In The Mailbox: 12.21.18

Posted on | December 22, 2018 | 2 Comments

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Winter Is Here
Twitchy: Headline Fail In Progress As The Hill Misidentifies Former Lawmaker Who Told Trump To “Sit On His Pointy Fence”
Louder With Crowder: Bill Burr & Joe Rogan Team Up Against Outrage Culture
According To Hoyt: The Super Stupendous Holiday Extravaganza Goes On!
Vox Popoli: God No Longer Blesses America
Slow Facts: Feel-Good Laws Are Getting Us Killed, And It’s Our Fault (via 357 Magnum)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The #MeToo Edition
American Power: Syria Withdrawal & Push For Border Wall Demonstrate Trump’s “America First” Worldview, also, Sweden’s “Immigrant” Ghettos
American Thinker: Ted Cruz Is Right – Make El Chapo Pay For The Wall
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Mexican Standoff Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For December 21
CDR Salamander: Operation Inherent Dissolve, also, Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Non-Tweets Under The Fedora For December 21
Don Surber: I Didn’t Vote For Jim Mattis
Dustbury: She Just Wants To Dance
The Geller Report: Over A Dozen Jihadis Arrested In Beheadings Of Young Female Tourists, also, Jihadi Who Murdered English Student Gets Mere 18 Months In Prison
Hogewash: Twenty Years Ago This Week, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Aquaman Proves DC (Still) No Match For Marvel
Joe For America: These Welfare Payout Stats Will Make Your Blood Boil
JustOneMinute: Government Down, SecDef Mattis Out
Legal Insurrection: Government Heads For Partial Shutdown As Congress Fails To Reach Spending Deal, also, Brenda Snipes To Get Her Day In Court January 7
The PanAm Post: From Millionaires To Beggars – Cristina Kirchner’s “Public Intellectuals”
Power Line: Death By Sanctuary State, also, The Trump Doctrine And 2020
Shark Tank: Justice Ginsburg Undergoes Surgery
Shot In The Dark: Don’t Mess With Fergus Falls
STUMP: Hindsight Is Hilarious
The Jawa Report: Merry Christmas, Jawas
The Political Hat: Modern Social Justice – Pre-Teen Drag Queen Dancing For Dollars At Adult Gay Bar
This Ain’t Hell: SecDef Mattis’ Resignation Letter, also, Marine Pilots Who Drew Sky Penises Allowed To Fly Again After Being Disciplined
Victory Girls: #TrumpShutdown – Will Senate Democrats Prevail & Cut Border Funding?
Volokh Conspiracy: SCOTUS Should Clarify 2A Test, also, Short Circuit – A Roundup Of Recent Federal Court Decisions
Weasel Zippers: Watch Bodycam Footage Of Police Shootout With Illegal Alien Protected From ICE By CA Sanctuary Laws Just Two Days Prior, also, SCOTUS Rejects Trump Bid To Enforce Asylum Crackdown
Megan McArdle: Fauxcahontas’ Generic Drug Plan Is More Placebo Than Cure
Mark Steyn: Fake Newsman Of The Year, also, As Ye Give, So Shall Ye Receive

Last Minute Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals
Wombat’s Wish List

Category: Linkagery

Syria, Afghanistan, and the #NeverTrump Problem of Jonah Goldberg

Posted on | December 22, 2018 | 1 Comment

Glenn Reynolds has an excellent round-up of reaction to President Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and reduce the force in Afghanistan by half, which was apparently the reason that General James “Mad Dog” Mattis resigned as Secretary of Defense.

Ace headlines it, “Trump Has Succeeded Where George W. Bush Failed: He Has Turned the Anti-War Left Into Passionate Neocon Warhawks and Intervention-Adventurers,” and cites Dave Reaboi’s observation: “The left has no foreign enemies and wages no foreign wars. They only have domestic enemies and domestic wars. When they’re pretending they care about a foreign war, that only means they are contriving justification for waging the real war on their domestic enemies.”

