The Worst Week Yet:
October 22-28, 2023

2,166 words

The Ritualized Defacement of Robert E. Lee

Although it often gets lost amid the subsequent media hysteria and toxic infighting that followed in the wake of August 2017’s hyper-ironically titled “Unite the Right” rally, the event’s initial intent was to prevent a massive bronze sculpture of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from being removed by the members of a largely white-hostile and seemingly illiterate city government in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Lee statue, along with one of Stonewall Jackson, was finally removed in 2021 amid cheers. At the time, Mayor Nikuyah Walker — one of millions of overweight black women who now populate the former Confederacy — gloated, “Today the statue comes down and we are one small step closer to a more perfect union.”

When in world history have fat black women made anything “more perfect”?

Last week, two years after the Lee statue was removed from its cement perch, it was finally melted down. Lee’s bronze head was ripped from his body, his face was peeled from his head in the form of a death mask, and then it was super-heated to the point where it glowed, offering the stark and ghastly image of a military leader — who by multiple accounts was a gracious and noble man — suffering amid hellfire for all eternity.

According to NPR, the molten remains of Lee’s statue are going to be recycled into “New, More Inclusive Public Art” as part of a project called “Swords into Plowshares.” Jalane Schmidt, a mulatto woman who is a project organizer, says, “We want to transform something that has been toxic in the Charlottesville community.” Yet another black woman named Andrea Douglas, who is executive director of Charlottesville’s Jefferson School African American Cultural Center and is leading the project to reincarnate Robert E. Lee into something more digestible to black women, says, “The act of myth-making that has occurred around Robert E. Lee, removing his face is emblematic of the kind of removal of that kind of myth.”

When will our shattered, defaced, and melted-down culture address the myth that black people are capable of building prosperous, or even functional, societies?

New Court Depositions Allege that the Man Who Performed George Floyd’s Autopsy Lied About the Cause of Death

Why, it was only three summers ago that our already irretrievably broken nation shattered itself into more pieces over the Big Lie that fentanyl addict, porn star, convicted robber, and banana-purchaser George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by racist cops.

Last week, new testimony emerged from depositions taken this past summer for a sex-discrimination lawsuit filed by Amy Sweasy, a former prosecutor in Hennepin County, Minnesota. In her deposition, Sweasy says she spoke with Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker the day after Floyd’s death.

On May 26, 2020, the day after Floyd joined the choir invisible, Baker had conducted an autopsy on Floyd. He initially told Hennepin County prosecutors:

The autopsy revealed no physical evidence suggesting that Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation. Mr. Floyd did not exhibit signs of petechiae, damage to his airways or thyroid, brain bleeding, bone injuries, or internal bruising.

According to Sweasy, shortly before Baker performed the autopsy:

I called Dr. Baker early that morning to tell him about the case and to ask him if he would perform the autopsy on Mr. Floyd. He called me later in the day on that Tuesday and he told me that there were no medical findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of Mr. Floyd’s neck. There were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation.

Sweasy said that the next day, Baker was acutely aware of the grave personal risks should he tell the truth:

He said to me, “Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?” And then he said, “This is the kind of case that ends careers.”

In August 2021, an exhibit emerged in the criminal case of Tuo Thao, an Asian-American officer who was at the scene with Derek Chauvin, memorializing a conference in 2020 between Dr. Roger Mitchell, a black former medical examiner in Washington, DC, and a group of Minneapolis prosecutors. It alleged that Mitchell, encouraged by Minnesota’s black Attorney General Keith Ellison, who’d been affiliated with the Nation of Islam, placed pressure on Coroner Andrew Baker to somehow slip “neck compression” into Floyd’s official cause of death. According to the exhibit:

[Mitchell] said there was a way to articulate the cause and manner of death that ensures you are telling the truth about what you are observing on the body and via all of the investigation. Mitchell said neck compression has to be in the diagnosis.

Later that day, Baker’s office issued a press release stating:

Cause of death: Cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.

You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.

And thus, through the alleged meddling of two black activists placed in positions of power and influence, the country was allowed to burn while one innocent officer was convicted of murder and three other officers were found guilty on federal charges of depriving George Floyd of his civil rights.

None of this ever would have happened if Floyd had merely used a legitimate twenty-dollar bill to purchase his banana.

Metastasis in the Middle East

This column’s last installment two weeks ago, before I took a much-needed vacation to the desert Southwest, involved the initial paragliding attack by Hamas into Israel and the predictably rabid, frothing, and perverted bloodlust that emerged in its wake as a bored, listless, and easily brainwashed public agitated for severe vengeance, even if it meant, you know, the end of the world.

Since things get worse every week, they’ve gotten doubly worse since that column. Among the developments:

• Israel has bombed Gaza Dresden-style along with denying its residents water, electricity, and Internet access. Whereas 1,400 or so Israelis were said to have perished in the initial onslaught, Palestinian authorities claim that 7,300 civilians in Gaza have been killed, including 3,000 children.
• The United States has moved aircraft carriers and dozens of transport planes into the Middle East.
• Despite Joe Biden’s initial claim that he’d seen photos of babies beheaded by Hamas, the White House has walked back that assertion and zero evidence has emerged to substantiate the hyperbolic tabloid-style allegations of 40 headless Israeli babies.
• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has referred to Hamas as “freedom fighters,” accused Israel of war crimes, and has hinted that he may declare war on Israel when they least expect it: “From now on, we will continue on our path with the motto that we may suddenly knock on your door one night.”
• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov alleged that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza violates international law.
• Iran is practicing war games.
• Chinese Premier Li Qiang has stated, “China will continue to firmly support Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national dignity, and will strongly oppose any external forces interfering in Iran’s internal affairs.”
• In one of world history’s most ironic political developments, Germany has proposed a law denying citizenship to “anti-Semites.”

