Historic NYC Church Goes Up in Flames

A historic church has been destroyed in Queens. The New York Post reports:

The blaze started at [an unoccupied rectory] attached to the First Reformed Church of Astoria on 12th Street, between 27th Avenue and Main Avenue, around 6:45 p.m. [yesterday evening], according to the FDNY.

Roughly 270 firefighters and EMS workers responded to the scene as the flames spread to the church and grew into a 5-alarm fire, fire officials added.

Whether this was arson has not been confirmed. Yet it already seems symbolic, considering that the burning of historic churches has been a prominent feature of the Islamization of Europe, and that the former home of the World Trade Center now has an aggressively Muslim mayor.

It takes centuries to build a culture. But it doesn’t take long to destroy one.

On a tip from Wiggins.

Eating the 3-Year-Old’s Faces Americans Won’t Eat

The damage done by Democrats through open border policies will not be corrected quickly — if ever. But at least the fundamental transformation they promised has made taking a child to the park more exciting.

KSAT reports:

A man was arrested for allegedly assaulting a woman and her 3-year-old daughter at a South Side park over the weekend, according to the San Antonio Police Department.

It happened in broad daylight in the middle of Saturday afternoon.

When SAPD arrived, officers found Atharva Vyas, 24, being restrained by a bystander who had witnessed the alleged assault. …

Gabriella Perez, 27, told KSAT she and her family were fishing at the park when the random attack happened. She said Vyas was a total stranger.

Perez said Vyas appeared out of the woods and began punching her and grabbing her by the hair, causing her to drop her daughter.

Vyas attempted to poke out the 3-year-old girl’s eyes with his thumb.

Perez said Vyas began biting her daughter’s face. She said it was like a scene out of a horror movie.

Apparently he was high on marijuana wax, a concentrated form of cannabis extract. Marijuana has just been reclassified as a “less dangerous” drug.

Unsurprisingly,

Police said the child suffered serious bodily injury.

Still less surprisingly, he is an illegal alien:

Vyas was arrested and charged with injury to a child with intent to cause bodily injury, assault causing bodily injury and illegal entry from a foreign nation.

Immigration does not mean what it used to mean.

On a tip from abcanc.

Maserati Food Stamp Moochers

It is the nature of federal programs that hand out other people’s money to perpetually expand. Consequently, food stamps are not only for the poor anymore. The New York Post reports that even the well-to-do can ride the EBT gravy train thanks to Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility:

The Clinton administration manufactured this loophole, and the Obama administration supercharged it.

Currently, 43 states and Washington, DC, use BBCE to bypass federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program eligibility limits on income, assets or both.

Here’s how it works:

State welfare agencies print up a brochure about welfare programs, or set up an informational hotline, and deem it a “benefit” under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

Anyone who touches that pamphlet or receives the phone number is then treated as being “categorically eligible” for food stamps — even millionaires.

Welfare fraud isn’t an accident. It is by design. The more of our money Democrats confiscate and cast to the four winds, the more power they achieve by enlisting an ever-larger army of freeloaders.

Many of these freeloaders live better than most of us. The Foundation for Government Accountability discovered that 14,000 EBT recipients bought new luxury vehicles — Maseratis, Ferraris, etc. — in a single state.

So as to facilitate fraud, SNAP does not require any serious confirmation of identity; a library card will suffice. As a result, many recipients claim benefits from other states. As determined by IP addresses, they often do it from other countries.

A foreign fraudster with a disposable email can sign up for welfare faster than you can get through to the IRS helpline.

No doubt it still counts as social justice so long as regular Americans get screwed.

On a tip from abcanc.

Southern Poverty Law Center Is a Hate Hoax

Sometimes a hate hoax is not just a single incident but an entire institution — as in the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Racism against anyone other than whites is virtually nonexistent in this country. What little there is, the SPLC has been financing to fundraise off of and to shore up its Cultural Marxist ideology.

From the US Department of Justice:

Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America

A Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, [on Tuesday] returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.

There is zero chance these crimes would be punished with leftist apparatchiks like Eric Holder or Merrick Garland running the Justice Department.

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Hilariously, liberal do-gooders have been financing the very hate groups they thought they were fighting. These groups require propping up with SPLC cash because they barely exist outside the fevered imaginations of moonbats.

“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups – even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”

Sure looks like criminal behavior to me:

In order to covertly pay the individuals, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities. The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the individuals. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.

Hopefully there will be prison time for some of these sanctimonious scoundrels.

The SPLC is a non-profit organization headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, whose mission, according to its website during the relevant time period, was to be a “catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people.”

Not so nonprofit after all. The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which claims to “dismantle white supremacy,” saw its offshore assets balloon by as much as 430 percent over the last decade.

Financing race hate so as to raise funds to fight it is big business. But the jig is up. Even ostentatiously woke corporations might step away.

This puts a new perspective on the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, a nothingburger Democrats have been hyping for the past decade. Daily Signal reports that the SPLC paid an organizer of the rally $270,000:

Not only was the SPLC paying the person—identified as “F-37” in the indictment—but the leftist group was also supervising F-37’s “racist postings” and helped F-37 “coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”

The spectacle was exploited by leftists at the highest levels:

Biden said he decided to run for president after watching the events of Charlottesville. He repeatedly used the event as a cudgel to demonize Trump, and he mentioned going after “white supremacy” in his inaugural address.

Under Democrat rule, the SPLC has functioned as a branch of the government:

When Biden became president in 2021, many federal agencies reached out to the SPLC for advice in combating “the domestic terrorism threat,” or so the SPLC’s then-president told donors. Public documents unearthed by America First Legal confirmed this, showing not only that SPLC staff advised Justice Department prosecutors, but regularly met with leaders at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Per Democrats, the domestic terrorism threat does not come from the Islamomaniacs they allow into the country but rather from regular Americans.

Biden would go on to nominate an SPLC attorney to a top federal judgeship. Under him, the FBI’s Richmond office would cite the SPLC in its notorious memo on “radical traditional Catholics.”

Under Democrat rule, you can qualify as a radical traditional Catholic by attending Latin mass. Biden’s DOJ sicced the FBI on such people.

After the White House reportedly helped draft a letter comparing concerned moms and dads to domestic terrorists, the SPLC put parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty on its “hate map” with Klan chapters—and gave the DOJ early access to the report.

The DOJ also sicced the FBI on parents who speak up at school board meetings.

The SPLC not only helped to organize the overblown Charlotte protest but to inspire it by using a map of Confederate monuments to be targeted by liberal thugs:

Antifa agitators, a comparably new phenomenon at the time, had mobilized to protest at the monuments and knocked many of them down. …

Carol Swain, a black former professor at Vanderbilt University who has analyzed white nationalist movements, told me that the SPLC likely knew that attacking Confederate monuments would inspire an event like Charlottesville.

It paid off. During media hype of the Unite the Right rally,

JP Morgan Chase announced it would give $50,000 to the SPLC. Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged $1 million.

Hate hoaxes are like Russian dolls. Charlottesville was in effect a hate hoax within the larger hate hoax of the SPLC, which in turn nestles inside the outer hate hoax that is modern liberalism.

On tips from David Kight and patthedog.

Another Transgender School Massacre May Have Been Narrowly Avoided

Unscrupulous characters in the healthcare profession will sometimes emotionally blackmail parents into agreeing to transsexualize their children by pretending that otherwise they will commit suicide. You’ve heard the argument: “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son? Then let’s give him puberty blockers and/or cut off his genitalia.” This is ironic, considering that transsexuals are vastly more likely to commit suicide. But at least committing suicide is better than shooting up a school — as might have been the case this week in a Cleveland suburb.

Via WKYC:

The Parma City School District confirmed to 3News that the female student who sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound at Valley Forge High School on Monday afternoon has died.

According to police,

“It was quickly determined this was an isolated incident and that there was no ongoing threat to students or staff. Additionally, no other students, staff, or community members were injured during this unfortunate incident.”

That was lucky. The Post Millennial adds details the legacy media avoids:

[R]eports have come in that the student may have wanted to carry out a school shooting. …

According to tips sent in to Libs of TikTok, the student apparently “idolized the Columbine shooters” Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, even posting a photo of the two of them with a pentagram medallion. It is also reported that the shooter, who went by the name “Jasey” on social media, was non-binary or trans, using “he/she” pronouns on Instagram.

Monday was the 27th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.

Looks like another Tumbler Ridge might have been narrowly avoided.

Transexual posturing in troubled teens is a red flag and a cry for help. It should never be encouraged, lest it lead to further expansion of the Transsexual Violence Hall of Horrors.

On a tip from Sheryl D.

Video Depicts DEI Applied to Law Enforcement

Maybe DEI can produce full employment in New York. Physical qualifications having been rejected, three NYPD officers are now required for even a failed attempt to arrest one of the savages running amok in the subway system. Presenting the Tremont Avenue station in the Bronx:

As Samantha Chang observes at the Western Journal,

The viral clip spotlights several disturbing themes underscoring the disastrous impact of left-wing social re-engineering agendas.

First, criminals no longer fear or respect law enforcement, which means there’s no deterrent to crime.

Second, many New York City officers are physically unfit to do their jobs. …

This is especially true of female cops, who’ve been hired en masse due to the Democrats’ DEI fetish, which has slashed standards amid leftist complaints that the fitness tests prevented women from being hired.

Liberals tried defunding the police, but public opinion forced them to retreat. Reducing the police to a laughingstock through DEI might achieve the same objective.

On a tip from abcanc.