My God. @realDonaldTrump has turned Noam Chomsky into an interventionist. There is literally nothing Trump can't do. https://t.co/5St8YSdEXb
h/t @AceofSpadesHQ

— Jim Rose ?? (@JimRoseVSOP) December 21, 2018

Because the Left hates Trump no matter what Trump actually does, all of their oft-stated opposition to U.S. military interventions abroad were suddenly forgotten as soon as Trump declared he was pulling out. By the same token, the Left generally applauded Obama’s foreign interventions, just as they had insisted that everything Bill Clinton did in the field of foreign policy was a masterstroke of statesmanship. In other words, American leftists have no true principles; they are mere partisan cheerleaders for the Democrats and are therefore implacable enemies of any Republican who might obtain power. This is what the #NeverTrump crowd can’t seem to get through their heads; they seem to imagine that if one of their pet candidates had won the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, somehow this candidate — Rubio, or perhaps Jeb Bush — would have ridden a wave of bipartisan popularity to the White House. But knowing what we know about the Left, there is no reason to believe this. No doubt any candidate the Republicans might have nominated would have been smeared and demonized by the media and, in the end, defeated by Hillary Clinton. I would argue that Trump was the only Republican candidate who could have beaten Hillary. The GOP primary voters prevented the Republican establishment from having its way and, thus, prevented a repeat of the predictable losses that Republicans had suffered in 2012 (Romney), 2008 (McCain) and 1996 (Dole).

As I argued in September 2015, Trump was a game-changer because he was unpredictable in a way that reminded me of Fran Tarkenton:

Tarkenton’s legendary ability as a scrambling quarterback was every football coach’s worst nightmare. Never mind what play Tarkenton called in the huddle, or what scheme the defense deployed against him. Once he started scrambling, the playbook ceased to matter. He’d run all over the backfield, eluding the defensive linemen who tried to tackle him, until he found a receiver open downfield. Tarkenton’s improvisational style was unique and unpredictable, and he led the Minnesota Vikings to three Super Bowls by defying the norms of what an NFL quarterback should be.
What Tarkenton did to NFL defenses, Donald Trump is doing to the Republican Party. The bombastic billionaire routinely says things that, for any other candidate, would be campaign-destroying gaffes. With his larger-than-life celebrity persona, however, Trump keeps winning. His poll numbers seem immune to the factors that affect ordinary politicians, because Trump is neither ordinary nor a politician.

Nobody expected Trump to win Pennsylvania and Michigan, states no Republican presidential candidate had won since 1988, and yet he did it. Whatever else you say about that feat, you cannot deny that Trump proved the “experts” wrong — and they will never forgive him for that.

This brings me to the sad case of Jonah Goldberg who, having made his camp with the #NeverTrump crowd long ago, keeps doubling down. You might think that the collapse of the Weekly Standard (“So Much ‘Ahoy,’” Dec. 14) would have chastened Trump’s Republican enemies, but they refuse to learn from such examples. It is not merely that they despise Trump personally, but rather that they are elitists who harbor a haughty disdain toward the grubby sort of people who voted for Trump. The #NeverTrump Republicans concur in Hillary Clinton’s judgment that Trump’s supporters are “deplorables,” and never miss an opportunity to heap insults on these 62.9 million GOP voters.

Perhaps feeling the heat of populist resentment, Jonah Goldberg today published an interesting column that includes a lengthy examination of the term “neoconservative,” in which he takes some unnecessary jabs at various of his chosen enemies, e.g.:

And then there are the Joooooz. Outside of deranged comment sections and the swampy ecosystems of the “alt-right,” the sinister version of this theory is usually only hinted at or alluded to. Neocons only care about Israel is the Trojan horse that lets people get away with not saying the J-word. Those bagel-snarfing warmongers want real Americans to do their fighting for them. Pat Buchanan, when opposing the first Gulf War in 1992, listed only Jewish supporters of the war and then said they’d be sending “American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown” to do the fighting. Subtle.

Why the need to beat that particular dead horse? Aside from any consideration of anti-Semitism, we have a demonstrable problem in our society, namely that the children of the policy-making (and policy-influencing) elite almost never serve in the military. I’m pretty sure Jonah Goldberg does not wish to accuse Army veteran Kurt Schlichter of secretly being an anti-Semites, and yet Schlichter is as serious as anyone of the distortions created by the class divide between those who serve in the military and the influential elite who shape U.S. policy.

If Buchanan unfairly portrayed the Iraq hawks as agents of the “Israel lobby,” and if it was rude of him to note that Jews are (as the campus diversity-mongers might say) underrepresented in our military, this unfair rudeness is to be lamented. Yet there was, and is, a real problem at the root of such accusations, and it is wrong to imply, as Goldberg does, that every criticism of neoconservatism is a veiled expression of paranoid anti-Semitic bigotry. What about Paul Gottfried, a Jew who is among the most formidable spokesmen of the paleoconservative “alt-right”? If Gottfried is willing to defend Pat Buchanan, and to make many of the same arguments that Buchanan does, doesn’t that tend to invalidate the assertion that critics of neoconservatism are all secretly Jew-haters? And isn’t the real heart of the problem an issue addressed by none other than Norman Podhoretz in his 2009 book, Why Are Jews Liberals?

