SHOCK: Texas Subsidized Lesbian Couple’s Adoption of Children They Killed

Posted on | April 8, 2018 | 3 Comments

The Hart family at a 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign rally.

People in Texas should be angry as hell about this:

An Oregon woman found dead at the base of a Northern California cliff with her spouse and three of their adopted children late last month likely received more than $270,000 from the state of Texas to help care for the children, according to a Texas newspaper.
The San Antonio Express-News reports the state paid a Jennifer Jean Hart monthly adoption subsidies for her children over the past decade. Hart got nearly $1,900 each month, most recently in March, the newspaper reports.
Most families who adopt children out of foster care from Texas get monthly payments that range from $400 to $545 per child to help cover care costs until the child turns 18, according to the newspaper.
Jennifer and Sarah Hart adopted all six of their children from Texas.
The couple and three of their kids — Markis, 19; Abigail, 14; and Jeremiah, 14 — were confirmed dead after their family’s SUV was discovered at the base of a 100-foot cliff about 20 miles north of Fort Bragg, California, on March 26. Their three other children — Hannah, 16; Devonte, 15; and Sierra, 15 — were believed to have been in the vehicle and are missing.
Though initially investigated as an accident, officials have said in recent days they believe the crash was intentional.
The family left their home in Woodland, Washington, shortly after the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services opened a Child Protective Services investigation in which the Hart children were “identified as potential victims of alleged abuse or neglect” after neighbors contacted authorities.

The liberal media want to make this story go away. Don’t let that happen.

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Category: Crime, Gays, Racism, Texas

The Compulsory Approval Doctrine

Posted on | April 8, 2018 | 1 Comment

News Item #1:

Harvard is now determined to ostracize, censor, and ultimately root out orthodox Christianity from a university that was founded to train ministers in the Puritan tradition. That is the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the school’s little-noticed decision this year to suspend and defund the largest evangelical fellowship on campus.
The fellowship, Harvard College Faith and Action (HCFA), ran afoul of the school’s progressive dogmas last September when it asked one of its student leaders to step down from her post. The student was in a same-sex relationship, which meant that she had “an irreconcilable theological disagreement pertaining to our character standards,” as the HCFA’s co-presidents told the Harvard Crimson in February. The HCFA’s character rules on premarital sexual activity apply to students of all orientations, the co-presidents insisted, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Egged on by a ravenous progressive mob, the Harvard administration suspended the group in February, and last month the Undergraduate Council voted to cut its funding.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Evangelical Christians aren’t allowed to be evangelical Christians at Harvard, because disapproval of homosexuality is not allowed at Harvard. Undergraduate Council member Sarah Fellman said: “I think this is, as it’s called, about solidarity. I think this is an important symbolic move to show that we, as the elected representatives of the student body, will not tolerate discrimination.” It would seem doubtful that Ms. Fellman has thought through the potential consequences of the “solidarity” principle she has invoked.

News Item #2:

Kevin Williamson, a National Review scribe with a brilliant pen and a long paper trail of insults and wild opinions . . . was boldly hired by The Atlantic and then quickly jettisoned, after it came to light that he had not only suggested hanging as a penalty for abortion in a since-deleted tweet but also more carefully defended the idea of someday prosecuting women who obtain abortions the way we prosecute other forms of homicide. . . .
The fact that Williamson is an extremist doesn’t change the fact that to hire him for his pen and then fire him for having expressed an extreme opinion was stupid and gutless — akin to hiring Christopher Hitchens and then firing him for antireligious bigotry (and yes, Hitch was a bigot, but worth publishing anyway), or adding Hunter S. Thompson to your masthead and then dropping him because it’s pointed out that he writes under the influence of drugs.

Exactly so. Last month, I defended Williamson at length:

We are living through a Buffalo Springfield “For What It’s Worth” moment in our history. There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear. Williamson’s reporting helps us make sense of why there’s a man with a gun over there telling us we’ve got to beware.
The quality of his reporting, however, means nothing to liberals, who consider Williamson unacceptable because of his opinions.

Some of my friends despise Williamson for his “Never Trump” stance, but that’s irrelevant to the issue involved here. Jeffrey Goldberg brought Williamson into The Atlantic to give their readers access to a point of view they might otherwise never encounter. Douthat’s comparison of Williamson to Christopher Hitchens is apt. In 2007, Marty Beckerman and I spent a summer evening at a D.C. bar buying whiskey for Hitchens just for the pleasure of hearing him tell dirty jokes. His “antireligious bigotry,” as Douthat calls it, was just part of the package with Hitchens, like his taste for whiskey (Johnny Walker Black) and his cigarette habit.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Hitchens took alarm at the reflexive “anti-war” reaction of the Left. Because a Republican was president, the Left adopted a posture that was objectively pro-Islam, and Hitchens (who was half-Jewish) saw the dangerous consequences of such a posture. His disillusionment with the Left was much like Orwell’s disillusionment after the Spanish Civil War, and Hitchens became a formidable critic of the Left. Conservatives and libertarians were therefore willing to tolerate Hitchens’ ideological peccadilloes, for the sake of his ability.

