There is a controversy brewing in the City of College Park, Maryland over its “racial equity” leader Kayla Aliese Carter, who is tasked with eliminating systemic racism in the departments of the liberal city. Carter has called for the United States to be burned down to allow for “Black Liberation.” The city says that it is investigating, but Carter is an interesting snapshot of what I have called the “radical chic” in academia and society. She is a revolutionary who called for violence while complaining that she is being asked to work for a living. In addressing the controversy, the City of College Park will now need to establish a free speech principle that will apply equally to revolutionaries and reactionaries alike.
In 2022, Carter joined the city workforce under Mayor Fazlul Kabir to implement a “racial equity” agenda across all city departments, affecting policies, practices, programs and budgets. Under Kabir’s leadership, she was to work on reviewing “all current policies and programs” for any bias and “disparate impact… for Black people.”
Carter however appears to prefer arson to analysis. She has long voiced violent and racist views. She helps guide fellow armchair revolutionaries on “how we will eat and live and grow after we burn it all down.” She has little patience with incremental changes and calls for others to “dismantle this s–t.” Carter maintains that it is only the destruction of society that will result in true justice: “I can’t wait for society to collapse so MY ideology can rise from the ashes!”
She also rejects criticism of violence, asking “Why do Black people always have to rationalize our violence and anger?” After all, she noted on Instagram, “we are at war against colonialism.” She has posted on how she has facilitated and co-hosted events with people committed to her view of Black liberation. In these public statements, she repeatedly rejects calls for nonviolence in seeking the destruction of society: In one May 2020 post, she asked “Do y’all understand why the oppressed are constantly shamed out of using violence?? BECAUSE THE OPPRESSOR WANTS TO BE THE SOLE PROFITEER OF VIOLENCE. THEY DON’T WANT TO DEAL WITH BACK TALK. ‘DO AS I SAY NOT AS I DO’ FACE A–. No.”Using “yT” for white people, she even slammed those who tried to be inclusive at work:
“This yT man in my meeting just said, ‘I want to take a moment and give the floor to any Black… participants to… tell us what MLK Day this year meant to you.’ I SWEAR I AM WHEEZING WHO HIRES THESE PEOPLE?” While working at one of the most far left governments in the country, she portrays her life as working within a system of white supremacist oppression. In one posting, she added at the end “White man calling, I got to go.”
While the Kabir administration pays her $75,600, she is not happy with having to work to feed herself due to this white supremacist, capitalist system. Instead, she posts how she should be a “collage artist” or a “lady of leisure.” However, her preferred job description may not resonate with employers outside of the City of College Park government: “I need a new job, but the problem is that I don’t want to work I just wanna lay in my bed being a girl can anyone help me with this?”
Yet, she says capitalism is to blame for forcing her back into criminal conduct: “Tired of being so underpaid also tired of applying to new jobs. I don’t wanna go back to s*lling dr*gs but this economy is getting desperate.” Of course, these postings may lead many to ask the same question raised by Carter herself: “I SWEAR I AM WHEEZING WHO HIRES THESE PEOPLE?”
The city has announced that it will look into the matter.
The fact is that Carter has free speech rights in the system that she is committed to burning down. The question is whether the City of College Park would support the same free speech rights for an employee who attacked minorities on social media and called for liberation or violence for white people. We have previously discussed the double standard often applied in academia.
If the City of College Park is going to defend free speech rights, it needs to be clear that it will extend equally to all views and all employees.
As we watch how this controversy will play out, the postings do offer another insight into the radical chic in America, including the call for revolution while hoping to realize the dream of being “lady of leisure.” So, it is not just companies who are complaining about the lack of work ethic among young workers. Revolutionaries are facing the same motivational issues. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote “IT HAS been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.”
They added that in a capitalist system
“Each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape . . . if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood. . . . in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow.”
So, in other words, collage artists unite against the yoke of the bourgeois City of College Park and their capitalist masters.
Gustavo Torres, the executive director of CASA De Maryland—seen here rallying with open-borders activists outside the White House on Dec. 30, 2015—is effusive in his apologies for voicing support for Hamas, but only because CASA’s state funding has been jeopardized by it. (Photo: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator, and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He served in the George W. Bush administration, first at the Securities and Exchange Commission and then at the State Department, and is the author of the book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.” Read his research.
Trouble is brewing in the deep-blue state of Maryland, where Democratic state senators are discovering that—gasp!—an “immigrant advocacy” group they have coddled for decades is really full of Hamas supporters who compare Palestinian terrorists to the experience of Hispanics in the Old Line State.
The group is CASA de Maryland. State lawmakers have been forcing weary taxpayers to underwrite this far-left group since it was first incorporated in Maryland’s radical chic neighborhood of Takoma Park in 1985. The Washington Post reported as far back as 2011 that “nearly half of CASA’s $6 million budget comes from local, state, and federal appropriations.” A reason for that is, as The Post put it, it successfully sells itself as an “immigrants’ rights” lobbying group.
That the people CASA de Maryland represents are mostly not immigrants at all, but illegal aliens who have willfully broken the law didn’t bother reliably lefty voters in tony Montgomery County, where many of the denizens of the federal permanent bureaucracy and the nation’s media and academic elite sleep, play, and more importantly, vote.
But just as CASA has moved out of its original modest Takoma Park church basement and is now headquartered in multimillion-dollar Langley Mansion, a former plantation restored to the tune of $13.8 million in nearby Langley Park (a rehab that The Post reported was partly footed by taxpayers), the organization’s political reach has expanded.
It is now, according to its website, a nationwide community organizing giant. “With over 155,000 lifetime members across 46 U.S. states, CASA is a national powerhouse organization building power and improving the quality of life in working-class: Black, Latino/a/e, Afro-descendent, Indigenous, and Immigrant communities.”
Things were going swimmingly well until this comfy status quo was shattered, as many things have been in America, by Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians and the gang-rape of Jewish women on Oct. 7. The fascination that the “woke” Left has shown for the terrorists (a Cornell professor said he was “exhilarated” by the killing spree) has shocked old-fashioned liberals. They are now suddenly finding it hard to overlook some tough realities.
Enter CASA, which chose to make clear on which side it belongs when its longtime executive director, Gustavo Torres, stated in a since-deleted post on X that “CASA stands in resolute and steadfast solidarity with the people of Palestine in their relentless fight for freedom. We stand shoulder to shoulder with countless Black and brown freedom activists from around the world. We specifically condemn the utilization of U.S. tax dollars to promote the ongoing violence.”
“We deeply acknowledge the interconnectedness of the struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people and Black and brown communities in the United States,” Torres added.
That set off all nine state senators from Montgomery County, who issued a letter that did not mince words. The statements by CASA and Torres, the senators’ letter said, “are hurtful, divisive, and antisemitic. It reflects a complete lack of understanding of the complex geopolitics of the Middle East, the indigenous roots of the Jewish people, and the long and painful history of antisemitism in its myriad forms.”
More to the point, the senators reminded Torres, “We have provided CASA with millions of taxpayer dollars intended to support our new Americans and help provide them with necessities and shelter.”
Then came the kicker: “We cannot and will not allow taxpayer money to subsidize hate speech. In light of CASA’s recent postings and statements, this might be an appropriate time to reevaluate the state’s mechanism for providing financial aid and support to our immigrant community.”
Clearly terrified that Maryland may withdraw its taxpayer teat, Torres has tried to backpedal as fast as he can, dignity be damned. “I want to profoundly apologize to the Jewish community in Montgomery County and beyond,” Torres told MoCo360. “We were not experts on this [crisis], and members of the Jewish community have been educating me.”
On X, CASA said, “We write to acknowledge that our words have caused hurt.” CASA, it said, is working to “refine our message and clarify our values.” Torres pleaded further, “We will do whatever is necessary to repair these relationships. We want to apologize not only with words, but actions.”
On our latest statement: We write to acknowledge that our words have caused hurt. We have received feedback from our dear and trusted partners, who have expressed their concerns about the impact of our language.
Boy, what the threatened withdrawal of millions will do. But apparently, the unseemly retreat is to no avail. Democratic state Sen. Cheryl Kagan said, “It’s unforgivable, and I choose my words carefully. It doesn’t matter if [Torres] says ‘I’m sorry’ 10 times. I cannot forgive statements that essentially say he wants to murder my people. It’s not OK.”
Torres’ words of regret do indeed beggar belief. He and CASA are hardly new to revolutionary struggle.
“Casa” is Spanish for home, but CASA is an acronym for the Central America Solidarity Association. The group has since registered under “CASA” to, as former Reagan official James Simpson put it in 2012, obscure any links with other “solidarity committees” set up in the 1980s to lobby for the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador, which were funded and guided by the Soviets and the Cubans.
The Colombian-born Torres earned his chops in Marxist Nicaragua, where he worked for a newspaper that was a mouthpiece for the Sandinista regime, according to the always reliable Influence Watch. Later, Torres popped up in Venezuela, where, according to the Militant,he spoke at a 2007 panel titled “United States: A Possible Revolution.” His co-panelist, Antonio Gonzalez, said, “What does a revolutionary do in the U.S. today? Take power wherever you can by electing Latinos to city, state, and federal offices.” Later, Citgo Petroleum, which Venezuela’s Marxist government uses as its piggy bank, gave CASA $1.5 million.
Many in the audience said that wouldn’t work, chiding Hispanics for buying into the “American dream” and not pursuing social and political change. But one of CASA’s beliefs under Torres is that Central Americans immigrate because the U.S. destabilizes its region and that their mass immigration, in return, will change the U.S.
Maryland’s attorney general suspends Zainab Chaudry from the state’s hate crimes commission after she compareds Israel to Nazi Germany in Facebook posts. Pictured: Chaudry, center, joins others from the Council on American-Islamic Relations for a press conference outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 25, 2015. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal and the author of “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Maryland’s new commission to “prevent and respond to hate crime activity” has met only once, but one member already has been suspended—for comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. This incident seems to echo a trend: Many of those on the Left who rush to police “hate” often spread their own kind of hate.
