Payton Gendron, 18-Year-Old White Supremacist, Massacres 10 in Buffalo Supermarket Racist Attack (VIDEO)

Most everyone has heard about Buffalo race murders by now.

Payton Gendron has pleaded not guilty in the attack. I've searched for the racist "Great Replacement" manifesto the shooter posted online, but it's been scrubbed. Posted in Google docs, the Google information overlords removed it within minutes of posting. The shooter fitted a Go Pro camera to his helmet and live streamed it on Twitch, which was also immediately taken down.

The left's diabolical partisan political exploitation of the murders was instantaneous. No surprise there, but more disgusting than ever. I scolded Joe Lockhart and Soledad O'Brien here and here.

Gendron killed a black security guard --- recently retired as a police officer of 30 years --- in a brief shootout.

The latest is at Buffalo News, "Community holds vigil, protests in wake of racially motivated mass shooting."

The main story's at morning newsletter from the New York Times, "Good morning. A massacre at a Buffalo supermarket was the deadliest in the U.S. this year":

A gunman embracing a white supremacist ideology opened fire yesterday afternoon at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three more. The mass shooting was the deadliest in the United States this year and among a spate of racist attacks in recent years.

The suspect, Payton S. Gendron, 18, had driven more than 200 miles to stage the attack, and he livestreamed it as he fired at shoppers and store employees. He was arrested at the store and pleaded not guilty in a brief court appearance.

Around the same time, a manifesto attributed to him appeared online, repeatedly invoking the racist idea that white Americans were at risk of being replaced by people of color. The view is known as “replacement theory” and was once linked to the far-right fringe, but it has become increasingly mainstream.

Among the victims were a security guard and an 86-year-old mother of four who had stopped at the store on her way home from visiting her husband at the nursing home where he lives.

How the shooting unfolded Around 2:30 p.m., as shoppers filled the Tops supermarket, the suspect arrived wearing body armor, tactical gear and a helmet with a video camera attached. He carried an assault rifle with an anti-Black slur written on the barrel and began firing in the parking lot. Three victims were killed outside, and one was wounded.

Then the suspect went inside the store to continue his attack, briefly exchanging fire with the security guard before killing him. He went on to stalk victims throughout the store; “bodies were everywhere,” one witness said.

Shonnell Harris, a store manager, told The Buffalo News that she heard an estimated 70 shots and ran through the Tops, repeatedly falling down before escaping out back.

The gunman eventually returned to the front of the store. By then, the police had arrived, and he briefly put a gun to his neck before he began removing tactical gear as a form of surrender and the police tackled him.

The victims Of the 13 people who were shot, 11 were Black and two were white. Four worked at the Tops grocery. Few have been publicly identified.

The security guard who was killed was a former police officer — “a hero in our eyes,” said Joseph A. Gramaglia, the Buffalo police commissioner.

Ruth Whitfield, 86, was a mother of four and “a mother to the motherless,” her son told The News. Her husband had moved into a nursing home years ago and she still visited every day. She had just visited him when she stopped at Tops to get something to eat, WGRZ reported.

The suspect

The attack appeared to be inspired by earlier mass shootings motivated by racial hatred, including a 2019 mosque shooting in New Zealand and a massacre at a Texas Walmart that same year, according to the manifesto.

In chilling detail, the document outlined a plan to kill as many Black people as possible, including the type of gun to use, a timeline, a specific parking spot and where to eat ahead of time.

Gendron wrote that he chose the area of the supermarket because it was home to the largest percentage of Black residents near his home in New York’s largely white Southern Tier. The police had surrounded his home outside Binghamton, N.Y., overnight.

“It was a straight up racially motivated hate crime,” said John Garcia, the local sheriff.

Federal law enforcement officials said they were investigating the shooting as a hate crime. The next court proceeding was set for Thursday.

More at Memorandum.

Buffalo Suspect Peyton Gundron, White Supremacist Spouting 'Great Replacement Theory', Is 'Mainstream Republican'

Rolling Stone's headline, at Memeorandum  "The Buffalo Shooter Isn't a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He's a Mainstream Republican." 

Talking to my wife yesterday, the first thing I said is "Democrat will use this to tar all conservatives as white supremacists." 

Sure, there's going to be a political angle to these things, but it was barely a few minutes after the news breaking that Democrats began viciously smearing conservatives and Republicans is literally accomplices to murder, as mentioned Saturday. I've been out here 15 years blogging, and grave-dancing as soon as a conservative or Republican dies is the most consistently heinous fact about Democrat leftists. It's evil.

I tweeted yesterday:

This isn’t journalism. It’s a smear, hateful #Democrat Party propaganda. #Democrats #Buffalo #BuffaloNY #PeytonGenfron #RepEliseStefanik #Election2022 https://t.co/b9FdvOwXen

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) May 16, 2022

And at the New York Times, also piling on Rep. Stefanik, "A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P." (via Memorandum)":

Replacement theory, espoused by the suspect in the Buffalo massacre, has been embraced by some right-wing politicians and commentators.

Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States.

The next year, another white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans.

And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday, a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”

Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.

But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.

By his own account, the Buffalo suspect, Payton S. Gendron, followed a lonelier path to radicalization, immersing himself in replacement theory and other kinds of racist and antisemitic content easily found on internet forums, and casting Black Americans, like Hispanic immigrants, as “replacers” of white Americans. Yet in recent months, versions of the same ideas, sanded down and shorn of explicitly anti-Black and antisemitic themes, have become commonplace in the Republican Party — spoken aloud at congressional hearings, echoed in Republican campaign advertisements and embraced by a growing array of right-wing candidates and media personalities.

No public figure has promoted replacement theory more loudly or relentlessly than the Fox host Tucker Carlson, who has made elite-led demographic change a central theme of his show since joining Fox’s prime-time lineup in 2016. A Times investigation published this month showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show, Mr. Carlson has amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration, and his producers sometimes scoured his show’s raw material from the same dark corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did.

“It’s not a pipeline. It’s an open sewer,” said Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor who was fired in 2020 after defending the network’s decision to call Arizona for then-candidate Joseph R. Biden, and who wrote a forthcoming book on how media outlets stoke anger to build audiences.

“Cable hosts looking for ratings and politicians in search of small-dollar donations can see which stories and narratives are drawing the most intense reactions among addicted users online,” Mr. Stirewalt said. Social media sites and internet forums, he added, are “like a focus group for pure outrage.”

In just the past year, Republican luminaries like Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Georgia congressman, and Elise Stefanik, the center-right New York congresswoman turned Trump acolyte (and third-ranking House Republican), have echoed replacement theory. Appearing on Fox, Mr. Gingrich declared that leftists were attempting to “drown” out “classic Americans.”

In September, Ms. Stefanik released a campaign ad on Facebook claiming that Democrats were plotting “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting “amnesty” to illegal immigrants, which her ad said would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” That same month, after the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group, called on Fox to fire Mr. Carlson, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, stood up both for the TV host and for replacement theory itself.

“@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on Twitter. In a statement after the Buffalo shooting, Mr. Gaetz said that he had “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race.”

