The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Bizarre Hell-World Updates

Posted on | December 3, 2020 | 1 Comment

Who knows how long we’ve been descending? It’s been going on for months — maybe even years — and our descent has been a steady process:

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT
OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH
ANDREW SULLIVAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY
— Ed Driscoll, May 2

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT
OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH
VAN JONES IS A VOICE OF SANITY
— Ed Driscoll, Sept. 5

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT
OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH
AL SHARPTON IS A VOICE OF SANITY
— Ed Driscoll, Sept. 9

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT
OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH
JAKE TAPPER IS A VOICE OF SANITY
— Ed Driscoll, Oct. 11

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT
OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH
GLENN GREENWALD IS A VOICE OF SANITY
— Ed Driscoll, Oct. 29

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT
OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH
BILL MAHER IS A VOICE OF SANITY
— Ed Driscoll, Nov. 15

. . . and finally:

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT
OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH
MATTHEW YGLESIAS IS A VOICE OF SANITY
— Ed Driscoll, today

UPDATE: Just to briefly address a few details of today’s bizarre hell-world update, Yglesias said on Twitter that “defund the police” is a bad idea, and the Left . . .

Well, I want to say they “went crazy,” but they were already crazy.

Perhaps it will be easier to understand why Yglesias is pro-police when I remind you that in 2013, he bought a $1.2 million condo near Logan Circle in D.C. This was part of the “gentrification” in our nation’s capital where an incentive program for first-time home buyers enabled a lot of white yuppies to purchase Washington real estate on favorable terms. This wave of “gentrification” in Washington and other major cities occurred at a time when more effective law-enforcement methods had driven U.S. crime rates down to their lowest level since the 1960s. Ah, but then the “Black Lives Matter” movement erupted and now effective law-enforcement methods are RAAAAACIST!

Something about owning property tends to make people — even “progressive” ideologues like Matt Yglesias — rather conservative, at least so far as it concerns their own personal interests.

If you’re renting an apartment and the city turns into Mogadishu, you just terminate your least and move elsewhere. But when you’ve purchased a $1.3 million investment, you have a vested interest in trying to prevent your neighborhood from becoming a war zone. To urban home owners, “defund the police” means surrendering to local warlords, which probably won’t be good for property values.




 

Category: Ed Driscoll

The Planners and Their Plans

Posted on | December 3, 2020 | 1 Comment

If you are my age, the very mention of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project calls to mind memories of how liberalism’s “War on Poverty” ultimately ended in catastrophic defeat:

At its peak, Cabrini-Green was home to 15,000 people, mostly living in mid- and high-rise apartment buildings, totaling 3,607 units. Over the years, crime and neglect created hostile living conditions for many residents, and “Cabrini-Green” became a metonym for the problems associated with public housing in the United States. Beginning in 1995, CHA began tearing down the mostly dilapidated, mid- and high-rise buildings, with the last high-rise being demolished in March 2011.

Cabrini-Green began with noble intentions — “slum clearance” and “urban renewal” were the phrases used to describe the rationale behind this project in a neighborhood once known as “Little Sicily.” Originally, in the 1940s, most of the tenants were Italian-American, but by the time the earlier rowhouse development (named for Saint Frances Cabrini, a nun who worked with the poor) was augmented by the high-rise William Green Homes (named for a famous labor-union leader), black residents were the majority, and not accidentally so. The liberalism of LBJ-era Democrats like Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley (who held office for more than 20 years beginning in 1955) incorporated an attitude toward African-Americans that can at best be called patronizing, insofar as it was not actually racist. If stacking up poor black people in 10-storey-tall housing developments seems like a bad idea in retrospect, consider that the alternative to this vertical solution was to allow Chicago’s poor black population to spread horizontally through the city’s neighborhoods. Black people who had left the segregation called Jim Crow in the South discovered a kind of segregation called “liberalism” in the North.

Support for federally funded public housing was a touchstone of liberal policy for decades, and it was the critics of this program, rather than its proponents, who were accused of racism. You were not only racist if you questioned the wisdom of pouring out taxpayer funding for projects like Cabrini-Green, you were a cold-hearted Scrooge. The idea of public housing as an expression of philanthropic charity was deeply embedded in the liberal worldview of the Welfare State. LBJ declared his “War on Poverty” in his first State of the Union address:

The speech led the United States Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty. The forty programmes established by the Act were collectively aimed at eliminating poverty by improving living conditions for residents of low-income neighborhoods and by helping the poor access economic opportunities long denied them.
As a part of the Great Society, Johnson believed in expanding the federal government’s roles in education and health care as poverty reduction strategies.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan famously summarized the result of LBJ’s policy: “In the Sixties, we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.”