Zainab Chaudry, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Maryland chapter and one of the commission’s first 10 members, described the Hamas terror attacks of Oct. 7 as an “uprising” and condemned the state of Israel as oppressive and worse.
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, last week suspended Chaudry from the newly launched Commission on Hate Crimes Response and Prevention.
The Maryland Legislature passed HB 1066 in April and Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, signed it into law in May. The law established the Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention to prevent and respond to hate crimes and “evaluate state laws and policies relating to hate crimes.”
“The commission has only met once, with its inaugural meeting on Sept. 6, 2023,” Brown noted in a Nov. 21 press release. “Ms. Chaudry’s posts on her personal social media since Oct. 7, in these very early days of the commission, have challenged the commission’s ability to do its work.”
Brown said he determined that Chaudry’s “social media posts risk disrupting the work and mission of the Commission,” so he temporarily suspended her, assigned staff to write a values statement to protect the commission from similar scandals, and urged members of the panel to “exercise great care in their communications and conduct.”
What led Brown to this conclusion?
On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists slaughtered about 1,200 Israelis, including women and children, and took more than 240 hostages. Horrific videos of terrorists bragging about killing Jews hit social media. Hamas terrorists slaughtered parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents. They raped women before killing them and mutilating their bodies. Terrorists bragged about this in horrifying detail when questioned after the fact by Israel Defense Forces.
On social media, Chaudry described these horrific events as “the uprising in Palestine,” urging readers to “keep in mind that they are a people who are illegally occupied.” She added that “the thirst for freedom is an innate instinct we’re born with.”
“Resistance is a reminder that it can’t be quenched through might and force,” she wrote.
Chaudry did not condemn the Hamas terrorists or lament the Israeli dead. Rather, she apparently praised the attacks in Israel as an “uprising” of freedom.
Chaudry’s later posts echoed the same ideas.
On Oct. 9, she compared “Palestinian freedom fighters” to “Ukrainian freedom fighters.”
She also suggested that a focus on the Israeli victims of the terrorists amounted to centering “white pain” in “global consciences.”
After appearing to celebrate the terrorist attacks that killed the most Jews in one day since the Holocaust in the 1940s, Chaudry compared the Jewish state to Germany’s Nazi regime during World War II that sought to eradicate Jews from the face of the Earth.
She shared two photos of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany: a 1936 photo of a Nazi parade and a 2023 photo of the gate lit up in the blue and white of the Israeli flag.
Chaudry posted the photos with the message: “That moment when you become what you hated most.”
Chaudry has not shown remorse for these posts, which remain public on her Facebook page. The Council on American Islamic Relations has not condemned them either. Instead, it mobilized nearly 4,000 petitioners to demand Chaudry’s reinstatement to Maryland’s hate crimes commission.
“There is no conflict between condemning the Israeli government’s war crimes overseas and standing up against all forms of hate here at home, including antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism,” Chaudry said in a formal statement after her suspension by Brown, the Free State’s attorney general. “False smears from anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim extremists will not stop me from standing up for justice here and abroad.”
Supporters wrote in a Nov. 22 letter to Brown that they “completely agree” with Chaudry’s quote.
“As the only American Muslim on the Attorney General’s Hate Crimes Commission, Zainab Chaudry’s voice was critical in representing our community’s concerns to your office,” the petitioners wrote. “Even a temporary suspension of her role is harmful and completely unjustified. Like Zainab, many members of the Maryland community have been critical of the Israel government’s horrific crimes against the Palestinian people.”
Since last night, dozens of Maryland Muslim organizations and over 3,800 petitioners have called on @OAGMaryland Anthony Brown to reverse his decision to temporarily suspend our MD director Dr. Zainab Chaudry from the Hate Crimes Commission under pressure from anti-Muslim &… pic.twitter.com/eob0t9FFSL
Chaudry may disagree with Israel and condemn its actions, but in what world is it acceptable to compare the world’s only Jewish state with the genocidal regime that sought to eliminate all Jews?
Rather than condemning Hamas for slaughtering women and children, she blamed Israel. She did not even acknowledge that Israel’s military takes key steps to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas deliberately stages terrorist activities in civilian buildings such as hospitals to use civilians as human shields.
Israel’s military objective, stated from the beginning, has been the eradication of Hamas’ military capabilities, to prevent another Oct. 7 pogrom. A Hamas terrorist infamously called his parents to brag, “Mom, Dad, I killed 10 Jews!” Israelis do not call their parents to brag, “Mom, Dad, I killed Palestinians.”
Although Chaudry is correct that criticizing Israel is not ipso facto a form of antisemitism, this blatant double standard, and the extreme hyperbole of comparing Israel to the Nazis, is absolutely antisemitic. Yet the Left’s intersectional ideology gives Chaudry a smokescreen for her hatred.
As Chaudry’s statement about “white pain” reveals, she considers Israelis part of the “white” oppressor class, putting the Jews—the No. 1 example of an oppressed people group throughout history—in the same category as the Nazis. The Marxist lens of analyzing every conflict along oppressor-versus-oppressed lines leads her to moral insanity, a moral insanity that inspires hatred.
This moral insanity reminds me of the perverse accusations of the Southern Poverty Law Center. As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC began as a noble civil rights nonprofit, helping poor people in the South. It later expanded its operations to suing truly hateful groups such as the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, and then expanded that effort to “monitor” conservative groups as if they were themselves hateful.
Now, religious freedom groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Freedom Law Center, and the Family Research Council find themselves on the SPLC’s “hate group” list alongside Klan chapters and plotted on a map with neo-Nazis. Groups that call for the enforcement of immigration law, such as the Center for Immigration Studies and the Dustin Inman Society, find themselves on the same map. So do parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education.
In the name of fighting hate, the SPLC has inspired hate—and even terrorism. In 2012, a man used the SPLC “hate map” to target the Family Research Council for a mass shooting. After a brave security guard foiled his plan, the gunman confessed to the FBI that he planned to slaughter everyone in the building.
Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former SPLC employee revealed that the organization’s “hate” accusations are a “highly profitable scam,” but that hasn’t stopped government agencies from relying upon those accusations.
The FBI infamously used the SPLC to target “radical-traditional Catholics” in a since-rescinded January memo. In 2019, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced a hate crimes unit “to fight against hate crimes and the many hate groups … in our state.” Her announcement cited the SPLC hate map and highlighted an area of the state that includes the headquarters of the Judeo-Christian group American Freedom Law Center.
The American Freedom Law Center sued Nessel, arguing that the announcement violated the group’s rights to free speech under the First Amendment. The center, a nonprofit public interest law firm, principally defends the First Amendment rights of conservative Christians and Jews.
Robert Muise, the center’s co-founder, recounted how the SPLC attacked him.
“I was on active duty in the Marine Corps for 13 years as an officer. I’m a father of 12 and a devout Catholic,” Muise told me in 2019. “They had me listed as an antisemite when my co-founder is a yarmulke-wearing Orthodox Jew!”
Much of the Left’s “hate” monitoring boils down to an excuse to demonize conservatives and exclude them from the conversation. This ideological policing often seems to miss antisemitism when it doesn’t outright enable it.
Many civil rights commissions and hate crimes commissions are slanted heavily to the Left, leading to perverse outcomes. Jack Phillips, the Christian baker who refused to create a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding, found himself prosecuted by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Phillips won his case because members of that commission had demonstrated hostility toward Phillips’ faith.
The Maryland hate crimes commission shows a clear leftward tilt. It includes left-leaning organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Pride Coalition of Maryland, but not any right-leaning organization.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, Chaudry’s organization, has worked with the SPLC to urge charitable institutions to blacklist “Anti-Muslim hate groups,” including the American Freedom Law Center.
Until hate crime commissions start including conservative members, conservatives rightly will view these efforts with skepticism. Brown not only should refuse to reinstate Chaudry, but also take the opportunity of the vacancy to find a conservative voice for the commission.
In simple terms, police officers in Maryland no longer are able to stop someone on the street or pull over a car just because they smell marijuana. (Photo illustration: RealPeopleGroup/Getty Images)
“They call it dope for a reason,” anti-drug campaigns used to say.
These public service campaigns were referring to the people who use drugs, but a marijuana law recently passed by the Maryland General Assembly shows that the slogan could apply to some legislators too.
That’s harsh, but accurate. Why? Under a statute that took effect July 1, police officers in Maryland no longer may rely merely on the distinctive odor of cannabis to search a lawfully stopped individual or motor vehicle for the presence of the drug that gave rise to the odor.
Maryland lawmakers hastily pushed through HB 1071, now Criminal Procedure Article §1-211, in the waning moments of the Free State’s legislative session when legislators are more interested in leaving than thinking about the bills up for votes. Proponents of this ill-conceived legislation argued that it would eradicate instances of racial profiling on the roads, but detractors warned of an impending surge in criminal activity.
Cannabis odor has been a lawful basis for making a probable-cause search of a car in Maryland and other states where use of marijuana is a crime. When officers smelled the unmistakable scent of marijuana, they used that fact to establish probable cause to search a person, stop a car, or the like, preventing countless handgun-related homicides and deaths related to impaired driving.
Aside from the evident, commonsense conclusion officers have drawn, the Supreme Court and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have recognized that the odor produced by contraband or its manufacturing process—such as the operation of a still to make alcoholic beverages—can establish probable cause that a crime has been committed.
In simple terms, police officers in Maryland no longer are able to stop someone on the street or pull over a car just because they smell marijuana. But the new law doesn’t place the odor of cannabis out of bounds altogether; the smell by itself just can’t serve as the basis for stopping a person or a vehicle.
Once an officer observes other evidence or suspicious conduct or, in the case of a motor vehicle, a legitimate traffic violation, a stop is justified. If the officer has sufficient additional evidence of a crime or other illegality—such as a car’s swaying side to side—the officer might have probable cause to arrest the driver for impaired driving.
