The Belfast stabber and his victim
Absolutely horrific.
The man who was viciously stabbed on a Belfast street by a man from Sudan has lost an eye. He’s fortunate he didn’t lose two – at least, that hasn’t happened yet:
The victim of the stabbing remains in serious condition and the court has heard he lost his left eye and has severe damage to his right eye in the attack as well as deep cuts to his head and face, and long lacerations on his back.
The attack was only stopped by some brave onlookers, including this man:
Among the heroes was Maitiu Mág Tighearnán, known as Matt, who stumbled upon the scene after returning home from a night out.
Grabbing a wooden hurley stick – used in the Irish sport of hurling – the young dad charged towards the knifeman.
Police later said the actions of courageous members of the public and responding officers had “undoubtedly” saved the victim’s life.
I originally thought, from the name, that Maitiu might be from the Pacific Islands or some other foreign place. But then I realized that no, the spelling of the name is a Gaelic thing. Here’s some information:
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Mr Mág Tighearnán said he had just returned from hurling practice with his son, when he noticed a car in the area reverse as “if to get away from something”.
He then exited his vehicle with his friend, named as Andre, when the pair noticed the attacker stabbing the man.
Mr Mág Tighearnán said “instinct took over” as he confronted the man.
“Andre was a few seconds behind and he came running in and tried to subdue the attacker with an ankle-hold so he could free the victim,” he added.
“I hit this guy again, hard, but it didn’t seem to phase him. He did stumble back, though and dropped the knife. I think another man who’d been watching came in and kicked the knife away.”
He also told the newspaper the victim appeared to “scream” but couldn’t due to stab wounds to his neck.
“I’m glad we intervened when we did. It was pure chance that we’d gone that route to the petrol station,” he continued.
“People have called us heroes but to be honest I’d like to think most people would’ve got stuck in and helped if they could. I just hope the victim pulls through and manages to recover as best he can.”
Heroes nearly always claim they’re nothing special. But they’re very special.
As for the perpetrator, he had nothing to say for himself when he appeared in court (via videolink):
Hadi Alodid has appeared before the city’s magistrates’ court on Wednesday morning.
The 30-year-old, with an address at Duncairn Avenue in Belfast, is charged with the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvy, threatening to kill an NHS radiographer on the same day and with the possession of a knife.
He appeared in court via videolink. He refused legal representation and made no reply to charges which were put to him through an Arabic interpreter.
He was refused bail. The threats against the NHS worker have not been further explained as far as I can tell. My guess is that this happened first, and was the beginning of the perp’s frenzy that culminated in the stabbing. Why was Alodid interacting with an NHS radiographer? Was he being worked up for some problem?
I’ve read a few other things from sources I don’t think are necessarily trustworthy, although I don’t know. For example, some are saying that Ogilvie had helped Alodid move into a flat just a few days earlier. Others say that Ogilvie is developmentally disabled. Each of these things may or may not be true.
The event sparked riots, and of course the riots were condemned by people like Starmer. It really does seem that he’s more upset about the riots than about the attack, although he did condemn the attack. But Starmer will not sympathize with the rage of people who feel their country has been invaded by a large number of newcomers who are culturally incompatible and many of whom are not assimilating. Nor will he sympathize with the rage they feel towards people like Starmer himself who have encouraged the huge number of third-world newcomers.
“The scenes in Belfast last night were shocking and completely unacceptable.
“There is no justification for the violence and disorder that we saw threatening our communities, nor for those who encouraged it, online or elsewhere.
“It is clear that people were targeted last night because of their background and I will not tolerate it. Those responsible will feel the full force of the law.”
Oh, that’ll calm them down.
NOTE: On the rescuer’s name, Google AI has this to say:
Yes, the name Maitiu (often spelled Maitiú) is distinctively Irish. It is the traditional Gaelic/Irish form of the English name Matthew, which traces its ultimate origins to Hebrew.The second part of the name, Mág, is a traditional Gaelic prefix (a variant of Mac) meaning “son of.” It is typically combined with another Gaelic word, such as Tighearnán (meaning “lord” or “master”), to form a full Irish surname (e.g., Mág Tighearnán, Anglicized as McKiernan)
So we might call him Matthew McKiernan.
