90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

HOW THE ADL USED FAKE STATS TO MINIMIZE ISLAMIC TERROR

Exposing the fake extremist violence statistics in its latest report.

Fake extremism statistics are big business. Just like those shoddy research studies which warn that drinking a glass of wine can kill you or make you immortal, they exist to be broadcast by the media.

Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center faked a three-fold increase in “hate groups” by switching from listing one organization it had been smearing to listing 45 of its chapters separately. This year, SAALT listed multiple Muslim hate crime hoaxes in its report claiming that such crimes had increased.

The media uncritically reported their claims. Now it’s pushing more bad numbers from the ADL.

"White supremacists responsible for most extremist killings in 2017, ADL says," CNN reports. "Murders By U.S. White Supremacists More Than Doubled In 2017, New Report Shows," the Huffington Postclaims. "Murders by white supremacists in US more than doubled in 2017," The Independent details.

"White Supremacists Killed 18 People in 2017, Double the Number From 2016," Newsweek alleges.

“Unlike 2016, a year dominated by the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando, Florida, committed by an Islamic extremist, a majority of the 2017 murders were committed by right-wing extremists, primarily white supremacists,” the ADL report’s key findings section asserts.

Don’t worry about Islamic terrorism, focus on white supremacists is the message. While white supremacists are obviously terrible people, there’s really no comparison when it comes to terrorism.

And there’s a huge problem with the ADL’s numbers.

White supremacists are extremists. And the ADL does document killings by white supremacists. But here’s the catch, not all white supremacist murders are extremists killings. Most aren’t.

Last year, Frank Ancona, a KKK imperial wizard, was allegedly killed by his wife and stepson.

The ADL report claims that, “In total, extremists killed at least 34 people in 2017. The far-right accounted for 59% of these deaths, or 20 deaths.” Frank’s murder is one of those deaths.

Why is Frank’s wife allegedly shooting him over a possible divorce a white supremacist murder?

Well, his wife was also allegedly a Klan member (in addition to allegedly hoarding 70 cats), so it’s a killing by an extremist. It just isn’t a killing motivated by political extremism.

The ADL report admits as much, "Neither ideology nor hate seems to have played a part when Frank Ancona, the head of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was murdered, allegedly by his wife and fellow Klan member, Malissa Ancona, and her son."

So why is it listed?

But the report is full of murders that happened to be committed by white supremacists

Randy Gene Baker was allegedly murdered by his wife, nephew and sister. His nephew has ties to a white supremacist prison gang. There’s no mention of the two women being white supremacists.

5 of the murders in the ADL’s report actually involve family violence by white supremacists. Three of them might have involved arguments over political beliefs, but the two above clearly don’t belong.

And it’s really hard to delineate how political the murder of a family member is.

The ADL report also lists, "Aryan Circle member Edward Blackburn" who "allegedly shot and killed another man who was reportedly dating his ex-girlfriend."

The victim was white.

White supremacist gangs have thousands of members. Like their black nationalist counterparts, they’re criminals. And they commit all sorts of crimes that have nothing to do with their politics.

In Indiana, John Byler was murdered by thugs demanding drugs. Or, as the ADL report puts it, “Wesley Andrew Hampton, a self-declared white supremacist, and another defendant allegedly robbed and murdered a man in a home invasion.” The report neglects to note that Aarron Christopher Vance, the other defendant, is a black man with dreadlocks.

The ADL report actually lists a murder by a black man and a white man as a white supremacist killing.

It’s one of four supposed white supremacist murders that were actually...

Armed Citizens Are Respected Citizens.
Armed Citizens Always Have Free Speech.

George Soros-backed ACLU investing in district attorney races as path to criminal justice reform

The American Civil Liberties Union, backed by millions in funding from billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, is investing resources and applying organizational muscle in local district attorney races in 2018.

The ACLU is among a variety of organizations working to elect prosecutors willing to jumpstart a laundry list of criminal justice reforms, including an overhaul of the pretrial bail bond system. It received a $50 million grant from Soros’ Open Society Foundations in 2014.

Now, in this year’s elections, the organization is planning voter education and outreach campaigns in district attorney races in California, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Vermont and possibly North Carolina and Missouri.

The group hasn’t determined which local races will be targeted, but it will focus on contests in big cities with large jail populations that feed the state prison system, said Taylor Pendergrass, senior campaign strategist for the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice. More than 1,000 local prosecutors are up for election in November, according to the group.

“We’re just recognizing how powerful district attorneys are in shaping criminal justice policies, both at the local level, but also at the statehouse,” Pendergrass said. “The lobbying power of prosecutors is really a substantial force almost everywhere we want to see change made in the criminal justice system.”

The ACLU doesn’t endorse political candidates. Instead, it said the objective is to raise awareness about criminal justice issues of concern to the organization, its members and the voting public.

But Soros-funded super PACs and advocacy groups have helped elect a growing number of progressive district attorneys who now serve metro areas such as Chicago, Denver, Houston, Philadelphia and Orlando. And it’s looking to add more in 2018.

The Color of Change Political Action Committee, which has also received Soros funding, is urging black voters to support Democratic candidate Elizabeth Frizell for Harris County District Attorney in the Dallas area. A former state district judge, Frizell has called for special prosecutors to investigate shootings by police. She also supports replacing cash bail bonds with a pretrial release system based on factors such as the type of offense, the facts of the case and the defendants’ likelihood to re-offend and return to court.