To be sure, at that time the officer may search only those areas of a motor vehicle that are “readily accessible to the driver.” This means the officer cannot search the trunk, for example. But the front seat area, including what’s underneath, the console, and glove compartment, is still fair game, as well as whatever a driver could reach in the back seat.
Plus, the officer may call for a tow truck to take the vehicle to an impoundment lot, where, if local procedures require or allow it, police may do an inventory search of the entire car.
Naturally, the American Civil Liberties Union released a statement on the new Maryland law, saying: “For decades, police have been granted the authority to conduct searches based on something that cannot be categorically proven: a claim based solely on their sense of smell. These claims by police have been routinely used to infringe on individuals’ privacy rights and justify racial profiling.”
Although it is true that relying solely on the sense of smell may have limitations and some potential for error, even adults who aren’t trained police officers know what burning marijuana smells like. (If you think the odor of burnt cannabis isn’t unmistakable, you must have been born yesterday.) Moreover, the ACLU’s statement implies a generalization, asserting that police officers’ claims based on their sense of smell routinely have been used to target black individuals and trample on their privacy rights unlawfully.
Making such sweeping generalizations without providing sufficient evidence, such as peer-reviewed studies, is disappointing. But it’s not surprising, considering the source.
Notice also what the ACLU statement avoids: the increased public safety risk of taking yet another tool out of police’s tool bag to catch criminals.
Marijuana odor as probable cause has aided in the discovery of many other types of crimes, not simply the recovery of cannabis. According to the State’s Attorney’s Office in Montgomery County, Maryland, a large percentage of illegal handguns are seized from vehicles that were searched based on the odor of cannabis. In Montgomery County alone, 80% of those firearms are coming off the street because an officer smells marijuana during a traffic stop.
More handguns on the street will lead to increased crime and homicides—which disproportionately will affect black residents of lower-income areas, the same people the ACLU claims this new law protects.
Beyond Maryland’s borders, driving under the influence of marijuana poses a significant threat to public safety across the entire country. Other states that have legalized recreational or medical marijuana have witnessed an increase in incidents related to impaired driving. With the growing accessibility of marijuana, more individuals may be prone to use it before getting behind the wheel, leading to a surge in preventable accidents and fatalities.
Driving under the influence of cannabis has similar effects as drunk driving. One can look at recent data and trends regarding legalization of marijuana in Colorado to shed light on the potential risks of this Maryland law. Colorado found that since lawmakers legalized recreational marijuana in 2013, traffic deaths where drivers tested positive for marijuana increased 138%, while all Colorado traffic deaths increased 29%. Moreover, traffic deaths involving drivers who tested positive for marijuana more than doubled, from 55 in 2013 to 131 in 2020.
Since marijuana was legalized, the percentage of all Colorado traffic deaths involving drivers who tested positive for marijuana increased from 11% in 2013 to 20% in 2020.
These harrowing statistics are just the beginning. What could prompt such a blatant dismissal of public safety? One word: money.
The market for cannabis in Maryland is expected to exceed $11 billion in sales following its legalization July 1. A recent survey conducted among thousands of Maryland residents revealed that the average marijuana consumption in the state surpasses the national average: Nationally, the typical person consumes around 20.2 grams of marijuana per month; Marylanders consume an average of 25.4 grams. The survey also found that cannabis consumers in Maryland are willing to travel between 11 and 20 minutes to obtain their desired products, and are willing to pay approximately $14 per gram of marijuana. This translates to an estimated monthly expenditure of $357 per Maryland user.
Let’s be clear: Maryland’s new law could lead to an increase in crimes involving firearms and a rise in drug-impaired driving offenses. With a staggering 10,000 fatalities across the nation in 2020 alone as a result of alcohol-impaired driving, one only can imagine how many death certificates will be signed in Maryland as a result of rampant driving under the influence of marijuana.
Paul J. Larkin directs The Heritage Foundation’s project to counter abuse of the criminal law, particularly at the federal level, as senior legal research fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Read his research.
ROCKVILLE, Md.—Here at the crossroads of Mannakee Street and College Drive in the suburbs of the nation’s capital, woke intersectionalism came to die.
Outside the headquarters of Montgomery County Public Schools, a cleric at a local Ethiopian Orthodox church stood in a white turban, gold-colored robe, and church insignia. Like Seyouman Getahun was in an interfaith crowd of about 1,000 parents, students, and community members. The crowd of largely “brown and black” people, as equity warriors so often colorize minorities, rallied for the right of parents to opt children out of age-inappropriate sex education in local public schools.
Meet Like Seyouman Getahun, a cleric at a local Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He told me why he was at the Montgomery County MD rally. I am putting 7 minutes of our chat here so you can hear from people in the trenches. Watch his reactions to Gay BCs and Gender Queer at the end! pic.twitter.com/SoCLuFlqrF
Co-organized by a new group called Coalition of Virtue, these parents are the “intersectional” answer to the Woke Army. The Woke Army are the leftist activists who exploit “black, indigenous, people of color” (BIPOC) to put children in the crosshairs of the “rainbow mafia” in K-12 schools. These parents who defy their stereotypes are the Woke Army’s worst nightmare.
Hundreds of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians from an estimated 40 local churches, including Getahun’s, rallied beside Muslim immigrant families from a dozen mosques and other area community members. Their ranks included a Filipino-Puerto Rican-American Christian dad and a Peruvian-American Catholic mother.
All were here to protest the refusal of the local school board, all affiliated at some point with Democratic Party politics, to allow parents to opt their kids out of sex ed that includes an introduction to homosexual behavior and gender identities that contradict one’s natural sex.
“This hill is where the democrats have chosen [to] die. Bizarre. Totally bizarre,” said a Twitter user.
Today, at the corner of Campus Drive and Mannakee Street, in Montgomery County, Maryland, woke intersectionalism came to die.
Today, June 27, about 1,000 Arab Muslims, Ethiopian Christians, Peruvian Catholics and so many other brown and black immigrant families outflanked the… pic.twitter.com/G623Q6Sw7x
From Rockville to Glendale, Calif., where Armenian American parents oppose school board indoctrination, a new “intersectional” rejection of wokeism includes voters up for grabs by Republican politicians and efforts like No Labels, which may advocate for a third-party presidential candidate in 2024.
“Vote them out!” the Rockville crowd chanted, packed shoulder to shoulder.
The protestors’ demands were simple enough: “Protect families’ rights!” “What do we want? Opt out! When do we want it? Now!” “We want freedom! We want rights!”
Across the parking lot, about a dozen all-white leftist activists stood, chatting with each other. They looked awkward and out of place, with rainbow umbrellas over their heads but no rain yet and soap bubbles from a party machine streaming by.
Later, inside for public comments at a school board meeting, local activist Laura Stewart complained about a video I had posted from a protest of Muslim parents early last month. She objected that it “was retweeted by Elon Musk,” the owner of Twitter.
In video testimony, Stewart omitted a critical detail from her resume: she has been an officer and leader in the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club. She has also been vice president of advocacy for the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations and just received the “National PTA Lifetime Achievement Award” from the local council.
The rallying parents are mostly new American citizens. Their lifetime achievement is immigration, acculturation, employment, and parenthood in a new nation where they enjoyed no legacy, no property, no bank account, and no “privilege,” except the inherited grit to navigate a new society with a new language and culture.
If you can believe it, the night before this rally filled with immigrants, the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club issued a statement with a newly formed group, “Coalition for Inclusive Schools” that Stewart now leads. It condemned “outside influences” seeking to opt-out children from age-inappropriate sex ed.
The #WokeArmy is dealt a lethal blow. The battlefront: Montgomery County, Maryland. TODAY. The hard-left came after the kids and Muslim parents aren’t having it. 🧵
Montgomery County Public Schools recently refused to allow parents to opt out of indoctrination that relates to… pic.twitter.com/KIMTI1fAIM
This multicultural crowd was anything but “outside influences.” It was filled with recent immigrants who live locally. These parents made an argument that parent groups are increasingly expressing around the country and in Canada, asserting religious freedom rights.
“Our beliefs! Our choice! Religious freedom, raise your voice,” they chanted.
Peruvian-American mother Norma Margulies carried a handmade sign that read: “Respetemos el derecho de las familias a compartir su cultura y religión con sus hijos e hijas!” “Respect the rights of families to share their culture and religion with their children, sons and daughters,” she translated, adding, “It’s a basic right.”
Margulies joined the protest from her home in nearby Fairfax County, Va., with a friend, Tony Sabio. He’s the son of parents from the Philippines and Puerto Rico and a military veteran who rescued a boy from Ukraine.
Sabio said he is running for school board in Fairfax County because of the disenfranchisement of parents. “I’m here for these parents,” Sabio said over the crowd’s chants as he carried the American flag over his shoulders.
In recent years, woke activists have exploited “intersectionality.” That’s a concept critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw invented in 1989 to look at injustices through the prism of an “intersectionality” of various allegedly oppressed social identities. While the idea had some merits, far-left activists and politicians have weaponized it.
In recent days, Maryland and Virginia parents have held sign-making events and parent educational seminars at local places of worship including mosques like the Islamic Center of Maryland and affiliates of the Medhanialem Orthodox Church. Holding signs that read “Respect Our Values” and “Parents Know Best,” they voiced concerns about the sex curriculum being taught to their children.
Across the street from the school system’s offices, a strip of locally owned storefronts showcased the diversity in this suburb community. On Hungerford Drive, an Ethiopian restaurant sits beside Island Pride Jamaican Restaurant, Yunnan Rice Noodle, Aria Halal Supermarket, and 5-10 Quick Mart.
In the crowd, Getahun, the Ethiopian Orthodox cleric, told me he was there to support parental rights as enshrined in the 14th Amendment and the U.S. Constitution. He flipped through copies of the books “The Gay BCs” and “Gender Queer” tucked in my “Mary Poppins” bag of inappropriate books in public schools and furrowed his brow at the images.
“T is for TRANS,” he read, not the usual “trains” in most books teaching the ABCs. “It’s a brave step to take,” he continued, “to take to live as the gender you know is innate.”
