Rep. Steve King's Campaign Ties Parkland Gun Control Activist Emma González to 'Communist' Cuba

Well, she sure dresses the part. I tweeted Saturday, "She’s looks like a militant communist lesbian lol."

And at the Washington Post, "Rep. Steve King's campaign ties Parkland's Emma Gonzalez to 'communist' Cuba."

Rep. Steve King’s campaign ties Parkland’s Emma González to ‘communist’ Cuba https://t.co/DSauujUDsF

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 26, 2018

ICYMI, @Emma4Change was proudly wearing a Cuban flag in support of an oppressive communist regime at the #MarchForOurLives. pic.twitter.com/4J8oP9xKjP

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) March 25, 2018

In one of the most publicized moments at Saturday's March for Our Lives, 18-year-old Emma González stood on the stage in complete silence, weeping. She marked the six minutes and 20 seconds that claimed the lives of 17 people at her high school in Parkland, Florida. And on her olive-green jacket, she wore several sewn-on patches, including a Cuban flag.

That flag, representing González's Cuban heritage, became the subject of attacks from some conservatives online over the weekend. And on Sunday afternoon, one of those critical messages appeared on the Facebook page for the campaign of a U.S. congressman — Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.

"This is how you look when you claim Cuban heritage yet don't speak Spanish and ignore the fact that your ancestors fled the island when the dictatorship turned Cuba into a prison camp, after removing all weapons from its citizens; hence their right to self defense," said the post, which also included a photo of González at the podium Saturday.

The meme, which was posted by King's campaign team, prompted hundreds of comments, many of them criticizing the congressman and defending González.

"Are you SERIOUSLY mocking a school shooting survivor for her ethnic identity?!" wrote Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. "When it was my community, where were you? When it was Sandy Hook? Columbine? Were you on the sideline mocking those communities too? Did you question someone identifying as a mother? Did you question whether people like me were crisis actors?

"Emma stood for 6 mins and 20 seconds to honor the lives of 17 gone too soon," Wolf added. "The least you could do is shut your privileged, ineffective trap for 6 seconds to hear someone else's perspective."

King's campaign team promptly and defiantly fired back at individual comments, creating a heated exchange on the Facebook post.

"Pointing out the irony of someone wearing the flag of a communist country while simultaneously calling for gun control isn't 'picking' on anyone," the campaign team responded to Wolf's comment. "It's calling attention to the truth, but we understand that lefties find that offensive."

Reached for comment early Monday by The Washington Post, a spokesman for King's campaign said that the King for Congress Facebook page is managed by the campaign team, not the congressman himself.

"And the meme in question obviously isn't an attack on her 'heritage' in any way," the spokesman wrote in an email. "It merely points out the irony of someone pushing gun control while wearing the flag of a country that was oppressed by a communist, anti-gun regime. Pretty simple, really."

González has become a prominent face of the student-led movement against gun violence since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. And she has not been shy about explaining her various identities.

"My Name is Emma González. I'm 18 years old, Cuban and bisexual," she wrote in an essay in Harper's Bazaar last month. "But none of this matters anymore. What matters is that the majority of American people have become complacent in a senseless injustice that occurs all around them."

Her father immigrated to New York from Cuba in 1968, Univision has reported. Emma was born in the United States. As Univision wrote, González does not speak Spanish, "but her voice reveals the heritage of the communicative passion of mixed Hispanics with oratory skills perfected at school."

Other images attacking the teenager's Cuban heritage circulated in conservative circles online...

More.

She's vile.

'Alt-Right Conspiracy Theories' Following Stoneman-Douglas Parkland Mass Shooting (VIDEO)

Seems as though leftists are feeling their oats. Perhaps if they ratchet up the attacks enough they'll be able to shame the public and government office-holders into banning firearms, lawful gun-owners be damned.

And as for the conspiracy theories, I don't go for them. But it's weird that this David Hogg kid was just on the West Coast last year being interviewed on local CBS News 2 about some activist issue, and now apparently some viral videos show him rehearsing his gun control talking points before going on the national news in Parkland. You can see why people are slamming him as a "crisis actor."

It's creating a firestorm of controversy. At the Tampa Bay Times, for example, "Florida lawmaker’s aide fired after saying outspoken Parkland students are actors."

And here's far-left Anderson Cooper, who was in Parkland interviewing survivors shortly after the massacre. FWIW:

Parkland Shooting Survivors Plan March on Washington

Well, we'll see how this turns out. When you "march on Washington," people expect massive crowds, filling the public spaces. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people. That's a tall order, especially to organize in six weeks.

We are all sickened by what happened in FL last week, but we cannot ignore these tragedies any longer. I am so inspired to see the students of Parkland & kids all over this country standing up to the status quo. On March 24, we march. Join us. #MarchForOurLives @MarchForOurLives pic.twitter.com/2v3yABKYn3

— Josh Gad (@joshgad) February 18, 2018

Watch these kids from Parkland speak to politicians- “At this point you are either with us or against us”. https://t.co/6hO6SJhYGe

— Julianne Moore (@_juliannemoore) February 18, 2018

Irvine's 'Great Park' Goes Bust

It's been a long time, but I can recall people hammering the idea of a "Great Park" in Irvine to rival New York's Central Park as far back as 2000. So now it turns out that the City of Irvine has spent millions of dollars on a regional development project that's gone literally nowhere.

Postcards from California's blue model of government.

See the Los Angeles Times, "Orange County's planned Great Park a victim of hard times":

Ten years after Orange County residents voted to turn a shuttered military base into one of America's most ambitious municipal parks, most of the land remains fenced off, looking very much like the airfield the Marines left behind.

The city of Irvine has spent at least $203 million on the project, but only 200 acres of the promised 1,347-acre Great Park has been built, and half of that is leased out for commercial farming.

Most of the money has paid for plans, designs and consultants, with less than a fifth of it going toward actual park construction, according to a Times analysis of the spending.

Now, the money to build "the first great metropolitan park of the 21st century" — as the city calls it — has just about run out, leaving Irvine leaders to contemplate radical measures: Selling off public land to raise funds or asking private business to step in and build the park for them.

