Anti-2A NY Court Convicts Gunsmith

A man who legally bought and built firearms is railroaded by a New York judge who is clearly opposed to Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

by THOMAS GALLATIN

For Dexter Taylor, it was an intriguing hobby. For the deep-blue state of New York, it was a criminal enterprise. And now Taylor is sitting in Rikers Island awaiting sentencing of anywhere from 10 to 18 years in prison.

And what exactly is Taylor guilty of? In short, pursuing his love of building things, specifically firearms.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Taylor — a black man, a software engineer, and a Brooklyn resident — discovered the world of gunsmithing. According to his lawyer, Vinoo Varghese, “He ended up building, I believe it was eight pistols and five or six rifles, AR-style rifles, and then eight or nine Glock pistols that he built.”

Taylor explained: “I found out that you can actually legally buy a receiver, and you can machine that receiver to completion, and you buy your parts, and you put them together, and you’ve got a pistol or a rifle. And once I saw that, I was hooked. I was like, ‘This is the coolest thing ever. This is the most cool thing you could possibly do in your machine shop.’”

As far as Taylor knew, his hobby was completely legal, right up until a joint ATF/NYPD SWAT team raided his home and arrested him. He was charged in April 2022 with constructing so-called “ghost guns,” which is the Left’s scaremongering term for homemade firearms.

A 37-count indictment raised against Taylor included multiple criminal firearms possessions that, according to Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, amounted to “a massive arsenal of homemade ghost guns that are as real and dangerous as traditional firearms.” While the 52-year-old Taylor had no criminal record and was not charged with any violent crime — he never even fired any of the firearms he constructed — for anti-Second Amendment New York, Taylor’s firearms were the crime.

Furthermore, Taylor stated prior to his trial: “Not only did I not intend to transfer or sell them or anything else, but the state of New York should know this because of course they seized my driver, my computer, my regular desktop, my work laptop, they seized my phone, they seized my credit cards, everything. So they know that I wasn’t out there talking about guns. I wasn’t out there advertising guns. I wasn’t out there talking about them on social media, and I certainly wasn’t talking or thinking about transferring weapons.”

However, a jury found him guilty. But it hardly sounds like Taylor got a fair shake, as Judge Abena Darkeh explicitly told his lawyer he was not allowed to even mention Second Amendment rights in Taylor’s defense. Varghese explained: “She told us, ‘Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue [the] Second Amendment. This is New York.’”

On top of that, Judge Darkeh forbade Varghese from arguing before the jury that there was no crime. As Varghese tells it: “I actually argued that jury nullification is allowed because there is some law from the high court of New York that talks about lawyers who made jury nullification arguments. And basically, they said that judges shouldn’t encourage it, but they can’t prevent it. I actually made a pitch directly to Judge Darkeh to allow me to argue during nullification. She, of course, rejected that.” He added, “She basically said, ‘You must vote guilty’ without saying ‘you must vote guilty.’”

Apparently, Judge Darkeh is opposed to the Second Amendment and wants to use Taylor as an example to others who might also enjoy gunsmithing. This is the epitome of viewing the Second Amendment as a secondary right at best or a license to convict at worst.

Despite the verdict, both Taylor and Varghese promised this fight is far from over. They plan to appeal the conviction and, as Varghese believes, “We have a shot at winning in federal court.” Indeed.

Thank You Patriot Post

An Unsustainable Debt

Interest payments on our $34 trillion national debt will soon exceed our spending on defense.
by BRIAN MARK WEBER

An Unsustainable Debt

As the saying goes, “Somebody’s gotta pay for it.”

Maybe, but it won’t be the U.S. government. Uncle Sam is flat broke, but he keeps the Federal Reserve’s printing press in motion 24/7.

Let’s not forget that we have to borrow that money, which means we have to pay interest. For years, politicians from both parties claimed that as long as we could pay off the interest, we’d be in good shape. But that’s easier said than done when the debt is astronomical.

“The government shells out more money, by far, on its military and defense than any other country in the world,” reports the Washington Examiner. “Yet that category of spending is set to be far exceeded by payments on the debt. A decade from now, in 2034, annual interest costs are projected to be a whopping $1.6 trillion. That is a staggering 45% higher than the U.S. is forecast to spend on defense in the same year.”

