When President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that he planned to reopen Alcatraz — the notorious island prison located just a little over a mile off the California coast near San Francisco — critics began to question just how &#8220;inescapable&#8221; it really was.
From 1934 to 1963, there were 14 documented escape attempts from <a href="https://www.gsa.gov/about-us/gsa-regions/region-9-pacific-rim/region-9-newsroom/feature-stories/the-captivating-history-of-alcatraz-island-from-military-fort-to-national-historic-landmark-05182020" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Alcatraz</a> involving 36 inmates. Not all of those who attempted to escape even made it to the shoreline. Some who did make it into the water gave up and turned back after encountering the strong currents and frigid temperatures. Two were confirmed to have drowned, and another five were officially declared &#8220;missing and presumed drowned.&#8221;
The only prisoner known to have survived the swim was John Paul Scott, who made it to Fort Point under the Golden Gate Bridge in 1962 before he collapsed from hypothermia and exhaustion. He was found there, unconscious, and returned to the island prison after being treated at a nearby hospital.
But following Trump&#8217;s announcement, some noted that people now swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco on a fairly regular basis. There are even annually scheduled triathlons that include a swim from The Rock to shore, suggesting that maybe escaping the prison through the San Francisco Bay wouldn&#8217;t be as formidable to prisoners in the 21st century as it had been in years past.
Any prisoner who attempted to make that swim to freedom would have to survive about a mile and a half — or more, if the currents pushed them off course — of choppy water that typically registers between 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit, and they&#8217;d have to do it without the benefit of a wetsuit. With water at those temperatures, hypothermia can begin to set in within 30-60 minutes.
But as the critics say, people do it every year: people who have the luxury of weeks or even months of in-water training and coaching to learn how to maximize each movement and breathe efficiently. And, more importantly, people who have access to wetsuits and even a quick rescue if things go sideways.
An average swimmer can complete a one-mile swim in about 30 minutes, about two-thirds of the distance from Alcatraz to the shore. But that&#8217;s with regular training, and prisoners on the island would have no ability to train in the water. People who have made that swim assured The Daily Wire that it was not something to be undertaken lightly.
Former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines swam from Alcatraz to shore with a group of Navy SEALs in July of 2024, and she told The Daily Wire that she prepared by swimming in the bay the day before without a wetsuit.
&#8220;FREEZING. And this was in the middle of July. No way you&#8217;d survive in the colder months.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Successfully swam Alcatraz with a handful of the most impressive Navy Seals &amp; combat veterans.
It was such a fun (and cold) way to honor those who risk their lives for our great nation. God bless our troops!🇺🇸 <a href="https://t.co/kuwkaAXUNs">pic.twitter.com/kuwkaAXUNs</a>
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) <a href="https://twitter.com/Riley_Gaines_/status/1811907603297108373?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 12, 2024</a></blockquote>
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Gaines said that in addition to the cold — even with a wetsuit for the full swim — she had to contend with &#8220;swimming directly into massive waves, major currents that change (sometimes they help, sometimes you&#8217;re swimming in place).&#8221;
&#8220;I had lots of seals and sea lions who were basically playing with me the entire time,&#8221; Gaines added. &#8220;They were so curious what I was doing they&#8217;d come up and nudge me. I swam with a pod of dolphins, maybe 15 to 20 or so. It was a good sign no sharks were around.&#8221;
Avid triathlete and fitness trainer Daniela Lavender participated in the &#8220;Escape from Alcatraz&#8221; triathlon in 2018, and she too mentioned the water temperature and the lengths to which athletes prepare for the experience. &#8220;Besides the wetsuits, we had neoprene caps and booties,&#8221; she said.
But one of the most important things, Lavender told The Daily Wire, was the fact that participants had kayakers with them to help guide them through the choppy waters — and redirect them if they started to stray from the best course to shore.
&#8220;You have to hit the current just right to have it shoot you in toward the shore,&#8221; she explained. &#8220;If you don&#8217;t hit it just right, it will sweep you out into the bay. It&#8217;s a hard thing to do because you really do have to hit that tide just right. They show you a building on the shore to aim for, but if the water is rough and the waves are big, that building is hard to see.&#8221;
&#8220;The depth of the water is a little bit stressful too,&#8221; Lavender added. &#8220;And of course the great whites are there. Not so much when we were there because they try to schedule the events around seasonal surges in the shark population, but they are there so you don&#8217;t want to get separated from the crowd. Don&#8217;t be first or last, I guess.&#8221;
Tarrant County Republican Party Chairman Bo French completed two triathlons at Alcatraz in the early 2000s, and he agreed that the water was frigid. Beyond that, he questioned whether anyone would be able to complete such a swim without the benefit of training.
&#8220;I was swimming maybe 5,000 to 7,000 yards, three times a week at the time,&#8221; he said. &#8220;[Without training] I don’t think it could be done. Swimming is 90% technique. You have to have that feel from training. It’s something you have to develop.&#8221;
French also noted that swimming in a large group with nearly 1,000 others competing in the triathlon actually eased any anxiety he might have had about running into the great white sharks that frequent the area: &#8220;In terms of the sharks, I figured if I was one of a thousand, my odds were pretty good.&#8221;
On a general note, French said that he was in favor of reopening the notorious prison. &#8220;I’m old enough to remember when Alcatraz had this mystique about it,&#8221; he explained.
&#8220;Love this. I actually swam Alcatraz twice (with a wetsuit of course). That place has an eerie feel to it. This will strike fear into criminals. More winning,&#8221; he posted on X.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Love this. I actually swam Alcatraz twice (with a wetsuit of course). That place has an eerie feel to it. This will strike fear into criminals. More winning. <a href="https://t.co/4wT4ilT0pa">https://t.co/4wT4ilT0pa</a>
— Bo French (@BoFrenchTX) <a href="https://twitter.com/BoFrenchTX/status/1919172465130910073?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2025</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;For me, I was like, this is amazing, this American institution is coming back — I think it is really going to send a message,&#8221; he said.
Rep. John McGuire (R-VA) also lauded Trump&#8217;s plan to reopen Alcatraz, calling it &#8220;a symbol of tough American justice&#8221; and a throwback to a &#8220;Golden Age&#8221; where criminals were met with swift justice and accountability rather than being sent right back to the streets by progressive prosecutors and judges.
That message hit home for him, and he referenced one criminal illegal alien who was released from jail four times in Virginia, after which he raped a teenage girl. &#8220;I&#8217;m a small government guy, but we have to keep our people safe,&#8221; he said.
McGuire, a veteran Navy SEAL (the sixth in Congress), swam from Alcatraz to shore with a group of SEALs for a charity several years ago, and he said that even for those in the best physical shape and whose training was &#8220;water-centric,&#8221; the support they got from kayakers in the water with them was of the utmost importance.
<div id="attachment_917881" style="width: 442px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-917881" class="wp-image-917881 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/IMG_1910-432x576.jpeg" alt="Photo courtesy of Rep. John McGuire" width="432" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/IMG_1910-432x576.jpeg 432w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/IMG_1910-225x300.jpeg 225w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/IMG_1910.jpeg 720w" sizes="(max-width: 432px) 100vw, 432px" />Photo courtesy of Rep. John McGuire</div>
&#8220;We had experts helping us to predict the currents and kayakers in the water who got updates over radios,&#8221; he said, noting that there were times when they had to change course in ways that seemed counterintuitive to avoid dangerous currents that could have swept them out to sea. &#8220;We had to swim in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go.&#8221;
&#8220;You can be super fit, but if you don&#8217;t have the right information [about the currents], you still won&#8217;t make it,&#8221; McGuire said. &#8220;If you swim at the wrong angle for even five minutes, you won&#8217;t make it.&#8221;
McGuire stressed the mental, emotional, and physical toughness that is ingrained into Navy SEALs during training, saying that all of those things were employed as they worked to combat the rough water, the freezing temperatures, and the grueling physical stress of the swim. He noted that the pace changed with the currents, and they had to know when to go all out and when they could back off in order to hit those currents just right.
The realization of how dangerous the swim was didn&#8217;t truly hit McGuire until he got out of the water, when he said a local approached and asked whether they were aware of just how many great white shark attacks happened in the area.
&#8220;They were local, so I figured they would know better about that than I would, coming from the east coast,&#8221; he said, and then he added the real kicker: &#8220;When we got to the beach, one of the kayakers told us that the biggest great white dorsal fin he&#8217;d ever seen went right by us right when we started the swim. Of course, we didn&#8217;t know that until we got out of the water, but it definitely added a little excitement.&#8221;

Alcatraz Swim

How Hard Would It Be To Swim From Alcatraz To Freedom? We Asked People Who’ve Done It.

How Hard Would It Be To Swim From Alcatraz To Freedom? We Asked People Who've Done It.

Crime

Criminal Justice

Donald Trump

Prison

Riley Gaines

The following is an excerpt taken from the new book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Gold-Radicals-Traitors-California/dp/1546008039">Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, And Traitors Who Killed The California Dream And Now Threaten Us All</a>” By Susan Crabtree and Jedd McFatter. (Center Street/Hachette, March 2025)
* * *
The Failed Progressive Vision
Under Newsom’s watch, violent crime in California has skyrocketed. Homicides jumped by 33.9 percent and aggravated assaults by 25.3 percent in 2022, with gun‑related homicides and aggravated assaults soaring by 37.7 percent and 61.1 percent, respectively. The actual rates are likely much higher. Crime data only captures incidents reported to police, and many crimes go unreported.
The rapidly rising crime rates didn’t just occur in a vacuum. They directly correspond with Newsom’s decade‑plus‑long progressive experiment with criminal justice reform, which has resulted in far lighter sentences and the premature release of violent criminals from jail. After Newsom released tens of thousands of prisoners during COVID, ostensibly to prevent the virus from spreading among California’s incarcerated criminals, the state prison population dropped from 160,000 in 2011 to around 91,556 by mid‑2024. As we discuss in Chapter 4, Newsom has been accused of releasing these prisoners under a false premise. COVID death rates in the state­ corrections system have been markedly lower than in the outside population. Even as crime surges, Newsom’s administration estimates the prison population will drop to roughly 86,000 by 2028.
Newsom is not only emptying prisons; he is also shutting them down. His administration has closed or is closing four state prisons, and has plans to “reimagine and transform” San Quentin, the state’s oldest and most notorious prison (and previous home to the largest “death row” in the United States), into a rehabilitation center. “We are literally tearing down walls to reimagine our prison system, incentivize true rehabilitation, and end cycles of violence and crime,” Newsom said in a 2024 press release. “Brick by brick, we’re building a new future that will make all of us safer.” But Newsom cited no evidence that the state is growing safer because there is none. As we will explain in Chapter 5 the state’s corrections agency won’t disclose rehabilitation results for the years Newsom has served in review copy office. Again, Newsom and the progressives’ failed COVID policies exacerbated the problem. During the pandemic, when millions were out of work and the state had the highest unemployment in the nation, flash mobs of masked robbers stormed through the doors of Nordstrom and other high‑end retailers in San Francisco and Greater Los Angeles, stealing thousands of dollars of purses, clothes, and jewelry. This type of organized retail theft has become such a massive problem that many retailers are closing their doors for good. By mid‑ 2024, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Whole Foods, Anthropologie, Old Navy, Office Depot, 7‑Eleven, and Denny’s all announced plans to close stores in downtown San Francisco or nearby Oakland. Starbucks and Target have also closed locations.
<div id="attachment_890669" style="width: 394px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Gold-Radicals-Traitors-California/dp/1546008039"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-890669" class="size-large wp-image-890669" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/91tKIgq7KIL._SL1500_-384x576.jpg" alt="Cover copyright: 2025 by Hachette Book Group, Inc." width="384" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/91tKIgq7KIL._SL1500_-384x576.jpg 384w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/91tKIgq7KIL._SL1500_-200x300.jpg 200w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/91tKIgq7KIL._SL1500_-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/91tKIgq7KIL._SL1500_.jpg 1000w" sizes="(max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px" /></a>Cover copyright: 2025 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.</div>
Newsom attributes business closures in downtown San Francisco to “macroeconomic” shifts, not rampant theft, drug use, and violent crime. In August 2023, downtown San Francisco was such a hotbed of crime, homelessness, and drugs that the US Department of Health and Human Services advised employees at the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in the Tenderloin District to work remotely “for the foreseeable future.” Showing up for work at the building had become just too dangerous.
In January 2024, California’s homegrown, beloved burger joint, In‑N‑­Out Burger, announced that it would close a store for the first time in its ­seventy‑five‑year history, citing crime. The franchise no longer considered the store near Oakland International Airport safe for operation. “We feel the frequency and severity of the crimes being encountered by our customers and associates leave us no alternative,” the company said. “Despite taking repeated steps to create safer conditions, our customers and associates are regularly victimized by car break‑ ins, property damage, theft, and armed robberies.”
Southern California isn’t faring much better. More and more businesses in Santa Monica and Los Angeles, even on once tony and vibrant Wilshire Avenue, have boarded up due to vandalism, crime, and homelessness scaring customers away.
“Mayor, we need your help. We need your help in this area,” Sean James, an independent contractor who runs a business in Santa Monica pleaded in an interview with a local Fox News affiliate.
The surge in violent murders, rapes, organized retail thefts, and other crimes that shock the conscience are directly the result of Newsom’s failed progressive vision and can be laid squarely at his feet. Back in 2014, when Newsom was lieutenant governor, he was the highest‑ranking official pushing the specific progressive ballot measure responsible for the chaos: Proposition 47. This was the George Soros–backed policy that decriminalized drug, property crimes, and even certain sex crimes. Prop. 47 turned theft of items valued under $950, and some drug offenses, from felonies to misdemeanors. Newsom vocally supported the progressive activists and organizations pushing Prop. 47, while his boss, then‑Governor Jerry Brown, remained quiet. The measure passed by a wide margin.
Despite the bedlam that has ensued, Newsom now seems in denial over the disastrous effects of Prop. 47. In early 2024, he revealed that he witnessed a shoplifter steal from Target without workers intervening to stop. When he confronted an employee about it, the woman blamed the California governor for passing laws that emboldened criminals — before realizing he was in fact the governor. “Why didn’t you stop him?” Newsom recalls asking the Target employee. “The governor lowered the threshold &#8230; there’s no accountability,” the employee said. Newsom’s description of the encounter was widely ridiculed for his failure to recognize the obvious truth in the Target employee’s accusation. 
* * *
This excerpt is taken from the new book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Gold-Radicals-Traitors-California/dp/1546008039" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Fool’s Gold</a>” by Susan Crabtree and Jedd McFatter. Published by permission of Center Street/Hachette Book Group. Copyright © 2025 by Susan Crabtree and Jedd McFatter.
Susan Crabtree is senior White House and national political correspondent for RealClearPolitics.
Jedd McFatter is the director of research at Peter Schweizer’s Government Accountability Institute.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

