Mid-Day Snapshot · April 23, 2024

Leave a reply

“From The Patriot Post (patriotpost.us)”.

THE FOUNDATION

“The general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws: its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any.” —James Madison (1787)

Fellow Patriots, on this day in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt created the Medical Reserve Corps, the first component of a reserve force for each military branch. What began as 360 medical professionals grew into what today is more than 700,000 reservists across all branches. —Mark Alexander

IN TODAY’S DIGEST

ON THE WEB

FEATURED ANALYSIS

Biden’s Big Earth Day Giveaway

In yet another effort to buy votes, our decrepit president is shoveling “green” billions into low-income communities.

Douglas Andrews

Yesterday marked the 52nd annual celebration of Earth Day, and we’ll forgive you if you missed it. The commie commemorative just doesn’t seem to have the same je ne sais quoi that it used to.

Still, that didn’t stop Joe Biden from taking full advantage. He marked the event by announcing a $7 billion federal grant boondoggle for solar projects that will “serve” low- and middle-income housing communities. In addition, our decrepit president announced plans to expand his American Climate Corps training program for “green” (read: government-subsidized) job opportunities.

As NBC News reports: “The grants are being awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency, which unveiled the 60 recipients on Monday. The projects are expected to eventually reduce emissions by the equivalent of 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and save households $350 million annually, according to senior administration officials.”

Three-hundred and fifty million annually? Spread across some 900,000 homes in low-income and disadvantaged communities? Wow, that’s roughly $400 per lucky household. Of course, that pittance isn’t nearly enough to offset the ravages of Bidenflation, but it’s the thought that counts.

And, hey, what better way to celebrate Vladimir Lenin’s birthday? And what better way for Biden to reconnect with and energize not only the urban poor, whose support he’s been bleeding of late, but also to reinvigorate the Jew-hating pro-Hamas youth vote, which might be growing impatient with his student loan transfer vote-buying scheme?

What’s the source of all this taxpayer-funded largess? The 60 gifts came from Biden’s redistributionist Solar for All program, which is part of the administration’s $27 billion “green bank” slush fund. It was created in 2022 when the Democrat-controlled Congress rammed through its deceitfully named $370 billion Inflation Reduction Act. The slush fund is intended to buy votes under the guise of reducing climate and air pollution while shoveling money to, in NBC News’s words, “neighborhoods most in need, especially disadvantaged and low-income communities disproportionately impacted by climate change.”

As for Earth Day itself, proponents appear to be trying a different tack this year, as their annual Thunbergian scolding and doomsaying don’t seem to be doing the trick. Don’t worry, they seem to be saying, be happy.

Here, for example, is what Hannah Ritchie, a senior researcher at Oxford who studies sustainability in relation to climate change, told her fellow travelers at USA Today: “People assume that in the 50 years since the first Earth Day we’ve made no progress. That we’re in a worse position now than we were in the 1970s, that there’s no point to environmental action.”

USA Today’s Elizabeth Weise picks up where Ritchie left off: “Quite the opposite is true. Climate-friendly advances that would have seemed impossible even 10 years ago are now commonplace. And three times in the past 50 years humanity has faced — and fixed — massive, man-made global environmental issues. This Earth Day, some climate scientists think climate change could be added to the list.”

Weise’s unbridled optimism seems to know no bounds. She adds: “But there’s something else happening that doesn’t get as much notice but is very hopeful. Experts — including the International Energy Agency — say that global carbon dioxide emissions will probably peak next year and certainly by 2030, using a scenario based on current policy settings.”

This, we suppose, is better than indoctrinating our children and causing young people to reconsider having kids due to their gloomy outlook for the future of planet Earth.

You might wonder, though, whether Wiese might want to curb her enthusiasm. After all, if there’s too much good news about the environment, then the green movement can’t dupe politicians and soak the American people as effectively as it might under the alarmist outlook that has defined Earth Day since its inception. Because if there’s one thing we need to remember about the “green movement,” it’s that green is the color of money.

Furthermore, the green movement can’t supply the world with sufficient energy. As economist Stephen Moore told Fox Business yesterday, “If we continue to shut down coal plants, not allow LNG terminals, not build nuclear power plants,” we’ll usher in an era of energy scarcity. Wind and solar, after all, are vastly inferior technologies when it comes to energy density. “But,” says Moore, “we have the capacity to lower our energy prices by an all-in energy policy.”

