Maine Journalist Almost Got Murdered by a Crazy Person and It's All on Camera

 

Maine Wire reporter Joe Sokol was taping a segment outside a methadone clinic when he was nearly run down by a crazed motorist who was unhappy about what Sokol said was an invasion of privacy. Sokol said the driver might have been under the influence, as the driver’s speech seemed mumbled and slurred. Sokol was well within his rights: he was not on the clinic’s property but across the street. 

The driver drove off, made a U-turn in the nearby parking lot, and then gunned it toward Sokol, who got out of the way. Sokol recorded the driver’s tags as he sped away. Sokol was reporting on the clinic, which has received $25 million in taxpayer funds. This isn’t the first time Maine Wire reporters have been assaulted or accosted while doing their job. Sokol was shoved by an anti-Trump protester in July. (via Maine Wire):

A Maine Wire reporter was involved in a potentially dangerous confrontation with a driver Thursday morning while reporting outside a Bangor methadone clinic.

Reporter Joe Sokol was conducting reporting from public property near Bangor Comprehensive Treatment Center, also known as Discovery House BR Inc., at 689 Odlin Road when a driver confronted him and attempted to interfere with his work.

Maine Wire Editor-in-Chief Steve Robinson said the driver recognized Sokol as a reporter and confronted him in an apparent effort to interfere with his reporting.

“The bedlamite identified Sokol as a journalist and expressed a clear intent to stop him from conducting routine journalism from public property,” Robinson said in a statement.

Robinson alleged that the driver then attempted to strike Sokol with a vehicle, characterizing the incident as an attempted killing.

Sokol was able to move out of the vehicle’s path and was not injured.

Robinson said Sokol also recorded the vehicle’s license plate immediately after the encounter, allowing police to identify the driver.

“Sokol’s quick-thinking and training immediately allowed him to preserve the license plate,” Robinson said. “He is unharmed and safe.”

The Maine Wire identified the vehicle as a blue Jeep Compass bearing Maine registration 841-LZD.

[…]

Sokol had been reporting on Bangor Comprehensive Treatment Center, an active medication-assisted-treatment facility that provides methadone treatment. The Maine Wire said the facility has received roughly $25 million in taxpayer funding.

The incident comes amid a series of confrontations involving Maine Wire reporters this year. In January, reporter Jon Fetherston was physically confronted while covering a Lewiston City Council meeting, and in July he was shoved, spat on and struck in the head with a skateboard while livestreaming an anti-ICE protest in Biddeford; a man was later charged with assault in connection with that incident.

It Isn't Racist to Not Want to Die

 Facts don’t have to be warm and friendly to keep you alive.

One of science's biggest challenges is separating an experiment from its surroundings. When measuring the energy of a chemical reaction, one has to completely isolate the experiment from its surroundings. Doing so might only require running the reaction in a thick container of Styrofoam so that no energy comes into or goes out of the reaction chamber. A very expensive accelerator (CERN) in Europe had electrical noise, and they couldn’t understand why. For a prize of a bottle of champagne, they challenged their scientists to find a solution. A fellow looked at a local train schedule and determined that a train that ran near the facility perfectly accounted for the timing of the unwanted noise.

With our Flydubai plane, we have a perfectly isolated “community”. The numbers keep changing, but apparently there were around 180 people on the plane. Most were Israelis, which no doubt includes Jews, Arab Muslims and Arab Christians. Few Emiratis visit Israel, but we’ll assume that cabin crew and security included some UAE citizens. There were the two ostensibly white Christian backup pilots who landed the plane. All of the people listed above wanted to live. Each expected to arrive in Tel Aviv and continue with his or her life. And then there was the Omani Muslim pilot. As President Trump mentioned, we still don’t know if he was a terrorist or a “whack job”. If he was a terrorist, and that’s where I would place my bet, then we have the case of one guy who wanted to die and take with him 179 other people who wanted to live. And this is the problem of Islam in the West.

An interesting clause in the Abraham Accords is that any pilots flying between Israel and other countries must come from states that recognize both Israel and the Arab country source/destination. By those rules, the Omani pilot should have been disqualified from being in the right seat of the 737 Max. Why was he there? This question will have to be answered by UAE officials as part of their investigation. The reason why that stipulation is in the agreement is obvious: an Iraqi-born pilot or similar might have a hankering to kill 200 Jews and get his 72 virgins. The US does not need 150 million jihadi Muslims to kiss the country goodbye. Rather, a relatively small number of determined terrorists with Muslim Brotherhood financing and backing could cause complete mayhem and destruction of people, property, and economic well-being. Nineteen hijackers killed 3,000 Americans, shut down the stock market for days, ended flights into and out of the US for weeks, and completely changed our lives (TSA, etc.).

