“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
More than 850 illegal immigrants managed to elude deportation officers conducting operations in Northern California this week, and the head of the deportation force on Tuesday blamed Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf for helping some of them escape.
More than 150 migrants were nabbed in the operations, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Half of them had criminal convictions, ICE said.
One of the men arrested was a 38-year-old Mexican who belongs to the Sureno gang, and who had been deported four times before, authorities said. Others had weapons, domestic violence and drunken driving convictions.
But some 864 criminals ICE was seeking remain at large in the Oakland and San Francisco region, ICE said.
The operation gained attention after Ms. Schaaf issued a very public warning to her community that ICE was making arrests. She said she wanted them to be aware and to take needed steps to protect themselves.
Thomas D. Homan, the top official at ICE, said by doing that she put his officers at risk, and likely endangered her own citizens by giving some criminals a chance to escape.
“I have to believe that some of them were able to elude us thanks to the mayor’s irresponsible decision,” Mr. Homan said.
ICE said one of the people who eluded them was a Honduran arrested for transporting cocaine and for sex with a child under 16. Another Mexican had drug and firearms convictions.
Both of those migrants had been in police custody before but the authorities refused to hold them for pickup by ICE, the agency said. Both have been deported before on multiple occasions, but managed to sneak back in.
Ms. Schaaf defended her decision earlier this week by saying she had an obligation to protect the city’s residents — “particularly our most vulnerable.”
“I believe it is my duty and moral obligation as mayor to give those families fair warning,” she said.
She also warned city businesses that California law prohibited them from cooperating with ICE officers, and the law actively bars ICE from going into employee-only areas of businesses.
Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.
Members of several congressional committees have been told by an FBI informant that the Russians “bragged” that the Clintons’ influence in the Obama administration would ensure approval of the Uranium One deal, according to the informant’s lawyer, Victoria Toensing.
Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the sale of 20 percent of U.S. uranium reserves in 2010 to a Russian state-owned company at a time when interested parties were donating hundreds of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton also was paid $500,000 by a bank tied to the Kremlin for a speech.
The FBI informant, William Campbell, said in his statement to Congress, which was obtained by the Hill, that he was told by Russian nuclear executives that Moscow had hired the American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide specifically because it was in position to influence Hillary Clinton.
Dick Morris, a longtime Bill Clinton adviser, writes in a commentary Monday that the Russians sought the Uranium One deal “very aggressively.”
He says Campbell told Congress that in the years before the deal came up before the Committee of Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), of which Hillary Clinton was a member, Russia deployed 10 spies in the United States with a single mission: to get close to Hillary Clinton to get her to approve the Uranium One deal.
CFIUS — a multi-agency board that includes the State Department, the Defense Department and the Justice Department — has the power to block deals that threaten national security.
Morris notes the FBI, then led by Robert Mueller, who now is special counsel investigating claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, found out about the Russian spies targeting Hillary Clinton.
“Fortunately, the FBI uncovered the nest of spies one year before the deal came up for approval. (The Bureau acted to arrest the spies when it did because one of them had risen to a high position in a company owned by Hillary’s finance chairman),” the report said. “Then, to seal the deal, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin arranged for former president Bill Clinton to address the Renaissance Bank in Moscow, an institution closely connected to the Kremlin,” Morris writes.
“To try to keep word of the Uranium One deal under wraps and to bury the story about the Russian spies, FBI Director Robert Mueller arranged for the suspects to take plea bargains admitting to minor offenses and then spirited them out of the country quickly – in a prisoner exchange with Russia – before the media could interrogate them.”
Two others involved were Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and recently ousted Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe.
McCabe’s wife, who ran for political office, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Hillary Clinton’s friends even as her husband continued to investigate claims against Clinton’s political opponent.
Morris said the information comes from Campbell, through his lawyer, Victoria Toensing.
The Russian donations to the Clintons’ foundation amounted to $145 million.
Morris says Rosenstein and McCabe need to be investigated to determine if their handling of the Uranium One case was designed to shield Hillary Clinton.
Campbell’s written testimony suggested Obama administration officials made decisions that ended up benefiting the Russian nuclear industry.