Why couldn’t liberals, who share Kevin Williamson’s loathing for Trump, display a similar “strategic alliance” attitude toward him?

The answer, I believe, is simple: Liberals have become totalitarians.

Or perhaps they always were.

Category: Liberals

Podcasting Tonight: Californication!

Posted on | April 7, 2018 | Comments Off on Podcasting Tonight: Californication!

Is Nancy Pelosi the face of our nation’s future?

John Hoge and I will be cranking up the machinery of The Other Podcast at 7 p.m. ET tonight and one of the things we’ll be talking about is the Democrats’ plan to Californicate America, endorsed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. As Townhall’s Matt Vespa says, “if California’s politics is the future of the country, I’d rather chug bleach.”

Twitter’s CEO loves this article about driving conservatives from public life and turning the rest of the country into California in the “new civil war.” Literally what it’s about https://t.co/b8DUxlC9Cw

— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) April 6, 2018

“California today provides a model for America as a whole.” Which tent will you be living in @Jack:https://t.co/qzNceFbcnJ

— DALE (@DCJ819) April 7, 2018

There are many disturbing aspects of this proposal to make California “a model for America as a whole,” including the fact that there are more Hispanics than whites in California. It’s now North Mexico, basically — a Democrat-controlled statewide ghetto: “Junkies and crackheads get high on the streets of San Francisco, urinating and defecating in public, and the liberal Democrats who control the city seem to believe this situation is perfectly acceptable.” California is the state that sends Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters to Congress, and I’ve explained what California meant in the 2016 election:

One of the “arguments” (an excuse, actually) employed by Democrats after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election was, “She won the popular vote!” To which the proper reply is, “Where?” In a handful of large urban states where Republican Donald Trump did not campaign, Clinton won by huge margins, and this proves . . .? Nothing, really.
In California, Clinton won with 62% of the vote, 7.4 million to 3.9 million, a margin of nearly 3.5 million votes (3,446,281 to be exact). Nationwide, Clinton got 65,853,516 votes to Trump’s 62,984,825 — a margin of exactly 2,868,691. In other words, her margin in California alone was more than enough to account for why she “won” the popular vote, which is completely irrelevant in our Electoral College system.

Did I mention the lesbian couple driving off the California cliff with an SUV full of adopted black children? Because that’s a pretty good metaphor for what Democrats want to do to America.

We will go live at 7 p.m. ET (4 p.m. Pacific, for the unfortunate doomed souls trapped in California) and the call-in number is (646) 668-2541.

By the way, could I ask readers to throw a few bucks in the tip jar to help defray expenses? Any amount — $3 for a cup of coffee, $6 for a pack of smokes, $17.76 to show your patriotism — will be welcome.

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Category: California, Talk Radio, The Other Podcast

The #BlackLivesMatter Angle in Lesbian Couple’s Murder-Suicide Mystery

Posted on | April 7, 2018 | 6 Comments

We may summarize the Hart family story in a single sentence: Two white lesbians adopt six black children, abuse them for a decade, parade them around as mascots, and then kill them in a murder-suicide.

A brutal summary perhaps, but accurate.

My conservative readers will, I suppose, read this as a cautionary tale about same-sex families, but liberals are noticing something else:

When Devonte Hart’s emotional photo went viral in 2014, white America embraced it. The image of a black kid in a fedora, giving out “free hugs” to a white officer during a police brutality protest was viewed as a sign of hope and racial reconciliation. It was, as CNN put it, “the picture we needed.”
But like many black Americans, I was skeptical. As an adopted child abuse survivor, I identified with the pain I saw on Devonte’s face and bristled at what seemed to be a staged act of virtue, a black boy forced by his white adoptive mothers to overcome his fears and offer comfort and hope to white people. . . .
Authorities believe that Devonte’s body may have washed out to sea last month after one of his mothers intentionally plunged the family’s SUV off a 100-foot cliff in California, with his five siblings inside. Since then, a timeline of suspected abuse has emerged stretching back a decade. The children had complained to teachers and neighbors about being hit and deprived of food. One teenage daughter looked nearly half her age. And in the days before the family disappeared, Devonte had repeatedly prodded neighbors to contact authorities for help. He showed up at their home three times one day to get food for his siblings, they said.
But even as these details came out, some continued to defend Jennifer and Sarah Hart.
Friends of the couple took to social media with angelic stories about the mothers and criticized the “rush to judgment” that they were abusive. In a long tribute written on Facebook, one friend said the couple was “the example of marriage and parenting that I looked to and wanted to emulate.” . . .
It seems that America cannot see or hear black children’s tears unless they are framed in the context of white redemption or white saviorism. In the 2014 photo, people looked past Devonte’s pain to see what they wanted to see, what they needed to believe: an image of racial unity, forgiveness, and progress that isn’t happening in America. And now, many are struggling to see two white women, who “saved” a half-dozen black children from their hard beginnings, as anything other than virtuous.
Why can’t we fix our collective lips to say that the Harts were probably horrible parents and that any good they may have done for their children was canceled out by the heinous crime they’re suspected of committing? Is it because they were white? Is it because they were lesbians? Or women? Or liberal? . . .

You can read the rest of that by Morgan State University Professor Stacey Patton, who is certainly not the only one who’s noticed the angle of “white saviorism” in the Hart murder-suicide story.

Before going further, permit me to digress slightly to say that more than 20 years ago, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and was struck by one point the firebrand black separatist made, namely that white liberals who want to “help” black people are actually part of the problem. Perhaps no one could be more truly “racist” than white liberals who believe their own beneficent assistance is necessary to black “progress.”

The phenomenon of “white saviorism,” as Professor Patton calls it, certainly did not begin with 21st-century “social justice warriors” (SJWs). We can trace this back to Société des amis des Noirs (“The Society of the Friends of Blacks”) in revolutionary France:

They opposed slavery, which was institutionalized in the French colonies of the Caribbean and North America, and the African slave trade. The Society was created in Paris in 1788, and operated until 1793, during years of the French Revolution. It was led by Jacques Pierre Brissot . . .

Brissot was a Girondist who went to the guillotine in October 1793, and perhaps there is a lesson here for latter-day amis des noirs, but those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, I suppose. One does not have to defend l’ancien régime to deplore revolution and terror, or to be skeptical toward utopian schemes of “social justice,” but I digress . . .

Jennifer Hart holds up Devonte at a 2011 ‘Occupy Minnesota’ protest.

“Is it because they were lesbians? Or women? Or liberal?” Professor Patton asks of those still in denial about Jen and Sarah Hart’s abuse of the six children they adopted from Texas, and we ought to be curious about the role that political correctness played in this tragedy.

One of my pet peeves about media bias is the way liberal journalists act as public-relations agents for favored “victim” groups. In The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell describes (pp. 149-182) the tendency of liberals to see the world in terms of sympathetic “mascots” (e.g., the homeless) and demonized “targets” (e.g., big business). No doubt, black children born into poverty would qualify as “mascots” in this liberal vision, as would a lesbian couple like the Harts. This almost certainly explains why, even after the abusive record of the Hart family became public, liberal journalists continued quoting sympathetic friends of the Harts:

“Monday night was really tough,” Jammie Hermans said.
Thousands of miles away, Hermans learned about the tragic deaths of her close friends.
“I just can’t fathom losing two friends and their entire family,” she said.
Hermans knew Jenn for more than 20 years. They grew up together in South Dakota. The family she says she knows was happy and always having fun.
“This world has lost something because we lost a family that champions for things that matter,” Hermans said. . . .
In the following days Hermans, along with the rest of the world, would learn about allegations of abuse.
“I’m not asking the world to view them as perfect or to condone possible child abuse, what I’m asking for is fairness, because they are being tried in the court of public opinion,” she said.

Jammie Hermans was the friend whose Facebook post was quoted by Professor Patton as describing the Harts as “the example of marriage and parenting that I looked to and wanted to emulate”:

The family’s mixed races have fueled suspicion and anger around the case, reflected in hundreds of online comments left on Facebook postings mourning the family. Many of the comments questioned the motives of white women who adopted black children.
“Your friends are killers,” wrote one commenter in response to a post by Jammie Hermans, a friend of the Harts’ who had written a long tribute that called the couple “the example of marriage and parenting that I looked to and wanted to emulate.”
Hermans, in an interview, said the messages she has endured on Facebook demonstrate “how far we still have to go in race relations. The racial tension is still there.”

We may have finally reached “peak SJW” — a white liberal woman whose lesbian friend killed six black children, praising this murderous psycho as an “example of marriage and parenting” worthy of emulation. And, when her praise elicits (understandable) angry reactions from black people, she says this shows “how far we still have to go in race relations.”