“If I sound a little frustrated,” Moore concluded, “I am. Because we have more energy than any other country in the world.”

Comment | Share

Joe Biden’s ‘Very Fine People’

He equivocates about the anti-Semitic protesters swarming college campuses while bailing them out for student loans.

Nate Jackson

Shout “Death to America,” get student loan “forgiveness” from Uncle Joe Biden. That seems to be the new reality in Clown World.

It’s not so simple, of course, and it would be here that the Leftmedia “fact-checkers” would jump in and say, There’s no evidence that any protesters received forgiveness for student loans.

Fact-checkers, however, exist to obscure the truth. In this case, the truth is that Biden hopes to win the votes of people on college campuses or with recent college degrees, and one method for doing so is to buy them off by transferring their student loan balances to taxpayers. How “generous.”

The connection with pro-terrorist protesters on college campuses is that Biden is threading a difficult needle with his administration’s policy toward our old ally, Israel. You’d think that when Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and brutally murdered hundreds of Jews on October 7, the reaction would be universal condemnation.

It was. Except some of that condemnation was aimed at Israel.

Why? It’s thanks to the Marxist oppressor/oppressed dialectic with which college kids today are indoctrinated. That miseducation is why, as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, “Younger voters are demonstrably more sympathetic to the Palestinians in Gaza than are older Americans, and many see Biden’s loyalty to Israel as a moral failure.”

If Biden’s policy is a “moral failure,” that justifies all sorts of rebellion against it. That’s why full-grown toddlers throw terrorist tantrums and block critical roads and bridges.

As for similar protests gripping our nation’s elite universities, our Emmy Griffin first covered them Friday, saying, “The barbarians are within the Ivy League gates.” Indeed they are, and they continue to spread their hate — students, professors, and administrators alike.

It’s been an eventful few days at Barack Obama’s alma mater, Columbia University, with more than 100 arrests and a move to hybrid classes for the rest of the semester. Raucous protests and subsequent arrests spread to New York University, Yale, Harvard, and elsewhere.

As protesters not only expressed support for the “global intifada” launched by Hamas terrorism — er, the “sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian freedom fighters” — but also harassed Jews and blocked them from accessing buildings or classes, one New York Times headline on the protests focused on “dancing and pizza.”

One man’s vile, hate-filled protest is another man’s pizza party.

That’s not as bad as Joe Biden, though. He claims he was inspired to mount a third presidential campaign because of Donald Trump’s “very fine people” remark at Charlottesville.

That was a big lie, of course, though Biden just had his own “very fine people” moment.

“I condemn the anti-Semitic protests,” he told reporters. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

“There is, however, a key difference” between Trump’s comment and Biden’s, writes David Harsanyi. “Trump’s garbled line was almost surely not aimed at tiki-torch neo-Nazis. Believe what you like about Trump’s motivations, but he also later unequivocally condemned the white supremacists on more than one occasion. Biden, on the other hand, can’t even get himself to call out Brownshirts without throwing them a bone.”

Officially, the White House only really condemned the anti-Semitism spreading like gangrene on college campuses in a Passover press release that had more to say advocating the two-state solution Palestinians keep rejecting than it did condemning the ugly Jew hatred in America.

That’s typical. Whenever Democrats do muster enough courage to denounce anti-Semitism, it’s usually watered down by also including racism and all their favorite “phobias” — Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ad nauseam.

Biden shared the stage Monday with one of the leading anti-Semites in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She declared, “It is especially important that we remember the power of young people shaping this country … as we once again witness the leadership of those peaceful, student-led protests on campuses like Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, and many others.” You know, places where “peaceful” students were arrested.

After she spoke, Biden told attendees to “listen to that lady.”

AOC can be called a lot of things, but few would accuse her of being a lady.

Speaking of anti-Semitic Squad members, Ilhan Omar’s daughter was among those suspended and detained at Columbia. Omar claims it was among the many protests throughout history that were “co-opted and made to look bad.” Trying to cast anti-Semitism caught on video as a conspiracy theory takes — to borrow a great Hebrew/Yiddish word — some real chutzpah.

That word goes a long way to explaining the entire pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic movement in America.

Comment | Share

Executive News Summary

Trump trial continues, Jew-hating Squadster steps in it, New York wind farm fails to launch, and more.