Campbell wrote that Russian nuclear executives “boasted” during vodka-fueled meetings monitored by the FBI about “how weak the U.S. government was in giving away uranium business and were confident that Russia would secure the strategic advantage it was seeking in the U.S. uranium market.”
CNN put on an atrocious spectacle last week, hosting a “town hall” production that was, as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass both remarked, a re-enactment of the Two Minutes’ Hate scene in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984. It was a remarkable example of shameless exploitation and ideological hate-mongering put on by the failing news network directed at the National Rifle Association.
Among the worst actors in CNN’s disgraceful play was Scott Israel, the partisan Democrat political hack masquerading as the sheriff in Broward County where the Parkland massacre took place. Israel engaged in a ridiculous back-and-forth with National Rifle Association spokeswoman (and stand-in for Emmanuel Goldstein) Dana Loesch, in which Israel offered one of the stupidest and most demagogic statements in recent memory, notable mostly for its having captured the zeitgeist of the gun-grabbing Left in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School carnage.
“You just told this group of people that you’re standing up for them,” Israel scolded Loesch. “You are not standing up for them until you say, ‘I want less weapons.’”
Loesch was attempting to explain that the NRA is for improving the federal system of background checks which failed to identify Parkland killer Nikolas Cruz as a dangerous psychopath when Cruz attempted to spend a chunk of the life insurance payout from his adopted mother’s death on a personal firearms arsenal, and that a better-functioning government implementing the laws already on the books, which the NRA has long argued for, would do more to stop the next Parkland from happening than any leftist gun-control fantasy. For her statements she was hooted at and called a murderer by the unhinged children in the audience.
But as Kass noted, Israel may have had his big moment playing to the crowd on CNN — but things have gone south from there…
What the public didn’t know at the time of Israel’s speechifying was that on the day of the shooting, a Broward deputy sheriff was stationed at the school.
When the shooting began, Israel’s armed deputy hid outside in safety and remained there.
But if the good sheriff — a political cat — had explained that business about his frightened deputy, he’d have ruined the show. So he kept his mouth shut.
That wasn’t the half of it. By the weekend it came out that Scot Peterson, the school resource officer who neglected to engage the shooter as he was duty-bound to do, wasn’t alone…
Not one but four sheriff’s deputies hid behind cars instead of storming Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., during Wednesday’s school shooting, police claimed Friday — as newly released records revealed the Broward County Sheriff’s Office had received at least 18 calls about the troubled teen over the past decade.
Sources from Coral Springs, Fla., Police Department tell CNN that when its officers arrived on the scene Wednesday, they were shocked to find three Broward County Sheriff’s deputies behind their cars with weapons drawn.
Peterson resigned Thursday once it became national news that he failed to run to the sound of the guns.
And the upshot is that Israel, who unquestionably knew his people had abjectly failed to protect the young people of Broward County, spent the week after the shooting pushing a political narrative that is irrelevant — demonstrably irrelevant — to solving the problem of school shootings.
How many times was Israel’s department called to deal with the domestic incidents Nikolas Cruz precipitated at his house? There had been 23 calls to his department involving Cruz, 18 of which directly involved his behavior. What had Israel done within his current powers as a law enforcement officer to prevent that tragedy?
And his answer when his failure results in 17 murders at the hands of a madman known to the authorities? Raise the stakes further so the same people he couldn’t protect have less opportunity to protect themselves. And demonize as irresponsible those with a different view.
It’s even worse than you know. A viral indictment of Israel making its way around the internet connects this manifest failure to a collaborative plan between the school district and sheriff’s department not to investigate crimes committed by schoolchildren in Broward. If that indictment is true, Cruz’s massacre was a lot more foreseeable than we realize.
Sunday morning CNN’s Jake Tapper bolted from his network’s promotion of Israel to utterly dismantle the sheriff in an interview after he boasted of “amazing leadership” in Broward County, in an example of actual journalism rarely practiced there.
The lesson of Parkland is that government doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it’s too often run by political hacks, usually of a leftist variety, incapable of doing a proper job. We are, at the end of the day, on our own — and we must act accordingly.
