Hopewell Chin’ono is an award-winning journalist who has relentlessly exposed the evils of the lawless and corrupt regime in Zimbabwe:
In 2020, Hopewell reported on alleged Covid-19 procurement fraud within the health ministry, which led to the arrest and sacking of Health Minister Obadiah Moyo. It was President Emmerson Mnangagwa who fired Obadiah in July for “inappropriate conduct” over the $60 million medicines supply scandal. On July 20, 2020, Hopewell was arrested and charged with inciting public violence. The US embassy called Hopewell’s arrest “deeply concerning”, while his lawyer called it “an abduction” and Amnesty accused Zimbabwean authorities of “misusing the criminal justice system to persecute journalists and activists”. He was freed in September on bail, then he was arrested again in November 2020 and was charged with obstructing justice and contempt of court for a tweet about the court outcome of a gold smuggling scandal.
Hopewell Chin’ono was released on bail on January 27, 2021 after spending three weeks in prison. Chin’ono expressed concern about the COVID-19 pandemic in the overcrowded Chikurubi Prison and accuses the government of harassment for arresting him three times in five months.
Given such credentials, Chin’ono must be taken seriously when he warns of the risks of a general “amnesty” for banned accounts on Twitter. And certainly we should hope that Elon Musk will have his staff exercise caution when it comes to such cases as these, where repressive regimes are using “ghost accounts” to harass their critics. But the problem in the United States is almost the diametrical opposite situation, i.e., critics of the regime have been banned, because Twitter staff were working with the Democratic Party to effectively prohibit dissent.
The New York Post, America’s oldest continuously published newspaper, had its Twitter account suspended at the behest of intelligence officials who falsely declared the Hunter Biden laptop story to be “Russian disinformation.” (For the record, I do not think the Biden family is less corrupt than the rulers of Zimbabwe.) Comparing the problems in America to the problems in Zimbabwe is apples and oranges, of course, but that’s the point: If we don’t want to descend into a Third World nightmare, the voices of opponents of the Democratic Party must be heard. Maybe you think Zimbabwe can’t happen here, but you’re wrong. I mean, look what Democrats have done to Chicago and Philadelphia . . .
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.
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?
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.
My categorical hatred of Canada is notorious, of course, and I probably should have known that those fiendish Canadian scum had spent years plotting their revenge against me, but now I feel like Don Corleone after he figured out who was behind Sonny’s murder: “I didn’t know until this day that it was Barzini all along.” And my Barzini is Scaachi Koul.
Before we get to that, however, some necessary background.
On Feb. 19, 2016, my @rsmccain account was banned from Twitter for “participating in targeted abuse.” As I said at the time, nobody at Twitter ever explained to me (a) who was “targeted,” (b) what kind of “abuse” they suffered, or (c) how I was “participating” in this alleged abuse.
People who had followed me on Twitter — and my @rsmccain account had tens of thousands of followers — were mystified. Nobody had seen me do anything different than my usual activity. In most other high-profile cases where Twitter accounts were banned, there was some kind of “incident” seen by everyone that was used to justify the banishment, so that even if you didn’t agree with it, at least you knew why it happened.
Ten days after that tweet, my account was suspended, and when I appealed the suspension, I was told it was permanent. What could I have possibly done to deserve this? It was a mystery.
So, now Elon Musk has paid $44 billion for Twitter, and he has lifted the ban on Donald Trump, and raised the question of whether other banned accounts should be restored. In the hope that perhaps something might finally be done to remedy the injustice of my banishment, I logged into @rsmccain for the first time in years and sent an appeal to Twitter Support, receiving this email reply:
Hello,
We received your appeal regarding your account. Please reply to this message and confirm that you have access to this email address. Once we receive your confirmation, we’ll review the information you provided and will respond as soon as possible.
We typically suspend accounts for violations of the Twitter Rules [URL] or Terms of Service [URL]. Additionally, repeat violations may result in permanent account suspension.
