.JPG)
Especially since I am old, crippled with a bad back & seen way too much real violence in my time. Grumpy
Category: Being a Stranger in a very Strange Land
Young American men will be taught the hard way that selflessness, courage, and their masculine instincts will get them 20 to life in prison.
This week, a brave Marine acted when no one else would to restrain a deranged homeless schizophrenic on a New York City F train who was, by all accounts, terrorizing people and shouting “I’ll hurt anyone on this train.”
“‘I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison,’ screamed the 30-year-old Jordan Neely, who had 44 arrests under his belt and an outstanding warrant for felony assault (he punched an old woman in the face), as he flailed around throwing items of his clothing. ‘I’m ready to die!’ In response, a 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran put Neely in a chokehold, incapacitating him and releasing him after he stopped struggling and passed out,” Inez Stepman wrote.
When Neely died at the hospital, all hell broke loose.
This is not the first time a courageous man minding his own business has put himself in danger to protect others. It’s happened many times, in fact. Toxic masculinity has saved more lives than penicillin.
But in this case, the erratic lunatic was black, the courageous restrainer was not just white but blond and handsome, and worst of all: the lunatic shuffled off this mortal coil when he arrived at the hospital.
Inevitably, the left’s muscle memory of how politically lucrative George Floyd’s 2020 death was for them kicked in. The Floyd Playbook could be run!
AOC fired up her Twitter and called his death a “murder.” Al Sharpton is polishing his diamond cufflinks before his press conference. Neely’s cousins are getting fitted for new suits before their Oval Office visit. Nancy Pelosi has already ordered the solid gold casket and white horse-drawn carriage for the funeral, which will be held after Neely lies in state in the Capitol. Kente cloth scarves are being passed out in the Old Executive Office Building. Kamala Harris’s speechwriter is ripping nitrous balloons as he crafts her eulogy. The whole band is getting back together!
Weakness Is Strength. Courage Is Hatred
In the aftermath, I tweeted this: “Strong men brave enough to intervene publicly when a deranged lunatic is terrifying people are going to be rounded up first; this is brilliant strategy for the Regime. Pick off the bravest and most selfless heroes first. Leave the cowards behind, who will fall in line fast.”
The worse the subway Viking’s fate is, the less likely any of us, the sane ones, will be tempted to lift a finger when they come for us, our friends, or our neighbors. If the Viking gets 20 years on Riker’s Island, plus some prison rapes and beatings for good measure as the guards look the other way — that’ll teach you boys a lesson.
Since literally the morning the first European settlers set foot in the new country, the ethos drilled into American men is to be strong, be brave, and be prepared to protect and defend your family, your homestead, and your fellow man. This is what men are for, after all. This is why God made them stronger than women. Those biceps are not just for deadlifting. Their main purpose is twofold: wielding a spear for the hunt, and wielding your fists or a sword for defense.
It feels like Good Samaritan laws have gone in and out of favor over time in America. For many years after 9/11, no able-bodied man boarded an airplane without first preparing himself to tackle a terrorist if he had to. Does that happen anymore? Or would the passengers laugh and whip out their phones as the terrorist slit a flight attendant’s throat? You will not go to jail for watching someone beat another person to death as you stream it live on social media. That’s perfectly acceptable now, even encouraged.
But every normal man I know would be unable to stand and watch a psycho assaulting an innocent stranger. My future husband once threw the first punch in a bloody fistfight against a much larger, much drunker man who was persistently harassing me and getting in my face late at night outside a bar in New York City. (My husband won, so I married him soon after.)
You Won’t Get In Trouble for Being a Coward
As an avid Twitter user, I probably see a dozen graphic videos a week of men doing the opposite: standing idly by, shouting approval and laughing, cameras out, as violent individuals assault, beat, rape, and shoot innocent strangers. This violence is almost exclusively black-on-white, or black-on-Asian.
In April, such a video made national news: a terrified young woman in downtown Chicago is knocked down and stomped on by a large mob during a “teen takeover” of the city. Where are all the videos showing the white-on-black and white-on-Asian stompings? I’m sure if they existed, AOC herself would be tweeting them out 24/7.
In this terrible, ugly, upside-down, zero-trust society I’ve been forced to raise a family in, I have developed new survival rules. I have instructed my husband and son to be cowards. That’s right: to do nothing if they are in a situation where a dangerous psycho is threatening violence to a stranger.