NEW YORK — Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Saturday released a purported rebuttal to a four-page House Republican memo from earlier this month that alleges abuse of surveillance authority on the part of Obama-era federal agencies.
The Democratic rebuttal contains misleading claims, omits key details, and, perhaps unintentionally, actually proves the FBI and Department of Justice utilized the infamous, largely discredited 35-page anti-Trump dossier to obtain a FISA court warrant to monitor an individual formerly associated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Here are seven key problems with the claims made inside the Democrats’ rebuttal memo.
1 – The House Democratic rebuttal opens with a seemingly deceptive statement that Steele’s dossier “did not inform” the FBI’s decision to start its investigation into Trump’s campaign in late July.
This is the first contention in the rebuttal, which relates it is trying to “correct the record.” However, the Republican memo did not assert that the dossier informed the FBI’s decision to launch its investigation in late July or anytime. Instead, the GOP memo documented that Steele’s dossier formed an “essential part” of the FISA court applications submitted by Obama-era federal agencies to monitor the communications of Carter Page, who briefly served as a volunteer foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, even though House Democrats seem to be rebutting a contention that was not made in the Republican memo, there are possible issues with the rebuttal’s claim that the FBI’s investigative team only received Steele’s “reporting” in mid-September, ostensibly referring to the written dossier. The Democrats entirely ignore that last July, Steele reportedly traveled to Rome, where he met with an FBI contact to supply the agency with alleged information he found during the course of his anti-Trump work. The Washington Postreported that Steele met with the FBI on July 5, 2016. The Democratic memo reveals that the DOJ “accurately informed the court that that the FBI initiated its counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.” That is 26 days after Steele met with the FBI in Rome.
2 – While perhaps not intending to, the Democratic memo actually confirms that the Obama Justice Department did use Steele’s largely discredited dossier for FISA court applications to monitor Page.
The memo contains a sentence stating that “as DOJ informed the court in subsequent renewals”; but the rest of that sentence is redacted. The next sentence states that “Steele’s reporting about Page’s Moscow meeting,” with the remainder of that sentence also redacted. The next sentence states that “DOJ’s applications did not otherwise rely on Steele’s reporting, including any ‘salacious’ allegations about Trump…” The word “otherwise” indicates that, according to the Democratic memo, DOJ did indeed rely on Steele’s dossier for something.
As a side note, interestingly, the Democrats only use the term “salacious” regarding the dossier, not fully quoting from former FBI Director James Comey’s famous remarks in which he testified that the anti-Trump dossier contained “salacious and unverified” material.
Meanwhile, the Democratic rebuttal goes on to cite specific instances of the FISA applications utilizing Steele’s dossier, with the applications citing Steele’s alleged sources reporting that Page took meetings in Russia.
In a clear attempt to minimize the importance of the dossier, the Democratic memo refers to a 2013 case in which Russian agents allegedly targeted Page for recruitment. In that case, Page was identified in court documents made public as “Male-1” in reference to a case involving three Russian men identified as Russian intelligence agents. The spy ring was accused of seeking information on U.S. sanctions as well as methods of developing alternate sources of energy. The FBI court filings describe “the attempted use of Male-1 as an intelligence source for Russia,” but Page was not accused of having been successfully recruited or spying. The court documents cite no evidence that “Male-1” knew he was talking with alleged Russian agents. That the Obama-era federal agencies needed to still use the dossier in light of that 2013 case may show that the 2013 episode was not enough to obtain a FISA warrant on Page. Steele’s dossier contains claims of updated meetings between Page and Russians that went into the year 2016.
The House Republican memo and a subsequent criminal referral authored by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) both state that the FISA applications relied heavily on the dossier. Grassley and Graham both reviewed the original FISA applications.
The Grassley-Graham memo relates (emphasis added):
On March 17, 2017, the Chairman and Ranking Member were provided copies of the two relevant FISA applications, which requested authority to conduct surveillance on Carter Page. Both relied heavily on Mr. Steele’s dossier claims, and both applications were granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). In December of 2017, the Chairman, Ranking Member and Subcommittee Chairman Graham were allowed to review a total of four FISA applications relying on the dossier to seek surveillance of Mr. Carter Page, as well as numerous other documents relating to Mr. Steele.