California Governor Newsom Announces New Funding For Los Angeles Communities Affected By Wildfires

Newsom Let Thousands Of Prisoners Walk During COVID. Then Crime Skyrocketed.

Books

California

COVID

Democrats

Gavin Newsom

Leftists

Prisons

Progressivism

San Francisco

Violent Crime

It&#8217;s always interesting when the news media, whose job is supposedly to keep us informed, fails to even mention one of the most important stories that&#8217;s unfolding in the country. As we&#8217;ve seen, the press will devote days of coverage to the plight of federal bureaucrats who can&#8217;t respond to a simple email. The idea appears to be that these bureaucrats, as government employees, are entitled to special protections, simply by virtue of working for the government.
But for reasons that no one has explained, these same mainstream media outlets have demonstrated no sympathy — or even the slightest interest — in the ongoing shutdown that&#8217;s unfolding in New York&#8217;s state prison system. Corrections officers in virtually every single one of New York&#8217;s prisons are now on a so-called &#8220;wildcat&#8221; strike, meaning a strike that&#8217;s not approved by the union or allowed by law. This is a strike that&#8217;s now in its second week. Nine out of ten corrections officers in the state have walked off the job, saying the working conditions have become extremely unsafe. Prison guards are now constantly being assaulted, and they&#8217;ve had enough. As a result, the National Guard has been called in, as part of a desperate bid to prevent a deadly prison takeover, like the one that led to mass casualties in Attica back in the 1970s.
Some of these National Guard units are currently staying in the cells at these prisons in New York. And as of now, it seems likely they&#8217;ll be there for a while. Even though New York has offered to double the overtime pay of any correctional officer who goes back to work, it doesn&#8217;t look like many of them are taking the government up on that offer.
So how did we arrive at a situation where government employees are encouraged to complain on CNN about an email from Elon Musk, while government employees who say their lives are in danger every time they go to work are being ignored? That doesn&#8217;t quite make sense. And it&#8217;s especially confusing when you consider the fact that, ordinarily, the fact that corrections officers are refusing to report to duty at roughly 38 of New York&#8217;s 42 prisons would be exactly the kind of story that the news media would be interested in. It&#8217;s clearly the setup for a potentially significant disaster, and normally the media loves a story like that. But not this time. Why might that be?
If you look into what these correctional officers are demanding, the media blackout starts to make a little more sense. But before I get into the specifics, I want to provide some context first. And I&#8217;ll do that by asking a simple question: If you had to guess the average life expectancy of a correctional officer in this country, what would you estimate it to be? For reference, the life expectancy for the general population is around 77 years, which is already relatively low, and it&#8217;s still dropping. Law enforcement officers, as a category, have a life expectancy of around 66 years. And that&#8217;s obviously pretty bad. But for correctional officers, life expectancy is even lower. In fact, it&#8217;s much lower. The average life expectancy for a correctional officer in this country is just <a href="https://news.siu.edu/2024/06/062624-siu-researchers-find-prison-guards-suffer-ptsd-and-other-issues-but-get-little-help.php#:~:text=The%20average%20life%20expectancy%20of,the%20most%20recent%20data%20available." target="_blank" rel="noopener">59-years-old</a>. A major reason for that is the stress that the job entails, which leads to a very high rate of suicide.
So already, the baseline is not good. The work conditions, in general, are not exactly ideal. But instead of addressing those work conditions in any meaningful way, in 2022, New York passed something called &#8220;The Human Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act,&#8221; or HALT Act. This is a law that had its origins in the George Floyd era, and it makes it far more difficult for prison guards to confine dangerous inmates to solitary confinement.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1544-criminals-are-taking-control-over-our-prisons-and-nothing-is-being-done-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
In particular, the law completely <a href="https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/senate-passes-halt-solitary-confinement-act" target="_blank" rel="noopener">prevents</a> prison guards from putting anyone aged 21 or younger into solitary confinement, for any reason. Yes, they consider 21-year-olds to be a &#8220;special population,&#8221; as if they&#8217;re children. So they can&#8217;t be locked away by themselves. That would be unthinkable. Additionally, no matter how old an inmate is, the law states that the maximum amount of time an inmate can be placed in solitary confinement is just 15 days. In other words, even if you&#8217;re a 25-year-old gangbanger in peak physical condition, and you&#8217;ve decided to constantly assault prison guards and shank other inmates, then you won&#8217;t be put in solitary confinement for more than two weeks. After that, you&#8217;re free.
New York Democrats passed this law on the theory that solitary confinement is a form of &#8220;legalized torture.&#8221; Of course, if you&#8217;re a sane person, then the idea of being forced to interact with other inmates in a New York state prison, outside of solitary confinement, probably sounds a lot like torture. And also, keep in mind, we&#8217;re talking about an extremely dysfunctional group of people here. The only people going into solitary are criminals who ended up in prison, and then committed additional offenses after they were incarcerated. No one is &#8220;torturing&#8221; these people. We&#8217;ve simply run out of places to put them.
But New York&#8217;s political leaders disagreed. They decided that it&#8217;s more important to have &#8220;compassion&#8221; for criminals than compassion for prison guards, or for anyone else. And the results have been clear. In the three years since the HALT Act was passed, inmate-on-inmate assaults have increased by nearly 170%. There&#8217;s also been a 75% increase in attacks by inmates against prison staff. That&#8217;s why, during this strike, the correctional workers have said that their top priority — their main demand — is repealing the HALT Act. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 Prison Strike" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x1RxWFBLE0Q?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
We give government employees a hard time — rightfully so — but these are government workers who actually perform a necessary job. In fact, it&#8217;s not just necessary. Civilized society can&#8217;t exist without these people. These correctional officers are not putting together mandatory DEI training sessions at the Pentagon. They&#8217;re not auditing people over $600 they received on Venmo. They&#8217;re nothing like the government workers <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1543-incompetent-federal-employees-panic-when-asked-what-they-do-all-day-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">we talked about yesterday</a>. They&#8217;re our last line of defense that&#8217;s keeping extremely dangerous criminals locked up, far away from the rest of us. And yet they&#8217;ve been ignored and, it seems, completely abandoned by the leadership in their state. If anything, the state has been actively sabotaging their ability to do their jobs.
And they&#8217;ve had some help along the way. In fact, local news stations in New York are still producing sob stories for these criminals. Just the other day, a local news station in Buffalo aired this segment about a convicted murderer who says that the prison guards are wrong, and that we really need the HALT Act to remain in place. Here&#8217;s his reasoning. This is one of the most deranged segments you&#8217;ll ever see on a news station. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="003 HALT Act" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CQCjfUEo6oI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Notice how the reporter just kind of casually slips in the whole &#8220;second-degree murder&#8221; thing in the middle of the segment. They introduce Jerome as this reasonable guy who&#8217;s upset with solitary confinement. He says it&#8217;s comparable to getting his fingernails pulled out. He calls it torture. Then they drop the fact that he&#8217;s killed another person, just to get it out of the way. They also don&#8217;t mention anything he did while he was incarcerated, which might explain why he was placed in solitary. Instead, they just move right along to the analogy he makes, where he says that normal people wouldn&#8217;t want to live in their bathroom for any amount of time.
The logic is pretty solid, right up until you realize that Jerome Wright has committed murder, manslaughter, robbery and burglary. Once you kill another human being, along with a slew of other very serious crimes, then you don&#8217;t get to complain about your accommodations in prison. On the other hand, if you don&#8217;t murder another human being, then you don&#8217;t have to live in your bathroom. You can live anywhere you want. It&#8217;s one of the perks of being a non-murderer. That&#8217;s how the system works. We don&#8217;t want to encourage people to commit murder. We want to discourage it. And one of the ways we do that is by placing murderers in places they don&#8217;t want to be. (And by the way, when Jerome Wright was paroled, he tested positive for cocaine during a drug test, then signed a confession admitting he had used cocaine. But we&#8217;re supposed to believe that was all a big misunderstanding as well. The Washington Post wrote up a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/23/new-yorks-crushing-parole-system-snags-an-activist-deacon-mentor/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">whole sob story</a> about it. So this guy is never responsible for anything that happens to him, essentially. While he&#8217;s busy killing people and failing drug tests, it&#8217;s our job not to disappoint him. And we just keep failing.)
On the bright side, I can think of one solution that would solve Jerome Wright&#8217;s problem, and the problems created by many other murderers like him. It turns out that no one — not a single person — has been executed in the state of New York since 1963. The state has essentially abolished the death penalty. That means that all of the worst, most violent people in the state just stay in the system forever until they die of old age. If we actually had a sensible system of capital punishment that we used on the worst kinds of criminals, then the chaos in our prisons could be greatly reduced, at the very least. Certainly people like Jerome Wright wouldn&#8217;t complain about their bathroom-sized cells anymore. And prison guards wouldn&#8217;t be assaulted every day. Seems like a win-win.
Then again, no one&#8217;s floating that as a possible solution here — just like no one in the mainstream press is talking about this prison strike at all. And they&#8217;re not talking about the strike because it&#8217;s yet another example of how so-called &#8220;criminal justice reform&#8221; is, in fact, a disaster waiting to happen. Once again, we&#8217;re seeing how &#8220;compassion&#8221; for criminals, in the end, causes suffering for innocent people. That is the lesson of the HALT Act, and the ongoing crisis unfolding in New York. And before criminals completely seize control of the prison system in one of our largest states, it&#8217;s a lesson more people in power need to learn — and quickly.