Karmelo Anthony has been sentenced to 35 years
As I wrote yesterday after the verdict but prior to the sentencing:
Anthony must pay the price. But what will the price be? It really depends; he was 17 when he killed Metcalf and perhaps the jury will be lenient for that reason. …
I have a hunch, though, that … Anthony will get less than the maximum sentence.
The maximum was life or 99 years. The crime was a heinous one. And the carrying of the knife to a school track meet, plus witnesses saying Anthony kept his hand in his bag (apparently at the ready with the knife) during basically a verbal spat, indicates the murder was not a sudden “heat of the moment” thing. Premeditation can involve a short time; it doesn’t have to be hours or days. Also, a knife plunged that deeply into the chest would almost certainly be known to be a mortal blow, so it would be very difficult for Anthony to successfully claim that he didn’t mean to kill Metcalf.
Therefore there was a very good argument that Anthony should have gotten life. The death penalty is not allowed if a perpetrator is under 18 and without other special circumstances, and since Anthony was 17 at the time of the murder and the requisite special circumstances were not present, life in prison was the maximum allowed.
Why did Anthony not get a life sentence? The jury didn’t deliberate long, and I don’t think they explained their sentencing decision; at least, I haven’t found an explanation. But I think – as I wrote earlier – it was his youth. Also his baby face. He will have a long time in prison to think about what he did, especially if he ends up serving most of it. But even if he only serves half of it (the minimum, because he would be eligible for parole then), when he gets out he would be around 34 because he’s 19 now. That will have to do.
Meanwhile, the scene in the courtroom during the penalty phase was absolutely heart-rending. I’m not primarily referring to the fact that Anthony himself was weeping during the sentencing phase. Was he weeping mostly for himself? Probably, but I’m not a mind-reader and perhaps the intense sorrow voiced by Metcalf’s family may have moved Anthony. It’s nice to think so, anyway:
Anthony sat with his head on the table moments before the sentence was delivered and appeared to be sobbing, NBC DFW reported.
He stood when asked, but still kept his head angled down, NBC reported.
Metcalf’s mother, Meghan, delivered a powerful statement calling her slain son their family’s beloved peacemaker.
“There was a part of him you can never take from me, the strength I still get from him every day, because I know what it was like to be loved by him. My son was murdered. He didn’t just die. He was taken from us. Just as he was starting to live,” Meghan said.
“You may have just been given a sentence of 35 years, you should feel lucky because I’ve been sentenced to a life without my son.”
Meghan’s sister imparted a poignant question that has haunted Metcalf’s loved ones since his murder.
“One question will always be with me. Why? Why could you not have just left?” she asked.
Anthony kept his head down the whole time – even when Metcalf’s father, Jeff, ordered him to look up, according to the report.
Jeff smacked the podium while reading his statement, telling Anthony that he doesn’t “belong in this community” and detailing how Metcalf’s murder “destroyed the person I used to be.”
Anthony finally raised his head when Metcalf’s twin brother, Hunter, asked him to look him in the eye.
“You took a son, a brother, a friend, and my best friend, from this world. You took someone from me who was supposed to be an uncle, godfather to my kids. Now I want everything taken from you,” Hunter choked.
Hearbreaking.
Meanwhile, Anthony’s family did not behave well:
After the hearing, Anthony’s mother, Kala, and his brother blasted the killer’s conviction and sentence as “racist and biased” to cheering supporters who chanted “free Karmelo.”
Were these the sort of values Anthony was taught by those who should have been guiding him? Apparently. And yet, of course, they are suffering too.
Here’s some background information about the Anthony family:
By all appearances, the Anthonys look like a typical family. Karmelo has several siblings and the family’s social media showed a comfortable life like vacations, a lavish home and expensive cars, per Distractify. Three years before the incident, they had relocated to North Texas. “Three years ago, my family moved to North Texas, searching for a better life,” Kayla said in a press interview after Karmelo’s arrest, she described their family as loving and said they had provided their children with opportunities to succeed.
The emotional toll of the trial on the family was visible in court. On Monday, Anthony’s parents were summoned into the courtroom for a private visit with their son during a two-hour delay. His mother came out of the courtroom alone and sobbing and had to be escorted to the restroom by security. His father followed shortly after, also in tears. It was not clear what was said during the private meeting, Daily Mail reported.
Did they ever teach Karmelo a sense of personal responsibility? Or was everything bad that happened to him due to racism? I simply don’t know enough to come to any conclusions. But the behavior of his mother and brother now, inflaming crowd passions and calling the verdict racist, may give us a hint.