At least back in the ‘80s, there was serious talk about tackling the debt to save our children and their grandchildren from the burden of paying it down. For years, Republicans prided themselves on being fiscal hawks, but that hawk didn’t fly for long. Ultimately, it took the partnership of Democrat President Bill Clinton and Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich to balance a budget.

Since then, Republicans and Democrats have thrown up their hands and continued to spend like there’s no tomorrow. And at this rate, there won’t be a tomorrow — at least one in which young Americans can hope to live better than their parents.

This debt is like walking down a railroad track with a train off in the distance but roaring toward us. We’ve heard the train coming for decades, though, and now it’s decision time.

Bloomberg recently ran a million simulations on the U.S. debt. The results? According to Fox News: “Bloomberg … found 88% of them show borrowing is on an ‘unsustainable path.’ The findings come after a forecast by the Congressional Budget Office that indicates the national debt will grow to an astonishing $54 trillion in the next decade, the result of an aging population and rising federal health care costs. Higher interest rates are also compounding the pain of higher debt.”

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, inflation, student loans, food stamps, foreign aid, cash for illegal aliens, tens of billions for Ukraine, climate change schemes, and, let’s not forget, the trillions for the COVID-19 crisis. To pay for it all, the Federal Reserve just prints more money.

This causes inflation and gives people the impression the government has money in the coffers when it doesn’t have any at all. Essentially, we create Monopoly money and place the burden on the backs of the people.

“When a person or business takes out a loan, their borrowing is limited by their earnings from providing real value for other people,” writes The Heritage Foundation’s Richard Stern. “Government borrowing, however, is only limited by how much of the fruits of your labors it will take in the future.”

Stern adds: “That’s why governments don’t really ‘borrow’ — government debt ultimately comes out of your wallet through future taxes or inflation. When governments use this unmatched power, they also crowd out private borrowing. This means families can’t get a mortgage and businesses can’t expand and provide new job opportunities or invest in innovation.”

No wonder Fitch Ratings downgraded the U.S. credit rating last year from AAA to AA+. As The Hill reported then, “Fitch warned that the growing debt — now well over $32 trillion — and Congress’s inability to manage it in a productive and responsible way posed threats to the country’s creditworthiness.”

Meanwhile, neither Democrats nor Republicans have any interest in tackling the debt. It’s all about raising the debt ceiling, borrowing more money, and keeping the printing presses moving.

There was a time when an upcoming presidential election was a perfect opportunity for the GOP to define itself and embrace fiscal conservatism, but Donald Trump and the Republicans aren’t even talking about it. We can only hope that a new wave of common sense comes to Washington in 2025.

We owe it not only to ourselves but to future generations to take the issue seriously.

Science Says Race Isn’t Real. How Long Will the U.S. Census Pretend Otherwise?

This whole business of counting Americans by race should have been junked long ago.

by JEFF JACOBY

A question about race has been on every US Census since the first one in 1790. But not the same question. In response to shifting politics, social attitudes, interest-group pressures, and government priorities, the list of racial categories into which the American government sorts the American people has changed many times. Now it is about to change again.

The Biden administration last month announced that the five racial categories currently used by the government — American Indian, Asian, Black, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and White — are to be joined by two more. One is “Hispanic or Latino,” which until now has been considered an ethnic group only. The other is “Middle Eastern or North African,” which is being added as a new racial classification.

“These updated standards will help create more useful, accurate, and up-to-date federal data on race and ethnicity,” says Karin Orvis, the federal government’s chief statistician, in a blog post on the White House website. The new racial classifications, she writes, “will enhance our ability to … understand how well federal programs serve a diverse America.”

Don’t count on it.

In what sense is “Hispanic or Latino” a race? Certainly not in the sense that “White,” “Black,” and “American Indian” have long been perceived as racial. As the scholar Michael Lind observes in Salon, the government’s definition of “Hispanic” encompasses “blond, blue-eyed South Americans of German descent as well as Mexican-American mestizos and Puerto Ricans of predominantly African descent.”

Indeed, until last week, the federal government was adamant that “Hispanic or Latino” was not a racial category and that its members could therefore be of any race. Before 1980 the “Hispanic” category didn’t exist on the census at all, and proposals to designate it as a race were often opposed by Latino organizations. Today, many Hispanic advocacy groups have come around to supporting the designation. That wasn’t because of some objective scientific clarification that “Hispanic or Latino” really is a racial category unto itself. It was because of a subjective change: More than 40 percent of Hispanics no longer identify their race as white, Black, or Asian; instead they answer the racial question on the census by checking the box marked “some other race.”

