Category Archives: Culture

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Amanda Marcotte and #VanceDerangementSyndrome It's a natural follow-on from her #TrumpDerangementSyndrome

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s previous Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar, and the beer light behind her advertises Bud Light.

If someone were to ask me what the very lovely Amanda Marcotte hates the most, Republicans, Donald Trump, Christianity, Donald Trump, pro-life people, Donald Trump, conservatives, Donald Trump, pregnancies, J D Vance, or Donald Trump, while it wouldn’t be hard to say that she hates President Trump with a white-hot, #TrumpDerangementSyndrome-inflamed passion, she seems almost equally outraged by everything else.

I had just posted my previous article on Vice President J D Vance’s new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, when the thought occurred to me, “I wonder what that hater of all things Christian thinks of his book.” Miss Marcotte had already published an article entitled Divorce him already, Usha, claiming that “JD Vance and his wife really seem to loathe each other,” while also laughably claiming that Salon, her publisher, is “a journalistic outfit,” a rather callous call to make the then three Vance children fatherless, only to wax wroth when Mrs Vance, along with Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, announced their pregnancies at about the same time.

So, naturally, I checked Salon, and was unsurprised by what I found: Continue reading →

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“Communion,” by J D Vance

I have my rosary hanging from the rear view mirror of my 2010 Ford F-150.

I will admit that it’s truly baffling to me that the northeast, the most politically liberal area of our country, is also our most heavily Catholic region, yet our good friends on the left love to spend their time bashing Catholics. It kind of makes me wonder just how actually Catholic they are.

Our 46th President was famously Catholic, attending Mass frequently, but he nevertheless supported but he prenatal infanticide, including wanting the federal government to pay for abortions including helping to pay for women in states which ban abortions to travel to states which do not, homosexuality, transgenderism, including overturning bans on transgender surgeries for minors, all things which the Church says are sins. Under his Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics,” due to the alleged:

probability that policy issues of mutual interest to RMVEs (Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists) and RTE (Radical-Traditionalist Catholics) adherents will remain in the public spotlight. Catalyzing events in which RMVEs and RTC adherents might have common cause include legislation or judicial decisions in areas such as abortion rights, immigration, affirmative action, and LBGTQ protections.

After this was exposed, FBI Director Christopher Wray lied through his scummy teeth as to the extent of the program.

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported, undoubtedly to their discomfort, that “Catholicism is growing in Philly and New Jersey. Who’s filling the pews? Local diocese officials are confirming what’s becoming a global trend: more people are converting or coming back to Catholicism.”

That would undoubtedly appall the very lovely Jennifer Palmeiri, once Hillary Clinton’s director of communications, caught in this exchange when Mrs Clinton’s campaign e-mails were hacked and disclosed by Wikileaks:

Center For American Progress fellow John Halpin: Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) …they must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.

Miss Palmieri: I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.

That was then, and this is now, where we come to Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, by Vice President J D Vance.

Vance’s new book puts his Catholic faith at the center of his story — and his political future

by Steve Contorno | Monday, June 15, 2026

When JD Vance published his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2016, he had drifted away from the Christian faith of his childhood — a familiar story amid a broader national retreat from organized religion that had left church pews emptier than in previous decades.

Now, Vance as vice president — and likely 2028 presidential contender — is a practicing Catholic, a conversion he has chronicled in his second book, “Communion,” publishing Tuesday. And it’s landing on bookshelves amid a remarkable turnaround: Catholicism is, by some measures, experiencing a resurgence in the United States unlike anything in recent memory.

An American-born pope presides over the Vatican the first time in the church’s history. While Catholicism still faces long-term demographic struggles, conversions are surging, with some dioceses reporting record highs. Accounts of Gen Z converts filling church pews have injected new energy into the 2,000-year-old religion and have surprised even Catholic leaders who had long braced for continued decline.

I note, with some amusement, that the CNN article did not include a link to Mr Vance’s book. I am not particularly surprised.

St Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, where I attend Mass. Photo by D R Pico.

My small parish, St Elizabeth’s, is too small to be statistically significant, but we have seen that new energy as well. We have a couple and another man coming in as catechumens, and two new already Catholic families, along with another man, have moved in as well. For a small parish, in a small county, in an area of the country with few Catholics, it’s noticeable.

“Rather than doing the JFK thing and saying, ‘I’m not going to be a Catholic president,’ (Mr Biden said), ‘If I’m elected president, here is how my Catholic faith will inform my presidency,’” (Terry Schilling, the founder of American Principles Project) said.

President Biden’s Catholic faith didn’t inform his presidency very much it would seem. Rather, Mr Biden, like so many other elected Catholic Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, found that being a Democrat was far, far, far more important to them than being Catholic.

Polling shows that Catholics are moving in the direction of those who identify as evangelicals by becoming more conservative. Trump won 59% of Catholics in 2024, according to CNN exit polls, higher than any Republican presidential nominee since at least 1972. New converts and recently ordained priests and nuns also appear to be considerably more conservative than those born into the religion and older clergy, said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at the Washington University Center on Religion and Politics.

You mean, Catholics are becoming more Catholic? That’s what we need to see!

We are seeing the weirdness of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate from the Lone Star State, and a Presbyterian Church USA seminarian, telling us that he is a devout Christian, but he supports prenatal infanticide, using the story of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38) as a supposedly Christian argument for it, supports “trans children”, and The Advocate, a ‘magazine’ which supports homosexuality and transgenderism, has said the candidate “has positioned himself as a fierce queer ally, even using the Bible to advocate in favor of LGBTQ+ rights.” With that kind of idiocy oozing from a supposedly Protestant Christian church, we need more men like Vice President Vance to argue and testify for the truth.

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Killadelphia: I confess to being unable to see how a victim’s race makes him either more or less dead.

On Sunday, November 28, 2021, Temple University student and a fellow with Philadelphia City Commissioner’s Office, Samuel Sean Collington, 21, was robbed and then murdered near the school in North Philadelphia. Mr Collington was a white victim, murdered by a black juvenile named Latif Williams in a botched robbery. On Thursday, December 2, 2021, The Philadelphia Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him.

On Thursday, September 22, 2022, recent Drexel graduate Everett Beauregard, 23, was senselessly murdered, shot in the neck.

Now there’s another senseless murder of 22-year-old William Schmidt, a Penn State student, in South Philly:

A Penn State student was shot to death in South Philadelphia, police said

The victim lived just steps away from where he was killed.

by Michelle Myers and Andrew Kitchenman | Sunday, June 7, 2026 | 1:59 PM EDT

A 22-year-old Penn State student died after being shot a half block from his home in South Philadelphia early Saturday, police said.

Police said officers from the 1st District responded at 1:32 a.m. to a radio call for a person with a gun on the 1900 block of Durfor Street. They found William J. Schmidt lying in the street with a gunshot wound to the chest, police said.

Schmidt was returning home from a local bar where he had been watching the NBA Finals with friends, according to his father, 6abc reported.

Surveillance cameras captured video that appeared to show the moments before the shooting, 6abc reported. A man can be seen throwing a cell phone in one video, and seconds later, another man ran around a corner with Schmidt chasing him, before the gunman turned around and shot him, according to another video.

There’s more at the original.

Note that there was video, but the newspaper simply referred to the suspects as “a man”, “another man”, and “the gunman”. Now, on Wednesday, 6ABC released images of the suspects, and though they do not describe the suspects, we can see that the suspects are black males. Perhaps the newspaper, the day after Karmelo Anthony, a black male, was convicted of murdering Austin Metcalf, a white teenager, the Inquirer doesn’t want to fan any flames of racial hatred. Those who love to fan the flames of racial hatred have been decrying the fact that Mr Anthony was convicted at all, but at least as I am typing this, the Inky has neither any stories on the trial or the Usual Suspects among the columnists pontificating on the subject.