The park, by now, was supposed to be filled with scores of sports fields and eventually museums, cultural centers, botanical gardens, and maybe even a university — all tucked into a bucolic landscape of forests, lawns, a lake and 60-foot-deep canyon that would be scooped from the earth once the barracks and runways were demolished.

But there are no baseball diamonds or regulation soccer fields. No canyon, no forest, no sprawling museum complex.

As much as anything, the lofty plans for the park — an expanse intended to rival San Diego's Balboa Park or even Central Park in New York — collapsed under the weight of the sagging economy...

Continue reading.

The city squandered at least $200 million on no-bid contracts and out-of-control "project" spending. And those responsible are Democrat politicians to the one, including former Irvine mayor and Democrat presidential candidate Larry Agran, who's quoted at the piece clamoring for more money:

Some city leaders said the spending on plans, public relations and events was necessary to secure a world-class design, build support for the project and entice visitors.

"We had to invest a lot to let people know there's a park coming," Irvine Mayor Sukhee Kang said.

Others, including Councilman Jeffrey Lalloway, have called the spending on plans and no-bid contracts reckless and suggested the money could have been put to better use by building ball fields and opening up more parkland.

Lalloway said he was "saddened by a potentially wonderful project that has been financially mismanaged."

He doubts whether some of master design's showpiece amenities, such as the 2.5-mile-long canyon that was to be created in the middle of the park, will ever be built.

The project's fiscal decay has left some to consider a smaller, scaled-back park or one that will be built with the help of private business.

The Anaheim Ducks, for instance, are in talks with the city to build ice skating facilities there. Another firm could build a concert venue to replace the nearby Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre.

Others, including Larry Agran — a 26-year veteran of the Irvine council and a park booster — say Irvine could raise money by selling off parkland for up to $4 million an acre, perhaps for a hotel, resort or high school.

"We own close to 1,500 acres of land free and clear and we can develop it in any way we see fit," Agran said.

Agran predicts the Great Park could be completed in 15 to 20 years, if the city can get its hands on more money.

Wonderful.

O.C. residents will start enjoying the benefits of this fabulous park in 2032!

Just think, that's five years before Social Security's scheduled to go bankrupt. Phew!

The Gun Debate: Another Shooting, But Different This Time (VIDEO)

At the New York Times, "Another Shooting, Another Gun Debate. Will the Outcome Be the Same?":

WASHINGTON — Around 2:30 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, President Trump was in the study off the Oval Office when John F. Kelly, his chief of staff, arrived with news of a school shooting in Florida. Mr. Trump shook his head, according to an aide, and muttered, “Again.”

Mark Barden was visiting a playground named for his 7-year-old son killed in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School when a friend texted him: Be careful watching television. It’s happening. Again.

His senator, Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, heard about the Florida shooting while he was on his way to the Senate floor and ripped up his speech to declare that through inaction, “we are responsible” for a mass atrocity. Again.

Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the Republican whip and gun rights supporter who was himself grievously wounded last year when a man opened fire at a congressional baseball practice, huddled with colleagues on the House floor, reliving his horror. He knew what was coming: the activists who in his view would exploit tragedies like his to advance their anti-gun agenda. Again.

Within hours of the blood bath in Parkland, Fla., where 17 students and adults were killed on Feb. 14, the machinery of the American gun debate began grinding into motion.

By evening, one anti-gun group had mobilized and already sent out its first email: “RESOURCES + EXPERTS AVAILABLE: Florida High School Shooting.” Another group, Everytown for Gun Safety, founded and financed by Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor, activated the 1,500 members of its “survivors network,” and soon paid $230,000 for an advertisement in The New York Times shaming pro-gun lawmakers.

The National Rifle Association followed its own playbook: remaining silent for several days — a recognition that its message might be unwelcome during the initial burst of grief. But it used its NRATV channel to argue to its members that more guns in schools could prevent massacres. Sales of so-called bump stocks, which can make a semiautomatic weapon fire like an automatic, rose out of fear that they would be banned.

The battles waged after shootings in Newtown, Conn.; Orlando, Fla.; Las Vegas; and Sutherland Springs, Tex., began playing out all over, presumably heading toward the same stalemate.

But this time, a few things are different: The gun control side has developed a well-financed infrastructure that did not exist when Mr. Barden’s son Daniel and other schoolchildren were fatally shot at Sandy Hook. Within days of the Parkland shooting, one anti-gun group flooded Florida lawmakers with 2,500 calls and 1,700 emails opposing a bill allowing guns in schools.

Another difference is an unpredictable president who belongs to the National Rifle Association and promotes the N.R.A.-favored solution of arming trained teachers but has also embraced a couple of modest gun control measures opposed by gun rights groups.

And perhaps most dramatically, the We-Call-B.S. teenagers of Florida have injected a passionate new energy into a stale debate, organizing demonstrations, flooding the Statehouse in Tallahassee, composing songs, creating protest signs, confronting politicians and taking to TV airwaves with an intensity and composure and power rarely seen in recent years.

“The initial reaction was the same kind of sickened resignation — this is one of the worst ever, and this probably won’t be enough either,” said Matt Bennett, a founder of Third Way, a center-left advocacy group in Washington.

“What has changed since then is the kids and the extraordinary, galvanizing force they have become,” he added, interrupting an interview to take a call from his 17-year-old son, whose class was leaving school to march to the White House. “No one knows when we are going to hit a tipping point on this issue. We may have hit it — we don’t know. But if we did, it’s because of them.”

Still, veterans of both sides said the fundamental dynamics of Washington have not changed. If President Barack Obama could not pass gun control in a Democratic-majority Senate in 2013, months after Sandy Hook, they said, it was unlikely that Mr. Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress would.

The N.R.A. remains as potent as ever, and the debate resumes as Republicans head into a primary election season when many worry about challenges from the right. In December, the House passed a bill to bolster criminal background checks before gun purchases, but Republicans paired it with a provision requiring states to allow anyone to carry a concealed weapon if they are allowed to carry one in their home state, essentially making it a national right, anathema to Democrats, who have their own liberal base to satisfy.