3 – The rebuttal leaves out key information that may dispute the Democratic document’s claim that the FISA warrant was “not used to spy on Trump or his campaign.”
The rebuttal claims this is the case because Page “ended his affiliation with the campaign months before DOJ applied for a warrant.” This is misleading. The FISA warrant gives access to phone calls, email, web browsing history and other electronic records, meaning agents can retrieve any emails or recorded communications from the period Page was affiliated with the campaign and would be able to access any recorded communications with the campaign from that period. Also, according to reports, the FBI monitored Page while he spoke to then-Trump adviser Steve Bannon about Russia in January 2017.
4 – The rebuttal tries to give legitimacy to the possibly illicit surveillance of Page by noting that two of the presiding federal judges were appointed by President George W. Bush and one by President Ronald Reagan.
However, the Republicans’ issue has never been claims of partisanship on behalf of the judges, but rather the charge that key information was withheld from the judges, primarily the origins of the dossier, which was produced by the controversial Fusion GPS and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Republicans also charge that the FISA court was not told about credibility issues related to Steele.
5 – The Democratic memo raises immediate questions about the possible use of a second dossier authored by Cody Shearer, a shadowy former tabloid journalist who has long been closely associated with various Clinton scandals.
The rebuttal states that the DOJ provided the FISA court with “additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborate Steele’s reporting.” The rebuttal does not mention the names of the other “independent sources.”
Shearer reemerged in the news cycle last month when the Guardian newspaper reported that the FBI has been utilizing a second dossier authored by Shearer as part of its probe into Trump and alleged Russian collusion.
The Guardianreported the so-called Shearer memo was given to the FBI by Steele in October 2016 to back up some of his claims.
According to the Guardian report, the FBI is still assessing portions of the Shearer memo. The newspaper reported that, like Steele’s dossier, Shearer’s memo cites an “unnamed source within Russia’s FSB” alleging that Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence during a 2013 trip to Moscow in which the future president purportedly engaged in “lewd acts in a five-star hotel.”
Shearer’s name was reportedly associated with the Grassley-Graham criminal referral of Steele, which contains redacted information that Steele received information from someone in the State Department, who in turn had been in contact with a “foreign sub-source” who was in touch with a redacted name described as a “friend of the Clintons.”
Numerous media reports have since stated that the second dossier author mentioned in the Grassley-Graham memo was Shearer, an associate of longtime Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal.
According to sources who spoke to CNN, Shearer’s information was passed from Blumenthal to Jonathan Winer, who at the time was a special State Department envoy for Libya working under then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
Citing the same source, CNN reported that Shearer’s dossier is “actually a set of notes based on conversations with reporters and other sources.” CNN reported that Shearer had “circulated those notes to assorted journalists, as well as to Blumenthal.”
National Reviewpreviously dubbed Shearer a “Creepy Clinton Confidante” and “The Strangest Character in Hillary’s Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.”
6 – While trying to argue otherwise, the Democratic rebuttal actually confirms the key contention in the Republican memo that the FBI and DOJ failed to inform the FISA court that Steele’s dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.
In an attempt to rebut the Republican argument that the FISA court was not informed about the dossier’s specific origins, the Democratic memo quotes from an explanation to the court that Steele:
was approached by an identified U.S. person who indicated to Source #1 [Steele] that a U.S.-based law firm had hired the identified U.S. person to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s ties to Russia. (The identified U.S. person and Source #1 have a long-standing business relationship.) The identified U.S. person hired Source #1 to conduct this research. The identified U.S. person never advised Source #1 as to the motivation behind the research into candidate #1’s ties to Russia. The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.
Contrary to the rebuttal’s characterization, this paragraph is a far cry from informing the court that the dossier utilized in the FISA warrant was paid for by Trump’s primary political opponents, namely Clinton and the DNC. Also, the general mention of “a U.S.-based law firm” does not identify to the FISA court the actual firm, Perkins Coie, which is known for its representation of Clinton and the DNC. Further, informing the FISA court about “an identified U.S. person” who hired Steele fails to actually identify that U.S. person as Glenn Simpson, founder of the controversial Fusion GPS.