But that doesn’t mean the newspaper won’t have any stories about a black man being murdered by a white criminal!

Brooklyn man is convicted of fatally stabbing a Philly dancer at a gas station

Dmitriy Popov faces up to 25 years in prison for killing O’Shae Sibley at a Brooklyn gas station in 2023.

by Rob Tornoe | Tuesday, June 9, 2026 | 4:38 PM EDT

A Brooklyn man has been convicted in the killing of beloved Philadelphia dancer O’Shae Sibley, who was stabbed to death at a New York City gas station in 2023.

Dmitriy Popov, 20, was convicted of manslaughter as a hate crime and other charges related to “taunting, stabbing, and killing” Sibley, which included “hurling homophobic and anti-Black slurs,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.

Sibley, 28, was a gay Black man, while Popov, who was 17 at the time of the killing, is white. Popov, who was tried as an adult, faces up to 25 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for June 30.

The reporter, Rob Tornoe, went out of his way to tell us that there was a racial aspect to the killing. More, as the newspaper has been celebrating homosexual “Pride” month, Mr Tornoe had to tell us that the victim was homosexual. I’m not certain how Mr Sibley being black or homosexual makes him either more or less dead.

I do not celebrate the conviction of Karmelo Anthony, because he is a young man who had his whole life ahead of him. He got stupid, killed another young man with his whole life ahead of him, all due to a fight which should never have been a fight. Austin Metcalf is stone-cold graveyard dead, and Mr Anthony, when he gets out of prison in 17½ to 35 years will be a hardened criminal, with no future other than the next crimes he’ll commit. He’ll wind up back in prison, or dead.

The conviction was necessary, but no one is better off for it.

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Can socialists learn anything?

I raised, in our after-Mass Bible study group — contrary to some Protestant claims, Catholics actually do read the Bible! — a theological question: can God, who is omniscient, learn? My question was inspired by this: God, being all powerful, cannot be hurt, but by taking human form, Jesus suffered the agony of the crucifixion, so did God learn anything new in this?

Which leads me to a more mortal question: can socialists actually learn anything? Continue reading →

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The peasants are revolting!

Apparently, at least in liberal-speak, if you are a member of an Accredited Victim Group™, you do not have to do anything really radical like obey the law or behave like a civilized human being.

The City of Brotherly Love — a pretty appropriate nickname right now — has gone all out on the homosexual “Pride” month, something our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper has been very eagerly covering, and as you might have guessed, the party atmosphere has not led to orderly behavior.

15 arrested as police response to Gayborhood Pride festival spurs criticism from some in LGBTQ+ community

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said officers had responded “to a growing number of public safety concerns.”

by Jesse Bunch | Monday, June 8, 2026 | 7:06 PM EDT

Fifteen people were arrested at a Pride celebration in the Gayborhood on Sunday, authorities said, and the response drew criticism from some LGBTQ+ residents over how police handled crowd control at the event.

Images of police officers engaging with attendees in Center City circulated widely across local social media feeds on Monday, featuring criticisms of what some considered to be an outsized and aggressive law enforcement presence.

In one image shared on X, a police officer on a motorcycle appears to push against a woman’s chest, and in another photo, pushes the woman against a garage door while arresting her.

Others videos showed police on horseback dispersing young people from a sidewalk, as well as officers physically struggling with a man outside of the gay bar Woody’s.

Sounds like crowd control to me, efforts by the Philadelphia Police to keep things safe and orderly, among a crowd in which some partygoers might have consumed mood-or-judgement-altering substances.

And in yet another clip, a row of police officers — two of whom were wearing face coverings — formed a line to clear a barricaded Gayborhood street while officers on motorbikes rode along the sidewalks.

Joshua Stokem, a New Jersey resident who regularly attends the city’s Pride celebrations, said he has never seen that large of a police presence during such festivities.

“They were definitely getting more and more aggressive” as the gathering stretched into the early evening, said Stokem, who works as a promoter for LGBTQ+ events at city bars.

