The buttheads on the Star-Ledger editorial board owe Sussex County an apology

By Rubashov

People in Sussex County have just spent most of the week without electricity, heat for warmth or washing, and hot food. They’re used to waiting for the government and government-sanctioned utilities to get around to them last. Sure they provide the drinking water to New Jersey’s cities – but that hasn’t stopped Governor Phil Murphy from wanting to turn the county into a dumping ground and cutting education funding to the county’s children.

Now the editorial board of the Newark Star-Ledger have directed their collective bungholes in the direction of Sussex County – to engage in a bit of unreserved dumping themselves. Over the weekend, the Star-Ledger let go a massive dump on folks still in the process of dealing with the damage done by that early December snowstorm.

According to the Star-Ledger, the arrest of two social outcasts – members of a biker gang – is a sign of a vast underlying social and political movement in Sussex County. The editorial board claims that in “sleepy Sussex County” there has been “a troubling uptick in hate crimes lately.”

Of course, this isn’t true. According to the official Bias Incident Report put out by the Murphy administration earlier this year – signed by Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, State Police Colonel Patrick Callahan, and Civil Rights Director Rachel Apter – Sussex County experienced no increase in bias crime between 2017 and 2018 (the latest available figures). No increase… as in zero.

The same cannot be said for counties like Passaic, which experienced a 286% increase; or Union County, with a 200% increase; or Camden, with a 55% increase in bias crime; or Hudson County with its 43% increase. Of course, these are all Democrat-controlled counties, so the Star-Ledger would be hesitant to tie these genuine “up-ticks” to something like “White Extremism”. Far-better to just fashion a narrative around the arrest of a couple biker gang members in a relatively peaceful county – and then use them to characterize and smear the entire population.

The official figures – the data – reveal something else as well. Statewide, “bias crime” or “hate crime” has fallen. Since figures began in 2006, reported incidents have fallen from 825 that year to 569 incidents in 2018. Such crimes are actually quite rare – from 151 arrests in 2006, “bias crime” has fallen to just 59 arrests in 2018. Those are the official figures, direct from the Murphy administration.

In fact, the only “bias crime” evidenced by the Star-Ledger’s editorial board is the crime of bias committed by said board against the people of Sussex County.

In August of this year, NJ 101.5 went through the Murphy administration’s Bias Incident Report and listed the 49 municipalities with the worse incidence of “bias” or “hate crime”. Guess what? None of those municipalities were in Sussex County. None.

Now guess which towns were listed? Number one for “hate crime” was East Brunswick, in Middlesex County. Number two was Evesham Township, Burlington County. Woodbury (Gloucester), Hoboken (Hudson), South Brunswick (Middlesex), Cherry Hill (Camden), Fort Lee (Bergen), Princeton (Mercer), Hackensack (Bergen), Livingston (Essex), Montclair (Essex), West Orange (Essex), Jersey City (Hudson), Edison (Middlesex), and New Brunswick (Middlesex) all appear to be hotbeds of “White Extremism” if the Star-Ledger is to be believed.

Funny thing… some of these towns are the places of residence of those very same members of the Star-Ledger’s editorial board. Which means, next time they want to take a dump on somewhere, they should just step outside, pull down their drawers, and do it on their own front steps – because apparently, that’s where all the action is.

So why would the Star-Ledger just make this crap up and defame a whole county and its people? Well, we’ve been here before…

All this puts us in mind of the Great Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s. The media went crazy reporting on every salacious detail, hundreds of suspected “witches” and “cultists” were investigated while politicians and prosecutors pontificated and made their careers, dozens were arrested, many of whom were convicted and spent years in jail – before the truth pushed through to reveal that it was all just media hype. A public circus of show trials and fake stoked fear.

The New York Times covered this in one of their Retro-Report series…

Those convicted were eventually released. Instead of the media, the politicians, and prosecutors who convicted them being made to pay – the taxpayers paid out millions as some measure of restitution to the people whose lives were destroyed (for a story, a headline, a conviction). Writer Aja Romano wrote an interesting piece on the Satanic Panic a few years ago…

In 1980, a since-discredited memoir called Michelle Remembers became a scandalous bestseller based on its purported detailing of a childhood spent undergoing a wealth of shocking occult sexual abuse. Its co-authors were controversial psychologist Lawrence Pazder and his wife Michelle Smith, a former patient Pazder claimed to have regressed into childhood through hypnosis. Pazder purportedly helped Smith uncover memories of past abuse at the hands of members of the Church of Satan, which Pazder insisted was older than LaVey’s group by several centuries.