Abandoned prison

Criminals Are Taking Control Over Our Prisons And Nothing Is Being Done

Matt Walsh

New York

Opinion

I&#8217;ve written a good deal about the damage that the field of modern psychiatry has done to mankind, across a variety of contexts. Most of the harms — the invention of gender ideology, the mass overprescribing of psychotropic drugs, and so on — are relatively widely known. What&#8217;s less well-known, because not a lot of people talk about it, is the sinister influence of modern psychiatry on our criminal justice system. For all the criticism to be made of Soros D.A.&#8217;s and Democrats&#8217; refusal to prosecute criminals — all of it justified — the role of modern psychiatry in freeing violent offenders is often ignored. But it&#8217;s very much a crisis in this country, and it&#8217;s been one for some time.
It was all the way back in the early 1970s when a man named Charles Meach beat a 22-year-old grocery store clerk to death in Anchorage, Alaska. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and shipped off to a mental institution. But just seven years later, Meach was released. Psychiatrists claimed Meach had made a full recovery. He promised he wouldn&#8217;t murder anyone in the future, and that was good enough, apparently. After all, why would he lie? What had Charles Meach ever done to prove himself untrustworthy? I mean, aside from the whole beating-someone-to-death thing. So he was released on the honor system. He pinky promised not to murder ever again. But the promise was short-lived. Two years later, Meach purchased a revolver and murdered four teenagers at a campsite, just for the thrill of it.
Reforms were promised after that massacre, and you can see why. It was a pretty clear sign that mental health professionals should stop pretending that murderers can somehow be &#8220;cured&#8221; of their murderous tendencies. Murder is not, in fact, a symptom of an illness. It is a manifestation of human evil. And people who commit those kinds of evil acts should be locked in prison forever.
But psychiatrists were not dissuaded. Instead, our sainted mental health professionals, with the help of mostly Democrat-controlled state governments across the country, have continued to embed themselves into the criminal justice system. Their psychiatric facilities now function as safe houses for violent thugs like Jordan Neely, who didn&#8217;t go to prison even after he punched an elderly woman in the face on the subway and broke her nose. Instead, Neely was offered &#8220;intensive outpatient psychiatric treatment,&#8221; which would supposedly cure him of his addiction to terrorizing random people on the train. And we all know how that turned out.
Any rational person who looks at incidents like this will recognize immediately what&#8217;s going on. Left-wing prosecutors have found a kind of hack that enables them to release extremely dangerous criminals, even when their guilt is beyond any doubt. All the prosecutors have to do is find some hippy psychiatrist to sign off on a &#8220;treatment plan,&#8221; and then pretty much anything is possible. They could release some of the most dangerous and depraved criminals on the planet, who committed their crimes not too long ago, based solely on the pseudoscience of modern psychiatry — which is completely subjective, and often relies entirely on the promise of the criminal not to reoffend. There is no crime — and I really mean no crime — so heinous that the criminal cannot be released back into society if a psychiatrist claims that he’s been successfully “treated.”
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1542-the-woke-justice-system-just-let-an-axe-murdering-cannibal-walk-free-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
If you think I’m exaggerating, then please consider the case of Tyree Smith, which has to be one of the most outrageous miscarriages of justice we&#8217;ve ever seen in American history. Tyree Smith confessed to the brutal murder of a 43-year-old homeless man in a vacant apartment in Connecticut back in 2011. Smith was apparently <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130820075136/https://www.ctpost.com/local/article/accused-cannibal-considered-eating-psychiatrist-4653241.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener">distressed</a> about losing his job at Starbucks, before he began to hear voices in his head. 
Now, the details of his crime are so horrific that I’m sorry that I have to share them with you. But it’s important that you have the full story. So here it is. Smith used an axe to kill the man inside an abandoned home in Bridgeport. He then hacked up the man’s body, removed several of his organs — an eyeball and some of his brain — and then ate them at cemetery nearby. So this is an axe murdering graveyard cannibal we’re talking about. Something straight out of a horror film. The man&#8217;s body (or what was left of it) wasn&#8217;t found for nearly 40 days. At trial, Smith was found not guilty by reason of insanity. In 2013, a panel of judges committed Smith to a mental institution for 60 years.
But Smith will not spend anywhere near 60 years in a mental institution.
Instead, something called the &#8220;Psychiatric Security Review Board&#8221; in Connecticut has just granted Smith a &#8220;conditional release.&#8221; That means he&#8217;ll receive &#8220;day passes&#8221; to wander around the hospital grounds as he pleases. And very soon, he&#8217;ll be able to make &#8220;off-site&#8221; visits into the community.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="001 Bridgeport Killer Cannibal" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/e5dnQA0zPPs?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
If you had told me a few years ago that woke justice reform would soon lead to the release of an axe murderer cannibal, it would have seemed too outlandish even to me. Even if you have a black murderer and a white victim, as you do in this case — even given everything we&#8217;ve seen during the moral panic of the BLM era — it still seems unthinkable. And it only gets more unthinkable when you look into the specifics of Tyree Smith&#8217;s case and why he was released.
First of all, it’s perhaps worth nothing, this decision was made during a hearing in which Tyree Smith wasn&#8217;t even present. He teleconferenced in, and he didn&#8217;t appear on the video screens in the hearing room. Right away, that should be disqualifying. You will not find very many employers in this country that are willing to hire a job applicant after a phone call, without seeing the applicant in any way. Which means it is, at least in some ways, more difficult for a normal person to get a job at Walmart than it is for a homicidal cannibal to get released from an asylum.
So why is Connecticut releasing Tyree Smith? As the hearing went on, a psychiatrist testified that Smith has recovered. He is a reformed cannibal. His axe murdering days are behind him. And her evidence for this statement is that Smith has denied experiencing any hallucinations, or a desire to harm other people. He’s better now, and we know he’s better now, because he says he’s better now. I&#8217;m going to play that clip from the hearing, then at the end you&#8217;ll see a question from the prosecutor to the doctor. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 Hearing footage" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a7qPoXhXTYs?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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As you just heard, evidence of Tyree Smith&#8217;s “recovery” is based on self-reported data. They “know” that he hasn’t had any hallucinations or cravings to consume human flesh because he told them: &#8220;He denied visual hallucinations or a desire to harm others or himself.&#8221; Well, okay then. What more do you need to know? Oh and by the way, if he stops taking his medications, he could totally become a cannibal again. But he pinky-promises that he&#8217;ll keep taking his medications, and stop murdering people.
Of course, at the same time, Smith also knows that his only chance of ever seeing the outside world again is to lie about all of this. So either he is an axe murderer cannibal who grew out of it like a child grows out of a bed-wetting phase, or he’s lying. There’s about a 99.9999 percent chance of the latter.
At the hearing, one of the victim&#8217;s family members pointed this out. She remarked, “How do we really know he’s not going to do this again? He had no remorse for killing Angel.” She also said that the whole family is terrified because it&#8217;s quite possible Tyree Smith will reoffend. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="003 family" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gHaMnGxwMvk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
So the axe-murderer is apparently the life of the party at the insane asylum. He’s a joy to be around. Of course we can probably assume that the man he hacked to death and then consumed would disagree with this assessment. But he’s not here — because he’s dead. The point is that, as long as Tyree Smith isn’t axe-murdering, he’s really quite pleasant. But that&#8217;s small comfort to the family of his victim, who really wants an answer to a pretty basic question, which is: What assurances do we have that he won&#8217;t kill us, exactly?
In their report, the Connecticut psychiatry board includes this line, which is really an all-time caliber line. If you&#8217;re assembling a hall-of-fame of the most deranged statements that the medical profession has tried to pass off as legitimate, this would have to be very high on the list. This is directly from the Connecticut psychiatry board&#8217;s report. I’m <a href="https://www.ctpost.com/news/article/bridgeport-ct-tyree-smith-released-18394546.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener">not making this up</a>, I assure you: &#8220;He denied experiencing cravings but stated that if they were to arise, he would reach out to his hospital and community supports and providers.&#8221;
Yes, cravings. So just relax, everybody. There&#8217;s nothing to worry about. The Connecticut psychiatric board is releasing an axe murderer cannibal back into society, but they assure us that if he experiences any “cravings” for the taste of human flesh, he will immediately “reach out” for help. They’re going to release him but they’ll say on his way out the door: “Hey, make sure to reach out if you ever feel like eating someone’s brain!” And that should do it. What a relief. In the last decade or so that he&#8217;s been locked away, Tyree Smith has become totally and completely normal. There&#8217;s zero likelihood that Tyree Smith will, say, order Uber Eats and assume that the delivery driver is the meal.
Of course, all of this discussion about whether Tyree Smith is “reformed” actually misses the point anyway. Even in the fantasyland scenario where an axe murderer could be transformed into a functional, tax-paying member of society, he still shouldn’t be released. He should be in prison as a matter of basic justice. If he&#8217;s truly cured of his schizophrenia and murderous tendencies, then he should be shipped to a maximum-security prison. The idea that he belongs in civilized society, after brutally murdering a man and then eating him, is only appealing if you&#8217;re the kind of person who — for one reason or another — sympathizes more with killers than the victims who are killed. And that&#8217;s the kind of attitude that defines a lot of psychiatrists.
For example, I looked up one of the Yale psychiatrists who testified for the defense in Smith&#8217;s original trial, named Reena Kapoor (pronouns she/her/hers). She&#8217;s written a lot of articles about her time working with murderers who were found not guilty by reason of insanity. Here&#8217;s a direct <a href="https://jaapl.org/content/36/4/563.long" target="_blank" rel="noopener">quote</a> from one of those articles. It&#8217;s about how an inmate — a murderer — asked to take a walk with her while in prison. And apparently it left her very hot and bothered:
<blockquote>J.M. and I never did take a walk together. In fact, neither of us ever mentioned the idea again. &#8230; As far as I know, J.M. does not speak of me longingly or wax nostalgic about our year of psychotherapy. .. As for me, I have had some time to reflect on things, and I am plagued by one last question about J.M.&#8217;s request to take a walk with me. Why did he ask to take a walk in particular? Why not ask to see a movie or have lunch together?</blockquote>
It reads like an early 2000s MySpace post or a LiveJournal blog from a teenage girl who&#8217;s infatuated with serial killers. But it&#8217;s not. It&#8217;s an excerpt from an article published in the &#8220;Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.&#8221; This is how a lot of &#8220;doctors&#8221; in the field of psychiatry conduct themselves. It&#8217;s the kind of thing they fantasize about. And in Tyree Smith&#8217;s case, they have taken their ideology to its logical conclusion. Of course, they don&#8217;t want Smith to live anywhere near their neighborhoods. They just want you to have to deal with him.
This is bleeding heart liberalism in its final, horrifically deranged and monstrous, and also literal, form. Although, as I’ve often pointed out, this isn’t actually due to an overabundance of compassion or sensitivity. It’s exactly the opposite. These decisions are fueled by a kind of psychotic indifference to the immense human suffering that will inevitably come as a result. The people who made this decision know that there&#8217;s a high likelihood that this man will butcher another person, and they just don’t care. They are just as psychotic as he is. In Russia, they <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/11/24/news/cannibal-serial-killer-denis-gorin-pardoned-by-putin-for-fighting-in-ukraine/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">send</a> their cannibals to fight in war, to inflict horrors on the enemies of the state. That happened several times in just the past few years, during the war in Ukraine. But in the United States, psychiatrists want cannibals to inflict those horrors on Americans.
When modern psychiatry was just getting started in 19th century Britain, something called the &#8220;Alleged Lunatics&#8217; Friend Society&#8221; formed. They saw psychiatrists as completely illegitimate — as totalitarians who just wanted to imprison people without due process. And there was indeed a long period of time where psychiatry was used to imprison people who were not dangerous and had done nothing wrong. We now have the exact opposite problem. Psychiatry has done a 180 flip. Deranged lunatics are being freed as a means of circumventing the criminal justice system. The common thread here — the the thing that ties together these two extremes — is that in both cases psychiatry is a cover to inflict horrors beyond comprehension onto the public.
The reality — and this really shouldn’t need to be said — is that someone who kills another human and eats his brain will never be fit to live freely in society ever again. This should not be a controversial statement. In fact, it should be the least controversial statement ever uttered. But in psychiatry, it is controversial, which is why people living in Connecticut are worried that they&#8217;re back on the menu tonight. The truth is that the people who freed the axe murderer cannibal are just as demented as the axe murderer cannibal himself. They haven’t consumed human flesh at a graveyard — as far as I know, anyway — but they are equally deranged. And because they have a lot more power, and are legitimized under the veil of “science,” they are quite a bit more dangerous.