Gun rights advocates also plan to focus on the failure of the F.B.I. to pursue tips about the suspected Florida gunman, arguing that blame should be on the federal authorities, not the firearms.

“We have seen breakdowns in existing laws,” Mr. Scalise said. “Before people talk about putting new laws on the books, when we find out that multiple laws on the books were not followed, that should be the first thing we figure out.”

The rapid mobilization of the anti-gun movement is a phenomenon that has evolved with the emergence of lobbying groups filled with veteran political operatives and growing lists of supporters. By now they are used to it...

More.

Boston Globe Front-Page on #Parkland Shootings: 'We Know What Will Happen Next'

Hmm, more of the same old gun control hysteria, this time at the Boston Globle: "Parkland. Las Vegas. Sutherland Springs. Newtown. On and on: In America, mass shootings have become so familiar that they seem to follow the same sad."

Wow. Boston Globe front today is something else. pic.twitter.com/oxCdXqN9YO

— Ali Watkins (@AliWatkins) February 16, 2018

Parkland Shooter Nikolas Was Mentally Disturbed

And apparently he's on the autism spectrum and at some point had been taking medications for ADHD.

Leftists now are decrying talk about mental health, claiming it's a ruse to divert attention from "common sense" gun control, as always.

At the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

#Parkland #Florida #NikolasCruz https://t.co/wD2o0zQM5T

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) February 17, 2018

BREAKING: FBI ignored warning that Nikolas Cruz might conduct school shooting https://t.co/DUwBWvyZyj pic.twitter.com/w6sEnrWeM5

— Sun Sentinel (@SunSentinel) February 16, 2018

Nikolas Cruz was regularly in trouble at school for years, disciplinary records show - Sun Sentinel https://t.co/UvZSfixgC4

— Sun Sentinel (@SunSentinel) February 18, 2018

Stoneman-Douglas Parent Fred Guttenberg Stalked Brett Kavanaugh at Lunch Break During Senate Confirmation Hearing (VIDEO)

Ed Morrissey has the analysis, at Hot Air, "Today’s “Controversy”: Kavanaugh Declines Handshake From Father of Murdered Parkland Student":

If Zapruder-style analysis of a missed handshake ends up being the most eventful thing to happen at this hearing, and it might, we should never hold a hearing again.

Actually, we should never hold a hearing again even if this isn’t the most eventful thing to happen. These spectacles are insufferable, insulting, grandstanding garbage for whichever party happens to be in the minority. If I were Grassley, I would have warned them this morning after the first outbursts that another one would force him to adjourn the hearing and recommend that McConnell immediately call a floor vote on the nominee. (The only senators truly in doubt about how they’re voting are red-state Democrats whose votes aren’t needed for confirmation anyway.) And when Schumer inevitably shrieked that America didn’t get a hearing on the new justice, he’d be reminded that that was what his party chose with how they behaved.


And if you’re reading that thinking, “That sounds like how you’d treat a five-year-old, taking away their toys when they won’t stop acting out”: Right. Correct.

As for the non-handshake:

More at the link.

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...

 

Democrats' Gun Control Agenda Not About Protecting Children

Here's the expert, Dana Loesch, "It's Not About Protecting Kids, It's About Banning Guns: Their response is to render you incapable of protecting them, took":

The Biden administration contradicted two separate commissions comprised of educators and security experts and reiterated that they have no intention of improving school security to protect students...

The Uvalde killer accessed the school through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School. There was no outside force multiplier against unlawful entry, no known security system, and no SRO on campus.

The commissions recommended numerous security measures, including controlled ingress/egress, locking doors, SROs, and more. Democrats oppose improving security and instead stated that they were also focusing on basic 9mm handguns while again falsely proclaiming that people were disallowed cannon ownership during the Revolution. He made this remark to the press pool yesterday. Last week Senator Chuck Schumer tanked a school safety proposal instead choosing to advance only gun control measures.

Authorities admitted during Friday’s presser with Texas DPS that they were hesitant to enter the school for fear they’d be shot.

Meanwhile, more details about the Uvalde killer’s violent behavior are spilling into public. The killer tortured animals. He was known to cops, he drove around randomly shooting people with a bb gun and tried to fight random people in the park. He threatened online women with rape and murder. He stopped coming for work and dropped out of school. Through his job at Wendy’s he was able to save $4k for two rifles and ammunition (should we also boycott Wendy’s?). No one in his family seemed engaged enough to see the obvious troubling signs. No one said anything, just like in Buffalo. Just like in Parkland.

TWO REASONS WHY AGE RESTRICTIONS AND UBCs FAIL

The Uvalde killer had murderous intent. As his violent behavior escalated, are we really to believe that a proposal like an age increase would have removed his murderous intent? The killer in Las Vegas’s 2017 tragedy was 64 years-old. The Virginia Tech killer was 23 years old. Where is the guarantee that the Uvalde killer would simply wait — instead of going to the black market where the majority of criminals get their guns?

Our respondents (adult offenders living in Chicago or nearby) obtain most of their guns from their social network of personal connections. Rarely is the proximate source either direct purchase from a gun store, or theft. *Only about 60% of guns in the possession of respondents were obtained by purchase or trade. Other common arrangements include sharing guns and holding guns for others.

Gangs continue to play some role in Chicago in organizing gun buys and in distributing guns to members as needed.

More: Washington Post: Four out of five criminals obtain their guns illegally

More: Chicago Tribune: Survey: Crooks get guns from pals, don’t keep them long

70 percent said they got their guns from family, fellow gang members or through other social connections. Only two said they bought a gun at a store.

A study from the DOJ — Source and Use of Firearms Involved in Crimes: Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016:

About 1.3% of prisoners obtained a gun from a retail source and used it during their offense.

Handguns were the most common type of firearm possessed by state and federal prisoners (18% each); 11% of all prisoners used a handgun.

Among prisoners who possessed a gun during their offense, 90% did not obtain it from a retail source.

More from DOJ: Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms — the vast majority of felons obtain their weapons on the black market.