One in three American adults now believe that an effort is underway “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to an Associated Press poll released this month. The poll also found that people who mostly watched right-wing media outlets like Fox News, One American News Network and Newsmax were more likely to believe in replacement theory than those who watched CNN or MSNBC.

Underlying all variations of replacement rhetoric is the growing diversity of the United States over the past decade, as the populations of people who identify as Hispanic and Asian surged and the number of people who said they were more than one race more than doubled, according to the Census Bureau.

Democratic politicians have generally been more supportive of immigration than Republicans, especially in the post-Trump era, and have pushed for more humane treatment of migrants and refugees. But the number of immigrants living in the United States illegally, which rose throughout the 1990s and 2000s, first began to decline under President Obama, a Democrat whom critics nicknamed the “deporter-in-chief.” There is no evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens and others who are ineligible. And while Mr. Biden has laid out plans to expand legal immigration, federal agencies have expelled more than 1.3 million migrants at the southwest border on his watch, while continuing some of the more restrictive immigration policies begun by former President Trump.

Throughout his presidency, Mr. Trump filled his public speeches and Twitter feed with often inflammatory, sometimes false rhetoric about immigrants, and he employed the term “invaders” in arguing for a border wall. Such language has been more broadly adopted by his most ardent supporters, such as Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator, who last summer said on Twitter, “We are being replaced and invaded” by illegal immigrants...

 

Payton Gendron's Descent Into Racial Extremism (VIDEO)

I did not read the guy's manifesto. 

When Norway's Anders Breivik murdered 77 people back in 2011, I read his manifesto, which was easily available online. Lots of anti-jihad bloggers were cited at the document, although Breivik wasn't easily pinned down as a white supremacist. Frankly, he could have been the William Foster of Oslo, murdering scores of people while having a bad day in an urban multicultural dystopia. 

I looked for Gendron's statement, to no avail. Folks on the left think they've got this guy nailed down like he's James Earl Ray or something. Who know? He's a kid who knew he'd be throwing his life away if he went through with his plans. What a fucking waste.

At WSJ, "Buffalo Shooter’s 673-Page Diary Reveals Descent Into Racist Extremism":

A lone actor, socially isolated and mentally troubled, found inspiration online: ‘I just don’t have the time to wait any longer’."

CONKLIN, N.Y.—Days before carrying out one of the deadliest racially motivated attacks in recent U.S. history, Payton Gendron wrote that he’d finally made up his mind.

“I just don’t have the time to wait any longer,” he posted online. “I was supposed to do this 2 months ago. But now I finally feel actually ready.”

The entry was from a nearly 700-page online diary that Mr. Gendron, an 18-year-old white man, kept for the past several months. Writing under the online pseudonym “Jimboboiii,” he detailed his preparations for the massacre and his embrace of racist conspiracy theories that he said drove him to kill. A link to the diary was posted on a public web forum shortly before Mr. Gendron opened fire at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo last Saturday.

The attack left 10 people dead and three more wounded. All but two of his 13 victims were Black. They included an 86-year-old grandmother, a retired Buffalo police lieutenant and a church deacon.

Mr. Gendron, who is being held without bail after surrendering to police, pleaded not guilty to a single charge of first degree murder. Federal prosecutors said they are contemplating charging him with hate crimes. Mr. Gendron’s diary entries, which appear to date from November 2021 to the night before the shooting, along with an accompanying 180-page document, chronicle his descent into a shadowy, isolated world of swirling conspiracies, paranoia and violence.

Investigators are working to fill in missing pieces of Mr. Gendron’s background. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and police continue to pore over evidence from Conklin to Buffalo.

But Mr. Gendron’s extensive posts—a dark and paranoid monologue—present a portrait of a mass shooter that has become familiar in recent years: a lone actor, socially isolated and mentally troubled, who finds inspiration to commit mass violence in the recesses of the Internet.

Mr. Gendron seemed to live an unremarkable childhood. He played soccer as a youth, was a Boy Scout and made his high school’s honor roll. He planned on going to college to become an engineer.

In the months leading up to the massacre, Mr. Gendron spent hours glued to a computer in his family’s home in this quiet, predominantly white town in upstate New York. He posted dozens of hateful memes about Black people and Jews, discussed past racially motivated mass shootings and planned his own attack in painstaking detail. In March, he drove hundreds of miles to scout the Buffalo supermarket he later attacked.

He disdained mainstream political parties and the media, writing that he believed they were controlled by Jews. He described himself as a fascist.

Though there were harbingers of trouble—including a 2021 incident in which he was hospitalized after threatening violence at school—Mr. Gendron by his own account had seemed to keep his plotting and extreme views largely hidden.

His tone flippant in some entries and rageful in others, Mr. Gendron posted his plans to a private channel on the messaging platform Discord. A few people had access to view the content, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“We took action against the server as soon as we became aware of it and removed all related content and the server in accordance with our policies against violent extremism,” said a spokeswoman for Discord.

Mr. Gendron found his way to extreme online forums on the anonymous social platform 4chan when he felt bored during the pandemic, he wrote. He started on pages devoted to the outdoors, migrated to ones focused on guns and ultimately landed on a page that allows nearly unfettered discussion of white supremacy. 4chan didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.

In Mr. Gendron’s Discord entries, which started last November, he recounted his childhood in this town of 5,000, saying he didn’t have many friends, wasn’t close to his family and felt isolated.

“I would like to say I had quite a normal childhood ([less-than] 8) but that is not the case,” he wrote, signifying his life up to 18.

Mr. Gendron is the oldest of three boys, according to neighbors. His parents, Paul and Pamela, are civil engineers who work for the New York State Department of Transportation, an agency spokesman said.

The boys played basketball in their driveway, and had a trampoline in the backyard, neighbors said. Mrs. Gendron would walk around the neighborhood for exercise, and Mr. Gendron would wave while tending to his property. By the front door there is a round cement tile bearing a boy’s hand print, a heart, the year 2008 and the name Payton.

The parents didn’t answer phone calls seeking comment and weren’t at their home when a reporter visited Monday. One of Mr. Gendron’s lawyers, Daniel Dubois, declined to comment on Tuesday. In one diary entry, dated May 5 of this year, Mr. Gendron wrote that he competed on school swimming and soccer teams and, until Covid-19, volunteered as a firefighter. But he said over and over that he never fit in. In a separate entry, dated May 9, he wrote that serving as a youth leader in his Boy Scout troop was “the peak of my life,” but “everything went bad after.”

“It’s not that I actually dislike other people, it’s just that they make me feel so uncomfortable I’ve probably spent actual years of my life just being online,” he wrote in the May 5 entry. “And to be honest I regret it. I didn’t go to friend’s houses often or go to any parties or whatever. Every day after school I would just go home and play games and watch youtube, mostly by my self [sic].”

While neighbors and those who interacted with him said Mr. Gendron seemed quiet and responsible, his behavior grew erratic in recent years. On the first day of his senior year at Susquehanna Valley High School in 2020, he came to school wearing what appeared to be a full-body medical protective suit complete with gloves and gas mask. In his online journal, Mr. Gendron posted a photo of himself in class wearing the outfit. Later, he posted memes calling Covid a Jewish conspiracy.