The Democrats claim that the above-referenced paragraph proves the Obama-era agencies informed the FISA court about the “political” origins of the dossier. However, the Republican memo specifically and apparently correctly charged that “neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts.” The Democratic memo fails to dispute that charge.
7 – The Democratic rebuttal omitted key details about the FBI’s internal assessments of Steele and his reporting.
The Democratic memo claims that the Obama-era agencies “repeatedly affirmed to the Committee the reliability and credibility of Steele’s reporting, an assessment also reflected in the FBI’s underlying source documents.”
Actually, the House Republican memo documents that a “source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated.”
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him onTwitter @AaronKleinShow.Follow him onFacebook.
Written with research by Joshua Klein.
Kenyatta: Going Full Ghetto in desperate attempt to make it "Say it ain't so."
The robber is in a medically induced coma but is expected to survive and police believe he is responsible for a string of armed robberies in the area
A mother-daughter duo are confronted by an armed robber in their family's liquor store in Oklahoma, but they quickly pull out their own guns and shoot him several times, and its all caught on CCTV.
The incredible heart stopping footage shows Tina Ring, 53, and her daughter Ashley Lee, 30, appearing to cooperate after giving the armed robber money while they are being held up with a shotgun at their Forest Acres Liquor Store Thursday night.
However the fast acting women grabbed two small pistols hidden under the register and lock him in the store with a button, turning the tables on the would-be robber, who police identified as Tyrone Lee, 36.
First Tina shoots Lee once at point blank range, as he runs off she pumps off two more shots in his direction. Her daughter Ashley looks to be dialing 911 while her mother covers them waiting for the brazen robber to return.
Video playing bottom right...
At first the robber, with his head covered by a hood, empties the register- Ashley keeps her hands up and appears to be cooperating
The robber tries to leave with his haul, but the quick thinking women have locked him in the store and they are each now armed with a pistol that was hidden under the register
Tina readies to fire a shot as she anticipates the robber is about to head back towards them
Tina fires multiple shots at and in the direction of the brazen robber who refuses to go down
At some point Lee and his shotgun have parted as he appears to be no longer armed.
He shockingly stumbles back towards the women, and Tina squeezes off another round and it looks as if she hit Lee in the leg this time as he winces over in pain.
He then tries to wrestle Tina's gun away from her, and manages to pistol whip her before successfully getting it out of her hand.
Ashley watches her mother struggle with the robber and shoots him at point blank range.
Tina and the man wrestle, he attempts to get her pistol away from her, and pistol whips her, when he finally does get the gun out of the mother's grip he quickly learns all the ammo has run out
Mother daughter duo Tina Ring, 53, and her daughter Ashley Lee, 30 (pictured) quick thinking and even quicker marksmanship managed to thwart an armed robber in their store
Tina said the only thing going through her mind was she wanted to make sure her daughter was not hurt in violent exchange with the robber (both pictured at their family owed store)
The pair fought off the hooded man who demanded cash from them at their Forest Acres Liquor store in Oklahoma at 6pm on Thursday night
Lee, who now in possession of Tina's gun tries to fire at the women, but it is out of ammo.
He falls to the floor behind the register, and tries in vain to get up several times after being riddled with bullets.
Police identified Tyrone Lee (pictured), 36, as the attacker and said he is suspected of carrying out several other armed robberies in the area
The would-be thief reportedly drove himself to a local hospital where he was put into a medically induced coma.
Tina suffered a gash to the head, which required staples.
Speaking out after her ordeal, she said: 'I didn't want him to hurt my daughter. That was my main thought.
'All I was thinking was "just give him the money and go" and the next thing I know I see him back in my face. I'm still in shock. I don't think I have really processed everything yet.'
Store owner Justin Christian, 33, was out of town at the time of the attack and says his mother and sister 'did what they had to do'.
He told KJRH-TV: 'I'm very proud of them. They fought for their life. Had my mom not made sure that the pistol she shot was empty... he tried shooting my sister with it point-blank.
'You're not going to scare me off from my store. This is what feeds my family, this is what pays my bills.'