In other words, the new category reflects a shift in feelings, not facts. That is a strange basis for making a major change to federal data collection.

Much the same is true of the new “Middle Eastern or North African” checkbox.

Arab-American activists and organizations lobbied for the creation of the MENA category as a proxy for Arab identity. “In a perfect world we’d have an ‘Arab’ category,” the president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee told a reporter in 2015. But the new category, writes David Bernstein, a professor at George Mason University, “will obscure more than it illuminates.” The author of “Classified,” a history of the government’s long entanglement with racial labeling, Bernstein observes that the MENA label will “include, in addition to Arab Americans, approximately 500,000 Israeli immigrants and their descendants, about 300,000 other MENA Jews, 600,000 Iranians, and 500,000 Chaldean Americans.”

In short, says Bernstein, the introduction of a new Middle Eastern/North African race checkbox will only compound the muddle of federal racial data, since “at least as many non-Arab Americans will be part of the classification as will Arab Americans.”

At the grassroots level, meanwhile, there is no consensus about race among Arabs or other Americans of Middle Eastern origin. Many instinctively identify as white; many do not.

A century ago, Arabs in America campaigned strenuously to be designated as white, in part because citizenship was available only to immigrants who were Black or white. The Middle East is in Asia, but Arab immigrants seeking to become naturalized resisted the Asian label (at the time, the government used the terms “Chinese” and “Mongolian”). The Arab American Historical Foundation recounts the fascinating case of George Shishim, a policeman in Venice, Calif., who earned the enmity of a prominent lawyer when he arrested the lawyer’s son. The lawyer fought to have the arrest invalidated on the grounds that Shishim, a Lebanese immigrant, could not be a US citizen and therefore had no authority to make an arrest. During the protracted litigation that ensued, Shishim argued: “If I am a Mongolian, then so was Jesus, because we came from the same land.”

The court ruled for Shishim and ordered that he be allowed to take the oath of allegiance as a US citizen. For decades thereafter, the government classified Arabs as members of the white race. Now it will let them pick a different racial label: “Middle Eastern and North African.” Is that an improvement? Or does it amount to making a system of racial taxonomy that has always been arbitrary, divisive, and nonsensical even more so?

The fundamental truth about the ever-shifting array of racial categories on the census is that little good has ever come of them. From the outset, Americans were sorted into groups in order to facilitate discrimination and legal restrictions. When the pseudoscience of eugenics arose in the 19th century, its racist practitioners exploited census data to lend credence to their claims. In recent decades, state legislators, Republican and Democratic alike, have made use of the census to gerrymander congressional districts so that certain racial groups are deliberately lumped together — or deliberately split apart.

This whole business of counting Americans by race should have been junked long ago. “Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life,” argued Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the NAACP in 1950. “There is no understandable factual basis for classification by race.”

That isn’t merely a moral claim. It is a hard scientific truth. Race has no biological reality. The Human Genome Project confirmed in 2003 that the genetic makeup of all human beings is 99.9 percent identical. The DNA of white people is indistinguishable from the DNA of Asian people — and of Black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, and Native American people. Unlike sex, which is etched into our chromosomes, race and ethnicity are subjective social constructs. Racial categories are objectively meaningless. There is no gene for race, and differences in skin color, hair texture, or eye shape have no more significance than any other physical variations among human beings.

The Constitution requires that Americans be counted every decade. It says nothing about using the machinery of the census to sort people into social or cultural categories. Just as the federal government doesn’t ask for your religion or political affiliation or sexual orientation, it shouldn’t be asking you to choose a racial label. That’s hardly an outlandish suggestion: Many diverse democracies — including Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Israel, and Italy — do not collect official racial or ethnic statistics. Science makes it clear that race isn’t real. How long will the census keep pretending otherwise?

Biden’s Collaboration in the Murder of Laken Riley

FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Never, ever forget the precious face of this young woman.

MARK ALEXANDER

“To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens, the moment they put foot in our country, as recommended in the Message, would be nothing less, than to admit the Grecian Horse into the Citadel of our Liberty and Sovereignty.” —Alexander Hamilton (1802)

I was raised with an appreciation for humor and satire, especially the Gary Larson “Far Side” variety and, later, “National Lampoon” and “The Onion.” I lost interest in the latter two decades ago because they lost interest in posting clever and funny content. Thank goodness for our friends Seth and Dan Dillon and Kyle Mann at The Babylon Bee for rediscovering the fine art of great contemporary political and cultural satire. I always take a minute to see what news The Bee is “reporting,” the best of which appears on our site.