A Symphony of Despair (in Four Movements)

With all due respect — and occasional fondness — for our readers in Ohio, I rarely think of that state as a repository of stunning natural beauty. Rusted-out asphalt slagheaps such as Cleveland, Toledo, and Youngstown are so hideous that they almost round the corner and impress with a stunning sort of anti-beauty. Cincinnati is sort of pretty, at least by Ohio standards, due to its riverside setting and the fact that it still boasts some great old buildings, most likely because it was never thoroughly gentrified. By and large, though, I find the Buckeye State to be a flat and bleak eyesore, and this includes its capital city, Columbus.

My first of four tales of soul-scarring American ennui comes from Columbus, where the state has indicted a rusted-out husk of a woman named Rebecca Auborn on four counts of murder and several other felony charges in connection with what may emerge as the most high-profile case of a serial-killing prostitute since Aileen Wuornos was arrested down in Florida in 1991.

Auborn, who is 33 but looks 66, is suspected of meeting men for sex in northeast Columbus, then dosing them with fentanyl so she could rob them. Although details are scant, it appears that her modus operandi was to slip fentanyl in the crack pipes of her johns, who were apparently so mortified that not only had they just reached climax with a woman who looks like an understudy for the Grim Reaper but that they paid for the experience, they needed a few puffs of crack cocaine or smokable meth to flee the horrid reality of what had just transpired. After her victims went night-night, Auborn is accused of then making off with their credit cards, automobiles, and in apparently one instance, their ill-fitting red Ronald McDonald wig.

One victim survived an attempted overdose on December 12, 2022. Since then, police say that four have died between January 15 and June 17 of this year. Court records state that Auborn has already admitted to detectives that on March 31, she placed a fentanyl nugget into a man’s crackpipe and was aware he was overdosing when she left his hotel room with his car keys and credit card.

Auborn, who has no prior criminal history, had a daughter who died in 2016 at only 18 days old, which is suspicious enough that authorities would probably be wise to open an investigation as to the causes of the infant’s death.

My second tale of despair comes from the monosyllabic state of Maine, which is beautiful this time of year — that is, when gunmen who’ve recently been fired from their job at the local recycling plant and suffered a breakup with their longtime girlfriend aren’t walking into local entertainment centers to shoot down 18 local yokels ranging in age from 14 to 76.

Last Wednesday evening in Lewiston, Maine, 40-year-old Robert Card strolled into the Just-in-Time Recreation center armed with a rifle and began blasting randomly at people. Fatalities included three young people who were competing in a “cornhole tournament for the deaf.” Card then drove four miles and entered Schemengees Bar & Grille and continued mowing down revelers. With 18 fatalities, Card’s spree became the year’s largest mass shooting.

A two-day manhunt ended when Card’s body was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot inside a box trailer ten miles away, at the Maine Recycling Corporation that had recently fired him. It then emerged that when Card had been in the Army, a federal agent had told military personnel that Card had said he’d been “hearing voices” and fantasized about “hurting other people.”

Last Sunday in Portland, Oregon, an off-duty pilot named Joseph David Emerson was arrested when an Alaska Airlines flight that had been scheduled to fly from Seattle to San Francisco abruptly changed its itinerary after Emerson allegedly tried to shut off the gasoline supply to the jet’s engines while it was peacefully sailing along at cruising altitude. Emerson — who’d been sitting in an extra cockpit seat known as a “jumpseat” and idly chatting with the plane’s pilots at the moment he suddenly blurted out “I’m not okay,” sprang to his feet, and attempted to yank the handles that control the plane’s fire suppression system — wasn’t able to fully pull the levers down before other pilots prevented him. According to court documents, if he’d successfully pulled them down, “then it would have shut down the hydraulics and the fuel to the engines, turning the aircraft into a glider within seconds.”

According to witnesses, Emerson then exited the cockpit and calmly walked toward the back of the plane, where he told a flight attendant, “You need to cuff me right now or it’s going to be bad.” The attendant then bound his wrists with a pair of flex cuffs.

Emerson later told detectives that 48 hours before his attempted stunt, he’d eaten some psychedelic mushrooms. He also said that during the prior six months, he’d been depressed over a friend’s death. He allegedly stated that when he had tried to pull the fire-suppression levers, he was feeling dehydrated, hadn’t slept in 40 hours, felt he was having a “nervous breakdown,” and did it because “I thought I was dreaming and I just wanna wake up.” When an officer asked him if he was trying to commit suicide, he responded that he was “trying to wake up and did not feel like this was real, though it felt real now.”

Emerson was booked into jail on 83 counts of attempted murder.

The final movement in this week’s symphony of despair comes from central Florida, where 31-year-old mother of two Catorreia Hutto leapt to her death off a bridge into Lake Jesup. As a local fisherman dragged her body out of the water, authorities made a wellness check on her five-year-old special-needs twins, Ahmad and Ava. The preschoolers were found lying dead in their beds of unspecified causes, presumably murdered by their mother.

And that’s it for this week. Unless the planet is obliterated in a thermonuclear hot war, I’ll see you next Monday.