Crime and Punishment

Thoughts on J6 Pardons and Investigations

by

I am in favor of a pardon for J6 protesters, but not all of them. Which ones? Those who posed no threat. Those not convicted or charged with assault or other violent offenses (with one possible exception – see next paragraph), or for inciting violent behavior (like John Earle Sullivan). Ray Epps still hasn’t been thoroughly investigated, so he should not receive a pardon.

The case of Rachel Powell must be reviewed carefully. She claims she broke a window to flee a dangerous situation created by an attack by Capitol defenders that had protesters pressed in a confined area. If there is a strong case for her self-defense argument, pardon her.

The pardon decision must reflect zero tolerance of violence other than justifiable self-defense. The pardon announcement must call attention to prosecutorial abuse, excessively lengthy pretrial detention, and pretrial prison conditions.

Now, on to J6 investigations. Here’s my not-necessarily-comprehensive to-do list.

A highly detailed sequence of events. If military history buffs can put together detailed videos of major battles pinpointing the positions of individual units at specific times, the same can be accomplished here. I want a series of maps in print or video format that show time and location of every single violent incident, whether fomented by the public- or private-sector, and other incidents of note (e.g. pipe bomb discoveries, Senate recess, the moment Capitol security started allowing entry into the building, Trump’s “go home” tweet, Jacob Chansley announcing said tweet), and that also show the location of key persons of interest at those times. This exercise should be valuable to various investigations, and will give the public a better sense of when and where rioting and other violence occurred. I suspect that many people imagine four solid hours of rioting, far more violence than actually occurred. I’m also curious to know how many people who heard the end of Trump’s speech entered the building. Given the walking distance, they would not have arrived yet when windows were being bashed in.

A request for private citizens to submit videos that have not yet been submitted. There may still be some videos out there that haven’t been tuned in out of fear of being railroaded by Biden’s DoJ.

The pipe bombs. Who planted them, and were they subjected to forensic analysis after the Feds exploded the devices? Since they were fitted with one-hour kitchen timers and placed many hours prior to discovery, the bombs either had a different trigger mechanism that wasn’t visible, or no trigger mechanism at all. The latter alternative calls into question whether the bombs even had explosives. They could have been filled with Clairol for all we know.

The use of tear gas and its possible role in inciting violence. Some tear gas rounds were fired deep into the peaceable section of the crowd, as witnessed by J. Michael Waller and documented in this video (first round visible at 1:02).

The decision to allow entry into the building. Who authorized it? At which entrances was entry allowed? I am vaguely aware of a claim that the rioting was mostly on one side of the building and allowed entry was on the other. I’d like some confirmation on that.

The shooting death of Ashli Babbitt.

The death of Rosanne Boyland.

The origins of the hoax that Brian Sicknick was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher.

The gallows prop. Who built it, and who decided it should not be torn down once it was up? People need to be fired over this.

All other conduct of Capitol defenders.

Prison conditions for J6 protesters in pretrial detention. Inspection teams should be ready to descend on the prison(s) two seconds after Trump takes the oath of office.

Prosecution of J6 defendants. One special concern is the decision to charge about 250 J6 defendants under an evidence tampering provision under Sarbanes-Oxley. How was this decision made? Did anyone in the loop doubt that the statute was genuinely relevant to those cases? Those convictions have since been shot down by SCOTUS. One has to imagine how someone could get the idea that a law concerned with addressing accounting shenanigans could be applied to protesters.

The J6 committee and Jack Smith. Obligatory mention. One issue I’d like to see settled: since the full committee never met, did it have subpoena authority? If not, the cases of those convicted of defying subpoenas should be appealed, not pardoned.

“Evil Amazon”

by

Josh Treviño regarding the Mexican cartels:

“It is evil Amazon, really. They’re logistic firms with small armies attached that will profit from whatever they can and increasingly take on the characteristics of insurgency.”

I think the Amazon comparison is apt, but Treviño pulls up a bit short because it’s more than just logistics. Amazon has proven to be a master of leveraging existing capabilities in order to exploit new markets. There is of course its e-commerce transformation from an online bookstore to selling just about everything under the sun. Then there was its leveraging the last-mile delivery and now using its expertise in data centers to develop AWS and enter the AI market.

Read more

Mwen Rekòmande Panik Imedyat

by

Having sensed that my public is calling: “In fair Springfield, where we lay our scene …”

Read more

A Profile of a Killer, Part 2: Audrey Hale

by

Part 1 is located here

Anybody remember Audrey Hale? That’s okay if you don’t, few do. The story of Audrey Hale is not only one of a killer, but one whose background is inconvenient for people who have the ability to make people disappear from public view.