This week, I picked up on this one: “Facing Low Approval, Biden Promises To Start Pretending To Care About The Border.” Indeed, Joe Biden is scheduled for a border photo op Thursday. He will use that event to blame Republicans for the “border crisis” laughably claiming that not consummating the recent congressional legislation is to blame.

That headline provided a moment of levity in what has become the most disastrous of Biden’s policy failures — his disgraceful open border policy. Biden and his Demos have invited more than NINE MILLION illegal immigrants across our southern border, just one of a plethora of Biden’s failed domestic and foreign policies that have, predictably, resulted in a flood of blood on Biden’s hands.

That’s nine million that we know of — the number is substantially higher, and those who are skilled at evading detection are substantially more dangerous.

That flood of open border blood starts with massive quantities of illegal drugs flowing across the border, with less than 10% being interdicted. In January alone, there were 1,778 pounds of deadly fentanyl and 4,983 pounds of methamphetamine seized at the border. For context, the fentanyl seized that month is the equivalent of almost 403 million potentially lethal doses. Again, that is only 10% of what was muled across our border by the cartel gangs now infesting our urban centers.

Today, fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans age 18 to 45, and the death rate is up 94% over the last four years. Of the record 110,000 fatal drug overdoses recorded by the CDC last year, two-thirds involved fentanyl. Most Americans now have a connection with someone who has died of a fentanyl overdose, but the flood continues. Unfortunately, those deaths get a political pass from Demos because they draw attention to their open-border policy. But the blood of all those who have died is on Biden’s hands.

Likewise, the surge in violent crime by illegal immigrants is also getting a political pass for the same reason — and the Democrat Party’s Leftmedia talkingheads and scribes are doing their part. Unless you read news from The Patriot Post and other reputable news platforms, you would not know that in January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested, in one operation, 171 “noncitizens” with pending charges or convictions for murder, homicide, or assault against children.

Most were arrested in so-called sanctuary cities, where federal authorities get virtually no assistance from state and local authorities because leftist politicians have prohibited that support. As I noted 18 months ago, Democrat states and urban centers are deliberately withholding information on the racial, ethnic, and immigration status of violent offenders.

But that ICE operation was just a minuscule example of their annual arrest records.

According to the ICE fiscal year 2023 report, agents arrested 73,822 noncitizens with criminal histories, and also according to ICE, those arrested “had 290,178 associated charges and convictions with an average of four per individual [including] 33,209 assaults; 4,390 sex and sexual assaults; 7,520 weapons offenses; 1,713 charges or convictions for homicide; and 1,655 kidnapping offenses.” In fact, almost two-thirds of those arrested by all federal agencies today are “noncitizens.”

To be clear, those 73,822 arrests are also just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This data does not include the tens of thousands of state and local arrests of illegal immigrants and exponentially more unsolved crimes with prime suspects being illegal immigrants.

Again, the blood and suffering of now hundreds of thousands of victims of violent illegal immigrants is on Biden’s hands and those of every Demo who has signed onto his open border policy.

Occasionally, these violent offenders make national news, like when a gang of illegal immigrants recently attacked a couple of New York City police officers, then flipped off America when they were released — another great sanctuary city moment. Nate Jackson noted that, in fact, it is “Biden and other illegal alien-enabling Democrats” who are actually flipping off America.

But most often, the faces of their victims are forever forgotten.

So how do we put a face on the victims of this violence, especially given the fact that the vast majority of murders in America are ignored by Democrats because they are black-on-black? It’s almost as if the socialist Democrat Party, which has a long racist legacy, does not think “Black Lives Matter.”

Let’s start with the face of just one murder victim, Laken Hope Riley, the 22-year-old Augusta Medical University student murdered while out on a morning jog in Athens, Georgia. After police were alerted by her roommate that she had not returned from her run, they found her battered body in a wooded area nearby.

Her murder adds one more “Angel Mom” to the growing list of those with a family member murdered by an illegal immigrant.

A day after Laken Riley was found, Georgia investigators arrested 26-year-old Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. Ibarra crossed our southern border on September 8, 2022, with his pretend wife, planning to take advantage of Biden’s “catch and release” policy.