Look at the 2018 exit polls: 79% of Jewish voters are Democrats, a higher percentage than Hispanics (69%) and one factor which may kindle suspicion toward Jewish conservatives is the perception that they seek to remain on good terms with their liberal kinsmen, and thus to hold the more populist type of conservatives at arm’s length. It’s not just on foreign policy that this is apparent. At risk of over-generalizing, isn’t it true that most prominent Jewish conservatives are more aligned with the open-borders lobby than with the “build the wall” crowd? Aren’t Jewish conservatives more liberal on social issues like abortion and homosexuality? If so, wouldn’t these distinctions tend to exacerbate whatever actual anti-Semitism there is in the populist Right’s critique of neoconservatives? This is not a problem that I, as a righteous gentile and friend of Israel, can solve. I appreciate the valuable contributions of Jews to the conservative cause, but the Trump era has brought widespread attention to the deep divisions within the GOP’s “big tent” coalition, and it cannot be true that everything wrong with the Republican Party is the fault of pro-Trump populists. And then there’s this from Goldberg:

Which brings me to Chris Buskirk’s ridiculous manifesto of conservative liberation in response to the demise of The Weekly Standard. The editor of American Greatness, a journal whose tagline should be “Coming Up with Reasons Why Donald Trump’s Sh** Doesn’t Stink 24/7” opens with “Neoconservatism is dead, long live American conservatism” and then, amazingly, proceeds to get dumber. . . .
I’m not a fan of tu quoque arguments, but the idea that American Greatness has standing to position itself as an organ dedicated to larger principles and ideas is hilarious, given that the website’s only purpose is to attach itself like a remora to Donald Trump, a man who doesn’t even call himself a conservative, even for convenience, anymore. . . .

Wait, is that it? I mean, was Goldberg’s long diatribe in defense of neoconservatism really just a warm-up for venting his butthurt over those gloating about the Weekly Standard‘s demise? Can’t he see that National Review might suffer the same fate if it doesn’t relent in its #NeverTrump absolutism? Does it really make sense for him to double-down this way?

Eh, I could go on, but why bother? After 1,400 words I’m more dismayed than ever. Is it “hate speech” to wish everyone a Merry Christmas?

The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Thanks in advance.

Category: Conspiracy Theories, Donald Trump

The Devil’s in Alabama

Posted on | December 21, 2018 | Comments Off on The Devil’s in Alabama

Yes, I know Charlie Daniels said the devil went down to Georgia, but that was years ago, and he’s been headed west since then:

An Alabama police department has been criticized for blaming recent violence on the community ‘rejecting god and embracing Satan’.
The post from the Opp Police Department comes as two gunshot killings in as many days in Covington County, located on the Alabama-Florida line.
It claimed recent area homicides had been perpetrated by young people who need ‘to stand up and be responsible leaders in our community’.
The post reads: ‘These murders have been done by our young people. This is happening because we have turned away from God and embraced Satan. We may have not meant to do so but, we have. It is time to ask for god’s help to stop this. It is time to be parents and raise our children, not have them raise us’.
The post calls on the community to support law enforcement and officers who have ‘to walk into dangerous situations and clean the mess’.
‘Bottom line, there are sheep, there are wolves and there are sheep dogs. Which group do you belong to?’
However the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation says police in the town of 6,500 people are wrongly promoting religion with the social media message.
The group said it is illegal for a government entity to endorse or criticize religious belief.

This isn’t about “belief.” If Satan is real, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in him or not, he’s still gonna get you. The way I figure it, the Devil must have left Georgia on I-85, gone down through Auburn and Tuskegee, then south on U.S. 29 through Troy before he hooked a left at Luverne and went down U.S. 331 until he got to Opp. And if folks in Covington County have “embraced” Old Scratch, there’s no helping ’em now. There’s only so much the Opp Police Department can do, I reckon.

UPDATE: I suppose some might criticize my calculation of Satan’s route to Covington County by pointing out that his trip could have been quicker if he had just taken I-85 all the way to Montgomery and from there headed south on U.S. 331, or taken I-65 to Evergreen and gone east on U.S. 84. However, considering how badly Auburn got whupped by Alabama this year, I’m pretty sure the Devil spent some time working his infernal arts in Auburn and, besides, does anyone imagine that Satan would risk getting caught in a traffic jam at Montgomery?