Thanks,
Twitter
ref:00DA0000000K0A8.5004w00002YzdWt:ref
Having filed this appeal, I then happened to glance at the @rsmccain feed, which I could view in “read only” mode. And here is one of the final tweets I sent before my banishment:
Do you see the significance of this? At first it wasn’t apparent to me, but I have always been a diligent researcher, driven by the kind of insane curiosity that led me to ask here: “Who the f**k is this ‘Scaachi’ person?” Honestly I had no idea, and had completely forgotten about this brief controversy caused by her public declaration that white males were persona non grata at BuzzFeedCanada. British journalist Martin Daubney screencapped her tweets (which she deleted amid the blowback) and I replied by calling it to the attention of Instapundit and adding the hashtag #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter).
The reason I didn’t make a mental connection between this and being suspended hours later was simply because this was such a routine sort of activity. Lots of people were raging against this @scaachi person’s discriminatory declaration, and I just added a couple of tweets to the general outrage. No big deal, right? Oh, but it was!
Oh, the melodrama! Oh, the victimhood! Oh, the mean tweets!
Scaachi Koul said something genuinely offensive, and the predictable reaction was very harsh. I’m sure some people said very rude things to her, and some may even have been so angry that what they said could be credibly called a threat. However, I was not one of those people. I didn’t send any death threats or whatever it was that caused Scaachi Koul to (temporarily) delete her account. But this climb-up-on-the-cross victimhood act by feminists — who think themselves entitled to insult anyone they choose, and never suffer repercussions for such behavior — has become a threat to free speech, because too many people are willing to play along with that childish game. In a futile effort to make public platforms “safe” for these easily offended children, social media companies have effectively prohibited open disagreement with the Left.
Twitter’s “participating in targeted abuse” rule is intended for just such a purpose. It now seems obvious to me that what happened was that Scaachi Koul went boohoing to the Twitter “safety” staff, complaining that she was a victim of harassment and the staff just decided arbitrarily to “make an example” of me, but without telling me what I had done to deserve being banned. Why didn’t they tell me? Because, if the case had been open to examination — if people were able to see my tweets and decide for themselves whether I deserved this odious punishment of being permanently banished from the platform — then certainly most people would have seen that this was grossly unfair.
Now that Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has promised to “amnesty” suspended accounts, I suppose it’s only a matter of days before @rsmccain will be active again, and as for Canadian feminists . . .
Pic related
Conservatives tend to be traditionalists, by and large, preferring to preserve the past and look skeptically on the New Improved Billion-Volt Limitless Future. We also tend to get cranky when organizations and people who we thought were on our side start acting woke or kowtowing to those who are.
So it pleases me to see that the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page has been a bastion of conservatism* for as long as I can remember, has rejected the whining of sundry annoying leftists and once again reprinted a pair of classic editorials by former editor Vermont Royster: The Desolate Wilderness, as well as And The Fair Land, which recount the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts and our progress since then. They are both well worth your time, as is the late Rush Limbaugh’s The True Story of Thanksgiving.
I hope this finds all of you in the Loyal Commentariat, as well as the trolls and ne’er-do-wells** that occasionally visit, having a happy Thanksgiving with your loved ones. See you tomorrow.
*One may occasionally grumble about the kind of conservatism they are defending, but generally, they have been Right.
**Romans 3:23 applies here, I think.
Wednesday I was watching CNN (so you don’t have to) and they were still leading every hour with Tuesday night’s shooting at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. The gunman killed six people and wounded four others before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide, shortly after police arrived. In CNN’s coverage, however, there was almost no mention of the gunman, and I had to Google to learn that police had identified him as Andre Bing, a 31-year-old who worked as team leader on the overnight shift. Co-workers said he was a weirdo:
The Walmart gunman who opened fire in the break room of the Chesapeake store where he worked last night had a list of the names of people he wished to target.