It turns out that old-fashioned poverty — not having enough money — was actually not bad, compared to federally subsidized poverty.

By the 1990s, the failure of liberal policy was so blatantly obvious that even Democrats did not object when the federal government began demolishing the high-rise public housing projects it had spent so much taxpayer money to build a few decades earlier. Cabrini-Green was a symbol of this failed liberal dream. The last resident to leave the last high-rise tower before it was demolished in 2010 was a woman named Annie Ricks. Born in Escambia County, Alabama, in 1956, Ricks was 10 when she moved to Chicago with her family. By the time she moved into Cabrini-Green in 1989, Ricks had eight children, and she gave birth to another five children while she lived there. The Cabrini-Green site was “redeveloped” with a mix of luxury condos and “affordable housing” in what reporters described as “a planned, mixed-income neighborhood.” There was an interesting coda to the story this year when a 9-year-old boy who lived in the “affordable” section was shot dead — Janari Ricks was the grandson of Annie Ricks. The man charged with Janari’s murder, 39-year-old Darrell Johnson, opened fire at “a group of people behind the townhomes on the 900 block of North Cambridge Avenue”:

According to prosecutors, Johnson spent four years in prison for a 2005 conviction on carjacking and weapons charges, and served two years’ probation for a 2002 conviction for aggravated battery.
Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. (27th) said Monday it appears neither the shooter nor his intended target live in Cabrini Green, although they grew up there. . . .
Janari is the fifth child age 10 or younger to be shot and killed in Chicago this year.

Joe Biden got nearly 75% of the vote in Cook County, Illinois, and his agenda regarding law enforcement is mainly an exercise in blaming “systemic racism” for everything wrong in the black community.

Interestingly enough, the community where Annie Ricks was born has a larger black community, percentage-wise, than Chicago. Escambia County, Alabama, is 32% black, whereas Cook County, Illinois, is only 25% black. And while Biden easily won Chicago, Donald Trump got 68% of the vote in Escambia County where — perhaps not coincidentally — children don’t get shot to death as a routine matter. Just sayin’ . . .

One of the basic tenets of liberal thinking about race — affecting a variety of issues, including immigration, education, poverty and crime — is what Steve Sailer has called the “Magic Dirt” theory. The places where impoverished POC (“people of color”) live are demonstrably afflicted with social problems which, the liberal believes, can be solved by relocating these people to places where white people live. This idea that social problems are geographic in nature means that certain ZIP codes are “Magic Dirt,” where high SAT scores and low crime rates are more or less automatically obtained by anyone fortunate enough to live there, whereas the places with high crime and low SAT scores are “Tragic Dirt.”

Once you understand this misguided concept, it becomes impossible not to recognize the “Magic Dirt” meme in media and political rhetoric. Given what we know about Joe Biden — representing the same party that got 75% of the vote in Cook County — what should we expect if he becomes president? Steve Sailer has thoughts on that subject:

My theory has long been, going back to Chicago’s demolition of near-Loop housing projects, that, because poor black people are America’s perpetual hot potato that everybody hopes to hand off to somebody else, white urban elites wish to shove inner-city blacks onto the hinterlands.

The only possible reply to that is, “Wait and see.”

Did I mention that U.S. firearms sales are at record levels?

CORRECTION: “Magic Dirt Theory” is a phrase coined by Vox Day, specifically referring to the belief of open-borders enthusiasts “that all immigrants will magically become Real Americans, real life nephews of their Uncle Sam, reborn on the Fourth of July by virtue of geographical relocation, thereby instantly negating of all of their racial, ethnic, religious, political, and cultural traditions.” My apologies for the erroneous attribution.




 

Category: Chicago, Crime, Racism

In The Mailbox: 12.02.20

Posted on | December 2, 2020 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.02.20

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Ellen Page? Eliot Page? Who cares?