He credited 4chan, where extremist views are expressed with few restrictions, with influencing him. In particular, he spent time on the platform’s “politically incorrect” page that is known among analysts as a hub for spreading far-right ideology, including white supremacy.

“I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts that they were intellectually and emotionally inferior,” he wrote on May 5, referring to Black people.

Last spring, a teacher reported to school administrators that Mr. Gendron had written about wanting to carry out a shooting, a law-enforcement official said. The state police were called, and he was taken to a hospital for a mental-health evaluation before being released a day and a half later, according to Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia.

Mr. Gramaglia said state and federal law enforcement didn’t detect any further warning signs involving Mr. Gendron until Saturday’s shooting.

“I spent 20 hours in a hospital’s emergency room on 5/28/2021,” Mr. Gendron wrote, in a post dated Dec. 9. “This was because I answered murder/suicide to the question ‘what do you want to do when you retire?’ on an online assignment in my Economics class.”

Mr. Gendron wrote in his Discord logs that his time in the hospital was “one of my worst nights of my life” and called it a turning point.

“I got out of it because I stuck with the story that I was getting out of class and I just stupidly wrote that down,” he wrote. “That is the reason I believe I am still able to purchase guns. It was not a joke, I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.”

In a public letter, Superintendent Roland Doig said the local school district was “shocked and unspeakably saddened by the tragic, racially motivated hate crime that took place in Buffalo, New York on Saturday.” Mr. Doig said the district is cooperating with law enforcement and wouldn’t comment further.

By the time he was hospitalized, Mr. Gendron had already discovered racist theories online, and his hospital stay pushed him further toward action, he wrote.

He exhaustively discussed in his diary the “Great Replacement Theory,” a white racist belief espoused by previous mass shooters and promoted on extremist online forums. It claims Jewish conspirators use Black people, immigrants and others to undermine whites. He also cited as a key motivation the 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which left 51 dead. That lone gunman, who promoted the replacement theory, had live-streamed his attack on Facebook.

The Gendrons didn’t show outward signs of trouble at home, erecting a tent and inviting neighbors and friends to a party last June when Payton Gendron graduated from school. Neighbors recalled Mr. Gendron saying he would follow in his parents’ footsteps to become a civil engineer.

A photo posted on his high school’s Flickr account shows Mr. Gendron and another individual driving in a black Toyota convertible festooned with balloons and a banner adorned with his name in a senior class parade. After graduating, he briefly attended SUNY Broome community college during the fall semester of 2021 and spring semester this year, according to the school.

Mr. Gendron also worked for about four months this winter at the Conklin Reliable Market along the town’s main road, but left around three months ago, according to store owner John Gage.

“He was a real quiet kid,” Mr. Gage said. “Gave me two weeks’ notice when he left. Never had any problems with him.”

During this period, Mr. Gendron ruminated on Discord over his evolving plans for the coming attack. He wrote about browsing extreme corners of 4chan and Reddit every day. By early February, he wrote that he was skipping his college physics class to work on documents he planned to publish about his beliefs...

 

Islamic Radicalization and the West

I received a pointed e-mail this morning from a hostile reader, Maysoon Zayid, with the subject heading, "Racist":

Scott Peterson beheaded his wife ... was he Muslim? No! This is a case of pure domestic violence. It's a male issue, not Muslim ...

So continues the intense pushback against the possibility that the murder of Aasiya Hassan was not an "honor killing." Even Kamran Pasha, the Muslim author of a Huffington Post essay on the topic, weighed in at the comments, emphatically claiming, "'Honor killings' - the murder of an innocent woman to avenge some sense of 'personal honor' - are not part of Islam's true teachings or Prophet Muhammad's life example."

Well, on top of this, it turns out we have more news suggesting that the American Muslim community's campaign is escalating against the "honor killing" meme. As the New York Times reports this morning:

At 4:30 p.m. today at The Islamic Society of Niagara Frontier in Amherst, N.Y., the president of the Islamic Society of North America, Ingrid Mattson, and Salma Elkadi Abugideiri, the author of the book “Garments for One Another: Ending Domestic Violence in Muslim Families,” will be facilitating a discussion “in memory” of Ms. Hassan.

The Muslim-American community in Buffalo and around the United States has reacted with outrage over suggestions that this was a religiously motivated killing, an “honor killing” brought on by the shame of Mr. Hassan’s wife seeking a divorce.

Why is the public discussion so heated on this one killing? Most of the media coverage so far has been local to Buffalo, with the exception of some reporting on Fox News - and there's a clue. The left-wing media, in tandem with the Islamic community, wants to quickly quash "honor killing" talk. Should that meme gain a credible foothold in the national discussion, the notion that Muzzammil Hassan was a "moderate" Muslim would be obliterated, and of course conservative cultural arguments in the larger war-on-terror narrative would be all the more compelling. In other words, we're witnessing a high-stakes media framing-battle of epic cultural and political proportions.

Notice, for example, in Mark Steyn's essay this morning, how Britain has capitulated to the forces of pro-Islamist political correctness. Steyn suggests that the Muslim extremists have migrated from Pakistan to London:

Among the growing population of Yorkshire Pakistanis is a fellow called Lord Ahmed, a Muslim member of Parliament. He threatened "to bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the House of Lords" if it went ahead with an event at which the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders would have introduced a screening of his controversial film "Fitna."

Britain's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, reacted to this by declaring Wilders persona non grata and having him arrested and returned to the Netherlands.

Smith is best known for an inspired change of terminology: last year she announced that henceforth Muslim terrorism (an unhelpful phrase) would be reclassified as "anti-Islamic activity." Seriously. The logic being that Muslims blowing stuff up tends not to do much for Islam's reputation – i.e., it's an "anti-Islamic activity" in the same sense that Pearl Harbor was an anti-Japanese activity.

Steyn continues by noting that the greatest population growth in many of the world's Western nations is found in the Muslim communities:

Along with the demographic growth has come radicalization: It's not just that there are more Muslims, but that, within that growing population, moderate Islam is on the decline – in Singapore, in the Balkans, in northern England – and radicalized, Arabized, Wahhabized Islam is on the rise. So we have degrees of accommodation: surrender in Islamabad, appeasement in London, acceptance in Toronto and Buffalo.

Yep, accomodate, or you'll be branded as "racist" for even entertaining the concept that Muzzammil Hassan's alleged beheading of his wife is a classic case of Muslim honor killing.

And note as well Steyn's inclusion of Buffalo, New York, in the listing of Western cities lying down for Islamic radicals.

Despite signs of accommodation in New York to the Islamic interest coalition today, the debate over Mrs. Hassan's murder continues. Phyllis Chesler has a new piece on the question, "Beheadings and Honor Killings," and she points to an essay from World Net Daily, "Beheader Hubby Was Hero to U.S. Muslim Activists," which notes:

According to a Council on Foreign Relations report, David Powers, a professor of Islamic law and history at Cornell University, explained that the Quran permits men to use physical force against disobedient wives in some circumstances. A woman may ask for divorce, but only a man can grant her request.

"Classical Shariah lays out very limited conditions under which a woman can divorce a man – he must be infertile at the time of marriage; insane; or have leprosy or another contagious skin disease," the CFR report states.