One can ignore this reality. That’s what Jews in southern Israel did. They gave Gazans jobs and took sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals. They were murdered like everybody else. Some think that by being nice and showing one’s good side, he will convince Muslims to like them and not kill them. Wrong! And in light of this reality, the West might want to take into consideration a smidgen of “racism” so as not to commit communal suicide.

In our desire to rewrite history, many like to shame or point a finger at the United States of the 1940s when it sent Japanese and other Axis-born immigrants to camps to move them away from the coasts and to keep an eye on them. This program sounds downright racist and bigoted, but if one was alive at the time, he would be the one breaking down doors to get his recently arrived Japanese neighbors onto a train to Montana. Racism is doing something evil to another for no real reason. No blacks in our restaurant! That’s bigotry and hatred. But if there are Muslims who wish to kill Westerners, then Western leaders have every right and even an obligation to protect their citizens. We see in Europe that their leaders don’t care about putting a couple hundred or even thousands of illegal African/Muslim immigrants in a small town, and if women get attacked, so be it. One may be accused of hysteria, but as several Israeli leaders said, they would rather be loathed and alive rather than dead and celebrated.

Islam is not a religion as much as a political movement with religious trappings. One cannot separate the “let’s kill all of the infidels” and violent jihad aspect of Islam from the prayers in mosques and fasting during Ramadan. Muslims in the UAE and, say, Malaysia somehow don’t seem to have the violent streak of those in Gaza and Tehran. Still, it was not that long ago (a decade) when the UAE was financing Hamas, and at this time, Malaysia has no relations with Israel. Claims of Islamophobia and racism are used in order to prevent non-Muslims from protecting themselves from people who, for ideological reasons, want to kill them.

The Indian-born pilot did not have any interest in killing the 179 souls under his command. The Air France pilot of the plane hijacked to Uganda refused to leave with the remaining non-Jewish passengers as he told the hijackers that he was responsible for his Jewish passengers and would not leave without them. He was rescued along with the others when Yoni Netanyahu led forces into Uganda to free those still held hostage.

In England, one sees violence and actual terror performed by recent Islamic arrivals, second- and third-generation Muslims as well as converts to Islam. The West doesn’t understand what kind of time bomb it has willingly and cluelessly brought into its midst. Just as nobody from circa 1990 United States thought much of 19 Muslims taking flight lessons at various US flight schools, today’s leaders aren’t thinking much of thousands and thousands of young, military-aged Muslim men coming to their shores. I don’t know what happened near the RAF base with the vans and five guys who were arrested. Was it a terror plot? Were they Muslims? Why were they released to house arrest? For all of the information at our fingertips, we don’t know everything. Let’s say that the Omani pilot says that Iran sent him, but the Saudis are terrified of renewed fighting. They won’t let Israel know the truth and will claim that the pilot was a kook and nothing more.

It’s not racist to not want to die. It’s not Islamophobic to note, as a Kuwaiti editor once did: not all Muslims are terrorists, while all terrorists seem to be Muslims. I asked a rabbi once about how one should look at and treat Muslims in Israel. He told me a story of a friend whose car broke down near an Arab town in the “West Bank”. As he sat there, he saw locals approaching and figured that the road would soon be named in memoriam after him. The guys approached and asked if they could help. The rabbi concluded that it’s not such a simple equation. I know of Arab Muslim doctors who have thrown themselves into saving Jewish Israeli patients. That said, one does not have to bury his head in the sand or go DEI and ignore the facts that A) some percentage of Muslims are into violent jihad against “infidels” and B) the remaining Muslim community is not doing anything about them. When some fake ultraorthodox Jews marched with Iran, Belgian Jewish schools threw their kids out of their institutions. Get out and stay out.

The West is either at a crossroads or lost. Europe doesn’t have the moral fortitude to recognize its destruction and right the ship. The US has the time and leadership to change things. But change must come now.