I have begged them to sit on their hands; to be one of the people who just watches, runs away, or calls 911. It goes against every chivalric instinct in their bodies, but I do not want them dead or in jail. Instead of being hailed as heroes for saving some old lady’s life, they would be tried as killers and put away for life.
My teenage son informed me he won’t go along with my surrender monkey ethos and is prepared to defend himself and others if he has to. This is a dangerous virtue for a boy to have in a blue city in 2023! Does he want his mother to get gray hair? Doesn’t he know how much good hair colorists cost these days?
I have failed as a mother because I forgot to teach my sons to be cowards.
This week’s watershed event on the New York City F train illustrates the blackpilling utility of my new rules. “Son, you see that damsel in distress over there getting her teeth kicked out by that filthy homeless man? You just sit tight and get off at the next stop and tell the nearest social worker. It’s not your problem.”
Podcaster Aimee Terese tweeted: “A man threatening the safety of everyone else in a tiny, highly populated, contained space, is a liability to himself and to others. The marine is a hero, and we need more men like him, which is why the left is wetting the bed about it. They don’t want that ethos to catch on.”
Courage and Nobility Will Be Punished
Neely was lynched by a racist and this racist will be made an example of. This is a teaching moment for Democrats — young American men will be taught the hard way that nobility, selflessness, courage, and their masculine instinct to defend the innocent are bad. Don’t be like this former Marine!
Mohammed Atta’s immortal words to the doomed passengers of American Airlines Flight 11 were “Just stay quiet and you’ll be okay.” Of course, it only applies to some of us. The raving maniacs on our subways, in our parks, and on our buses are free to live their best lives.
Democrat politicians have made forced passivity the new rule for normal people out in public. We are all cuckolds now. After all, what other sane choice do we have?
One of the joys of living in California for over 30 years in both the south and the Bay Area was watching demographic change swirl through some of it and revise whole towns overnight as the newcomers swept away the old. Such a case in point was the City of Compton. Almost 100% white into the ’50s with all the usual tricks of a society that wanted to live by itself was completely replaced by blacks in the 60’s and they remained the majority of the population until into the 90s when they were all swept away by the incoming Mexicans and other hispanics with all the violence and turf wars and shootouts that presage big changes in little places.
New York and some of the other Atlantic states are slowly figuring out that what happened so dramatically in Florida could and will happen in their towns as the newcomers from south of the border kick the ever loving crap out of the old denizens and demons that run the drugs, gangs, pimps in places like New York City and either exterminate them or drive them out. Perhaps they’ll head to the suburbs and New Jersey. It’s hard to tell where they’ll end up.
What the current demons don’t really understand is that the Mexicans?
The guys that routinely take on the Mexican Army and own the Mexican police forces from the local level all the way up to the Minister of Justice and Minister of Defense…..those cartels you hear about from time to time if you look for news other than in the mainstream of media foulness, they are the utterly amoral killers and they’re more heavily armed than anybody in the United States and they’re coming here.
They also know that the richest pickings are in places like New York, Delaware, Massachusetts, Connecticut and the other urban hellholes that spawned the gangs, the drugs and the crime that make urban living so darned pleasant for commuters in those places.
When the mayors of towns like NYC bleat about a mere 45,000 illegals dumped on his city by the mayors of Texas and Oklahoma towns and the Federales who answer to literally noone, he aint seen nothing yet. What a pity they shit on their police, defunded their police and voted for socialist progressive liberal BLM types to administer justice in their fair little cities.
In 20 years you will not be able to recognize them. Kind of like Compton.
To any of my fantastic readers who reside there. Hey what can I say? As I am stuck in LA, so I feel your pain! Grumpy
WELCOME, Md. — The complaints about the property on Fire Tower Road were urgent but not too far out of the ordinary in this rural stretch of Southern Maryland: Earsplitting gunfire, endangered cows, a stray bullet that pierced a neighbor’s equipment shed.
Moorish Americans take over a rural gun range, sparking a strange showdown© Eric Lee/For The Washington Post
But that was before the would-be heirs to a mythical North African empire moved in, claiming their dominion extends not only over the lost island of Atlantis but also over five acres in Charles County.
The episode began when gun enthusiasts started getting together on Sundays for target practice at the wooded property of 64-year-old Byron Bell.