“ASSAULT WEAPONS” BANS

Are we to believe that a ban on a commonly-owned rifle responsible for the fewest number of homicides (even when compared to hands feet and fists?) would work? ...

Yet still Democrats propose another “Assault Weapons” ban when the first one didn’t work.

RAND:

We found no qualifying studies showing that bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines decreased any of the eight outcomes we investigated.

Propublica: “The senator says ‘the evidence is clear: the ban worked.’ Except there's no evidence it saved lives – and the researcher behind the key statistic Feinstein cites says it's an outdated figure that was based on a false assumption.”

LA Times: No, the assault weapons ban didn’t work: Impact Evaluation of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994

The New York Times: “The Assault Weapon Myth”

School shootings are, thankfully, rare tragedies. Defensive gun use — when guns are used to protect and save lives — outnumbers criminal usage even by the most conservative estimates.

GUN-FREE ZONES

Schools have been gun-free zones since the 1990 passage of the Gun Free School Zones Act. The video of parents howling after they were blocked from going and saving their children is gutting. I read one mom broke free and hopped the fence to get into the school, totally unarmed, with nothing but her fierce nature as a mother to protect.

The people allowed to have the guns stood outside. If the government is going to demand a gun free zone anywhere they need to guarantee the safety of the people being disarmed — if at a school they should protect those kids with the same ferocity as that desperate mother and have the ability to do it — especially considering police have no legal obligation to protect your life...

Keep reading. 

Broward County Deputy Sheriff Scot Peterson 'Never Went In' During Florida Shooting

This really makes me sad.

The school's "resource officer."

Here's the New York Times' headline, at Memeorandum, "Armed Sheriff's Deputy ‘Never Went In’ During Florida Shooting."

And at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "Stoneman Douglas cop resigns; sheriff says he should have 'killed the killer'."

Sheriff Scott Israel said school cop Scot Peterson should have “went in. Addressed the killer. Killed the killer.” - Sun Sentinel https://t.co/ZnWkX0iCTK

— Sun Sentinel (@SunSentinel) February 22, 2018

And more on Twitter:

The armed school resource officer at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School responded to the shooting BUT NEVER WENT IN for “upward or 4 minutes” while the gunmen killed people, said Sheriff Scott Israel.

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) February 22, 2018

The armed school resource officer at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School responded to the shooting BUT NEVER WENT IN for “upward or 4 minutes” while the gunmen killed people, said Sheriff Scott Israel.

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) February 22, 2018

Sheriff Israel sat on that stage and pointed fingers @DLoesch last night. If he had an ounce of integrity he'd resign immediately. https://t.co/TI1gsBETY2

— Jesse Kelly® (@JesseKellyDC) February 22, 2018

Miami Herald: Parkland school cop 'never went in' during the shooting. There were other failures, too https://t.co/Z1Hkr4ULV8

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 23, 2018

This is horrific. “In November, a tipster called BSO to say Cruz ‘could be a school shooter in the making’ but deputies did not write up a report on that warning. It came just weeks after a relative called urging BSO to seize his weapons.” https://t.co/3gtwGPl6bo

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 23, 2018

FBI tipped off about Cruz, his guns, instability, DESIRE TO KILL PEOPLE in school shooting
-DID NOTHING

Deputies called to Cruz’s home 39x
-DID NOTHING

On-site Officer heard gunshots
-DID NOTHING@DLoesch pressed Sheriff Israel on inaction
-He deflected
-Audience jeered, booed pic.twitter.com/jdxtGVCput

— Chet Cannon (@Chet_Cannon) February 23, 2018

You didn’t stand up for them when they repeatedly reported that this murderer was threatening them in messages that violated FL law, his parents reported he “held a gun to others’ heads;” 39 visits and 2 FBI reports and NOTHING. It’s literally your job. Not mine. https://t.co/KjQhfvQc2N

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) February 23, 2018

Additionally, @browardsheriff sat on that stage with me last night fully aware that his deputy had been outside and armed while this madman had four minutes to massacre — and said NOTHING.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) February 23, 2018

Were there any adults who didn’t fail?

The FBI failed.

Local police failed.

The security officer failed.

The people who set up the video feed failed.

Seventeen lives never should have been lost. https://t.co/1aYZUi6wU5

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) February 23, 2018

I Got My News From Print Newspapers

This is great, from Farhad Manjoo, "For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned":

I spent 2 months getting the news mostly from print. It changed my life.

I was better informed, less anxious, and I had tons of free time.

I distilled the experience into three Michael Pollan-esque lessons:

Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.https://t.co/09A1Q3vzBK

— Farhad Manjoo: not really on here a lot now (@fmanjoo) March 7, 2018

I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through.

But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting.

There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn’t see the false claims — possibly amplified by propaganda bots — that the killer was a leftist, an anarchist, a member of ISIS and perhaps just one of multiple shooters. I missed the Fox News report tying him to Syrian resistance groups even before his name had been released. I also didn’t see the claim circulated by many news outlets (including The New York Times) as well as by Senator Bernie Sanders and other liberals on Twitter that the massacre had been the 18th school shooting of the year, which wasn’t true.

Instead, the day after the shooting, a friendly person I’ve never met dropped off three newspapers at my front door. That morning, I spent maybe 40 minutes poring over the horror of the shooting and a million other things the newspapers had to tell me.

Not only had I spent less time with the story than if I had followed along as it unfolded online, I was better informed, too. Because I had avoided the innocent mistakes — and the more malicious misdirection — that had pervaded the first hours after the shooting, my first experience of the news was an accurate account of the actual events of the day.

This has been my life for nearly two months. In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.

I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news — I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.

It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment...

I too have been limited my online and social news gathering. Not completely, but I've always favored news in hard-copy form. I especially like the more deliberative style of news reading you get, the morning paper with a cup of coffee.

Anyways, I totally recommend it. There's a lot less stress, and particularly a lot less hatred.

Until then!

Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene

Whatever happens to these two, in this bad and ugly kerfuffle, could be decided as soon as tomorrow, and it's all like a wrecking ball just hanging above the halls of Congress, just a few feet above both parties (that is, the "uniparty" elite in Congress), ready to crush the living shit out of them all.

