May 27: A Date That Will Live in Hilarity

Posted on | May 27, 2025 | Comments Off on May 27: A Date That Will Live in Hilarity

Anthony Weiner — hacking victim?

Big hat-tip to Ace of Spades for reminding us that it was on this date — May 27, 2011 — that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) used his official Twitter account to send a photo of his . . . pelvic bulge, and then claimed that his account had been hacked. Wikipedia:

On May 27, 2011, Weiner used his public Twitter account to send a link to a photo on yfrog. The picture of his erect penis concealed by boxer briefs[ was sent to a 21-year-old female college student from Seattle, Washington, who was following his posts on the social media website.[8] Though the link was quickly removed from Weiner’s Twitter account, screen shots of Weiner’s original message and of the photo were captured by a user identified as “Dan Wolfe” on Twitter and subsequently sent to blogger Andrew Breitbart who published them on his BigGovernment website the following day. CNN described it as a “lewd photograph” of a “man bulge in … underwear”.
On June 1, 2011, Weiner gave a series of interviews in which he denied sending the photo and suggested that someone, perhaps a political opponent, had hacked into his accounts and published the photo.

Memories light the corners of my mind . . .

Yeah, I don’t need Wikipedia to tell me how that went down, because I was living through it every minute, starting on May 28, and continuing through dozens of blog posts up until Weiner resigned June 16.

Of course, working in “file-it-and-forget-it” mode, as is my habit, the details had blurred in my memory. Like, I’d completely forgotten the name Gennette Nicole Cordova, the Seattle-area student who was the intended recipient of Weiner’s crotch photo. In hindsight, obviously, we know what happened — Weiner meant to send her that photo as a DM, but somehow fat-fingered it, so that instead it was a public tweet.

At the time — the fateful tweet went out late at night on the Friday before Memorial Day that year — I was trying to figure out if there could be some kind of innocent explanation, for example, the possibility that one of Weiner’s staffers, with access to his account, had accidentally sent the photo. And I remember calling up Andrew Breitbart to discuss this with him. Andrew’s response was blunt: “No, Stacy. Trust me — there’s more.”

What I didn’t know at that time was that, about a week earlier, someone had sent an email to Breitbart’s tip line, saying that they had also received lewd photos from Weiner. That email was from a woman who lived in Texas, and after the “Weinergate” story broke on May 27, Breitbart went back and saw this email, and reached out to the woman. Unfortunately, she had gone off on a long weekend camping trip — completely out of touch — so they could not immediately get confirmation. In other words, Breitbart and his team knew for a fact that Gennette Cordova wasn’t the only woman Weiner had been “sexting” with, but until the Texas woman returned from her camping trip, they couldn’t prove it. So there were several days of uncertainty, during which time Democrats sought to defend Weiner by demonizing Breitbart. Oh, it was crazy!

June 6, 2011 — the Weinergate avalanche

June 6 was the big breakthrough, when the Texas woman, an Army veteran and single mom named Meagan Broussard, told her story on Breitbart’s site. The same day, Anthony Weiner announced a press conference in New York. Weiner was late to the press conference, but Andrew Breitbart was there on time, so the assembled media demanded that Breitbart answer questions — upstaging the congressman:

The vindication of a genius, is what it was. When Weiner finally spoke at that June 6 press conference, he defended himself by saying that while his behavior was “inappropriate,” it was “consensual,” and he insisted that he would not be resigning. So then we had another 10 days of it — Democrats trying to see if they could leverage their media allies to spin the “rising star” congressman out of his jam, until at last they were compelled to admit it was hopeless, and he resigned June 16.

That very day, it so happened, I had to fly out of Dulles Airport to Minneapolis for the Right Online conference, and guess who I found “holding court” in the lobby of the Minneapolis Hilton?

Good times, my friends. Andrew died less than a year later, and it was an irreparable loss. There has never been anyone like him, and he was at the absolute peak of his fame then. All we have left are memories.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE II: By the way, it was past 2 a.m. when I conducted that brief video interview with Andrew Breitbart in the lobby of the Minneapolis Hilton. While I was flying to Minneapolis, Weiner was announcing his resignation, so as soon as I got to the hotel, I started blazing away on my column for the American Spectator:

By the time Weiner gave his resignation speech Thursday in New York, he was such a pariah that even his political mentor, Sen. Charles Schumer, would not even speak publicly in his defense, instead issuing a brief statement wishing Weiner well. . . .
[T]he digital images that defined the scandal known as WeinerGate left little to the imagination. There was also a transcript of Weiner’s sexually explicit Facebook exchanges with Las Vegas blackjack dealer Lisa Weiss, and the fact that Weiner’s Twitter correspondents included both a blonde porn star and a 17-year-old high school girl with a penchant for freely employing the F-word in her online communications.
In retrospect, it is possible to see Friday, June 11, as the day on which it became clear that Weiner was doomed. The scandal had begun two weeks earlier — late on the evening of Friday, May 27 — when Weiner sent a lewd photo of his crotch as a Twitter message addressed to a 21-year-old college student from Seattle. While Weiner first attempted to explain this as the work of “hackers” or a “prank,” further revelations forced the congressman to call a June 6 press conference where he admitted the truth: He had meant to send that photo as a private message and by a simple error had sent it publicly to the more than 40,000 people following his Twitter account. At that press conference, Weiner confessed to having carried on a half-dozen “online relationships” with women, but vowed he would not resign.
That vow became non-operational June 11, when police in Delaware showed up at the home of Weiner’s teenage Twitter correspondent. Although police said they found no evidence of criminality, and Weiner said there was nothing “indecent” in his private Twitter exchanges with the teen, the very fact that he had been in communication with her was disturbing. In light of what was already known about Weiner’s other “online relationships,” talking dirty and sending pictures of his penis to women he’d never met, for him to have a 17-year-old among his Internet contacts… well, it just looked bad. Within 24 hours, three top Democrats — including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, both of whom had previously defended Weiner — called for his resignation. . . .

You can read the rest of that, in case you’d forgotten. But it explains why, when I began recording that interview with Andrew, he asked, “Did you hit your deadline?” Yeah, man, I sure did.

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Category: Andrew Breitbart, Anthony Weiner, Democrats, Scandal

Conclusions in Search of Evidence: Sex and the Modern Female Journalist

Posted on | May 26, 2025 | Comments Off on Conclusions in Search of Evidence: Sex and the Modern Female Journalist

The Guardian’s ‘reproductive health and justice reporter’

My two daughters are named Kennedy and Reagan, and one of my sons is named Jefferson, so I’m not against the trend of presidential names, but probably you shouldn’t name your daughter “Carter.” That was my first thought when I encountered the name Carter Sherman, who writes for the U.S. edition of the Guardian. Knowing my readership, I’m sure the commenters will engage in a spree of ad hominem remarks about Miss Sherman’s appearance, but while y’all will be slagging her looks, my concern is about the nature of her work. Mark Judge has a very interesting article about Miss Sherman and her forthcoming book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future.

There’s a certain hall-of-mirrors factor involved here: When Miss Sherman was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, she and her sorority sisters were interviewed by Peggy Orenstein of the New York Times, who was working on a book about young women’s sex lives. Orenstein, then in her 50s, was focused on the theme of “hookup culture,” and Miss Sherman says she and her Northwestern sorority sisters disappointed Orenstein’s expectations: “Frankly, we weren’t slutty enough.” So now Miss Sherman has written her own book, with its own preconceived conclusion, i.e., that “sexual conservatism” is the real danger to women, and I suppose her work is about as reliable as Orenstein’s, which is to say, not reliable at all.

“Never Take Advice From Feminists,” I warned in 2016:

The influence of feminism tends to steer individual women, and even entire societies, toward “The Darwinian Dead End,” as I’ve called it. The rhetoric of “choice” and “empowerment” is so strongly associated with declining fertility that, nearly a half-century after the eruption of the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1960s, you might suppose this ideology would have perished along with its proponents. . . .
The road to feminism’s utopia of “gender equality” is paved with dead babies. Yet these Death Cult fanatics still expect to be taken seriously when they offer parenting advice to those of us who consider our children a blessing from God.

That 2016 blog post specifically mentioned Peggy Orenstein and her then-new book, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. My point was that Orenstein could scarcely be trusted, given her background and ideological commitments, and I will take Miss Sherman’s testimony as proof that I was correct in that judgment.

Peggy Orenstein

If the commenters could be relied upon to make harsh comments about Carter Sherman’s looks, they’ll have a field day with Peggy Orensteiin, but of course that’s not my point. We may be approaching the event horizon of feminism’s solipsistic tendency, when we have feminist authors writing books about sex, based on critiques of other feminist authors’ books about sex. All of these authors are smugly certain that they possess the Feminist Truth About Sex, and none of them consider the possibility that, perhaps, the truth about sex is not feminist. What I mean to suggest is that because feminism is a radical egalitarian project, the fundamental premise of Equality (with a capital “E” denoting its quasi-religious status among feminists) will make any discussion of sexual behavior tendentious, biased toward a particular political objective.