Councilmember Rue Landau, herself a member of the LGBTQ+ community, said in a statement Monday that LGBTQ+ constituents had reached out to her office in “outrage” and that she was working to better understand the department’s strategy.

It’s really simple: police officers in those situations are trying to keep things orderly and safe, while ‘revelers’ are not always inclined to behave.

Considering the size of the crowds, at least to judge by the coverage that The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philly television stations have provided, fifteen people being arrested, mostly for disorderly conduct, but at least one person “was arrested for aggravated assault of a police officer.”

Can I blame that on the newspaper’s encouraging attitude when it comes to citizens ‘resisting’ law enforcement when it comes to immigration? To me, those things are related. If someone has no respect for law enforcement in one area, would it be any particular surprise that such a person might have less respect for law enforcement in other areas?

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said in a statement that the celebration was “by all accounts, a successful event attended and enjoyed by thousands of people.”

Still, “as crowd sizes increased in the Gayborhood, officers responded to a growing number of public safety concerns, including fights, disorderly behavior, blocked roadways, and the challenges associated with safely managing large crowds in a confined area,” Bethel said.

What? Fights? Among our peaceful, leftist communities? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!

Let’s face it: Commissioner Bethel, all of the supervisors, and really every police officer in the City of Brotherly Love know that Philly is very supportive of the homosexual community, and they would certainly not be going out of their way just to beat up the revelers; that’s very much a career-limiting move, and with the city’s asinine, far-left, police-hating District Attorney, any cop would know that if he stepped over the line, Larry Krasner would want to throw him in jail. I’m not going to give any credit to the special pleaders for this particular Accredited Victim Group.™

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Navy Joan Roberts is probably better off with her father being absent Perhaps the current generation of young adults are going to do things better

In the 1960s, I was the boy who was embarrassed about growing up without a father in small-town Mt Sterling, Kentucky. Divorce was far less common at the time, and all of the kids I knew in Mt Sterling Elementary School had fathers, or at least the ones about whom I knew anything about their families. I was the outlier!

My mother moved us to Mt Sterling because her sister had been able to get her a job. Our family, from Antioch, California, with a detour to Portland, Maine, my mother’s hometown, was completely unknown to the people there, and naturally no one had seen or heard of my father; there was no knowledge of him whatsoever, no knowledge that he had completely abandoned his wife and three children, so it could have been, at least for the townspeople, a question of whether it was somehow my mother’s fault. If you think that’s strange, it wouldn’t be to the mind of a nine-year-old boy with a girl’s first name, and the first one wearing glasses to boot. I at least think I can understand what life must be like for almost eight-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, growing up without her father, Hunter Biden.

Oh, there are certainly differences: my sisters and I grew up poor, because good jobs for women were rare in the sixties, and my father saw child support as more of an option than an obligation; men could get away with that far more at the time. My mother worked hard and struggled, in ways that it has taken the responsibilities of adulthood to make me understand now. Young Miss Roberts, and her mother Lunden Roberts, aren’t having to struggle too much financially, because her father has been hit with very substantial child support payments, but it’s also public knowledge that the younger Miss Roberts is a bastard, something that, as a child, I only feared people might think of me, and the fact that the older Miss Roberts was working as a stripper undoubtedly has many people thinking poorly of her. I guess that she was doing what she had to do to keep a roof over her head.

At a time when the Biden family ought to be slipping back into obscurity, former First Lady Jill Biden is back in the headlines as she has to do a tour to sell her book View from the East Wing: A Memoir. The problem for the tour is that Dr Biden has been denying that she saw in her husband what any wife should have noticed: that he was in serious mental decline, and her stories as she makes the rounds of talk shows have been shifting and never sounding truthful.

ABC’s ‘The View’ is a place for journolism, not journalism, but it is also a place in which the hostesses sometimes go off-script, and things like Dr Biden’s paean for her stepson get broadcast without critical thinking. Critical thinking is then applied from outside, as the former First Lady’s effusive praise of her wastrel stepson gets hammered from outside. President Biden finally acknowledged the young Miss Roberts as his granddaughter, though to my knowledge Dr Biden never did.