Liswa Hawkins, 27, center, shows people how to shoot during a Handgun Qualification License class at the gun range in July. (Eric Lee for The Washington Post)
As the gatherings grew bigger, along with the caliber of weapons and the number of rounds discharged, they drew the ire of neighbors even in this sparsely populated and gun-friendly area.
Yet it was after county officials took action, deeming the site an unlawful firing range and filing an injunction to stop it from operating in September, that events took several unexpected turns.
That was when a group calling itself Moorish Americans — an offshoot of the extremist “sovereign citizen” movement whose members believe they are immune from dealings with U.S. legal and financial systems — essentially took over the range, declaring it “protected under the consular jurisdiction of Morocco.”
There followed arrests, flurries of spurious legal documents and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, all to the accompaniment of what neighbors describe as an ongoing din of gunfire on weekends. Things escalated last week when sheriff’s deputies raided the property, seizing what Bell said were about a dozen firearms.
The saga in Welcome, an agglomeration of tumbledown farmhouses and newly built homes roped together by winding country roads, highlights several enduring American loves: Guns, conspiracy theories, property rights and fruitless litigation.
William Tomlinson, 75, complained about excessive gunfire from a neighboring gun range, which eventually led to a decision by Charles County officials to shut it down.© Peter Jamison/The Washington Post
William Tomlinson, who owns a farm that backs up to Bell’s property, said decisive action by law enforcement was long overdue. Tomlinson said many rounds zipped through the air on his property, chewing up a stand of timber trees and forcing him to move his small herd of cattle to a pasture where they aren’t at risk of stopping a stray bullet.
Tomlinson, who owns guns himself, said he sometimes has friends over for target practice. But it’s not comparable to what goes on at Bell’s place, he said.
“We’re not over here with fully automatic weapons, 40-round clips, shooting thousands of rounds,” Tomlinson said. “It’s a completely different situation. I would use the term reckless endangerment.”
Bell, who moved into his home in 2019 and bought it earlier this year, said he believes he and his friends were unfairly singled out.
“Everybody shoots around here. So why you going to have me stop shooting?” Bell said. “I thought it was about these people telling me what to do with my land.”
Weapons that belong to a member of the Choppa Community. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Yet even Bell, speaking to a Washington Post reporter in his home hours after he had sat there in handcuffs while sheriff’s deputies searched the premises, acknowledged that things had gone too far.
“It just went overboard,” he said.
‘I don’t want them shot’
Bell began hosting shooting days on his land in 2021. The events were organized by Mark “Choppa” Manley, a social media influencer and former D.C. security guard who promoted the site as home to the “Choppa Community” — an incubator of firearms education and ownership for African Americans.
On Sundays, amid the aroma of grilling burgers, kids would take classes in basic gun safety with plastic pistols while the grown-ups lined up for target practice with 9mm handguns and AR-style rifles. Manley catered in particular to Black residents of the District and Prince George’s County who were seeking to arm themselves for protection amid spikes in violent crime. Visitors were not charged, although ammunition was sold, as well as classes for concealed-carry licenses.
“It was like a family day,” Manley said.
Mark Manley holds a rifle at the gun range in July. He is now seeking another home for his operation. (Eric Lee for The Washington Post)© Eric Lee/For The Washington Post
Yet some of Bell’s neighbors didn’t share that view. Disturbed by the noise and risk of errant gunfire, nearly 40 of them supported a petition demanding that the range be shut down, the Southern Maryland News reported. Tomlinson, in particular, said he feared for his safety, since his farm sits downrange from a backstop for bullets on Bell’s property that he called “totally ineffective.”
“I have moved my animals to the other side of the farm,” he said. “I don’t want them shot.”
Tomlinson said he first brought his complaints to the county about a year ago. But it was not until September — in anticipation of an especially large crowd for Manley’s birthday on Sept. 11 — that government officials took decisive action. On Sept. 9 the county attorney’s office filed an emergency petition for an injunction against shooting on the property.
In an attached affidavit, the county’s planning supervisor said regulations prohibited the gun range unless it was granted a special exception to operate in an area zoned for agricultural conservation. No application for such an exception had ever been filed, she said.
The county attorney’s office declined to discuss the case with The Post. Charles County spokeswoman Jennifer Harris said in a statement that officials’ “top concern is for the health, safety, and welfare of the community. We achieve that through the enforcement of regulations that must be followed by property owners.”