Could I elaborate on that theme at length? Yes, I wrote a whole book about radical feminism, so writing at length on this topic is easy for me, if perhaps somewhat redundant at this point. I have long since become weary of pointing out the delusions involved in Equality — a condition which has never existed anywhere at any time in human history — and am disappointed that so many people continue to mindlessly worship at the idolatrous altar of Equality. What is particularly disappointing about Carter Sherman’s take on the subject is that, having seen through Peggy Orenstein’s façade of journalistic truth-telling, she seems to think the appropriate response to previous feminist failures is to double-down on Equality and declare war on “sexual conservatism”:

Specifically, sexual conservatism aims to implement policies that make it difficult and dangerous to have any kind of sex that is not heterosexual, married, and—as it seeks to limit access to abortion and birth control—potentially procreative. In addition to elevating heterosexual and married sex, American sexual conservatism tries to enforce specific ideas about gender, about what makes a man and what makes a woman. It wants to turn the United States back to a pre-internet age—to, say, the 1950s, before the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism of the 1960s and ’70s, a time when a (white) man was expected to have a (white) wife, 2.5 (white) kids, and a suburban home on a single salary. This is not a short-term plot. It is a slow-drip corrosion of community and state-level attacks that normalizes the loss of freedoms and ultimately clears the path for national action.

Mark Judge has more of that. Here’s a question that Carter Sherman might want to consider: What’s so wrong about sex being “heterosexual, married, and . . . procreative”? Or what is so precious about other kinds of sex that the threatened “loss of freedoms” is a societal crisis? While we’re asking questions that feminists never bother to ask, was life really so awful for women in “the 1950s, before the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism of the 1960s and ’70s”? Are women happier now that many of them have no hope of achieving that kind of suburban life?

One important difference between Peggy Orenstein and Carter Sherman is that Orenstein, born in 1961, at least has some direct knowledge of what life was like for her parents “before the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism,” whereas for Sherman, born in 1993, this is all ancient history. And, because she is a feminist, certainly Sherman believes that the 1950s were a Dark Night of Fascist Oppression — Leave It to Beaver was Nazi propaganda directed by Leni Riefenstahl, with Ward Cleaver as Hitler, and his wife June in the role of Eva Braun. Carter Sherman expects young women to share her existential fear — what a dreadful thing it would be to “turn back the clock” to those days!

* * * * * *

Unlike feminists, I’m not an ideological ax-grinder madly pursuing a utopian idée fixe. As explained Saturday, my motive is an honest one, which Samuel Johnson once described: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Pretty sure Harper-Collins isn’t going to offer me a six-figure advance to write a book (Carter Sherman Is a Skank and Other Facts About Feminism) which is why I’m rattling the tip jar this Memorial Day weekend — just $5 or $10 would help — and reminding readers that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

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Category: Feminism, Journalism

Rule 5 Sunday: Country Girl in Carhartts

Posted on | May 26, 2025 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Another fine appetizer thanks to Rule 5 Texan on X.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Cheating In Womens’ Sports Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, MAGA – No Tax On Tips Passes Senate, Karoline Leavitt, Sarah Lynn Milgrim RIP, A Simple Favor, Cheers – Every Time Norm Enters, Murderbot, Sunny, The Brutalist, Anne Boleyn, Marty, and Mount St. Helens

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Kayla Moody, Maryland Has Crabs, Fish Pic Friday – Emma on Deck, Thursday Tanlines, The Wednesday Wetness, Devil Like You, MD VA Struggle With Blue Catfish, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Random Celebrity News and Sunday Sunrise

BACON TIME: Rule Five Fore!

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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FMJRA 2.0: Indians Scalped!

Posted on | May 25, 2025 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Indians Scalped!

— compiled by Wombat-socho

What a wild week! The Senators went to the Mistake By The Lake to face the Tribe, against whom we were 2-4, and managed a sweep. The bullpen saved us in Games 1 & 2, with Steve Foucault and Charlie Hough notching the wins, and Spaceman Lee returned to form in Game 3, outdueling Mickey Lolich for his 13th win. It dodn’t go so well against the Royals at home. Joe Coleman lost the opener because we couldn’t buy a hit off Bert Blyleven, but Carl Morton gave us hope in Game 2 by blanking the Royals as Dave “Kong” Kingman led the offense by blasting two homers off Mike Cuellar. Unfortunately, in Game 3 Blue Moon Odom failed us again, coughing up three runs in the 4th, and the bullpen made it worse, giving up another six runs for a 9-1 blowout by the Royals. Still, that left us 4-2 for the week, tied for second with the Red Sox at 60-64 and 6.5 games behind the Brewers. Unfortunately, Charlie Hough ran out of innings, which means we won’t have our best right-handed reliever for the final 38 games, but we’re hoping Foucault and Sells can fill in. Pete gave us a nice writeup this week, and we hope to keep the winning ways going when we face the Braves on Tuesday (we’re 2-1 against him this season) and the Brewers on Friday (4-5 so far).
Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

When Teddy Baseball is happy, everybody’s happy! Have a Moxie!

