Was New Orleans Terrorism? Duh!

insanely stupid the further we got away from it. Pretty immediately they determined that the guy who drove his truck into the crowd of people in New Orleans, which by the way, is a repeated Islamic terrorist strategy that they've done this same exact thing multiple times, where they take a truck, they drive it into some super crowded gathering of people, just like a month ago, an attack like

that happened in a German Christmas market. I guess we'll take a wild guess about the racial, ethnic, whatever profile of the person who did that attack. And yet, as Annie McCarthy writes a National Review about this, he has a very good piece about this. Basically, here's what he writes. A top official in the New Orleans Field Office leading the investigation so this is one of their geniuses we have leading the investigation. The Assistant Special Agent in charge, ALTHEA.

Duncan could not get to a microphone fast enough to state emphatically quote, this was not a terrorist attack, mind you. Jabbar had just flown from the rear hitch of his rented pickup truck. The black J Hottest flag of isis made notorious by terrorist organizations and terrorist organizations that are designated as such under the very laws that the FBI enforces.

He had just employed a classic, oft repeated g Hottest tactic of driving a vehicle into a crowd gathered for a public celebration offensive to fundamentalist Islam, in this instance, an observance of the new year, the hallmark of time measured from the birth of Jesus Christ, not the Hidra, the Hidra, which is the way of measuring time from the offh at Mohammad's migration from Mecca to Yathrib, which

happened in the year six twenty two. So they don't like the Western New Year because it's like it's basically designating time has centered around Jesus Christ rather than Muhammad.

In some Jabbar had just quote cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, as the Quran instructs in Surah three one fifty one, an injunction the fundamentalist Muslims take literally and regard as immutable one that enables terrorism by dehumanizing non believers in Sharia's supremacist eyes, because as verse one fifty one continues, their abode will be the fire and evil is the home of the wrong doers in

what realm? Again, This is Andy McCarthy writing at National Review, and McCarthy was for those who don't know his background. If you listen to John Jolready show long enough, I'm gonna read something by Andy McCarthy, who I think is great. He was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York for many years and did a lot of

stuff with terrorism. He prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombers, the guys who detonated actual bombs in the World Trade Center in the early nineties, and as a result got a lot of expertise in international terrorism and has been a big critic of particularly Obama era policies and attitudes towards international terrorism and the sort of willful PC blinders that federal counter terrorism has taken with regards to well, what is real is the role influence of Islam, the

nature of Islam within as a motivator of Islamic terrorism. And that was one of the things he had a problem with during the First World Trade Center bombing was he was trying to show, oh, no, their religious ideology is specifically what pushed what motivated these guys to do this attack. And he was having some problems during that First World Trade Center trial with getting some of that evidence in on the grounds, well it's inappropriate to bring

in their religious background. He said, well, no, it's very distinctly relevant here. So he writes about this fundamentalist Islam, which is better described as sharia supremacism, is an authoritative interpretation of Islam. It may not be the authoritative interpretation. Islamic practice and belief is diverse, so the authoritative version

really doesn't exist. And this plays off a thing that was a problem even in the Bush era, where Bush was sort of saying, well, Islam is a religion of peace and that this is a perversion of Islam, which I always sort of thought like, is it are we actually the right people to be judging what is and is not authoritative Islam because a lot of aspects of Islam that we would view as out of bounds that most Americans with views out of bounds are accepted and

practiced by large swaths of the Middle Eastern world. And McCarthy's sort of making this point, fundamentalist Islam, Sharia premisism whatever is undoubtedly an authoritative interpretation of Islam. It is so dominant, So dominant is it in the Muslim Middle East that it is accepted as authoritative even by Muslims who, in their private thoughts and lives do not necessarily believe

or practice it. That is because it is an Islam supported by more than a millennium of scholarship and championed by some of the world's most influential Muslim nations such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, some of the world's most prominent Muslim establishments such as Al Ajar University in Cairo, organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its global tentacles and figures such as the late Shikh use of Karadawi and Turkey strongman Receptayep Erduan, a key backer of the

Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Sunni Jihatis tied to such groups as al Qaida and ISIS. Under this fundamentalist interpretation, it is the duty of Muslims to spread Islam by implementing Sharia, Allah's law and societal framework. This can be done in many ways. One of those ways undeniably endorsed by scripture is jihad or struggle in Allah's cause, which is the spread of Islam. In its classic understanding, jihad is a

military struggle. Jihad is cons disidered defensive when Muslims deem themselves under attack, in which case all Muslims are obliged to support. The jihad under attack is in the eye

of the beholder. Sharia supremacists perceive Islam to be under attack, for example, if a territory that was once under Muslim rule falls under the control of non Muslims, or if Muslims form an enclave in the West and the local government interferes with their determination to live under Sharia's struct strictures rather than the jurisdiction's laws, or if Muslims are

aggressors and the aggrieved people dare to fight back. Western progressives because they tend to be hostile to religion in general see religion as outdated superstition and can't fathom the centrality of religion to others when it is avoid in their own lives. They do not take Sharia supremacism seriously as an ideology. For them, Muslims are just an oppressed other resisting their oppressors and the white male Judaeo Christian power structure. In this way of thinking, why Muslims themselves

may believe they must resist is beside the point. This is the silly thing about the sort of bizarre alliance between the modern left and the pro Palestine movement of the Middle East. The Hamas led anti Israeli movement in the Middle East is based on all kinds of Sharia inspired hatred of the Jews and this notion that basically the Jewish state was created in nineteen forty eight on land that Muslims had controlled, and therefore it's inherently wrong.

It violates this Sharia supremacist view of the world, and so all military violence, etc. Is justified to push them out. Modern day liberals in America support this cause because they somehow have it in their heads that the Israelis are white and the Muslims are brown. And that this is Western colonialism, and that that's what this struggle is, which couldn't be absolutely nothing to do with what's going on.

Since progressives don't take religious beliefs seriously, McCarthy writes, they regard religion as an abstraction that, though obsolescent, has certain universal, well meaning attributes. In the case of Islam, the relevant one is peace. People who study sharia supremacism forthrightly note its propensity toward militant jihad when Muslims become a critical mass of the population in a given place. Progressives reject this, demagoguing it as Islamophobia, as if critical examination were the

equivalent of racism. Ergo the regnant syllogism. Religion is peace. Islam is one of the world's great religions, with close to two billion adherents. Therefore, is Islam is altogether now a religion of peace? What to do about? What then, do we do about fundamentalist Muslims and the inconvenience that some of them routinely engage in violent attacks easy people who claim religious justification for brutality are simply said to be engaged in false religion. After all, true religion is

inherently peaceful. Indeed, to hear progressives describe the Islam of their very own that they've fashioned, you'd think peace might be Islam's only tenant. Consequently, another syllogism, religion is peaceful. Al Qaeda and ISIS, among other jihadist groups, unabashedly claim Islamic tenets as justification for committing violence. Therefore, al Qaida and Isis represent false Islam. And this is the thing I've always thought was stupid. Well, they're just al qaida Is.

This is a perversion of Islam, perversion of the one of the world's great religions. Well, it's a version of it that has a pretty long standing track record in the Middle East. Again, this rationalization is at war with reality, McCarthy writes, in which there is an authentic Islam that summons Muslims to wage jihad and Allah's cause and has been doing so for centuries. But onreality is where the

FBI dwells. And don't blame the FBI for that. While I have no doubt that asak Alathea, Duncan and other agents recruited and promoted since the Obama era are perfectly comfortable spouting the party line. It is the party line imposed on the Bureau by its superiors. McCarthy continues, I used to feel confident, saying that most agents doing actual investigations don't buy into this nonsense. But fifteen years is a long time enough to change in agency's culture, which

Obama undertook to do. Recall the purging of such terms as jihad, the termination of instructors versed in Sharia supremacism, and the instructions that agents should avoid noticing any nexus between ideology and violence, a core principle in the transformation of counter terrorism into what Obama fileds dubbed countering violent extremism. So basically, what the upshot of all this is when

a terrorist. When an obvious Muslim terrorist attack happens, the FBI starts from the premise that it is not terrorism unless agents can establish a solid operational tie between the Muslim who committed the attack and a group designated as a foreign terrorist organization under federal law, such as Al Qaeda or ISIS. The Bureau has no problem labeling such an incident a terrorist attack because the government's official position is that those groups are driven by false Islam i e.

Their claim to be faithful Muslims is deemed false. There's no danger then that the FBI in the US government will be perceived as linking terrorism to Islam because that's a religion of peace, or so they tell themselves. Now it also just sort of seems just my comment to in here, the rush to say it's not terrorism when what you of course it's terroristic. He he killed a whole group of people in this bizarre fashion. You don't

do that if it's not terrorism. That that you can't kill a large crowd of people celebrating at a party without it being terrorism. That that's just what I don't know. It's it's like, I don't know, it's like beating up your wife without unkindness. There's no way to beat up your wife that isn't unkind Obviously it's terroristic, that the

fact of it happening is terroristic. I guess it's questionable whether this guy had set up formal operational connections and coordination with ISIS or al Qaeda, or some international terrorist group designated as a terrorist group by our US government, even though he was flying an ISIS flag at the time. Maybe it was was he inspired by or actually coordinating with Probably at that very early stage when that special agent ran to the microphone and declared it's not a

terrorist attack. Probably at that point it was not clear whether the guy was in coordination with an international terrorist group. Maybe he just did it on his own, inspired by isis okay say that, but don't tell me it's not terroristic? All right? When we return. A great question that was asked of Joe Biden regarding terrorism, whether he still thinks white supremacy terrorism is the most imminent threat to the

United States. Next on the John Girardi Show, President Biden had a little press conference at some point after the terrorist attack. It actually wasn't President Biden, it was just a one of It was the January third Daily Press briefing with Karine Jean Pierre, the President's press secretary, and she ducked this question that was asked by Lucas Fox Lucas Tomlinson, Sorry, Lucas Tomlinson from Fox News. He was

reported there as she was leaving the briefing room. He asked out loud, didn't look at him, didn't address it. Does the President still consider white supremacy the greatest terrorist threat to the United States? Let's talk about that. Now.

Some of you may recall, after January sixth, the Attorney General Merrick Garland, President Biden, everyone in the Biden administration solemnly stood there and declared to us all that white supremacy was the greatest terrorist threat facing the United States of America. White supremacist white supremacist terrorism, home grown white supremacy terrorism, the greatest threat facing the country, and that

January sixth of twenty twenty one was an example of this. Now, I'm not here to say January sixth was good, and I hate that I have to do.

don't think need to be prosecuted. The idea that this became the largest criminal investigation in the history of the FBI is an absolute, absolute idiocy and obviously smacks of political retribution, the fact that people, some of whom were just waved in, who committed crimes no worse than trespass.

Basically that the full resources of the federal government are used to prosecute people far flung all over the United States who were there, happened to be there at January sixth, happened to walk through the barrier at some point, are being prosecuted. Look the guys who were punching police officers or breaking windows or whatever.

supporters who thought the election had been stolen. Some of them were black, probably not most of them, certainly not most of them, but some of them were black. I'd be curious to hear how many African Americans were prosecuted as part of the January sixth prosecutions. So, but why was the FBI able to cast this as white supremacy. I think it's because of the way in which academic liberals have recast the whole notion of white supremacy into

this far broader category. That basically they have expanded the notion of white supremacy into just basically anyone who favors sort of policy prescriptions that liberals don't like, people who don't like equity as a measure of who don't like equity and favor equality, the idea of someone who favors the oppressive patriarchal norms, or I don't know, the basically white supremacy got so wildly expanded as to be an almost meaningless label that the left and the FBI, the

Department of Justice started to apply to basically anyone they disliked. Now the question gets raised, is white supremacist terrorism really the chief terrorist threat facing the country? Because last I checked, there what white supremacist terrorism has actually happened in this country since January sixth, Which, even if if you want to go so far as to call it a white supremacist event, which I think is ridiculous, I'm sorry, I haven't heard of any. Look, actual, honest to god, white

supremacism bad thing. Don't like it. If you know of any white supremacist committing crimes, let's prosecute them, put them in jail. I don't like neo Nazis. I don't like non neo Nazis any all stripes of Nazis, Illinois Nazis.

I hate Illinois Nazis. If you've got some white supremacists out there committing you know, driving pickup trucks and killing ten people during parties in New Orleans, or planting bombs around the French Quarter near the cathedral down there, if you've got white supremacists doing that kind of stuff, please let me know. I'll be first in line to say that they need to be prosecuted. It's not happening. I think there are other kinds of terrorism that are still

pretty serious threats. By the way, I feel like it's been pretty quiet the investigation into the terrorist attack in New Orleans, by the way, other than this one guy that they killed, and clearly he wasn't acting alone. He had put bombs around different parts of the French Quarter that were found and safely detonated. Feels odd we haven't

heard more about all this anyway. When we return, a Republican member of the House calls for the stupidest idea I've heard in a while, mandating independent redistricting commissions in every state. Next on the John Girardi Show, So I saw a little little quickie news story. Republicans just desperate to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, is introducing a bill to

mandate one of the dumber ideas I've ever heard. Or I don't know, maybe I'm being too harsh, but and maybe it's a thing where in one maybe it's a thing where it just won't really change anything more so than it's going to do something actively bad. But let's let's talk it through. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick has introduced a bill to mandate independent redistricting commissions in every state. The people who recommend independent redistricting commissions, it's people who get

real upset over jerrymandering. Jerrymandering is the practice where the what is the the what are the boundary lines of the congressional district you live in? How did those boundary lines come to be drawn? Well, for most states and most of American history, it happens like this. Every ten years in America, we have a census nineteen ninety two, ten, twenty twenty. Based off that census data, different states are allocated a different number of seats in the House of

Representatives in Congress. So, oh, okay, California's population jumped by this is not true. I'm just making this up as an example. Okay, if California's population jump by a million people, they get two more members of the House of Representatives. Okay, brings their total account of congressmen from forty eight to fifty or something like that. All right, Oh, Wyoming's population jumped big time. They may move up from having only

one member of the House of Representatives now they have two. Hey, what do you know? So every ten years, the census happens, and reapportionment happens. As a result, changes the number of members of the House of Representatives that a state has. It thus changes the number of Electoral College votes that a state has. The number of Electoral College votes your state has, it's the combined number of how many House

seats you have plus your two Senate seats. So Wyoming only has Wyoming and Alaska only have one member of the House of Representatives and they have two senators. So Wyoming and Alaska each have three electoral College votes. California, though, has I forget what it is. California has like something like I think like forty eight members of the House

Representatives represent California plus the two senators. California gets a total of like fifty electoral College votes somewhere around that ballpark. Now you get apportioned all these House seats, Well, how do you draw the map of the specific regions that these individual members of the House Representatives will represent. Furthermore, for state legislators, how do you draw their district lines? Well, again,

it's based off of the census data. So every ten years you have a census and somehow you've got to draw all the lines. For Okay, we have eighty members of the California State Assembly. We got forty members of the state Senate. How do we draw their lines? Well, historically, the way this was done and the way it's done in most states is the state legislatures draw the lines.

The state legislators draw the lines for members of the House representatives and they draw the lines for members of the state legislature, and political parties being aggressive towards their own self interest. When one political party is in power in a state legislature, they try their best to draw the maps in a way that's advantageous to them, and this might result in districts drawn that looked weird. And we call this process jerry mandering. The term came from

an eighteen twelve political cartoon. This was a state Senate election, and the governor of Massachusetts at the time was this guy named Elbridge Gary spelled g r ry, even though it was pronounced Gary with a hard G. But over time it started to be pronounced as jerry jerry mandering. And this political cartoon showed this one state Senate district that was drawn in this really weird fashion. They drew it to it looked like a monster, so they drew

it almost looks like a dragon. And this bizarrely shaped district that was clearly drawn to benefit the Democratic Republicans. Elbridge Gary, by the way, would go on to be a Vice President of the United States. Now so ever, since that time, ever since that event, advantageously drawing weirdly shaped, non naturally shaped districts for the political advantage of one side over another has been referred to as jerry mandering, and basically, and then people took the term jerry mandering

and started to apply it to other specific politicians. In eighteen fifty, jerry mandering was sometimes used in reference to California Governor Jerry Brown Perry mandering was used for Texas Governor Rick Perry and some Texas electoral maps that were drawn under him, et cetera, et cetera. Now people get all bent out of shape about jerry mandering. They really do. There's a certain class of people who just think that it's the worst thing ever. I sort of accept it

as Look, this is governed by the political process. It's a political thing. The framers of the Constitution surely understood that politicians would try to advantageously draw these districts. It was put in the hands of the political process, political players, political actors making their political coalitions. We're going to advantageously do this. So I've never really cared about jerry mandering.

It's sort of what I dislike are people who pretend like jerry mandering is so awful and then engage in it anyway, and that's basically precisely what we have in California. So there are people who get so angry about jerrymandering, and particularly they get angry about it when Republicans do it.

That's the main thing. Most of the people who say they dislike jerrymandering, they get suspiciously quiet when Democrats do it in absurd ways in states like Illinois or Maryland where Democrats have controlled the process and draw up the most insane maps possible, maps with these big, long, thin districts connecting completely separate disparate cities from one another, because that'll make a more effective map. What they don't like

is when Republicans do it. Now, there's this legacy of whites in the South drawing electoral maps deliberately to deprive any sort of electoral power to African American voters. You take some African American section of town and instead of making it a natural kind of district, you do whatever you can to lessen the power of an African American population.

So they did this in a number of ways. One way would be to sort of split up this one African American section, this one African American heavy region, almost to divide it up into little individual pizza slices where it's divided up as members of a bunch of different congressional districts, and none of them do African Americans have

anything close to political power. Or another way to do it is, if you have too many African Americans and there's no way to stop them from having political power, you just shove them all into one district so that all the other districts don't lack any African American participation whatsoever. And you can draw and in order to do either of those two things, you can draw maps that are are oddly shaped and that combine regions that don't have

any sort of natural ties to each other. So there was kind of an ugly legacy of that, and some of the federal voting Rights Acts and then state voting rights acts, particularly California that were past, were designed to stop that from happening, but have resulted in bizarre outcomes here in California, where you know, Latinos are a historically oppressed minority, where you can't do that too, even though Latinos in a lot of regions of California, maybe California

in general are now basically the majority. And there's also the problem of, well, the point of it's okay to draw district lines in a way that's politically advantageous. The problem is, well, what if that political advantage lines up with racial demographics. African Americans tend to vote Democrat. So if I draw a map that's intended just to favor Republicans, it's not intended to be racist or any I'm just

trying to have my Republicans win. Is that against the law? Well, the interpretation by some courts has been that, yes, if the outcome has the effect of disadvantaging a racial minority, then therefore it violates the law, and that that is certainly that's the interpretation, certainly in California. Now, with all of this, the idea came about of why do we let the political process play out here? Why do we let political parties decide all of this? We should have

an independent redistricting commission. If we have an independent redistricting commission, then it can put together district lines that are more natural that makes sense, that won't do racially bigoted things, and it'll put meaningful communities together without the motivation of politics. So Honald I love this idea and pushed it through a ballot initiative that, of course we it's California's pass We passed the Independent Redistricting Commission. We also passed idiotically

the jungle primary. Schwarzenegger had this beautiful, brilliant vision of a post political partisanship era for California politics, which have just become more politically partisan than ever. Why well, because the Independent Redistricting Commission just became Both the political parties noticed, hey, if we could get hard partisans for our party on this independent redistricting Commission, we could draw the lines in

ways that are advantageous to us. So what happened. Both parties rushed to get as many of their partisans as humanly possible on the Independent Redistricting Commission, with predictable results. Democrats got more, and the redistricting in California has been predictably one sided. Democrats have drawn the lines in a way that's really advantageous to them. Certainly that's their intent.

Remember what I said about, you know, hey, the example of you take all of the African Americans and shove them into one district so that none of the other districts have their influence. Basically, Democrats have just done that to Republicans here in the San Joaquin Valley. They take every heavy Republican enclave in central California and they shoved it into what was Kevin McCarthy's district is now Vince Fong's district. Right, I tweeted out what Vince Fong's map

looks like. It kind of looks like the number three. It's got the main body of it along the right side is kind of very little population. Mostly it's just the Sierra Nevadas. But then it's got three spurs that come out. One is kind of Clovid, yes, the other is Lamore for some reason, not Daanuba, not a bunch of cities in between Lamore and Fresno, but Lamore. And then a third spur goes around around the city of Bakersfield, basically, I think all the more conservative rural parts of Kern County.

It's this bizarrely shaped thing that now it's the result is I live in Clovis and my Member of Congress is from Bakersfield. I like Vince Fog a lot, but he is not from where I am. And of course, what a natural grouping Clovis, Lamore, and the area around Bakersfield. What do those three cities have in common? I mean, not very much. I can tell you that. I mean, I guess we're all in the San Joaquin Valley, but that certainly there's nothing about Lamore that I that I have.

You know, I don't know. I think I have at least as much in common with Dai Nuba as I have Lamore and Delano and Wasco. But those are all cities that are no part of this district. And it's all sort of specifically drawn so that Jim Costa can have his Democrat majority area, Adam Gray will have his Democrat majority area. David Valadeo keeps winning even though it's a Democrat majority district that he keeps winning it anyway, it's the same old nonsense, just under a different package.

When we return, Justin Trudeau stepping down as Canadian Prime Minister my conspiracy theory I will never let go of. Next on the John Gardi Show, Justin Trudeau announced he'll be stepping down as Canadian Prime minister. And I just want to let everyone know I don't like a lot of conspiracy theories, but here's one I do hold on to. Still kind of think Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro's son. If you haven't heard of this, just google Fidel Castro,

Justin Trudeau. There was some point where his mom and had met Fidel Castro that there might have been some up. Some people say there's no opportunity. He looks exactly like a young Fidel Castro. It's insane. That'll do it. John Jardy Show, See you next time on Power Talk