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #1189
Red Pilled Jew: A Nation Divided By The Information Flow
357 Magnum: Suicide Or COVID-19?
Twitchy: USA Today “Fact Check” Tries To Rescue Democrat COVID Hypocrites
Louder With Crowder: Meet The Leader Of The Elitists Who Want To Control You
Vox Popoli: This Is Why They Say There’s No Evidence, also, Splish Splash (Full Text Of President Trump’s Speech)

 

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Has Bibi Boxed BIden In On Iran?
American Greatness: USPS Contractor Says His Trailer With 130-280,000 Ballots Disappeared In Lancaster, PA
American Power: A Plea For A Humanist Antiracism
American Thinker: Coronavirus Hysteria Is Simply Too Ridiculous To Continue
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Democrats Contending For Kamala Harris’ Senate Seat Are Fans Of The Murderous Castro Dictatorship
BattleSwarm: How Social Justice Warrior Language Manipulates People
Cafe Hayek: Walter Williams, RIP, also, My Inadequate Tribute To One Of The Greatest Men I’ve Ever Known
CDR Salamander: Hug Your Local SINKEX Today
Da Tech Guy: Proof That The Pandemic Numbers Don’t Add Up, also, Twitter’s Prevent Defense, or, Seventh Time’s The Charm
Don Surber: Why People Ignore COVID Restrictions, also, Biden Is Muellered
First Street Journal: SJW vs. SJW, also, Not Just No But Hell No!
The Geller Report: Dominion Worker BLOWS UP Michigan Hearings, also, President Trump’s Speech On Election Fraud
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, A Synthesis
Hollywood In Toto: Yes, Scorsese’s Casino Outhustles His Iconic Goodfellas, also, Red Pill In Progress? Ron Howard Calls Out Political Film Critics
JustOneMinute: Marc Rich Redux
The Lid: Facebook & Twitter And Anti-Trump Labels To Trump’s “Most Important Speech” Ever
Legal Insurrection: Federal Appeals Court Upholds NC Voter ID Law, also, Media Rushes To Defend Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s Pink Hammer & Sickle Hat
Nebraska Energy Observer: A Harlot’s Way – 2 Babylon
Power Line: Walter Williams, RIP, also, What Is To Be Done?
Shark Tank: House Democrats High On Legalizing Weed, Put COVID Funding On Ice
Shot In The Dark: And The List Goes On
STUMP: COVID Mortality With Meep
The Political Hat: Asians Are Now Persons Of Pallor
This Ain’t Hell: Daily Monolith News, also, Alabama Man Arrested For Stolen Valor After False POW Claims
Victory Girls: Obama Says “Defund The Police” Is Unworkable “Snappy Slogan”
Volokh Conspiracy: The Statutory Authority For Barr’s Appointment Of Durham As Special Counsel
Weasel Zippers: Under CO Vaccine Distribution Plan, Elderly & At-Risk People Would Be Vaccinated LAST, also, Whistleblowers – USPS Labeled 388,000 Votes For Trump As “Undeliverable”
The Federalist: Media Elites, Not Trump Supporters, Are Disconnected From Reality, also, Austin Mayor Threatens City With Lockdown While Vacationing In Cabo
Mark Steyn: It Ain’t Over Till It’s Grover, also, Backbeat

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 12.01.20

Posted on | December 1, 2020 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.01.20

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links last month. It was very much appreciated!
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Pneuma
EBL: So What Happened To The Mysterious Utah Monolith?
Twitchy: Kim Klacik KO’s Racist Troll Who Tries To Shame Her & Other Black Female Conservatives For “Sounding White”
Louder With Crowder: Alyssa Milano Chirps At Red Cruz Over COVID Aid, Gets Rekt, also, James O’Keefe’s Been Eavesdropping On CNN Meetings & Just Broke The News To Network Prez Zucker
Vox Popoli: Rumors & More Rumors, also, Guess Who Owned The Vote?
Gab: A Discussion About QAnon