Judge Karen Abrams granted the order, stating that the shooting happening at the range was illegal and that a failure to enforce the zoning laws “encourages citizens to ignore the very regulations that are implemented to protect them and others.”
Manley cleared out and started looking for a new site in Virginia. “I could tell Charles County wasn’t going to let up,” he said.
Yet around the same time, county officials came up against a new challenge. It was heralded by the filing of perplexing documents — adorned with symbols including the star and crescent and the pyramid-tip “Eye of Providence” that appears on the back of the dollar bill — asserting that the dispute over Bell’s land was subject to the terms of an 1836 treaty between the United States and Morocco.
Booking photo of Lamont Butler from a decade ago. (Prince George’s County Police Department)
‘Moorish American national’ charged with trying to take mansion
Among those documents was a “writ of error” signed by a man identifying himself as Lamont Maurice El and claiming that he was the consul general of the “Morocco Consular Court at the Maryland state republic.”
The consul, whose real name is Lamont Maurice Butler, had some experience with Maryland’s judicial system. In 2013, he was convicted on multiple charges stemming from his attempt to occupy a 12-bedroom Bethesda mansion. The ideology that had fueled that escapade was the same he later brought to bear in the legal wrangling over the property on Fire Tower Road.
The ‘Moroccan Empire’
Moorish Americans, also known as Moorish sovereign citizens, believe themselves to be the inheritors of a fictitious empire that they say stretched from the present-day kingdom of Morocco to North America, with Mexico and Atlantis thrown in for good measure. They claim the same protections from U.S. legal proceedings that are granted to foreign citizens, while simultaneously asserting their rights to take over properties — often well-appointed homes owned by other people — that they say are still part of the “Moroccan Empire.”
Bell declared his Moorish American citizenship in September, according to court documents. He told The Post that he was still struggling to understand much of the group’s doctrine but that he found it “very educational.”
Among the things he had learned, he said, was that he should consider himself exempt from the county’s legal actions — in part because government officials did not refer to him in court documents by the Moorish variant of his name, Byron David Bell-Bey.
“They weren’t really talking to me,” he said.
The mansion in Bethesda that was occupied by Moorish Americans in 2013.© Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post
Butler, who had attended the weekend shooting gatherings when they were overseen by Manley, joined with other Moorish Americans to reopen the range, charging $25 a head and promising that “security will be in full force for everyone’s safety and protection” under Moroccan consular jurisdiction.
The group of Moorish Americans to which Butler belongs did not respond to requests for comment by email and through their website. Officials at the genuine Moroccan Embassy in Washington also did not respond to a request for comment.
On Nov. 13, Butler and another Moorish American, George Neal-Bey, tried to intervene when Charles County sheriff’s deputies pulled over a third member of the group. In a video that the Moorish Americans later posted online, Butler — wearing a camouflage uniform, dark headscarf and a pistol on his hip — can be seen approaching the deputies on the side of the road. Four of them then abruptly wrestle him to the ground while a fifth stands by with his gun drawn.
Butler and Neal-Bey were arrested and later indicted on various gun-related charges. Butler was also charged with resisting arrest. A judge ordered them held without bail. A hearing in their case is scheduled for Dec. 30 in Charles County Circuit Court.
Their case files have begun to thicken with documents bearing esoteric symbols. On Dec. 7, Butler filed a handwritten affidavit demanding acknowledgment of his treaty rights.
Bell, who until recently ignored the court order to close the range and has not appeared for court hearings, is now facing a $350,000 sanction for contempt of court. (Under the terms set by the judge, Abrams, $1,000 will be taken off the fine for every week that no shooting takes place on his property.) And just last week he learned that he could face further legal troubles.
On the morning of Dec. 21, Bell said, he and his wife, Chrystal, were awakened by a loud knocking, followed by the busting in of their door. A group of sheriff’s deputies then searched his home, he said, taking away his guns and a computer.
The warrant shared with Bell — which he showed to The Post — contains few details but indicates that the search was conducted as part of an investigation into possible possession of illegally owned or modified firearms, such as machine guns or short-barreled shotguns.
The sheriff’s office declined to comment.
Bell said the officers who searched his home were “very cordial.”
“They could have tore the house clean up,” he said. “But they didn’t.”
And though it took a while, the original problem on Fire Tower Road could now be resolved: Bell says there will be no more shooting on his property. As darkness filled the windows of his kitchen on a lonely plot of land nearly 4,000 miles from Morocco, he said he had gotten the point.