Andre Bing, 31, opened fire in the breakroom of the Walmart in Sam’s Circuit, Chesapeake, at 10.12pm last night, where 14 employees had gathered for a pre-shift meeting.
Bing’s rampage killed six people in total, including a 16-year-old boy.
In a press release Wednesday evening, the City of Chesapeake identified five of the deceased victims as Lorenzo Gamble, Brian Pendleton, Kellie Pyle, Randall Blevins, and Tyneka Johnson.
The sixth deceased victim’s name and photo was withheld due to his age, the city said. . . .
Earlier in the day, the city identified the shooter as Bing, saying he was ‘armed with one handgun and had multiple magazines on his person.’ . . .
Bing opened fire in the breakroom at the back of the store. He shot ten people before killing himself.
When police searched his body, they found a list of names that contained the names of the colleagues he wished to target, according to local Virginia outlet WAVY, citing an anonymous source. . . .
Former colleagues today described Bing as ‘weird’ and revealed he was so paranoid about being watched by the government that he taped over the camera on his phone. . . .
‘Everyone called him weird. That was all anyone could say about Andre,’ Shaundrayia Reese, who previously worked with him, told The New York Times. She added that he had a ‘nasty attitude’ – something other staff also complained about. ‘He had an attitude. He was kind of aggressive.
‘There were moments where he was OK, but he was definitely hard to work with and a little hostile,’ Nathan Sinclair, who also used to work with him, said.
None of this was mentioned on CNN, which de-emphasized the killer and instead ran with a chyron, “GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA,” but actually had Stephen Gutoski on their panel, surrounded by liberals advocating gun control. But what law could have prevented this shooting? The gunman used a common sort of pistol, not some exotic “assault rifle.” While it’s not known how he acquired the weapon, there’s no indication that he got it illegally, or that “background checks” should have prevented him from purchasing firearms. The White House issued a presidential statement: “This year, I signed the most significant gun reform in a generation, but that is not nearly enough. We must take greater action.” Well, so what? In what way would this “gun reform” have prevented the Walmart shooting? If “greater action” is needed, please tell us exactly what you have in mind, and how it’s related to what happened in this case. Which, of course, they won’t and can’t, because Democrats won’t be satisfied until Americans are completely disarmed, but they can’t say that out loud and still win elections. Meanwhile, however, this story presents yet another Case of the Disappearing Perpetrator.
If the shooter had been a white guy, especially some sort of right-wing type, the perp’s mug shot would have been featured at the top of the hour, every hour, on CNN, but instead Andre Bing is barely mentioned (and his photo never shown) in CNN’s coverage. This is your big “tell” that what they’re doing is not exactly news, but rather political propaganda on behalf of the Democratic Party. The obvious reason CNN jumped on the Virginia Walmart shooting initially was that the producers must have thought: “The South! Surely this shooter must be a redneck Bubba!”
Unfortunately for their agenda, wrong again.
They’re 0-for-2 this week on mass shootings. When a gunman stormed into a Colorado Springs gay bar and opened fire, killing five people, the media immediately leapt to the conclusion: “Hate crime!” And immediately seized on the idea that “transphobic rhetoric” by Republicans must somehow be to blame, since the club in question had hosted drag queen performances. In a New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg declared the shooting “was at once shocking and entirely predictable, like terrorist attacks on synagogues and abortion clinics.” She name-checked Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo and Ben Shapiro among those to blame for the “demonization” that she presumed led to the shooting, even though her column was published before anybody actually knew anything about the gunman or his motives.
Their brains simply can’t cope with the disappointment. So the Colorado Springs shooter will disappear down the media’s memory hole, as will the Virginia Walmart shooter, because neither of them fit the Preferred Narrative of Right-Wing Violence. These gunmen lack the necessary qualifications of significance — they don’t advance the agenda — and so they’ll be forgotten, just like Bernie Sanders fanboy James Hodgkinson has been forgotten, because most self-identified “journalists” are, indeed, just Democratic Operatives With Bylines.