Indeed, as scholar Timothy Furnish has written, the practice of Islamic decapitation "has both Qur'anic and historical sanction. It is not the product of a fabricated tradition."

Considering how hard the Muslim lobby is pushing back on this, it remains to be seen if the left's disinformation campaign against this scholarly consensus carries the day.

Indeed, new cries of "racism" and "bigotry" are already being hurled.

Democrats Mobilize Demonization

Well, er, speaking of the devil. I just wrote about this a minute ago, "Lincoln Project's Attack on Elise Stefanik is Evil":

And now here's Caroline Glick, "Demonization, American Style":

Demonization, the effort to portray a political rival as an inhuman monster, has long been a means to mobilize public support. The ancient Romans did it. The Soviets didn’t know there was another option.

While negative campaigning has long been a tried and true method for winning elections in the free world, actual demonization was fairly rare, particularly in the United States, actual demonization was a fairly rare phenomenon until after the turn of the century. But in recent decades, and with unprecedented intensity and venom since 2016, the Democrats have aped the Soviets and adopted demonization as their main political tool for winning elections. The primary object of their hatred is former President Donald Trump.

Last Sunday, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi showed how it is done in an interview with CNN. The interview focused on the Democrat Party’s concern that the conservative majority in the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the federal mandate for abortions and letting the separate states decide for themselves whether to place limitations on the procedure. Concerns among Democrats and the party’s progressive base rose exponentially earlier this month when in a shocking break with the past, a source at the Supreme Court leaked a draft judgment on the issue authored by conservative Justice Samuel Alito to Politico.

Sunday, CNN‘s Dana Bash asked Pelosi if the fact that conservatives are now the majority on the Supreme Court means that the Democrats dropped the ball on abortion rights. Pelosi rejected Bash’s assertion and instead blamed Trump.

Brimming with rage Pelosi seethed, “Who would have ever suspected that a creature like Donald Trump would become president of the United States, waving a list of judges that he would appoint, therefore getting the support of the far-right, and appointing those anti-just freedom justices to the court?”

In that one sentence, Pelosi managed to demonize Trump, demonize Trump voters and delegitimize three sitting justices of the Supreme Court. It bears noting that as Pelosi made these remarks, Democrat activists were staging threatening demonstrations outside the homes of conservative justices.

Pelosi’s statement wasn’t an isolated event. It was part of an overall partisan strategy ahead of the Congressional elections in November. President Joe Biden gave voice to it in a speech last Friday where he spoke of “Ultra MAGA Republicans.” Just to make clear what he was talking about, he called Trump “King MAGA.” MAGA, or Make America Great Again, was of course Trump’s election slogan in 2016. Since then, MAGA has become shorthand for Trump supporters.

The obvious purpose of Biden’s coinage of “Ultra MAGA” was to link all Republicans to Trump and to make the 2022 elections a referendum on Trump, the demonic “creature” even though Trump isn’t on the ballot and the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress.

The administration is so excited by the new term their invented that Biden’s spokeswoman bragged that “Ultra MAGA” was the product of six months of market research.

Wednesday, Politico reported that the progressive fundraising giant Moveon.org is launching a $30 million “Us vs. MAGA” ad campaign ahead of November. Moveon.org executive director Rahna Epting told the progressive online publication that the purpose of the campaign is to tie Republicans to Trump, who all right-thinking people hate because he threatens the very existence of America.

The idea of using demonization as a political tool was most powerfully introduced to radical US politics by political guru Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals became the political bible for revolutionary leftists in the Democrat Party. There Alinsky warned his disciples that in light of the unpopularity of their America-hating agenda, the way to win is by distracting the public from their actual agenda and to focus their target audience instead of on their political opponents, whom they would defeat by presenting him as the devil.

One of Alinsky’s star pupils was a young coed at Wellesley College named Hillary Rodham, better known by her married name Hillary Clinton. Alinsky’s methods were adopted and taught in the 1990s by a community organizer in Chicago named Barack Obama.

As the US moves into elections mode, the last thing the Democrats want to talk about is policy. The only issue they may want to run on is abortion, and it’s unclear how popular the issue will be in swing states and districts. The more the US public feels the impacts of the Democrats’ economic, energy, and social policies, the lower the party’s polling numbers drop. Every day another shocking story appears about the fruits of the Democrats’ revolutionary agenda.

This week, for instance, the school board in Kiel, Wisconsin, a small town of some 3,000 people decided to charge three middle school boys with sexual harassment.

Their crime?

They didn’t refer to a girl in their class as “they” or “them” after she said she decided she is no longer willing to be referred to as “her” or “she,” because she no longer considers herself a female.

According to Critical Race Theory expert Christopher Rufo, depending on the questions asked, between 60-80% of Americans oppose revolutionary sexual policies. The more stories appear like the one from Kiel, Wisconsin, or even more distressing ones about children given sexual hormones by school officials without their parents’ knowledge or consent, the more voters abandon the Democrat Party in fear.

The Democrats’ response to the public’s rejection of their agenda isn’t to move toward the public by ending their support for sex-change operations for minors. They remain stridently committed to their agenda. The Democrats’ response to the public’s rejection of their policies is to castigate the Republicans as the evil acolytes of Trump who share his demonic characteristics – first and foremost, “racism.”

Last weekend, an 18-year-old racist antisemite murdered 10 people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Biden, Democrat politicians from coast to coast, the progressive media, and Hollywood stars all rushed to blame Trump, Fox News, and the entire Republican Party for the slaughter. Never mind that the same day, a Chinese man motivated by hatred of Taiwanese entered a church attended by Taiwanese immigrants in California and opened fire killing one and wounding four other worshippers. Last December, a black racist mowed down six people, and wounded 77 more, (all white) at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Republicans didn’t blame Biden and the Democrats.

Tuesday, Democrat advertising executive Donny Deutsch explained the Democrats’ post-Buffalo massacre efforts on MSNBC. In Deutsch’s words, the Democrats’ mission post-Buffalo is to, “Brand every Republican,” as the party of “racist, violent replacement theory.”

“Take a branding iron, put it on them so any mainstream Republican has to wear that badge.” Notably, the Democrats’ “Ultra-MAGA campaign hasn’t raised any concern among Republicans. Indeed, immediately after Biden launched it, the Republican National Committee began printing “Ultra MAGA” t-shirts to give away to party donors.

Some 95% of Republicans voted for Trump in 2016 and in 2020. Despite its near-unanimous support, the Democrats’ demonization of the former president did have an impact at the margins of the party and among independent voters. Members of these groups were convinced that Trump and the Republicans are a demonic force that threatens the soul of America.

It wasn’t the likes of Deutsch who convinced them. That job was carried out by a smattering of former Republicans who share the Democrats’ visceral hatred of Trump. In the 2018 Congressional elections, and to an even greater degree in the 2020 presidential race, members of this tiny minority of Republicans appeared nearly around the clock on progressive media organs to castigate Trump and his voters as dangerous, racist and evil. While their overall impact was indiscernible, in all-important swing states where Biden’s margins of victory were miniscule, they appear to have made a difference.