[NOTE: This Daily Mail article contains more of the victim’s family members’ statements. Very sad.]
So, Graham Platner will be the Democrats’ Senate nominee from Maine
Anyone surprised? I doubt it. Platner’s nomination is shocking but not surprising in the least, since he ran basically unopposed. He also fits the current profile of the Democratic Party in the political sense: very very far to the left.
Platner has a history containing just about everything the Democrats say they hate – Nazi symbols, misogyny and mistreatment of women, elite background while pretending to be just a working class guy – plus a few things they hadn’t thought of being against yet, such as a habit of masturbating in port-a-potties.
Whatever, they say now. He’s our guy to get the all-important Senate majority which will remake America to our liking.
Platner was very pleased with himself last night. His message is that the incumbent, Republican Susan Collins, is old and corrupt. Well, she is 73, which used to be thought of as old in politics but these days doesn’t seem all that geriatric. But Platner is 41 years old, and he was chosen in part for his relative youth, much like AOC and Mamdani.
Platner’s way of dealing with his murky past is to say he’s seen the light. It’s a tale of redemption, and he credits his wife – although he was reportedly sexting with other women after he married her:
“If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics, and change our country, then you must also believe that people can change,” Platner said, speaking at a YMCA in his hometown of Blue Hill. “And the reason I believe that is because I have lived it — and the reason I have lived it is because of my wife.”
He added: “To all those who feel let down, disappointed, or disillusioned. It is my job to earn your trust, your faith, and your support. And I will spend every day of this campaign, and if I have the privilege, every day in the United States Senate, doing exactly that.”
As for Collins, he said that she is “just as spineless and corrupt as the establishment she now serves.” “Corrupt” is a funny word for the corrupt Platner to use, but he used it in the populist sense of being supported by money interests.
Note this as well:
“The truth is, Susan Collins does not serve us. She serves Donald Trump,” Platner said. “She serves the Epstein class. She serves her corporate donors and the corrupt political system that has rigged the economy against us. She does not serve us, and so we will defeat Susan Collins.”
“The Epstein class” is the newest catchphrase. It refers to a shadowy and ill-defined group that supposedly runs the world, is completely corrupt, and coalesced around the figure of Epstein. Sound familiar? Platner will be hammering this message home and directing it at Susan Collins.
Open thread 6/10/2026
News roundup
(1) A near-beheading on the streets of Belfast – by a Sudanese “migrant”:
A Sudanese man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a knifeman appeared to try to behead a man in Belfast.
The suspect has been taken into custody after the victim suffered “significant injuries” to his face, neck and back in what police called a brutal attack.
The injured man, a resident of the area in his 40s, is being treated in hospital, where his condition is described as serious.
Footage shared on social media – which is too graphic to publish – appears to show the knifeman, in his 30s, pinning the man to the ground before repeatedly stabbing him in the head.
The video shows three apparently local men intervening, one hitting the attacker with a wooden hurling stick as others kick him to try to force him to release his victim.
Note that the three rescuers didn’t seem to have conventional weapons. Fortunately there were three of them.
(2) Steve Hilton will be on the ballot in California for the governorship. I guess his total was too big to surmount, since that particular primary is statewide (compared to the LA mayor’s primary, which was only in LA). So, to coin a phrase, for the post of governor California will have “a choice, not an echo.”
(3) Todd Blanche is nominated for the post of AG. Until now, he was the acting AG. I think Trump liked the job he was doing.
(4) The cellphone and fertility rates:
Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, and Ezekiel Hooper, her student, used the spotty early rollout of the iPhone as a way to isolate the effects of the phone on fertility. The first iPhone was released in June 2007, they wrote, and was available only on the AT&T network until February 2011. The study compared fertility rates in U.S. counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with counties that had little or none.
Their paper, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the iPhone caused as much as half of the fertility decline between 2007 and 2011. The most pronounced effects were among young people aged 15 to 24.
What happened in the counties with iPhones? One theory, Professor Myers said, is that young people began to socialize more on their phones and less in person, and consequently were less likely to have sex and become pregnant.
Professor Myers said iPhones may also have made pornography more accessible, which led young people to substitute it for sex, or young people may have used them to obtain better information on avoiding pregnancy, including contraception and abortion.
