Category: United States

Groups the States

‘The Road Leads Back to You’

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One cold evening in 1930, two Midwesterners sat in a third-floor apartment on 52nd Street in New York and dreamed of a warmer climate. Stuart Gorrell and Hoagy Carmichael had become friends while attending Indiana University together. As they looked out the window in frigid New York, “not liking what we saw,” Gorrell later recalled, he and Carmichael “turned our thoughts to the pleasant Southland”:

Georgia, Georgia,
The whole day through,
Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind.

At the time Carmichael and Gorrell wrote “Georgia on My Mind” in New York, a 15-year-old girl in Albany, Georgia, had just given birth to a baby boy. Aretha Williams named her son Ray Charles Robinson. He developed glaucoma in childhood and went blind at age 7. Ray Charles learned to play piano and by the time he was a teenager, was earning $4 a night playing in a theater in Jacksonville, Florida. Before he was 20, he was making hit records, and in 1960, he recorded “Georgia on My Mind.” It was his distinctive rendering of the song which, in 1979, was declared the official state song of Georgia. It seems “the pleasant Southland” has been on a lot of minds recently:

Democrats will turn America into a one-party country if they win the Senate runoff elections, President Donald Trump said Monday in Dalton, Georgia.
“They’ll make Washington, DC, and other liberal places the 51st, 52nd, 53rd states of the union, guaranteeing the radical left a permanent majority of the U.S. Senate and the House, and the electoral college,” he said at a rally for Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
“It will make it really a one-party country and the party will be the wrong party,” the president continued:

They will pack the Supreme Court with crazed extremists, and I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They are not stepping up to the plate … They’re not stepping up. How about that? We don’t have … look at the Supreme Court. President of the United States, I want to file suit … and they said, “Sir, you can’t. You really can’t do that.” Why? So, they have legal reasons. Complex legal reasons. It’s wrong. If you’re the president of the United States and you get defrauded out of an election, you should be able to file a suit. But we can’t do that. They say, “Sir, you don’t have standing.”

President Trump said he was winning by a lot and then, “all of a sudden, I was losing by a little tiny bit, just a little.”

We shall soon learn if Democrats can steal another election (or two) in Georgia. They have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Senate runoff campaign to elect Jon Osoff and Raphael Warnock. My native state has been barraged by wall-to-wall campaign ads and everybody down home has been bombarded by get-out-the-vote messages, so it is impossible for anyone in Georgia not to realize how high the stakes are. A few headlines via Instapundit:

Raphael Doesn’t Just Flirt With Marxism,
He Embraces It
— Lisa Carr, Victory Girls

The Media Is Lying About Trump’s Call
with Georgia Secretary of State
— Matt Margolis, PJ Media

Campaign Director: Warnock ‘Absolutely’ Backs
Defunding Police, ‘Most of Them Are Bad’
— Tyler O’Neil, PJ Media

Police Reports Detail Warnock’s
Obstruction in 2002 Child-Abuse Probe
That Led to His Arrest
— Brittany Bernstein, Yahoo News

Harvey Weinstein Attorney David Boies
Donated Thousands To Help
Warnock, Ossoff In GA Senate Races
— Dylan Housman, Daily Caller

The liberal media, of course, are ignoring any news that may reflect negatively on the Democrats, while hyping up a lot of nonsense about Trump’s phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State, but the news probably won’t have much impact on the Senate elections simply because of that multimillion-dollar advertising blitz in the state.

Modern election campaigns are ordeals to be endured, a punishment inflicted on the citizenry, and I pity the Georgians who can’t turn on their TVs without being reminded of this ugly political mess.

Other arms reach out to me.
Other eyes smile tenderly.
Still, in peaceful dreams, I see
The road leads back to you.

Not many peaceful dreams in Georgia lately — more of a nightmare. But one way or another this dreadful election will soon be over, and then perhaps “the pleasant Southland” will be pleasant once more.

 




 

How Bad Is Philly? Worse Than Chicago

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Yesterday I took notice of the awful crime situation in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago, where homicides increased 55% last year.

