The Other McCain

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

New-Age Cult Connection Emerges in Lesbian Couple’s Mystery Suicide Plunge

Posted on | April 5, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Jennifer and Sarah Hart, the lesbian couple who adopted six children and drove off a cliff in an apparent family suicide last month, had connections to a New Age spirituality cult, according to multiple sources.

The Harts regularly attended the Beloved Festival in Oregon, which involves former followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (“Osho”), a notorious guru who was recently the subject of a Netflix documentary series. A March 30 message on the festival’s Facebook page called the Harts “extraordinary members of our community, our family,” and posted photos of the Harts and their children at the annual festival.

 

Public questions about the Harts’ association with the New Age scene in Portland, Oregon, have intensified as police continue investigating why the couple apparently drove their SUV off a 100-foot oceanside cliff in northern California, killing themselves and at least three of the black children they had adopted from Texas:

The Mendocino County Sheriff’s office on Thursday said that, contrary to numerous previous statements, neither Jennifer Hart, who was driving the SUV, nor Sarah Hart was wearing a seatbelt when the vehicle crashed off the California coast last month.
Investigators have said since soon after the crash that both women were buckled in but the children weren’t when the car went over the 100-foot cliff.
“Information released … by the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office incorrectly stated that Jennifer Hart and Sarah Hart were wearing a seat-belt during the incident,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release. “Investigators from the California Highway Patrol … determined Jennifer Hart and Sarah Hart were not wearing seat-belts during the incident.”
That detail could prove important as investigators work to determine whether the crash, which killed both women and three of their adopted children, was an accident or an intentional act. A search continues for their other three adopted children, who remain missing but are thought to have been in the vehicle.
On Wednesday night, however, Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman, whose agency is heading up the investigation into the crash, said in the most definitive terms to date that he believes the crash was intentional.
“I’m to the point where I’m no longer calling this an accident, I’m calling it a crime,” he told HLN’s Ashleigh Banfield.

The Harts had been repeatedly investigated for child abuse. In 2011, Sarah Hart pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic assault in Minnesota after one of the girls told a teacher she was beaten at home. Not long after that, the Harts relocated to Oregon, where a friend reported them for child abuse in 2013. After that, the Harts moved to Washington State, where they were again the subject of a child abuse complaint last month. Days after that complaint, the couple died when police say Jennifer Hart deliberately drove their GMC Yukon off the California cliff; all six children were believed to be in the vehicle at the time of the deadly crash, but three are still missing, presumably washed out to sea.

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

Details of the New Age connection to the Hart family were highlighted by journalist Kristin Rawls in a long Twitter thread about the case. Rawls was critical of the mainstream media coverage:

Even though police have now admitted this was intentional, every article still includes a comment from some acquaintance suggesting the parents were “heroes” who “turned those kids’ lives around.” This is so insulting to the children.

Rawls took note of a 2013 video from the Beloved Festival in which Devonte Hart, who carried a “Free Hugs” sign during the family’s travels, went onstage to hug popular New Age musician Xavier Rudd. Devonte became briefly famous in 2014 when a photo of him hugging a police officer at a “Black Lives Matter” rally in Portland went viral.

Portland-based photographer Zippy Lomax first met the Harts at the Beloved Festival, and was quoted in news coverage of their deaths:

“I was in awe of them. I think that I speak for a lot of people. I was inspired by them. They gave me hope,” said Lomax.
She snapped dozens of photos of the family about five years ago at the Beloved Festival in Oregon where she met them. Through Lomax’s lens, the Harts were a model family.
“There was no question as to how completely loved and adored those children were,” said Lomax. “We all have lost something because I don’t think there are a lot of examples of families like that, and of kids like that who were so selfless.”
All six children were adopted by Jennifer, 39, and Sarah Hart, 39. Friends in the community know them as the Hart Tribe. They recently moved to Woodland, Washington, where neighbors say there were possible signs of abuse and neglect.
“None of that computes. I’ll tell you, none of that lines up with the people that we all knew,” said Lomax. “Jen and Sarah, I think, were the parents that this world desperately needs.”