Today the same group of former Republicans is working full throttle at the side of the Democrats to prevent their former party from winning the mid-term elections and taking control of Congress.

Sitting at Deutsch’s side on the MSNBC panel Tuesday was political activist and former Republican Miles Taylor. While serving as a mid-level official in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, Taylor anonymously published an op-ed in the New York Times and a book where he claimed that many officials inside the administration believed that Trump was a danger to the United States. These officials, he said, were working together to subvert Trump’s policies and save America from its duly elected president. Now Taylor is running a well-funded Super-PAC, where “former Republicans” run campaign ads against Republicans.

Taylor explained that the goal is to shame Republicans into leaving the party.

“I tried and failed to save the party in my own little way,” he said.

“We tried to prevent Trump from rising in 2016. Some of us tried from within to contain his reckless impulses. We thought we beat him in 2020, but we didn’t. Trumpism is alive and it’s well and it’s fueling this so that what conservatives need to do is convince other conservatives to quit the Republican Party.”

It’s hard to know what these former Republican conservatives tell themselves when they see empty shelves in supermarkets, $4.00/ gallon gas, cratering stock markets, and boys being persecuted for being boys in schools across America. It’s hard to know what they tell themselves when they see children indoctrinated to reject their biological sex and hate their parents and their country.

But what is clear enough is that through their efforts to demonize their fellow conservatives, former party and former president, these Trump-hating former Republicans enable the progressive revolution. Under the mask of anti-Trump paranoia, this revolution rejects the foundations of the United States and seeks to transform the country from the land of the free and the home of the brave into the land of the unfree, and home of the bullied, cowed and socially engineered.

 

African Cape Buffalo Sends Stalking Lion Flying Through the Air

This is something else.

At London's Daily Mail, "Buffalo soldiers! Bull is saved by its friends while being EATEN by lions... which are sent flying through the air."

Black Monday Sweeps Through the NFL

Seven coaches were fired.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

@ampowerblog pounding the sidelines as long as he has been pounding all you can eat buffets I gather #NFL #SNF
— Em (@lamblock) December 31, 2012

Overnight, the NFL went from Xs and O's to ex-coaches and whoas.

In a head-spinning blizzard of pink slips, seven head coaches were fired Monday, leaving openings in Philadelphia, San Diego, Buffalo, Chicago, Arizona, Cleveland and Kansas City.

The dismissals included three coaches who led their teams to Super Bowls in the last eight years: Andy Reid of Philadelphia, Lovie Smith of Chicago and Ken Whisenhunt of Arizona.

Also shown the door were San Diego's Norv Turner, Buffalo's Chan Gailey, Cleveland's Pat Shurmur and Kansas City's Romeo Crennel.

Five general managers were fired: San Diego's A.J. Smith, Cleveland's Tom Heckert, Arizona's Rod Graves, Jacksonville's Gene Smith and the New York Jets' Mike Tannenbaum.

Most of the moves were long-anticipated, but the Bears raised some eyebrows by dumping Lovie Smith after a 10-win season that failed to produce a playoff berth. The Eagles parted ways with Reid, the league's longest-tenured coach, who had been there for 14 seasons. Philadelphia was 4-12 this season.

"When you have a season like that, it's embarrassing. It's personally crushing to me and it's terrible," Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said in a news conference.

Lurie said he didn't fire Reid after last season because the Eagles had always bounced back after a down year.

"That was the history," Lurie said. "I really believed that this season, with our talent, that we would be a strong contender and a double-digit win team. Nobody is more disappointed or crushed than myself because I fully believed that that's exactly where we were at in August as we started the season."

Although the firings came fast and furious Monday, the turnover has yet to match that of 2010, when there were 10 new coaches put in place, nearly a third of the league. The day after the season ends has come to be known as Black Monday.

"You hope that those guys that obviously were victims of Black Monday land on their feet," St. Louis Coach Jeff Fisher said. "You've got guys that have been to Super Bowls and won championship games and all of a sudden they've forgot how to coach, I guess."

More at the top.

I'm taking my boys up to Long Beach to watch the Rose Bowl with my colleagues Charlotte and Greg Joseph and their kids. I'll be back blogging tonight. I'm still reading around on the reaction to the budget deal and I'll have more on that. And don't miss lamblock on Twitter. She's a riot.

New York Churches React to Gay Marriage Vote

At WIVB-TV Buffalo, WIVB-TV Buffalo. A mixed reaction among church groups, but this part is heavy:

In response to the State Senate's vote Friday night , the New York State Catholic Conference released a statement saying, in part:

"The passage by the Legislature of a bill to alter radically and forever humanity's historic understanding of marriage leaves us deeply disappointed and troubled. We strongly uphold the Catholic Church's clear teaching that we always treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and love. But we just as strongly affirm that marriage is the joining of one man and one woman."

Check the full statement here.

And at the Jackson Sun, "Same-sex marriage vote is a national issue."

Rep. Elise Stefanik Rejects Allegations of Invoking 'Great Replacement Rhetoric' (VIDEO)

She had a killer interview with Harris Faukner on Fox this morning. She's spunky and fired up. I love her message. Last night's primaries were a disaster for the Democrats, and she's expecting the GOP to sweep into power and start shutting down the left's radical agenda next January.

It's no wonder Democrats are now trying to destroy her, alleging her campaign spots have invoked the dreaded "great replacement theory."

At the Wall Street Journal, "GOP Leaders Face Calls to Denounce White Supremacy, ‘Replacement’ Theory":

Stefanik rejects any tie between party rhetoric and racist violence as Cheney criticizes Republican leadership.

WASHINGTON—Some GOP lawmakers are calling for Republican Party leaders to forcefully denounce white supremacy, after the deadly shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., sparked renewed focus on political rhetoric related to race and immigration.

Eleven of the people shot at the supermarket were Black, and two were white. In documents posted online that police think the alleged shooter wrote and compiled, he cited racist conspiracy theories he discovered on Internet message boards. At several points, he condemns both Democrats and Republicans as being controlled by a Jewish conspiracy.

In the documents, the writer presents racist and anti-Semitic views and references the “great replacement,” a conspiracy theory centered on the notion that whites are being systematically replaced with other racial groups and immigrants. Police said he targeted the grocery store because of its location in a Black neighborhood. In one document, he attacks immigration as “ethnic replacement.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, in which 10 people were killed, Democrats and some Republicans who are vocal critics of former President Donald Trump and his political movement called for other GOP lawmakers to condemn white supremacist rhetoric. Mr. Trump rose to prominence during his first presidential campaign in part by deploying harsh language about illegal immigrants that his critics said often was dehumanizing and racist.

After a woman was killed at a 2017 march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump wavered on condemning the marchers, at one point saying there were “very fine people, on both sides.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), who was kicked out of the Republican House leadership last year after sharply criticizing Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, said House GOP leaders have enabled white nationalism and anti-Semitism and must renounce those views within the party. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse,” Ms. Cheney tweeted.

Back in February, she said party leaders should have been tougher on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) for speaking at an event organized by a white nationalist.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.) tweeted that the “replacement theory they are pushing/tolerating is getting people killed.” Mr. Kinzinger, who isn’t running for reelection, said Republicans need to oust Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, along with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.).

“We’ve never supported white supremacy,” Mr. McCarthy said Monday night. “The suspect is the very worst of humanity and for political individuals to try to make some political game out of this shows how little they are.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, Liz Harrington, said, “It is truly disgusting to use an evil act of mass murder by a mentally ill individual against your political opponents. But nothing is beneath the Democrat Party. Our prayers are with the victims and their families.”

Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican Whip, said Republicans have been very vocal against white nationalism. He also referenced the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball game practice that left him badly wounded, saying he knew from experience that the aftermath of a tragedy is a time for prayers, not ratcheting up the rhetoric and blame.

Ms. Stefanik, in a statement, said she was “heartbroken and saddened to hear the tragic news of the horrific loss of life” in Buffalo. Her camp rejected the idea that being tough on illegal immigration amounted to promoting white supremacy or racism.

Stefanik senior adviser Alex deGrasse said any attempt to tie the shooting to Ms. Stefanik “is a new disgusting low for the left, their Never Trump allies” and the media. “Ms. Stefanik has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.”

The comments came after scrutiny of her past campaign ads. The Washington Post reported that Ms. Stefanik’s campaign committee paid for Facebook ads last year that said Democrats were seeking a “permanent election insurrection” by giving millions illegal immigrants citizenship in an attempt to bolster their election chances...

 

Renaud Camus' 'Le Grand Replacement'

Following-up from yesterday, "Great Replacement Theory."

The New York Times is very interested in this, as noted last night on Twitter.

Here's the newspaper's story from 2019, which bears a lot of similarity with its reporting yesterday on the Buffalo shooter, Payton Gendron (perhaps for political purposes). See, "The Man Behind a Toxic Slogan Promoting White Supremacy":

Here it is: 🫤 #Buffalo #BuffaloNY #BuffaloNewYork #BuffaloStrong #PaytonGendron https://t.co/7qs6KKH5f2

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) May 16, 2022

PLIEUX, France — Though the writer had already lived in his castle for a quarter of a century, it was only three years ago that he finally restored it to its original purpose as a fortress.

The writer, Renaud Camus, rebuilt the top 10 feet of the 14th-century tower, giving him an even more commanding view of his surroundings: the village of 40 souls below; the Pyrenees, faintly visible some 100 miles south despite the midsummer haze; and, in every direction, the peaceful, rolling hills of the “eternal France” that he describes as under assault from what he calls hordes of immigrants.

Up in his castle, the France that Mr. Camus imagines has made him one of the most influential thinkers on the far right in his own country and elsewhere. In his writings, he describes an ongoing “invasion” of France by immigrants bent on “conquest” of its white, European population. To him, the immigrants are “colonizing” France by giving birth to more children and making its cities, towns — and even villages — unlivable.

Others have espoused similar ideas. But Mr. Camus’s portrayal of demographic change — le “grand remplacement,” or the supposed “great replacement” of France’s original population by newer arrivals, mostly from Africa — has become an extremist talking point, cited by mass killers in distant parts of the world.

“It’s a slogan that dramatizes the situation, talking of great replacement the same way we speak of the great barbarian invasions,” said Rudy Reichstadt, an expert on political extremism at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès research institute in Paris. “Now, if you go to a horse race betting bar and talk politics, and you mention the great replacement, people will understand what you mean.”

The idea of the great replacement has directly influenced French politicians and thinkers. Interpreted and repackaged across the internet, it has resonated widely beyond France, including in white supremacist circles.

The men held in two recent mass shootings — at a Walmart in El Paso and at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand — both referred to the “great replacement” and the need to defend white populations against invading outsiders.

While decrying the killings, Mr. Camus said he had no regrets about coming up with the term.

“The great replacement has become a household word,” he said. “I take responsibility for it. I believe in its relevance.”

Stroking his white beard, Mr. Camus, who is not related to the 20th-century writer Albert Camus, sat in his expansive study — half the top floor of his castle filled with books and a handful of African masks. In contrast to the harsh words he chooses to describe France’s immigrants, he spoke softly, and sometimes with the mannerisms of another era. He and his partner of two decades, Pierre, addressed each other as “vous,” though they said they sometimes slipped into the informal “tu.”

Ensconced in his castle in southern France, in a village an hour’s drive across country roads from the nearest train station, Mr. Camus, 73, is perhaps an unlikely source of inspiration for the world’s far right and white supremacists. Until a few years ago, Mr. Camus was known, mainly by other French writers, as a novelist and a pioneering writer of gay literature. An early book about his sexual experiences, called “Tricks,” remains his most translated work.

Growing up in a conservative rural town in central France, Mr. Camus went to Paris in the 1960s and found a niche in the capital’s literary and artistic scene. He befriended Roland Barthes, who wrote the preface for “Tricks.” As a member of the Socialist Party, he became active in politics on the left.

Still, Mr. Camus longed to return to the countryside. He sold his Paris apartment and, in 1992, used the money to buy and restore the castle in Plieux, fulfilling a lifelong fantasy.

A few years after moving to Plieux, he had what he calls an epiphan that would shape his political views. While visiting a 1,000-year-old village in southern France, he said he saw a group of veiled women milling around a fountain.

“And in the ancient windows — beautiful, paired gothic windows — veiled women would appear all of a sudden,” he said. “It was really the population of eternal France that was changing.”

That led to the formation in 2002 of his own political party, l’In-nocence, which calls for an end to all immigration and promotes sending immigrants and their children back to their countries of origin.

But it was a decade later, when he publicly began using the term “great replacement” and wrote a book with the same title, that his influence in France began to be felt.

The great replacement, he wrote, indicates the “replacement of a people, the indigenous French people, by one or others; of its culture by the loss of its cultural identity through multiculturalism.”

He says he sees no contradiction between his earlier life as a gay writer on the left and his current role as an ideological beacon for the right, including violent extremists. He contends he has always told “the hard truths.”

Previous generations of European immigrants had been drawn by “love” for France, he wrote. But the newer arrivals since the 1970s — mostly from France’s former colonies in the Maghreb and in sub-Saharan Africa — didn’t come “as friends.” Instead, he declared, they came as conquerors and colonizers, filled with hatred and a desire to punish France. He singled out Muslims for “not wanting to integrate” into French society...

 

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Now That the Buffalo’s Gone

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Now That the Buffalo’s Gone: A Study of Today’s American Indians.

Tourists Run for Their Lives After Spooking Buffalo at Yellowstone National Park

The tourists are smiling after that little run down, but a brute animal like that will kill you if it gets the chance:

You can see how close the tourists were to the buffalo at The Blaze, "THE STUNNING MOMENT A WILD BISON CHARGES A CHILD IN YELLOWSTONE!"

Custom Leather Sheath for Buck 110 or 112. Water Buffalo Antique Brown Leather Sheath. Right-Hand Cross Draw to fit on The Left Side

At Amazon, Custom Leather Sheath for Buck 110 or 112. Water Buffalo Antique Brown Leather Sheath. Right-Hand Cross Draw to fit on The Left Side. Strong and Durable; Made in USA; Sheath ONLY.