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Gearing Up For Round 3 Of The Great Trump War
American Power: F**k Red China. Just F**k Them.
American Thinker: Examining The Evidence For Democrats’ “No Evidence Of Voter Fraud” Claim
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Alternative Medicine News
Babalu Blog: The Violent Arrest Of A Young Woman In Communist Cuba
BattleSwarm: Joe Rogan Under Attack? also, Election Fraud Update For December 1
Cafe Hayek: Putting Stock In Competition
CDR Salamander: Red China Bullies Australia
Da Tech Guy: My Idea For Subscribers To Save Some Publications & Protect Conservative Voices, also, Was Calling AZ Early The Signal That The Steal Was On?
Don Surber: NYT Fears We’ll Treat Biden Like They Treated Trump
First Street Journal: Out Of Juice, also, Conservatives Now Vs. Conservatives Under Bush
The Geller Report: USPS Whistleblowers Come Forward, also, Dominion Employee Caught On Video Fiddling Data
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Baker v. Carr
Hollywood In Toto: Was Cure For Wellness Too Gonzo For Its Own Good? also, Hollywood’s Time’s Up Scandal Just The Beginning
JustOneMinute: Why Waste Your Time Voting?
The Lid: Whole Foods CEO Torches Socialism As “Trickle-Up Poverty”, also, Whitewashing FDR’s Abandonment Of The Jews
Legal Insurrection: PA – Emergency SCOTUS Injunction Sought To Halt Further Certification Actions, also, AG Barr Appoints Special Counsel To Investigate Russiagate
Nebraska Energy Observer: “A People Before ‘We The People'”
Power Line: The Flynn Outrage, also, Bruce Herschensohn, RIP
Shark Tank: DeSantis Says Mask Mandates & Lockdowns “Totally Off The Table”
Shot In The Dark: Challenges
STUMP: Reading The News With Meep
The Political Hat: Big Brother In A Kilt, also, These Are Not The Catgirls We Are Looking For
This Ain’t Hell: Deception Is The Name Of The Game, also, Navy Will Scrap Bonhomme Richard
Victory Girls: Takeaways From AZ GOP Election Fraud Hearing
Volokh Conspiracy: 4000 Years Ago, Textile Traders Invented A Basic Social Technology
Weasel Zippers: LA County Supervisor Dines At Outdoor Restaurant Hours After Voting To Ban It Countywide, also, Two-Thirds Of Americans Want Election Recount
The Federalist: CNN Finally Discovers Red China Lies, also, Despite Science, Fauci & DeBlasio Kept Schools Closed To Hurt Trump
Mark Steyn: The Outliers Of The Outliers, also, The Ragtime Restaurant

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Best Sellers in Computers & Accessories
Nestle In & Shop Home Entertainment Gifts
Chic Gifts Under $100




Category: Linkagery

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Woman in Viral Rant Blames QAnon, Mental Illness

Posted on | December 1, 2020 | 3 Comments

Melissa Rein Lively was a successful Phoenix businesswoman, CEO of her own marketing and public relations firm, The Brand Consortium. She “had developed a reputation for living a posh lifestyle and organizing red carpet events, business openings, fashion shows and charity events in Arizona.” But that was before she cracked up and “went viral” in July and recorded video of herself destroying a COVID-19 mask display at a Target store. In social-media posts, Lively claimed to be spokeswoman for QAnon. Eventually, her husband called 911 and she got hauled off for psychiatric treatment. “I was canceled. My business was gone overnight”:

“I got sucked into QAnon because I was desperate, lonely, scared, and searching for answers,” she said.
She says people around her were telling her to “snap out of it,” but her obsession only grew deeper.
“It’s so crazy, this cult ideology it has. The more you read into it, the more you freak out. Somebody in my mental capacity, who was having a traumatic experience, it was the fuel to the fire and set the whole thing off,” Lively said.

She’s better now. She has been diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar disorder, but a diagnosis is just a fancy label for “crazy.”

And that’s OK. You can be crazy and functional. You’ve just got to learn how to keep the craziness under control. There are a lot of seemingly normal people out there barely hanging onto sanity, who may be just one bad day away from going completely bonkers. Plan accordingly.