The book is meant for toddlers, as young as three.
While the rally primarily focused on the right to opt out of sex curriculum, the attendees also saw the school board’s refusal to address their concerns as an infringement on their religious freedom.
Nearby a rally organizer, Ismail Royer, a director of Islam and religious freedom at the Religious Freedom Institute based in Washington, D.C., said: “This is the intersection, this is the alliance that really matters. This is the moral consensus that is at the heart of the American moral tradition and virtue tradition.”
By about 5 p.m., the rally ended, with Getahun among the last leaving the rally off Mannakee Street and College Drive, as members of this new intersectional alliance chanted, “We will prevail!”
Asra Nomani is a senior contributor at The Federalist. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, she is also the author of “Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance Destroying America’s Freedom.” She is a senior fellow in the practice of journalism at Independent Women’s Network. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com or @AsraNomani on Twitter.
After the 14-year-old was found being sexually assaulted in another state, a judge kept her from loving parents because they questioned her transgender identity. Then she was trafficked again.
In August 2021, by concealing a teen’s newly asserted transgender identity from her parents, Virginia’s Appomattox County High School participated in a chain of events that led to that girl falling into the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice.
When the FBI found Sage (last name of the family withheld for privacy) in Maryland, where she was victimized by a sexual predator, a judge refused to return her to her parents on the grounds they were abusing her in not affirming her as male. Housed in the boys’ quarters of a children’s home away from her parents, she told her mother, she was assaulted again. The girl soon fled, then was brutally sex-trafficked again until her rescue in Texas by law enforcement.
Sage’s Law, or the Child Protection Act, is being introduced this week in the Virginia House of Delegates by Delegate Dave LaRock in honor of this young teen from Appomattox County, Virginia. Sage hopes sharing her story will help protect others from the abuse she suffered at the hands of predators, precipitated in part by the very institutions that should have protected her.
School policies and state laws that encourage concealing information from parents’ purport to protect vulnerable minors. In practice, as tragically demonstrated by Sage’s case, such policies open the door to predators by removing children’s greatest protection from their lives.
Sage’s Law aims to shut that door in three ways. It would require schools to notify parents if their child asserts a gender different from his or her sex; it prevents school counselors from withholding or encouraging minors to withhold information about a child’s gender identity; and it clarifies that raising a child according to his or her biological sex, including decisions about a child’s mental and physical health, may not be construed as abuse.
Sage’s story, compiled from months of interviews, reports, and records, has been lived by countless other families torn apart in the name of gender ideology by activist schools, judges, anddoctors. This is a story of the unbearable cost of parent-exclusion policies, but also of a mother’s love and relentless determination to save her child.
Institutions that Should Protect Endanger Instead
Sage is a slight, pretty, 15-year-old girl with elfin features and an edgy style. Recently, reflecting back on her transgender identification, she told her mom: “I don’t know who I was. I’m a totally different person now. I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends.”
That self-reflection is consistent with the research showing that upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty. Children who are “affirmed” as the opposite sex, however, particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization. Sage’s comment also reflects the reality of social contagion, fueled by social media and increasingly recognized internationally as a factor in the exponential rise in the number of children identifying as transgender.
Yet states such as California allow children as young as 12 to make their own health-care decisions, without their parents but under the authority of the state. In January, Virginia delegates Candi Mundon King, Nadarius Clark, Michelle Maldonado, Sam Rasoul, and Marcus Simon filed a similar bill authorizing courts, social workers, and medical professionals to withhold information from parents and consent to medical procedures for “mature” minors.
The consequences for children and families in states such as California that construe not “affirming” as abuse are particularly dire. In October, progressive Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman announced she would reintroduce her 2020 bill to criminalize parents who do not affirm their child’s transgender identity as guilty of abuse, potentially resulting in the loss of custody.
School Policies Endangering Students
Michele adopted Sage, her biological granddaughter, after the death of her son. Like many gender-dysphoric children, Sage has a history of trauma from that early childhood loss. Related health problems became severe at times, requiring therapy and medical treatment. Her daughter’s previous schools notified Michele when concerns arose, she said, enabling her to have Sage’s treatment adjusted. But when her daughter entered Appomattox County High School in early August 2021, Michele says she was cut out of the loop.
Unbeknownst to Michele, her then-14-year-old’s taste at the time for boys’ clothing, which she described to her mother as simply “dressing emo,” was accompanied by her assertion at school that she was a transgender boy. School records, shared by the family, indicate school staff were calling Sage by her chosen male name and pronouns and at her request concealing this from her parents. Sage recalls her school counselor telling her during the first week of school that since she identified as male she could use the boys’ bathroom.
School records also indicate bullying, although they do not capture the severity of what Sage eventually told her mom: boys were following behind her in a group, touching her, threatening her with knife violence and rape, and even shoving her up against the hallway wall. On Aug. 23, according to school notes, reports were received from students and teachers that Sage had used a boys’ bathroom and encountered hostile boys there. The school counselor met with Sage the next day to direct her to use the nurses’ bathroom for safety reasons.
Sage’s statement that “all the boys at this school are rapists” prompted the school to review hallway footage outside the bathroom, showing that several boys had entered while she was inside. On Wednesday, Aug. 25, the counselor and school resource officer called Sage into a meeting, where she became so emotional that the counselor recorded concern Sage might be “a risk to herself due to being so upset when leaving school.”
Only at this point — after meeting alone with her daughter, after two days had passed and knowledge of the incident had reached all the way to the superintendent, according to the school records — did the school finally contact Michele, she said, still without revealing the male identity her daughter was asserting.
Michele recalls finding a school hall pass labeled with a new name that August evening and Sage telling her for the first time that she was identifying as a boy at school. As Michele sat with her on the floor, Sage tried to stop the tears as she told her mother a group of male students had “jacked” her up against the wall of the boys’ bathroom and threatened her with violence, and that she was terrified of what they would do. Michele tried to comfort her, assuring her she could stay home while they figured out how to handle the bullying.
That night, Sage disappeared. She was found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault. That was just the beginning of her family’s ordeal.
Excluding Parents Invites Predators
As Michele’s case illustrates, school policies that exclude parents from critical knowledge of their child’s mental health remove a child’s greatest safeguard from his or her life. While this author could find no such policy posted on the Appomattox High School or school board websites, the school’s actions to “affirm” Sage’s stated gender, name, and pronouns and to permit access to bathrooms of the opposite sex are all consistent with the directives of former Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s 2021 model policies. So is the choice to deceive parents.
In fact, the Northam policies direct that an entire gender transition team and plan be set up for such a child, all in secret from the parents if the child so wishes. This guidance was revoked in 2022 by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, but Virginia Democrats and LGBT groups are fiercely contesting the transparency and parental consent required by the new proposed guidance.
Yet school counselors, unlike parents, have at best an extremely limited knowledge of a child’s mental, emotional, and physical needs. They also have neither the constitutional authority nor the expertise to determine a child’s best interests.
Children who identify as transgender have well-documented mental health co-morbidities and rates of adverse psychiatric events. Even Dr. Erica Anderson, former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), has raised alarm at the “pitched battle” engendered by professionals who “triangulate” or set children in opposition to their parents.
In Sage’s case, by withholding information about her daughter’s gender identity and related issues, including the severe bullying related to Sage’s transgender exploration, the school destroyed vital opportunities for Michele to discern warning signs in time to assess and respond before tragedy struck.
Predators know transgender kids are vulnerable prey. Sage told Michele months later that some of the transgender websites to which a school counselor referred her linked to “creepy” older men and pornography.
One mother told this author that as soon as her daughter identified online as “female to male,” multiple suspicious “sugar daddy” accounts reached out to her on social media. Roblox, the wildly popular children’s gaming site, has transgender chat rooms with a panic button to “hide your screen from your parents.” Sage, her mother says, was lured to meet sex traffickers by online predators posing as friends.
A Court-Enabled Tragedy
The first call from the FBI came late at night on Sept. 2, her mother recounts: Sage had been found. Michele says investigators told her Sage had been trafficked into Washington, D.C. and then Maryland for nine days of horrific, brutal sexual abuse.
Driving through the night, their backseat full of stuffed animals and cozy blankets, Michele and her husband Roger arrived early the next morning at the Baltimore Courthouse. They were stunned to hear that their child, who had just survived unspeakable trauma, was being held in a juvenile detention cell and that they were being summoned to a hearing late that afternoon before Judge Robert Kershaw. When they entered the courtroom, Sage appeared from the penitentiary remotely, on screen, with only court-appointed attorney Aneesa Khan, an assistant public defender, present in person. “I love you, baby!” Michele cried to her daughter, who responded “I love you too, Nana.” To their shock, Khan spoke up and alleged on Sage’s behalf that she did not wish to return home and had been “both emotionally and physically abused by his parents in connection with [his] expressed male gender identity and desire to live as a trans male.”
Michele had only found out about this claimed male identity the night her daughter disappeared. Yet Michele was willing to use any name or pronoun to bring her home. Sage later told her, Michele says, that Khan “told me to tell the judge my parents hit me, starved me.” Sage also told Michele that Khan “didn’t care how much [Sage] had to lie…but they were going to win this case” to remove Sage from her parents’ custody and place her in a Maryland foster home that would affirm her as male.
Michele is a Virginia Court-Appointed Child Advocate (CASA) with years of experience supporting troubled teens, and she and Roger were quickly cleared of abuse charges. But the allegations were used to take custody of their daughter and bar them from seeing her.
The Cruelty of Ideology
Rather than treat Sage as a victim of horrific sex trafficking and return her to her family, the court dealt with her as a runaway, providing grounds for temporary custody in Maryland. Significantly, under the Interstate Juvenile Compact, even if allegations of abuse are made, juveniles are to be returned to their home state, which is presumed to better be able to assess the child’s needs. Judge Kershaw delayed this return for two months, which led to Sage’s next trafficking episode.