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FMJRA 2.0: Hanging In There
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The Ultimate ‘Pro-Choice’ Logic? Weird New Terrorist Threat Emerges
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In The Mailbox: 05.18.25 (Sunday Substackery)
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Category: FMJRA Award

Blast From the Blogging Past: Saint Pancake and the Anti-Israel Cause

Posted on | May 25, 2025 | 1 Comment

Certainly it is not a coincidence that Elias Rodriguez is being compared to Rachel Corrie and Aaron Bushnell by a slew of social media accounts. When people are part of an activist hive-mind, participating in a propaganda campaign on behalf of a terrorist organization, one does not expect originality in their rhetoric. As I’ve been saying for more than a decade, bad causes attract bad people, and the kind of people who think “solidarity” with Hamas is a good idea . . . Well, they’re not the sharpest tools in the shed. Like a herd of bleating sheep, they mindlessly repeat the same slogans because they’re incapable of more intelligent discourse.

Pro-Hamas terrorist Elias Rodriguez

No need to use “allegedly” here. Elias Rodriguez has admitted he murdered Israeli embassy aides Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky — shot them in the back, and kept shooting even after Milgrim, severely wounded, was trying to crawl away. Nor is there any doubt about Rodriguez’s motive. He “did it for Gaza,” he told the cops, and posted an online “manifesto” elaborating on his pro-Hamas beliefs.

February 2024: Aaron Bushnell

To quote myself:

“If you’re a Jew-hating, terrorist-supporting left-wing kook, the kind who likes to scream ‘Free Palestine’ and chant other pro-Hamas slogans, I want to encourage you to emulate Aaron Bushnell.”

Bushnell lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, livestreaming it on Twitch after declaring he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.” Brilliant idea. The world would be a better place if all the entire pro-Hamas student protesters at Ivy League universities decided to emulate Bushnell en masse. But what really drew my attention was the people comparing Elias Rodriguez to Rachel Corrie.

In case you’ve forgotten, or perhaps never knew, who Rachel Corrie was, she was a 23-year-old middle-class college kid from Olympia, Washington, who got caught up in post-9/11 “peace” activism. During the Second Intifada, at a time when the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and other terrorists were blasting Jews to smithereens on a regular basis, Rachel Corrie took up the Palestinian cause, joining a radical “direct action” group called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Her radicalization ultimately ended with her death in Rafah, Gaza:

Her fanaticism led Corrie to travel to Gaza in January 2003. Three weeks later, when activists organized an international protest of the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq, Corrie was photographed burning a hand-drawn fascimile of the U.S. flag, her face distorted by rage, while dozens of Palestinian children watched. . . .
So it was that, on March 16, 2003, Rachel Corrie joined six other ISM activists in a “direct action” against the Israeli military. The Israelis were destroying terrorist bases and smuggling tunnels in Gaza, an operation that ISM attempted to thwart. The circumstances of Corrie’s death have been mired in controversy for years, but there is no argument that she positioned herself in the path of an Israeli bulldozer and was fatally crushed.

Immediately, the anti-Israel propagandists seized on Corrie’s death to portray her as a martyr, and commenters at the Little Green Footballs blog responded by mocking her as “Saint Pancake.”

“The Holy Church of St. Pancake”https://t.co/Q44Bb4ax7z

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) May 23, 2025

Do you know what I mean by the phrase “institutional memory”? Back when I was in the newspaper business, every newsroom had some old guys who’d been there 15 or 20 years, who could help provide guidance to the new hires. This was before you could research stuff with computers, and you had to go plowing through archives in what was called the “morgue” if you wanted to look up the background on a story. Old-timers in the newsroom were a repository of institutional memory, because they could show you the “shortcuts” (so to speak) in this kind of research.

A major problem in the 21st-century communication environment is a deficit of institutional memory. There are so many people out there blabbering away on social media — and, indeed, “professional journalists” at major news organizations — who don’t know a damned thing about what happened 15 or 20 years ago. Still fewer are those who, like me, are old enough to have watched the Six-Day War on TV news as it happened. Unless you’re my age or older, you can’t have that kind of direct historical knowledge, and you’re certainly unlikely to know the background of the so-called “Palestinian” cause. To put it bluntly, Yasser Arafat was the Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh of the Middle East, at a time when the Soviet Union’s geopolitical strategy was focused on sponsoring “wars of national liberation” in the Third World. Almost none of the journalists and commentators on the current situation in the Middle East are old enough to understand this Cold War background, which is a major reason why latter-day Communists — literally, I mean Communists — are able to deceive so many idiots into supporting Hamas terrorists.

The recent death of David Horowitz has deprived us of a valuable source of institutional memory on all this. Among his contributions to the cause of freedom was starting a site called Discover the Networks, a database about left-wing organizations and individuals that is extremely useful to anyone researching the Left. For example, Discover the Networks can tell you all about the Workers World Party (WWP) and its splinter, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), both of which are connected to International ANSWER (“Act Now to Stop War and End Racism”).