 

Category: Arizona

The Liberal Extinction Project

Posted on | December 1, 2020 | 2 Comments

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen:

People worried about the climate crisis are deciding not to have children because of fears that their offspring would have to struggle through a climate apocalypse, according to the first academic study of the issue.
The researchers surveyed 600 people aged 27 to 45 who were already factoring climate concerns into their reproductive choices and found 96% were very or extremely concerned about the wellbeing of their potential future children in a climate-changed world. One 27-year-old woman said: “I feel like I can’t in good conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions.”
These views were based on very pessimistic assessments of the impact of global heating on the world, the researchers said. One respondent, for example, said it would “rival world war one in its sheer terror”. The research also found that some people who were already parents expressed regret over having their children.
Having a child also potentially means that person going on to produce a lifetime of carbon emissions that contribute to the climate emergency, but only 60% of those surveyed were very concerned about this carbon footprint.
“The fears about the carbon footprint of having kids tended to be abstract and dry,” said Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, of Yale-NUS College in Singapore, who led the study. “But the fears about the lives of existing or potential children were really deep and emotional. It was often heartbreaking to pore through the responses — a lot of people really poured their hearts out.” . . .
The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, found no statistically significant difference between the views of women and men, though women made up three-quarters of respondents. A 31-year-old woman said: “Climate change is the sole factor for me in deciding not to have biological children. I don’t want to birth children into a dying world [though] I dearly want to be a mother.” . . .
The study is the first peer-reviewed academic study of the issue and analysed a large group of concerned people. The survey was done anonymously so people could express themselves freely. . . .
The study indicated that climate-related fears for their children’s lives were rooted in a deeply pessimistic view of the future. Of the 400 respondents who offered a vision of the future, 92.3% were negative, 5.6% were mixed or neutral, and just 0.6% were positive. . . .
However, he said further research was needed on a more diverse group of people and in other parts of the world. The self-selecting group in the study all lived in the US and were largely white, more highly educated and liberal.
Previously, opinion polls of the general public indicated people were connecting the climate crisis and reproduction, with one poll in 2020 finding that among 18- to 44-year-old US citizens without children, 14% cited climate change as a “major reason” for not having children.

Everyone old enough to remember Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” hoax should realize that “climate change” is simply the latest iteration of this neo-Malthusian doom-and-gloom propaganda.




 

Category: Contraceptive Culture, Global Warming

In The Mailbox: 11.30.20

Posted on | December 1, 2020 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.30.20

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Speaks for itself

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ammo.com: COVID-19 Lockdowns – Liberty & Science
357 Magnum: So How Is That “Affordable Bail” Program Working Out?
EBL: Last Of The Mohicans
Twitchy: “Do Not Give Them The Calm They Seek”
Louder With Crowder: Why More Than 150,000 Michigan Votes Are Sus
Vox Popoli: “Biggest Sting Op In U.S. History”, also, This Is Civil War
Stoic Observations: Where Have All The Grownups Gone?
The Rageaholic: Body Bags For Blackpills

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Most Important Thing You Can Do In This Time
American Conservative: Will Trump Be Prosecuted?
American Greatness: Why Our Universities Have Failed, also, Cybersecurity Expert – Dominion Was Connected To Internet On Election Day, Communicated Overseas
American Power: Infographic – The Four Year Long Campaign Against Trump
American Thinker: Did President Trump Spring An Election Night Trap On Treasonous Democrats? also, The Hijacking Of The 2020 Election & The Hate America Strategy
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Castro Dictatorship Cuts Electricity, Uses Pepper Spray On Protesters Outside Ministry Of Culture, also, Montreal Protesters Call For Canadian Boycott Of Cuba’s Apartheid Tourist Industry
BattleSwarm: Sir, Any Firearms In The Vehicle? also, 70 Years Ago – The Battle Of Chosin Reservoir
Cafe Hayek: More Ivor Cummins On COVID Derangement Syndrome, also, Hygiene Socialism
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Nate Silver Hardest Hit, also, Analyzing Mattis’ Comments On Red China
Don Surber: Term II – The Gloves Come Off, also, Down Ballot Races Prove Democrats Cheated
First Street Journal: The Weight Of The State Is About To Fall On Andrew Cooperrider, also, Gov. Beshear Continues To Try Restricting Freedom Of Religion
Fred On Everything: Red China – A Cold Shower
The Geller Report: Dem Rep Tlaib Calls For Israel’s Destruction, also, President Trump Threatens To Declassify “Devastating” Documents About Democrats
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Nothing To See Here, Move Along
Hollywood In Toto: Why Peter Weir’s Witness Remains “A Kind Of Miracle”, also, Kristen Stewart Ties Herself In Knots With Woke Casting Platitudes
JustOneMinute: Kick Like A Girl
The Lid: Joe Biden’s Putting That Old Anti-Israel Band Back Together
Legal Insurrection: Candace Owens Takes On Facebook “Fact Checker” PolitiFact And Wins, also, NY22 GOP Challenger Claudia Tenney Moves Back Into Lead BY 13 Votes After Final Recount
Nebraska Energy Observer: Rowan’s Way – Two Pooh Sticks
Power Line: Police Chief Escapes From Washington DC, also, David Horowitz – Where We Are & What We Face
Shark Tank: Byron Donalds To Join House “Freedom Force”
Shot In The Dark: Blue Fragility, Part MMXMLCII – Pious Fury!
STUMP: COVID Mortality With Meep
The Political Hat: When The Establishment Protects The Anti-Establishment Revolutionaries
This Ain’t Hell: I Thought Social Workers Were The Answer? also, The Cowards Of Broward Don’t Just Leave Children To Die
Victory Girls: Trumpism Must Be Purged, Say Former Obama Counsels, also, Jen Psaki Has A Problem With The Truth
Volokh Conspiracy: The Paranoid Style Of American Politics, Presidential Election Edition
Weasel Zippers: One Third Of NJ’s Small Businesses Are Gone Forever, also, Democrats Face Accusations Of Fraud In NY22 After Democrat Judge Miraculously Finds Enough Ballots To Erase 22,000 Vote Lead
The Federalist: The #NotMyPresident Crowd Needs To Sit Down & Shut Up, also, Apple, Nike, & Coca-Cola Lobby To Preserve Red China’s Slavery Of Uighurs
Mark Steyn: The Shenanigan Express, also, Luck Be A Lady