Less Gun Control Likely in Wake of Uvalde, Texas, School Massacre

Gun owners will tell their communities are safer, with less crime, when everyday people are armed and ready to defend their lives and the lives of others. Taking away the basic right to bear arms only empowers  criminals, who flout whatever regulations are in place or those coming down the pike.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court may make it easier for individuals to carry arms in public spaces, which if it turns out that way, will have a very significant effect on California.

At the Los Angeles Times, "U.S. gun laws are getting looser, not stronger, despite more mass shootings":

In recent weeks, a string of devastating shootings — at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., a church in Laguna Woods, and now an elementary school in little Uvalde, Texas — has renewed calls for tighter gun restrictions.

Just hours after a teenage gunman killed at least 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school Tuesday, an emotional President Biden demanded: “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a series of furious tweets Tuesday, asked, “Who the hell are we if we cannot keep our kids safe. This is preventable. Our inaction is a choice. We need nationwide, comprehensive, commonsense gun safety now.”

Experts, however, say the opposite — the loosening of gun laws — is almost certainly coming instead.

That’s despite the 10 shoppers and grocery workers gunned down in a largely Black neighborhood on May 14. The elderly Taiwanese churchgoers terrorized a day later. The elementary school students shot dead Tuesday at Robb Elementary School.

“If your reaction to these kind of atrocities is, ‘Well, where is the political will to move the needle on regulation?’ the truth is that the space for that kind of regulatory move is becoming narrower and narrower, both as a matter of constitutional law but also as a matter of state law,” said Darrell A.H. Miller, a Duke law professor and expert on the 2nd Amendment and other gun laws.

By this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision undoing a long-standing New York law that forbids individuals from carrying guns in public without first demonstrating a “special need” for self-defense.

Depending on how narrowly the court tailors its decision, the ruling could have sweeping implications for similar concealed carry restrictions all across the country and especially in liberal states like California, Miller and other 2nd Amendment scholars said.

If the court issues a broad decision — such as one that implies regulations on guns that aren’t historically based are unconstitutional — even more gun control legislation could become vulnerable to challenges, the scholars said.

“Any day now the Supreme Court could hand down its decision in the New York concealed carry case and make it much harder for states like California to regulate guns in the name of public safety,” said Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor.

Miller said the “trend line is definitely [toward] ever more expansive gun rights,” not gun restrictions, and that there will almost certainly be “a flurry of litigation” from gun rights advocates targeting additional state gun control measures once the Supreme Court issues its decision in the New York case.

Pro-gun rights groups have been slowly building toward such an outcome for years, scholars said, and feel that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority — bolstered by former President Trump’s three appointees — shares their interests in scaling back gun restrictions nationwide. At the same time, Miller said, many lawmakers in red states feel emboldened to bolster gun rights now — even in the face of tragedies such as what happened in Uvalde, where a teacher, at least one other adult and 19 elementary school children were killed by a gun-wielding 18-year-old who was later shot to death by a Border Patrol agent.

Before the school massacre, the black-clad gunman allegedly shot and wounded his grandmother.

“Even absent action by the Supreme Court of the United States, the demonstrated reaction of red states in particular to atrocities like what just occurred in Texas and what just occurred in Buffalo — what was it, last week? — is not to actually reconsider or even consider any sort of gun regulations, but ever more expansive gun rights,” Miller said.

Miller was one of several law professors who filed what’s known as an amicus brief with the high court in the New York case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen, in which they argued against a far-reaching decision suggesting that any gun regulation not grounded in early U.S. history is unconstitutional...

 

Black Friday Mob Tramples Shopper at North Buffalo Target Store

A follow up to this morning's report: "No Deaths Reported So Far as Crowds Mob Stores for Black Friday!"

At KSAZ FOX 10 Phoenix, "Shopper Hospitalized After Stampede." And from WIVB News 4 Buffalo, "Shoppers Trampled by Early-Bird Rush":

Added: "Black Friday 2010: Woman Arrested, Threatened to Shoot Shoppers at Toys "R" Us."

Jerry Brown Wins $52 Billion Gasoline Tax in California (VIDEO)

Jerry Brown is the lamest of lame ducks. He's finishing his fourth term as Governor of California, cementing his legacy of clusterfuck moonbeam progressivism.

At the Los Angeles Times, "California Legislature votes to raise gas taxes, vehicle fees by $5.2 billion a year for road repairs and transit."

Video via KCRA News 3 Sacramento.

I've got another 10 to 15 years or so at the college, then retirement. A lifelong Californian, I'm constantly wondering which state would be best to relocate? Nevada? Texas? Idaho or Montana? Seriously. I want to get out to more of the classic West, and especially to a low-tax state that's big on gun rights.

More at WND, "FLEEING INSANITY -- THAT IS, LIBERALISM: Exclusive: Patrice Lewis cites increasing exodus of people from California, Chicago, NYC:

In 1972, when I was 10 years old, my father’s job was transferred from Buffalo, New York, to California. After endless cold Buffalo winters, the golden state seemed like a golden place, a land of golden opportunity. My parents built a house, my father built a successful career, and my brothers and I thrived.

That was then, this is now. California is going off the deep end. The gold has turned to brass. It has become the land of fruits and nuts, a caricature of its former glory, a place people seek to leave in droves before they run afoul of the latest insanity.

Consider just a few examples of recent lunacy:

* Public university to host talk on animal-based sex fetishes
* Claim: Trump ‘threatens mental health of young Californians’
* They’ll have a ‘gay’ old time: ‘Bordellos’ now in nursing homes?
* California just passed a law regulating cow farts
* New bill would criminalize pronoun usage in nursing homes
* California bans students from traveling to ‘anti-LGBT’ states

Perhaps unsurprisingly, middle class Californians are leaving the state in droves. Take a look at these words from a frustrated inhabitant:

Came to SoCal as a kid in 1969 … got married and had kids who now are in college (out of state). I worked my *** off to get where I am today, but my house goes on the market this spring. I’ve watched this state sink into the abyss of liberal insanity inch by inch, drop by drop.

There is no hope for the state of Kalifornia. The Dems and their insane view of this world have a super majority in the Senate and Assembly. Combined with a Dem governor, there is nothing they cannot get passed. Even the Republicans who end up getting into the minority party are squishy and put up little resistance.

This past summer the legislative branch passed a bunch of bills that finally broke my desire to stay here with my salary. Gov. Moonbeam signed into law a bill that forces the cattle industry (dairy and meat) into providing flatulent catching backpacks for all cows to wear, for their precious global warming efforts. He also signed a bill that permits early release of felons out of jail and has them live amongst the citizenry. Combine that with the draconian laws further limiting my Second Amendment rights by making ammunition costly and more difficult to obtain, making some of my firearms illegal to own, he has put more rights into criminals and made my family less safe to live here.

I am DONE. Good riddance. I am moving to a state that will appreciate my conservative, constitutional values.

This person’s lament echoes that of over a million (mostly middle-class) people who have departed California in recent decades. We were among them. My husband and I shook the California dust off our feet in 1992 and never looked back at that once-beautiful state.