Recall that the day Biden entered office in January 2021, he began issuing 94 executive actions on immigration, most notably an order halting all construction of southern border protection walls, which had been initiated by Donald Trump. In one proclamation, he declared: “It shall be the policy of my administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall.”

Biden then discontinued Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” policy.

For the record, three days after Ibarra entered the U.S., Biden’s then “border czar,” the ever-cackling Kamala Harris, declared, “We have a secure border and that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration.”

ICE spokesperson Lindsay Williams said her agency had previously arrested Ibarra shortly after “unlawfully entering the United States: near El Paso, Texas.” She added that he “was paroled and released for further processing.” He was bused to New York, where in September of last year, he was arrested by NYPD and charged with “acting in a manner to injure a child less than 17 and a motor vehicle license violation,” but again was released. He is also suspected of being involved in the distribution of fake “green card” resident permits, one of which was in the possession of his illegal immigrant brother, who has also now been arrested.

Ibarra left New York and made his way back to Georgia, where he stands charged with murdering Laken Riley.

Much as the case with the ICE arrests of violent illegal immigrants last month, Biden’s Leftmedia publicists have suppressed news about Riley’s murderer. The Associated Press whitewashed the murder in a story carried by most of the big MSM print platforms. Likewise, the broadcast platforms obscured Ibarra’s immigration status.

CNN went as far as to fallaciously assert, “There is little evidence indicating a connection between immigration and crime.” ABC insisted the murder “turned a spotlight … on the dangers women face while running outdoors.”

Again, for the record, the same month Ibarra crossed our border, we protested, “The Biden administration has deliberately prohibited any national database of violent crimes committed by illegal aliens he has invited into our country.”

A month later we noted: “Illegal immigration is a substantial voter concern, which accounts for why there is no national database of violent crime committed by these offenders — including the terrorists, murderers, rapists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and gang members who have entered the U.S. undetected. … Every violent crime committed by Biden’s illegal pawns needs to be hung around his neck, especially since the administration is releasing illegal immigrants they know are criminals.”

Of course, as noted above, the obstacle to reliable data is the same as it is with the FBI’s overall crime surge data — i.e., Demo-controlled states and urban centers, especially those so-called sanctuary states and cities, refuse to submit information on crimes committed by illegal immigrants. However, Republicans could have passed legislation requiring the reporting of such data, tying it to federal tax dollars supporting law enforcement agencies across the country. If they had, the border would be closed today.

They didn’t, so Biden is still getting a pass on violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

Fact is, Biden is the nation’s most notorious human trafficker. And again, every violent crime committed by Biden’s illegal pawns needs to be hung around his neck.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp issued a stern rebuke of Biden, demanding answers. Kemp declared, “Because of the White House’s failures, every state is now a border state.”

In a statement, Riley’s family said: “Laken was an amazing daughter, sister, friend and overall person in general. Her love for the Lord was exemplified in every aspect of her life. She will be missed every day, but we promise to honor her life moving forward in a very big way.”

Please, never, ever, EVER forget the precious face of Laken Riley, and pray for her family through this dreadful loss.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

The Biden Administration’s Top 10 Accomplishments Of 2023

From the border to the economy, President Biden has accomplished feats in 2023 that no one ever saw coming. With so many incredible achievements for the Biden administration this year, narrowing them down was no easy task! Here are the top ten accomplishments of the Biden administration in 2023:

  1. Reduced obesity in America by making food unaffordable: So simple.
  2. Cleaned up all the cocaine bags someone was leaving around the White House: Decency restored!
  3. Kept American hostages safe from junk fees during their stay with Hamas: Not one single junk fee!
  4. Set all-time record for people illegally streaming into the U.S.: Because he’s the most popular President ever. Numbers don’t lie.
  5. Raised dementia awareness by 400%: Also, sandbag awareness.
  6. Created record numbers of new billionaires: They’re all in Ukraine, but still.
  7. Promoted transparency by releasing several “Behind-the-Scenes” videos from Capitol staffers: Campaign promise, delivered.
  8. Saved democracy by arresting political opponents and not allowing people to vote for anyone else: Thanks, Joe!
  9. Set new record by spending 40% of time on vacation: Finally giving Delaware Beach the attention it so richly deserves.
  10. Heroically stayed alive to save America from a Kamala Harris Presidency: We salute you, Mr. Biden!

What can’t Biden do?? We can’t wait to see what Joe has up his sleeve in 2024!

From our friends at The Babylon Bee.