David Horowitz also created Front Page Magazine, where Daniel Greenfield describes Elias Rodriguez as a “Communist terrorist,” pointing out Rodriguez’s known association with PSL and ANSWER.

“This was a Communist #terrorism attack in support of Muslim terrorists.”-@Sultanknish

Communist Terrorist Kills Engaged Couple Outside Israeli Embassy https://t.co/j1tCxfxrqA

— ImaZionist (@ImaZionist) May 22, 2025

We could follow this chain of connections further, to include Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans:

From 2017-2022, Evans and [her husband] Neville Roy Singham together served as the two principal funders of The People’s Forum, a New York-based organization describing itself as a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.” During that period, the couple — through an array of shell organizations and donor advisory groups — gave more than $20.4 million to The People’s Forum, a sum that accounted for almost all of the funding which the organization received.

Here’s the connection to Elias Rodriguez:

The suspected terrorist charged with gunning down two Israeli embassy workers in Washington Wednesday is associated with radical socialist groups funded by the far-left Chinese sympathizer, millionaire Neville Singham and his activist wife Jodie Evans.
Elias Rodriguez, 31, who allegedly confessed to killing the couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum and chanted “free, free Palestine!” was part of that network through his association with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Communist political organization that has fielded presidential candidates since 2008.
In 2018, Rodriguez also raised $240 in a GoFundMe campaign to join the March to Fight Poverty in Washington DC and took part in demonstrations and protests around Chicago as a member of the ANSWER coalition around 2017 and 2018, another radical socialist group, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Both the PSL and ANSWER Coalition are connected to People’s Forum – a Manhattan-based non-profit which has ties to the Chinese Communist Party – through funding from Singham, 71.
All three groups have been involved in anti-Israel protests, with the People’s Forum having a cadre of operatives embedded at Columbia University — an epicenter of protest — according to previous reports.
The People’s Forum received more than $20 million in grants from Singham, much of it filtered through the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, a fiscal sponsor, as The Post has previously reported.
Another group, the Bronx Antiwar Coalition is also connected to groups in Singham’s orbit. The Bronx group applauded the murders of the Israeli diplomats on X Thursday.
“What Elias Rodriguez did is the highest expression of anti-Zionism,” a tweet from the group proclaimed.
The Bronx Anti-War Coalition was founded by Dee Knight, a radical socialist and pro-China activist, who has worked with People’s Forum, according to reports. . . .
“The People’s Forum… and ANSWER Coalition serve as the conduit through which [Chinese Communist Party]-affiliated entities have effectively co-opted pro-Palestinian activism in the US, advancing a broader anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist agenda,” according to [the National Contagion Research Institute].

These people are literally Communists, like I said, but kids nowadays don’t know enough about history to understand what’s wrong with Communism, which killed 100 million people in the 20th century.

Institutional memory matters, and I hope y’all remember yesterday’s post, in which I explained why I’m rattling the tip jar this weekend — just $5 or $10 would help — and ended with the familiar reminder that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

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Category: Israel, Terrorism

Joseph Javonte Washington Was Shot by a Cop and (Perhaps Unfortunately) Survived

Posted on | May 24, 2025 | 2 Comments

If he lives long enough to get out of prison when his sentence expires in 2055, Joseph Javonte Washington will be 60 years old. The taxpayers of Minnesota can do their own cost-benefit analysis in this matter, but a former police officer nearly saved them that cost — and got fired for it.

I’ve watched enough YouTube videos of officer-involved shootings in the past few years that I could probably qualify as an expert witness on the subject by now. Many times, there’s not much to learn from such videos — like, what part of “drop the knife” do I have to explain? At least 90% of the time a suspect gets shot by a cop, there’s no doubt that the shooting was justified, and the deceased criminal is such a menace to society that nothing of value was lost in incident. However, the case of Joseph Javonte Washington is highly instructive in several ways, because (a) he’s a vile monster, but (b) was unarmed when the cop shot him, however (c) he survived the shooting and (d) the cop got fired before the completion of the investigation which (e) found the shooting was justified.

OK, maybe it’s a stretch to say that the investigation found the shooting of Washington was “justified,” but no charges were filed against the officer, and when you consider that this decision was made by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison — yeah, if he could have prosecuted the cop, he certainly would have done it. There are a lot of interesting factors involved in this case, including the fact that Joseph Javonte Washington was stark naked when he got shot, so I’m gonna break it down pretty thoroughly — right after this brief word from our sponsor . . .

Say hello to the Big Yellow Button. Every once in a while, as a service to those readers who might be suffering visual impairment, I super-size the PayPal button, just in case you didn’t notice it before. Also, I rattle the tip jar like this when I find myself in need of some extra cash, which hasn’t been very often lately, as the day job’s been pretty good to me. However, with Fourth of July just a few weeks away, and my fireworks addiction being a monkey on my back, I’m kind of in a bind. Must I approach my dear wife and ask, “Honey, the fireworks store has a buy-one-get-one-free special for Memorial Day weekend, do you mind if I blow a couple hundred dollars?” Because we just got back from our trip to Michigan and Wisconsin for our kids’ graduations, and that wasn’t exactly cheap.