Almost from the moment of Michelle Remembers’ publication, its claims and allegations were repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. However, thanks to widespread and credulous media praise, Pazder and Smith were able to double down on their story, and Pazder became seen as an expert in the arena of what would come to be called satanic ritual abuse.

Despite the wild implausibility and unverifiable foundation of its stories of grisly abuse and sex orgies, Michelle Remembers was presented during the ’80s and early ’90s as a textbook for legal professionals and other authorities. It also spawned numerous copy-cat memoirs like 1988’s Satan’s Underground, all equally false, which embellished and mainstreamed the idea of a massive, intergenerational, clandestine satanic ritual sex abuse cult — one that could be occurring in your very own neighborhood.

“The devil worshippers could be anywhere,” writer Peter Berbergal said in summing up the zeitgeist. “They could be your next-door neighbor. They could be your child's caregiver."

The false narrative of Michelle Remembers would directly impact the nation for over a decade. Its dark occult fantasies helped to spark the rash of wildly dramatic, highly unfounded accusations of satanic ritual abuse that were attached to a string of daycare centers throughout the 1980s…

This fear would ravage communities and ruin multiple lives before it finally subsided — and lead to two of the most notorious criminal trials in US history.

…In 1980 in Bakersfield, California, social workers had been reading the just-published Michelle Remembers as part of their training when a number of children came forward to declare that they had been molested as part of a clandestine local occult sex ring. Two of the girls had been coached by a grandparent who was believed to have a history of mental illness. Over the coming months, their story of strange occult sex acts would grow more and more bizarre, as they claimed to have been hung from hooks in their family’s living room, forced to drink blood and watch ritual baby sacrifices, and much more.

Between 1984 and 1986, the investigation into these labyrinthine claims of satanic ritual abuse would send at least 26 people to jail in interrelated convictions, despite a complete lack of corroborative physical evidence for any of the claims.

Nearly all of those convictions have since been overturned, including that of a local carpenter named John Stoll, who spent 20 years of his 40-year sentence in jail. Parents Scott and Brenda Kniffen were each sentenced to 240 years in jail after their own sons were coached, through coercive investigative techniques and overeager therapists, to accuse them of child molestation. Both children later recanted and the Kniffens were released after serving 12 years in prison. As adults, several of the children involved in the trials professed to have been traumatized by their own earlier false testimony and the subsequent damage it caused.

But these children weren’t alone; the Kern County abuse case was the first, but would not be the last, to spiral hopelessly out of control.

…Among the many failed prosecutions of satanic ritual abuse in daycares was the McMartin trial, which became the largest, longest, and most expensive trial in California history. This massive investigation began in 1983, when one parent accused one of the staff members at the McMartin pre-school in Manhattan Beach, California, of abuse. During the police investigation into the abuse claims, a child-service nonprofit group known as the Children’s Institute conducted examinations of 400 children who attended the daycare. The examinations were run by a woman named Kee MacFarlane, who was an unlicensed psychotherapist.

MacFarlane had no psychological or medical training, and boasted a welding certificate as her highest academic credential; still, she and two other unqualified assistants were allowed to conduct the investigations, famously using “anatomically correct” dolls and other questionable methods of interrogation. These extremely coercive interview processes led to false memories among children, which then led to highly fantastic claims of abuse directed at even more staff members. Out of 400 children, the interviewers determined that 359 of them had been abused.

The accusations collected by the Children’s Institute resulted in a staggering 321 counts of child abuse being leveled at seven daycare staff members by 41 children. (Pazder, now considered an “expert” in satanic ritual abuse, was among the consultants in the case.) Among the litany of outlandish claims children made in the case were that daycare owners would flush them down toilets, that they had built secret underground tunnels to transport them to ritual ceremonies, that they had ritually sacrificed a baby, and that they could turn into witches and fly.

After six years of investigation and litigation of a five-year trial, the case ultimately essentially evaporated due to an utter lack of evidence. The original accusing parent in the case was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, the investigative techniques used by the Children’s Institute were thoroughly discredited by the psychological community, and one by one, all charges against the daycare staffers were dropped due to insufficient evidence.

Due to the over-the-top nature of the allegations in the McMartin case, the public gradually became skeptical of claims of satanic ritual abuse. “After scouring the country, we found no evidence for large-scale cults that sexually abuse children,” Dr. Gail Goodman, a psychologist who conducted a wide-scale survey of US case workers about the hysteria, told The New York Times in 1994. What criminal allegations were made had generally come about due to a mix of mental illness, false memories implanted during therapy and witness investigations, and, most frequently, reports from people who were being influenced by histrionic media reports of satanic ritual abuse — a pattern very similar to the current outbreak of clown scares.