However, as bad as Chicago is — and frankly, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live in that Democrat-controlled hellhole — Philadelphia is actually worse. Under Democrat Mayor Jim Kenney, violent crime in Philadelphia, which was already worse than Chicago, increased more than 40% in 2020. More people were murdered in Philly last year “than in all of 2013 and 2014 combined”:

The only time more people were slain in the city was in 1990, when police reported 500 homicides as violence surged alongside an intensifying crack-cocaine epidemic.

The media would have you believe that crimes other than homicide have not increased, but Dana Pico is not buying that claim:

Murder is a crime of evidence; dead bodies are very difficult of which to dispose or hide, and they get found. But rape, assaults which don’t result in hospitalization, robberies, etc, are crimes of reporting; if the victims don’t report them, then as far as the police, as far as the statistics are concerned, they didn’t happen.
And with Larry Krasner’s refusal to prosecute seriously the ‘little’ crimes, with the black community hating the police, and with conviction rates so low, it is more probable that other crimes are simply being reported less frequently than it is that fewer crimes are being committed. When your city is stuck with a District Attorney like Mr Krasner, who doesn’t believe in prosecuting criminals, or sentencing them harshly when they are prosecuted and convicted, what reason is there to report that you were robbed?

When you vote for Democrats, you vote for crime. But don’t worry. If you get murdered in Philadelphia, you can continue voting for Democrats after you’re dead. They’re “inclusive” like that.




 

Transgender Terrorism: Seattle Antifa Weirdo Charged in Firebombing

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Crazy People Are Dangerous:

A third militant Antifa has been arrested and charged with arson over a firebombing attack on a Seattle police station.
Jeremy Michael Haines, 34, of Bremerton, Wash., was arrested by Seattle police earlier this month and charged with attempted first-degree arson.
Haines, who is transsexual and is also known by the name “Naomi Cassandra Krell,” has been arrested multiple times this year at violent Antifa protests. But the latest serious felony charge makes her the third suspect arrested over a firebombing attack on an occupied Seattle police station in September.
Haines is accused by the State of Washington of being part of a mob who carried out an organized attempt to burn down the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct on Sept. 1. Ex-realtor Danielle Elizabeth McMillian and Jacob Bennet Greenburg, the two other identified suspects, were arrested and charged in October.
On the night of the attack, around 100 Antifa dressed in black bloc and riot gear gathered at Cal Anderson Park, the location of the previous “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ). They then marched to the adjacent police station where they proceeded to carry out a coordinated firebombing using Molotov cocktails.
According to the criminal complaint, Haines was armed with a baseball bat and used a large umbrella to shield McMillan while she lit the wick of a Molotov cocktail, which was thrown toward the police station but failed to ignite. Antifa use umbrellas to shield themselves and their comrades from CCTV cameras and journalists while in the act of preparing or carrying out criminal activities.
The complaint says that Haines next shielded Greenburg from view, who successfully threw an incendiary device at the East Precinct that ignited into flames.

Who says it’s crazy to believe in “lizard people”?

Compared to what Antifa believes in, that’s relatively sane.




 

Crazy People Are Dangerous

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Wow, talk about dropping the ball:

More than a year before Anthony Warner detonated a Christmas Day bomb in downtown Nashville, officers visited his home after his girlfriend told police he was building bombs in a recreational vehicle at his residence, according to documents. But they did not make contact with him, or see inside his RV.
Those revelations, contained in a newly disclosed 2019 incident report, put Nashville’s police chief on the defensive Wednesday as he said his officers did nothing wrong and that they had handled the situation properly. He added that other than a 1970s marijuana-related arrest, Warner was “squeaky clean.”
“I believe the officers did everything they could legally. Maybe they could have followed up more, hindsight is 20/20,” Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at a news conference.
Officers were called to Pamela Perry’s Nashville home on Aug. 21, 2019, following a report from her attorney that she was making suicidal threats while sitting on her front porch with firearms, the police department said in a statement.
According to the incident report, when officers arrived, police said she had two unloaded pistols beside her on the porch. She told them the guns belonged to “Tony Warner” and she did not want them in the house any longer. Perry, then 62, was taken for a psychological evaluation after speaking to mental health professionals.
“During that visit, before leaving for the evaluation, Perry told police that her boyfriend was making bombs in an RV,” the report stated.
The report says police went to Warner’s home, about 1 and 1/2 miles (2.4 kilometers) away, but he didn’t answer the door when they knocked repeatedly. They saw the RV but it was in a fenced-off backyard and officers couldn’t see inside the vehicle. They also spotted several security cameras and wires attached to an alarm sign on a front door.
“They saw no evidence of a crime and had no authority to enter his home or fenced property,” the police statement said, adding supervisors and detectives were then notified.
“If we could have had more to go off of, it would have been good,” Drake said.
Law enforcement officials did not publicly release the report, which was obtained only after news outlets submitted public records requests. Later, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced that Warner’s only arrest was for a 1978 marijuana-related charge.
David Rausch, the TBI’s director, had told reporters earlier this week that Warner was not on their radar. Rausch was flanked by federal and state officials — including Drake — who did not object or amend the statement.
Drake later told reporters Wednesday he didn’t learn of the report until late Sunday evening, but said he believed his officers that they could not smell any explosives and that there was no probable cause for a search warrant.

You can almost — almost — see how this happened. Officers were called to a report that a woman was threatening suicide; she was taken for psychiatric evaluation. So all the police had to go on, in terms of suspicions about a bomb, was what a crazy woman told them. Imagine going to a judge to get a search warrant based on that.

Meanwhile, there’s the “lizard people” angle:

Investigators are exploring several conspiracy theories as potential motives behind the Christmas Day bombing outside an AT&T building in Nashville, Tennessee, including evidence that the bomber believed in lizard people and a so-called reptilian conspiracy, two senior law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
Investigators are expected to conclude their crime scene work this week, but it could take several more weeks until they determine the motive of the bomber, Anthony Quinn Warner, who died in the blast.
Since Saturday, authorities have been examining Warner’s digital devices — which an official said includes a significant trove of pictures, videos and writings — looking for any clues to what drove the man to set off a powerful bomb inside his recreational vehicle, which took down communications networks and injured several people in downtown Nashville.
Specifically, investigators are looking into the suspect’s previous trips to an undisclosed location in Tennessee where he would camp out in his recreational vehicle and, according to the suspect’s statements to others, hunt possible aliens, the officials said.
In addition, investigators are aware of statements the suspect made about an internet conspiracy that powerful politicians and Hollywood figures are actually lizards or other reptiles who have extraterrestrial origins and are taking over society, the officials said.

In terms of protecting Americans from terrorist threats, how do you deal with kooks who believe we’re being invaded by “lizard people”? Like, dealing with al-Qaeda or ISIS is certainly a national security challenge, but what are officials supposed to do when every random kook might go off on a deadly rampage? We are at the mercy of deranged nutjobs:

In the wake of an explosion that rocked Nashville last week, Americans are more concerned about domestic terrorism than foreign threats, and many believe the danger has increased during President Trump’s term in office.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 63% of Likely U.S. Voters say domestic terrorism is the greater threat to the United States, compared to 24% who say foreign terrorism is the greater threat.

To repeat what I have said so many times: Crazy People Are Dangerous.

PREVIOUSLY:




 

Wealthy Celebrities Flock to Georgia to Help Elect Two Left-Wing Democrats

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If you believe the polls, it’s neck-and-neck in the two Senate runoff elections next week in Georgia. Republican Sen. David Perdue appears to be holding his own against Joel Osoff while we are told that Raphael Warnock (D-Racist) is edging ahead of Kelly Loeffler. Of course, the polls are garbage and nobody trusts them, and Democrats are probably going to steal the thing with truckloads of phony mail-in ballots anyway.

Meanwhile, Hollywood is going all-in to turn Georgia blue:

Georgia is ground zero in the battle for the balance of power in Washington, DC, as control of the U.S. Senate now hinges on the outcome of the two Senate runoff races in the Peach State. With the Senate majority leadership within his reach, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) recently declared, “Now we take Georgia, and then we change America.”
More than 50 Hollywood celebrities have tried to make that a reality for Schumer, mobilizing to raise money and pump up enthusiasm for Democrat challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Using their star power to attract donor dollars, they have put their Hollywood imprint on the Georgia races in the hopes of flipping the Senate on January 5.
The vast majority of these celebrities have never lived in Georgia and have no personal connection to the state — except for the TV or movie roles that require them to occasionally film there. As Breitbart News recently reported, Ossoff raised nearly six times more in California than he did in Georgia. . . .

Call me crazy, but I’m not sure Amy Schumer’s endorsement is going to move the needle much with swing voters in Georgia.




 

Nashville: ‘Lone Wolf’ Suicide Bomber

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Police have identified Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, as the perpetrator of the Christmas morning explosion in Nashville. It is believed that Warner acted alone and that he died in the blast:

Metro Nashville Police Department Spokesman Don Aaron confirmed Warner’s identity to the Associated Press on Sunday. He did not provide any more details. However, Warner had experience with electronics and alarms, according to public records. . . .
It appears to be a “lone wolf” situation, but the motive remains under investigation. Authorities do not believe the city of Nashville is in danger.
Separately, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press that federal investigators have started examining Warner’s digital footprint and financial history.

The Internet has been buzzing with two slightly separate but related theories of Warner’s motive, based on the fact that the target of his attack seems to have been the AT&T facility in downtown Nashville. Either (a) Warner was “paranoid” about 5G technology or (b) Warner was concerned about AT&T’s (very real) involvement in federal surveillance.

Keep in mind that both of these theories are just speculation. We do not yet know if Warner left behind any kind of “manifesto” or some other indication of his motive. Warner’s father, who died in 2011, “once worked for BellSouth communications before it merged with AT&T,” according to investigators, so it is possible that Warner had some kind of personal grievance against the company. Much speculation, however, has focused on conspiracy theories about 5G technology:

Law enforcement and intelligence agencies warned in May of this year about escalating threats targeting 5G communications infrastructure, a possible motive now being considered by investigators looking into the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville, according to government documents reviewed by Yahoo News. . . .
5G is the latest standard for broadband cellular networks, which is expected to dramatically increase data transfer speeds. . . .
A May 14 Joint Intelligence Bulletin produced by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center warns of social media posts calling on people to “target critical infrastructure including cell towers, locations associated with the electric power grid, and other sites associated with perceived impending government action against citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic” and referring to past attacks in Europe and the United States on cell towers.
The bulletin notes that there have been dozens of recent attacks on cell towers, particularly those associated with 5G service, in Western Europe. While there have been fewer such attacks in the United States — just six, according to the bulletin — there have been increasing online calls for such attacks, according to the document. . . .
“Online calls for targeting have focused particularly on those facilities believed to be equipped with 5G wireless technologies, probably in part because of the recent proliferation of conspiracy theories that falsely link the COVID-19 pandemic spread with 5G infrastructure development, including beliefs that 5G towers cause the spread of COVID-19 or weaken the immune system allowing transmission of COVID-19,” the document says.
The intelligence bulletin also says that some of the calls for attacks on critical infrastructure sites, like those connected to 5G, appear to come from white supremacists.

Oh, of course, they had to throw in the “white supremacist” angle, despite the complete lack of evidence connecting Warner to any such ideology, and despite the fact that 5G conspiracy theories are also rampant in minority communities and among left-wing anarchist types.

Beyond mere speculation and politically motivated finger-pointing, however, there is the reality — not a theory, but a fact — that AT&T is working with the National Security Agency.

AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale

That’s a 2015 headline from the New York Times which, so far as I know, is not a right-wing “white supremacist” conspiracy theory site.

The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

That’s a 2018 headline from the Intercept, and although Nashville was not named as a site of one of these “NSA spy hubs,” there’s this:

The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” It is a collaboration that dates back decades.

So if you’re concerned about federal surveillance, you would certainly consider AT&T one of the bad guys. But it’s best to avoid any kind of potentially paranoia-inducing information if you’re concerned about your mental health. That is to say, if we are being targeted for warrantless surveillance by an all-powerful “Them” — Big Brother, the Deep State, rogue agents trampling on our constitutional rights — I don’t want to think too much about it, or it might drive me completely bonkers.

“How to Maintain Your Sanity” — trust me, I’m an expert.




 

‘Something for Everyone to Hate’

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It would be interesting to know how many high-school students in Loudon County, Virginia, would be able to identify Col. Edward D. Baker. If you are a student of the Civil War, you know that Baker’s death in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff was the chief inspiration for the creation of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, chaired by the radical abolitionist Sen. Ben Wade of Ohio. This tale is told artfully by Bruce Catton in a dozen pages (pp. 68-80) of Mr. Lincoln’s Army, a book I doubt any recent student at Heritage High School in Leesburg has actually bothered to read, despite the fact that the historic events related by Catton happened about five miles down the road from the high school.

Military history is almost completely absent from the 21st-century curriculum, which is big on “social justice” themes and short of any genuinely useful knowledge. What students are expected to learn in school now is not facts, but rather a politically-correct attitude. The way history is now taught, the chief goal of the curriculum is to inspire teenagers with the kind of fanatical passion for “progressive” values that one might find in an Antifa riot in Portland, Oregon — fire-bombing police cars as your senior project. But I digress . . .

Heritage High School was the scene of a teenage melodrama this summer, when a vindictive punk decided to make a big deal out of a Snapchat video, thus destroying the reputation of the captain of the school’s varsity cheerleading squad. “There’s something for everyone to hate in this story,” Ed Driscoll remarks, and indeed I found something:

How long must the South be chastised for its history? For the editors of the New York Times, apparently, the answer is, “Forever.” Nothing could be more obvious in its intended purpose than the non-accidental choice of Leesburg, Virginia, for the latest iteration of the tiresomely familiar “Legacy of Slavery” theme in the New York Times.
If you are not a Southerner, or if you pay no attention to the New York Times, you may be unfamiliar with that newspaper’s long tradition of invoking slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow as a means of insinuating the South’s permanent status of moral inferiority. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Left-Wing Journalist Among 4 Arrested in Arkansas for Firebombing Police Cars

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Renea Baek Goddard, 22, came to the United States as a child when her Air Force father, who had met her mother while stationed in South Korea, was transferred to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The family later moved to Arkansas when her father was transferred to Little Rock AFB. While a student at the Little Rock campus of the University of Arkansas, Goddard became a journalist and worked last year for a public radio station (KUAR) while also writing for other outlets including the left-wing site Truthout, where she wrote that “journalists have a responsibility to be vigilant” against white supremacists.

Well, I guess somebody needs to be “vigilant” against journalists, too:

Four suspects, including a journalist, from Little Rock, Ark. with extreme far-left ties were taken into custody and charged by federal authorities last week in connection to coordinated firebombings of police cruisers over the summer.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Arkansas announced that Brittany Dawn Jeffrey, 31, Renea Baek Goddard, 22, Aline Espinosa-Villegas, 24, and Emily Nowlin, 27, were arrested following a months-long ATF investigation.
The four suspects have been charged with malicious destruction of property belonging to an entity receiving federal funding, conspiracy to commit those acts and possession of a destructive device.

You can read the rest about this motley crew, but my favorite tidbit in this pathetic saga was unearthed by Andy Ngo:

Renea Goddard is a decidedly weird person. She has denounced U.S. “imperialism” for saving South Korea from Communism, and identifies as a Marxist lesbian even while vending her “slutty” images via the capitalist venue OnlyFans. Too bad we can’t send her to Pyongyang.