Sergeant Brandon Watkins, of the Tulsa Police Department, identified Tyrone Lee, 36, as the alleged attacker and said he is suspected of carrying out several other armed robberies in the area.
He said: 'It does appear that this is going to be the guy we had been looking for. He's done multiple robberies here in Tulsa, as well as up in the county.'
Officers are reported to be monitoring Lee's condition and he is expected to survive.
On February 22 Breitbart News reported that one deputy resigned after it was learned that he was on scene but failed to control Nikolas Cruz. Sheriff Israel told ABC 13 that video shows the deputy, Scott Peterson, “arrive at the west side of Building 12” and “take a position” outside the school — but never go inside. The sheriff’s office moved to suspend Peterson, who resigned before the suspension could take place.
Now CNN reports that the Coral Springs police officers claim three other Broward County deputies were outside the school but failed to go inside as well. They quote “Coral Springs sources” who said the three “deputies had their pistols drawn and were behind their vehicles” when Coral Springs officers arrived. They said “not one of [the deputies] had gone into the school.”
The sources indicate other Broward County deputies arrived on scene, and two of those new arrivals joined with Coral Springs officers and entered the building.
The sources said, “Coral Springs police were stunned and upset that the four original Broward County Sheriff’s deputies who were first on the scene did not appear to join them as they entered the school.”
Coral Springs Police Department public information officer Sgt. Carla Kmiotek would not comment on what Broward County deputies did or did not do. Rather, “The Coral Springs Police Department will speak on behalf of our officers and their response in that incident,” she said. “We will not speak on behalf of Broward Sheriff’s deputies and their response to the incident.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
As fun as it is to ridicule the FBI for devoting massive resources to chasing down Hillary Clinton's oppo research while blowing off repeated, specific warnings about school shooter Nikolas Cruz, we've put a lot on the agency's plate.
We're hauling in nearly 2 million manifestly unvetted Third World immigrants every year, leading to a slew of FBI "Watch Lists" with a million names apiece. In 2015, Director James Comey said that there were ISIS investigations in all 50 states -- even Idaho and Alaska! And that's just one terrorist organization.
Maybe the FBI brass would still be a bunch of incompetent, PC nincompoops if we weren't dumping millions of psychotic and terrorist foreigners on the country. But even the most efficient organization would have trouble keeping track of the Nikolas Cruzes when our immigration policies require approximately one-third of the country to be constantly watching another third of the country.
Thanks to our Second Amendment, the United States has fewer mass shootings per capita than many other developed countries, including Norway, France, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium and the Czech Republic. (And 98 percent of our mass shootings occur in "gun-free zones.")
But imagine if we could cut our mass shootings in half?
There have been about 34 mass shootings since 2000. Forty-seven percent -- 16 -- were committed by first- and second-generation immigrants, i.e. people who never would have been here but for Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration act.
And the immigrant mass shootings have been some of the most spectacular ones, such as Fort Hood and San Bernardino. Two of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, at Virginia Tech in 2007 and at the Pulse Nightclub in 2016, were committed by first- and second-generation immigrants, i.e., people who were in this country because Teddy was pouting in his room and refused to come out until he got his own legacy.
(Excluded from both lists: the Las Vegas shooting, because law enforcement has released nothing but lies about it, so that shooting remains unclassifiable; family dispute shootings; targeted assassinations of police officers; and shootings on Indian reservations.)
Here's the list of immigrant mass shootings, defined as a shooting at the same general time and location, not during the commission of another crime, that leaves at least four people dead -- i.e. no gangland shootings, no "man kills family, then self" and no drug deals gone bad.
On account of the Rule of Journalism that permits the word "immigrant" to be used only in sentences with the word "valedictorian," you may not have heard of some of these mass shootings at all.
1) Omar Mateen, son of Afghan immigrants, killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on June 12, 2016.
2) First- and second-generation Pakistani immigrants Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik opened fire at a community center Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, on Dec. 2, 2015, killing 14 people.
3) English immigrant Christopher Harper-Mercer killed 9 people at Umpqua Community College in southwest Oregon on Oct. 1, 2015.
4) Kuwaiti immigrant Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot and killed five people in attacks on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on July 16, 2015.