Anyway, to rescue me from that dilemma, readers are invited to chip in whatever they can — just $5 or $10 would help — and thanks in advance. Meanwhile, back to this police shooting in Minnesota . . .

St. Paul ‘community advocate’ Toshira Garraway

It was November 2020, barely six months after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis touched off nationwide riots, when Joseph Javonte Washington was shot by a cop in neighboring St. Paul:

“No justice no peace, prosecute the police,” and “no good cops in a racist system” were among the chants heard last Friday, Dec. 4 as over 100 people marched down University Avenue in St. Paul demanding former St. Paul cop Anthony Dean be criminally charged following his November 28 shooting of Joseph Javonte Washington.
Washington was naked and unarmed at the time of the shooting and appeared to be experiencing some kind of mental crisis. Dean was fired within days of the shooting by St. Paul Police Chief Todd Axtell.
On the same day, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi referred the case to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. . . .
“This is not about what happened prior to the incident,” said Toshira Garraway in a speech to the crowd, referring to Washington’s assault on his girlfriend prior to his confrontation with the police. “Police should not add to our pain. They say they are fighting crime, but they are committing crimes.”

Fortunately, this inflammatory rhetoric didn’t incite any rioting because, even in a hotbed of liberalism like St. Paul, most people have enough common sense to consider that maybe it really was “about what happened prior to the incident,” as Ms. Garraway phrased it.

What happened was heinous enough that Washington won’t be getting out of prison for another 30 years, and even Keith Ellison couldn’t find a way to prosecute the cop who shot Washington.

Officer Anthony “Tony” Dean had been previously recognized as a hero:

The St. Paul officer who shot an unarmed man did so “to protect his fellow officers and himself” and because he had information that the suspect “claimed to have a gun and had used a knife earlier that evening in a violent assault and rape,” his attorney said Wednesday.
Tony Dean, who the police chief has terminated, was an award-winning officer who reached his dream of becoming a cop in his hometown.
Dean, who graduated in 2001 from St. Paul’s Central High School, was a U.S. Marine for eight years and Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office correctional officer before he was hired as a St. Paul officer in 2014. . . .
“Many attempts by law enforcement to de-escalate the situation using a variety of non-lethal methods were unsuccessful and the suspect did not cooperate,” Dean’s attorney, Robert Paule, said in a statement on Wednesday. . . .
Dean, who initially was a St. Paul patrol officer, was assigned to the gang unit since 2018. . . .
The Minnesota American Legion named Dean as officer of the year in 2016 and Axtell gave him the department’s life-saving award for working with other officers to save a woman who was trying to jump from a bridge in April.
Axtell honored Dean and the gang unit at the start of the year, writing in January that they “displayed diligence, teamwork, professionalism and exemplary investigative work over the past few years” in federal prosecutions against more than 50 people related to firearms crimes involving gang members.
“Officer Dean has led an exemplary career as a law enforcement officer, and has received recognition and accolades for his compassion, commitment to community, and his mentorship of youth in St. Paul,” said Paul Kuntz, St. Paul police union president, in a statement Wednesday.

What happened here? Wouldn’t you think that an officer like Tony Dean, who had been praised just a few months before by the chief, would have deserved the benefit of the doubt? But the political climate had been changed by the George Floyd riots, and the police chief . . . Well, I hesitate to criticize the chief too harshly, but when all the facts are considered, Officer Dean deserves an apology. Here I have to give a big tip of the hat to the Midwest Safety YouTube channel, which had to file an appeal with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) in order to get access to all the records and video footage in this case.

You can and should watch that entire 20-minute video, because the crimes committed by Joseph Javonte Washington were heinous and, when you look at the situation in its totality — Washington was known to have wielded a knife, yelled to cops that he had a gun, etc. — it’s clear that Officer Dean made the best decision possible. Also, I would point out, Officer Dean didn’t do a “mag dump” on Washington. Once the suspect was down, Officer Dean stopped shooting, which is the only reason the suspect survived. By the way, this was the first time in Officer Dean’s entire career that he ever shot anyone, so it’s not as if he could fairly be accused of being trigger-happy. And wow, the details of Washington’s crimes — “what happened prior to the incident” — are horrific:

A judge handed down a nearly 35-year sentence Tuesday [May 13] to a man who sexually assaulted and kidnapped his girlfriend, after which he was shot by a St. Paul police officer during a manhunt.
Dakota County Judge Dannia Edwards said she agreed with the prosecution’s request for a long sentence because Joseph Javonte Washington livestreamed the sexual assault “for the world to see” and because he assaulted the woman in her Lakeville residence, a place where she should have been safe.
After Washington assaulted the woman in November 2020, he instructed her “to drive him at high speeds from Lakeville to St. Paul,” which she did due to “fear and self-preservation,” Assistant Dakota County Attorney Caitie Prokopowicz wrote in a memo to the court. . . .