MixCollage-24-Feb-2025-02-40-PM-880

The Woke Justice System Just Let An Axe Murdering Cannibal Walk Free

Connecticut

Courts

Mental Health

Murder

Psychiatry

Woke Culture

President <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/joe-biden" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Joe Biden</a> announced Friday that he was commuting the sentences of 2,500 drug offenders in what will be one of his final actions in office. 
Biden said that those whose sentences were commuted were “non-violent” offenders who had been given &#8220;disproportionately long sentences.” The announcement means that Biden has now handed out the most pardons or commutations of any president. 
“Today, I am commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of non-violent drug offenses who are serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today under current law, policy, and practice,” Biden said. “With this action, I have now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president in U.S. history.”
He said the action was for individuals who &#8220;received lengthy sentences based on discredited distinctions between crack and powder cocaine” and “outdated sentencing enhancements for drug crimes.”
In his statement, Biden pointed to multiple sentencing laws passed by Congress, including the First Step Act, which then-President Donald Trump signed during his first term in office. 
“This action is an important step toward righting historic wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families and communities after spending far too much time behind bars,” Biden said. “I am proud of my record on clemency and will continue to review additional commutations and pardons.”
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Biden previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-announces-mass-commutations-after-criticism-over-hunter-pardon" target="_blank" rel="noopener">commuted</a> the sentences of 1,500 people, issued 39 pardons for individuals convicted of non-violent crimes, and gave a mass pardon for people convicted of marijuana possession. 
Biden has faced criticism over his clemency actions, including when he commuted the death sentences of 37 of 40 prisoners on federal death row, each of whom had been convicted of murder, just two days before Christmas. 
One of those whose death sentence was commuted was Thomas Sanders, who was <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/neworleans/news/press-releases/jury-imposes-death-sentence-on-a-las-vegas-man-for-kidnapping-and-murdering-a-12-year-old-girl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">convicted</a> in 2014 of kidnapping and murdering 12-year-old Lexis Roberts. Sanders kidnapped Roberts after he shot her mother in the head. He held Roberts captive for several days before he shot her four times, cut her throat, and hid her body in the woods. 
Biden was also sharply criticized for his sweeping pardon of his son Hunter, which came after he had previously promised not to do so.

President Biden Speaks At Commander In Chief Farewell Ceremony

Biden Commutes Sentences Of Another 2,500 Drug Offenders

Drugs

Executive

Joe Biden

Pardon

Politics

A woman is speaking out and blasting Vice President Kamala Harris after an illegal immigrant criminal was able to evade prison time because of the Democrats&#8217; presumptive nominee, and subsequently ran the woman down in an SUV after stealing her purse.
Amanda Kiefer was just 30 years old when she was assaulted by the illegal, identified as Alexander Izaguirre, back in 2008. He was part of Harris&#8217; controversial &#8220;jobs program&#8221; when she served as the San Francisco District Attorney.
Speaking out for the first time about the attack, Keifer <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/victim-undocumented-immigrants-2008-attack-now-cited-trump/story?id=112314125" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> ABC News that it&#8217;s &#8220;laughable&#8221; for Harris to position the 2024 election as a race between a &#8220;tough prosecutor,&#8221; in Harris, and a convicted felon, former President Donald Trump.
Harris&#8217; jobs program was called &#8220;Back on Track,&#8221; and, in part, it kept illegal immigrant criminals out of jail by instead training them for jobs they could not legally hold. Izaguirre was one of those criminals.
The illegal was picked for Harris&#8217; program following a felony drug charge. After evading jail time, he stole Keifer&#8217;s purse and ran her down in an SUV. At the time, the Los Angeles Times, a far-left paper, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jun-22-me-harris22-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">described</a> the attack as follows:
<blockquote>A stranger, later identified as Alexander Izaguirre, snatched her purse and hopped into an SUV, police say. The driver sped forward to run Kiefer down. Terrified, she leaped onto the hood and saw Izaguirre and the driver laughing. The driver slammed on the brakes, propelling Kiefer to the pavement. Her skull fractured. Blood oozed from her ear.</blockquote>
&#8220;If people who committed crimes were allowed to stay out of prison to train for jobs they couldn&#8217;t legally hold, I think most Americans would disapprove of that,&#8221; Kiefer said.
Harris said in 2019 that she does not want illegal immigrants criminally charged for entering our country illegally. She was also notably tapped by President Joe Biden as “border czar,&#8221; but as VP has <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/harris-has-not-spoken-border-patrol-chief-despite-ongoing-migrant-crisis-root-causes-push">reportedly</a> never spoken to the Border Patrol chief and did not actually visit the border until June 2021. 
NBC News host Lester Holt famously confronted Harris about why she hadn’t made her way down to the border:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
Kamala Harris literally had just ONE job, as &#8220;Border Czar&#8221;. On a scale of 1 to 10, how well has she done? If you&#8217;re not sure, this short video should help. <a href="https://t.co/iVZM9k5qLP">pic.twitter.com/iVZM9k5qLP</a>
— GREG SWAIM SHOW (@GSwaim) <a href="https://twitter.com/GSwaim/status/1816094285579628718?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 24, 2024</a></blockquote>
Under Biden and Harris, border crossings hit an all-time high, averaging around 2 million per year, which doesn’t include the “gotaways” or the <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-parole-biden-administration-1-million-migrants/">more than one million</a> parole migrants. Among those encounters were 362 individuals who were on the terror watch list. The total number of encounters under the Biden-Harris administration is expected to reach 10 million by the end of the fiscal year. 
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/kamala-a-to-z-from-marxist-influences-to-willie-brown-to-radical-policy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Kamala A To Z: From Marxist Influences, To Willie Brown, To Radical Policy</a>

Vice President Kamala Harris Delivers A Keynote At The American Federation of Teachers’ 88th National Convention In Houston

Illegal Immigrant Criminal Assaulted Woman After Kamala Harris Let Him Evade Prison. Now She’s Speaking Out.

Illegal Immigrant Criminal Ran Woman Down In An SUV After Kamala Harris Let Him Evade Prison. Now She’s Speaking Out. 

Kamala Harris

Today, a federal jury in Wilmington, Delaware, found that the president&#8217;s son, Hunter Biden, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hunter-biden-guilty-on-all-counts-in-gun-case" target="_blank" rel="noopener">violated the law</a> when he lied about his drug use on a gun store firearms form to obtain a revolver, speed loader, and ammunition in October of 2018.
This was not a particularly close case. Evidence showed, among many other things, that Biden was texting his drug dealer the day before he bought the gun. The upshot, however, is that Hunter Biden becomes the first son of a United States president to become a felon in the history of the country. For much of the national news media, Hunter Biden&#8217;s trial and conviction is proof that the justice system is fair and impartial. Therefore, we should conclude that Donald Trump&#8217;s prosecutions are legitimate.
It&#8217;s fine to imprison the leading presidential frontrunner on a novel and untested legal theory, they say, because the current president&#8217;s son could potentially go to jail for crimes he obviously committed.
A columnist for The Daily Beast, for example, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/hunters-trial-reveals-trumps-big-lie-about-biden-and-justice" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a>:
<blockquote>Hunter Biden’s trial &#8230; shows that Trump’s principal assertion—that he is being unfairly targeted by Joe Biden—doesn’t hold water.</blockquote>
CNN, meanwhile, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/04/media/hunter-biden-trial-right-wing-media/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ran this headline:</a>
<blockquote>Hunter Biden trial shows America’s justice system isn’t so rigged after all.</blockquote>
In order to come to a conclusion like this, you have to ignore the circumstances of how this trial came about, as well as the many crimes Hunter Biden has not been charged with — and, thanks to the DOJ, will never be charged with. Under Joe Biden, the federal government, very simply, did not want to bring this case. And when their hand was forced by two IRS whistleblowers, the federal government did everything they possibly could to protect Joe Biden and to sabotage more serious foreign corruption and tax evasion charges.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1384-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
As the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/us/politics/inside-hunter-biden-plea-deal.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> last year, the lead prosecutor on the case, David Weiss, &#8220;appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr. Biden at all, and his office came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges. But the correspondence reveals that his position, relayed through his staff, changed in the spring, around the time a pair of I.R.S. officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation.&#8221;
One of those whistleblowers, Gary Shapley, <a href="https://waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Whistleblower-1-Transcript_Redacted.pdf#page=9" target="_blank" rel="noopener">alleged</a> in an affidavit that:
<blockquote>But the criminal tax investigation of Hunter Biden, led by the United States Attorney&#8217;s Office for the District of Delaware, has been handled differently than any investigation I&#8217;ve ever been a part of for the past 14 years of my IRS service. &#8230; At every stage decisions were made that had the effect of benefiting the subject.</blockquote>
Shapely also stated:
<blockquote>Investigators assigned to this investigation were obstructed from seeing all the available evidence. It is unknown if all the evidence in [Hunter&#8217;s] laptop was reviewed by agents or by prosecutors.</blockquote>
The testimony of Shapley and another whistleblower caused major, unexpected problems for Joe Biden&#8217;s DOJ. Their plan to bury the Hunter Biden case entirely was no longer viable.
First of all, the whistleblowers revealed that Merrick Garland may have lied when he told Congress that the DOJ wasn&#8217;t interfering in the Hunter Biden investigation. That had to be resolved immediately.
Secondly, and more importantly, the whistleblowers helped establish a direct link between Hunter Biden&#8217;s criminal activity and Joe Biden&#8217;s actions. 
Here&#8217;s one recent interview, for example:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Two IRS whistleblowers who investigated Hunter Biden and say they were stopped from following the trail leading to his dad tell their story tomorrow on Full Measure. <a href="https://t.co/hLOnUVJKtI">pic.twitter.com/hLOnUVJKtI</a>
&mdash; Sharyl Attkisson 🕵️‍♂️💼🥋 (@SharylAttkisson) <a href="https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/1799487153694499157?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 8, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Confronted with statements like this from whistleblowers, the DOJ had no choice but to bring some kind of charge against Hunter Biden. So they settled on a plan: They would bring a prosecution, and then immediately seek out a plea deal. This deal, as the DOJ envisioned it, would grant Hunter Biden immunity from prosecution for unrelated felonies he may have committed — including potential violations of FARA, or the Foreign Agents Registration Act, relating to his overseas business operations. That&#8217;s the law that was essentially never prosecuted until the DOJ decided to use it to target Trump aides, including Paul Manafort.
In exchange for accepting this plea deal granting him total immunity, Hunter Biden would suffer no actual punishment whatsoever. The deal was too over-the-top, though, which is why it collapsed late last year when a federal judge refused to sign off. The DOJ admitted in court that they couldn&#8217;t think of a similar sweetheart deal ever being offered in the history of federal prosecutions.
So the DOJ was back at square one — but not entirely. Their strategy to absolve Hunter Biden completely may have failed, but their plan to insulate Joe Biden from scrutiny appears to have succeeded.
As Shapely stated in his affidavit, the sabotaged investigative process into Hunter Biden:
<blockquote>… meant no charges would ever be brought in the District of Columbia, where the statute of limitations on the 2014 and &#8217;15 [tax] charges would eventually expire. The years in question included foreign income from [Ukrainian oil company] Burisma and a scheme to evade his income taxes through a partnership with a convicted felon. There were also potential FARA issues relating to 2014 and 2015. The purposeful exclusion of the 2014 and 2015 years sanitized the most substantive criminal conduct and concealed material facts.</blockquote>
In other words, the government let the statute of limitations on the most serious potential charges — the ones involving Hunter Biden&#8217;s time working at a high-paying, no-show job at a Ukrainian oil company — expire on purpose. And those potential charges aren&#8217;t simply significant because of their impact on Hunter Biden. They&#8217;re significant because, as you may remember, Joe Biden once publicly bragged about getting Ukraine&#8217;s top prosecutor fired. This was the prosecutor who, coincidentally enough, was investigating Burisma at the time. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Joe Biden Brags about getting Ukranian Prosecutor Fired" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S3Ibbq_LG-4?start=16&#038;feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
That&#8217;s Joe Biden admitting that, when he was vice president, the U.S. threatened to withhold funding to Ukraine until Ukraine fired its own top prosecutor. You can choose to believe that Joe Biden is just really passionate about ending corruption in eastern Europe or it might be that Joe Biden wanted to take the heat off the corruption that his own family was engaging in.
We&#8217;ll probably never have the evidence of any such corruption now, though — because as Shapely said, 
<blockquote>There is no mechanism available to collect the tax owed by Hunter Biden for 2014 other than in a voluntary fashion.</blockquote>
This is the ultimate goal of the Hunter Biden prosecution. The DOJ isn&#8217;t concerned about this gun case. Their real objective has been to slow-roll their work as much as possible, so that the more serious charges expire. And it&#8217;s very clear, as the whistleblower said, that there&#8217;s a viable reason to investigate not only Hunter Biden for potential FARA violations, but also his father.
Congressional Republicans, for example, have <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/hunter-biden-whatsapp-message-fuels-gop-assertions-corruption/story?id=100338044" target="_blank" rel="noopener">released</a> a July 2017 WhatsApp message in which Hunter Biden appears to threaten a Chinese business associate by mentioning his father. According to court documents, Hunter Biden wrote:
<blockquote>I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. … Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. &#8230; And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. &#8230; I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.</blockquote>
So that&#8217;s a conversation that strongly suggests that Joe Biden was directly involved with his son&#8217;s foreign business dealings with a Chinese private equity fund closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party — and that he&#8217;d leverage his influence to secure payouts.
These are the kinds of investigative threads that the DOJ has been working to bury since they obtained Hunter Biden&#8217;s laptop all the way back in December of 2019 — as part of an investigation dating back to 2018.
These investigations haven&#8217;t taken so long because they&#8217;re particularly complicated. They&#8217;ve gone on for so long because the federal government has been trying to run out the clock. First they denied that the laptop was even real, then they slow-walked the investigation into its contents. And when two IRS whistleblowers disrupted their plan, they selected the pettiest charges imaginable so that they can obscure the real crimes they desperately don&#8217;t want to investigate.
Hunter Biden was convicted today for only one reason — so that Joe Biden won&#8217;t ever be investigated.