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

Who Commits Crime?

Posted on | December 1, 2020 | 1 Comment

Her neck tattoo tells you everything you need to know about her.

Her name is Fantasia Shantal Rivera, and “Beautiful Disaster” is a rather comprehensive summary of her life. This was apparent in May 2019, when she was sentenced to five years in prison:

A woman present at several shootings and stabbings over the past decade was sentenced Thursday to five years in prison after pleading guilty to a handgun charge.
Washington County Circuit Court Judge Dana Moylan Wright sentenced 25-year-old Fantasia Shantal Rivera to 15 years, with 10 years suspended, after she pleaded guilty to possession of a handgun by a felon.
Five years is a mandatory minimum during which Rivera will not be eligible for parole. She will be on supervised probation for five years after her release.
Wright also gave Rivera a concurrent sentence of about two years for violating probation on a 2012 robbery conviction.
“Ironically, you’ve served most of that sentence” because of previous probation violations, Wright told Rivera.
That conviction was for a strong-arm robbery in which Rivera participated. Her original sentence was eight years, with all but two years suspended.
“Obviously, we are all familiar with Ms. Rivera,” Assistant State’s Attorney Christopher McCormack said during the hearing.
On the afternoon of Jan. 21, a woman told Hagerstown police Rivera, her upstairs neighbor at 201 E. Washington St., threatened her with a handgun, McCormack said.
Rivera was searched and had no weapon, but allowed police to search her apartment. A loaded .40-caliber Glock handgun was found in a closet underneath some clothing, McCormack said.
Defense attorney Loren Villa told Wright that Rivera has a 1-year-old child and is pregnant with a second child.
“The father of the child passed away,” Villa said, referring to Christopher Turner, 27, who disappeared in January and was found a few days later in West Virginia, shot dead and wrapped in an artificial Christmas tree bag.
Authorities charged several people in connection with Turner’s death and with removing drugs from his body and removing his body from the crime scene in a Hagerstown apartment.
“If she didn’t have bad luck, she’d have no luck at all,” Villa told Wright. Rivera’s connection to past violent crimes was sometimes incidental, she said.
“I was a witness to one of the shootings,” Villa said, referring to a man being wounded as he walked with Rivera outside the former Office of the Public Defender.
“Imagine the amount of trauma she’s seen,” said Villa. She asked that the probation violation sentence run concurrently with her other sentence.
“There’s nothing wrong with a boring life,” Wright said, warning Rivera to change her lifestyle for the sake of her children.
“If you’re going back to what you’ve been doing, just turn your kids over” to their grandparents, Wright said.
Members of Rivera’s and Turner’s families sat together during the hearing.
Rivera was present at a number of shootings and stabbings in the past, according to police reports, including:
• On Sept. 27, 2010, Rivera was present when a toddler was shot and paralyzed in a Little Elliott Drive apartment. The child apparently shot himself with a stolen handgun, which Rivera then hid in a playground.
• Wesley Colin Williams was shot and wounded on Jonathan Street on Oct. 17, 2011, as he was walking with Rivera, police said.
• On June 24, 2012, Antonio Joyner of Walkersville, Md., was fatally shot in a Guilford Avenue house. A male friend of Rivera’s was charged with murder, but the charges were later dropped. Hagerstown police said Rivera was present.
• Shakur Thornton, 17, was fatally stabbed in a fight on West Franklin Street on March 29, 2013. Rivera was present, police said.