Category: Alabama

The Gathering Darkness

Posted on | December 21, 2018 | Comments Off on The Gathering Darkness

Adam Piggott calls the above photo “the end game of homosexuality.”

It shows an 11-year-old boy earlier this month performing in drag at a Brooklyn gay bar where adult men threw money at the child. Let us consult this young celebrity’s official online biography:

Desmond [Napoles] was born in June 2007, during NYC Pride Week, at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. As he tells it, this means that he “is a member of the Village People by default”. He has also claimed that he “came out of the closet when he was born”. . . .
Desmond’s parents allowed him to inherently progress, explore, and choose his tastes in clothing, toys, and activities on his own. He had developed his gender identity as non-conforming, or gender fluid, as a young child. . . .
His mother likens her support of Desmond’s interests and activities as being similar to that of a mother who supports her son’s interest in sports. Both scenarios are unconditional acts of love for their children and recognition of their child as an individual.

To quote the Church Lady: “Isn’t that special?”

If you wish to know how we got here, go back to the 2003 Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which declared state laws against sodomy to be unconstitutional. In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia four times called attention to the majority’s invocation of an “emerging awareness” of sexual liberty as the basis for its ruling. Well, who could predict where this Emerging Awareness Doctrine might lead?

In 2011, Matt Barber described a trend toward “Sexual Anarchy” with activists seeking to normalize pedophila. And the “end game” of this trend, as Adam Piggott observes, is a logical extension of the claim that homosexuals are “born that way.” If it is true that some children are genetically programmed to be homosexual or transgender, why shouldn’t parents emulate Desmond’s mother and support their “interests and activities” in a spirit of “unconditional love”?

As Jack at Sigma Frame says, this results in a defiled condition. Because Jack seeks to make a specifically Christian contribution to the “manosphere,” I will share this: Recently I found myself talking to a minister of the gospel and expressed my concern about the inroads that corruption have made in the church, with activists demanding the ordination of women and acceptance of homosexuality. The minister replied that, as we approach the End Times, no denomination will be able to withstand this diabolic trend. There will be no “safe” (i.e., orthodox or conservative) Christian institutions, but only scattered individual Christians who still cling to the old rugged cross. And I’m reminded of the long-ago words of R.L. Dabney:

“The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is to-day the audacious reform, and will be tomorrow the accomplished fact.”

Dabney was a Presbyterian theologian who served as Stonewall Jackson’s chief of staff, and I suppose it’s “hate speech” to quote him, but isn’t every expression of common sense “hate speech” now?

UPDATE: NeoWayland in the comments recommends Lauren Chen’s take:

It’s “hate speech”! How dare you disapprove?

Category: Gays

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | December 21, 2018 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

Thank Thee for time to pause,
Commercial though’t sadly be,
To humbly gather for the cause,
Forgiving here before the tree.

Thugged my girl of Spring even,
There before the burger joint,
That wretched jerk, my brother Steven,
Whom I absolve at this here point.

I suppose his Summer days of fun,
He had, while there at work I toiled,
Should burn more as a blazing sun,
While his savings that tramp spoiled.

She dumped him as a habit bad,
When all of his cash was gone,
How then can I now be sad?
Destiny has its bit of fun.
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Teacher Pronounces Education Secretary DeVos ‘Completely Under-Qualified’

Posted on | December 21, 2018 | Comments Off on Teacher Pronounces Education Secretary DeVos ‘Completely Under-Qualified’

Hannah Parisa Siboyeh (from her Facebook page).

In a video posted to YouTube in February 2017, Hannah Siboyeh provided “a list of reasons why I believe that Betsy DeVos is completely under-qualified to be” U.S. Secretary of Education. Siboyeh at that time was 23, a college student who was also working as a substitute teacher at Labay Middle School in Houston, Texas. Flash forward to September 2018, and Ms. Siboyeh made headlines:

A former Cypress-Fairbanks [Independent School District] employee appeared in court [Sept. 10] after she admitted to losing her virginity to a 15-year-old boy who previously attended a middle school in the district, court records show.
Hannah Parisa Siboyeh, 24, was identified at the time of her arrest as a paraprofessional at Labay Middle School, where the boy previously attended. She was booked into Harris County Jail last week on a charge of an improper relationship with a student and posted her $10,000 bond.
Her hearing Monday determined the conditions of her bond, which includes staying away from the boy or his family. She is required to stay more than 200 feet away of any child care facility, school or home where the boy resides, documents show.
During the investigation, Siboyeh reportedly told investigators that her relationship with the boy was “one mistake after another.” She said she lost her virginity to the boy in the summer of 2017, adding that they had sex at the boy’s house, a local park and a Palace Inn at 8920 West Road in Houston.
“She admitted that she loved [the boy] with all of her heart,” the charging document states.
In a prepared statement, Cy-Fair ISD said Siboyeh worked as a substitute teacher in the district in January 2014 and later as a paraprofessional.
She has since been removed from her position, the district said. . . .
Police initially received information about the relationship from an assistant principal in the district in April 2018. The principal said an anonymous tipster told her about the sexual relationship involving the employee and the boy.
The tipster later told police that they had been visiting boy’s house when they saw the boy and Siboyeh lying in bed together, adding that “weird noises would be coming from the room,” the charging document states. The tipster also noticed them sharing photos with eac hother on Snapchat.
Police spoke to more witnesses, who confirmed the employee and student were in a “boyfriend and girlfriend” type of relationship, documents show.

On her Facebook page, Ms. Siboyeh indicated she and the boy were “soulmates always.” Well, isn’t that sweet? But I suppose she won’t be commenting further of Secretary DeVos’s qualifications.

Category: Crime, Education, Texas

Samuel Little: FBI Says Serial Killer Murdered at Least 34 Women

Posted on | December 21, 2018 | Comments Off on Samuel Little: FBI Says Serial Killer Murdered at Least 34 Women

Samuel Little in a mug shot from the 1980s (left) and more recently (right).

After I posted my earlier Violence Against Women updates, my brother Kirby called to tell me about Samuel Little, who authorities believe may be the most prolific serial killer ever apprehended. Little, now 78 years old, is serving a life sentence for murdering three women in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. He has reportedly confessed to 90 murders, and the FBI says their Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) has confirmed 34 of those. The FBI’s announcement is interesting:

Little’s run-ins with the law date back to 1956, and there are clear signs of a dark, violent streak among his many shoplifting, fraud, drug, solicitation, and breaking and entering charges. But law enforcement has only recently begun unraveling the true extent of his crimes.
Little was arrested at a Kentucky homeless shelter in September 2012 and extradited to California, where he was wanted on a narcotics charge. Once Little was in custody, Los Angeles Police Department detectives obtained a DNA match to Little on the victims in three unsolved homicides from 1987 and 1989 and charged him with three counts of murder. For these crimes, Little was convicted and sentenced in 2014 to three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.
In all three cases, the women had been beaten and then strangled, their bodies dumped in an alley, a dumpster, and a garage. . . .
In the early 1980s, Little had also been charged with killing women in Mississippi and Florida but escaped indictment in Mississippi and conviction in Florida. He had, however, served time for assaulting a woman in Missouri and for the assault and false imprisonment of a woman in San Diego.
When Los Angeles got the DNA hit on Little, they asked the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) to work up a full background on him. The FBI found an alarming pattern and compelling links to many more murders.
ViCAP reached out to the Texas Rangers with one clear connection. “We found a case out of Odessa, Texas, that sounded very much like him, and we could place him passing through the area around the same time,” said ViCAP Crime Analyst Christina Palazzolo, who worked on the cases with Department of Justice Senior Policy Advisory and ViCAP Liaison Angela Williamson. “We sent that lead out to the Texas Rangers, who were eager to follow up on the long-cold case.” . . .
In total, Little confessed to 90 killings, and Palazzolo and Williamson have been working to match up evidence to as many confessions as they can. Thus far, the team has confirmed 34 killings with many more pending confirmation. There are still a number of Little’s confessions that remain uncorroborated. . . .
From the time Little dropped out of high school and left his Ohio home in the late 1950s, he lived a nomadic life. Palazzolo and Williamson said he would shoplift and steal in a city or town to gather the money to buy alcohol and drugs, but never stayed in one place for long. He would drive from New Jersey to California in a matter of days, reports Palazzolo, and when he had his many run-ins with police, they often just wanted to shoo him out of town. . . .
“The biggest lesson in this case is the power of information sharing,” said Kevin Fitzsimmons, ViCAP’s Supervisory Crime Analyst. “These connections all started in our database of violent crime.” . . .
“A Jane Doe who turned up dead in an alley in New Orleans may look like an isolated event,” stressed Fitzsimmons. “But when entered into the ViCAP database and examined with other mysterious deaths or missing persons, patterns emerge. That is the value of ViCAP.”