Jury Deliberates In Hunter Biden Gun Trial

Hunter Biden Was Convicted Today, But Not For The Reasons The Media Claims

Court

Delaware

Guns

Hunter Biden

Merrick Garland

Readers Pass

As a former correctional lieutenant at a high-security men’s prison in California, I came face-to-face with a moral dilemma that ultimately led me to resign. It wasn&#8217;t an easy decision, but I could no longer stand by and watch as corruption and injustice thrived within the very system I was sworn to uphold. 
The tipping point came in 2022 with the implementation of California State Senate Bill 132, also known as the <a href="https://nicic.gov/weblink/transgender-respect-agency-and-dignity-act-sb-132" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act</a>. This new law, which legalized “gender self-identification” in state prisons, was not only misguided, but also fundamentally flawed in its execution.
I was initially hopeful that the new policy would provide necessary protections and accommodations for inmates who identified as transgender. However, what I witnessed was a system rife with negligence and disregard for both inmate safety and the well-being of correctional staff.
One of the most concerning aspects of this policy was the lack of proper protocols for housing male inmates who identify as women. 
Under the new law, a male inmate can simply tell officers, “Call me Susie today.” If officers don’t call that inmate “Susie,” the inmate can have officers written up. Inmates can then demand to be moved to a women&#8217;s institution, and officers are required to start the paperwork. In a matter of days, that male inmate can be put on a bus headed for one of California’s two women’s prisons. It’s that easy. 
Instead of conducting thorough risk assessments and considering the safety of all inmates, decisions were made haphazardly, putting vulnerable individuals at risk. As a correctional lieutenant, I witnessed firsthand the chaos and violence that ensued when inmates were placed in inappropriate housing assignments.
At Centinela State Prison, where I worked for eight years, and at Richard J. Donovan State Prison, where I worked for another eight years, we housed serial rapists, serial child molesters, and murderers. This criminal behavior doesn’t stop when the men are put behind bars — it often continues inside prison walls. 
 
In 2020 at Donovan, for example, two correctional officers and five staffers were <a href="https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/crime/6-correctional-officers-attacked-at-donovan-state-prison-in-otay-mesa/509-2c29fa7b-e1c9-456b-8e7f-afaf7cb4f4b3" target="_blank" rel="noopener">attacked</a> by four male inmates. I responded and saw the blood and prison knives on the floor. That very well could have been me.
Giving these criminals access to women’s prisons reminds me of one of the “Little Red Riding Hood&#8221; fairy tales, where a predatory wolf dresses up as a fragile, old lady with a little bonnet over his head. Just because he’s got granny’s clothes on, it doesn’t mean he’s anything like granny.
As a lieutenant, I witnessed a lot of men manipulate the new law, claiming to be transgender to cheat the system. In many cases, they wouldn’t even hide their plan from prison staffers including myself.
<div id="attachment_745987" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-745987" class="size-large wp-image-745987" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/MixCollage-04-Jun-2024-08-22-AM-8636-1024x576.jpg" alt="Screenshot: YouTube. Cruel &amp; Unusual Punishment: Prison Guard Resigns After ‘Immoral, Dangerous’ Trans Policies (Ep. 3)" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/MixCollage-04-Jun-2024-08-22-AM-8636-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/MixCollage-04-Jun-2024-08-22-AM-8636-300x169.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/MixCollage-04-Jun-2024-08-22-AM-8636-768x432.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/MixCollage-04-Jun-2024-08-22-AM-8636-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/MixCollage-04-Jun-2024-08-22-AM-8636-2048x1152.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Screenshot: YouTube. Cruel &amp; Unusual Punishment: Prison Guard Resigns After ‘Immoral, Dangerous’ Trans Policies (Ep. 3)</div>
In one instance, there was a male housed inside the prison hospital. He was scheduled to have a “sex realignment surgery” in Beverly Hills, paid for with taxpayer money. While on patrol, I overheard him say, “When I come back, I&#8217;m going to prostitute myself on the yard. I&#8217;m going to make money.”
When he returned, this inmate faced complications from his surgery. He then turned around and sued the state, saying the state purposely gave him a faulty surgery.
The California Department of Corrections, as they always do, settled the case — with more taxpayer money. 
There was also a clear lack of training and education provided to correctional staff regarding transgender issues. Many of my colleagues were ill-equipped to handle the unique challenges presented by inmates who identified as transgender, leading to conflicts and misunderstandings that could have been avoided with proper guidance.
My female colleagues are also victims of the prison transgender policy. Under the law, a male inmate identifying as a woman can now pick and choose to have a female officer perform an unclothed body search on them. So now you have females forced to look at male body parts, and what do you know? The inmates are demanding it.
Correctional staff are required to search inmates multiple times a day. Every time an inmate goes on a visit, goes to work in a vocational trade, exits his cell to go to the administrative segregation yard — they get strip searched on their way and their way back. Every time there is an incident and the inmate is placed in a holding cell, an unclothed body search is conducted. It is inhumane to force female prison staff to strip search the bodies of biological males.
As a correctional lieutenant, I took an oath to uphold the law and ensure the safety and security of all individuals under my watch. However, less than a year into the implementation of this policy, I could no longer reconcile my values with the pervasive corruption and injustice I witnessed on a daily basis. After much deliberation, I made the difficult decision to resign.
At the time I resigned, I had a number of accolades and was making $157,000 a year. I had a mortgage, two vehicles, and a 5-year-old daughter to support. It was not easy going back to eating soups and sandwiches, but as a veteran who served in Iraq, I don’t need much to survive.
My resignation was not simply an act of defiance, but a statement against a broken system that prioritizes profits over people. California&#8217;s prison system is in dire need of reform, from top to bottom. We cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the rampant corruption and abuse that plague our correctional facilities.
It is imperative that we hold those responsible for perpetuating injustice and corruption accountable for their actions. This includes administrators and policymakers who have failed to enact meaningful change, and who have subjected female inmates to cruel and unusual punishment.
As I reflect on my time in the California prison system, I am reminded of the words of Edmund Burke: &#8220;The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.&#8221; I could no longer remain silent in the face of such egregious wrongdoing. It is my hope that my resignation will serve as a wake-up call and spur much-needed action to reform our broken prison system. We owe it to the inmates, the staff, and society as a whole to do better.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Cruel &amp; Unusual Punishment: Prison Guard Resigns After ‘Immoral, Dangerous’ Trans Policies (Ep. 3)" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rOcBFCLp_rA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
* * *
Hector Bravo Ferrel is a recently retired correctional lieutenant from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, U.S. Army Combat Veteran, and YouTuber known as ‘That Prison Guard.’ He shared his story with the Independent Women’s Forum in the <a href="https://iwf.org/cruelandunusual">Cruel and Unusual Punishment</a> series.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Alcatraz Prison Cellhouse interior

Resigning In Protest: Whistleblower Exposes Corruption In California’s Prison System

Resigning In Protest: Whistleblower Exposes Corruption In California's Prison System