If people have a remarkable habit of getting shot in your vicinity, consider the possibility that you’re hanging out with bad people. Or as an alternative possibility, consider maybe you are a bad person. But let’s talk about how the man who sired Rivera’s child died:

Three people have been arrested in connection with the homicide of a 27-year-old man who went missing last month, police said Monday.
Christopher Turner was reported missing January 23 at around 4 p.m. to Hagerstown police, and had last been heard from by family on January 20 and was known to be in the Hagerstown area.
His body was found in Berkeley County, West Virginia on January 30.
19-year-old Antonio Cane Arana of Jefferson, Md., was taken into custody in Frederick, Md. on February 17 at around 9 a.m.
19-year-old Dakota Daniel Paugh of Hagerstown, Md. was taken into custody in Washington, D.C. on February 17 at around 9:25 a.m.
21-year-old Erica Shatiena Earl of Hagerstown, Md. was taken into custody in Jacksonville, Florida on February 15 at around 12:30 p.m.

How did Fantasia Rivera’s baby-daddy meet his violent demise? He “was lured to an apartment in the 1000 block of West Washington Street with the promise of a sexual encounter with two women”:

Turner was shot dead in the apartment, and drugs were stolen from his body. His body was found Jan. 30 wrapped in the packaging for an artificial Christmas tree and dumped off a bridge into a ravine in Berkeley County, W.Va.

Let’s dig a little deeper into Fantasia Rivera’s past. Remember she was present at the 2011 shooting of Wesley Colin Williams? That was apparently in retaliation for the previous stabbing of Malik Anwar Scott. The man who shot Williams was Dennis S. Marshall Jr.:

Williams was charged with attempted murder, but later pleaded guilty to second-degree assault, court records said. Marshall pleaded guilty to second-degree attempted murder in the shooting of Williams, court records said.
In February 2012, Scott was charged with taking part in a home invasion robbery in Hagerstown, published reports said. Later that year, he pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge and was sentenced to eight years in prison with 6 1/2 years suspended, court records said.

In 2014, Scott was sentenced to five years in prison for possession with intent to distribute cocaine. If you think that getting stabbed and being sentenced to prison would cause Scott to change his ways, you might be an optimist. Or a fool. Because, of course not:

A report of shots fired on Saturday [July 22, 2019] resulted in a Hagerstown teenager being charged as an adult in the shooting, and the arrest of two of the alleged victims on warrants from a May armed robbery.
Anthony De’Jhen Byrd, 17, of Berger Avenue was charged with first-degree assault, using a handgun in a crime of violence, using a dangerous weapon with intent to injure and other offenses. . . .
The investigation also led to the arrests of two Hagerstown men, Malik Anwar Scott and Dennis Steven Marshall Jr., both 24, on warrants for a May 14 armed robbery at Motel 6 on Massey Boulevard. . . .
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office investigated the hotel robbery in which a woman, Courtney Ruppenthal, allegedly conspired with two or more men to rob the hotel room occupants. She was inside the room and opened the doors to the intruders, one of whom was armed with a semiautomatic rifle.
Scott is also charged in a May 12 assault in which three males — one armed with a handgun — approached a man in an automobile on Maryland Avenue, broke out a window and began beating him, court records said.