Researchers not involved in the study said the results were persuasive.
Makes sense. The lockdowns didn’t help, either. And, as Ace writes:
And what messages did they get over their cellphones 24/7? Constant crisis, constant fear, constant messaging that the world was ending and it was all due to human births, constant messaging in favor of hook-up culture and abortion and, for the boys, pornography, and constant messaging against marriage, the family, and humanity itself.
(5) Another horrible murder, this time on a Bronx bus. Jonathan Pettigrew, 41-year-old father of 7 was shot and killed by a teenager – as yet at large – whom Pettigrew had asked not to talk so loudly on a cellphone. There were plenty of witnesses. The news reports don’t mention the races involved, but Google AI said that Pettigrew was black. My guess – and it’s only a guess – is that both victim and perpetrator were black. This fits the pattern of an out-of-control teenager, armed and ready to kill any time he perceives anyone as insulting him or telling him what to do.
RIP Jonathan Pettigrew.
Karmelo Anthony is found guilty of murder
It seemed extremely clear that “guilty of murder” should be the verdict. There was no defense offered except “after he provoked a dispute and refused to leave, for no particular reason he thought he was in danger of being killed and therefore killed another person.” Fortunately, the law doesn’t absolve you of murder by that sort of twisted reasoning.
But many of Anthony’s “supporters” do, because of racism, the perennial accusation:
Karmelo Anthony sobbed Tuesday as he was swiftly convicted of murder in the fatal stabbing of fellow high-school jock Austin Metcalf at a track meet — and his furious supporters raged, “This whole thing’s been racist!”
The jury in Collin County deliberated about three hours before finding Anthony, 19, guilty of first-degree murder in the death of the 17-year-old and must now decide whether to put him away for life — prompting the killer’s weeping mom to later take the witness stand and beg for mercy for her son, according to a report by NBC DFW.
“He’s my oldest. He’ll always be my baby. I love him very much,” Anthony’s mom Kala Hayes sobbed to jurors before they headed into further deliberations to decide his sentence.
As she spoke, Anthony also cried.
“I know my son, and he’s very sorry for what he did,” Hayes told the jury.
“Sorry” doesn’t cut it. That doesn’t mean this isn’t a tragedy all around. I don’t know enough about Anthony’s family to blame them for his behavior, and it’s certainly not the case that the family is always to blame. But in the end, he is guilty of stabbing another young man in the heart for no good reason on earth.
Anthony must pay the price. But what will the price be? It really depends; he was 17 when he killed Metcalf and perhaps the jury will be lenient for that reason. I doubt his lawyer’s summation helped him much, though. Then again, his lawyer’s task was tough, because this was pretty much an open and shut case in the legal sense:
“Austin Metcalf had no legal right to use force to eject Karmelo Anthony from that tent,” Anthony’s lawyer, Mike Howard, said during closing arguments at the Collin County trial — as Anthony looked on intently from the defense table.
“He had the right to ask him to leave, but he didn’t have any legal right to use force,” Howard said of Metcalf, according to a report by the Daily Mail. …
Howard said Anthony “had an absolute right to defend himself.”
What is Howard talking about? After Anthony was asked to leave 15 times and refused to do so, while insulting and cursing at the group and threatening them, Metcalf gave him a moderate push. That is legally irrelevant and does not justify murder. And this was no accidental act of Anthony’s, either – no case in which someone caused a chain of events that led to death. This was a knife plunged deep and with great force into Metcalf’s heart.
Or, as the prosecutor said:
You don’t get to meet a shove with a stab, especially if you provoke the shove …
No, you don’t. That is quite literally overkill. But Anthony’s lawyers really had no other way to approach his defense, since his act was basically indefensible.
The prosecution added this:
The prosecutor told the jury they should consider Anthony’s mindset rather than his motive.
“It’s mindset, mindset,” Wirskye said. “He took a knife to a track meet. He of course felt empowered that he was going to come out on top of any encounter.”
I have a hunch, though, that if it’s possible Anthony will get less than the maximum sentence. No matter what, he will be a hero to some people, but I don’t think their numbers will reach the level of the Luigi-lovers.
ADDENDUM: The jury deliberated for three more hours, and gave Anthony a 35-year sentence for the crime.
