90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, February 11, 2019

If Only Stupid People Would Carry Signs To Let You Know...

Jussie Smollett’s neighbors cast doubt on his attack story

CHICAGO — Nearly two weeks after “Empire” star Jussie Smollett claimed he was the victim of a racist, homophobic attack, cops have yet to identify any suspects — and some people in his tony Chicago neighborhood are growing skeptical.

“I don’t believe it happened the way he said it did,” said Agin Muhammad, who lives in the same swank high-rise near the Navy Pier as Smollett.

“I’ve been in this neighborhood five years. I don’t believe it, not around here . . . Half the people are gay and the other half are black.”

related: Yet Another Rush to Judgment in New Allegations Against Trump Supporters

A patron at Lizzie McNeill’s Irish Pub, about a block from the scene of the alleged Jan. 29 incident, said Smollett’s story “doesn’t really make sense.”

“It’s a lie, because Chicago is the most liberal city around,” said the man, who wouldn’t give his name. “They have cameras everywhere. . . Why can’t they find the attack?”

Cops have said they found plenty of surveillance video, but none that captured the incident.

Meanwhile, Chicago police said Sunday that Smollett has yet to turn over data from his cell phone to verify that he was on the phone with his music manager, Brandon Moore, when he was allegedly attacked.

Moore has said he heard Smollett’s assailants shout a “racial slur” and the words “MAGA country,” an apparent reference to President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

“We have no reason to doubt the statements but for a criminal investigation we need to independently confirm the...

Thought Police: UK Mom Arrested for Calling Transgender Activist a Man

UK officials arrested a woman after she called a transgender activist a biological man on Twitter.

The Daily Mail reports that three officers showed up to the home of Kate Scottow in Hitchin, Hertfordshire and arrested her in front of her children on Dec. 1. The 38-year-old was reportedly detained for several hours, processed, and is currently under investigation.

Scottow was arrested after Stephanie Hayden, a biological man who identifies as a woman, told police that the mother of two had harassed him by calling him a man.

"I was arrested for harassment and malicious communications because I called someone out and misgendered them on Twitter," Scottow later wrote on the online forum Mumsnet.

Hertfordshire Police confirmed the arrest to The Daily Mail and said, "We take all reports of malicious communication seriously."

Court documents obtained by the paper on Sunday reveal that Scottow is accused of a "campaign of targeted harassment" Hayden.

The papers claim that Scottow used two separate accounts to engage in a "toxic" Twitter debate over transgenderism and tweeted "defamatory" messages about Hayden.

Scottow denied harassing Hayden and said she has the "genuine and reasonable belief" that a human "cannot, practically speaking, change sex."

However, Deputy Judge Jason Coppel QC issued an interim injunction on Scottow banning her from "referencing [Hayden] as a man" or linking him to his "former male identity."

This is not the first time Hayden has accused someone of misgendering him.

West Yorkshire Police issued sitcom writer Graham Linehan a verbal harassment warning after Hayden reported him for referring to him as a man on Twitter.

One Twitter user accused Hayden of "using government authoritarianism and speech codes" to violate one's right to free speech.

Hayden reminded the user that the right to free speech does not exist in...

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.”

That pithy observation is attributed to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served in the Senate from 1977 to 2001.

The final two years of Moynihan’s stint in the Senate overlapped the first two years of that of his fellow New York Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer.

President Donald Trump, at a rally set for Monday night on the border in El Paso, Texas, should remind Schumer of Moynihan’s maxim in their fight over the need for more walls and fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border to help stem the flood tide of illegal immigration.

Schumer and his House counterpart, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., are entitled to their opinions about Trump’s proposed border wall, but they aren’t entitled to their own facts.

In their rebuttal to the president’s Jan. 9 nationally televised address outlining the need for a border barrier and his request for $5.7 billion in funding for them, both described the proposed wall as “ineffective”—Pelosi once and Schumer twice.

In her rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams didn’t echo Schumer and Pelosi’s “ineffective” claim, but she advanced an argument that was equally fallacious.

“America is made stronger by the presence of immigrants, not walls,” Abrams said, disingenuously omitting the key adjective in this debate, “illegal.”

Insisting that walls are “ineffective” over and over again doesn’t make it true. The facts on the ground—both in the U.S. and around the world—not only don’t support that opinion, they decisively refute it.

Walls along four Customs and Border Protection sectors—El Paso; San Diego, California; and Tucson and Yuma, Arizona—have reduced illegal immigration “by at least 90 percent,” according to the Republican National Committee’s Borderfacts.com page.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner recently cited figures from the Center for Immigration Studies showing that before construction of border barriers in Yuma, the Border Patrol apprehended 138,438 illegal immigrants in 2005, compared with 26,244 last year. While not 90 percent, that’s still a dramatic drop.

The comparable before-and-after figures for the San Diego sector, according to the Border Patrol, were more than 565,581 in 1992 and 26,086 in 2017—a 95 percent reduction.

Meanwhile, USA Today reported last May that “[s]ince the start of Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015, at least 800 miles of fences have been erected by Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Slovenia, and others.”

Do Schumer and Pelosi know something all these other countries don’t? Not according to Hungary, which said that fencing on its border with Serbia helped reduce illegal immigration by nearly 100 percent since 2015, according to the USA Today report.

Israel’s fencing along its borders with the Gaza Strip and West Bank, as well as with Egypt and Jordan, has likewise all but eliminated illegal immigration and terrorist attacks. (The Jewish state announced Feb. 3 that it was beginning construction of an additional 40 miles of 20-foot-high, state-of-the-art fencing.)

“Walls should not be controversial,” Trump said Jan. 25, when he called Pelosi’s bluff and agreed to reopen the government for three weeks so bipartisan negotiations on border security could proceed. “Every Border Patrol agent I’ve talked to has told me that walls work. It’s just common...