NYT has updates, "Live Updates: House to Vote Thursday on Removing Marjorie Taylor Greene From Committees." There's also a longer, "conflicted" piece on Ms. Cheney, who indeed represents the "swamp" to many, many voters back home in her at-large congressional constituency in Wyoming. Trouble's brewing, and it's scalding.

Whatever, here's an LAT story trying to wrap it all together, "McCarthy faces choices as GOP divides over Reps. Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene": 

WASHINGTON — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy faced unrest Tuesday from opposing ends of the Republican spectrum over Reps. Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene, underscoring GOP fissures as the party seeks its pathway without Donald Trump in the White House.

Hard-right lawmakers were itching to oust Cheney, a traditional conservative and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, from her post as the No. 3 House Republican after she voted to impeach Trump last month. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) praised Cheney and aligned himself with party moderates trying to isolate or punish Greene, a first-term congresswoman gaining renown for embracing outlandish fictions such as suggestions that mass school shootings were staged.

McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) met with Greene for about 90 minutes in his Capitol office Tuesday night. Aides to the two representatives offered no immediate comment afterward.

The looming House decisions on Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Greene (R-Ga.) represent a moment of reckoning for a party struggling with its future. Two weeks after Trump left office, House Republicans are essentially deciding whether to prioritize the former president’s norm-shattering behavior and conspiracy theories and retain the loyalty of his voters over more establishment conservative values.

“At the very moment that Joe Biden is lurching to the left is the moment that the Republican Party is lurching out of existence,” GOP pollster Frank Luntz said of the new Democratic president, who is preparing to try to muscle a mammoth COVID-19 relief package through the narrowly divided Congress.

“We can either become a fringe party that never wins elections or rebuild the big tent party of Reagan,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, one of the few elected Republicans who routinely rebuked Trump, said in a written statement. Without mentioning Cheney or Greene, he added, “I urge congressional Republicans to make the right choice.”

But pro-Trump forces in and out of Washington remain powerful. John Fredericks, who led Trump’s Virginia campaigns in 2016 and 2020, warned that there would be party primaries against Cheney defenders.

“We’ve got millions and millions of woke, motivated, America-first Trump voters that believe in the movement,” Fredericks said. “If you’re going to keep Liz Cheney in leadership, there’s no party.”

Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), a leader of the effort to oust Cheney, says he has enough support to succeed.

“She’s brought this on herself,” Rosendale said. He said Cheney, who was joined by only nine other Republicans in backing impeachment, was wrong to not forewarn colleagues about her decision.

House Republicans planned a meeting for Wednesday, when Cheney’s fate as leader could be decided. A House vote on a Democratic-led move to strip Greene of committee assignments could also occur Wednesday.

Greene, who has suggested that school shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Parkland, Fla., might be hoaxes, was selected to serve on the House education and budget committees. Democrats told McCarthy this week that if he didn’t remove Greene from her committees, the House would vote to do so, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

Republicans say that GOP members would unite against a Democratic move to remove Greene from her committee assignments and that such an effort would help Greene cast herself as a victim of partisan Democrats...

For M.J.T., the outcome to me is much more interesting than for Ms. Cheney, who has her dad's reputation to fall back on if she attempts a political comeback. 

Ms. Greene is generally a grassroots force, and while she's freakin' looney and has a nasty online profile she's now desperately trying to scrub, she won her district in her general election race with a 75 percent share of the two-party vote! Of course she's not going to stand to the side while she gets singled out by CNN and all the other hack leftist "news" networks, because, she'd have a damn good argument that her removal from Congress should be up to the voters in HER district to decide, not the bought, corrupt "leaders" from both parties in Congress, who do not care what happens to her.

How Progressives Win the Culture War

From David Brooks, at the New York Times:

What’s happening today is that certain ideas about gun rights, and maybe gun ownership itself, are being cast in the realm of the morally illegitimate and socially unacceptable https://t.co/2mXNbOi04X

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) March 2, 2018

I wonder if I’m wrong on the subject of guns. I started this latest round of the debate with the presumption that supporters of moderate gun restrictions are popularly strong but legislatively weak. Since Sandy Hook in 2012, more than two dozen states have passed gun laws and almost all of those laws have LOOSENED gun restrictions. Roughly 360 gun bills have been introduced in Congress, and they have all failed but one, which also loosened gun use.

The blunt fact is that Republicans control most legislatures. To get anything passed, I thought, it would be necessary to separate some Republicans from the absolutist N.R.A. position. To do that you have to depolarize the issue: show gun owners some respect, put red state figures at the head and make the gun discussion look more like the opioid discussion. The tribalists in this country have little interest in the opioid issue. As a result, a lot of pragmatic things are being done across partisan lines.

The people pushing for gun restrictions have basically done the exact opposite of what I thought was wise. Instead of depolarizing the issue they have massively polarized it. The students from Parkland are being assisted by all the usual hyper-polarizing left-wing groups: Planned Parenthood, Move On and the Women’s March. The rhetoric has been extreme. Marco Rubio has been likened to a mass murderer while the N.R.A. has been called a terrorist organization.

The early results would seem to completely vindicate my position. The Florida Legislature turned aside gun restrictions. New gun measures in Congress have been quickly shelved. Democrats are more likely to lose House and Senate seats in the key 2018 pro-gun states. The losing streak continues.

Yet I have to admit that something bigger is going on. It could be that progressives understood something I didn’t. It could be that you can win more important victories through an aggressive cultural crusade than you can through legislation. Progressives could be on the verge of delegitimizing their foes, on guns but also much else, rendering them untouchable for anybody who wants to stay in polite society. That would produce social changes far vaster than limiting assault rifles...

More.

NIMBY Progressives: 'Green' Marin Rejects Affordable Housing for Immigrant Workers

Because doing good for social justice is a-okay, as long as there's no impact on the lefty do-gooders' bottom line.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Affordable housing is again a red flag in 'green' Marin County":

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — After George Lucas abandoned plans to build a movie studio along a woodsy road in Marin County, he complained about the permitting process in a place so environmentally friendly that hybrid-car ownership is four times the state average.