Transgender

Women

A couple of months ago, in March, a 37-year-old man named Crosetti Brand was released on parole in the state of Illinois. He had been locked up on a charge of home invasion and sentenced to more than a decade in prison, but the state&#8217;s prisoner review board decided to let him out early with electronic monitoring.
What happened next was predictable. Just a day after he got out of prison, Chicago police say Crosetti <a href="https://abc7chicago.com/edgewater-chicago-murder-jayden-perkins-ravenswood-avenue/14527280/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">attacked</a> a pregnant woman and her 11-year-old boy, killing the child and critically injuring his mother. According to court documents, the last time he was on parole, Crosetti had <a href="https://abc7chicago.com/edgewater-chicago-murder-jayden-perkins-ravenswood-avenue/14527280/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">threatened</a> the same woman by text message and showed up at her home. But none of Crosetti&#8217;s criminal history, including his alleged threats, were enough to keep him in prison. And his ankle monitor apparently wasn&#8217;t much of a deterrent when he got out. Now, authorities say, a child is dead as a result.
This is clearly a massive failure of the judicial system in Illinois — which, particularly post-BLM, has focused more on &#8220;rehabilitation&#8221; instead of punishment. It&#8217;s the kind of episode that you&#8217;d hope would spur lawmakers in Illinois to pass new laws to rein in their approach of &#8220;restorative justice.&#8221;
But the Illinois government has opted for a very different response. Instead of doing something to prevent violent criminals from getting out of prison, state lawmakers have decided on a course of action that&#8217;s ripped straight from a Babylon Bee article. 
A new bill that was just passed by both houses of the Illinois legislature — and which is expected to be signed by the governor — will modify state law so that the term &#8220;offender&#8221; becomes &#8220;justice-impacted individual.&#8221; The Department of Corrections and a bunch of other government agencies will be required to use that term. So the plan is not to do anything about the criminals who are getting out of prison. It&#8217;s to use a nicer word to describe these criminals. Don&#8217;t call them &#8220;offenders,&#8221; call them &#8220;justice-impacted individuals.&#8221; 
I had to check several times to make sure this wasn&#8217;t satire, because it&#8217;s quite literally beyond parody. Actually, if the Babylon Bee did this, I wouldn&#8217;t find it very funny because it would be too on the nose. But it&#8217;s reality now in Illinois. This is their cutting-edge approach to criminal justice. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="001 Stop Using Term Offender" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x72M3tvnLy8?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Before the fact-checkers jump down my throat, I&#8217;ll emphasize one thing, which is that this rebrand doesn&#8217;t apply to everyone who commits crimes in the state of Illinois. Instead, this new term applies only to men and women in the state&#8217;s &#8220;Adult Redeploy Illinois&#8221; program, or ARI. According to the government of McLean County, Illinois, the ARI program provides for &#8220;comprehensive daily supervision&#8221; of dozens of &#8220;high-risk adult felons as an alternative to costly penitentiary commitment.&#8221;
So they&#8217;re not rebranding every criminal as a &#8220;justice-impacted individual.&#8221; They&#8217;re only rebranding some &#8220;high-risk adult felons&#8221; who otherwise would be in prison. If you&#8217;re living in Chicago, hopefully you can rest easy tonight with that distinction in mind.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1374-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
The point of the word game here is the same as always: first, it removes agency from the individual by making terminology as passive as possible. An offender is not an offender anymore, because offending is something that a person actively does. It puts the onus on the individual. Instead they are “justice impacted.” They were impacted by justice. It’s not their fault. Justice just came alone and impacted them. They’re the victims here, if anything. And second, it helps identify the people in your club. They&#8217;re the ones who know about these lingo changes and follow the rules. It’s not much different from a child who sets up a pillow fort and won’t let you inside it unless you know the password, which changes randomly and on a whim.
If you go looking online for the term &#8220;justice-impacted individual,&#8221; you&#8217;ll find that it&#8217;s popular among Harvard <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXvUBYA9C3Y&amp;t=70s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">podcasters</a>, billionaire Left-wing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZXyRPvTcGc" target="_blank" rel="noopener">activists</a>, and giant Silicon Valley <a href="https://grow.google/justice-impacted/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">corporations</a> like Google. These are people and organizations that, conveniently enough, have distanced themselves as much as possible from communities where crime is high. They don&#8217;t want anything to do with &#8220;justice-impacted individuals,&#8221; but they want you to have to live near them and treat them with respect.
Of course, no one in the real world uses terms like &#8220;justice-impacted individuals,&#8221; which is precisely the point. If you go around saying the words &#8220;justice-impacted individual,&#8221; then you&#8217;re instantly communicating where you stand on the political spectrum. And perhaps more importantly, people who don&#8217;t use these new terms are instantly identifiable as outcasts — as racists and terrible people. Every so often, wealthy elites and academics come up with new ways to provide these kinds of signals, and then they inevitably filter down to activists and government bureaucrats, which is what&#8217;s happening now in Illinois.
There was an episode during the Canadian trucker convoy a couple of years ago that illustrates how this strategy works in practice. The truckers who gathered in the Canadian capital city of Ottawa were exactly the kind of blue-collar workers that liberals pretend to care about. But in this case, the blue-collar workers were protesting for autonomy from their government, so they had to be crushed. It was vitally important for liberals to smear these truckers as racist. And one of the ways the liberals did that was by criticizing the truckers for using the wrong lingo.
This is a clip from a Fox interview that Leftists mocked relentlessly during the convoy. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 Not Racist" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZG4_ASvxI5c?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This is a Romanian trucker who clearly speaks English as a second language. And he&#8217;s explaining on primetime television that he&#8217;s not racist because he has a bunch of &#8220;colored friends.&#8221;
Logically, there&#8217;s no difference whatsoever between saying &#8220;I have colored friends&#8221; and &#8220;I have friends who are people of color.&#8221; It&#8217;s just a slight grammatical difference that means absolutely nothing. If anything, the latter sentence is unnecessarily wordy. Otherwise, they&#8217;re the same statements. If a person can be “of color” then it is accurate to say that the person is “colored.” A person of color is a colored person. But your intellectual superiors have decided that &#8220;people of color&#8221; is the only phrase you&#8217;re allowed to use. Say &#8220;colored people&#8221; and — unless you&#8217;re the NAACP — you&#8217;re a bigot. So they vilified this trucker all over social media, both here and in Canada.
This is one of the main reasons that cutting-edge P.C. lingo exists. It&#8217;s why you&#8217;re supposed to say &#8220;people experiencing homelessness,&#8221; instead of &#8220;homeless drug addict.&#8221; It&#8217;s why you&#8217;re supposed to say &#8220;minor attracted person&#8221; instead of &#8220;pedophile.&#8221; And it&#8217;s why, if at all possible, you&#8217;re supposed to employ clever euphemisms to describe criminals who happen to be black.
The New York Post is particularly adept at this trick, to the point that it&#8217;s become a running joke online (and presumably, in the Post&#8217;s newsroom). Among the <a href="https://x.com/iamyesyouareno/status/1784289896418447624" target="_blank" rel="noopener">euphemisms</a> that the New York Post has come up with to describe black suspects are: &#8220;cold-hearted teens,&#8221; &#8220;knife-wielding sicko,&#8221; &#8220;misogynistic maniac,&#8221; and my personal favorite, &#8220;<a href="https://nypost.com/2022/10/01/greenwich-village-block-held-hostage-by-lunchtime-rowdies/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lunchtime rowdies</a>.&#8221;
Just in case there was any doubt that the Post is doing this deliberately, here&#8217;s a passage from that article on &#8220;lunchtime rowdies.&#8221; See if you can count all the euphemisms: &#8220;A band of foul-mouthed, toy gun-waving, pot-puffing high school hooligans are keeping residents of West 13th off 6th Avenue hostage in their own tony homes. &#8230; For at least a year while school is in session, the roughnecks roam from stoop to stoop every day at lunchtime, rolling blunts, getting high, acting out and taunting anyone who gets in their way.&#8221;
With terms like “hooligans,” “roughnecks,” and “lunchtime rowdies,” you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is an article from a small town newspaper somewhere out in the wild west in the year 1873. My only hope is that in the next Post article they can work in the terms “ruffian” and “scoundrel.” In any case, you can read the whole article, and you won&#8217;t find any mention in the text about the ethnicity of these &#8220;lunchtime rowdies&#8221; and &#8220;pot-puffing hooligans.&#8221; But if a white person is causing problems, the Post will generally put the race in the headline. 
For example, one recent <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/09/27/video-shows-white-queens-man-allegedly-spray-black-partygoers/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">headline</a> in the Post read, &#8220;Video shows black NYC partiers scatter for cover as white neighbor douses them with garden hose.&#8221;
There was no euphemism for the white guy. He wasn&#8217;t a &#8220;hose-toting scoundrel&#8221; or anything like that. He was just a &#8220;white neighbor.&#8221; And for what it&#8217;s worth, not all of the people he hit with the water were black. The Post went out of its way to mention the race of the white guy even when it was misleading to do so.
This isn&#8217;t specific to the New York Post. It&#8217;s the approach of most major media outlets. As the account DataHazard <a href="https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1791131053278515440" target="_blank" rel="noopener">found</a>, the race of white murderers is made clear in more than 90% of news articles. But with black murderers, race is only mentioned in 30% of the article — and when it does appear, it&#8217;s usually much lower down in the text of the article.
Journalists do this, in part, to signal that they&#8217;re true believers in principles of &#8220;restorative justice.&#8221; And in the process, they&#8217;re denying the agency of black offenders by holding them to a completely different standard. These criminals get additional protections in the media, even when they commit heinous crimes, solely on the basis of their skin color. Now the state of Illinois is doing the same thing. It&#8217;s almost as if they hired the New York Post euphemism guy to write their legislation.
To give the Left some credit, they understand the role of language in shaping policy. In order to normalize crime and pedophilia, they first need to change the way people refer to crime and pedophilia. That effort is now underway in Illinois, which means many more &#8220;justice-impacted individuals&#8221; will soon be out on the streets. It also means that many more innocent people — including children and pregnant women —  will be impacted by these &#8220;justice-impacted individuals.&#8221; One euphemism at a time, in Democrat-run cities all over the country, it&#8217;s pretty clear that&#8217;s the point.

Violent Criminal Offenders Are Now ‘Justice-Impacted Individuals’

Violent Criminal Offenders Are Now 'Justice-Impacted Individuals'

Illinois

Prisoners

You might think that it would be difficult to cause any kind of serious problem in a Wendy&#8217;s drive-thru. The concept is pretty simple: You sit in the car, and when it&#8217;s your turn, you drive up, get your order, and then you drive off. In an orderly society, it&#8217;s a pretty straight-forward, fool-proof system.
But in the days after George Floyd was canonized, of course, all rules were suspended. Things started breaking down. Accordingly, on June 12 of that year, a 27-year-old man named Rayshard Brooks decided to treat the Wendy&#8217;s drive-thru like a motel room. He got drunk out of his mind and passed out in his car, as he waited to get his hamburger and frosty. Then, when two police officers arrived in an attempt to keep the drive-thru moving, Brooks started fighting with one of the officers, stole his taser, and began running away. A few seconds later, Brooks turned around and pointed the stolen taser at the officers, at which point he was shot and killed. It was not only a justified police shooting but perhaps one of the most justified police shootings ever caught on film.
Nevertheless, just a few days later, the top prosecutor in Fulton County Georgia, a guy named Paul Howard, decided to charge both officers on the scene with a variety of crimes. One of the officers was hit with aggravated assault charges. The other cop — the officer who shot Brooks — was charged with capital murder. In other words, Howard tried to give a cop the death sentence for the crime of simply doing his job. And it&#8217;s all because, as Paul Howard argued, they didn&#8217;t seem afraid after they had shot Rayshard Brooks and neutralized the threat he presented — as if they should have been cowering behind their cruisers until backup arrived. That was the actual argument Howard made.
This makes no sense whatsoever, which is why a couple of years later — after these officers’ careers and lives were destroyed — a special prosecutor dropped the charges. Howard was then voted out of office. This obviously incompetent, politically motivated D.A. was gone. He lost the ability to bring frivolous charges against anyone else ever again.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1316-we-re-living-under-a-tyranny-of-mediocre-morons-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
Unfortunately for the people of Atlanta and the rest of the country, Howard&#8217;s replacement was a woman named Fani Willis. And over the past few days, it&#8217;s become clear that Willis is somehow an even less dignified, more incompetent, and more corrupt version of the man she replaced. 
Willis is not simply trying to prosecute two police officers to appease the mob, as unforgivable as that is. Willis is instead trying to imprison the leading candidate in the U.S. presidential election. And she&#8217;s doing it, apparently, to enrich herself and her boyfriend, Nathan Wade.
Last week, Willis had to answer questions under oath in a hearing about her romantic relationship with Wade. That&#8217;s because Willis has told the court that the relationship began only after she named Wade — a family lawyer with no experience prosecuting RICO cases — as a key lawyer overseeing the Trump RICO prosecution. 
But Willis&#8217; claim was contradicted in the hearing by a former co-worker in Willis&#8217; office, who said the relationship actually began back in 2019:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
BREAKING: Fani Willis’ friend testifies that Nathan Wade’s romantic relationship with Willis started in 2019. <a href="https://t.co/2f6GM4I92I">pic.twitter.com/2f6GM4I92I</a>
&mdash; ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) <a href="https://twitter.com/alx/status/1758154707992764738?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 15, 2024</a></blockquote>
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This is obviously a big problem for Fani Willis, Nathan Wade, and the entire Trump prosecution. If they lied to the court, they can be disqualified or even disbarred on that basis alone. But in context, the reason for the lie is even more important. Fani Willis, by hiring Wade, was able to direct hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars into his bank account. And the two apparently used that money to fund a lavish lifestyle — which means the RICO prosecutors might be guilty of a little RICO themselves.
You&#8217;ve probably heard this analysis from other pundits already, so I won&#8217;t belabor it. What I will emphasize, however, because a lot of people are too polite to say it out loud, is that above and beyond her obvious corruption, Fani Willis is a complete moron. Put aside the fact that she&#8217;s trying to sabotage the upcoming election in a flagrant act of election interference. Fani Willis — the chief law enforcement officer in Fulton County, Georgia — is not even remotely close to being a bright woman. This hearing made that very clear. And the implications could not be any more significant. 
There are too many clips to show you that prove this point, so here&#8217;s just a couple. Watch:
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BREAKING: Fani Willis Just admitted to campaign finance violations under oath
Things can&#39;t get any worse for her 😂
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&mdash; George (@BehizyTweets) <a href="https://twitter.com/BehizyTweets/status/1758243640806117508?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 15, 2024</a></blockquote>
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FANI WILLIS RATTLED ON THE STAND:
&quot;I am not a hostile witness. I VERY much want to be here. Ms. Merchant&#39;s interests are p&#8230;are..contadi&#8230; contrary to democracy, your honor, not to mine!&quot; <a href="https://t.co/tTrKTvQUBh">pic.twitter.com/tTrKTvQUBh</a>
&mdash; 💋🇺🇸 Country Over Party🇺🇸🇮🇱🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@gagirlpolitics) <a href="https://twitter.com/gagirlpolitics/status/1758232633710936168?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 15, 2024</a></blockquote>
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In that second clip you just saw, Fani Willis says she&#8217;s not a &#8220;hostile witness&#8221; because she wants to testify. But the designation of &#8220;hostile witness&#8221; has nothing to do with wanting to testify or not. It means that the witness has adverse interests to the party questioning her — which is the normal situation on cross-examination, but an unusual situation on direct examination. Being a &#8220;hostile witness&#8221; basically means that the lawyers can ask the witness more aggressive leading questions on direct examination, as if it&#8217;s a cross-examination. You&#8217;d think Willis would know this, as the D.A. of Fulton County. But apparently not.
Fani Willis also doesn&#8217;t appear to understand the legal implications of other claims she made during her testimony. For example, in the first clip you just saw, Willis states, &#8220;When I took out a large amount of money on my first campaign, I kept some of the cash of that.&#8221; I&#8217;m not a campaign finance expert, but that seems like the kind of statement that you don&#8217;t want to make under oath. Using campaign funds for personal expenses is generally frowned upon.
To be fair, elsewhere in the hearing, Willis does say that she took money out of her retirement account to fund her campaign for local judge (before she ran for D.A.) — so it&#8217;s possible she&#8217;s referring to her own money here. But it&#8217;s not clear whether she told donors to her D.A. campaign about this arrangement.
That would certainly be the professional thing to do. But, after watching Fani Willis&#8217; other testimony, we have reason to doubt her professionalism, to put it mildly. Watch:
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FANI: “So if you tell me it’s a G then you gon get a thousand dollas”
🤣💀
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&mdash; ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) <a href="https://twitter.com/alx/status/1758229706170618081?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 15, 2024</a></blockquote>
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FANI WILLIS: “I don&#39;t like wine. I like Grey Goose.” 🤣🤣🤣
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&mdash; ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) <a href="https://twitter.com/alx/status/1758298673656598733?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 16, 2024</a></blockquote>
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It used to be that prosecutors displayed some level of respect for the office they held. These are people with the power to use the force of law to imprison and bankrupt pretty much anyone in the state. They&#8217;re elected, supposedly, to uphold fundamental principles of fairness and justice — without which we do not have the rule of law. When D.A.s start acting like sassy waitresses, or trashy pop stars, then people, understandably, lose all faith in the judicial system. If they have no integrity, then the system has no integrity.
It doesn&#8217;t help matters that Fani Willis was reportedly <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13092639/fani-willis-dress-backwards-georgia-misconduct-hearing.html">wearing</a> her dress backwards, and her flag-pin sideways. Now, for the record, this isn&#8217;t confirmed. Fashion experts on the internet have identified two dresses that are similar to the one Fani Willis was wearing — one with the zipper in the back, and one with the zipper in the front, as Fani Willis was wearing it. Here&#8217;s a side by side of the two dresses in question:
<div id="attachment_699425" style="width: 825px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-699425" class="size-large wp-image-699425" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/MixCollage-20-Feb-2024-06-13-PM-9915-815x576.jpg" alt="VFSHOW Womens Front Zipper Tie Waist Slim Work Business Office Bodycon Pencil DressColor: Hot Pink. Retrieved from Amazon.com.
Adrianna Papell, Tie Waist Crepe Sheath Dress, Color: Vibrant Coral. Retrieved from Nordstrom.com." width="815" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/MixCollage-20-Feb-2024-06-13-PM-9915-815x576.jpg 815w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/MixCollage-20-Feb-2024-06-13-PM-9915-300x212.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/MixCollage-20-Feb-2024-06-13-PM-9915-768x543.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/MixCollage-20-Feb-2024-06-13-PM-9915-1536x1086.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/MixCollage-20-Feb-2024-06-13-PM-9915-2048x1448.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 815px) 100vw, 815px" />VFSHOW Womens Front Zipper Tie Waist Slim Work Business Office Bodycon Pencil Dress Color: Hot Pink. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Adrianna Papell, Tie Waist Crepe Sheath Dress, Color: Vibrant Coral. Retrieved from Nordstrom.com.</div>
If you&#8217;re more inclined to pursue this question than I am, you can compare those images to the pictures of Fani Willis testifying. And you can come to your own conclusion on whether she&#8217;s wearing the dress properly. But the point is, given everything else about Willis&#8217; testimony, it&#8217;s completely believable that she doesn&#8217;t know how to dress herself. If she doesn&#8217;t know anything about the law, even though she&#8217;s a lawyer, then putting clothes on could also present challenges. This is the level of faith that people have in Fani Willis, and deservedly so.
As a result, right now it looks like Willis stands a real chance of getting booted off this case. Her performance was that bad, to say nothing of the fact she apparently lied to the court. But even if she and Nathan Wade are ultimately disqualified from continuing this prosecution, the reality is that there are many more equally incompetent prosecutors waiting to take their place in the state of Georgia.
<h4><a href="https://onelink.to/dwapp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP</a></h4>
Take this footage from a couple of months ago, for example. It&#8217;s from the prosecutor&#8217;s closing argument in the case of Hannah Payne. For background, Hannah Payne witnessed an impaired driver run a red light, cause a car accident, then flee the scene. Payne realized no one had the guy&#8217;s license plate, so she gave chase and pulled in front of the guy. Then she says the man grabbed her wrist through the window of the car, and the gun went off, killing him.
Whether you think Hannah Payne is guilty of murder or not, based on those facts, you have to concede it&#8217;s a complex case. Hannah Payne&#8217;s life is on the line, and it&#8217;s clear she&#8217;s not a malicious person who goes around shooting people at random. Plus, she had reason to worry that this impaired driver was going to cause more accidents. So given that background, you might assume that the prosecutor in this case would be a serious person, well-versed in the law, who&#8217;s able to communicate professionally to the jury.
Instead, here&#8217;s the prosecutor who was assigned to Hannah Payne&#8217;s case. Watch:
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&#8220;She shoulda minded her own bid-ness,&#8221; says the prosecutor. Then she pauses for a while, just to let the line sink in. This was her &#8220;Clarence Darrow&#8221; moment and you can tell she&#8217;s proud of it. The rest of us are wondering whether there are any prosecutors in Georgia who don&#8217;t act like Fani Willis. Is there a single prosecutor in the state who&#8217;s capable of speaking and acting like an actual lawyer? Again, this is the major crimes division. This is a homicide case. And this is the best they can offer?
The problem isn&#8217;t just confined to Georgia, of course, although it appears to be especially acute there. We&#8217;re living under a tyranny of mediocre morons. These morons are representing the government in court, where they can send you to prison for the rest of your life. In some cases they&#8217;re also enforcing the law on the street, as police officers. And they have the complete and total backing of the government. There&#8217;s no effort underway to restore competence to any of these positions. What you see is what you get. 
In fact, the government is seemingly encouraging these people to act as dumb as they possibly can, just to erode the public trust as much as possible. That&#8217;s the only explanation for why the NYPD just sent out its dance team — because apparently, police departments have dance teams now — to perform on television. Watch:
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Meet the NYPD dance team!
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&mdash; The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) <a href="https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1759667470732763340?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 19, 2024</a></blockquote>
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You&#8217;ll find various responses to this video online in which people try to find the silver lining here. &#8220;At least they&#8217;re getting exercise in,&#8221; is one of the common refrains. You might also say that, hey, they’re just trying to give the female cops something to do. 
But really there&#8217;s only one bit of good news in all of this, especially when you look at the Fani Willis case — which is that the mediocre morons who have power over us are extremely easy to expose. They&#8217;ll go on television and reveal how incompetent and corrupt they are. They just can&#8217;t help themselves, that&#8217;s the good news. The bad news is that there&#8217;s an endless supply of these amoral half wits out there, waiting to replace their bosses when they&#8217;re gone. And in some cases they&#8217;re even worse, somehow, than the failures they replace. Get rid of Paul Howard, and you&#8217;ll get Fani Willis. This is the pattern. 
What happens when you get rid of Fani Willis? Very soon, for better or worse, we might find out.