An African American, Frizell reflects a new wave of ethnically diverse, activist district attorney candidates, many of whom support policies such as diversion programs for...

As Broward sheriff touts ‘amazing leadership,’ a low grumble builds in the ranks

Report: Four of Sheriff Scott Israel’s Deputies Waited Outside Douglas High During School Shooting

Loesch Slams Sheriff Israel For Hiding His Deputy's Inaction From Town Hall: You 'Said NOTHING'

Were Four Deputies Ordered To Stand Down During Shooting?

He Doesn't Always Stand Down And Let Innocents Die...

NAACP Helped Craft Sheriff Israel’s No Arrest Policy

What You Need To Know About The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban To PREVENT Another One

Here we go again. Another assault weapons ban rears its knee-jerk head. The Assault Weapons Ban of 2018 is the feel-good, we-have-to-do-somethingmove. I’m all for it if it will make a positive difference. But it won’t. We already know that it won’t because of the 1994 assault weapons ban.

Remember how excited your mother was in 1994? “Honey,” she said, “finally we’re doing something about crime.” She did have a point since crime had been rising steadily through the eighties and early nineties. The ban seemed like a good idea at the time, and darn it if FBI crime statistics didn’t prove her right. (You hate it when that happens.) From 1994 to 2004, the violent crime rate dropped 35 percent.

When the Department of Justice released statistics about firearms homicides specifically, your mother was even more sure of herself. In 1993, the year before the ban took effect, there were 18,253 firearm homicides. The ban took effect, and the number of firearm homicides dropped every year for the next seven years. They began to rise again in 2001, but in 2004, there were 11,624 firearm homicides, an overall reduction of 36 percent.

“See?” your mother crowed, “Told ya!” (*sigh*)

Then you got to thinking. There was that statistics course you took in college, and something is niggling in the back of your mind. Hey, you realized, those numbers don’t mean much unless you know how many guns were on the street while all of this was happening. A crude measure of gun sales is criminal background checks, and the FBI began collecting data in 1998, four years into the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban. You can’t study the entire ban period, but you can study the last six years. And then you can study the first six years after the ban.

For the six years from 1999 to 2004 when the ban was lifted, 52,214,932 background checks were conducted. For the first six years after the ban was lifted (2005 to 2010), 71,319,676 background checks were conducted. If each background check represents one gun, 19 million more guns were purchased in the six years after the ban than during the last six years of the ban. This makes intuitive sense: when guns are banned, fewer guns are sold; when the ban is lifted more guns are sold. But is it the number of guns we care about or what people are doing with those guns?

You compare the data on background checks — your reference point for gun sales — to the FBI’s data on what people were doing with those guns for 1997 to 2001, 2002 to 2006, and 2007 to 2011. While you’re at it, you look at what the FBI says people were doing with rifles specifically since there were a principal target of the ban.

The FBI says that during the last six years of the ban, firearms were used to kill 54,468 people, 2,483 of whom were killed with a rifle. During the first six years after the ban — with 19 million more guns on the street — the FBI says firearms were used to kill 58,065 people, 2,432 of whom were killed with a rifle.

What? More people were killed with a rifle during the ban than after the ban? Could it be the assault ban made no difference to homicide by rifle? Why, yes, yes it could. And with 19 million more guns on the street after the ban, there were only 3,597 additional firearms homicides? Could it be that limiting guns had very little impact on...

One of the most heartbreaking and perhaps infuriating aspects of the Florida school shooting that took 17 lives is just how many red flags there were surrounding the shooter.

The national debate following the shooting has mostly revolved around guns. Much ink has also (rightly) been spilled about the failed leadership of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office in its moment of crisis.

What’s been lost in this discussion are the issues of school safety and discipline. Those issues are highly relevant to what took place in Parkland.

Prior to the mass shooting, Nikolas Cruz was involved in a huge number of incidents on and off campus, numerous calls were made to the police, and the was FBI even involved. He certainly appeared to be a ticking time bomb.

It would seem that somewhere along the way, he should have been stopped before the shooting took place.

But that wasn’t the case.

Max Eden, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, explained in City Journal how an Obama-era Department of Education initiative designed to put an end to the “school to prison pipeline,” combined with local mismanagement, helped allow the shooter to fall through the cracks.

“[I]n 2013, the school board and the sheriff’s office agreed on a new policy to discontinue police referrals for a dozen infractions ranging from drug use to assault,” Eden wrote.

A separate report by RealClearInvestigations found that Broward County was part of a “vanguard of a strategy, adopted by more than 50 other major school districts nationwide, allowing thousands of troubled, often violent, students to commit crimes without legal consequence.”

This was part of a larger Obama administration effort, launched in 2011, to reduce racial disparities in school discipline numbers, according to RealClearInvestigations.

“Students charged with various misdemeanors, including assault, would now be disciplined through participation in ‘healing circles,’ obstacle courses, and other ‘self-esteem building’ exercises,” the report said.

“We must ensure that school discipline is being handled by trained educators, not by law enforcement officers,” said former Secretary of Education John King in 2016. “Some schools are simply turning misbehaving students over to [school resource officers]. This can set students on a path to dropping out or even to prison.”

Florida’s Broward County, which is where the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting took place, was a leader in adopting this new program and was even touted for it by former Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The number of school arrests dropped dramatically in the years that followed, but that didn’t mean serious crimes weren’t...