5) Second-generation Malaysian immigrant Elliot Rodger killed six people on May 23, 2014, around the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
6) Second-generation immigrant John Zawahri opened fire at his Southern California home and later at the campus of Santa Monica College on June 7, 2013, killing five in all. (The New York Times never mentioned that he was the child of Lebanese immigrants. The Times didn't even mention that his father used to beat up his mother, despite that paper's usual heightened interest in stories about men being mean to women.)
7) Cuban immigrant Pedro Alberto Vargas fatally shot six people in his apartment complex in Hialeah, Florida, on July 26, 2013.
8) Probable Barbadian immigrant Aaron Alexis shot and killed 12 people inside the Washington Navy Yard on Sept. 16, 2013. (See this.)
9) South Korean immigrant One L. Goh opened fire at Oikos University in Oakland, California, killing seven people on April 2, 2012.
10) Mexican immigrant Eduardo Sencion shot up an IHOP in Carson City, Nevada, on Sept. 6, 2011, killing four people -- three National Guardsmen and a 67-year-old woman.
11) Second-generation immigrant Nidal Malik Hasan, son of Palestinian immigrants, killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2009.
12) Vietnamese immigrant Jiverly Wong shot up the Binghamton, New York, American Civic Association on April 3, 2009, killing 13.
13) Bosnian immigrant Sulejman Talovic fatally shot five people at the Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City on Feb. 12, 2007.
14) Seung-Hui Cho, a South Korean immigrant, slaughtered 32 people at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.
15) Hmong immigrant Chai Soua Vang killed six hunters in northern Wisconsin on Nov. 21, 2004.
16) Mexican immigrant Salvador Tapia shot up the Windy City Core Supply warehouse in Chicago in 2003, killing six of his former co-workers.
If you missed your favorite immigrant mass shooting, please note that I excluded Jamaican immigrant Colin Ferguson (Long Island Railroad massacre in 1993); Nigerian immigrant Peter Odighizuwa (Appalachian School of Law shooting in 2002); Haitian illegal immigrant Kesler Dufrene (North Miami shooting in 2012); and Nigerian immigrant Henry Williams Obotetukudo (Bronx-Lebanon Hospital shooting in 2017). We are only counting mass shootings since 2000 that left at least four people dead. First- and second-generation immigrants have committed more than 40 percent of all mass shootings since 2000. I know we've been admitting Third World immigrants at a breakneck pace, but I don't think immigrants make up nearly half the population yet.
Once we exclude the immigrant mass shooters, a clearer pattern emerges. The typical American perpetrator is a young man with paranoid schizophrenia -- or, as we're now euphemistically calling it, "autism" -- probably exacerbated by pot, a deadly combo platter.
An immigration moratorium and widespread deportations would not only cut mass shootings in half, but it would also free up the FBI's time to focus on these delusional young men with the terrifying stare, who hear voices no one else hears.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Colton Haab said he was approached by CNN to ask a question at Wednesday night's town hall but decided not to after the network gave him a "scripted question," quashing one he wrote himself. Haab, a member of the Junior ROTC shielded students while the school was under attack from the shooter, said he was going to ask about using veterans as armed security guards.
"CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions and it ended up being all scripted," Haab told WPLG-TV.
CNN aired a town hall on the Florida school shooting with Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) that included NRA's Dana Loesch and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel that was moderated by Jake Tapper. Students and parents asked questions about gun control and school safety.
"I expected to be able to ask my questions and give my opinion on my questions," Haab said.
"Colton Haab, a member of the Junior ROTC who shielded classmates in the midst of terror says he did not get to share his experience," WPLG's Janine Stanwood explained.
"Colton wrote questions about school safety, suggested using veterans as armed school security guards but claims CNN wanted him to ask a scripted question instead so he decided not to go," Stanwood reported.
"CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions and it ended up being all scripted," Haab said. "I don't think that it's going get anything accomplished. It's not gonna ask the true questions that all the parents and teachers and students have."
I’ve got a theory which continues to be supported by evidence — namely, that the American Left is a movement by and for people who simply cannot do a good job.