The writer goes on to outline a dozen or so similar prosecutions. All built on literally insane allegations. All debunked in time – but not after causing a remarkable degree of harm on those who were falsely accused.

Where were the members of the Star-Ledger editorial board in the 1980s and 90s? Maybe they were covering the Satanic Panic? Maybe they were fanning the flames of illogic and fear? Maybe they believe enough time has passed, that people have forgotten, and that maybe they’ll do it again? Let’s hope not. But then again, it’s not the 1980s… and who reads newspapers nowadays (besides the advertisers, many of whom rely on customers from… Sussex County)?

It is time to recognize Sept 11, 2001 as a “Hate Crime”

Most Americans would agree that the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington, DC -- along with the hijacking and destruction of a passenger jet over Pennsylvania -- were crimes motivated by hate.  In the aftermath of the attack, no less than the President and the United States Attorney General agreed with this assessment. 
 
Now go to the U.S. Justice Department's Uniform Crime Report for 2001.  The report counts 12,020 victims of crimes that were the result of the "offender's bias."  7,768 of these were victims of "crimes against persons", with another 4,176 counted as victims of "crimes against property." 
 
Among the victims counted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Hate Crime Data Collection Program were 554 victims of "anti-Islamic" bias crimes.  According to the official USDOJ/FBI figures for 2001, just 10 people died (murder/non-negligent manslaughter) in the United States as the result of crimes motivated by hate.  By our count, that is 3,037 victims short. 
 
The count of homicides in New York City for that year does not reflect the 2,823 victims of mass murder at the World Trade Center; or the 184 victims at the Pentagon; or even the 40 victims in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.  They were all left out of the murder count.    
 
If you read the official homicide figures for 2001, you will find that the deadliest month in 2001 was July -- and that September actually experienced a drop in homicides from August before rising again in October.  This is not the fault of the FBI, who do their best, but who are, after all, servants of a political class more interested in the preservation of power than in honest and transparent government.
 
Isn’t it time that the United States government recognize the victims of September 11 ,2001, as victims of a “Hate Crime”?
 
How meaningful is the term “hate crime” when the victims of September 11, 2001 are not counted?  The term is a scam, a hypocrisy, when it ignores those dead.
 
Of course, we know the term “Hate Crime” is a very subjective one and too often it has been used as a tool of partisan politics by less than honest folks trying to score points against their opponents. 
 
Congressman Tom Malinowski likes to change the subject and direct us to the fashionable new threat of “white supremacy”.  You are encouraged to spy on your neighbor because he or she might be a “terrorist”.  Malinowski ignores the fact that he’s supported by Action Together New Jersey, a group that works with CAIR (the Council of American-Islamic Relations) which has been named a “terrorist organization” by one of America’s closest Islamic allies.   

 Hey, says Malinowski, what does an actual Islamic government know about what motivates Islamic terrorism anyway? Why should we listen to them? And so he goes on aiding and abetting while trying to focus the attention of Americans on each other.

Of course, Tom Malinowski really doesn’t give a hang about actual Muslim people anyway. He totally dissed the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar, as they were suffering from what the United Nations called "genocide". This was when Malinowski was a top official at the State Department. Later, Tom Malinowski joined a business venture that sought to build Myanmar’s economy while the government of Myanmar was exterminating actual Muslims in an actual case of genocide.

Apparently the term “Islamophobia” only applies to speech… not to genocide.

Democrats like Congressman Malinowski (and, it must be said, quite a few Republicans) appear unable to call out acts of hate motivated by a belief in radical Islam or by the impasse between Palestine and Israel. But as Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard points out, these same Democrats (and their GOP counterparts) are quite content to support actions against Islamic civilians and send the American military into the field to fight and die against an Islamic enemy.

The great hypocrisy of woke Democrats is to support war-making candidates for President (and, with Tulsi Gabbard pushed out of the debates by the Democrat Establishment, they are ALL wannabe “warriors”) while complaining about “Islamophobia” in others.

Hey Establishment Democrats!!! If you really care so much about ill-will between working class Americans and Muslims, then stop sending working class Americans to war against Muslims. Stop telling people to be careful about what they say, but that it is okay to kill (when instructed) or to support policies that kill. Stop the violence you are doing instead of trying to monitor the speech that is a natural result of the violence that YOU send people to commit.

In the end, this is all about the absolution of sin. The people screaming “white supremacy” the loudest know their policies kill actual everyday Muslims, so they seek to change the focus so that they can feel good about themselves. The fact that they blame the very people who they send to war to fight Muslims is horrific.

Perhaps such hypocrisy itself should be labeled a “Hate Crime”?