Instead of receiving treatment for her profound physical and emotional trauma, Sage was kept for days in solitary detention as a runaway, then transferred to the Catonsville Children’s Home. Per Judge Kershaw’s order, she was housed according to her “expressed male gender.” Michele says she eventually learned from Sage that she was the only girl in male quarters and that she had been repeatedly assaulted there.
Kershaw held multiple hearings focusing on Sage’s claimed male identity and Khan’s efforts to demonstrate gender identity abuse, including calling two Appomattox school counselors to testify against Sage’s parents. While his final ruling on Nov. 10, 2021, reluctantly conceded lawful custody to the parents, Kershaw opined at length that “more likely than not” Sage had “endured emotional abuse and neglect by his parents,” including “misgendering” and “misnaming.” Astonishingly, Kershaw cited as evidence of parental abuse “running away from Virginia to Maryland,” when in fact Sage was abducted, raped, and trafficked across state lines.
While Sage was in The Children’s Home, Michele says she sent letters and cards multiple times a week and tried countless times to reach her by phone, especially on Sage’s 15th birthday. Months later, Sage commented: “I missed you so much, but I tried not to because you didn’t want me back.” Horrified, her mother asked what she meant. She learned from Sage that Khan had told her that, because she was transgender, Michele didn’t want her anymore — and that not one of her cards or messages had ever reached her daughter.
Sage also eventually told her mother that, while living at the foster home, she skipped classes every day and would “smoke weed and do drugs” with kids she had met. Sage also relayed later that Khan had told her “I don’t give a sh-t if you do drugs, I just want to win this case.” Sage also said Khan had visited the home of one of Sage’s Maryland school friends to enlist her support in contacting Sage, claiming Khan had won the case and resulting in knowledge of Sage’s case spreading around the school.
In a text to a friend at the time, Sage referenced Khan’s intent: “going to the court of appeals, and the supreme court.” It is difficult to avoid Michele’s conclusion that “[t]he only best interest [Sage’s] attorney had was for herself. To put my traumatized child on center stage to push her political or gender agenda!”
Michele begged the court to provide treatment for the trauma Sage had endured and had found placement for her by mid-October, approved by Virginia social services, in Youth for Tomorrow’s program for young victims of sexual exploitation. The judge rejected it because they would treat Sage as a girl.
Not until Nov. 10 did Judge Kershaw approve placement in North Spring, a residential treatment facility that would affirm her claimed male identity. Frightened of being locked in the facility and believing her mother no longer wanted her, Sage texted a friend, “im gonna dip” (leave). On Nov. 12, 2021, Sage says, she cut off her court-required GPS monitor and ran away to meet an online “friend” in Texas she thought was 16.
Once more, the unspeakable happened. Sage fell into the hands of a predator who, police told Michele, raped, starved, drugged, and brutalized her. This time she disappeared for months. For the second time in less than four months, Michele had no way of knowing if her daughter was even alive. But Michele never stopped searching. Finally, a tip she discovered on social media led Texas marshals to her daughter’s rescue in Dallas on Jan. 24, 2022.
For the first time since that conversation on the floor of Sage’s bedroom on Aug. 25 the year before, mother and daughter were able to talk. On the plane ride home, Michele listened as Sage began to unburden her heart, grieving over what she learned but overcome with gratitude that her daughter was alive and restored to her.
Affirmation by Intimidation
Upon her return to Virginia, Sage entered North Spring, the lock-down facility negotiated by the court, with Michele driving four hours each way for her weekly allotted visit. Sage was heavily medicated, suffering from constant nightmares, and fearful of both residents and doctors. Sage told her mother that her counselor also pressured Sage to tell Michele she wanted a “gender-affirming” mastectomy.
Yet, during one of Michele’s visits, Sage asked if her mother could secretly take her to buy girls’ clothes, stating she didn’t want to be a boy anymore, but she was scared to tell the doctors. Pressured by North Spring to let them treat her daughter, Michele reached out to Josh Hetzler, an attorney with Richmond-based Founding Freedoms Law Center, who secured her daughter’s return. After nearly a year of horror, she was finally home safely.
The road ahead is a long one of healing both physically and emotionally. There are confusing lapses in concentration and persistent, terrifying nightmares. In a safe, loving home, surrounded by her pets and easing into at-home learning and therapy sessions, the painful recollections emerge unpredictably, as do the panic attacks. Michele doesn’t press, letting Sage open up at her pace, whether to her or to her beloved uncle Cory, who has moved home to support her.
As she begins to process her ordeal, Sage now desires to protect others from the horrors she experienced. Michele’s heroic, unrelenting determination to save her daughter has turned not only to helping her heal but to preserving other families from what hers endured. Advocates have rallied to help fund legal action through The Gavel Project, and to craft policies that will help protect others.
Sage’s Law
Many children never escape the clutches of sex traffickers. Had it not been for her mother’s relentless love and determination, Sage might never have been found. Michele calls it a miracle. In the starkest of contrasts, the actions of ideologues played a part — twice — in her daughter falling into the traffickers’ hands.
Sage’s public school could have been transparent to Michele about her daughter’s struggles. The court could have returned her to Virginia without furthering a quest to make legal history. The children’s home could have protected her from assault and access to drugs. And doctors could have treated trauma, not pressed living as the opposite sex and mutilative surgery on a victim of sexual abuse. All along, it was her mother who truly had Sage’s best interest at heart.
Sage was failed by adults who thought they were helping but were blinded to their own cruelty by their ideology. Michele tells of countless parents who have reached out to her with their own stories of families and bodies destroyed by school counselors, courts, and doctors who may spend minutes with a child, but assert they have the expertise and authority to usurp decisions from parents who have poured a lifetime into their care.
Sage has shown great courage in sharing her story, and it is time for lawmakers to take a stand for her and many other children by passing Sage’s Law. There is only one acceptable response to her story: never again.
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
The Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office in Salisbury, Maryland, is conducting an investigation into the attempted murder of a police officer, according to WBOC-TV.The incident took place early Monday morning when a suspect reportedly fired on an occupied patrol vehicle in Salisbury. Authorities said that a deputy inside the vehicle came under fire while responding to reports of shots being fired.
The station reported that the investigation of the incident revealed that a “large block party” celebrating Independence Day drew at least 200 attendees. As the party progressed, authorities said an altercation broke out, prompting gunfire.
“An investigation of this scene revealed evidence that more than 100 shots were fired, although [authorities believe] most of them were celebratory for the holiday,” the outlet reported.
Several homes and vehicles in the area were reportedly struck by gunfire, but there were no reports of injuries.
WBOC reported, “It is presumed the gunshot that impacted the marked patrol vehicle in the driver’s door was fired out of a sedan that was leaving the area upon the deputy’s arrival.”
Additional officers responding to the scene recalled seeing a suspect fleeing from the area and attempted to stop the driver. Officers attempted to catch the vehicle, but it turned off its lights, according to the station. Though the driver apparently intended to go incognito, officers were able to track the vehicle to an area 7-Eleven. Upon realizing they were caught, the suspects abandoned the vehicle and began running away. Deputies were able to detain two of three suspects.
In a statement on the attack, Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis said, “This deputy is an awesome deputy. He is a young deputy, very impressionable, less than a year on the job. He is a very valued member of our patrol force, and thank God he was not struck by gunfire.” The deputy was uninjured in the incident.
The two suspects initially taken into custody were released due to a lack of evidence.
Lewis added, “It pained us to cut them loose, but we recognized that we had insufficient evidence to charge them. With the collection of DNA and ballistic evidence at the scene, and the processing by the Maryland State Police Crime Lab, we are going to try to put the pieces of this puzzle together.”
The investigation into the incident continues.
Authorities ask anyone with insight on the attack contact Crime Solvers at (410) 548-1776. Those with information could qualify for a cash reward.
Pastor Dennis Jackman, who is also a physician, leads Community United Methodist Church in Pasadena, Md. | Facebook/Community United Methodist Church
A Maryland pastor and physician, who was recently issued a citation by a local health official threatening a fine, jail time and the shutting down of his church for answering his door without a mask, is now speaking out.
“The document that they handed me suggested that if we weren’t in compliance, first of all, they would shut us down completely and that I could be fined $5,000 and imprisoned for one year,” the Rev. Dr. Dennis Jackman, who leads the Community United Methodist Church in Pasadena, told WCBM.
“I just can’t believe this. I truly believe the power of the church to help to facilitate the American Revolution and to have churches shut down? The flip side is we have people out there that are hurting dramatically that need love and care. People that are deeply depressed and what we’ve done is isolated people and said we can’t have contact with people.”
The incident which has attracted national attention was first made public by The American Constitutional Rights Union, which is dedicated to protecting the civil rights of all Americans by publicly advancing a constitutional understanding of their essential rights and freedoms.
Jackman told the organization that the health official came to the door of the church on a recent weekday when he was alone at the church building.
Community United Methodist Church in Pasadena, Md. | Facebook/Community United Methodist Church
“I was in my office alone, without a mask on, and heard someone at the locked door of the church. I was not expecting anyone, so I went to see who was trying to get in the church. Immediately after answering the door, I went to my desk and put on my mask, but the health official seemed intent on finding something worthy of a citation,” Dr. Jackman said.
He told WCBM that the health official said he was directed to the church after they received an anonymous complaint that “there might be somebody here without a mask on.”
ACRU President Lori Roman said she was concerned about the call that triggered the incident and blamed it on the state government encouraging neighbors to “snitch” on each other through COVID-19 violations hotlines.
“The other twist on this is that the government is encouraging people to snitch on their neighbors. We saw a twist on this, a worshiper from Rev. Jackman’s church called and snitched to us about the health official giving the citation to their pastor,” Roman said.
“Pastors need to band together” to fight back against these abuses, she said, noting that they can also call her organization for help.
“Pastor Jackman wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was alone in his church, there were no services going on when a health department official showed up at a locked door, tried to get in. Pastor Jackman jumped up to try to see who was getting in his church and his citation was simply for showing up at the door to trying to check on who was getting in the church with no mask on. That’s outrageous and it’s time to fight back,” she said.