You may have noticed …
… that I haven’t written about goings-on in Iran for a few days. That’s because I have nothing to add to what I’ve said in the past. The situation is confusing and frustrating, plus it’s hard to know – very hard to know – what’s happening, who is trustworthy on the subject, and what if anything is planned. So at the moment I’m waiting.
But here’s a thread to discuss it, if you’d like.
Open thread 6/9/2026
You know the guy lived through it, because he’s talking. But you can’t figure out how:
Still having that intermittent “too many requests” error message
Apologies for any inconvenience. It’s not fixed yet, although I’ve been struggling to eliminate it and have tried several suggestions.
Question for the techies among you: Today I was told something new by the host, which is that my own IP number is brute force attacking the site and that’s what sometimes makes it close down for a while for “too many requests.” This seems very odd; anyone have any suggestions as to what this might represent and how to fix it? Thanks.
The Karmelo Anthony trial in Texas
You may recall the case: 17-year-old Austin Metcalf was stabbed by then-17-year-old Karmelo Anthony (now 19) at a track meet in front of many witnesses. Metcalf was white; Anthony is black.
The trial is not about whether Anthony stabbed him; it’s about why. And in that respect the Anthony defense is very much like the argument Vickrum Digwa tried to mount: that the stabbing was self-defense. Anthony’s definition of self-defense, much like that of Digwa, is the perception of danger even when no real danger was present or even arguably present. In other words, it rests on feelings.
That’s not the way the law of self-defense goes, even if you buy that that’s what Anthony felt in his heart. Mere perception is not enough; there must be some valid and objective reason for that perception. Karmelo’s defense lawyers are presenting this approach, and tomorrow will be closing arguments:
Prosecutors say the stabbing was an unjustified attack stemming from an argument over whether Anthony could be under the tent of Metcalf’s team.
Anthony’s attorneys have argued that he acted in self-defense and reacted in fear during a “split-second” moment after Metcalf made physical contact.
The jury heard from defense witnesses on Monday, including one of Anthony’s former teammates who was at the track meet when the fatal confrontation unfolded.
One of Anthony’s teammates, testifying Monday, said Anthony was “distraught” after the stabbing.
“I was hearing him say, ‘I told him not to touch me,’” the witness said.
So what?
From what I’ve read, evidence in this trial paints a picture of Anthony as the aggressor. He had come into the other team’s tent and refused to leave although asked many times, and then this happened:
Prosecutors previously called more than 20 witnesses, including students who were at the meet and a medical examiner who testified that Metcalf was stabbed through the heart. …
One teen recalled Anthony telling Austin, “Touch me and find out,” and described both teenagers as angry, though he characterized Anthony as the one provoking the situation. He said Austin eventually pushed Anthony, after which Anthony pulled a knife from his backpack and stabbed Austin in the chest.
It seems to me that, both in the Digwa case and this case, the person doing the stabbing was highly reactive and ready to kill at the slightest provocation, which included anything perceived as “dissing” him. That’s not self-defense in the legal sense. That’s a murderer in the making.
Anthony has his champions among the public, and jury selection and race has been an issue. If Anthony is sentenced, I bet that will be one set of grounds for his appeal:
The trial, which is expected to last about two weeks, has drawn significant political scrutiny, with racially charged demonstrations calling for Anthony to ‘walk free.’
A panel of 12 jurors and six alternates was selected after roughly 600 prospective jurors were questioned during a selection process that began Monday. No black jurors were seated on the final jury.
Why no black jurors? Here’s some information on that:
Dewey had to remind panelists that nobody would get “in trouble” for revealing their feelings about the hot-button case, which the Anthony family, who are black, claimed is a product of “white supremacy.”
With that sort of attitude on the family’s part, it’s not hard to see why Anthony might have been so primed to strike.
As for the potential jurors:
“He looks like a child,” several said in questioning relayed by WFAA, when asked if they could consider a life sentence for the teen, who has been charged with first-degree murder.
“I don’t think I can make a decision about somebody so young. One mistake, one argument, one conflict, you can’t say he’s a bad person,” one potential juror told Assistant District Attorney Dewey Mitchell. …
Mitchell asked panelists how they feel about this statement: “I don’t feel comfortable finding an African American male guilty of murder.”
“I don’t know if I feel right putting a brother in jail,” one candidate stated, according to WFAA.
Perhaps they’re also afraid of being doxxed if they’re on a jury that convicts Anthony.