Douglas Andrews, Thomas Gallatin, & Jordan Candler

Cross-Examination

  • Trump trial continues amid gag-order threats: As former President Donald Trump returns to court today in his hush-money trial in Manhattan, the focus is not on the prosecution’s unfortunately named witness, David Pecker, but rather on accusations from snowflake prosecutors themselves — including hard-left DA Alvin Bragg — that Trump has violated Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order 10 times. (Translation: Trump has exercised his First Amendment rights 10 times.) And so, a thin-skinned pro-Biden judge will likely do the prosecution’s bidding and warn Trump that he could go to jail for 30 days and be fined $10,000 if he keeps saying unkind things about them. This judge, though, is on thin ice if he wants a conviction and wants it to stick. The gag order “is objectionable in two ways,” as former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy told Fox News. “First … it creates this uneven balance, where people can talk about [Trump], and he can’t talk about them. … There’s an election going on here, and Trump is in a situation where everyone he is competing with in the contest is able to talk till their hearts’ content about all the allegations, and he can’t speak about them. That’s a problem not for the administration of justice; that’s a problem for the principle that the public should have robust debate in connection with a political campaign and that we want our elections decided at the ballot box and not the courtroom.” Apparently, Judge Merchan doesn’t understand that there are other constitutional considerations that he must abide by within his courtroom, even if he and his Demo-fundraising daughter don’t like the defendant.
  • Jew-hating Squadster steps in it: Someone should’ve advised Jew-hating Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Somalia) to sit this one out. Alas, though, the Pride of Minneapolis couldn’t help herself, so she came to the “defense” of her fellow Jew haters there on the Columbia University campus to decry the real villains of the Mostly Peaceful™ protests. “Throughout history,” the historian Omar intoned, “protests were co-opted and made to look bad so police and public leaders would shut them down. That’s what we are seeing now at Columbia University. The Columbia protesters have made clear their demands and want their school not to be complacent in the ongoing Genocide in Gaza. Public officials and media making this about anything else are inflaming the situation and need to bring calmness and sanity back.” So, you see, it’s not the Jew-hating pro-Hamas thugs who are to blame for “inflaming the situation” there at Columbia, but rather the “public officials and media.” Incidentally, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Omar’s daughter, Isra Hirsi, was among the rabble who were suspended and detained last week for their hate-filled activities on campus.
  • SHOCKER: Student loan scams are on the rise: Actions have consequences, even for decrepit Democrat presidents, and Joe Biden’s vote-buying student loan transfer scheme is no exception. Indeed, Biden’s continuing promises to unconstitutionally “forgive” the debts of deadbeat borrowers are coinciding with an increase in scams about just that very scheme. As the Washington Examiner reports: “The Federal Trade Commission is warning about scammers targeting people with promises to cancel their student loans, and critics say President Joe Biden fueled the fire himself. Biden has been pledging to cancel student loans since the 2020 presidential campaign and has rolled out a wide range of programs and proposals toward that end. While his actions so far have affected 4.3 million of the 44 million people with student debt, his headline-grabbing announcements have created an expectation that scammers are eager to exploit.” And so, it appears that yet another act of naked government redistributionism has attracted the attention of opportunistic fraudsters. Who could’ve imagined?
  • Mistrial declared for AZ rancher: After days of deliberation, the judge in the second-degree murder trial of Arizona rancher George Alan Kelly declared a mistrial after the jury was unable to reach a decision. Kelly was accused of killing a Mexican national illegally in the country who was found shot to death on his property. According to Kelly, who had repeatedly reported the problem of illegal aliens on his land, he shot his rifle in the air to scare them off. Later, when he called the sheriff to report the incident, a dead Mexican national was found on his property. The prosecution argued that Kelly’s rifle was the weapon used to kill him. The defense contended that the Mexican national had a history of being deported, was known to have been involved in drug running, and was likely a victim of one of the drug cartels. The prosecution had earlier offered Kelly a deal to plead guilty to one count of negligent homicide, which he rejected. The state will now decide if it will seek a retrial or drop the issue.
  • NYC high school soccer game canceled due to migrants: At a field in East Harlem, two high school boys soccer travel teams showed up for a scheduled game only to have it canceled due to a group of migrants who refused to leave the field. Erik Johansson, coach of one of the boys’ teams, observed, “I directly asked them to leave, and some of them kind of took it into consideration, but then four or five of them said, ‘You know what, f**k it, we don’t have to leave, we can do whatever we want.’” The game was scheduled for 5:00 PM, and roughly 40 high school boys showed up in uniforms ready to play. Despite this, the African migrants who spoke little English refused to leave, even after the police showed up. With the conflict escalating and time for playing the game running out, Johansson and the other coach agreed to cancel the match. “Even when the game is over,” he explained, “you don’t know if they’re waiting for you, so even if the cops kicked them out, it may not be over. So we just all agreed, this is too dangerous.” Johansson, who hails from Sweden, noted, “I have seen this before, [and] I know how bad it can get.”
  • New York wind farm fails to launch: New York hit another setback for its planned offshore wind farm as the state’s Energy Research and Development Authority pulled out of contract negotiations with three different wind developers over turbine maker GE Vernova’s announcement that it could not provide 18-megawatt turbines. When the offshore wind farm project had first been drawn up, it was based on GE’s plan to produce 18-megawatt turbines. However, the company has since downgraded the size of the turbines it will produce to a maximum of 16.5 megawatts due to the high cost of repairs for the bigger turbines. GE’s renewable energy business lost $1.44 billion last year. So, despite massive federal government handouts from the Biden administration for its green energy agenda, the costs are so prohibitive that it is effectively impractical. Furthermore, this is despite New York regulators agreeing to pay a price of roughly $150 per megawatt hour to wind farm developers. To put that in perspective, the cost of natural gas-generated power comes in at around $30 per megawatt hour. New York residents will be forking out more of their hard-earned dollars to pay for leftist politicians’ enforcement of their climate cult ideology.
  • SHOCKER II: Self-checkout thefts are on the rise: Speaking of the ingenuity, opportunism, and irrepressibility of America’s criminal class, it seems that all those self-checkout lines in the big-box grocery stores might be coming up on their freshness date. As CBS News reports: “Walmart is joining the ranks of retailers rethinking self-checkout, with the industry giant in the process of removing the self-service lanes at a store in Missouri. The return to registers staffed by humans at the Walmart store in Shrewsbury, a suburb of St. Louis, comes a month after Target announced only those buying 10 items or less could use the self-checkout lane at its stores, and Dollar General reduced self-checkout at thousands of its locations.” The latter didn’t mess around with half-measures. Instead, it removed the self-checkout option entirely at 300 locations most plagued by shoplifters. In a perverse way, it’s hard to blame folks, especially given how much more it costs to fill up a grocery cart in Joe Bidenflation’s America.
  • Israel’s intel chief resigns: On Monday, Major General Aharon Haliva announced his resignation from serving as Israel’s head of military intelligence. Haliva pointed to Hamas’s surprise terrorist attack on October 7 and his failure to prevent it as the reason for his resignation. “The intelligence directorate under my command did not live up to the task we were entrusted with,” Haliva explained. “I carry that black day with me ever since, day after day, night after night. I will carry the horrible pain of the war with me forever.” Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant accepted Haliva’s resignation and thanked him for his 38 years of service. The timing of and the unprecedented scope of Hamas’s terrorist attack against Israel on October 7 has given rise to a number of dubious conspiracy theories seeking to explain how the Israeli government could have been caught so off-guard. A number of other Israeli intelligence and security officials are expected to resign in the coming days and weeks. Meanwhile, Israel continues its war in Gaza as it works to bring justice and wipe out Hamas.

Headlines

  • Judge rules against NY attorney general, says Trump’s $175 million judgment bond will stand (Fox News)
  • Columbia professors declare solidarity with student protesters and call for Minouche Shafik’s resignation (Washington Free Beacon)
  • Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters arrested at Yale, NYU (Washington Post)
  • Harvard suspends pro-Palestinian student group (National Review)
  • Supreme Court rejects Kari Lake’s voting machine lawsuit (Washington Examiner)
  • PA middle school girl confronts school board when they ignore warnings of trans student assaulting others (RedState)
  • Satire: Columbia University students reject a two-campus solution (Babylon Bee)

For the Executive Summary archive, click here.

Comment | Share

A Union Win for Biden but Not Workers

A Volkswagen plant in Tennessee becomes the first such facility in the South to vote to join the UAW.

Thomas Gallatin

The third time is apparently a charm for the United Auto Workers.

After having twice rejected unionization, workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, just voted overwhelmingly to unionize. This marks the first such success for the UAW in the South and comes after the 4,300 workers at the VW plant voted against unionization in both 2014 and 2019. Remarkably, nearly three-quarters of the plant workers voted in favor this time around.

UAW President Shawn Fain celebrated the victory, suggesting it was a harbinger of things to come for unions in the historically anti-union South. “Many of the talkingheads and the pundits have said to me repeatedly, before we announced, that you can’t win in the South,” Fain said to cheering workers after the vote was announced. “But you all said, ‘Watch this.’ You all moved the mountain.”

Joe Biden was quick to jump on the unionization bandwagon. “Let me be clear,” he said, “to the Republican governors that tried to undermine this vote: there is nothing to fear from American workers using their voice and their legal right to form a union if they so choose.”

Leftmedia outlets also jumped aboard, implying that the southern states’ anti-union resistance had finally been broken. The New York Times headline read, “Could the Union Victory at VW Set Off a Wave?” NPR announced, “Volkswagen workers vote yes to unionizing, igniting UAW’s push to organize the South.” CNN trumpeted, “Volkswagen workers vote overwhelmingly to join the UAW, giving the union a groundbreaking win.”

It’s happening! they say.

But is it really? The truth, both for the UAW’s victory in Chattanooga and the Leftmedia’s pro-union sentiments, isn’t what it seems. This union victory had much more to do with crony capitalism and autoworkers voting to save their jobs than it did with any true expansion of unionization into the deep red South.

To that first point, thanks to Biden’s anti-fossil fuel agenda, the auto industry in America is being pressed into pumping out electric vehicles for a supposed electric-dominated future. Via EPA emissions regulations along with government subsidies, automakers are effectively seeking to go where the government money is.

The Chattanooga VW plant happens to manufacture the company’s electric SUV, known as the ID.4. VW will get big bucks from the government for pumping out these EVs, which of course means job security for workers at the plant. The vote to unionize was, in many ways, a vote to keep their jobs. Indeed, unlike the previous two organization votes, VW did not seek to initiate any real campaign against unionization. VW likely wanted this outcome because of its own bottom line.

The trouble is that Americans aren’t embracing EVs. In fact, that reality may be why VW wanted this to happen. Every EV maker across the country, including America’s number one EV maker, Tesla, is bracing for rough waters ahead.

Energy journalist Robert Bryce, who recently reported “Tesla In Turmoil: The EV Meltdown In 10 Charts,” puts it this way:

Tesla is the bellwether for the EV business, and it’s in trouble. Last week, the company announced it was laying off more than 10%, or about 14,000, of its employees. The move comes after a quarter during which the company missed delivery expectations and just before it reveals its quarterly profits on Tuesday. Here’s what Wired wrote last Thursday about Tesla’s situation: “Demand is dropping for electric cars in the U.S. and Europe, just as competition in China intensifies and workers revolt in Europe. Investors are worried.”

If Tesla is in trouble, then the rest of the struggling EV industry must be in panic mode. The EV bubble seems near bursting, as it remains little other than a luxury novelty accessory for those with enough disposable income to spend on such things. For the rest of America, EVs simply are too expensive and do not meet their practical demands for daily life.

Meanwhile, the UAW is celebrating a “big” win, even as labor unions across the country continue to shrink — down in 2023 to their lowest level on record. Just 10% of American workers are unionized, as the UAW is facing a decertification election this week at a Nissan plant in New Jersey, and workers at a Penske Truck Rental are looking to decertify from the International Association of Machinists in both Minnesota and Tennessee.

And what of the widely celebrated workers strikes that led to the so-called big win for the UAW over the Big Three automakers last year? As a result, some 18,000 workers may soon get their walking papers.

While Biden and the Leftmedia may be celebrating a historic union victory in the South, those workers at Chattanooga’s VW plant may soon come to regret their vote.

Comment | Share

Biden’s Title IX Revisions Erase Women

The Left is taking away protections from women, but they aren’t the only ones hurt by this.

Emmy Griffin

The Biden administration has been in the process of rewriting Title IX with several troubling “fixes.” Some of those rewrites were officially codified last week. Most importantly, gender identity will now be included as protected under Title IX. This essentially eliminates women’s protections … which was the initial impetus for the law back in 1972. Biden should know — he was there.

Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer for the University of Kentucky and an activist for women’s rights, laid it out plainly regarding the Department of Education’s going ahead with enforcing the sexual harassment and discrimination aspects of the changes:

The Biden Admin has just officially abolished Title IX as we knew it. Now, sex = gender identity.

In a nutshell, the new rewrite means:

— men can take academic AND athletic scholarships from women
— men will have FULL access to bathrooms, locker rooms, etc
— men could be housed in dorm rooms with women
— students and faculty MUST compel their speech by requiring the use of preferred pronouns

If the guidelines above are ignored or even questioned, then YOU can be charged with harassment.

The most cowardly aspect of this whole thing is that Team Biden is waiting to make the sports changes until after the November election. Democrats know this will hurt them politically because virtually no sane person wants it. It caters to a very small and delusional/brainwashed group of young men who have a very high chance of growing out of it anyway. In the meantime, because they declare they are actually female, the Left is taking away protections from women and girls.

The full depths of how grossly unjust and evil these moves are cannot be adequately expressed. I am a former high school and college athlete, and now, as the mother of two little girls, the prospect of having their future opportunities quashed because of this feckless president and his radical left flank is infuriating.

Should Joe Biden be reelected in November and these rules and proposed changes not be reversed, my girls will not have the freedom to have a locker room or bathroom that is safe for them. My girls will not have a fair chance to learn to play a sport or to excel with other girls. Their risk of serious injury is exponentially higher, and their opportunities for scholarships and awards are slashed. This is the very opposite of justice.

But women aren’t the only ones hurt by this. Because of the new rules on sexual harassment and discrimination, men’s due process and free speech rights are also compromised. They will have no way to defend themselves against false accusations of sexual harassment and rape. Everyone’s First Amendment rights are infringed because of forcing people to use “preferred pronouns.”

Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chairwoman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, excoriated the Biden administration: “The rule also undermines existing due process rights, placing students and institutions in legal jeopardy and again undermining the protections Title IX is intended to provide. Evidently, the acceptance of biological reality, and the faithful implementation of the law, are just pills too big for the Department to swallow — and it shows.”

Biden is using a 20-80 issue to push us all to believe that he is a great “civil rights” president. His version of empathy is making this country a worse place for everyone.

Comment | Share

Another ‘Transgender Man’ Planned School Mass Murder

Authorities in Maryland thwarted a copycat high school rampage by a young woman who identified as a man.

Michael Swartz

Is our mainstream media downplaying a penchant for violence among so-called “transgender” individuals?

Last week, Maryland authorities arrested an 18-year-old female who identifies as male, accusing her of a plot to commit a school shooting. We briefly touched on this story Friday, and it follows in the footsteps of several incidents over the last few years where people who identified as the opposite of their biological gender committed mass murder, most heinously the Covenant School rampage last year in Nashville.

While the 18-year-old student in this latest case was purportedly enrolled in a local high school, she had not attended classes in person since the fall of 2022. Since then, she had participated in a “virtual learning program” when not hospitalized. Per a local news report, “The Associated Press says court records show the teen was hospitalized in December 2022 after threatening to ‘shoot up a school,’ and the following month clinicians reported that the teen was talking about ‘suicide by cop.’”

That same local news report also noted that Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich used the occasion to wax political. “Hopefully, it inspires people to make more investments in the mental health of our community because I think we’ve identified this as a lacking space for a long time,” said Elrich. “This could be a wake-up call that we need to take it more seriously now.” Elrich, a Democrat, also praised Maryland’s gun-grabbing efforts, noting, “Maryland has some of the strictest gun laws, and it may be a helpful thing that he [sic] found our gun laws an impediment to getting armed.”

There are a couple of things to ponder with this case. If you consider that the student’s plot has been incubating since the point at which she decided to make her feelings known via her “manifesto” — in her case, a third-person narrative and a technique to work out a plot and eventually gain fame after the act similar to that of the Covenant School killer — there was plenty of time to secure a gun.

What’s more chilling and enlightening, though, is how the would-be assailant sought fame and compared herself to others in her school. “Truthfully, would rather become a serial killer than a mass shooter. Serial killers are romanticized a lot more. They get tons of love letters and Netflix documentaries about them. Mass shooters are brushed off unless they are truly unique or good-looking,” court documents read. “It’d be hard to tell me apart from the hundreds of other Asian guys at my school in police lineup. My school is mostly Asian and white. It’s in upper-middle-class Rockville. It’s a suburban city in Maryland where almost everyone goes to college.”

So instead of standing out for academics or athletic prowess, something told this girl — who, by the mugshots provided, had obtained a somewhat masculine appearance and manner of dress — that she needed to rebel by acting out as a boy and emulating a transgender school shooter. While we haven’t heard from the girl’s parents, it’s apparent they tried to give her help, but perhaps those “helpers” tried to make her more secure in a transgender identity rather than encourage her to work her way out of it. (As in most states, so-called “conversion therapy” is against the law in Maryland — a major irony in the age of “gender-affirming” care.)

Worse still, though, are the enablers in the press and judicial system. Readers may have noticed that the accused was commonly referred to in news reports by male pronouns and her assumed name rather than her birth gender and given name. And when pressed on the subject, Elrich snapped: “Why are you focused on it being a transgender is beyond me. It is not a news story. It is not a crime to be transgender.”

Indeed, it’s not a crime to be “transgender,” and no one said it is. But it’s a symptom of a mental disorder that has led to shootings and murders often enough to become a red flag and worthy of investigation. Perhaps it was only this young lady’s conscience that won out and stopped her before she went too far, as she wrote: “I do recognize that my plan is fully unethical. It’s selfish and evil.”

Regardless of the reason she held off, it was sheer luck and timing that saved students at the accused’s high school. Next time, we may not be as fortunate.

Comment | Share

READER COMMENTS

Editor’s Note: Each week we receive hundreds of comments and correspondences — and we read every one of them. Click here for a few thought-provoking comments about specific articles. The views expressed therein don’t necessarily reflect those of The Patriot Post.

VIDEOS

Share

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

SHORT CUTS

We Have Questions…

“We will be producing the weapons that the Iranians use to defeat Vladimir Putin.” —Senator Bob Casey (D-PA)

The BIG Lie

“Putin does what he would like to do: kill his opposition, imprison his opposition, drive journalists and others into exile, rule without any check or balance. That’s what Trump really wants. … He sees Putin, he sees Xi [Jinping], he sees Kim Jong Un in North Korea. Those are the people he is modeling himself after.” —Hillary Clinton

Non Compos Mentis

“I condemn anti-Semitic protests. … I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” —Joe Biden

Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes

“It is especially important that we remember the power of young people shaping this country today … as we once again witness the leadership of those peaceful, student-led protests on campuses like Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, and many others.” —Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)

Belly Laugh of the Day

“It’s Joe Biden that’s standing for peace — and a lasting peace at that — and it’s the Republicans that frankly would stoke the flames of war in the Middle East.” —Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D)

For the Record

“[Biden] subscribes to the idea that if you parry enough blows, eventually the man who is pummeling you will recognize the error of his ways and move on. He believes that a combination of economic penalties and shaming or embarrassing or chastising rogue regimes in the fictional court of international public opinion will lead to peace. He is wrong. Biden’s reluctance to unleash our allies — what the press calls his fear of escalation — has produced the disaster in Afghanistan, the slow-motion advance of Russia in Ukraine, the standstill in Gaza, and a Greater Middle East where Hezbollah, Iranian proxies in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis do as they please. And there are eight months left in his term.” —Matthew Continetti

“The way to reestablish deterrence is to ignore the arms of the octopus and go straight for its head. Take away something Iran’s leaders hold dear — their nuclear program. By destroying Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, you not only exact a heavy cost for the regime’s malign behavior. You guarantee Israel’s security.” —Matthew Continetti

“Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan did not start any of these fights. Their only ‘crime’ is existing and looking like awfully appealing targets to men such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, and Iranian ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” —Jim Geraghty

More Belly Laughs

“People understand that it’s Joe Biden that stands for American values.” —Gov. JB Pritzker

“Joe Biden is a terrific debater.” —Gov. JB Pritzker

Dumb & Dumber

“The attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — DEI — is an attack on democracy, it’s an attack on education, it’s an attack on how our economy works.” —failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams

“I have stayed in the Congress because I’ve got three little kids, I’ve got $75,000 in student loan debt, and we have childcare costs.” —Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA)

Upright

“The threat facing our country is from the far-Left and the drift that’s been occurring toward really a socialistic system and one that brooks no opposition, that cancels people, that has only one viewpoint taught in colleges, that tries to push parents out of the picture when it comes to the education of their children. It’s a heavy-handed bunch of thugs, in my opinion, and that’s where the threat is.” —former Attorney General Bill Barr

“Time to make crime illegal again.” —Elon Musk

Insight

“Education is the best provision for old age.” —Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Comment | Share

TODAY’S MEME

Share

For more of today’s memes, visit the Memesters Union.

TODAY’S CARTOON

Share

For more of today’s cartoons, visit the Cartoons archive.

“From The Patriot Post (patriotpost.us)”.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.