But it’s not just California. Recent articles show a massive exodus from both New York City and Chicago as well.

What do these three locations (California, New York, Chicago) have in common? They are bastions of liberalism, cauldrons of experimental progressive policies, vanguards of whatever feel-good fiscally irresponsible nonsense disturbed minds can think up.

So when we read about populations draining out of certain locations, the conclusion is obvious. People aren’t fleeing New York or Chicago or California; people are fleeing liberalism. The festering cauldron of progressive thought ultimately makes places unlivable.

I’m honestly sorry for those freedom-loving conservatives who are unable (due to work or family commitments) to beat feet and flee the gold-plated state. And I welcome those honestly looking to escape the insidious poison. I do, however, bear a grudge with those who bring their poison with them and enthusiastically spread it to a new location, dragging everything down with them.

Keep reading.

BONUS: From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "WELL, THAT’S ONE WAY TO PUT IT: “California’s gas tax hike shows governor’s political skill” reads an AP headline this weekend."

Tucker Carlson on the Buffalo Massacre (VIDEO)

My previous Buffalo coverage is here.

Thanksgiving Classic, 1994: Detroit Lions Over Buffalo Bills, 35-21

My life as a sports fan has gone through many gyrations. Lately I've been blogging more than watching football and baseball, although I watch the Thanksgiving Classic every year, and especially the Detroit Lions.

Thinking about it now, I simply never forget Thanksgiving 1994, when Quarterback Dave Krieg gave one of the most outstanding performances of my lifetime. The Lions' homepage has the details:

1994 - Detroit easily controlled the four-time AFC Champion, Buffalo Bills, 35-21, with reserve QB Dave Krieg at the helm for the injured QB Scott Mitchell. The Lions set the tone on the second play of the game as Krieg used the flea-flicker to connect with a streaking Herman Moore (seven receptions for a then-career-high 169 yards) on a 51-yard touchdown strike. DT Kelvin Pritchett sacked Bills QB Jim Kelly three times and Lions S Willie Clay intercepted the first two passes of his career, returning the second 28 yards for a touchdown.

And the sports page report at the New York Times, November 25, 1994:

Quarterback Dave Krieg, a 15-year veteran making his third Detroit start since Scott Mitchell was injured, played his best football in years. His numbers were striking: 20 completions in 25 attempts for 351 passing yards, with 3 touchdown passes and 0 interceptions.

It wasn't just his numbers, though, that helped bury the Bills; it was his reads, his picking up secondary receivers and his courage to stand in the pocket and take big hits as he released the ball.

"Dave Krieg had the game of his life," Kelly said.

The Lions nevertheless cut him loose at the end of the season.

About Last Night's Buffalo Bills at Kansas City Chiefs AFC Divisional Playoff Game (VIDEO)

If you watched last night you'll know. Pat Mahomes engineered a 13 second drive --- 13 FUCKING SECONDS --- in overtime, to beat the Buffalo Bills. Some are saying was the best playoff game ever played. 

I was for the Bills --- I'm tired of Kansas City, they're so good --- so I'm not unbiased. But if you were on Twitter last night you'll know what I'm talking about. Just about EVERYBODY was calling to end the sudden-death overtime rule. Josh Allen played just as well as Mahomes, and he never got a chance to respond in OT. He never touched the ball.

It was a real shame. I'll bet Roger Goodell and his cronies in the NFL executive suites are mulling their options. These kind of things piss off fans, and at a time when football is more popular than ever, seems like you wouldn't want to slow down that momentum.

Allahpundit took up the topic this morning, at Hot Air, "Should the NFL ditch its sudden-death rule for overtime?"

Thirteen seconds. Watch: 

MAHOMES HAD 13 SECONDS! #NFLPlayoffs pic.twitter.com/68g4cJ0sqW

— NFL (@NFL) January 24, 2022

Victims in Texas Shooting Were Killed in One Classroom

Following-up, "'We do have background checks --- laws are already in place...' (VIDEO)."

God have mercy.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Texas School Shooting Victims Were Killed in One Classroom":

Officials say shooter barricaded himself in a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

All the victims killed in the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school Tuesday were in the same classroom, a law-enforcement official said, as details about both the victims and how the massacre unfolded continued to emerge.

According to law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation, the gunman barricaded himself in a two-room classroom and fired on law enforcement continually through the windows of the classroom.

The details of the attack were continuing to unfold a day after 19 children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. this year.

All of the victims have been identified, Lt. Christopher Olivarez, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety told CNN Wednesday.

Police have identified the gunman as Salvador Ramos, a resident of Uvalde, where the school is located. Uvalde, pronounced you-VAL-dee, is a city of around 16,000 located about 80 miles west of San Antonio. The school teaches second- to fourth-grade students.

Members of an elite Border Patrol tactical team known as Bortac responded to the shooting but couldn’t get into the classroom because of a steel door and cinder block construction, according to the officials familiar with the investigation. Meanwhile, the gunman shot at them through the door and walls.

Bortac members were able to enter the room after getting a master key from the principal, according to the officials. One Bortac agent took rounds to their shield upon entering, a second was wounded by shrapnel. A third killed the suspect.

Inside, authorities found dead children in multiple piles, according to the officials.

Agents from Bortac, among the most highly trained federal agents, typically track smugglers, serve high-risk warrants and raid stash houses.

Before the massacre at Robb Elementary, Ramos shot his grandmother, who he lived with, before going to the elementary school, according to police. Mr. Olivarez said the shooter’s grandmother is still alive, and that police are working to understand the motive behind the massacre.

“Everything is still active,” Mr. Olivarez said. “We’re trying to put all the pieces together.”

A law-enforcement official said Ramos legally purchased two assault-style rifles on the same day, within a week of his 18th birthday, from the same local store. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives requires firearms dealers in border states such as Texas to report the purchase of two or more semiautomatic rifles within five days as part of a program that aims to spot gun trafficking across the Mexican border.

Former and current law-enforcement officials said that buying two rifles on the same day or during the same week wouldn’t necessarily trigger further inquiry. An ATF official declined to say whether Ramos’s purchase was flagged to the agency. Officials said they believe Ramos acted alone and aren’t pursuing other suspects, according to Pete Arredondo, chief of police for the local school district. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has determined that there is no known connection to terrorism, a law-enforcement official familiar with the investigation said.

At the current death toll, Tuesday’s shooting in Texas was the deadliest at a U.S. school since the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, where 20 children and six staff members died. In 2018, an attack at a high school in Parkland, Fla., left 17 students and staff dead. Historically, elementary schools haven’t been the sites of mass shootings with as much frequency as high schools or middle schools.

Before Tuesday’s shooting the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket on May 14 in which 10 people were killed was this year’s worst mass shooting in the U.S.

President Biden addressed the shooting Tuesday night from the White House not long after returning from a five-day trip to Asia.

“To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away,” he said in a seven-minute speech from the Roosevelt Room.

As he has before, including in Buffalo earlier this month after the mass shooting there, the Democratic president called for gun-control legislation.

“As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” he said. “I am sick and tired of it. We have to act. And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage.”

The president ordered the flag at the White House and across federal property to be flown at half-staff until sunset Saturday...