The ACRU further noted their appreciation for recent comments by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, warning that the COVID pandemic “resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty” and that religious liberty is “in danger of becoming a second-class right.”
A week ago the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Catholic diocese and an Orthodox Jewish group, temporarily blocking New York’s COVID-19 restrictions on houses of worship.
“Members of this Court are not public health experts, and we should respect the judgment of those with special expertise and responsibility in this area. But even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten,” the high court said in its 5-4 ruling. “The restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.”
Kimberly Klacik is a young black woman running for Congress in Maryland and you are going to hear a lot about her in the very near future. Klacik is smart, and a very pretty woman. She also has natural instincts for politics, as this new campaign ad shows.
‘Black People Don’t Have To Vote Democrat’: GOP Challenger In Baltimore Releases Ad Attacking ‘Decades’ Of Dem Rule
Republican Maryland 7th District Congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik released an ad Monday questioning whether “decades” of Democratic Party rule in Baltimore and other major U.S. cities have benefited the black community.
The ad, titled, “Black Lives Don’t Matter To Democrats,” features Klacik walking through some of Baltimore’s most impoverished areas and showing areas that she says Democrats “don’t want you to see.” She also asks several residents how they feel about efforts to defund the police.
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“Do you care about black lives?” Klacik asks viewers. “The people that run Baltimore don’t. I can prove it. Walk with me. They don’t want you to see this.”
A massive explosion devastated a Baltimore neighborhood Monday morning, leaving one person dead and numerous others injured or trapped.
“On scene of a major gas explosion at Labyrinth and Reisterstown Rd. involving 3 homes. 2 occupants transported in serious condition, 1 adult woman deceased as BCFD continue to search for more,” the Baltimore City Fire Department wrote on Facebook.
The department shared images showing a neighborhood in northwest Baltimore partially destroyed.
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The Baltimore Firefighters IAFF Local 734 union also tweeted about the incident.
“(3) patients, all critical have been rescued by Firefighters. Special Rescue Operations units have arrived and are beginning to search and rescue the other patients,” the union wrote.
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The Local 734 also said at least one person was still trapped after the explosion.
The Associated Press reported the explosion destroyed three homes and partially damaged a fourth. The report said the Fire Department contacted Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. about the explosion at 9:54 a.m. BGE spokeswoman Linda Foy said the company was working to shut down gas lines in the area.
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“We are on the scene and working closely with the fire department to make the situation safe,” Foy said. “Once the gas is off, we can begin to safely assess the situation, including inspections of BGE equipment.”
Numerous images posted on social media showed the magnitude of the devastation in Baltimore:
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The Baltimore Sun reported one person was buried from the neck down in debris from the explosion.
Colin Campbell, a reporter with The Sun, spoke to a military veteran and a resident of the neighborhood affected by the blast.
The man, who is 88, said the explosion “sounded like Korea.”
Johnathan has authored thousands of news articles throughout his career. He has also worked as an editor and producer in radio and television. He is a proud husband and father.
Liberals finally support travel bans. No, not when the president uses his lawful power over foreign affairs and commerce to ban foreign nationals from dangerous countries, such as Iran or China, from immigrating here. Liberal governors are now illegally implementing travel bans on their own citizens from state to state. Welcome to the Articles of Confederation government, unless, of course, you’re a foreign national seeking entry to get on welfare. Then a court will defend your “right” to travel and immigrate to the U.S.
Truth be told, even when states were super-sovereigns, during time of the Articles of Confederation, they did not ban Americans from traveling from state to state, because that was recognized as a fundamental liberty interest that even King George didn’t try to stop. Even as states were free to regulate interstate commerce from 1776 to 1789, Art. IV of the Articles of Confederation unambiguously recognized the right of Americans to travel freely from state to state: “The free inhabitants of each of these states … shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states; and the people of each state shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other state.”
But now, governors like “Lockdown Larry” Hogan of Maryland have illegally barred residents from traveling out of state.You heard that correctly. While these governors and some wayward federal judges opposed a travel ban on foreign nationals from terrorist countries or those who would become a public charge, when there is no right for foreigners to immigrate, they are now implementing a travel ban on their own countrymen.
WBAL TV reports that a spokesman for Governor Hogan said that vacation is not allowed under the governor’s stay-home order, which would bar people from traveling to another state unless they are exempted from the order.
Thus, Hogan has now declared an edict that was never in effect for a single day in the history of the American settlement on this continent, under any governing body. Sadly, and ironically, Maryland was the first state to recognize personal liberty and freedom of movement in an act of the governing body in 1639 – well over 100 years before the Revolution.
The natural right of freedom to travel without restraint that was even enumerated in the Articles of Confederation was codified in Art. IV Sec. 2 of the Constitution, using similar language: The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states. As Clarence Thomas has eloquently written in numerous cases over the years, the 14th Amendment’s Privileges and Immunities Clause granted the federal government authority to enforce this right when states infringe upon it.
As recently as 1999, the Supreme Court said in plain English that the “‘constitutional right to travel from one State to another’ is firmly embedded in our jurisprudence” (Saenz v. Rose). Citing previous case law, the court ruled that the right to travel freely is “assertable against private interference as well as governmental action … a virtually unconditional personal right, guaranteed by the Constitution to us all.”
All nine justices agreed that this right is unquestionably protected by the privileges and immunities referenced in Art. IV Sec. 2 and the 14th Amendment. It is the very same language referenced in Maryland’s “Act of the Liberties of the People” of 1639, believed to be the first Bill of Rights.
How far back does this jurisprudence go? In Crandall v. Nevada (1868), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously, based on the 1849 Passenger Cases involving state taxes at harbors, that a state couldn’t even inhibit people from traveling outside by taxing them, much less by threat of criminal prosecution, as today’s governors are doing.
“For all the great purposes for which the Federal government was formed we are one people, with one common country,” wrote Justice Samuel Miller for the unanimous opinion. “We are all citizens of the United States, and as members of the same community must have the right to pass and repass through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own States. And a tax imposed by a State, for entering its territories or harbors, is inconsistent with the rights which belong to citizens of other States as members of the Union, and with the objects which that Union was intended to attain. Such a power in the States could produce nothing but discord and mutual irritation, and they very clearly do not possess it.’”
What about exceptions to this right? There are none. Justice Robert Jackson made it clear in his concurrence in Edwards v. California (1941), a case involving a California law barring indigent citizens from entering, that unless someone is a fugitive of law, there are no limitations on interstate travel: “It is a privilege of citizenship of the United States, protected from state abridgment, to enter any State of the Union, either for temporary sojourn or for the establishment of permanent residence therein and for gaining resultant citizenship thereof. If national citizenship means less than this, it means nothing.”
Justice Jackson is the one who famously observed that aside from habeas corpus during a rebellion or invasion, the Founders “made no express provision for exercise of extraordinary authority because of a crisis.”There are no exceptions to the constitutional prohibition on taking fundamental rights without due process.
This principle is firmly established, ironically, in Governor Hogan’s own state constitution, more eloquently and emphatically than in perhaps any other state’s constitution. Art. 44 of Maryland’s Declaration of Rights emphatically declares “that the provisions of the Constitution of the United States, and of this State, apply, as well in time of war, as in time of peace.”
Yet it appears Mr. Hogan has swapped our constitution with that of the Weimer Republic, which empowered the government “to suspend any or all individual rights if public safety and order were seriously disturbed or endangered.”As Justice Jackson warned in the Youngstown case, we all know the rest of that story. He certainly did, because he served as the lead prosecutor unearthing the results of that fatal mistake of giving executives unqualified authority under the guise of “public safety.”
Author: Daniel Horowitz
Daniel Horowitz is a senior editor of Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @RMConservative.
House Democrats are not letting the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report impede them from further investigations of President Donald Trump. “We’re going to move forward with our investigations of obstruction of justice, abuses of power, corruption, to defend the rule of law, which is our job,”House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said Sunday, according to Bloomberg.
Nadler insisted his wide-ranging probe, which he has already begun, is not a rehash of the Mueller report.
“It’s a broader mandate than the special prosecutor had,” he said.
Mueller was initially charged with investigating allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in 2016. As noted by Attorney General William Barr in a note to Congress, those allegations have been proven false.
“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election,”Barr said in a letter to Congress.
But Nadler is now digging into the gray area in the Mueller report — whether Trump obstructed justice.
Barr’s letter said the report “leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’”
Nadler said that he wants to put Barr in the hot seat to determine how Barr decided not to pursue an obstruction case against Trump.
“Attorney General Barr, who auditioned for his role with a memo saying that it was almost impossible for any president to commit obstruction, made a decision in under 48 hours,” Nadler said Sunday, according to CBS.
He referenced a 2018 memo Barr wrote that said “Mueller’s obstruction theory is fatally misconceived” and based “on a novel and insupportable reading of the law.”
Mueller said Barr needs to better explain himself.
“Given what Barr found on obstruction of justice, I think all of us should be very concerned about the even-handedness,” Nadler said Monday. “The American public needs to know how exactly did he conclude there is no obstruction of justice.”
Nadler issued a statement co-authored with fellow Democrats House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff of California and House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings of Maryland that gave Barr a zinger for not charging Trump.
“It is unacceptable that, after Special Counsel Mueller spent 22 months meticulously uncovering this evidence, Attorney General Barr made a decision not to charge the President in under 48 hours. The Attorney General did so without even interviewing the President. His unsolicited, open memorandum to the Department of Justice, suggesting that the obstruction investigation was ‘fatally misconceived,’ calls into question his objectivity on this point in particular,”the statement said.
The three Democrats maligned Barr’s impartiality.
“The only information the Congress and the American people have received regarding this investigation is the Attorney General’s own work product,” the chairmen said.
“The Special Counsel’s Report should be allowed to speak for itself, and Congress must have the opportunity to evaluate the underlying evidence,” the statement said.
It is unclear yet whether the full Mueller report will ever be released. Both Trump and his Democratic critics, however, have said it should be released in full.