Think back to the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995, one of the first high-profile cases involving DNA evidence and an all-black jury refused to convict him, a verdict that everyone at that time saw was fraught with racial significance. Nowadays, television programs have familiarized the public with DNA evidence, and it is unlikely that a case like Simpson’s would end in an acquittal now, without regard to race. What the Samuel Little case shows, however, is that for many years our law enforcement system did not deal effectively with violent black criminals. As the FBI notes, nearly all of Little’s victims were “marginalized and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution and addicted to drugs. Their bodies sometimes went unidentified and their deaths uninvestigated.” Nevertheless, when Little was charged in two homicides — killing a mentally disabled woman in Florida and a prostitute in Mississippi — authorities were unable to convict him.

When people talk about racism in relation to criminal justice, they often fail to understand how this cuts both ways. Unfortunately, our system seems to view some victims as more valuable than others, and the black criminal who preys upon black victims (which was the case in most of Little’s crimes) is less likely to do serious prison time than any criminal (whatever their race) who targets white victims. Black-on-black crime is not taken as seriously as it should be — certainly, the national media can’t be bothered to pay attention to the rampant violence in cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans and Chicago — and this involves a form racism that liberals seldom think about. Because they don’t want to depict black people as prone to criminality, the media unwittingly contribute to a situation in which innocent black people suffer disproportionately from violent crime and nobody seems to care.

It is not racist to take seriously the problem of violent crime in the black community. What is racist is to take for granted that our nation’s major cities will always be dangerous places, that there is nothing we can do to reduce the menace of crime. As the Samuel Little case demonstrates, law enforcement has developed technologies and methodologies that make it harder for criminals to get away with serious crimes. If you’ve ever watched The First 48 on the A & E network, you know that homicide detectives now often solve murders with help from surveillance cameras and data retrieved from cell phones. Most states now routinely take DNA samples from convicted criminals, and this DNA evidence becomes part of a national databank that can be used to solve crimes. Fingerprints are also part of a national databank, and it is thus far less likely that a criminal can get away with a serious crime because of a lack of evidence.

What the Samuel Little case also highlights is how much crime in our society is perpetrated by repeat offenders. Little was arrested over and over for crimes like burglary, theft and narcotics, and yet in the course of a decades-long criminal career, served only about 10 years in prison. As the FBI notes, most times, police “just wanted to shoo him out of town,” and so he went from town to town, dead bodies piling up in his wake.

In 2017, according to the FBI, 15,129 Americans were the victims of homicide and 51.8% of these victims were black. Overall, less than 62% of homicides were “cleared” by arrests, which means that nearly 40% of killers are getting away with murder. This is not because murderers are criminal masterminds, but because so many U.S. homicides occur in urban neighborhoods where police are overwhelmed by the enormous amount of violent crime, much of which involves drug-dealing gangs:

The issue of murder clearance rates is in the spotlight as Chicago officials struggle to solve gun violence that’s plaguing the city. But the nation’s third-largest city, which only cleared 26 percent of its homicides in 2016, is just one among many big cities struggling to quickly solve gun crimes, according to FBI data and crime experts. . . .
In big cities such as Baltimore, Chicago and New Orleans — which cleared less than 28 percent of its homicide cases in 2016 — the fracturing of gangs has added a difficult dimension for detectives as they try to glean information from the streets. . . .
In Memphis, Tennessee . . . the city saw its homicide clearance fall to 38 percent in 2016. . . .
Detroit, which [in 2016] had the third-worst per capita homicide rate in the nation, managed to clear less than 15 percent of homicides in 2016, down from about 35 percent the prior year.

Many U.S. cities have backlogs of hundreds of unsolved “cold-case” murders, which means thousands of murderers are running loose in America. If that doesn’t bother you, it should. Just because an unsolved drive-by shooting happened on Chicago’s South Side doesn’t mean the killer is going to stay in Chicago, and no one is safe anywhere as long as so many killers are allowed to escape justice.

Finally, what do feminists have to say about Samuel Little? Nothing. You can hear the crickets chirping. “Intersectionality” means that feminists only care about violence against women when the perpetrators are “privileged” white males, so Jessica Valenti and her feminist comrades have nothing to say about this man who killed dozens of women.