His next move, some here say, was payback for what Lucas described in a written statement as the "bitterness and anger" expressed by his neighbors.

The creator of "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" is working with a local foundation that hopes to build hundreds of units of affordable housing on a former dairy farm called Grady Ranch, where his studio would have risen.

Now Marin County is squirming at that prospect — and it is not a pretty sight.

The issue of affordable housing in California's wealthiest county has always brought its "green" lifestyle and liberal social leanings into conflict. No Bay Area county has more protected open space — or fewer workers who can afford to live anywhere near their jobs.

At a recent planning commission hearing, where possible sites for subsidized housing were discussed, nearly all the heated testimony had some version of: "I'm all for affordable housing, but …"

Nine days later, protesters wearing "End Apartheid in Marin County" buttons demanded that officials do something to help low-income workers find housing in a place where the median home price is $650,000 and 60% of the workforce lives somewhere else.

The irony is not lost on Thomas Peters, president of the Marin Community Foundation, the philanthropy that is collaborating with the filmmaker to build along Lucas Valley Road. The region's environmentally conscious lifestyle, he said, is built on the long commutes of low-paid workers whose cars choke Highway 101 to the point that "you can literally see the CO2 rising."

"The community, to some degree, has been lulled by success in its 40-year-old determination to really protect the open spaces," Peters said. But "it is not sustainable to hold that kind of misperception that this is all beautiful and everything can stay as it is."

With the Golden Gate Bridge as its front door and Point Reyes National Seashore in the backyard, Marin County is blessed with some of California's most breathtaking vistas. Indeed, 84% of its land is protected as tideland, open space, parkland, agricultural preserves and watershed.

In an effort to address climate change and cut greenhouse gas emissions, the county in 2010 launched California's first so-called community choice energy program. Marin Clean Energy purchases power for its customers from renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydroelectric projects.

But Marin is near the back of the pack in the nine-county Bay Area region when it comes to absorbing predicted population growth — and is the most unwilling, said Ezra Rapport, executive director of the Assn. of Bay Area Governments.

We see story after story of leftist hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy. It's ridiculous. Extremely affluent and cloistered in environmental smugness, these people couldn't care less about immigrant workers or clean air, if ameliorating such would impair their lavish lifestyles.

These people are so pampered you'd think Occupy Wall Street would be having a field day over there. Sheesh. Makes you want to puke.

Continue reading.

18 Children and 1 Teacher Killed in Texas Schoohouse Massacre (VIDEO)

I've been watching this unfold this afternoon. The death toll keeps going up. We're in Sandy Hook territory at this point, and it's devastating. 

At the video, Chris Murphy, far-left Senator from Connecticut, goes off, "What are we doing here?!!" 

He always goes off. Then, nothing changes, because the left can't get over its gun control fetish when state authorities need the power to intervene before people get killed, and that means institutionalizing those with a history of mental illness and a documented propensity toward gun violence. Elliot Rodger, who killed 7 in the 2014 U.C. Santa Barbara attacks, should have been hospitalized beforehand. He'd been under long-term treatment and his parents knew he was not right in the head. 

Mass murderer James Holmes had been under the care of a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. He killed 12 and 70 others survived their wounds. I wrote a lot about it at the time. See, "Neuroscience Ph.D. Program Can Be Isolating, Competitive, and Highly Demanding," and the links therein.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Texas Shooter Kills at Least 18 Children and One Teacher in Elementary School":

An 18-year old man opened fire in a Texas elementary school Tuesday, killing at least 18 students and one teacher before he was killed by police, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Police identified the gunman as Salvador Ramos, a resident of Uvalde, where the school is located. Uvalde is about 80 miles west of San Antonio.

Ramos, a former student at Uvalde High School, shot his grandmother before going to Robb Elementary School, police said. He left his vehicle outside the elementary school in Uvalde and carried a handgun inside, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.

Two police officers who responded to the scene were shot, but are expected to survive, the governor said.

“What happened in Uvalde is a horrific tragedy that cannot be tolerated in the state of Texas,” said Mr. Abbott, a Republican.

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. That record stood for a little more than a week.

The Uvalde school district reported an active shooter at Robb Elementary School just after 11:30 a.m. local time Tuesday. The school, according to the district’s website, teaches second- to fourth-grade students.

All district and campus activities, after-school programs and other events were canceled. The district said parents could pick up students at regular dismissal times at their respective campuses, and officers would be there to escort the students to their parents’ vehicles.

“Parents please be patient as lines will be long,” the school district said in a post on social media.

After the shooting, Uvalde Memorial Hospital said 13 children arrived by ambulance or buses for treatment and two people arrived deceased.

University Health, in San Antonio, said it had received two patients from the shooting, a child and an adult. The hospital said the adult was a 66-year-old woman in critical condition. Hospital authorities didn’t confirm whether the woman was the shooter’s grandmother.

he child, identified as a 10-year-old girl, was also in critical condition.

Late Tuesday, authorities were in the process of notifying victims’ families, said Pete Arredondo, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s chief of police.

Armando Ramos, an uncle of Salvador Ramos, said in an interview that he doesn’t think his nephew intended to target the school, but wound up there after a police chase. Salvador Ramos’s grandmother, whose name he declined to share, is currently in surgery, he said.

President Biden was briefed on the shooting as he flew back to Washington from a trip to Asia and planned to give remarks Tuesday night, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

“His prayers are with the families impacted by this awful event,” she tweeted.

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

Gov. Abbott said he had instructed the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Rangers to work with local law enforcement to investigate the shooting...

 

To Trump's True Believers, January 6th Was an Act of Faith, Ashli Babbitt's a Martyr, and White Is Not Only a Race, But a Spiritual State

Following-up, "Georgia Election Worker Shaye Moss, And Her Mother and Grandmother, Terrorized by Trump Followers After 2020 Election (VIDEO)."

At Vanity Fair, "January 6 Was Only the Beginning":

"Although no one believed in civil war, the air reeked of it…" — Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, recalling 1860.