Fulton County Court Holds Fani Willis Misconduct Hearing

We’re Living Under A Tyranny Of Mediocre Morons

We're Living Under A Tyranny Of Mediocre Morons

District Attorneys

Fani Willis

fulton county

Georgia

One pattern that has emerged over the past four presidential elections — ever since Barack Obama — is that the national conversation, as directed by the media, shifts back to race right around the time that the primaries are wrapping up. 
Of course, the primaries are technically still happening on the GOP side if you count Nikki Haley as a real presidential candidate. When you realize that she is, at this point, simply running to be the next overpaid CNN contributor, you understand the primaries ended weeks ago, which means it is now time for the race cycle to begin anew.
Right on cue, MSNBC released a new special this month called “Black Men In America: The Road to 2024.” Now, based on the title, based on the timing, based on the fact that it’s MSNBC, you might assume that the show automatically is going to consist of a bunch of mindless race-baiting. You might make that presumption without seeing a single second of it. You might write it off, without giving it a chance, under the assumption that it’s going to be nothing but idiotic, dim-witted racial grievance mongering. You might assume all of that. And you would of course be entirely correct.
Yet, as you’ll see in the clip I’m about to show you, it still manages to limbo its way under the incredibly low bar that you have set for it in your mind. Watch:
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As you could see, that’s Ben Crump pretending to shoot pool with Al Sharpton. In other words, it’s neo-Al Sharpton with old Al Sharpton. It’s broadband Al Sharpton with Dial-Up Al Sharpton. Ben Crump is what happens if you clone Al Sharpton but you remove his hair and his three brain cells. Because that’s the thing you notice about Crump. He is, objectively speaking — and I say this in a medical sense, and not as an insult — a moron. In fact, his very existence single-handedly, and ironically, disproves systemic racism. There is simply no way that a black guy this aggressively mediocre, this consistently unimpressive, this simple-minded and ridiculous, could ever achieve the success he has achieved in a country that was systemically racist against black guys.
Sure, even in a country with systemic racism you could still end up with brilliant and innovative people who manage to succeed in spite of it. The existence of successful black people doesn’t in and of itself disprove systemic racism. A million other things disprove it, but not that. But Ben Crump, specifically? This guy? You want to tell me this guy rose to the top despite having the entire system arrayed against him?
No, the truth is obviously quite the opposite. The system favors guys like Crump, which is the only reason anyone knows his name. By all rights the pinnacle of this dude’s career should be a position no higher than shift manager at Wendy’s — with no disrespect intended to shift managers at Wendy’s. The point is that his wealth and success is entirely a product of a system designed to move mediocre half-wits like himself to the front.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1315-we-need-to-respect-black-culture-by-getting-rid-of-laws-says-msnbc-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
As if to prove my point, what does he say? What’s the great insight he offers the world? Well, he says that we can get rid of all the crime in America overnight by changing the definition of crime. He’s right, of course. “Crime” is a legal designation. If you stop applying that legal designation to things, then it will not be applied to thing, and therefore you have gotten rid of the designation. Stop calling murder, robbery, and rape “crimes,” and — just like that, presto chango — the crimes of murder, robbery, and rape have disappeared. This is evidently what Crump, a guy who somehow earned a law degree, wants to see happen.
Of course, the problem is that by getting rid of the crimes of murder, robbery, and rape, you have not gotten rid of the actions of murder, robbery and rape. People are still being murdered, robbed, and raped — at what seems to be an even higher rate now — but it doesn’t count in the books. The assailants aren’t being brought to justice. The victims have nowhere to turn for redress. All the bad things are still happening, but the law is covering its eyes and plugging its ears and pretending that it’s not. That’s what happens when you “get rid of crime,” as Crump suggests.
In fact every major city in America has adopted a strategy like this, to one degree or another. Every major city, thanks in large part to Soros-funded Marxist DAs, has decided to reduce crime by not fighting it. They’ve decided to create fewer criminals by not calling the criminals “criminals.” As a result, most of these places are unlivable hellscapes. Which is not a problem for Crump, whose firm rakes in tens of millions of dollars a year. He’s not living in these crime-infested sewers that ambulance-chasing con artists like himself have helped to create.
Crump then goes on to claim that laws have the effect of “criminalizing black culture.” He gives the example of Eric Garner, who died while police attempted to take him into custody for selling loose cigarettes. Now, the law against loose cigarettes isn’t as important or essential as laws against murder and robbery, but the policy does make perfect sense. You aren’t allowed to buy a pack of cigarettes from the convenience store and then stand outside the convenience store selling each individual cigarette to people walking by on the street. Why? Well, that’s not very fair to the convenience store, for one thing. For another, there are all kinds of additional laws governing the sale of tobacco products — laws that cannot be enforced if people are allowed to walk around hawking individual cigarettes on the street corner.
It’s not the most important law, but it is a law, and it’s one that makes plenty of sense. The question in this case is why Eric Garner couldn’t just follow the law. Is it “black culture” to simply disregard whatever law you personally find inconvenient? That seems to be the claim Crump is making. But all of that is irrelevant anyway. Garner didn’t die because he sold loose cigarettes. Cops didn’t show up and stage a public execution as a penalty for selling loosies, as they’re called. No, they tried to arrest him, he resisted, and in the struggle he lost his life. Why resist? What is that going to achieve? What possible good can come from it? Even if you disagree with the law you broke. Even if you didn’t break a law at all. Even if you’re being falsely accused. Even if you’re innocent. No matter the situation, how does resisting arrest help your case at all? What good will it do you? What is the plan? Walk me through the steps: Step 1) Resist arrest. Step 2) Unknown. Step 3) You get to go home and have a pleasant day.
What happens in that second step? What did Eric Garner, or any of these BLM martyrs, think that second step would be? Did he think that if he declined to be arrested, the cops would just say, “Oh, you don’t want to be arrested? You’d prefer not to be arrested this particular afternoon? Well, never mind then, good sir. Please be on your way. Our apologies.” Was that the idea?
Well, we know the answer. There was no thought process behind it. He didn’t have any ideas at all. He was acting in a totally thoughtless, self-destructive manner, and responding to a situation in a way that was guaranteed to make the situation worse, no matter what. Is that black culture, according to Crump?
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Crump also mentions George Floyd. He says Floyd was another man arrested for participating in black culture. What was the culture in that case? Floyd was trying to pass off a forged $20 bill. Is that black culture? He was overdosing on fentanyl. Is that black culture? I’m not asking these questions rhetorically. I would really like to hear Crump answer. I would like to know what he considers “black culture” to be. I would not personally call any of that black culture, but I will say that if it was black culture, then the culture needs to change. If your culture — as Crump seems to think — involves disregarding the law, being self-destructive, making decisions that are guaranteed to introduce more chaos and violence into your life and your community, then your culture is deeply flawed, terminally sick, and needs to change. 
The law doesn’t need to accommodate your culture. Your culture needs to accommodate the fact that it exists in a civilized society with laws.
Naturally, Crump only talks about the laws against loose cigarettes and milk cartons and baggy pants — as if anyone is actually being arrested for having baggy pants. He completely ignores the obvious fact that black men are arrested every day, in every city in America, for committing actual violent crimes. Young black men aren’t landing in prison because of their milk cartons and ill-fitting pants. But Crump, of course, doesn’t want to acknowledge that. Because he is a liar, and he’s evil, and he doesn’t care how many people die, or how many black men get themselves killed by making the worst possible decisions, as long as he can personally profit off of it.
I began this by saying that Crump is stupid. And he certainly is. You can’t listen to him for more than five seconds without arriving at that conclusion. But like any other race baiter, he also knows exactly what he’s doing. He pretends to speak up for “black culture” — whatever he thinks that is — while at the same time doing everything he can to make black communities more dangerous, poorer, bleaker, more miserable. 
It’s not the white man keeping black communities down. It’s men like Ben Crump. And he deserves to be held accountable for it.