Kristin Rawls remarked that several people quoted by media defending the Hart family were connected to the Beloved Festival:

But it turns out that the Harts were involved with a New Age cult in Oregon led by followers of Rajneesh/Osho (he of the Wild Wild Country docuseries on Netflix). Those defending the Harts in the media are also members.
Names of group members who have defended this family to the media include Max Ribner (a musician with Nahko and Medicine for the People), Kristina Pescatore and Elijah Parker. They seem to be involved with Beloved Festival and something called OneDoorLand.

Among those Rawls connected to the Beloved Festival is the popular New Age musician Deva Premal, who met her husband in Rajneesh’s cult.

In the days immediately following the March 26 discovery of the fatal crash in California, mainstream media quoted praise for the Harts from their acquaintances without mentioning their New Age associations. For example, a March 30 Washington Post story:

Samantha Sinclair, a Portland trauma nurse who has known the family since 2014, described their home as one of joy, filled with books, music and healthful food.
“Their story is not about abuse,” she said. “It is a story of triumph and love.” . . .
“Jen and Sarah were providing a hilarious, joyful life for these kids,” Sinclair said. “They were what gave me hope for the future.”

The Post article neglected to mention that Sinclair practices pagan shamanism, “soul retrieval and power animal rediscovery.”

Pagan shaman Samantha Sinclair.

The Hart family had been involved in the New Age music scene in Minnesota, which is where they met Max Ribner in 2012:

Family friend Max Ribner, a Portland musician who plays in the band Nahko and Medicine for the People, said the Harts were amazing parents.
“They’d nursed those six kids back to life,” he said. “These children were coming from some of the roughest childhoods you could imagine.”
Ribner said he first met the family in 2012 when playing the Shangri-La music festival in Clarks Grove, Minnesota. He said he remembered the Hart children because they had dressed in matching outfits and were as close to the stage as possible. The family, he said, always traveled as a pack.
Ribner said that Sarah Hart first came out to Portland around 2012 to look for a job and to see if the area would be a good fit for their family. They’d been living Alexandria, Minnesota, a small town of 13,000 northwest of Minneapolis.
She found a job at Kohl’s. Jennifer and the kids joined her sometime in 2013, he said.
“I think there was an openness of community out here that gave them some breathing room from the challenges they had in Minnesota.”

Crime Online reporter Ellen Killoran interviewed one member of the New Age “tribe” in Minnesota who knew the Hart family well:

“If you had asked me two weeks ago I would have just ranted and raved and told you how wonderful and perfect they are,” said Arlain Ingeldew, who knew the Harts as fellow members of a community she described as a group of hundreds of people drawn together by music, who attended the same festivals. Arlain said that she would often camp alongside the Hart family at Harmony Park, an outdoor event venue next to Lake Geneva in southern Minnesota.
CrimeOnline has reached out to several people believed to be part of this so-called community, of which little is known, and only Arlain agreed to speak.
“The festivals we go to are all about the music and art and loving nature and loving each other,” she said. “And harmony.” . . .
“They were just a blessing. It’s unbelievable what happened here,” she said. “So many of us are flabbergasted.”
Arlain said . . . she frequently spent time with them at these musical gatherings and never saw anything that concerned her. She said the children seemed happy and well cared-for, and were always well behaved. She stayed in touch with the family on social media after they moved from Minnesota, where she lives.
“I would say [Jennifer and Sarah] were equal partners, madly in love, in love with life, in love with the children,” Arlain said.
“They were just idolized for being the perfect family.”

Unfortunately, this “perfect family” drove off a cliff in California. Now, according to Kristin Rawls, New Age cultists are “involved in an active misinformation campaign to salvage the reputations of their ;community’ and Jennifer and Sarah Hart.”