So, after getting out of prison for his previous crimes, Scott was soon wanted on a warrant for robbing the Motel 6, and had also been charged in an recent assault. It’s as if he never did anything else in his life except perpetrate crimes. And let’s talk about the Motel 6 case:

The last of three people involved in a 2019 robbery at Motel 6 pleaded guilty Tuesday [March 10, 2020] to conspiracy to commit robbery.
Washington County Circuit Court Judge Brett R. Wilson ordered a presentence investigation, which will delay the sentencing of Latrell Robert Taylor for several weeks.
Taylor was the third person to enter a plea agreement in the May 14, 2019, robbery at the motel on Massey Boulevard.
Courtney Miranda Ruppenthal was sentenced in January to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to robbery. In 2018, she had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery for her involvement in a pair of holdups in 2017.
She testified for the state against co-defendant Dennis Von Gundy in her previous case. Gundy is serving a 30-year sentence.
In February, Dennis Steven Marshall Jr. pleaded guilty to second-degree assault for his role in the robbery and was sentenced to five years in prison. However, Marshall was facing a parole retake for an attempted murder conviction for shooting a man in 2011.
Ruppenthal had been invited to the motel room by the two victims, according to charging documents. While there, she was texting someone and left the door ajar, allowing two men to barge into the room, one of them armed with a rifle.
The two victims were assaulted and their personal belongings were stolen, and Ruppenthal left with the two intruders, charging documents said.
Marshall and Taylor were later identified as the two robbers, and the weapon was recovered, Deputy State’s Attorney Gina Cirincion told Wilson.

On the same day Dennis Marshall was sentenced to prison, his buddy Malik Scott was also in court being sentenced for separate crimes:

Coincidentally, Scott was in the same courtroom earlier Thursday pleading guilty to second-degree assault.
Scott, 25, of Hagerstown, opted for a jury trial in the assault case, but over lunch accepted a plea offer from the state.
The assault was on May 12, 2019, when Scott and two other relatives were charged with assaulting the longtime boyfriend of Scott’s mother, according to court records.
The robbery was on May 9, 2019, when Scott was accused of taking part in holding up a man for $120 during a marijuana buy, according to court records.

How did police find the weapon used in the Motel 6 robbery?

On May 16, a deputy serving an arrest warrant in an unrelated case on Dejaniro A. Rivera at a home on the 900 block of Maryland Avenue found a rifle fitting the description of the weapon used in the robbery.
Rivera told an investigator he believed Ruppenthal brought the Hi-Point 9 mm weapon to the house and that she, Taylor and the second man committed the robbery.

Oh, that’s interesting — Dejaniro Rivera just happens to have the same surname as Fantasia Rivera. Maybe it’s only a coincidence. Meanwhile, however, Dejaniro Rivera made news last week:

Hagerstown police said they found 70 rounds of ammunition and an individual wanted in connection with a recent shooting when they searched a house Wednesday morning in the 200 block of Taylor Avenue off Frederick Street.
The wanted person was one of three adults arrested when a search and seizure warrant was executed at the house at about 4:40 a.m., according to the Hagerstown Police Department. . . .
City detectives obtained the warrant after an investigation into people living in the house, according to a news release from the police department.
Besides the ammunition, police also found drugs and related paraphernalia, according to the release.
Those arrested included:
• Dejaniro Armante Rivera, 23, who had two active arrest warrants. Rivera also was charged with illegal possession of ammunition, common nuisance, possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to deliver and possession of a controlled dangerous substance.
• Destiny Marie Frisby, 19, charged with illegal possession of ammunition, common nuisance, possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to deliver, possession of a controlled dangerous substance and charges related to harboring a fugitive.
• Marquis Armond Craig, 19, charged with illegal possession of ammunition, common nuisance, possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to deliver, possession of a controlled dangerous substance and charges related to harboring a fugitive.

Whether or not Dejaniro Rivera is related to Fantasia Rivera, the connection between them is nonetheless interesting: Dejaniro had possession of the weapon used in the Motel 6 robbery, perpetrated by Dennis Marshall and two accomplices. Marshall previously went to prison for shooting Wesley Williams, who was walking with Fantasia at the time. It’s like “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” except with a small clique of criminals in one town. My point is that the question in the headline — “Who Commits Crime?” — has a very simple answer: Criminals.

Everything from dope dealing to robbery to murder — the vast majority of crime in America is committed by a comparatively small group of habitual offenders who will perpetrate crimes almost constantly if they aren’t behind bars. In a relatively small place like Hagerstown, Maryland (population about 40,000), it seems all the criminals know each other, so that Hagerstown police seldom arrest anyone who is more than two degrees of separation from Fantasia Rivera, the “Beautiful Disaster.”

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Category: Crime, Maryland
« go back — keep looking »