That’s not to say all the competent people in this country are conservatives, though it does appear that on balance you’ll find more people on the Right capable of high performance than on the Left. Nor am I saying all conservatives are competent. They aren’t. Nor am I even saying there aren’t people on the Left capable of doing a proper job.
But I am saying that left-wing politics and competent job performance make for a very difficult mix, and increasingly where you find one you will not find the other.
With that in mind, the revelations about Parkland, Florida mass shooter Nikolas Cruz, who last week murdered 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in that South Florida suburb, point to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a good example of the connection between left-wing politicization and dysfunction.
Whether you buy the theory or not, let there be little question but that the FBI is an agency in decline. After all, the Bureau is amid a long string of high-profile investigative failures resulting in disaster on American streets.
The FBI had all the information necessary to sound the alarm about Nidal Hassan, for example, before Hassan turned his affinity for violent Sharia Islam into the Ft. Hood massacre, and yet nothing appears to have been communicated to the Army regarding the threat Hassan posed. The FBI also dropped the ball on Omar Mateen, whom they had interviewed and built a file prior to his perpetration of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, and it had all the information it needed to intervene before Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik committed mass murder in San Bernardino. Similar observations could be made about Dylan Roof, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, William Athison and other mass murderers over the last few years.
And then there was Cruz, who was a blinking neon sign advertising a future mass murder. Cruz had been brought to the FBI’s notice, it turns out, on multiple occasions — the first, when in September of last year a YouTube video blogger sent the Bureau a screenshot of a comment Cruz left under a vlog entry, using his own name, advertising his desire to become a “professional school shooter.” The FBI followed up with the YouTuber, Ben Bennight, both at the time and after Cruz followed through on his desire, but it doesn’t appear they did much to follow up with Cruz himself.
And the second time was in January. According to a statement of admission the FBI released on Friday, “a person close to” Cruz called the agency’s public tip line on Jan. 5 and left information on Cruz’s “gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.”
Nobody followed up. And then six weeks later 17 people lay dead with more than a dozen others wounded when Cruz, who had been meticulously planning his attack, finally executed his plan.
If nothing else one might have expected the FBI to pass this information along to local law enforcement, but Cruz’ case seems to be part of a pattern of neglect when it comes to killers telegraphing their intentions.
That’s not to blame the FBI for these killers doing their deadly work. But it’s clear the Bureau isn’t fulfilling its reputation for investigative excellence and it sure does appear the problem is getting worse.
But the FBI certainly does seem to be progressing along in its politicization. We’ve just come through a couple of months full of revelations about the Bureau conducting, essentially, “black ops” in using campaign opposition research in order to get a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page, an innocent man working as a campaign advisor to Donald Trump, and the recently released text messages of lead FBI investigator Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page, who also worked for the Bureau, show a level of politicization and unprofessionalism which call into question whether we’re not completely wasting our tax dollars on the FBI in the first place.
Andrew McCabe was the #2 man at the FBI, for crying out loud. James Comey and Robert Mueller are the last two directors of the place. These are political schemers, not crimefighters.
Yes, yes — the FBI contains a great many excellent agents and still does its share of good work. Having the benefit of friendships with several former FBI agents, though, your author can attest that a consensus among them is the Bureau is overrun with political hacks promoted for ideological leanings rather than excellence, and the results are all around us — a refusal to address Islamic jihad as a national security threat cripples the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts, a focus on high-profile, show-off arrests rather than public safety hinders the ability to work with local law enforcement to stop a Nikolas Cruz before he goes off, a willingness to engage in presidential politics kills public trust.
It’s a common story. The FBI is one more victim of the March Through the Institutions, the cultural-Marxist initiative in which hordes of leftists infiltrate a trusted institution and corrupt it as a weapon to use against political enemies. We see it in academia, news media, Hollywood. We saw it at the IRS. And the FISA warrant case shows it was very much in effect at the FBI. And like a Hollywood which struggles to create movies worth watching, a news media which can’t seem to get the story straight and an education industry which turns out kids who are experts in how they feel about math but not-so proficient in doing it, we’ve now got an FBI which routinely drops the ball on major cases.
Enough already. The FBI either needs to return to competence or be disbanded. It is no place for left-wing partisan hackery.