 

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Category: California, Crime, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington State

It’s Not Over ‘Til He Pops The Question

Posted on | April 5, 2018 | Comments Off on It’s Not Over ‘Til He Pops The Question

by Smitty

Category: Uncategorized

Oregon: The Anti-American State

Posted on | April 5, 2018 | 1 Comment

Oregon’s anti-American Gov. Kate Brown.

If you hate America, you’ll love Oregon:

The Democratic governor of Oregon said Wednesday that she will refuse to send National Guard forces to guard the border with Mexico.
Gov. Kate Brown even trolled President Trump, tagging his “RealDonaldTrump” handle in the tweets in which she said her state’s units will not participate in his border-security plan.
“If @realDonaldTrump asks me to deploy Oregon Guard troops to the Mexico border, I’ll say no. As Commander of Oregon’s Guard, I’m deeply troubled by Trump’s plan to militarize our border,” she wrote on Twitter.
In a later tweet, she said there had been no request by the federal government to send Oregon’s Guard units.
But nevertheless, “I have no intention of allowing Oregon’s guard troops to be used to distract from his troubles in Washington,” she wrote.

Y’know, if President Trump really is “colluding” with Russia, perhaps he could sell Oregon to Putin for a few billion bucks. I mean, it’s not as if the kind of worthless socialist swine who would elect someone like Kate Brown as their governor have any love for America, anyway.

 

Category: Democrats, Oregon

‘Outdated Ideas of Biology’

Posted on | April 5, 2018 | 2 Comments

A left-wing Welsh politician, Leanne Wood, last month declared her party’s support for “trans equality”:

I want to see an inclusive feminism which brings women together rather than dividing us. . . . A feminism that understands that gender is a complex and deeply personal thing, and is about so much more than outdated ideas of biology.

“Outdated ideas of biology,” otherwise known as facts.

 

Ms. Wood’s comments were cited in a Guardian column by feminist Hadley Freeman, who is tired of being lectured about transgenderism:

Intriguingly, some of the most passionate arguments I’ve had about this have not been with trans people, but with liberal men. I surely speak for all of us ladies when I say I love nothing more than when a man explains to me, at some length, what a woman now is. I only have 40 years’ experience but, as we all know, experience is old hat now. There is something, shall we say, revealing about the way these “woke bros” take such glee in calling women (older ones, especially) who talk about their rights and bodies “terfs” — trans-exclusionary radical feminists — and insist they shut up or risk ostracism.

These left-wing “woke bros” evidently have no interest in women like Ms. Freeman, and care only about transgender activists like Ana Valens:

If Freeman’s opinion sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same faux-feminist take pitting cis women against trans women that has been used again and again by transgender-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), such as Feminist Current founder Meghan Murphy, who repeatedly depicts TERFs as “leftists” being “silenced” by trans women. . . .
In reality, a true feminist take would never attack trans women because trans women are women, and attacking women for being women is fundamentally misogynistic. . . .
It’s true that accepting trans women means challenging how we’ve long defined womanhood and expanding that definition. But this isn’t anything new; this is how progress works. Queer theory has long challenged straight people to see sexuality beyond treating straightness as the “default,” and trans theory challenges cis people to see gender beyond treating cis people as “normal.”

Ana Valens is the commissar of ‘true feminism.’

Thus, Ana Valens — a 2016 graduate of Rutgers University — declares himself/“herself” an arbiter of “true feminism,” a sort of ideological commissar with the authority to anathematize as a “faux feminist” any woman who disagrees, because “this is how progress works.”

Darleen Click observes that such attacks on “TERFs” have the effect of making “males-who-identify-as-women . . . the ultimate authority on what it means to be a woman.” By asserting that biology is “outdated,” and that “progress” requires us to pretend that Ana Valens is female in every sense of the word, the Left seeks to make political power the source of definition and meaning, without regard to scientific facts.