1. It’s Cool

We watched her die before we knew her name. We watched almost in real time, or soon enough after, her death looped and memed before the fight was over. But then, the fight’s still not over. A video gives us a crowd throbbing against two wooden windowed doors, one reinforced glass pane spiderwebbing, three Capitol Police officers, standing between the glass and members of Congress on the other side. We don’t yet know to look for her, but she’s there on the screen, the only woman, up front (“a firecracker,” her friends will say), screaming at cops. (“Joking,” her defenders will claim.) There’s a knife in her pocket. She shouts: “Just open the door!” It’s barricaded. “Break it down!” chant the men. One screams at the cops, “You lied!” The cops said there was nobody on the other side. They can see them. Congressmen. Traitors. A young man wearing a black T-shirt and $325 Canada Goose aviator fur hat, shouts “Heyyy!” He stretches out his arms, pulsing veins—he has already punched the glass, hard—and opens his hands. “Fuck the blue!” shouts the crowd. A man wearing a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag tied like a bib beneath his MAGA hat hands Goose a black helmet with which to hit the glass.

Goose lines the helmet with his hat, to cushion his fist. The cops slide out of the way. (“Escape route,” one will later tell investigators; they thought they were going to be killed.) “Go! Get this shit!” the videographer shouts. They get that shit—pounding the reinforced glass.

“Gun!” the videographer yells. Two hands emerge from behind a pillar on the other side, aiming.

Fourteen seconds left. Does she hear them shout “gun”? Can she make out the warnings Michael Byrd, a plainclothes lieutenant in the Capitol Police, will say he delivered? That the man standing beside her will say, “She didn’t heed”? “Please,” Byrd will say he shouted. “Stop! Get back!” She doesn’t. He aims. There are more videos. There she is, bobbing up and down, straining. Her long, smooth face, her dark golden hair, her golden skin. She has come to this moment—seven seconds—from Ocean Beach, California, where she lived in a bungalow beneath avocado and lime trees. Little woman. Five foot two, 115 pounds, her mother will say. One hundred ten, according to Representative Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who’ll make her name into a martyr song, “#onemoreinthenameoflove.” She’s 35; or in her “20s,” one witness will say; or “16, supposedly,” guesses another man, each aging her backward, into the imagined innocence of girlhood.

Goose smashes the glass.

“Go!” she shouts. She’s boosted up. She crouches on the sill, her Trump flag like a cape tucked under a red-white- and-blue backpack, like some absurd American bird.

The gunshot sounds like a cannon. Glock 22, .40 caliber. Big gun. One boom.

She falls back. Her hands fly up, open, empty, raised to her temples. As if rather than a bullet there’s an unsettling thought.

Nobody tries to catch her.

“#Sayhername,” the patriots will tweet, delighting in their appropriation of a campaign created for Black women. It’s grotesque. But the dead are the dead, no matter what they died doing. So, yes, her name: Ashli Babbitt. She wasn’t a hashtag. As a girl in rural Lakeside, California, she’d ride her horse to the 7-Eleven. She was a scrapper. “She just did boy things,” her brother will say. She joined the Air Force at 17. Two wars, eight deployments, 14 years. Her favorite movie was The Big Lebowski. Her thing was the shaka. “Hang loose,” thumb and pinkie. (Her last words, as she bleeds on the Capitol floor, according to a witness: “It’s cool.”) She did not climb the ranks, but she did marry, and then divorce, and in between she voted for Obama, and she fell in love with a Marine named Aaron Babbitt, and there was some trouble with his ex, who in 2016 claimed Ashli rammed her car three times, but Ashli was acquitted and anyway, maybe love is like that sometimes, at least for Ashli in 2016, since that was when she fell hard for Donald J. Trump. “#Love,” she wrote beside his name that Halloween, in the first of more than 8,000 tweets. “She was all in,” says Aaron, who did not share her devotion. She believed Trump was “one of gods greatest warriors.” She thought she’d be his “boots on the ground.” She wanted to be “the storm.” She had a husband and together they had a girlfriend; she had four younger brothers and parents who loved her, and in the end, she left them all. What’s left is a meme, “Ashli Babbitt,” on Twitter and Fox and Newsmax and Telegram, where she dies on permanent repeat for a man who won’t, in fact, say her name for half a year, until the day it proves useful, when the Trump Organization is indicted for tax fraud. He’ll issue a one-sentence statement: “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” That he knows is beside the point. Who shot her? They did. The enemy.

2. Sacramento, California

The Justice for Ashli Babbitt Rally opens with a prayer, asking God to bless Ashli’s family, sitting in a row of white “Justice 4 Ashli” T-shirts, and to work on the hearts of the “opposition,” which, whether I like it or not, is me. Ashli’s mother, Mikki Witthoeft, has already told me this morning that she wouldn’t talk to me. “Media,” she’d growled. “Goddamned media,” she’ll clarify when she takes the podium.

Leading the prayer is a “patriot” pastor called JP. He looks like an especially dangerous mushroom. JP wears a black floppy sun hat, mirrored shades, a stars-and-stripes gaiter, green half gloves, and utility-belted jeans that puddle around his ankles. His black T-shirt features in golden letters a “battle verse” popular with patriots, Joshua 1:9. “Be strong and courageous,” the Lord instructs Joshua as he readies to storm Jericho and, at God’s command, to slaughter all—“man and woman, young and old.”

We’re on the west side of the California State Capitol. The rally was called by a group named Saviors of Liberty, hatched in a pickup truck three weeks prior by a couple of white dudes drinking beer and thinking about all that was wrong in the world and how they might fix it by building a supergroup of right-wing fraternal organizations. They’d need new T-shirts. Lady Liberty bleached white on a field of black, looking in sorrow on a red-and-black American flag, vertical so that its stripes appear to bleed. Packed into these T-shirts are muscle-bound men, some bulked up by bulletproof plates, many flexing studded leather gloves. Many are Proud Boys.

