem analyses of the midterms, I didn’t ace the SATs in seventh grade, so my dumbass guess is that maybe we should start trying to figure where Democrats are getting all this money? Because it seems strange to me that a political party grimly determined to strangle capitalism and install a Weimar America regime would be so popular with big-money fat cats.

Is this some kind of kinky BDSM thing? Corporate CEOs kneeling before leather-clad Mistress Katie, begging her, “Demonize me in your rhetoric! Destroy my business with regulations! Tax me more, please!”

Meanwhile, please explain to me how somebody in Iowa with a “family tradition” of university education becomes a “farmer-turned-banker,” because that story seems too weird to be true . . .