 

Category: The Transgender Cult

‘A Totalitarian Misery Cult’

Posted on | April 5, 2018 | 2 Comments

Ace of Spades tells the story of Lindsay Shepherd, the Canadian graduate student and teaching assistant “who was summoned before a Diversity Kangaroo Court to explain why, as part of an issues-in-media class, she had played a debate . . . about the use of made-up trans pronouns”:

She used to consider herself a leftist, but she says she now knows what leftism actually is, and she’s not that, any longer.
Interestingly, she exposes, accidentally, the syndrome of Default Leftism. Leftists have struggled hard, and achieved great success, at making Leftism the default politics of anyone who actually doesn’t think about politics. She thought she was a leftist, she says, because she cared about being nice to people and rode a bicycle instead of driving a car.
That, in her mind, was “leftist.” And the leftists put a lot of effort into making people think they were leftists or aligned with the left if they merely thought you should be nice to people and also liked trees.
But now she knows what it really is — a totalitarian misery cult.

Video at the link. (Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Speaking of Russian collusion (this is what we Professional Writers call a “transition”), for the past few weeks I’ve been reading several books on the history of Communism and the Cold War. The Soviet World of American Communism by Harvey Klehr, et al., provides documentary proof from Soviet archives that American Communists (CPUSA) were at all times under the control of Moscow. The CPUSA actually persecuted people in the United States who were believed (correctly or not) to be allies of Stalin’s enemies in the U.S.S.R. Thus, the purges and “show trials” of the 1930s (an era chronicled by Robert Conquest in The Great Terror) were mirrored in America by the CPUSA’s own paranoid crusade against Trotskyists and other “deviationists.”

This is relevant to Ms. Shepherd’s experience in Canada. She thought of herself as a leftist “because she cared about being nice to people,” as Ace says, but she hadn’t gotten the memo that the Left’s goon squads have decided that no criticism of transgender ideology is permissible. Radical feminists have been complaining for years about the totalitarian tactics of the transgender cult; eminent feminists have been “no-platformed” for dissenting against transgender ideology. In a sense, feminists are like Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev and other Bolsheviks who, after Lenin’s death, were purged and murdered to satisfy Stalin’s sadistic whims.

Recall that James Damore’s internal critique of Google’s “diversity” policy included multiple avowals of his agreement with the concepts of equality and inclusion; he merely intended to raise questions about whether Google’s policy as implemented had harmful unintended consequences. His avowals of good intentions were ignored; he was demonized as a “misogynist” and fired. And so it was with Lindsay Shepherd — she meant no harm by showing the video debate in class, but her good intentions counted for nothing. She was demonized and purged.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.



 

 

Category: The Transgender Cult

In The Mailbox: 04.04.18

Posted on | April 4, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.04.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Going to Minnesota tomorrow for a long weekend with friends, family, furries, and other otaku. Posting may be intermittent, and both the FMJRA and Rule 5 Sunday may be delayed.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #215
EBL: The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Twitchy: Cops’ Colossal YouTube Shooter Screwup Actually Gets Worse
Louder With Crowder: UK Man Defends Himself From Burglars, Kills One – Is Charged With Murder