On the LA vote-counting process that is giving LA two leftist Democrats to choose from for mayor
We knew it would probably happen; Pratt would be shut out of the election. The only question is whether the process was fraudulent, and if so what method was used. Although we cannot say for certain, it’s incredibly hard to maintain the idea that the post-Election Day surge for Raman was bona fide; the details point so strongly in the direction of fraud.
In other words, the process gives us the appearance of fraud. That is built into the system, which allows vote-counting of mail-in ballots a week past election day as long as they are postmarked on that day (and “postmarked” is rumored to be interpreted as including a handwritten note), and which features mail-in ballots to everyone on the rolls plus liberal ballot-harvesting.
California has some of the most permissive — if not the most permissive — vote-by-mail laws in the country. Every active registered voter is automatically mailed a ballot before each statewide election. Because the state has refused to allow the Department of Justice to review its voter rolls, there’s no way to know how many registrations belong to deceased individuals, voters who have moved, duplicate records, or were actually fraudulent registrations to begin with. …
Additionally, California accepts ballots that arrive as late as one week after Election Day. Although the law requires those ballots to be postmarked on or before Election Day, claims circulating on social media suggest that even a handwritten date may be enough to meet that standard, raising further questions about the state’s ballot-counting process. For obvious reasons, this is impossible to confirm.
That time frame is inherently untrustworthy and should never be allowed, unless perhaps for absentee ballots from military personnel. Why would anyone implement a system like that, with so few ways to check on it? Hard to believe it’s for any reason other than to make it more possible to cheat if necessary, once the counters know how many ballots they have to create in order to make up the difference. And with the universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, it’s even more suspect.
So either there was an amazing bona fide surge for the most far-left major candidate in the mayoral race, Raman – hard to believe – or there was cheating here. And the argument made by the left, that late-arriving mail-in ballots in California always go for Democrats, is unconvincing. Do such ballots go disproportionately for Democrats compared to the earlier mail-in ballots? More importantly, do they go for the non-frontrunner – the person in third place? And if so, does the phenomenon occur even when there is no threat from a Republican or a candidate the Democrat establishment doesn’t want – in other words, when there is no reason to manufacture votes? In the case of this LA mayoral primary, there wasn’t so much a late surge for Democrats as a late surge for Raman in particular, the third-place candidate prior to that, and the one who is most to the left.
Because only the top two vote-getters in the California primary advance to the general, if the counters of votes wanted to push Pratt out of the running, they had two choices to eliminate him. The first choice would be to help the frontrunner and incumbent Bass reach 50% and win outright; if a candidate gets over 50% in the primary that person is the outright winner and there’s no further voting [CORRECTION: This appears to be incorrect information, and therefore this option was not available]. But Bass was about 13 or 14 points away from 50% on election night, so that was probably a bridge too far. Too many votes to manufacture. But Raman and Pratt were only five or six points apart on election night. Much easier to make up that difference and set up an obligatory Democrat/Democrat twosome. And that’s what has happened.
Bass had been consistently beating Raman in the ballots arriving by Election Day. And then suddenly Raman beats Bass in the later ballots. See this:
The big tell about Los Angeles Mayor right now is not that Nithya Raman has gained massively on Spencer Pratt. It’s that she’s gained on Karen Bass *while Bass’ share actually declined* in two full days, Thursday PM to Saturday PM.
Bass and the Normie Dem Adam Miller both dropped slightly in share while Raman essentially took all the net gains.
Thursday Left, this morning Right. Raman gained 3.1 points on Bass. Conventional wisdom was that late voters would’ve consolidated around the incumbent, not bolt for the upstart extremist.
A candidate who was getting around 20% of the vote is suddenly getting 40% of the vote, and those votes are coming at the expense of Spencer Pratt.
Not her Democrat opponent, whose vote percentage has remained steady.
Not a “Democrat” surge; a Raman surge.
I’m not sure where this guy gets his information, but it’s certainly interesting:
As @BoredElonMusk & the data show, Raman’s late mail in ballot surge was fueled in large part by ballots from Skid Row.
Tens of thousands of homeless whose ballots are sent to central addresses (not the sidewalk) & can be filled out/returned by someone else.
There’s also this:
Many have been asking me describe the potential signature verification loophole for Los Angeles mail in ballots.
It says: “If a voter is unable to sign, the voter can make a mark witnessed by one person.”