(OK, I’m interrupting here to point out that it’s about 30 miles from Lakeville to St. Paul, which fact is relevant.)

Washington, now 35, ran and hid in a dumpster behind a funeral home in St. Paul’s North End.
He yelled from the dumpster that he had a gun. The officer who shot him reported that Washington wasn’t fully facing the officers when he jumped out and he couldn’t tell if he was armed, according to prosecutors.
Washington, who was naked, turned out to be unarmed. . . .
Washington punched the woman in the face, breaking her eye socket. He held a knife to her neck and forced her to perform a sex act on him, Prokopowicz said during the trial. The prosecution also said he caused the vehicle to crash as the woman drove him. . . .
Washington previously filed a federal lawsuit against the city of St. Paul and two officers over his shooting, and the lawsuit is ongoing. The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office reviewed the officer’s shooting and announced in 2021 he would not charge him.

That brief summary barely scratches the surface of what Washington did:

Around 6:30 p.m. Saturday [Nov. 28, 2020], Washington’s ex-girlfriend came home to find him waiting inside her Lakeville apartment.
Washington stole her phone and punched her in the face, knocking her head into a TV stand as she fell on the ground.
For the next hour, Washington dragged her from room to room by the hair, sexually assaulting her while brandishing a knife from her kitchen, charges say. Throughout the assault, Washington used her cellphone to record and livestream videos on Facebook and Snapchat. . . .

(This detail is important: He used her phone to livestream the sexual assault on her Facebook and Snapchat accounts, meaning that all of her followers — friends and family — could see it.)

Eventually, Washington forced the victim into her car and told her to drive, without stopping, through red lights. The car crashed into the fence of a Minnoco service station on Maryland Avenue and Rice Street around 8 p.m., after Washington grabbed the steering wheel.
A naked Washington ran from the car. The victim flagged down a passing motorist for help. . . .

(And now, ladies and gentlemen, the kicker.)

His criminal record includes at least three previous felonies for burglary and illegal possession of a firearm as a minor.

How many “second chances” do criminals deserve? How many times must we read news stories about heinous crimes committed by lifelong habitual felons who probably should have still been behind bars? All things considered — especially with Washington forcing the woman at knifepoint to drive at speeds over 100 mph, running red lights — this could be considered attempted murder. Washington was a clear danger to the community, and yet just four days after the shooting, Chief Axtell announced Officer Dean’s firing at a press conference where the chief played a single 44-second clip of body cameras video:

A St. Paul officer who shot and wounded a Black man who emerged naked from a dumpster while being sought in connection with a sexual assault failed to measure up to department standards, the city’s police chief said.
Chief Todd Axtell said Tuesday at a news conference where he released police bodycam video of the confrontation that he’d taken “swift, decisive and serious action” against the officer, identified by state investigators as Officer Anthony Dean.
Axtell said state law precludes him from releasing details of the action. The Minneapolis Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press, citing law enforcement sources they did not identify, reported that the officer was fired following Saturday night’s shooting of Joseph Javonte Washington.
“When I asked myself if the officer’s actions on Saturday night were reasonable and necessary,” Axtell said, “the only answer I could come up with is “No.”

Again, I urge you to watch the 20-minute video from Midwest Safety, which contextualizes the incident thoroughly, in a way that could not have been done after a mere four days. And I cannot emphasize enough that the state’s attorney general, a notorious liberal who served in the Obama administration and who is certainly not pro-police, declined to file charges against Officer Dean:

[T]he investigation by the Attorney General’s Office found that Dean had enough facts at the time to reasonably conclude Washington was capable of inflicting great bodily harm or death upon officers or others in the area, and that Dean took action to protect himself and others.
“Officer Dean stated that he could not see Washington’s hands while in the dumpster, which caused him concern given report of a knife and Washington’s assertion he had a gun,” according to the Attorney General’s report.
Dean declined to comment Saturday. But his attorney, Robert Paule, said Dean was “relieved that justice was served in this matter” and called Axtell’s decision to fire his client “a knee-jerk reaction designed to prevent protests in St. Paul rather than a logical, thoughtful decision.”
Leading up to the incident on Nov. 28, Washington’s ex-girlfriend told officers that he had sexually assaulted, kidnapped and held her at knife point before forcing her to drive from Lakeville to St. Paul and crash her car. She said that Washington was high on drugs.
Later that night, officers attempted to coax a naked Washington out of a dumpster he was hiding in behind a funeral home in the North End. Body camera footage shows him suddenly jumping out of the dumpster and rushing at the officers, getting within 3 feet of Sgt. Kathleen Brown, who was leading the negotiations with him. That’s when Dean, who was assigned to cover Brown, shot Washington.
Dean told investigators that Washington had displayed several characteristics that “reasonably implied his use of narcotics and unpredictability.” Those characteristics included being naked in 40-degree temperatures for more than an hour, breaking into a nearby home to steal orange juice, and not being affected by pepper balls that officers shot at the dumpster where he was hiding.
Washington yelled at officers that he had a gun with him in the dumpster, Dean told the Attorney General’s Office. . . .
Dean told investigators he couldn’t see Washington’s hands as he left the dumpster, so he couldn’t verify that he was unarmed. Though the officers gave Washington a clear path to flee, he chose instead to run directly at them — another highly unusual sign that pointed to his unpredictability and potential for violence, Dean said.
Investigators hired use-of-force expert Jeffrey Noble to review the evidence independently and determine whether Dean’s conduct met generally accepted police practices. Noble determined that Dean’s actions were “objectively reasonable and consistent with generally accepted police practices.”
“Based on these objective facts, the State could not disprove that it was reasonable to believe death or great bodily harm could occur without using deadly force,” the Attorney General’s memo concluded.

“Objectively reasonable” — and we don’t know what would have happened if Officer Dean hadn’t shot Washington. As it was, Officer Dean should have been given an award for his excellent marksmanship, considering that he fired four shots at a moving target, at night, scored two hits, and did not hit either the officers nearby or the police K-9 that was involved in trying to take down Washington.

It was August 2021 when AG Ellison announced there would be no charges against Officer Dean, and two months later, in October 2021, Chief Axtell announced that he would retire after 33 years on the force, effective June 2022. As previously stated, I don’t want to criticize Chief Axtell too harshly. As the St. Paul Pioneer Press noted, Axtell’s six-year term as police chief was a long series of crises, and the chief had to walk a tightrope, especially after the George Floyd riots. I think Officer Dean’s lawyer is correct in saying that he was fired in “a knee-jerk reaction designed to prevent protests,” but I would also say that Chief Axtell sincerely believed he was doing the right thing. And frankly, it seems to me that Chief Axtell was psychologically broken by his experiences.

Imagine what it’s like trying to be cop in the capital city of a liberal state like Minnesota. You’re out there putting your life at risk every day, getting paid less than a school teacher (and a lot less than a politician) and the whole time you have to worry you’ll get into some kind of “incident” like this, where the “community advocate” types like Toshira Garraway demand you get fired and prosecuted. Always, it’s problems with The Community™ that make a cop’s life miserable. He is supposed to “serve and protect” The Community™ and yet cannot avoid noticing that many members of The Community™ (including the Toshira Garraway types) hate his guts and would be happy to see him dead.

Chief Axtell did that job for more than 30 years, rising up through the ranks of the St. Paul PD, and somewhere along the way, alas, I think the Woke Mind Virus took hold. Just before his retirement, Chief Atxell gave a long interview to to the local CBS affiliate, and if you watch the whole thing, you’ll hear the chief start talking a lot of progressive jargon about “disparate impact,” which was the point when I stopped watching, because I can’t stand to see a man humiliate himself that way.

It’s a sad thing to see a veteran cop demoralized, and I suspect many police officers in St. Paul were angry at how swiftly Chief Axtell threw Tony Dean under the bus to appease The Community™.

Just one little coda to this story. After the attorney general’s office announced there would be no charges against Officer Dean, we got this pious lecture from an outstanding Community™ member:

Washington’s mother, Tonya Comer, said the officer could have killed her son when he shot him.
“My son was unarmed, he had no weapons and he suffers from a mental health condition,” Comer said Friday. “… I want that police officer charged. … My son is being dragged through the mud for something he didn’t even do.”

Ma’am, your son already had three felony convictions before that night, and he livestreamed the sexual torture of a woman using her own phone. Yet here you are trying to claim “he didn’t even do” it? Portraying him as some kind of victim, making excuses about his “mental health condition,” and demanding that the officer be charged, despite the clear results of the investigation that found the officer did nothing wrong? Why anyone would sign up to “protect and serve” such people is a mystery to me. Some people just don’t deserve good cops, and the entire Community™ in St. Paul, Minnesota, can go straight to hell, for all I care.

* * * * * *

Well, that’s more than 3,000 words, but I figured on a Memorial Day weekend, maybe you had time to read the whole story. Also, because Officer Tony Dean is a Marine Corps veteran, Memorial Day weekend is a good time for remembering that not all heroes wear capes. But I’m not a hero, just a guy who tells stories for a living, and I disclaim any motive other than the one Samuel Johnson bluntly described: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” That Memorial Day weekend sale at the fireworks store is beckoning me, so once again I ask readers to recall the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

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Category: Crime, Fireworks, Minnesota