The Other McCain

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

Boston Serial Rapist Faces Life in Prison; His Sister Endorsed Kamala Harris

Posted on | September 18, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

His sister is a local Democrat politician:

A 39-year-old Cumberland, Rhode Island, man who has been accused of posing as a rideshare driver in order to target women at Boston bars has been indicted on charges including rape and kidnapping, officials said Wednesday.
Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins has called the suspect, Alvin Campbell, a serial rapist. Campbell was indicted Tuesday on two counts of kidnapping, two counts of aggravated rape, five counts of rape, two counts of indecent assault and battery, one count of assault with intent to rape and eight counts of filming an unsuspecting person in the nude. The indictment moves Campbell’s case to Suffolk Superior Court.
The charges reflect assaults against seven women between 2017 and 2019. Campbell was previously indicted in March for an attack on an eighth woman that occurred in 2019, Rollins’ office said in a statement.
Campbell will be arraigned on the indictments at a later date. Additionally, Campbell is charged as a habitual offender based on prior convictions for violent acts and firearm offenses, the statement said. The habitual offender indictment opens Campbell to the potential of life in prison if found guilty.
Campbell posed as a rideshare driver in connection with six of the indicted offenses, the district attorney’s office said, trying to target women near bars. In two incidents, the victims believed Campbell was a bouncer.
Most of the assaults happened in Campbell’s vehicle, Rollins’ office said. Campbell is accused of assaulting two women at their apartment after driving them to the residence.
“He is charged with filming each of the victims, who were unconscious, in a state of undress,” the statement said. “In five of the assaults, he allegedly filmed the victims as he raped them.”
Campbell is the brother of Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell.
Rollins’ office previously said that Campbell last worked for Uber in 2016. When his vehicle was seized in the first case, “it was festooned with Uber stickers and logos.”

Andrea Campbell’s father went to prison, her twin brother died in jail, and now her other brother is facing a life sentence for serial rape. Andrea Campbell, who has “long been a champion of law enforcement reform and accountability,” last year endorsed Kamala Harris for president.




 

Category: Crime, Kamala Harris, Massachusetts

In The Mailbox: 09.17.20

Posted on | September 17, 2020 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 09.17.20