Here, the person drew a happy face & “witnessed” it with a scribble. That scribble isn’t validated as being a real person. No name, nothing.
While a happy face may draw scrutiny, a plain line would not.
This could hypothetically enable mass harvesting where the voter never fills out, signs or even sees their own ballot.
We should be told how many ballots show up without the voter’s signature.
A hundred, two hundred years ago, a lot of people couldn’t even sign their name. Today? No excuse for this except in extremely rare circumstances. Combined with ballot harvesting, it’s an obvious travesty. And yet how can the fraud be proven in such a situation? It can only be inferred, but there’s no way to check on who made that mark.
More numbers here:
Mail-ins arriving before Election Day:
– Bass: 38.1%
– Pratt: 27.9%
– Raman: 20%Mail-ins arriving after Election Day:
– Raman: 37% (+17% surge)
– Bass: 34.9% (-3% drop)
– Pratt: 19% (-9% drop)
Add to all this a fact that many have not considered: you don’t even need to manufacture ballots after election day. All you need to know is the approximate results beforehand (Raman comes in third), and fill out the harvested ballots from the homeless, apartment buildings, and fake voters, ensuring that the correct result is overturned after the election is held. You have over a week to get them in, so you can even wait until the polls close and initial results come in and still get that vote counted “legally.” …
Most of the “cheating” can be done legally, save for the actual filling out of the ballots, which is practically impossible to detect. Simply have the harvested ballots ready to fill out when the initial results come in on election night, vote the ballots, and send them in. No magic USB drives necessary. No video trail. No paper trail. No examination of the ballots. …
As far as I can find, which is not admittedly definitive, there is no case where a third-place candidate far back vaults into first place in ballot counts days after the initial results come in. It beggars belief, violates common sense, and depends on the belief that late-breaking voters surged to a candidate everybody knew was rightfully dead and buried. That pattern is never observed in the wild. …
But it is the pattern necessary to kick Pratt off the ballot, giving Karen Bass a clear and easy path to victory over a candidate few people like, and nobody is enthusiastic about, and with the charisma of a rock.
I don’t see any remedy possible for this particular election. One very slight comfort (very slight) is that, if Pratt had been allowed to get on the ballot against Bass in the general, I think it’s highly likely he would have lost the election. I suppose it’s theoretically possible he could have won if he ran an amazing campaign in the next few months. But we haven’t been allowed to find out; it was too dangerous to let us see what he was saying, or to have another debate where he might show Bass up to be a fool. And the Democrats couldn’t even risk the remote possibility of a Pratt win.
However, for the future, there’s this possibility:
The case before the Supreme Court is Watson v. Republican National Committee. The question is direct: When Congress established a national Election Day for federal elections, did it mean ballots must be received by Election Day — or merely mailed by Election Day?
During oral arguments in March, Justice Samuel Alito warned that confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined when the apparent result on election night is later flipped by a large batch of late-arriving ballots.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh likewise pressed attorneys on whether history supports requiring ballots to be received by Election Day. Their questioning reflected broad skepticism from the court’s conservative majority.
Sacramento should be paying attention.
Most Americans understand Election Day to mean the deadline. California’s system tells them otherwise.
When vote totals keep changing for days after the polls close, suspicion naturally grows — because the process looks like it has no real endpoint.
I would say it has no objective endpoint other than 30 days after Election Day. It does have a goal, though – which is to select and then elect the preferred candidates of the Democrat powers-that-be.
The article mentions that, even if SCOTUS decides that Election Day is the final acceptable day for mail-ins, that rule would only apply to federal elections. State and local elections could still use the old method – which means the primary rules for governor and mayor would not change, as far as I can tell.
Once states go this way, it’s very hard to reverse the trend. And that is part of the design.
ADDENDUM:
A similar reversal has been starting to happen in the governor’s race; see this. Will Hilton make it into the general? I submit that it looks better for him than it did for Pratt. I think it’s more difficult to commit enough fraud to matter on the level of an entire state election unless the percentages are very close to begin with. On the state level, there are too many red areas which are not amenable to Democrat vote-counting control, plus the sheer number of faked votes needed is higher. So maybe Hilton will hang in there – although if he doesn’t, it would not surprise me either. It would be third-place Steyer who would have to outperform both Becarra and Hilton as time goes on.