It’s been 1 ½ years since Hale, a transgender-identifying woman, entered the Covenant School in Nashville on March 27, 2023 and proceeded to slaughter six people, including three children, and only now are we finding out about any possible motive. Hale had attended Covenant, a private Christian school, some years earlier.

I am not a big believer in “hate crimes” as a legal term, but the basic facts of the incident, transgender-identifying woman hunting down and killing Christian children, had on the surface all the hallmarks of hate.

However, within a day after the slaughter, Audrey Hale started to disappear from public consciousness. This disappearance was a deliberate act in two parts.

The first part dealt with suppressing Hale’s writings, Hale left a manifesto of sorts in her car, clearly with the intention of its being discovered. She communicated with a friend via Instagram before the killings that “One day this will make more sense. I’ve left more than enough evidence behind.” However, federal and local law enforcement seized the material and refused to release its contents, initially citing that there was still an on-going investigation, the fear it would incite other violence, and later the reason given was due to a copyright claim by the parents (the government transferred the copyright to the materials to Hale’s family). No motive for her crimes was provided by law enforcement.

The contrast with a similar case is remarkable. In 2022 Payton Gendron, a white man, drove several hours to a supermarket in Buffalo and killed ten people, all black. Gendron left writings declaring his intent. By the evening of the shooting, local law enforcement had not only reviewed said material but announced to the public that it was “…racially motivated hate crime”. Needless to say, the story filled the media for weeks and Democrats made political bank on it.

Hale’s writings were finally released to the public September 2, 2024, not by the government, but rather by the Tennessee Star which had obtained her writings and other investigation documents from an unknown source. The editor-in-chief of the Star is still under the threat by I’Ashea Myles, the judge assigned to the case, of investigation by a special prosecutor.

Only the New York Post, a few local Tennessee outlets, and some conservative sites bothered to report on the release of Hale’s writings or their content. As Hillary Clinton might have said, it had become old news. Public attention is a fickle thing.

The second part dealt with what David Plouffe, part of the Obama brain trust, once called “stray voltage.” This is a deliberate method which creates controversy to spark attention, which in turn provokes conversation, and that conversation then embeds ideas into the public consciousness.

Three days after the shootings, a mob of several hundred demonstrators entered the Tennessee Capitol. Many of the demonstrators occupied the visitor galleries inside the House chamber, and working in concert with three Democratic legislators who had taken over the chamber’s well, yelled gun-control slogans and ground official business to a halt. That action, along with a larger gun-control demonstration outside and protesters wandering the Capitol, was all over the media.

Controversy, conversation, ideas. What was once a story about a transgender-identifying woman killing Christian children had, within 72 hours, become embedded in the public’s mind as a gun-control issue. Including the protesters outside, an estimated 1,000 people showed up at the Capitol on short notice. Nicely organized, from the protest itself to the narrative switcheroo.

Then there was more controversy. The Tennessee House voted to expel two of the three Democrats who had decided to take over the chamber’s floor. The two who were expelled were black, the one who escaped expulsion was white. All heck broke loose as the racial angle was exploited and inflamed by the Democrats with a visit from Kamala Harris and an invitation for the expelled legislators to come to the White House.

With that, the disappearance of Audrey Hale was complete, buried with a combination of information suppression and stray voltage.

So now after more than a year we can finally start to fill in aspects of Hale’s profile. The part of Hale’s writings that were published last week by the Tennessee Star does not paint a pretty picture. She had been planning the Covenant massacre for some time, was struggling with mental health issues and her gender identity, and was twice evaluated for commitment. You could see how a mentally-unstable, transgender-identifying woman killing children could create image problems.

So what are the larger implications of this story?

This is Information Warfare 101, where the Left understands that while they couldn’t erase the Covenant massacre from history, they could change the way in which it was told. Feed the news cycle with alternative narratives, delay or outright suppress inconvenient information, and wait until enough time passes. Switch topics, suppress, delay.

The story they were going to tell was going to be about racism, gun control… anything but the portrait of a crazed, transgender-identifying killer.

Fair Play

by

“The Saxon is not like us Normans, His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealings,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.
Rudyard Kipling

If there is one concept thought to be more quintessentially English over any other, I think it must be the concept of fair play. Fair dealings, as Kipling put it. That one party should be treated as any other, held to the same standard of conduct, and afforded the same penalties or rewards for the same acts, regardless of economic standing, religious beliefs or racial background. A lot of this concept of “fair dealings” carried over into the American cultural mainstream as well; honored as a concept and an ideal to be striven for. I’d guess that a lot of that general support among Americans generally for the civil rights movement was based on the dawning realization among most of us that Jim Crow laws restricting black Americans were not fair at all.

Read more