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #79 – The Magical Days Episode
American Power: Orange County Faces Legal Threat Over Anti-Camping Laws, also, Michael Walsh, The Fiery Angel
American Thinker: Why a 53-Year-Old Big City Lawyer Who’s Never Shot A Gun Joined The NRA
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: Trump Tells Democrats “You Didn’t Clap Loud Enough! DACA Is Dead!”
Da Tech Guy: Voices At CPAC 2018 – Byron York Of The Washington Examiner
Don Surber: I Ordered Four My Pillows. Maybe You Should Too.
Dustbury: Please Don’t Think Ill Of Me
Fausta: [Fausta Wertz is recovering from an appendectomy and would appreciate your thoughts and prayers. – Wombat-socho]
The Geller Report: Canadian Muslim Family Conference To Feature Pro-Jihad Speaker, also, Mark Zuckerberg Explains How Facebook Will Try To Kill Alternative Media
Hogewash: An Anniversary, also, A Cosmic Cold Front
Joe For America: Being A Police Officer In California Is Going To Be More Dangerous
Legal Insurrection: After YouTube Shooting, We Need Better Vegan Activist Control, also, Merkel Under Pressure Over Germany’s Imported Stabbing Epidemic
Michelle Malkin: Open-Borders Churches, Caravans, And Sanctuaries
Power Line: Mulvaney Responds To Warren, also, Chappaquiddick Revisited
Shark Tank: Graham Attacks Trump In New Ad
Shot In The Dark: Ganders
STUMP: Kentucky Meltdown – Teachers In Revolt, Bill In The Sewers, & Nothing Actually Solved
The Jawa Report: Nonviolent Iranian Feminist Vegan Animal Activist Attacks YouTube
The Political Hat: Obama’s Assault On Urban, Suburban & Rural Communities On Its Last Breath?
This Ain’t Hell: Four Marines Feared Dead In Helicopter Crash, also, Trump To Send Troops To The Border
Victory Girls: Wu, Black, And The YouTube Shooter
Weasel Zippers: Dem Rep Debbie Dingell To Introduce Gun Confiscation Legislation, also, Clinton Admits He Tried To Help Peres Beat Netanyahu In 1996 Israeli Elections


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Category: Linkagery

The ‘David Jewberg’ Hoax

Posted on | April 4, 2018 | Comments Off on The ‘David Jewberg’ Hoax

 

Oleksiy Kuzmenko has a fascinating report at Bellingcat about how Dan Rapoport created an online persona, “David Jewberg,” who claimed to be an Army lieutenant-colonel, a Pentagon “senior analyst” specializing in Russia policy. “Jewberg” amassed a substantial following on Facebook and was interviewed via email by a Ukrainian reporter:

Although “Jewberg” has often been quoted as being a Pentagon insider by Ukrainian and Russian media, he is evidently a fake composite character and “the U.S. Department of Defense and State Department have disavowed [his existence], stating that they have never employed a person by this name,” Bellingcat writes. . . .
“Jewberg” is best known for running a popular Facebook page used to post anti-Kremlin, anti-Trump sentiments in the Russian language. Jewberg also posted photos and identification cards in an attempt to attest that he was real, although all such evidence actually featured the photograph of a Texan man named Steve Farro — a college friend of Rapoport’s.

In 2013, Rapoport was fined nearly $70,000 by the Security and Exchange Commission for violations regarding his solicitation of U.S. investors in Russian companies. “Rapoport also claimed on numerous occasions to have worked for Romney and Jeb Bush presidential campaigns,” according to Kuzmenko. The “Jewberg” persona was promoted by various people associated with the Free Russia Foundation, an anti-Putin group. Rapoport relocated to Ukraine in 2016, Kuzmenko reports, but the “Jewberg” hoax — which involved the posting of fake military identification — could expose Rapoport to charges of impersonating a federal employee in violation of 18 U.S.C § 912.

Doveryai, no proveryai — “Trust, but verify,” as Reagan said.

 

Category: Russia

‘Emotional Abuse and Cruel Punishment’: Woman Reported Lesbian Couple in 2013

Posted on | April 4, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

More background on the story of Jennifer and Sarah Hart, the lesbian couple who adopted six black children and died when they drove their SUV off an oceanside cliff in California last week:

A woman said Tuesday that she told Oregon child welfare officials in 2013 that Jennifer and Sarah Hart — who plunged off a California cliff with their children last month in an SUV — had been depriving the kids of food as punishment.
In a statement provided to the Associated Press, Alexandra Argyropoulos, a former friend of the Harts, said she “witnessed what I felt to be controlling emotional abuse and cruel punishment” toward the six children.
Argyropoulos said she was told the children had been interviewed by officials but there was nothing more the Oregon Department of Human Services could do because there was not enough evidence to make a case. . . .
Authorities have said social service officials in Oregon contacted the West Linn Police Department about the family in 2013 while they were living in the area. Police referred media questions to the Oregon Department of Human Services, which cited privacy laws in refusing to say whether the agency was involved.
After reporting her concerns in 2013, Argyropoulos said, she was told the Hart children had been interviewed by officials from the Oregon department; it was apparent that each child had been coached by their mothers on what to say; and nothing more could be done.
Argyropoulos said she was unaware of a 2011 domestic assault conviction against Sarah Hart. She said the couple broke off contact with her after she went to Oregon officials.
“My heart is completely broken. The current system failed to protect these children from their abusers,” Argyropoulos said. . . .
On Sunday, authorities disclosed that data from the vehicle’s software suggested the crash was deliberate. They said the SUV had stopped at a pull-off area before speeding straight off the cliff.

All six children were adopted from Texas. Three were found near the crash site, and the other three are missing and presumed dead. Jennifer and Sarah Hart had a history of abuse complaints:

The parents of Devonte Hart removed him and his five siblings from public schools in Minnesota the day after one of his mothers resolved a child-abuse court case, The Oregonian/OregonLive has learned.
Sarah Hart reached a probation agreement April 14, 2011, a week after she pleaded guilty to physically abusing one of her daughters, who was then 6 years old.
The next day, all six of their adopted children were taken out of public schools in Alexandria, where the family lived before moving to Oregon. They would never attend public school again. . . .
An Alexandria police report obtained Tuesday also shows a different daughter told authorities in 2008 one of her mothers bruised her with a belt.
Asked by police about the beating, Jennifer and Sarah Hart said the girl had fallen down the stairs days before, the report shows. . . .
All eight Harts left their home in Woodland, Washington, sometime after no one answered the door March 23 for a visit by child protective services, according to neighbors and the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. . . .
Court records in Minnesota show Sarah Hart in 2011 received a 90-day suspended jail sentence and a year of probation after daughter Abigail arrived at Woodland Elementary School with bruises on her stomach and back.
The girl’s teacher contacted social services and police.
Abigail told authorities her mother struck her repeatedly with a closed fist, submerged her head under cold water and withheld meals from her for misbehaving, according to report by police in Alexandria, a small town northwest of Minneapolis where the family lived.
Though the girl said Jennifer Hart was the one who hit her, Sarah Hart pleaded guilty April 7, 2011, to misdemeanor domestic assault.
Previously, Abigail’s older sister Hannah said in September 2008 it was her mother Jennifer who struck her with a belt, causing a bruise on her arm that attracted notice — and a call to authorities, according to the newly obtained Alexandria police report.
In an interview, both mothers told a police sergeant and social worker they had no idea how Hannah, who was 6 at the time, got the bruise but said she had recently fallen down the stairs in their home. . . .
Records show the Hart children enrolled in Alexandria public schools Sept. 8, 2009 — seven months after Jennifer and Sarah finalized their adoption of siblings Devonte, Jeremiah and Sierra in Harris County, Texas. The women had previously adopted siblings Markis, Abigail and Hannah from Colorado County, Texas, in September 2006. . . .
Bruce and Dana DeKalb, who lived next door in Washington, said Devonte had come to their home a dozen times to ask for food, saying his parents had withheld it as a form of punishment.
The DeKalbs also recounted that three months after the family moved into a home on 2 acres last May, one of the girls rang their doorbell in the middle of the night.
The girl, who they later learned was Hannah, “was at our door in a blanket saying we needed to protect her,” Bruce DeKalb said. “She said that they were abusing her.”

This was an avoidable tragedy. Did political correctness discourage authorities from intervening to save the lives of these children?




 

Category: Crime, Gays, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington State
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