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
The narrative that liberals have hung their hopes on to stop Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is falling apart. There are now so many holes in the story, it’s incredible Democrats are still running with it.
Christine Blasey Ford is the woman who accused Kavanaugh of drunkenly groping her at a party way back when he was 17 years old, but she has been largely unable to produce solid evidence or witnesses to back up her serious claims.
One of the only points in her favor was that she took a “lie detector” polygraph test, which was widely reported by the media as supporting her story by showing that she wasn’t lying.
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That is, until now. On Wednesday, the actual details from that polygraph were released to the public — and they make her already-flimsy story seem downright unbelievable.
The biggest problem with the so-called “lie detector” results are that the examinernever actually asked questions about Kavanaugh during the polygraph test.
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Bizarrely, the person conducting the polygraph — who was a third-party examiner and not a law enforcement official — had Ford scribble down her nearly 40-year-old memory of the drunken party, and then asked her two vague questions.
Those two questions were: “Is any part of your statement false?” and “Did you make up any part of your statement?”
This is absolutely important to understand: Again, the polygraph test didn’t actually ask the main accuser any questions about Kavanaugh. His name was never brought up by the interviewer. Instead, Ford was simply asked if she believed her own hand-written statement.
It gets even more strange, as nowhere in that written statement does the name “Kavanaugh” appear, either.
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And, to make matters worse, the statement from Ford that she was then asked about by the polygraph examiner directly contradicts different versions of the alleged event that the accuser has also given.
“Ford’s polygraph letter contradicts letter she sent to Feinstein,”pointed out Charles C. W. Cooke, the editor of The National Review.
“Polygraph letter says ‘4 boys and a couple of girls’ were at party. Letter to Feinstein says ‘me and four others,’”he continued. “No way to reconcile the two — irrespective of whether she’s counting herself in polygraph letter.”
It’s important to remember that fundamental facts such as how many people witnessed the alleged incident and what their genders were have been up in the air already. Even journalists from the left-leaning Washington Post are seemingly unable to keep the details straight.
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“July 30 (to Dianne Feinstein): It was me and four other people. August 7 (to polygraph examiner): There were four boys and a couple of girls. September 16 (to Washington Post reporter): There were three boys and one girl,”The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis posted to Twitter, summarizing the inconsistencies.
Here’s another huge point: The fact that Ford “passed” the polygraph based on a statement that she later herself contradicted while telling the story to other people shows how unreliable this “evidence” truly is.
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Contrary to how it’s shown in the movies, a polygraph can’t actually determine if a person is lying or not. All it can do is indicate how calm or stressed somebody is compared to a baseline. It can be used to indicate deception, but a completely delusional person can also “pass” a polygraph.
In other words, Ford may believe that something happened at a party four decades ago, and she may be confident that some version of her story is true, but the vagueness and unscientific nature of this process proves absolutely nothing. The problems with this accuser’s story don’t stop there. Buried in the release of the weak polygraph results was the fact that Ford was in Maryland — on the other side of the country from her home in California — to take that test.
But the supposed reason she couldn’t appear to testify in front of the Senate and answer questions about her accusations was that she’s afraid of confined spaces, which means she won’t travel by plane.
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“The GOP has been told that Ford does not want to fly from her California home to Washington … which means she may need to drive across the country,”reported Politico just five days ago. “Ford has reportedly told friends she is uncomfortable in confined spaces, indicating a physical difficulty in making the trip by plane.”
Yet the letter from Ford to Senator Feinstein made no mention of this difficulty, and casually mentioned that she planned to be back in California from the East Coast in less than three day’s time. It takes at least 42 hours of nonstop driving to go from Maryland, where the polygraph was administered, to Palo Alto, California, where Ford lives and teaches at a university.
This borders on being humanly impossible: Anybody who has done long road trips knows that a realistic daily limit is about ten hours of driving a day before exhaustion sets in. USA Today has recommended that people set aside between four and six days to do this arduous drive.
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When none of the details add up or pass even the most basic sniff test, something is wrong.
This entire ordeal looks increasingly like a slimy and desperate effort to delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation at any cost. But the truth always has a way of coming out, and it doesn’t even need a polygraph.
Benjamin Arie has been a political junkie since the hotly contested 2000 election. Ben settled on journalism after realizing he could get paid to rant. He cut his teeth on car accidents and house fires as a small-town reporter in Michigan before becoming a full-time political writer.
Is there a reason some ‘mass shootings’ are ‘more newsworthy’ than others?
Were you aware that there was another ‘mass shooting’ this week?
Was it splashed all over the news?
Wall-to-wall coverage?
Is Edgewood, Maryland now a household name?
No? Well, that’s strange.
A guy went into an office park there and started shooting.
He murdered three and wounded two others before fleeing the scene. After that, he went to Delaware and shot a guy at a used car dealership.
When police finally caught up with him, a few hours later, 37-year-old Radee Labeeb Prince was seen outside a school, enjoying a cigar.
Six shot, three fatally, and this is NOT a national conversation? And at least two of the survivors had been shot in the head?
What are the possible explanations for NOT making this a national story?
1) It’s ‘workplace violence’. — the accused had worked there, was known to his victims, and another coworker had tried to get a restraining order against him.
2) It was a handgun, not a ‘scary black rifle’… let alone ‘assault’ rifle, so it wouldn’t help their gun-grabbing efforts.
3) Dude wasn’t the ‘white shooter’ they like their narratives to be about.
As the voices of football fans and patriotic Americans continue to swell in opposition to protests taking place before NFL games, even athletes who endeared themselves to the fans are feeling the sting. Retired Baltimore Ravens star linebacker Ray Lewis is an example.
Lewis made the Pro Bowl in 13 of his 17 seasons, was named Super Bowl MVP, and had a statue erected in his honor outside the Ravens’ M&T Bank Stadium.
Then came Sunday, when Lewis dropped to his knees during the singing of the national anthem at Baltimore’s game against the Jacksonville Jaguars in London — and now a petition calling for the removal of his statue has collected over 50,000 signatures.
By Friday, a change.org petition for the removal of the statue had almost 69,000 signatures.
Officials are not taking the fans’ passion as lightly as are the NFL’s players.
“There is additional security at the statue plaza at this time,” said Rachelina Bonacci, a spokesperson for the Maryland Stadium Authority.
“Certainly observers can notice the presence of uniformed security officers at M&T Bank Stadium, which includes the statue plaza,” she said. “The additional officers and other security enhancements have been in place since Sunday afternoon.”
The petition reads, “I want the Ray Lewis statue at Ravens Stadium removed because of his refusal to stand during the national anthem. That song honors our country and our veterans who fought for it. To kneel during it is disrespectful, regardless of what you are protesting. I will not stand for that kind of disrespect towards our country, especially from a legend such as Ray Lewis. You stand for the National Anthem as a salute to those who can’t stand because they fought for this land.”
The petition was accompanied by a soul-searching letter from Eric Moniodis, who started the petition, to Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti.
“I sit here heartbroken, searching for answers, and questioning why it has come to this. I am disappointed, to say the least. The team that I have loved since 1996, and the Raven I came to respect more than any other, has defiled my National Anthem, my country, and all of it’s (sic) troops,” he wrote.
Moniodis said Lewis was once a legend, but is so no longer.
“A legend is a hero both on and off the field, and by disgracing this great country by kneeling during the national anthem, on foreign soil no less, he has lost the respect of myself and many of my peers who used to see him in a different light,” he wrote.
Moniodis called refusing to stand for the anthem “blatant disrespect to our country’s solute to our troops, veterans and first responders.”
Lewis spoke about the petition during a local sports radio show.
“It only bothers me if I blatantly did something to gain awareness for myself. What I did — is for our country. That’s why I challenge people,”he said.
Lewis said there was significance in the fact the he knelt on both knees, and not only one. “You can protest, I’m gonna pray,” he said.
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The rape of a 14-year-old teenager in Maryland by at least one illegal immigrant has caused outrage throughout the nation, but generated surprisingly little outcry from feminist activists. Guatemalan Henry E. Sanchez-Milian, 18, and a 17-year-old male were charged with raping their classmate in Rockville High School. Authorities confirmed that Sanchez-Milian was an illegal immigrant who was being considered for deportation prior to the assault.
Sanchez-Milian’s father, Adolfo Sanchez-Reyes, 43, was also arrested on Friday after authorities discovered he was in the United States illegally.
The girl was raped in a Rockville High School bathroom earlier this month, but the report of the alleged crime began to reverberate last week. The reaction on the Left and in the media has been largely muted — even given the brutalization of a young girl.
“ABC, NBC, CBS did not cover it on their nightly news broadcasts,”said Bill O’Reilly on “The O’Reilly Factor” on March 22. “CNN did not cover the Maryland story in prime time last night. Ditto MSNBC. That is beyond anything I have ever seen in my 40 years-plus of journalism.”
But surprisingly, even many feminist and domestic violence activists have remained mum on addressing the issue, a week after the news hit.
The official web page for the National Organization for Women, the longtime feminist group, doesn’t mention the Rockville High School case. Instead, it urges members to “#StopGorsuch,” President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, as part of an effort to preserve reproductive rights.
On the Feminist Majority Foundation’s website, no mention of the alleged crime has been made. The site features a number to call regarding violence against women. It also has an article entitled, “No more excuses: Rape is rape.”The article calls for a reduction in the backlog of rape kits collected by police. The group’s news blog makes no mention of the Rockville High incident, instead updating the page on Tuesday with an article, “GOP Healthcare Bill Fails, But Could Be Reintroduced.”
The official website for the Women’s March on Washington, which turned out tens of thousands of women on Jan. 21, makes no mention of the issue. But the site has been updated on another issue — a controversy over missing black and Latina girls in Washington, D.C.
At Latina magazine, the consequences of President Trump’s immigration policies are pondered, without reference to Rockville.
In a Monday article by Nichole Fratangelo, Latina writes, “Undocumented immigrants aren’t exactly feeling comfortable in Trump’s America, so much so that women are keeping quiet about their assault cases. According to NPR, four women in Colorado have dropped their cases of domestic abuse due to fear of being deported.”
