Jack of Harts

I have sympathy for the woman who died in Minneapolis. She was a little girl once, and her parents wanted her to grow up to be a functional adult to raise children of her own one day.

Now her children don’t have a Mom anymore.

Now an officer has to live with the knowledge that he shot and killed someone. The fact that he was defending his life doesn’t make things much better for him. The knowledge that you shot someone is always a hard thing to deal with. It’s why most departments have mandatory downtime for officers involved in an officer-involved shooting. Even if you were one hundred percent in the right, it takes a toll on a functional person to kill someone. And it should. We should never feel good about killing people.

We shouldn’t celebrate death. We shouldn’t laugh at it. And I don’t celebrate this woman’s death.

She was a little girl once, full of promise and dreams and the wishes to do great things. I mourn for that girl. Someone filled her with lies and twisted her into the kind of person who thought it was totally okay to go out and lead a group of people devoted to interfering with a law enforcement agency rounding up illegal aliens. She used her vehicle as a weapon to stop them, and when officers demanded that she stop, that she get out of the vehicle, she backed away from them instead. And when they surrounded her in an attempt to arrest her, she hit the gas and hit one of them.

And that was that. Three quick shots from the officer she hit. A single threat response series of trigger pulls. The classic one-two-three trained into professional trigger-pullers all over the place. The automatic defensive reaction of someone trying to stop another human being from killing them or other people. He shot her through the windshield, but she had her foot on the gas so hard that the vehicle continued to accelerate away until she crashed into the other side of the road several car-lengths away. And in that much time, those handful of seconds, a human being died.

Because she thought it was a good thing to lead a group of people devoted to protecting illegal aliens from deportation and that it was a good thing to use her vehicle as a weapon to attack officers who were deporting illegal aliens.

I grieve for the little girl she used to be. I grieve for her family. I grieve for her children. I even grieve for the woman herself. And I have sympathy for her. She was doing what she thought was right.

But the people who taught her that? The people who filled her full of lies? The people who turned that little girl into the woman who could try to kill someone who was only trying to arrest her? I want them found and brought to justice, because they destroyed that little girl and their actions resulted in the death of a human being. They killed that little girl back then, and now they have killed that woman.

I have no sympathy for them, I hope we find out who did it, and I hope they go to prison for what they did to her.

Yesterday was January 6. President Trump made a speech in Washington DC about election fraud and many other things five years ago. People protested election fraud at the capitol. Some people shouted at people to go into the capitol. Some people broke the security fences down. Some people broke into the capitol. Some people walked into the capitol through broken doors or windows. Some people walked through doors held open by Capitol Police and followed Capitol Police through the capitol before being led back out. Some people did not follow Capitol Police. Some people did property damage in the capitol. Some people stole things. Four people died. One was shot dead. The other three collapsed after being in an altercation with Capitol Police. Their deaths were declared medical related and all four dead were cremated so no further autopsies could be performed. I will note that not all of these people were the same people, and no single person that we know of did all of these things.

Today is January 7, and today is the day the world changed as we know it. The news media began to report that protestors beat Capitol Police officers to death with fire extinguishers. This was a lie. No police officers died on January 6. The days went into months and then years, and people went to prison. Not the people who shouted the crowd into action. Not the people who broke the security fences or doors in. The people who walked in through doors held open by Capitol Police. The people who went to the bathroom inside. People who didn’t go inside at all. People who didn’t even attend the protest at the capitol. People who weren’t even in town when the protest happened. The dragnet for political foes of the incoming administration stretched far and wide across the country as they searched for any who would dare protest their “most free and fair election ever.”

Many people lost their businesses. Many people were fired from their jobs. Some people were debanked. At least one entire social media network was taken off the internet. With some people, the government watched them until they got home, then burst in, and shot them dead. Some people they just drove to suicide. Many people they put in a special political prison devoted just to them, with jailers that taunted them, refused to give them needed prescription medications, or just put them in solitary confinement for days, weeks, or months. Some report longer than that. Some people report worse than that. Some people developed lifelong health issues in that political prison.

For the people who never went to prison, or were never personally hounded by the government, our speech was censored. The government went to companies and forced them to censor what we could say. Or just removed us from the social network entirely by saying we spread disinformation. They started a Ministry of Truth. They suppressed news stories they didn’t like. Made it impossible for people to even post them or talk about them or link to them. Entire words and concepts and ideas were banned from being allowed to be spoken at all.

They routinely called their political opponents enemies of the people and worse. Far worse. Racists. Fascists. Nazis. Literally Hitler. The Democrats and the Federal and State and City governments they controlled declared war on Republicans, and they called on all of their political followers to take that war to the streets. Republican politicians faced physical assaults on the streets. Normal citizens were shot dead on the street while leaving Republican rallies. An assassin tried to kill a Supreme Court Justice. President Trump was actually shot at a political rally, as were several other people, and one was shot DEAD at that rally. They drove lawyers who dared to represent Republicans out of business. They tried to put Republicans who defended themselves and others from deadly threats on the streets in prison for it.

For four years, the Democrats sought to put every Republican they could in prison or in the ground. It all started five years ago on January 7. It started with a lie. It started with a great many lies. And the lies continued, and they continue to this day.

We still don’t know who called for the protestors to enter the capital. Oh, we know one or two of them, but not all of them. We don’t know who broke into the capitol, or who broke down the barricades. We don’t know who erected the gallows-like structure out there. We do know that there were many undercover government assets in the crowd, but we don’t know who they were or what they did. Well, we know that ONE of the people who shouted at people to go into the capitol was a government asset, but we don’t know who the others were. We do know that Democrats refused to accept support in securing the capitol and then blamed Trump for not sending it despite their refusal to accept it. We know Capital Police opened the doors to let protestors in. We know Capital Police led protestors around the capitol before taking them out. We did finally find out who planted the bombs at the Democrat and Republic headquarters. But we don’t know who turned that protest on January 6 from a protest about a rigged election into a riot.

We still don’t know who started the violence. And that is very scary. But we do know that more violence will continue. We see it continuing right now. People are still dying on the streets today because Democrats are taking their war with Republicans to the streets and attacking people on the streets. Exactly as Democrat politicians are telling them to do. We have lived in very dangerous times the last five years, and those times are not over. They will continue, and I do not know where they will lead. And that is scary.

Captain Jack Hart grew up in Northern Minnesota.

Watching birds was one of the things he did a lot of. There are a lot of birds up there. Birds that love to spend time in water. Some that even dive under water.

He grew up watching them out on the lake in front of his house.

Do you have a guess what his favorite bird was?

[Image originally generated in Juggernaut XL 5 on dezgo dot com. Grok Imagine added the birds.]