Category: United States

Groups the States

‘A Coven of Sexual Predators’

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Well, at least they weren’t Catholic priests:

Multiple cheerleading coaches in South Carolina — including a coach who recently killed himself — sexually abused at least six boys and girls and provided them with drugs and alcohol, a federal lawsuit alleges.
A “coven of sexual predators” surrounded Rockstar Cheer of Greenville for more than a decade, according to one of the lawyers for the alleged victims.
Attorney Bakari Sellers contends that what happened is a result of the same kind of institutional failure seen in the case of Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor who is serving a minimum of 40 years in prison after admitting that he molested some of the nation’s top gymnasts for years.
The lawsuit was filed Thursday by four girls and two boys who said they were abused by Scott Foster and others affiliated with Rockstar gyms. It suggests there could be up to 100 more survivors of the abuse.
“Scott Foster and his allies did their best to intimidate and isolate their targets, making these young people feel alone and somehow responsible. Well, they’re not alone anymore,” attorney Jessica Fickling said in a statement announcing the suit.
Foster, 49, was found dead in his car at a state park on Aug. 22. He shot himself in the head, the Greenville County Coroner’s Office ruled.
“He knew this was going to be a moment when the light was going to be shined on what I think will turn out to be a coven of sexual predators surrounding Rockstar,” said attorney James Bannister.
A number of people either knew Foster was abusing his cheer students and ignored it or did not have rules and procedures in place to stop the abuse, the lawsuit says.
Foster and other coaches not named in the lawsuit had sex with cheer students, sent and asked for explicit photos over social media, gave them alcohol and marijuana at their homes and in hotel rooms at cheer competitions and warned them to not tell anyone about it, according to the lawsuit.
“We have video of Scott Foster on Snapchat with beer bongs drinking with his underage cheerleaders,” Sellers said at a news conference this week.
The suit also names Varsity Brands, which runs cheerleading competitions; the U.S. All Star Federation, which is an organizing and governing body for competitive cheerleading across the country; Bain Capital, which bought Varsity in 2018, and others.
State and federal police are investigating Foster’s Rockstar Cheer and other cheerleading outlets, seizing computers, cellphones and other evidence, Bannister said.

Jeffrey Epstein could not be reached for comment.




 

Another Loser With a ‘Manifesto’

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Say hello to Ethan Miller, 20, of Bend, Oregon, and while you’re at it, go ahead and say good-bye, because he died of a self-inflicted gunshot after shooting up a Safeway supermarket Sunday. He shot four people, two of whom died, after posting a 56-page “manifesto.” Miller ranted about “the government, COVID lockdowns, technology, and women, [and] said in the rambling, oddly punctuated screed that he had an insatiable compulsion to kill”:

“I can’t wait to just send a Bullet into someone’s Brain,” Miller wrote in the first entry, on July 29. “This is going to be the Bloodiest and Most Gruesome Massacre in the History of Massacres! I want Blood, Guts, Brain Matter, and Pieces of Skull & Flesh to Paint the Walls and Floors. Then I wanna End my Life Here in the Most Violent Way Possible. By Eating the Barrel of My Shotgun then Blowing my Head Off & Evacuating my Brain with Buckshot.”

Two dead and two wounded? Definitely not “the Bloodiest and Most Gruesome Massacre in the History of Massacres,” and I’m sure we’ll get an explanation from police for why Miller’s massacre plan was even worse than his prose style. It appears he originally planned to attack a local high school on Sept. 8, but became impatient and attacked the Safeway instead. He was an unpopular creep in high school:

Akela Haverlandt, 21, lived a few houses away from Miller and attended Mountainview High with him. She graduated in 2019, a year before Miller did, but the two had a number of classes together, she said in a phone interview from Florida, where she now resides.
“He would get in tons and tons of fights at school,” Haverlandt told The Daily Beast on Monday. “I think he had this sort of rage. I mean, he was just super aggressive.”
Miller “wasn’t really liked” by others, and didn’t have very many friends, according to Haverlandt.
“People thought he was weird, or rude, or just creepy toward the girls,” she said. “… He would always message me and my friends saying, like, you’re so pretty… Kind of like a weird type of harassment situation. And he would message us and bother the shit out of us.”
One of Miller’s few friends at Mountainview High was a varsity athlete that Haverlandt dated for three years, she said. The former jock, Keenan Harpole, was arrested and charged in April with murder in the shooting death of a 19-year-old woman at Portland State University, where he was matriculating.
When Haverlandt first read Miller’s manifesto on Sunday, which has now been taken offline, she said she found it so disturbing she couldn’t sleep all night. Still, Haverlandt said it came as little surprise that Miller, of all people, would be IDed as the shooter.
“To read [it] was super crazy, but also like, ‘Wow, makes sense,’” she continued. “I wouldn’t think of anybody else in my grade or in that school that… would do that. He was so recognized for being violent, and constantly fighting with kids, and just causing problems.”

There was “little surprise” he was the shooter, because he was “recognized for being violent,” and yet nobody warned anybody.




 

Joe Biden Has Not Condemned This Atlanta ‘Hate Crime,’ For Some Reason

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Atlanta police got 911 calls: Someone was spray-painting swastikas on the rainbow crosswalk in the predominantly gay Midtown district. The LGBTQ community, not only in Atlanta, but nationwide, was prepared to launch a 24/7 media circus over this atrocity, but then police released surveillance video of the suspect, and suddenly the activists got so quiet you could hear the crickets chirping. An arrest was made Friday:

Atlanta police have identified the man arrested last week after allegedly spray-painting swastikas on the city’s rainbow crosswalks that honor the gay community.
Police identified Jonah Sampson, 30, as the man who allegedly spray-painted swastikas on Atlanta’s Midtown rainbow crosswalks. Authorities believe he is also responsible for graffiti that was found on a monument at the Federal Reserve Building, Fox 5 reported.
Sampson was arrested in Atlanta on Friday outside his apartment after a roughly five-hour standoff with a SWAT team.
Jail records show Sampson is facing three charges of second degree criminal damage to property, one count of criminal trespass and a felony charge of interference with government property.
A spokesperson for the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office told Fox News Digital on Monday that Sampson’s bond was set to $77,500 for all charges. He remains in custody.
His arrest follows the discovery of one swastika that had been painted on the rainbow crosswalk last Wednesday, as well as a second swastika found on the crosswalk on Friday, which appeared next to an anti-gay slur. Police also discovered another swastika and other graffiti on the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta on Friday.

A five-hour standoff with a SWAT team because of graffiti? Gosh, if only we’d taken this approach with Antifa … but I digress. Why would Jonah Sampson commit these crimes? Could it be that he is, shall we say, a few fries short of a Happy Meal? Andy Ngo offers important clues:

Sampson’s feed consists almost entirely of screenshots of Apple’s note app, with the occasional image of a swastika.
Some of his posts reference a “master race” of black people, while other posts are religious in nature. He often targets Jehovah’s Witnesses for portraying biblical figures as white. In one post, he simply writes “EPHESIANS 6:12.”
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” the verse reads, “but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
These words mirror many of the comments Sampson makes in his posts, calling out political leaders and sometimes even threatening them with violence.

People have gotten banned from social media for a helluva lot less than what Jonah Sampson was posting on Instagram. But the larger point is to ask the question, why hasn’t Joe Biden or any other national Democratic Party leader commented on this case? If this crime had been committed by a white person, somehow the media would have found a way to blame it on the Republican Party — the “climate of hate” incited by Trump, no doubt — but they never make the opposite inference, do they?

Of course, it’s foolish to see the actions of a lunatic as having a political significance for which public officials are responsible. The voices in the heads of schizophrenics can be consider non-partisan. Yet if an atrocity is committed by a lunatic who can, in some way, be construed as “right wing,” the media treat this as if the kook were on the payroll of the RNC.

Oh, and just imagine if the Atlanta SWAT squad had shot and killed Jonah Sampson during that five-hour standoff: He would have instantly become a martyred saint of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The media now interprets everything through political lenses, and so some atrocities become national headlines while others are just local crime stories. We should be grateful that Jonah Sampson surrendered peacefully to police, or we’d be watching Atlanta burn live on CNN.




 

Julie Jaman, Mayor David Faber and the Transgender War Against Women

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Shocking news from Washington State:

Julie Jaman, 80, was banned from Port Townsend’s Mountain View Pool after complaining about a biological male ogling young girls in the changing room. Jaman had been swimming at the pool for 35 years without incident, yet it was she who was banned and insulted by the employees and management.

The mayor of Port Townsend is a perverted monster named David Faber, who has made clear his hatred of “TERFs,” and the mere fact that Faber could be elected to office suggests that transgender radicalism is pervasive in the community. Whose side are you on?

Mandy Stadtmiller has the complete lowdown on David Faber, and I am honestly baffled why people tolerate this freak as their mayor.

(Hat-tip: John Hoge.)




 

Who Hates Republican Voters Worse, Allahpundit or Liz Cheney?

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Tuesday, I said that Liz Cheney might lose by a 30-point margin, which was wrong — it was 38 points! She lost more than 2-to-1 and didn’t even get 30% of the vote in Wyoming’s Republican primary. Her contempt for the electorate — her fathomless hatred for Republican voters — was expressed quite clearly in her concession speech:

“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all,” she said before an audience of what few supporters she has. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”
Hardly finished with her delusional Civil War era comparisons, Cheney went on to equate her ongoing fight with former President Donald Trump to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Battle of the Wilderness.
“As the fires of the battle still smoldered, Grant rode to the head of the column. He rode to the intersection of Brock Road and Orange Plank Road, and there, as the men of his army watched and waited,” Cheney said. “Instead of turning north back towards Washington and safety, Grant turned his horse south toward Richmond and the heart of [Confederate Gen. Robert E.] Lee’s army. Refusing to retreat, he pressed on to victory.”

That scene, portrayed vividly in Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, indeed captures what made Grant different from any of his predecessors commanding the Army of the Potomac, who had a habit of getting into a fight with Lee, losing thousands of men in a battle, and then retreating to the fortifications of Washington. But how does it function as an analogy for Liz Cheney’s defeat? That is to say, who is the enemy she proposes to defeat if she presses “on to victory”?

Do you get the point? The enemy is you, the Republican voter!

Cast your mind back to November 2012, when you went to the polls to vote for Mitt Romney. Chances are, Mitt wasn’t your first choice for the GOP nomination. Probably, he wasn’t your second or third choice, either. You probably weren’t too excited to go vote for Mitt on Election Day 2012, and might not have been too optimistic about his chances of beating Obama, but you voted for him anyway, because he was the Republican nominee and you’re a Republican voter. If millions of conservatives could vote for Romney — who has always been a moderate, if not indeed a liberal — then why couldn’t moderate Republicans support Trump? Why is it that the demands of party loyalty seem to be a one-way street like this? And, by the way, shouldn’t it matter that Trump was far more popular and successful than GOP Establishment choices like Romney and John McCain? The Republican presidential candidates got about 60 million votes in both 2008 and 2012, but Trump got 63 million in 2016 and 74 million in 2020. Why such hatred from “Republicans” toward a man who increased the GOP vote by more than 10 million?

Liz Cheney and the rest of the #NeverTrump crew will never answer that question, because they avoid any situation where they would be required to answer it. Oh, they can go on endlessly about why they hate Trump, but what about their hatred of the people who elected Trump?

That’s the real issue here, you see. All these people keep talking about the need to save Our Democracy™ — from whom? The voters!

Apparently, these defenders of Our Democracy™ believe that elections should be decided by a consensus of elite pundits, and that actual voters should just go along with the choices made by the wealthy and influential insiders who control both parties. Finally, in 2016, the voters replied with two words; the first was an obscene verb and the second was “you.”

It was our refusal to let the elites have their choice that made us, the Republican voters, the enemy that Liz Cheney proposes to defeat.

Which brings us, finally, to Allahpundit, the RINO that Ace of Spades has ridden like a rented mule for the past five years. In a Tuesday post contemplating the certainty of Cheney’s defeat, Allahpundit mused:

I think of the Trump-era GOP as a 30/50/20 proposition. Thirty percent are fanatics who’ll support him in whatever he wants to do. If he wins a second term and asks the new Republican Congress to pass an enabling act so that he can rule by decree, the 30 percent will say that it’ll be great not to have to worry about congressional gridlock anymore. At the other pole are the 20 percent, the people like me who find all of this endlessly repulsive and would struggle to think of an unkind word to say about Cheney after she sacrificed her career to hold Trump accountable for trying to stage a coup. She committed an act of civic heroism and demonstrated honor to a downright freakish degree among American politicians. And she knows it, which I imagine is why she’s at peace with losing this race 70/30.
As for the remaining 50 percent, I find that Cheney makes an excellent litmus test in identifying them. The 50 percent aren’t Trump fanatics, as they’re forever eager to assure you, but they’re the sort of hardcore partisans who’ll vote GOP no matter what the GOP is serving up. Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, J.D. Vance — better an autocrat with an “R” after their name than a Democrat. Ask any of these people how they feel about Cheney and you’ll find them hard-pressed to praise her even though, in theory, they broadly agree with her about Trump and January 6. The partisanship always gets in the way. Their highest allegiance is to the GOP and so, for lizard-brain reasons, they can’t allow that someone who’s spent 18 months antagonizing the head of their party and his cronies in Congress is doing an unvarnishedly noble thing. Her methods are wrong, or her messaging has been wrong, or she should have done X, Y, or Z slightly differently, yadda yadda.
It’s the 50 percent who have run this party into a ditch, not the MAGA 30 percent. If the 30 percent got a hard lesson from the 50 percent that nominating autocrats would mean electing Democrats, they’d rethink. It’s the enabling 50 percent who’ll provide the landslide margin against Cheney tonight. Never forget it.

Trust me, pal, we will never forget it. Nor are we likely to forget how you’ve been paid by a “conservative” media operation all these years, despite your unvarnished hatred of actual conservatives.

And how is it that “hardcore partisans . . . have run this party into a ditch”? Are you saying that the people who elected Trump have done more damage than the GOP Establishment types who, by nominating guaranteed losers like John McCain and Mitt Romney, ensured that Barack Obama would be elected and re-elected? Boy, you couldn’t run a successful campaign for middle-school class president. In choosing Liz Cheney as your heroine, you got what you deserved.

(Image via MsEBL on Twitter.)




 

Some Blunt Truth About ‘Hate’

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Who is attacking Asians in San Francisco and other major cities? Everybody knows the perpetrators of these atrocities are black, but almost nobody in the media wants to talk about it, because the media — as I have discussed elsewhere — are committed to a one-sided portrayal of black people as victims, rather than perpetrators, of “hate.”

San Francisco police announced the arrest of an 18-year-old and three juveniles, ages 11, 13 and 14, in a particularly brutal attack this month on an elderly Asian woman, an attack that was captured on video:

Some thoughts from Darrell Owens, a black activist in Berkeley:

“Ching chong aye yah,” hurled one of the two Black kids to an elderly Asian woman on the 30-Stockon bus in San Francisco. I had kept quiet for a few minutes but I couldn’t keep quiet anymore.
“Hey, if these Chinese people called you a nigger you’d be mad,” I told the kid. “So don’t go saying ‘ching chong’ and shit. Leave them alone.”
“Nobody cares, though. Mind your business.”
“Just leave them alone,” I reiterated. “Respect yourself.”
This wouldn’t be the first time that I had witnessed these kind of anti-Asian slurs. Many of my friends growing up were Asians: Chinese, Tibetan, Laotian, Taiwanese, Cambodian and Punjabi. I knew the families of two Asian business owners growing up who watched out for me like their own kid.
Because I was close to them, I witnessed the instances of street racism they endured, and unfortunately most of it was by young Black boys. Young boys who would mostly mock how they spoke when they entered their stores. Afterwards those Asians would often turn to me and ask me why those Blacks acted like that. My friend from China was much less guarded than his American counterparts and would never cease to ask me: why are all the poor people here Black? Why are those loud kids Black? Why are the criminals Black? . . .

You can read the whole thing, but I think the main point is in the two words Owens said to that kid on the bus: “Respect yourself.”

There is some problem around self-respect and self-image highlighted by such behavior. Decent people do not wish to be seen as bullies. One of the reasons Trump has been such a controversial figure is that he is widely perceived as a bully, and people don’t like that. And this is related to the perception of Trump’s supporters as “racist,” because people think of these two phenomena — racism and bullying — as closely connected.

It doesn’t matter if we think these perceptions are unfair, just as it doesn’t matter if Darrell Owens thinks it is unfair to judge all black people by the misconduct of unruly teenagers. As individuals, we must be mindful of our own behavior if we wish to avoid negative perceptions about whatever group we belong to, and I believe this is what Owens had in mind when he told that kid on the bus, “Respect yourself.”

My son, Jefferson, left for law school this week, and before he left, I handed him a letter of paternal advice, including this:

Dress well. Try at least to wear a button-up shirt to class, rather than a T-shirt or sweatshirt. Wear a sports coat and slacks, rather than jeans. And pay attention to your grooming and manners. We may not be rich, but you should try to convey the impression that you are a properly-raised gentleman from a good family.

This may seem like a trivial matter, but it’s not. A future lawyer should not dress like a slob or act like a slob. People will judge you by your behavior — how you dress, how you talk, how you carry yourself — and in a competitive environment like law school, it behooves a young gentleman to mind his manners. You’re not trash, are you?

The first step to solving any social problem is to avoid being part of the problem. Crime and violence in the black community are harmful in many ways, including the harm done to the general reputation of black people, as a group. How much “racism” is simply a result of the kind of observations that led Owens’ friend from China to ask, “Why are all the poor people here Black? Why are those loud kids Black? Why are the criminals Black?” White people are powerless to affect this dynamic.

“Respect yourself” — it’s good advice for everyone.




 

R.I.P., Republican Establishment

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Cause of death? Trump Derangement Syndrome:

By later this evening, Liz Cheney will lose her Wyoming Congressional seat and, in the eyes of the Beltway pundit and media class, ascend to a heroic political martyrdom for the ages.
For the partisan press, it’s an alluring story: nearly alone in her party, Cheney was willing to become the outspoken and enthusiastic tip of the spear against the spectre of Donald Trump, even as she is rejected by Republican voters. Hers has been the most prominent face on the farcical January 6th Commission, lending it the kind of faux-solemn legitimacy it was impossible to stage with hyperventilating Democrats or the tearful Adam Kinzinger.
Liz Cheney’s martyrdom is catnip for a dwindling number of Republicans who, unable to recognize what time it is, prioritize performative virtue in politics. These people — nearly all suburban, moderate, establishment Republicans employed as conservative columnists — seek their reflection in the politicians they support, because their heroes’ supposedly superior virtue reflects back on them. . . .

Read the whole thing. His point about Republicans who are “unable to recognize what time it is” relates to what Ace of Spades often says about the #NeverTrump crowd acting under the apparent delusion that it’s still 2003, that the shallow patriotic buncombe of Bushism could still muster a “center-right” majority, as if nothing had happened in the past 15 years that might render their core political assumptions invalid.

Let us give some credit to the “New Right” types — including the more zany extremists among them — for at least recognizing that the demographic trend required a reorganization of the forces opposed to liberalism. The beliefs and rhetoric which had commanded landslide majorities in the 1980s simply were not working, as a political platform, by the second decade of the 21st century. Something different had to be done to bring into the Republican coalition those alienated lower-income white voters who identified the GOP as the “rich man’s party,” indifferent to the social and economic realities of life outside the college-educated middle-class suburban world that the political elite think of as The American Dream. And, everyone must admit, Trump was different.

How strange it was that Liz Cheney, allegedly representing Wyoming in Congress, should be anti-Trump, when no state in the Union gave a greater share of its vote to Trump in 2020 than Wyoming, where Trump came within a statistical eyelash of getting 70% of the vote. In essence, Liz Cheney has been waging war on her own state’s voters.

She will lose tonight, and lose badly — her primary challenger Harriet Hageman might pile up a 30-point margin tonight — and yet Cheney will learn nothing from her defeat. She actively hates the people of Wyoming, just like she hates each and every one of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump. Hatred is always irrational, and in surrendering to this hatred, Cheney has become utterly mad, just like all the other kooks (e.g., David French) who joined her on the USS Never Trump cruise.

Bon voyage, Liz Cheney.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Biden Was Wrong, Kirby Was Right: Albuquerque Muslim Murders Were Not — NOT — Motivated by ‘Hate’

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My brother Kirby has a keen sense of probability. We were sitting outside our local convenience store having coffee on Sunday, when he started ranting about a story out of New Mexico to which I hadn’t paid attention. Four Muslim men had been murdered in the span of a few days, and President Biden (or, at least, whatever White House staffer is running his Twitter account) issued a statement condemning the “hateful attacks.” Kirby expressed doubt that this was some kind anti-Muslim hate crime. Why? All four victims were from the same mosque, Kirby pointed out, and it seemed to him that this was significant. Well, I said, we’ll wait and see. The killer couldn’t possibly get away with this, I said, because of ubiquitous video surveillance, so it probably wouldn’t be long until they announced an arrest. Oh, did you notice how Biden said he “stands strongly with the Muslim community”? Someone should ask him whether he stands with the Shi’ite Muslims or the Sunni Muslims, because Albuquerque police arrested a suspect Tuesday and — call it a hunch — but I don’t think Syed Muhammad is a MAGA-hat wearing Trump voter:

Police said Tuesday that they were investigating whether a string of murders that have shaken Albuquerque was motivated by a Sunni Muslim father’s anger over his daughter marrying a Shiite Muslim.
Muhammad Syed, 51, has been charged with the murders of two Muslim men in New Mexico’s largest city, and faces possible charges for the murders of two other Muslim men killed in the last nine months.
Authorities said in a press release that “the offender knew the victims to some extent, and an interpersonal conflict may have led to the shootings.”
Ahmad Assed, president of the city’s largest mosque, told The New York Times that authorities informed him the shooter is a Sunni Muslim who may have targeted the victims because he was angry over his daughter marrying a Shiite Muslim.
At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, Albuquerque’s deputy chief, Kyle Hartsock, said police are still investigating the motive behind the slayings, but acknowledged the theory that Syed targeted victims because he was angry over his daughter’s marriage. “We’re not sure if that’s the only motivation,” Hartsock said, adding that they’re “still investigating it.”
The men killed have been identified as Mohammad Ahmadi, 62, Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, Aftab Hussein, 41, and Naeem Hussain, 25.
Syed faces murder charges for the deaths of Aftab Hussein and Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, police said Tuesday, and remains the prime suspect in the other two homicides. A gun traced back to two of the homicide scenes was found during a search of Syed’s home, authorities said. . . .
Syed is the only suspect being investigated as of Tuesday, Hartsock said. Authorities are not labeling him a “serial killer” and said that, at this point, they still do not believe the murders were a hate crime.
Syed is a native of Afghanistan who has lived in New Mexico the “last several years,” Hartsock said. He’s been arrested on domestic violence charges three times in recent years, but all the charges were eventually dropped. . . .
As police connected the four murders to a single shooter, authorities released a photo of a silver sedan they believed was driven by the suspect. On Tuesday, Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina posted to Twitter just before 1 p.m. local time that the car had been found.
“We tracked down the vehicle believed to be involved in a recent murder of a Muslim man in Albuquerque,” Medina wrote. “The driver was detained and he is our primary suspect for the murders.”
Sherry Shafiq, a friend of Afzaal Hussain, told The Daily Beast he was relieved that the alleged killer was caught. Over the past few days, he said, his community was living in fear while a suspect was on the loose. Some Muslim residents stayed home or kept hyper-vigilant of their surroundings.
“It’s heartbreaking news,” Shafiq said. “It’s one of the community members. It was a possibility that had crossed our minds, but never in my wildest dreams would I imagine someone in the community would do such a heinous crime.”

He “can’t imagine” a Muslim committing “such a heinous crime” because vengeance and honor killings are unheard of in the Islamic community.

Somebody should tell Joe Biden he was wrong. Of course, he’s been so wrong about so many things, this isn’t really surprising.