The Hart family’s SUV plunged off an oceanside cliff in California.

There were no brake marks on that highway overlooking the Pacific shore, police say. Jennifer Hart drove toward that cliff at top speed. Why? Because for the fourth time, the Harts were being investigated for child abuse, and so their “family that champions for things that matter” had to die together, plunging 100 feet headlong into the abyss.

Many mysteries still surround this case. For example, how could the Harts afford to adopt these children? These women from South Dakota were in their mid-20s, just two or three years out of college and living in Minnesota when they adopted the first three kids from Texas. It costs a good bit of money for attorneys’ fees, etc., to adopt children, and the Harts were working jobs in retail, so where did they get the money? Also, shouldn’t we have expected that officials in Texas — quite a conservative state — would hesitate to approve the adoption of these black children by a pair of out-of-state lesbians? Or was this a case of Texas racism overcoming Texas homophobia, so that shipping these black children off to Minnesota served some kind of weird white-supremacist agenda? “Yeah, let those crazy Yankee lesbians have ’em!”

Devonte Hart with his ‘Free Hugs’ sign at a 2012 Bernie Sanders rally.

One of the unwritten rules of liberal journalism is that homosexuality can never be portrayed in a negative way. Even in the case of homosexual serial killers like Andrew Cunanan or Jeffrey Dahmer, their crimes must never reflect poorly on the cause of “gay rights.” Homosexuals are always celebrated in the liberal media as heroic victims of societal prejudice, just as black people are heroic victims of racism and women are heroic victims of sexism. Anyone who objects to this kind of one-sided coverage is condemned as a “hater” — racist! sexist! homophobe!

This simplistic division of humanity into heroic victims (women, homosexuals, racial minorities) and demonized oppressors (white heterosexual males) is so deeply entrenched in the minds of liberals that, whenever a high-profile crime fails to fit the narrative, the media experience cognitive dissonance. Two lesbian Bernie Sanders supporters drive off a cliff with a vanload of black kids? No, this doesn’t fit the “social justice” narrative, and conservatives can enjoy the schadenfreude of watching liberal journalists squirm while trying to explain it.

Maybe those lesbians were crazy? No liberal would say such a thing aloud. The possibility that not everyone in the LGBT community is a model of good mental health can only be mentioned if the purpose is to imply that homophobia is to blame for such psychiatric issues.

There are many mysteries involved in the Hart family saga, including the influence of the New Age “community” to which they apparently belonged. Could it be that a neopagan spirituality movement — perhaps connected to the Rajneeshee cult — was somehow implicated in this tragedy? Is all that hippie-dippie peace-and-love stuff a “progressive” façade concealing weird and sinister secrets?

Jennifer Hart was from a devout Catholic family. When her grandmother died in 2006, the obituary noted that all five of Marjorie Hart’s children, including Jennifer’s father, attended Catholic school in Huron, South Dakota. It is perhaps not surprising to discover that Jennifer Hart and her wife (Sarah Gengler, of Big Stone City, S.D., whom Jennifer met when they both attended Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D.) were “substantially estranged” from their families. Imagine being from a large Catholic family in a small town in South Dakota (Huron is a town of just 13,000 people) and your daughter goes off to college, gets into a lesbian relationship, moves to Minnesota, adopts six black children, and then starts traveling around to hippie New Age music festivals and Bernie Sanders rallies with her SJW “Brady Bunch” tribe.

It may be easy for liberals in a big city like Portland to shrug this off, but in small-town South Dakota? This is a scandal. Can you imagine the Hart family trying to explain to their friends at Holy Trinity parish why Jennifer’s life went so horribly wrong?

So, yeah, they were “substantially estranged” from their families, and their social network was a bunch of their New Age hippie friends. Then one night the lesbians drive off a cliff in an apparent murder-suicide, and “a family that champions for things that matter” suddenly becomes a story that doesn’t quite fit the social-justice narrative.

The liberal media must be desperately hoping we’ll just forget about this.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE II: Texas taxpayers subsidized Jennifer Hart’s adoption of these children to the tune of $270,000.