“You got to follow the rules,” Bell said.
By Larry Keane
A New York Times conference featured a bank CEO pushing the financial industry to track Americans making purchases at retailers and monitor their “suspicious activity” under the guise of “reducing gun violence.”
Amalgamated Bank CEO Priscilla Sims Brown was the special guest at the Times’ DealBook confab and was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin. He’s the Times’ columnist who previously proposed the gun buying monitoring scheme and spelled out the “next steps” in a column highlighting Sims Brown’s efforts after an international financial standards board adopted her petition to create the tracking codes.
Putting even a little thought to the idea reveals the serious flaws of the plan. Implementing the enormous system to track the private financial transactions will create a myriad of privacy and civil liberty concerns and no doubt is ripe for abuse.
Gun Control Dragnet
Sims Brown lobbied the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to create a gun-related Merchant Category Code (MCC) for credit and debit card companies to use to track cardholders’ purchases of firearms and ammunition. The ISO adopted the proposal and banks are beginning to use them. Listening to Sims Brown forecast what’s ahead, her true gun control aim is revealed. It’s a dragnet for law-abiding Americans.
“We’re at the very early stages of this –,” Sims Brown told Sorkin and the audience. “But as this is implemented, those scenarios will be used.”
By “those scenarios,” she means “detection scenarios” in which a particular purchase prompts a bank to file a Suspicious Activity Report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Here’s how the MCC tracking will reportedly work. Purchases made at retailers selling firearms or ammunition would be assigned the new code for purchases. The MCC won’t identify what is in the customer’s basket, so it could be a total purchase for a firearm and several boxes of ammunition. It could also include a new tent, sleeping bag, propane stove, waders, decoys, blinds and other outdoor gear. The total cost could be flagged as “suspicious” since it might be an outlier on a customer’s purchase history. That doesn’t make it nefarious, though.
Media reported the proposal won’t have its intended effect. “The payment network and its banking partners would have no idea if a gun-store customer is purchasing an automatic rifle or safety equipment,” Bloomberg News reported. Banks aren’t saying what purchases would be “suspicious.”
Just a Steppingstone
The MCC scheme has caught the attention of Congressional gun control politicians. Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 5764, by Reps. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) and Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and in the U.S. Senate, S. 3117, by Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). That legislation, The Gun Violence Prevention Through Financial Intelligence Act, would provide banking institutions the cover they need to track purchases by requiring the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to provide “guidance” needed to institute the MCC.
“Financial institutions have a legal obligation… to have programs in place to help detect and report suspicious activity, but they have to know what they are looking for,” Rep. Wexton said.
Rep. Dean has praised the back door gun control effort, too. “Financial institutions already have proven systems in place to identify suspicious behavior and purchasing patterns,” she wrote in a release.
Still no one has offered what “suspicious behavior” or “purchasing patterns” would be flagged. The questions are endless, answers few and the threat to Constitutional rights high.
Trudging Ahead. Trampling Rights.
Sorkin hypes his work in getting the MCC code established. He told the Dealbook audience, “This is an emotional topic for me in many ways… because back in 2018 I started writing about the role of guns in our society… and the role of credit card companies and banks in financing mass shootings.”
Sorkin stated his belief that lawful firearm retail businesses and the already-highly regulated Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) which provide for the legal exercise of the Second Amendment should do their part to create the backdoor database of gun buyers – something Congress is prohibited by law from doing on their own.
“Merchants must start using the code, and not obfuscate transactions by using other classifications,” Sorkin wrote. “Most crucially, the payments industry needs to develop and refine software algorithms for identifying suspicious activity…”
There are those words again – “suspicious activity.”
The suspicion is better reserved for those who would compile lists of Americans lawfully exercising their Constitutional Second Amendment rights. The right to keep and bear arms begins with the ability to make a purchase at the retail counter. Financial industry power players, though, are twisting their roles to facilitate legal transactions into social credit scores that put Americans on secret watch lists.
The financial industry doesn’t need to be suspicious of gun buyers who already are subject to FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) verifications. This move, though, is reason enough for Americans to be suspicious of “woke” banking CEOs doing the bidding of gun control politicians.
Larry Keane is Senior Vice President of Government and Public Affairs and General Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association.
——————————————————————————– Does anybody remember voting for this guy? I don’t! Grumpy