US-politics-RACISM-LAWSUIT

We Need To Respect Black Culture By Getting Rid Of Laws, Says MSNBC

Al Sharpton

Benjamin Crump

Blacks

George Floyd

I have talked a lot about the collapse of the criminal justice system. The very concept of criminal justice — of enacting justice, and punishing crime — has been destroyed. But very few people ever take the time to trace the roots of our current state of lawless anarchy back to its origins. And the thing is, you don’t need to trace the roots very far.
There is a reason why we now live in a country governed by people who don’t believe in simply enforcing the law and punishing lawbreakers. These are people who are operating according to certain particularly crazy set of beliefs. And one of those beliefs is that deterrence doesn’t exist. Effectively, you cannot deter crime by punishing it. That’s the insane idea that began in our institutions of higher learning — the sort of insane idea that can only begin in our institutions of higher learning — and filtered its way down from there. As these ideas always do.
It began with the claim, first made years ago, that the death penalty doesn’t deter crime. This was always false, for reasons we’ll touch on later. But whatever you think of the death penalty, the implication underlying this &#8220;deterrence&#8221; argument was never going to stop with the death penalty. It was always going to progress far beyond that. And indeed, we&#8217;ve seen that progression in recent years. It&#8217;s no longer, &#8220;The death penalty is pointless because people don&#8217;t consider those consequences when they commit crime.&#8221; Instead, the argument we&#8217;re hearing today is, &#8220;All harsh punishment is pointless because people don&#8217;t consider any consequences when they commit crime.&#8221;
This is the intellectual origin of the &#8220;soft-on-crime&#8221; approach to law enforcement that we&#8217;re seeing in every major city in the country right now. And several years ago, this approach was adopted by the Obama DOJ without any fanfare whatsoever. In May of 2016, the National Institute of Justice, which is the research arm of the DOJ, published a <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">document</a> entitled, &#8220;Five Things About Deterrence.&#8221; You’ve probably never heard of this document but it is essentially the modern manifesto of the anti-incarceration movement in the United States. It applies the reasoning of anti-death penalty advocates to all forms of crime. It’s truly a remarkable document.
So here are the &#8220;five things about deterrence&#8221; that the memo highlights and then expands upon.
Number one: &#8220;The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.&#8221; In other words, according to the DOJ, criminals are primarily worried about whether the cops are going to arrest them — not about how long they&#8217;re going to have to stay in prison. The question that apparently never occurred to this DOJ is: If the punishments aren’t severe, then why would the certainty of being caught deter anyone? Why would criminals care if they’re caught, if they know ahead of time that they won’t be punished? The whole reason that being caught is scary is that you will be punished. But if you aren’t punished, then being caught isn’t scary anymore. 
We are seeing this play out in cities across the country. Sure, the criminals are caught (sometimes), but it doesn’t matter because they aren’t punished and they’re back on the street a day later, committing more crimes. The argument from the DOJ is like saying that home invaders are deterred by guns, but it doesn’t matter if it’s a Glock or a super soaker. It makes no sense.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1309-why-the-criminal-justice-system-gave-up-on-punishing-criminals" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
The DOJ&#8217;s manifesto doesn&#8217;t bother to expound on this point in any way. It just says, &#8220;Research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment.&#8221; So there you have it. &#8220;Research&#8221; shows that punishment doesn&#8217;t work. What kind of research? They don&#8217;t say, at least not in that paragraph. Buried in the fine print on the page, however, is a citation to an <a href="https://prohic.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2020-06-02-DeterrenceMetaNagin.2013.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">article</a> by a public policy professor named Daniel Nagin at Carnegie Mellon University. This is the primary paper the DOJ relies on, along with a couple of others. Apparently, Nagin has done the research, and he&#8217;s realized that criminals don&#8217;t really care that much about punishment. They only care about the prospect of being caught.
I looked around to see if Nagin actually thinks this, and if so, what his logic is. I came across this clip from many years ago, which I&#8217;m going to play primarily because it&#8217;s kind of hilarious. Watch as a local news team breaks the news that, according to Daniel Nagin&#8217;s first groundbreaking finding, when you have more police officers, criminals tend to commit less crime. And then the news station interviews a couple of random people who think that checks out. This is one of the best examples of &#8220;research&#8221; telling us something that&#8217;s incredibly obvious, to a comical degree. But buried in this report, if you listen really carefully, is Nagin&#8217;s second theory, which the DOJ finds so compelling. Watch:
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So the reporter holds up the stack of papers. &#8220;Here&#8217;s the research,&#8221; he says. &#8220;It shows that more police means less crime!&#8221; Cut to the two local residents and the sheriff who say, &#8220;uh, yeah. You think?&#8221; Apparently, being a professor at Carnegie Mellon isn&#8217;t what it used to be. Random people off the street think your research is incredibly obvious, because it is.
But the key part of that segment for our purposes is what Daniel Nagin says in that clip. He reports that, &#8220;There&#8217;s little evidence that making punishments even more severe than they already are has an incremental effect.&#8221; Right away, that&#8217;s a different argument from the one the DOJ is making. The DOJ said flat-out that, &#8220;draconian punishments&#8221; don&#8217;t deter crime. But the argument this Carnegie Mellon professor is advancing in that clip is that, if you make our existing punishments more severe, then they won&#8217;t deter crime that much. Those are two completely different arguments.
This little inconsistency confused me enough to look up Nagin&#8217;s actual paper — the one the DOJ cites in its manifesto on deterrence. And in that article, you&#8217;ll find two main claims.
The first one is the idea he outlines in that video clip, &#8220;There is little evidence that increases in the length of already long prison sentences yield general deterrence effects that are sufficiently large to justify their social and economic costs.&#8221; In other words, he&#8217;s saying that existing prison sentences are a sufficient deterrent, and we don&#8217;t need to make them longer.
But afterwards in the paper, Nagin goes on to say pretty much what the DOJ claims. He says, &#8220;I have concluded that there is little evidence of a specific deterrent effect arising from the experience of imprisonment compared with the experience of noncustodial sanctions such as probation. .. It is clear that lengthy prison sentences cannot be justified on a deterrence-based, crime prevention basis.&#8221;
Those claims don&#8217;t follow at all. His starting point is that we don&#8217;t need to make prison sentences longer. And somehow, without showing his work, he ends up with a declaration that criminals don&#8217;t really care about their punishments, only whether they&#8217;re apprehended — as though apprehension without punishment matters to anyone. We might as well just sentence everyone to probation, is what he&#8217;s saying.
The technical term for this kind of argument is that it&#8217;s garbage. It&#8217;s a clearly absurd result, but it&#8217;s the basis for the DOJ&#8217;s entire argument against deterrence. This is the document that the DOJ cites to justify its policy of releasing as many criminals as possible — or at least, criminals who share the DOJ&#8217;s politics. It&#8217;s hard to overemphasize how truly bizarre and incredible this is.
But it gets weirder. Citing Nagin&#8217;s research, the DOJ goes on to claim that, &#8220;Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.&#8221;
Again, that&#8217;s a direct quote from a document produced by the DOJ in 2016. &#8220;Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn&#8217;t a very effective way to deter crime.&#8221; They&#8217;re saying that because some random Carnegie Mellon professor just wrote it down a few years earlier. Again, they don&#8217;t really clarify this point. Here&#8217;s the extent of the DOJ&#8217;s explanation: “Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Inmates learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment.&#8221;
If this is true, it’s an argument for giving out even longer punishments, not shorter ones. In fact, this is a solid reason to be much more generous in handing out life sentences. If you give a life sentence — and actually make it a life sentence, meaning that the person isn&#8217;t released after 25 years or whatever — then the deterrence issue, at least for that individual, is a moot point. He’s gone. He’s off the street for good. But the DOJ doesn&#8217;t mention this possibility in the memo. Instead they conclude that we should let people out of jail sooner, after just telling us that jail only makes criminals more dangerous.
The rest of the DOJ document continues along these lines.
The third bullet point in the DOJ&#8217;s document says, &#8220;Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.&#8221; (This was the earth-shattering revelation that shocked those news reporters). 
Number four: &#8220;Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.&#8221;
And number five: &#8220;There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.&#8221;
Those latter two bullet points contradict everything we know about the human condition. Obviously longer, harsh prison sentences deter crime. This is a basic fact of human psychology. People are less likely to do something if the consequences are very bad. That doesn’t mean nobody will do it. It doesn&#8217;t mean that everyone will respond to incentives like a rational person. It just means fewer people will do it. It&#8217;s impossible for a reasonable person to deny this point because it is again a basic fact of human behavior, well established over the course of thousands of years of human civilization.
That’s why they have no way of disproving it. All they have are random studies done by quack sociologists which are supposed to outweigh the collective experience of all mankind for the past 10 thousand years. And by the way, these random studies contradict the random studies I cited earlier — the ones CBS News reported on back in 2007.
That&#8217;s a cue that it&#8217;s a good idea to ignore all of these studies, and use common sense. The DOJ is stacking a handful of research papers against the totality of human experience, and expect us to believe the research papers. Which is also how they come up with the ridiculous proposition that the death penalty doesn’t deter crime. Obviously people are less likely to do something if you kill them for doing it. If the death penalty in its current form is less effective as a deterrence than it has been in the past, that&#8217;s only because we put so much time in between conviction and punishment that the punishment loses much of its societal impact.
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And again, the DOJ&#8217;s arguments are all assuming that &#8220;deterrence&#8221; is somehow the only relevant goal. But long prison sentences have another important goal, known as &#8220;incapacitation.&#8221; They remove violent criminals from the public, so they can&#8217;t hurt anyone again. 
Later on in the document, the DOJ does briefly touch on the goal of incapacitation. Here&#8217;s what they say: &#8220;Individuals grow out of criminal activity as they age. &#8230; A more severe (i.e., lengthy) prison sentence for convicted individuals who are naturally aging out of crime does achieve the goal of punishment and incapacitation. But that incapacitation is a costly way to deter future crimes by aging individuals who already are less likely to commit those crimes by virtue of age.&#8221;
This is how the DOJ views criminal justice. They actually say that sending criminals to prison for a long time might be pointless because they&#8217;ll grow out of being criminals anyway. This is the type of thinking that is directing the justice system from the very top, and the mental rot goes all the way down from there.
But the DOJ does make one point that makes sense, which is that it&#8217;s impossible to say which criminals are likely to reoffend, and which criminals are likely to &#8220;age out&#8221; of a life of crime. That&#8217;s true. Really, it&#8217;s impossible to conduct a fully accurate study of deterrence. There&#8217;s no way to quantify the number of people who would have committed a crime had the punishments been softer, or the number who did commit one because the punishments were too soft. This would require not only self-reported data (which is notoriously unreliable) but also a person&#8217;s speculations about their theoretical mental states in some other possible universe. There&#8217;s just no way to compile that into a statistic and call it science.
We ultimately have to fall back on the history of human societies and our own basic common sense intuitions about how human beings operate and what sorts of things incentivize and disincentivize them.
And all of that points back to a simple and straightforward conclusion: if you want less crime, you have one choice. It&#8217;s the choice that academics and public health experts and politicians have avoided making for decades now. You have to punish criminals, and you have to punish them severely.

Chalk Outline at Police Crime Scene

Why The Criminal Justice System Gave Up On Punishing Criminals

Death Penalty

Jail

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