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Red Pilled Jew: Wednesday Whittle
357 Magnum: The Media Lies Again
EBL: Remember When Schools Actually Celebrated The Constitution & Patriotism?
Twitchy: Princeton President Wrote That Racism Is “Embedded” At The University – Education Dept. Investigating
Louder With Crowder: Fox News Cuts Off Newt Gingrich For Bringing Up George Soros, And We’re As Confused As Newt Is
Vox Popoli: New Nests To Foul, also, Trumpslide 90%
Sh0eOnHead: I Watched Cuties Because You Told Me To (And Now I’m On An FBI Watchlist)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Trump Challenges Pro-War Foreign Policy Elite
American Greatness: AG Barr Pushes For Sedition Charges Against Violent Rioters, also, Two Campaign Workers For Ilhan Omar’s GOP Opponent Shot, One Fatally
American Power: Whose America Is It?
American Thinker: How The Underground Press Will Thwart The Media & Re-elect Trump
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Young Commies News
Babalu Blog: Rudy Giuliani Tells NYC Mayor & School Chancellor They Should Go Back To Cuba
BattleSwarm: Is Red China Backing Antifa/#BLM?
Cafe Hayek: Economic Ignorance Runs Deep
CDR Salamander: A Four Year Late Start
Da Tech Guy: Tweets & Threads That Should Have Been Blog Posts, also, Is It Possible For Opposite Ends Of The Political Spectrum To Communicate With Each Other?
Don Surber: Swedes Stand Up To Red Chinese Slavery, also, Holding Their Breath Until America Turns Blue
First Street Journal: The Left Decries White Privilege, But They Sure Get Concerned About Cute Little White Girls
The Geller Report: 162 House Democrats Vote Against Bill To Combat Antisemitism, also, Trump Announces Executive Order To Promote “Patriotic Education”
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Don’t Know Much About History
Hollywood In Toto: ABC Memory Holes The Path To 9/11, also, Chris Rock Threw Jimmy Fallon Under The Cancel Culture Bus
JustOneMinute: Glide Path, Interrupted
The Lid: Judge Rules Recall Of Socialist Seattle Councilwoman Can Proceed
Legal Insurrection: Facebook & Instagram Now Flagging Tucker Carlson’s Coronavirus Posts As “False Information”, also, Survey Finds 20% Of Millenials & Gen Z In NY Believe Jews Caused The Holocaust
The PanAm Post: James Story Says Elliott Abrams Was Misinterpreted
Power Line: Princeton’s “Systematic Racism” Gets The Feds’ Attention, also, Seeing The Minneapolis Effect
Shot In The Dark: This Is What Dismantlement Looks Like, also, DIY
STUMP: Keeping Up With Meep – Public Pensions, MEPs, Public Finance, & More
The Political Hat: The Rotting Of Art, also, The Cowardly Propaganda Of Courteous Conversation
This Ain’t Hell: Carol Badoni, Fake Twice-Wounded Afghan War Vet, also, Trump Presents DFC To Seven California Guardsmen
Victory Girls: Democrats Planning For Riots If Trump Wins
Volokh Conspiracy: WSJ Op-Ed – Homicide Stats Show “Minneapolis Effect”
Weasel Zippers: Media Says Timberland Boots Are Only Sexy When Democrats Wear Them, also, #BLM Co-Founder Teams Up With Red Chinese Communist Party Group
The Federalist: FISA Court Confirms FBI Lied In Every Spy Warrant Application Against Carter Page, also, Leaked 2016 Call Reveals Biden Risked National Security To Sabotage Trump
Mark Steyn: Joe Goes Corny Pop, also, Virtue-Signaling Unto Death

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Category: Linkagery

When Do Black Lives Matter, and Why?

Posted on | September 17, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Cortavion Tyriques Shemerlee Murphy was 15 years old and behind the wheel of a stolen Dodge Charger traveling about 115 mph when he crashed into a tree, killing himself and four passengers, all minors.

The crash that killed Murphy and his passengers — two 15-year-old boys, Jaquarius Hegler and Marshawn Williams, and two girls, Elexus Hillsman, 16,and Deztanee Cobb, 17 — happened around 12:45 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 2, 2017. Shortly before the crash, the Dodge Charger had blown past a police car in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The cop had at first tried to pursue the Dodge, but gave up, telling the dispatcher: “Yeah, I’m going to have to terminate it. It’s well over 100 mph.” The officer continued traveling east on Main Street at normal speed and, about a mile later, came across the site of the flaming wreckage:

 

It took four days for the medical examiner to identify the charred remains of the five teenagers killed in this crash, using dental records. But immediately after the crash, Cortavion Murphy’s mother told local media she knew that her son was driving the Dodge:

Jamila McFerrin, Murphy’s mother, said she is still in shock.
“That’s my child, my first born,” McFerrin said. “We were just laughing, talking and taking pictures at 10:30 last night. To get called saying he was in his accident. I just thought it was an accident.”
“Losing my child is tough, but knowing he was the driver and responsible for other children in the car is tough as well,” McFerrin said.

Who was Cortavion’s father? Nothing I could find online gave any hint about that, but a bit of research shows that his mother was only 16 when she gave birth to him. Apparently, however, Cortavion and his mother were living with a man named Leonard Stafford. That information involves the story of how Cortavion got hold of the car:

According to the reports, police believe the driver waited until his parents were in bed to put a license plate that was not registered on the Charger before leaving home. . . .
Then-Undersheriff Paul Matyas said in a report he was approached by Leonard Stafford at the scene of the crash. Stafford told Matyas that “I just got that car. It didn’t have plates on it and it didn’t have insurance on it and I told him not to drive it, he must’ve taken the keys.”
The teen’s name Stafford was talking about was redacted.
The vehicle had been reported stolen out of Detroit in May 2016, according to Michigan State Police.
Officers contacted Stafford again Sept. 16 at his house in Kalamazoo.
“He said that he had not really bought the vehicle, that he had been doing work on the vehicle and the person he was doing the work for had not paid for his services,” KCSO Det. Sgt. Jim VanZile wrote in a report. VanZile wrote that Stafford told him a Detroit man brought him the car to work on in May 2017.
“He worked on the transmission and the engine of the vehicle and (the man) did not pay him for all of the work he had completed,” VanZile wrote.
Stafford told police the man was “one of those drug boys” from Detroit who sells drugs in Kalamazoo.
Stafford also told police he had put a plate on the vehicle from another car he was working on and had never insured the vehicle. He denied ever letting the teen drive the vehicle, and said he left the keys in the car the night it was taken. He said he did not know the vehicle was stolen out of Detroit in May 2016.

So, if we may connect the dots here, Cortavion’s mother’s boyfriend was doing repairs on this car that was stolen in Detroit, and which had been brought to him by a known drug dealer. The mother’s boyfriend denied knowing the car was stolen, and also denied giving the teenager permission to drive the car, although the keys were conveniently left in it.

You may be wondering why I am telling the story of this 2017 car accident. It’s because, unless you live in Michigan, you almost certainly never heard of the death of these five black teenagers. Why? Because there was no “systemic racism.” The story offered no political advantage to Democrats, and therefore the national media ignored it.

See, this is what I’ve figured out: “Black Lives Matter,” as the slogan of a political movement, is a wicked lie. Black lives only “matter” to these activists when a black person is killed by a white cop, a death that can be leveraged (a) to whip up a frenzy of anti-police anger, (b) to incite a generalized hatred of white people within the black community, and thus (c) to “energize” black voters to help elect Democrats.

As a statistical proposition, what #BlackLivesMatter claims about police and racism is easily disproven. Anyone who has followed the work of Heather Mac Donald (author of The War on Cops) knows that the actual number of unarmed black people killed by police is a tiny decimal point fraction in comparison to the number of black people killed by black criminals. But because black-on-black violence can’t be leveraged to support radical rhetoric about “systemic racism” (and thus to help elect more Democrats), the national media ignore the bloody death toll of black-on-black crime. The result of this one-sided media bias is a wildly distorted public perception of crime and race in America.

Whenever I write up a story like this, my intent is to balance the false perception created by the national media’s warped coverage, which feeds a myth of white racism as the one-size-fits-all explanation for every problem affecting black people in America. Racism obviously had nothing to do with the death of Cortavion Murphy and his passengers — and that’s why nobody outside of Michigan ever heard of this story. Five black teenagers killed and not a peep from CNN or the New York Times.




 

Category: Crime, Michigan, Racism

No Lower Form of Human Scum Exists: @TheRickWilson Engaged in Blackmail?

Posted on | September 17, 2020 | Comments Off on No Lower Form of Human Scum Exists: @TheRickWilson Engaged in Blackmail?

 

Whenever some “alt-right” type accuses Republicans of being “controlled opposition,” my instinct is to dismiss this as paranoia. But then I remember that, for years, Rick Wilson claimed to be a Republican and now insists, along with the rest of the #NeverTrump crowd, that his unlimited support for Democrats is testimony to his “principles.”

Ace of Spades calls attention to a tweet by Wilson in which he rather transparently threatens Ben Domenech of The Federalist with an “oppo file” he describes as “hideous and vivid” in its details.

Let me share some advice: Never make threats.

If you’ve genuinely got the goods on somebody, either publish it or don’t.

Never threaten to publish dirt about somebody, because that makes it look more like blackmail than journalism. Of course, this business of treating journalists as public figures, subject to gossipy reporting about their personal lives, is a consequence of “cancel culture.” And notice this difference between Wilson and Domenech — Wilson is a longtime political consultant, someone who earned his living on the payroll of campaigns, whereas to my knowledge Domenech has always been an independent conservative journalist, rather than a campaign operative.

Domenech is obviously very close to powerful Republicans, but he is not (and, to my knowledge, never has been) on a campaign payroll. So if Domenech is “fair game” for the kind of “oppo file” smear that Wilson is threatening, then what political journalist is not fair game? Are we now supposed to “vet” journalists as we would a candidate? Because let me tell you that (a) journalists are generally a hard-drinking crowd, and (b) what journalists do when they’re drunk . . .

Well, finish that sentence however you wish. Suffice it to say that there is a pile of potential #MeToo stories lying around in the world of journalism, just waiting for someone to strike a match. You may have noticed the #MeToo campaign kind of lost its momentum once the subject of sexual misbehavior by journalists started making headlines.

Are Republican campaign operatives more scrupulous than journalists? Based on my own years of close observation, I’d say the answer is no.

Rick Wilson ought to consider whether he is scandal-proof, and whether some of his #NeverTrump allies might be vulnerable.

At any rate, anyone who ever had a high opinion of Rick Wilson needs to contemplate their own poor judgment. He’s vile scum.




 

Category: Scandal

Trump Getting 50% of the Catholic Vote

Posted on | September 17, 2020 | 1 Comment

The abortion issue is hurting Biden:

Catholic voters have an opportunity in November to help elect only the second Catholic president in U.S. history in former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, but already the more devout followers are lining up behind President Trump.
Gone are the days when nearly 80% of Catholic voters united to push Irish-Catholic Democrat John F. Kennedy into the White House in 1960. Catholic voters today are split on the 2020 candidates, even though Mr. Biden is a lifelong Mass-attending Catholic, and Mr. Trump is a Presbyterian.
A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that 50% of registered Catholic voters plan to vote for Mr. Trump, while 49% back Mr. Biden.
“The Catholic vote is not a monolithic vote in America,” said Brian Burch, president of the conservative CatholicVote. “We’ve moved away from that kind of tribal, if-he’s-a-Catholic-therefore-I-trust-him view. There are other reasons inside our own church for that as well. It’s not enough to merely say you’re Catholic.”
While Mr. Biden is known for his regular church attendance — he and his wife Jill Biden worship at St. Joseph on the Brandywine in Greenville, Delaware — polls show his supporters within the church tend to be less fastidious in their Sunday habits.
“The more you go to Mass and the more you self-describe as following the church’s teachings, the more likely you are to be voting for Trump,” said EWTN executive editor Matthew Bunson. “If you go to Mass less often and disagree with key teachings, you’re more likely to support Biden.”
About 18% of Catholics say they accept all the church’s teachings, versus 38% who say they accept most of them, and 29% who say they do not accept some key teachings, according to a February EWTN News/RealClearOpinion poll.
“Among Catholics who do practice the faith in a substantive way, yes, there’s been a dramatic shift over the last several decades away from the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party, and I think it’s been especially pronounced under President Trump,” Mr. Burch said.
He cited not only the abortion issue, on which Mr. Trump has been widely described as the most pro-life president ever, but his appeals to “this notion of the importance of place, of country, of patriotism, of family, of meaningful work,” as well as his political grit in the face of opposition.
“His policies are demonstrative proof of his pro-life credentials, but more important, and I increasingly hear this from Catholics, are his fortitude and courage,” Mr. Burch said. “Many Republican administrations in the past have paid lip service to the issue, and while they might be sympathetic to our cause, when things got difficult, they abandoned ship.”
Both camps are making plays for Catholic voters, and for good reason: Not only do they make up 22% of the U.S. electorate, but in nine of the last 10 presidential elections, Catholics voted with the winner, Mr. Bunson said.

Most Americans who identify as “Catholic” are what might be called cultural Catholics — usually people of Irish, Italian or Polish ancestry — who don’t regularly attend services and certainly don’t practice Catholic teachings, or otherwise they’d have six or eight kids. The fact that self-identified Catholic women do not, on average, have significantly more children than other American women tells you all you need to know about the decline of faith. If religious belief does not manifest itself as a behavioral difference from non-believers, then the salt has lost its savour.

To be pro-life is not merely to be anti-abortion. Catholic teaching explicitly condemns artificial contraception, and it is therefore to be expected that self-described Catholics would have far more numerous offspring than non-Catholics. The self-evident failure of Catholics in America to “practice what they preach” is at least as much of a scandal as pedophile priests, and these two scandals are not unrelated. Both are evidence of institutional corruption and being “conformed to this world.”




 

Category: Catholics, Donald Trump, Joe Biden

In The Mailbox: 09.16.20

Posted on | September 16, 2020 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #1111
357 Magnum: The Moral Of The Story Is…
EBL: Milwaukee Trump Supporter Arrested For Defending His Own Home
Twitchy: Newt Gingrich Names Person Who’s “A Major Cause Of The Violence We’re Seeing” On Fox News And Then Things Get Weird
Louder With Crowder: Honey Badger McEnany Levels Press Corps For Not Asking About Peace Deals
Vox Popoli: “We Could Have More Unrest”, also, That Tells Us A LOT About You, Dave
Stoic Observations: Forty Virtues

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: The Time To Stop Coddling Saudi Arabia Is Now
American Greatness: Fox Outnumbered Hosts Cut Off Newt Gingrich After He Links George Soros To Antifa/#BLM Riots
American Thinker: Western Wildfires Due To Arson & Stupidity, Not Climate Change
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Biden Likens Trump To Fidel Castro On Florida Visit (But Jill Biden Made A Tourism Ad For The Castro Regime)
BattleSwarm: Joe Rogan – “Biden Has Dementia”
Cafe Hayek: “Is” Never Implies “Ought”
Da Tech Guy: A Massachusetts Senate Game Changer? also, Five One-Liners Under Other Bloggers’ Fedoras
Don Surber: Sen. Tom Cotton Proposes Undoing What Biden Did For Red China, also, Minneapolis Defunded Police – Violent Crime Rose 55%
First Street Journal: PA’s Governor Wolf Wants To Reinstate Unconstitutional Restrictions He’d Already Suspended
The Geller Report: CBS Used Photos From Phoenix “Latinos For Trump” Event To Cover For Empty Biden Event, also, Red Chinese Organization Funding #BLM-Linked Org
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Looks Like Self-Defense To Me
Hollywood In Toto: Hollywood Grovels To Woke Mob, Stands Tall Against Conservative Complaints, also, Run Hide Fight Packs Gritty Girl Power Without Woke Theatrics
JustOneMinute: Plenty Of Blame To Go Around
The Lid: Trump Didn’t Downplay Corona-Chan’s Seriousness – But The Democrats Did
Legal Insurrection: NeverTrump Awokening – Orange Man Bad, But Trojan Horse Man Worse, also, Trump Drops The Hammer On CDC’s Attempt To Continue “Critical Race Theory” Despite Presidential Ban
The PanAm Post: Ticking Time Bomb In Venezuela – Gasoline Shortage Worsens & Pandemic Spikes
Power Line: America’s Most Pathetic Government Body? also, NFL Player Bucks Teammates By Honoring Vet, Not Drive-by Shooter
Shark Tank: Ft. Lauderdale’s Democrat Mayor Under Fire For Mismanaging Growing Water Crisis
Shot In The Dark: A Democracy, If We Can Keep It
STUMP: Quick Note On Actuarial Outpost & New Mortality Video
The Political Hat: Abolishing The United States
This Ain’t Hell: Korean War Vet Gives Away $8B Fortune To Die (Relatively) Poor, also, Stolen Valor In A Prop 21 Ad
Victory Girls: Liberal Media Defends Foreign Agent AJ+
Volokh Conspiracy: New Survey On Public Ignorance About The Holocaust
Weasel Zippers: Biden Endorses Man Who Once Called Women “Breeders” And Blogged About 4-Year-Old Girls In Thongs, also, Philly #BLM Organizer – “We Do Not Win If We Rely On An Election”
The Federalist: Up To 95% Of 2020 Riots Linked To #BLM, also, Democrats Are Complicit In The Killing Of Our Police
Mark Steyn: Tal Bachman – Finding Jessica, also, Middle East Peace From President Hitler

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Category: Linkagery

Mandatory ‘Struggle Sessions’ in Arizona

Posted on | September 16, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Robert Shibley, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), calls attention to how “critical race theory” indoctrination is made mandatory at universities:

Teaching about anti-racism in a state university Intro to Communications class is one thing. Telling students they have to do “inner work” on their beliefs as college classwork sounds a lot more like thought reform than education. Maybe this isn’t what it looks like, but if you can’t make a grammar school kid say the Pledge of Allegiance during World War II, there’s no way a professor can mandate psychological therapy for his or her adult students.

In other words, making this kind of indoctrination mandatory — and Introduction to Communications is a required class for all freshmen at Arizona State University — violates the constitutional rights of students.

Ask yourself what educational purpose is intended by requiring students to make a commitment to “doing the inner work of anti-racism”? We might suppose that Arizona State would never have admitted these students if their scholastic achievement was deficient. So it may be assumed that these are reasonably intelligent young people who have completed a state-approved high school curriculum. Unless Arizona schools are demonstrably failing in terms of teaching “anti-racism,” how does requiring this assignment in a freshman communications class constitute an academic necessity? What need is there for this?

Without any evidence of a general need for this “inner work,” then, we may assume that this indoctrination is intended to serve the political agenda of ASU’s faculty and administration. What is that agenda?

Cultural revolution:

A struggle session was a form of public humiliation and torture that was used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at various times in the Mao era, particularly years immediately before and after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and during the Cultural Revolution. The aim of a struggle session was to shape public opinion and humiliate, persecute, or execute political rivals and those deemed class enemies.
In general, the victim of a struggle session was forced to admit various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse the victim until he or she confessed. Struggle sessions were often held at the workplace of the accused, but they were sometimes conducted in sports stadiums where large crowds would gather if the target was well-known.

The purpose of mandatory “anti-racism” training is to humiliate white people, to destroy their self-esteem by requiring them to confess their guilt of “racism” and denounce themselves as oppressors.

There is another obvious purpose in making these “struggle sessions” mandatory for all freshman. It allows the faculty to identify any potential dissenter in the student body. Any freshman who complains about these “anti-racism” lessons will become a target for destruction. Outspoken conservatives on campus are systematically downgraded by their professors and denied opportunities for grants, internships, etc. All campus benefits are exclusively reserved for those students favored by the liberal faculty and administration; conservative students are subjected to harassment, and excluded from graduate programs.

Confronted with a program of political coercion, most students will voluntarily comply — they are sheep, and will do as they are told. The only hope for conservative students to make it through university is to keep their mouths shut and stay under the radar, to avoid any overt expression of their political beliefs so as not to get “profiled.”




 

Category: Arizona, Education

Liberals Outraged by Million-Dollar Bail for Lancaster #BlackLivesMatter Rioters

Posted on | September 16, 2020 | 5 Comments

 

Actually wrote up an item for The American Spectator yesterday in which I quoted Pennsylvania’s Democratic lieutenant governor:

The $1 million bail quickly came under fire from Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and a local advocacy group, with Fetterman calling it “blatantly unconstitutional” and an infringement on the protesters’ Eighth Amendment right against excessive bail….
“It’s self-evidently unconstitutional,” Fetterman said. “Whatever the merit of the underlying charges, what is absolutely indefensible is a million dollar bail for those charges.” …
City police did not request the bail amount, said Lt. Bill Hickey, the public information officer for the bureau. The District Attorney’s office did not provide any input regarding bail, spokesperson Brett Hambright said in an email.
The protesters are charged with several felony offenses, which are considered in the judge’s equation when deciding bail, as well as the input of police.
“The crimes that these defendants are facing include serious felony offenses,” Hickey said in an email. “This is not a new or unheard of practice and falls within the rules of criminal procedure.”

What I did not expect was that liberals everywhere — who have lately been trying to avoid the suspicion that they’re pro-riot, because that might not be good for Joe Biden’s campaign — would join in the outrage over this. Guess which rioter is getting the most media sympathy?

The father of Kathryn Patterson, 20, an undergraduate student at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, said she was acting as a medic, as she has at other protests in the recent past.
Chip Patterson called Kathryn Patterson’s $1 million bail, set by a magisterial district justice, “obscene.”
“Everything that I know so far, which is not a lot, indicates that Kat is not guilty of those charges. But then again, we’ll have to wait and see,” said Chip Patterson, who lives in Mercersburg, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Lancaster.
He said he has not been able to reach his daughter since her arrest.
“I cannot tell you how long this night has been,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “I think regardless of what these people did or didn’t do, the bail amount is just outrageous and clearly against the Eighth Amendment,” which addresses bail.

Unless I am mistaken, this is the same Chip Patterson who is the head of the English department at prestigious Mercersburg Academy. Perhaps it’s not considered scandalous among the faculty there for a kid to grow up to become a Marxist revolutionary, but Ms. Patterson’s dad seems rather eager to avoid that implication of his daughter’s arrest. Oh, she was merely acting in a humanitarian role as a “medic” to tend the wounds of injured protesters — the Florence Nightingale of Antifa, as it were.

Meanwhile, the president of Franklin & Marshall College, Barbara Altmann, issued a statement via her Instagram page:

Dear Students:
Our community is hurting. We are all processing and trying to contextualize the death of Ricardo Mun?oz in Lancaster city this past weekend. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of this investigation, we all mourn the loss of the life of Mr. Mun?oz. For many, this is a reminder of the deeply challenged relationship between BIPOC and law enforcement. We are shaken as a campus and city. We find ourselves asking questions and trying to understand the moment. These are questions we all should grapple with.
On a community-level, we are also processing the impact that the past few nights of activism have had on a member of our own family. As you are likely aware, F&M student Kat Patterson was arrested Sunday night at the protests. We have read the allegations against her, as reported in the LNP. We stand by our students’ constitutional right to protest. And affirm a presumption of innocence. Senior staff has been in close contact with the family and will continue to do so as we focus on her well-being. Thank you, students, for creating a GoFundMe page to assist Kat and her family; many of us in our community will be contributing.
F&M’s senior staff will continue to work with students, faculty and professional staff, on campus and studying remotely, to support and encourage programs, courses and workshops on these social justice issues. We recognize that many are feeling unsafe, including within our own community. This must change. We encourage everyone to be part of this effort and support one another. We have all been heartened by the persistent and dedicated activism demonstrated by our community, especially by you — our students. Thank you for that. Together, we know we will persevere to a better tomorrow.

Let us assume that the Lancaster police had reasons to arrest Ms. Patterson and charge her with multiple felonies. While I suppose it is possible that this was a case of mistaken identity or something, isn’t it more likely that the cops have video evidence of which “mostly peaceful protesters” engaged in felonious acts of vandalism and arson? We cannot rule out the possibility that the cops just started grabbing whatever anarchist scumbags they could catch, more or less randomly, and that thus the Florence Nightingale of Antifa was mistakenly arrested. But this is 2020, and even in a small town like Lancaster, cops have access to digital surveillance technology that would enable them to prove which particular scumbags committed which specific crimes. Therefore, if cops arrested Ms. Patterson, chances are pretty good they can prove she was doing more than handing out bandaids to injured protesters.

However, we must “affirm the presumption of innocence,” as Barbara Altmann says, which I suppose also should be extended to Ms. Patterson’s personal life, no matter what our common-sense hunch might be. For some reason, commenters yesterday kept suggesting that Ms. Patterson is a fan of British television programs, IYKWIMAITYD.




 

Category: Crime, Pennsylvania
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