She’s certainly never been invited to family get-togethers, but the younger Mr Biden had married Melissa Cohen not long after his daughter was born, so such would be pretty awkward. Mr Biden knew that he had knocked up the elder Miss Roberts before he married someone else.

I have to confess here: I do not understand family relationships these days. My wife and I had been married, married for a few years, before our children were born, and after 47 years, we’re still married. I just don’t get men fathering children without the least regard for marrying the mothers or rearing their children. I suppose the things I saw so negatively when I was a child are commonplace now, and perhaps children growing up today without their fathers around just see it as normal, and hardly different from a bunch of the other children they know.

Our great, Christian society and culture has lost something. Now discussions are about “body counts,” how many people you’ve screwed, and, as much as it would horrify the lovely Amanda Marcotte, the fact that men trying to rack up high body counts for themselves are also ruling out women with high body counts as potential wives, even though women don’t get to rack up high body counts without men going right along with it.

But there is hope! Britain’s very leftist The Guardian reported that ‘millennials’ are not ‘hooking up’ for random sex as much as previous generations. A Google search for current generation having less sex turned up many more such articles, though several were hidden behind paywalls.

Along similar lines, we have reported on the slow growth of the Catholic Church, the faith that President Biden and his wife have professed, a faith which does not support contraception and abortion the way Miss Marcotte does, a faith which encourages personal responsibility and the confession of sins. Our good friends on the left hated people like Charlie Kirk for stressing such to college students, and the previously mentioned 48-year-old Miss Marcotte sees three married Republican women getting pregnant at about the same time through conspiracy theory eyes rather than more conservative women actually having more babies. She really, really, really doesn’t want the next generation of young adults to disapprove of her view about life and marriage and sex.

It will take more time to see how this all plays out, but perhaps, just perhaps, we are seeing a more conservative social and cultural movement among Americans.

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At what point does a columnist slanting or hiding information to one side become lying through his scummy teeth?

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s communist, oops, sorry, columnist Will Bunch frequently shades the truth, slanting it as far left as he possibly can, but there’s a difference between shading the truth and lying through his scummy teeth.

Mikie Sherrill’s state police riot in Newark is a national disgrace

New Jersey state troopers meant to protect Newark protesters from ICE are violently shredding the First Amendment instead.

by Will Bunch | Sunday, May 31, 2026 | 2:05 PM EDT

When Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016 and the United States began its decade-long spiral into authoritarian madness, there arose a popular meme: Whatever you think you would have done to stop the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, or to end American racial injustice in the 1960s, is what you are doing right now.

Today, a humanitarian tragedy is taking place behind barbed wire and rows of riot cops in the industrial netherlands of Newark, where immigrants snatched by masked agents of American secret police are held in a private lockup called Delaney Hall in squalid conditions — fed rancid food, denied proper medical care, and fearing for their lives.

What are good people doing right now? As news of a detainee hunger strike inside Delaney Hall reached the outside world, a few hundred protesters have made their way toward the gates of the facility run by the for-profit GEO Group — to voice support for the strikers, demand humane treatment, and, for some of them, put their bodies on the line to commit acts of civil disobedience against a human-rights catastrophe on American soil.

Let’s use the same link Mr Bunch used last to see what he meant by “put their bodies on the line to commit acts of civil disobedience.”

Groups of demonstrators, many wearing gas masks and other face coverings, linked arms in a human chain, videos and photos posted on social media show.

The distinguished columnist doesn’t like it when ICE officers wear “face coverings,” but it doesn’t seem to bother him when the mostly peaceful protesters do.

Some used trash cans, old mattresses, umbrellas and other materials as makeshift shields and barricades as they confronted U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement officers.

Others attempted to block people and vehicles from entering and exiting the building or threw orange traffic cones and other objects in the direction of ICE officers as they taunted them with expletives and vulgar chants.

The ICE officers, many of whom wore helmets and tactical vests, used pepper spray to try and disperse the protesters, according to videos posted to social media. Some used their batons to beat and push back protesters as the officers attempted to clear the roadway for vehicles.

DHS said about six demonstrators were arrested for assaulting law enforcement officers.

The source is WPVI-TV, the ABC owned-and-operated television station in the City of Brotherly Love; it’s not some evil reich-wing source.

Mr Bunch’s subtitle called it “shredding the First Amendment,” so let’s ask: what exactly does the First Amendment say?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Do throwing “orange traffic cones and other objects in the direction of ICE officers,” attempting “to block people and vehicles from entering and exiting the building,” or using “trash cans, old mattresses, umbrellas and other materials as makeshift shields and barricades” sound like they meet the constitutional standard of assembling peaceably?

Is “assaulting law enforcement officers” part of the right of the people peaceably to assemble?

Mr Bunch again:

So is the New Jersey governor at war with the rogue agency that sends masked goon squads into city streets to grab day laborers or Uber drivers and warehouses them in squalid gulags, and that murdered two citizens on the streets of Minneapolis when they tried to protest? Or is she partnering with them? How long can we remain in denial that 21st century America is a police state with “resistance Democrats” as willing partners?

By “grab day laborers or Uber drivers” the columnist means arresting people in our country illegally. By “they tried to protest,” Mr Bunch means trying to run down ICE agents with her car (Renee Good) and pulling a gun on ICE agents (Alex Pretti). Of course, he doesn’t tell you that part, does he?

At what point, I have to ask, does the columnist slanting or hiding information to one side become lying through his scummy teeth? In my opinion, he’s not just past that point, but well past it.

However, I do agree that we should get rid of these illegal immigrant detention centers. What we should do is deport them immediately upon apprehension, and if they have a case to be made for being allowed to live in the United States, they can make it at the American embassies or consulates in their home countries.

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James Talarico: a representative of failing ‘progressive’ Christianity, and a hypocrite to boot Former 'vegan' campaigner now chows down on barbeque to appeal to Texas voters

In a move reminiscent of Democratic congressional candidate Amy McGrath Hnderson being caught on tape, fund raising in Massachusetts for a congressional seat in the Bluegrass State, saying “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” Texas Democratic Senate nominee was caught on tape saying, in a 2022 state House of Representatives campaign, “I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign. We are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”

Now Mr Talarico is telling us, it ain’t true, ’cause see, I is eating spare ribs and turkey drumsticks.

Battling rumors that he is a sexual neuter or homosexual, the 36-year-old Mr Talarico announced that yes, he has a girlfriend, saying “She is my rock. She is my best friend. I don’t know if I could have gotten through the last six months of this crazy race if she hadn’t been by my side.” She’s been “by (his) side” so much that no one knows who she is or has a photo of her with him.

Oh, we’ll eventually see a name and photo of her, a version of the fake dating books now popular for some reason, but she’s just as likely to be a beard to get him past election day. Continue reading →

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They’re dead; what more could be done to them?

There’s some silliness in Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s concluding statement about the San Diego mosque killings:

(Cain) Clark and (Caleb) Vazquez’s hideous rampage almost certainly would have been treated as a murder, charges if they had lived. But in the hands of the Trump DOJ they may well not have been slapped with federal hate crime charges. This glaring laxity is just enough space for the Cains and Vazquez’s of America to run loose.

Uhhh, the killers are stone-cold graveyard dead; there’s not a lot more we could do to them at this point.

Why the San Diego Mosque’s Shooters Continue to Run Loose

Many police departments see hate crime data as a politically loaded minefield, leaving the FBI blind to the true scale of civil rights violence.

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson | Wednesday, May 20, 2026

At a news conference within hours after the shooting rampage at the San Diego Mosque, the San Diego Police Chief said the obvious: “The shooting would be investigated as a hate crime until it’s not.” His add-on, “it’s not,” gave with one hand and took back with the other on the issue of whether the rampage was a hate crime.

The FBI was only marginally less equivocal about whether the shooting was a hate crime. A top official promised to leave no stone unturned and said, “There was definitely hate rhetoric that was involved.” But he also gave with one hand and took back with the other. He quickly added that he did not see the murderous attack as “a specific threat to the mosque.”

The police are usually circumspect in issuing statements like this; is it any surprise that they were so this time?

The irony is that the alleged shooters, Clark Cain and Caleb Vazquez, left little doubt as to why they shot up the mosque. In what’s usual in these kinds of mass killings, the shooters leave a disjointed journal filled with scribblings that spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims. The pair did the same. If ever there was a smoking gun on a hate motive for the killing, they provided it with their diatribes against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims.

But why should that surprise? Surveys have repeatedly shown that hate crimes, violence, harassment, and threats against Muslims have been almost the norm in many circles. Dozens of neo-Nazis, anti-government, white supremacist groups, and tens of thousands of individuals spew hate with aplomb. The site’s writers lambaste blacks, Jews, gays, and are unabashed in praise of Hitler. They perennially exhort their readers and followers to arm themselves to the teeth against the imagined assault by the federal government on white people’s rights. It was virtually a given that the murders would fire the horde of racists up and ignite a frenzy of debate, speculation, denial, and even veiled acquiescence to the murders.

In reading those two paragraphs, I see no evidence or even allegations of a crime prior to the killings. Their speech was certainly offensive, but offensive speech is part of our freedom of speech. If people’s “scribblings . . . spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims,” are there not other people spewing hatred of whites and Christians and really normal people in general? Does Mr Hutchinson want the Geheime Staatspolizei to search every computer posting, or perhaps search people’s homes for written journals looking for hate speech? We have reported many times on the FBI under the Biden Administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics” looking for “domestic violent extremists”, before the program was made public and embarrassment made the FBI shut it down, and even then FBI Director Christopher Wray lied through his scummy teeth about the extent of it.

However, even when the Cains and Vazquezes are known, tracked, monitored, and surveilled, and worse commit hate acts, they often evade full punishment. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, but rather muddled, confused, and outright lax enforcement and prosecution of hate acts. Even when the FBI and local law enforcement agencies ID them for their propensity for violence, their hands are still tied.

The author keeps mistakenly referring to Cain Clark as Clark Cain.

It’s still early in the investigations, but if Messrs Clark and Vasquez committed any previous crimes, I haven’t yet seen such reported, and I have searched. If either committed offenses as juveniles, those records would have been sealed. News flash: neither the local police nor the FBI can do anything about people who have not yet committed actual crimes.

Another point: while Mr Vasquez was 18, Mr Clark was a minor at 17. Had they survived and been tried for murder, Mr Clark could be sentenced to nothing more than life without the possibility of parole. Mr Vasquez could be sentenced to death, but the Pyrite State has not actually executed anyone for the last twenty years. A ‘hate crime’ rider could do nothing more to them.

ABC Channel 7 reported:

A Sonnenrad patch, depicting a neo-Nazi symbol, and what analysts assess is likely a patch for a militant accelerationist group, are both visible on the plate carrier being worn by the person believed to be Clark, according to sources. Additionally, writings are visible on a gun, including drawings of SS bolts and neo-Nazi insignias, sources said.

According to our good friends on the left, Nazi symbols and signs are not at all disqualifying, at least not when it comes to a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, but just youthful mistakes.

But it shows you the depth of the problem about which Mr Hutchinson complained. The same Democrats who are willing to forgive Graham Platner’s ‘youthful mistake’ were also willing to surveil devout Catholics who simply preferred the Latin Mass. Mr Hutchinson would, like the FBI surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics,” criminalize thoughts. Like the movie Minority Report, they want to lock up potential criminals before they’ve committed any crime.