And the Rockville City Council heard citizen testimony on Monday about making the Maryland city a “sanctuary city.” Just days earlier, the Maryland State House of Delegates approved a bill to make Maryland a sanctuary state.
Maria Espinoza, director of the The Remembrance Project, which advocates for families whose loved ones were killed by illegal aliens, told LifeZette Tuesday she was disappointed feminists have been silent on the Rockville case. Too often organizations that purport to advocate for women allow their liberal tendencies to keep them silent when women are the victims of illegal immigrant crime,Espinoza said.
“It’s obvious they’re placing their very liberal agenda ahead of our safety,”said Espinoza. “Here they stand down when a little girl is raped.”
Sanctuary policies came into sharp focus on Monday, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions warned the Department of Justice was serious about withholding federal grants to localities that pursue such policies.
Hans van Spakovsky, a legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said the government’s own data shows millions of crimes are committed by the sizable segment of the illegal alien community, who keep getting released in sanctuary jurisdictions.
“It’s totally preventable,”said Espinoza. “It’s a shame they’re putting our children at risk.”
Blue states have 42 percent more mass shootings than red states after adjusting for population, according to data published by Vox, a progressive media outlet, and examined by The Daily Caller News Foundation. Vox published its data after the Orlando terror attack last Sunday, and it suggests that blue states, which tend to have extremely strict gun laws, are ironically much more likely to have mass shootings than red states with less strict gun laws.
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TheDCNF’s analysis found that 543 of the mass shootings listed by Vox occurred in blue states while only 330 occurred in red states. If adjusted to account for differences in the size of population, blue states have .381 mass shootings per 100,000 people, while red states have a mere .267.Places where Democrats controlled the state legislature were even more likely to have mass shootings than the average blue state. This means that a mass shooting, as defined by Vox, is 42 percent more likely to occur in a blue state after accounting for population differences.
The deep blue areas of Washington, D.C. and Maryland led the nation with 2.38 and .998 mass shootings per 100,000 people. Illinois, Delaware, Michigan Rhode Island, and California were relatively close behind and had more mass shootings than the blue state average, according to Vox’s data.
The typical liberal explanation for this is that mass shooters go to red states to buy guns, which they use in blue states. Even progressive Politifact finds these claims“misleading for a varied number of reasons.” This also ignores the fact that there are already roughly 360 million firearms in America, or more guns than people.
Republicans currently control the state legislature and the governor’s office of Michigan, but the state has consistently voted for Democrats in the last six presidential elections. During the last six years, the GOP has won governorships in purple and even deep blue states: Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, New Mexico.
Of the top ten states by mass shootings per capita, TheDCNF’s analysis found that six of them were deep blue states. Several red states such as Idaho, North Dakota, and Wyoming did not have a single mass shooting.
TheDCNF concluded that a state was blue or red based on how it voted in each of the last four presidential elections. This methodology only factored in America’s 22 red states and 18 blue states. This means that if everything else was even, statistically, red states should be over-represented as there are more of them. This methodology excluded large swings states like Ohio and Florida and states, which leaned red or blue.
TheDCNF previously found that of the 998 “mass shootings” noted by Vox only 86, or roughly eight percent, meet the threshold of a “mass murder,” as defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and academics. Vox’s data claimed America had 11.6 times more mass shootings than actually occurred. This lack of “mass murder” didn’t stop Vox founder Ezra Klein from tweeting out an updated map of 998 “mass shootings,” which was retweeted almost 25,000 times and favorited more than 22,000 times.
Vox’s definition of a “mass shooting” isn’t an official one taken from law enforcement or academia, but appears to be originally created by anti-gun activistsfrom the website Reddit. Vox defined a mass shooting as any shooting where four or more people are injured or killed, not counting the shooter. Criminologists and law enforcement, however define it as four or more people killed, not counting the shooter.
Daily Caller interns Dan Chaison, Josh Hamburger, Ford Springer and Jacqueline Thomas contributed to the analysis of Vox’s data that went into this report.
On Monday and into Tuesday, more than two dozen governors moved to block Syrian refugees from entering their states. (Photo: Kelsey Lucas/Visualsey)
In the aftermath of Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris, governors across the United States are attempting to shut their doors on Syrian refugees looking to find a safe haven in the country. As of Monday evening, more than two dozen governors announced opposition to policies that would permit Syrian refugees to enter their states amid concerns they could have ties to terrorists.
KentuckyGov.-elect Matt Bevin, who will take officeDec. 8, also said he opposes resettlement efforts.
The movement, which was overwhelmingly spearheaded by Republican governors, came after French prosecutors discovered aSyrian passporton one of the suspected Islamic State suicide bombers in Paris. That finding raised concerns that terrorists are embedding with refugees to enter Europe and other nations.
The series of attacks in Paris on Friday night left more than 130 dead and hundreds others injured. French President François Hollande called the attacks an “act of war” and launched airstrikes against ISIS.
President Barack Obama sharply pushed back against the growing number of states attempting to undermine his policies surrounding Syrian refugees, saying Monday at a press conference in Antalya, Turkey, that it would be “shameful” and “not American” to close America’s doors on Syrian refugees.
“When some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful,”he said. “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
In September, Obamavowed to accept10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States next year.
Those issuing executive orders to block refugees pushed back on the president’s narrative while announcing their decision.
“Michigan is a welcoming state, and we are proud of our rich history of immigration,”said Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. “But our first priority is protecting the safety of our residents.”
In a letter addressed to the president, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, “Neither you nor any federal official can guarantee that Syrian refugees will not be part of any terroristic activity. As such, opening our door to them irresponsibly exposes our fellow Americans to unacceptable peril.”
While their responses send a clear message to the president, John Malcolm, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, said the practical implications blocking refugees are limited.
“Governors can certainly order state agencies to stop doing anything to assist federal authorities with their resettlement efforts, but they cannot stop federal authorities from continuing those efforts, nor can they stop immigrants who are lawfully admitted to this country from moving to and settling in those states,”Malcolm said. “They can, however, ask state law enforcement authorities to keep an eye on the refugees who settle in their states, so long as those authorities do so within the bounds of the Constitution.”
“It’s abhorrent for the federal government not to consult with and consider the interests of the states,”added Jim Carafano, a foreign policy expert at The Heritage Foundation. “Particularly the views of governors, as it impacts the welfare and public safety of their citizens.”
Florida Gov. Rick Scott addressed those concernsin a lettersent to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. In that letter, dated Nov. 16, Scott wrote:
[I]t is our understanding that the state does not have the authority to prevent the federal government from funding the relocation of these Syrian refugees to Florida even without state support. Therefore, we are asking the United States Congress to take immediate and aggressive action to prevent President Obama and his administration from using any federal tax dollars to fund the relocation of up to 425 Syrian refugees (the total possible number of refugees pending for state relocation support at this time) to Florida, or anywhere in the United States, without an extensive evaluation of the risk these individuals may post to our national security.
In response, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced legislation on Monday afternoon that would suspend issuance of visas to refugees from countries with a high risk of terrorism until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security meets certain standards. Those standards include fingerprinting and screening all refugees, implement a tracking system “to catch attempted overstays,”and enhancing security measures that are already in place.
“The time has come to stop terrorists from walking in our front door. The Boston Marathon bombers were refugees, and numerous refugees from Iraq, including some living in my hometown, have attempted to commit terrorist attacks,”Paul said in a press release.
Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, also called to suspend the refugee program.
“The Syrian refugee program should be suspended until the American people are satisfied that they know exactly who the president is admitting into the country via this program,” Burr said. “There is simply too much at stake, and the security of the American people should be our top priority.”
This article and its accompanying map has been updated to reflect the growing number of governors who do not wish to permit Syrian refugees into their state.
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley made national news last year when he fought to pass and signed a tax bill that levied a tax on Marylanders, businesses and churches for the amount of “impervious surface” they have on their property.
Roofs, driveways, sidewalks, and parking lots qualify for the “rainwater remediation fee” to “protect the Chesapeake Bay.”
Though the O’Malley administration calls it a “fee,” it is commonly called the “rain tax” throughout the state. It is wildly unpopular and the promise to fight to repeal the tax was a large factor in Maryland electing Republican Larry Hogan governor this month.Now Prince George’s Country is offering a way for churches to avoid paying the tax, which is estimated to be an average of $744 per year for them — preach “green” to their parishioners.
So far 30 pastors have agreed to begin “‘green’ ministries to maintain the improvements at their churches, and to preach environmentally focused sermons to educate their congregations” to avoid being hit with the tax, The Washington Post reports.
Prince George’s County’s Department of Environment director Adam Ortiz told WBAL Radio churches “don’t have to preach, per se,” that they could avoid the tax if they “provide educational programs to teach them (parishioners) about how to be more sustainable. And to help them engage in grant programs and other way that they can control the runoff from their property.”
Asked about the concern of government telling churches what to preach to their members, Ortiz said he had no concern over that. “It’s an opt-in. It’s up to them, if they want to help participate and help clean up the bay, they can opt-in to this program and we can all work together to clean up the bay.”
“All of us are part of the problem,”Ortiz said, “and we can also be part of the solution.”
Between 30 and 40 additional churches have filed applications to avoid the tax and participate in the program, according to Ortiz. “It’s completely voluntary,” he said, “and paying this fee is state law.”
Asked if businesses and private property owners could avail themselves of this program to avoid paying the tax, Ortiz said, “For businesses and private property owners the most important thing is the help control the pollution (rain water), keep it from going into the storm drain, cuz that goes directly into the rivers. So we have a series of grant programs that we’re happy to work with private owners on.”
Ortiz said those programs, particularly for businesses, do not involve talking to employees like churches are required to talk to congregants.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
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In response, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced legislation on Monday afternoon that would suspend issuance of visas to refugees from countries with a high risk of terrorism until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security meets certain standards. Those standards include fingerprinting and screening all refugees, implement a tracking system “to catch attempted overstays,” and enhancing security measures that are already in place.
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