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Category: Crime, Gays, Media Bias, Racism

In The Mailbox: 04.06.18

Posted on | April 6, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.06.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Blondie – “I Didn’t Have The Nerve To Say No”
Twitchy: Try No To Burn Yourself On Jill Filipovic’s Flaming Hot Chappaquiddick Take
Louder With Crowder: Houston Woman Scares Off Masked Thugs With Her Gun
According To Hoyt: Room For What?
Vox Popoli: What He Said

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Erick Erickson On The Cultural Revolution, also, When Leftists Take Off The Mask
American Thinker: How One Arizona Charter School Teaches Patriotism In Ten Easy Steps
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Off-Road Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For April 6
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday, also, Don’t Discount The French Role In The Long War
Da Tech Guy: Democrat Elites Still Offended By Those Who Consider All Life Sacred, also, The Blue Wave Is Real
Don Surber: Make Them Build Cars Nobody Wants
Dustbury: Small-Scale Tyrants
The Geller Report: Although Police Acted Legally, NYC To Pay $1 Million To Muslims In Spying Suit, also, UK Purges Jihadis Working For London Transport, 20,000 Suspects Under Scrutiny
Hogewash: A Dead Star Circled By Light, also, Team Kimblerlin Members Tell Flimsy Lies Which Are Easily Found Out
Legal Insurrection: Interior Ministry Says Germany Home To 11,000 Islamic Extremists, also, The #CounterResistance In California Continues To Grow
Power Line: Texas A&M Cuts Ties With Confucius Institute, also, The Goldberg Variations On Kevin Williamson
Shark Tank: Putnam Blasts DeSantis For Not Knowing Florida
Shot In The Dark: Throwback Friday
The Political Hat: White Nurses Now Required To Acknowledge Their “White Privilege”
This Ain’t Hell: Friday Morning Feelgood Stories, also, Former NY Guardsman & NYPD Officer Arrested For Grand Theft
Victory Girls: No, President Trump Wasn’t Wrong About Reports Of Rape By Illegal Immigrants
Weasel Zippers: Six Teenagers Stabbed In 90 Minutes In Four London Attacks, also, Man Detonates Bomb In California Sam’s Club
Megan McArdle: There’s A Lot That Goes Into A Riot.
Mark Steyn: #MeToo Was Her Too

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Category: Linkagery

Science Is Racism, or Something

Posted on | April 6, 2018 | 2 Comments

The latest madness from academia:

Washington State University is currently offering a class on how Western science is impacted by “socially constructed” categories such as gender, sexuality, and nationality.
“Women’s Studies 220: Gender, Culture, and Science,” is a sophomore-level class taught this semester by Jenifer Barclay, an assistant professor in the school’s Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies.
In a copy of the syllabus obtained by Campus Reform, Barclay frames Western science as “socially constructed,” asking “How objective is objectivity? Who determines ‘the facts’ and what social, cultural, economic, and political forces influence those who do?”
The syllabus then goes on to inquire, “Are fields like science, technology, engineering and medicine always completely objective and free of any kind of bias?”
To answer that question, Barclay pledges to map the “rise of Western science and the ways that ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nationality shape(d) the production of knowledge…and many other seemingly ‘objective’ topics.”
Though the class has three seemingly separate learning objectives, all three of the goals ultimately circle back to how scientific knowledge is “constructed” or “produced.”
For example, one learning goal explains that by learning about the “construction of scientific knowledge, [this class] encourages students to think critically about the importance of contextualization and the meaning of ‘objectivity.’”
Students will also learn “how gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality [have] influenced the production of scientific knowledge in different historical eras and what the concrete consequences of this trajectory are,” the syllabus adds.

We need to get rid of our “outdated ideas of biology,” you see. And you wonder why Democrats want to make college education “free”? They want to indoctrinate kids with this nonsense at taxpayer expense.

Category: Education

‘Who Could Have Seen This Coming? Nostradamus, Maybe! But No One Else!’

Posted on | April 6, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘Who Could Have Seen This Coming? Nostradamus, Maybe! But No One Else!’

So says Ace of Spades after a pervert took advantage of Target’s “gender-neutral” bathroom policy in an entirely predictable way:

According to NBC Chicago, police are now on the hunt for a man who exposed himself to a child in the women’s restroom at a Target store in the South Loop.
“A mother was with her young child at about 4:08 p.m. in the women’s restroom at the Target at 1154 S. Clark when the man entered and insisted he had to go to the bathroom, according to Chicago Police,” reports the outlet.
When the man entered the restroom, he reportedly pushed into the child’s stall and exposed himself. . . .
After enacting the new policy allowing people to enter their preferred restroom no matter their biological sex, Target suffered a $10 billion loss in value, a full 20% drop . . . As the protests against the store from pro-family groups escalated, Target’s CEO Brian Cornell not only doubled-down on the controversial policy, but went as far as to compare those opposed to it as being akin to racists who opposed the outlet when they featured black models in their advertisement.
“We’ve had a long history embracing diversity and inclusion,” said Cornell.

“Embracing diversity and inclusion” and also, insanity.