A rally organizer keeping a lower profile is a woman named Chelsea Knight, an administrator of Placer County, California, for Trump and a co-administrator, with her husband, Victor Knight, of a Telegram chat group called 1488, which surely has nothing to do with the “14 words” embraced by white supremacists—prattle about protecting white children—and 88, as in the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, which times two in the idiot math of fascism equals “Heil Hitler.” That’s Victor’s thing. He’s the one with an SS Totenkopf skull tattooed on his left fist. Victor’s here too, and that plus the 90-something-degree heat on the sunblasted concrete, plus antifa’s promise to disrupt, may explain the low turnout.

Antifa does arrive. A column of mostly black-clad, black-masked protesters coming from a rally on the other side of the Capitol for what should have been Breonna Taylor’s 28th birthday. The Saviors are ready. A Savior in a skull mask takes the first shot at the tallest antifa, a beanpole in black but for his fists and the pale skin around his eyes. Saviors call him Nosferatu. He’s skinny but he knows how to take a punch; it bounces off his head, and you can almost hear him smile beneath his mask. “That’s a pussy-ass move right there,” Nosferatu says.

Another Savior throws a punch. The cops observe. Then an antifa protester takes a swipe. The cops charge—at antifa. An antifa cries to the police even as they shove her backward.

“Shut up, fat ass!” a right-wing streamer screams.

“Fuck yourself, faggot!” she answers.

“These cops want to let us go at ’em,” comments the man next to me. It’s one of the speakers, Jorge Riley, an indicted J6er.

“They don’t have any worries about what the outcome would be,” says a Savior.

Riley smiles. He wears his black hair in a ponytail and a black leather vest over a black T. “I’m a French-speaking Native American Jew,” he likes to say. “For Jesus,” he sometimes adds. He waits for a laugh. He invaded the Capitol with three white feathers braided into his hair, three streaks of black paint running down each cheek. In a video, he boasts: “I may or may not have rubbed my butt on Nasty Pelosi’s desk.” Before January 6, Riley held positions in the local Republican establishment. Two days after the insurrection, he posted his address on Facebook: “Come take my life. I’m right here. You will all die.” The FBI, he thinks, didn’t get it. The “joke,” the threat, was for antifa. “I got six charges,” he crows. He says he likes cops, except the cop who shot Babbitt.

“You feel like the cops are on your side?” I ask.

“Obviously!” He swings his arms open. “They’re here protecting me.” He turns to a woman beside him and asks for the name of the officer who killed George Floyd. “And they only prosecuted him,” continues Riley, “because these people”—the protesters—“threw a fit.” A white cop’s nine-minute knee on a Black man’s neck? “Somebody doing their job.” A Black cop’s split-second shot at a white woman leading a mob? “Assassination,” Riley agrees with another of the speakers today.

Such is the seesaw reality of January 6. “No cops were hurt,” Riley says. More than 150 were hurt. Five would die. Riley says it was a lovefest, J6ers and cops hugging it out after a friendly tussle. Delusion? No—his smirk bespeaks self-awareness. Disinformation? Too obvious. More like lucid dreaming: a deliberately surreal assault. I think of a Telegram message one of the Proud Boy organizers sent on January 6: “I want to see thousands of normies burn that city to ash today.” It wasn’t their own crimes that thrilled them, it was the prospect of drawing the many into their boogaloo vision. The city still stands. But in my mind—in the imagination of anyone who even now marvels at how close we came; how close we still are—it burns. The coup was a bust. The psyop? Victory.

Here, in Sacramento, the speaker at the podium, a former TV host named Jamie Allman—taken off the air of a St. Louis ABC affiliate after he tweeted his desire to “ram a hot poker up the ass” of a Parkland shooting survivor—declares January 6 “one of the most beautiful days I’ve seen in America.”

In the back of the crowd, protesters challenge patriots to define “Nazi.”

“We love America,” says one.

“If Ashli Babbitt were here,” continues Allman, “I guarantee you she’d be out there”—on the edge of the fighting—“talking to those people.”

“Scum!” a patriot screams at the protesters.

“Ashli Babbitt does not want you to be afraid,” Allman says, “ever again.” Present tense. Ashli Babbitt lives, in the hallucinatory. Allman says the patriots will return to Washington, to remember her. Ashli Babbitt dies, in perpetuity.

“I suffered,” says Riley. “But I didn’t pay the price Ashli did. I’m like the guy from 300. I lived to be able to tell her story.”

At the podium, Allman: “What her death does, when we compare it to Crispus Attucks, is—it calls for a revolution!”

“It calls.” The myth of history is calling the patriots. The “spirit of 1776” and 300, the 2006 CGI blood opera, 300 Spartan warriors’ battle against an overwhelming Persian horde until all but one Spartan falls. Attucks, the first man to die in one war, and the fictional Spartan warrior who was the only survivor of the latter, the source material of which is a comic book. Sacrifice stripped of history. “Trial by combat,” as Rudy Giuliani promised on January 6, hours before the mob made it real. “The first Patriot Martyr of the Second American Revolution,” an Oath Keeper posted before anyone knew who the martyr was, only that hers was the mythical victimhood of a white woman, killed by a Black man, they could now claim...

Keep reading.

What happened to Ashli Babbitt, and the official whitewashing after her death, is the most infuriating thing about January 6th.

Laura Ingraham on Parkland Massacre and Stupid Student Gun Control Walkout (VIDEO)

At Fox News:

Leftists Turn to Connecticut in Wake of #Parkland Massacre

I guess it's better to push radical policy change at the state level, closer to the people. But this time as previously, mental illness appears to be the single biggest factor contributing to the carnage.

Leftists never learn.

At NYT, "In Wake of Florida Massacre, Gun Control Advocates Look to Connecticut."

In the wake of the Florida school shooting, gun-control advocates are pointing to the success of Connecticut in addressing the spiraling toll of gun violence https://t.co/hFeZnBzkUs

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 18, 2018

Parkland Sheriff's Deputy 'Never Went In' During Shooting (VIDEO)

Following-up from last night, "Broward County Deputy Sheriff Scot Peterson 'Never Went In' During Florida Shooting."

At CBS This Morning: