05/15/2019
As Ann Coulter has noted in two articles (Media Pot Reporting — Just Don’t Call Us Uncool! and There Really Are "High Crimes"), award-winning author and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has shown that marijuana use is frequently seen in under-reported murders.
As I noted below, one of them is the anti-white hate crime committed by William T. Jones in Cleveland, who shot a white man to death and seriously wounded a white woman because of "Black Lives Matter" ideology.
William T. Jones named local black nationalist Lebron James (you may have hear of him) as his inspiration for this under-reported crime.
Here’s a brief excerpt form Berenson’s book, which Ann quoted in her column tonight:
So where are all the heinous murders committed by psychotic cannabis users?
Turns out they are all over, hiding in plain sight.
Scientists like to say that the plural of anecdote is not data. In other words, don’t draw conclusions based on stories, no matter how convincing they sound. Just because you know someone whose toddler was diagnosed with autism a week after a vaccination doesn’t mean vaccines cause autism. (They don’t.)
But no one ever points out the statement is true in reverse. If the scientific evidence suggests that a phenomenon is common, then that phenomenon should be easy to spot in the real world. The issue of marijuana and violence proved the point. Once I started looking, I found a long parade of cases, each more terrible than the rest.…
I can identify with that statement, although my focus is different:
Advocates for the mentally ill often say the media stigmatizes people with schizophrenia by highlighting crimes they’ve committed. The truth is the opposite. Reporters and news outlets dislike covering these cases, especially when the victims are family members. The crimes are brutal and ugly but without much mystery. People with severe psychosis rarely make much effort to hide what they’ve done. Even when they do, they are obvious suspects, and police often arrest them quickly. These are the murders the New York Post writes about for a day or two and the elite media ignores as tabloid fodder.
The elite media is dying because they simply refuse to do their job. The "tabloid fodder" is the news people want to know, and "journalists" don’t want to give it to them.
Still, the cases popped up frequently. After a while, I grew to recognize murders that involved psychosis even when it wasn’t explicitly mentioned. They were chilling both in their lack of obvious motive and in the degree of violence. Often, they involved bats or knives rather than firearms. They were the cases where parents suffocated infant children, or children clubbed their adult parents, or men stabbed to death women they’d never met before in libraries.
Of course, I couldn’t always be sure cannabis played a role. Prosecutors don’t usually bother with a marijuana charge when they indict someone for beheading his best friend. But mental illness is no barrier to having a Twitter account or a Facebook page.
Over and over, I found that defendants themselves revealed either their love of marijuana or their psychosis or both.…
And here’s one of the under-reported cases:
Sometimes the marijuana connection came not out of social media but from the comments of prosecutors. In May 2018 … a Cleveland judge sentenced William T. Jones Jr. to sixty-three years in prison for the murder of a uniformed Salvation Army volunteer in December 2017. Video shows that Jones walked to up to the man, 21-year-old Jared Plesec, and shot him in the head without warning.
After shooting Plesec, Jones did not immediately try to escape. Instead he went on an incoherent four-minute rant that a passerby captured on video. “F---Trump,” he yelled. “They’re going to kill us all.” Then he ran off, tried to carjack two vehicles, and wounded several other people before being arrested. At his sentencing hearing, a prosecutor said that blood samples taken from Jones after his arrest tested positive only for marijuana and no other drugs.
The thing is, as I explained at some length in Hate Crime In Cleveland: William T. Jones’s Killing Of Jared Plesec Caused By Hatred Of Whites, As Well As Marijuana,this shooting, while obviously the act of a crazy man, was not motiveless. It was a Black Lives Matter-inspired killing, like the murders of NYPD officers Wen-Jian Liu and Raphael Ramos by Ismaaiyl Abdul Brinsley, the murders of five police officers in Dallas by Micah X. Johnson, three in Baton Rouge, by Gavin Eugene Long, et cetera.
It had white victims and a black gunman, which is the most important thing about this crime, as prosecutors, judge, local media, and gunman William T. Jones himself all agreed. See Murder of Salvation Army worker appears 'racially motivated,' prosecutor says, Cleveland19.com, December 12, 2017 and '63 minutes of mayhem': killer of Cleveland Salvation Army worker cursed Trump in Facebook Live after murder, by Cory Shaffer, Cleveland.com, May 21, 2018, which quotes Jones’s self-justifying sentencing statement.
There’s none of that in Berenson’s book, although his source is presumably the "63 minutes of mayhem" article quoted above. (Another thing not in Berenson’s book:footnotes.) Berenson has done a lot of valuable research on the marijuana thing, but apparently years of being an award-winning author and New York Times reporter teach that there are some things you're not supposed to Notice.
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