Gavin Newsom Adds Woke and Islamic Holidays to the California Calendar

 The bill updated the list of California holidays to include Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, allowing for school closures and work exemptions for state employees. While the legislation recognizes the new holidays on the California calendar, state employee observers are required to use holiday credits to use them, and courts and other offices will remain open. Students are to be issued excused absences when requested.


Additional legislation of a similar vein signed by Newsom added “Native American Day” to the docket of paid holidays. The additional costs of payroll expenses and lost productivity are expected to cost California taxpayers up to $20 million annually. Newsom hopes that the added holiday will “challenge misconceptions about California Indians and address what it describes as an incomplete understanding of Native American societies in the teaching of California history,” according to the California Post.

The new addition raises the number of California state holidays to 12, nearly 5 percent of the weekdays in a given year.

Democrats Are Coming After You and It Won’t End Well

 When someone shows you who they are, believe them. When someone tells you they’re coming after you, believe them and prepare accordingly. Democrats have been showing us who they are for decades – monsters willing to do absolutely anything to obtain power and abuse the ever-loving hell out of it once they do have it, so they never let it go again. They’re telling everyone their plan, how they will bury their talons so deep into power if they get it again that the options for prying it loose are limited and as awful as they are.

What will these people do to get back in power? Anything, literally.

Democrats have always been infested with violent radicals, but they’ve been able to win elections without surrendering to them. As their policies have failed in cities and states across the country, that ability to win has faded as people noticed. Then Obamacare failed, as designed but much sooner than planned, and fewer and fewer people were willing to trust the people who designed the failed system to “fix” it again.

Democrats could no longer attract enough voters to win elections in places they hadn’t drawn the lines or absolutely dominated, so they had to embrace the fringe.

Honestly, I thought former President Joe Biden might have stood up to these lunatics when he got into the race in 2020. Everyone else in their field was on the “America is fundamentally racist and awful” and “Israel is the root of all evil” train; I figured there was a lane on the left for someone to stand up and tell those crackpots off. If anyone could pull it off, I figured it would be the cranky old man. But Biden was even more spineless than I’d imagined – rather than stand up to the left and for the country, he joined them and tried to out-crazy them all.

That’s when I knew there was nothing redeeming left in the Democrat Party, that not a single candidate in a large field even bothered to stand up for the greatness of the United States, even the old guy with the resume long enough to do it without any personal electoral consequences. None of them dared try a different path; it was all obedience to the anti-American left, period.

Since then, it’s only gotten worse, and they’ve only gotten less popular. In fact, polls indicate that the only thing less popular than Republicans is Democrats. If they manage to win either or both chambers of Congress next month, it won’t be because they’ve won people to their side; it will be a result of anger taken out on Republicans over the discontent of the moment.

Democrats won’t admit that, and they won’t let that give them a second’s pause over what they’ll try to do with any power they might get. The Nazis didn’t win anywhere close to a majority in 1932 (only 37 percent), but that didn’t hinder their goosestepping over the rights of everyone else, and Democrats will be no different.

Some of their politicians are laying out the pathway Democrats will try to take – the Democrats Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD-8)/ Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17) sleaze – say they will spend their time and our money investigating everything to financially punish anyone who served in the Trump administration. Others – the intellectual “hub” of the left – are less polished or interested in appearing less fascist.

Podcast host and Botox disaster, Jennifer Welch, wants to “restructure” the Supreme Court. She demonstrates a puppy’s understanding of the concept of a co-equal branch of government and wants to impeach all the conservative Justices because they exist in a way that displeases her.

MS NOW’s Simone Sanders Townsend wants Republicans to be afraid of what Democrats will do with whatever power they get because, as she puts it, “I'm of the belief that some people probably need to go to jail. And that should not be a radical concept. That's not retribution, that's doing what the hell needs to be done,” like a good little Nazi.

Rachel Maddow agrees, saying Trump administration “people who are committing those things now should know that they are not in a permanent position of power, and when other people take power, which is going to happen in a few weeks, they are going to have to preserve their documents and answer for what they did and pay for their crimes...”

“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,” comrade.

If they’re saying these things in public, what do you think they’re planning for you in private? They are, after all, of the political philosophy that is responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million human beings for reasons ranging from incompetence to malice, from starvation to “reeducation” camps. If you don’t think it can happen here, you didn’t notice how it has happened everywhere it has.

Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed people to do incredible evil and brutality. That’s the story of the 20th century; they intend to make it the story of the 21st, if we don’t beat them.

Vote like your life depends on it, because it probably does.

Why Ireland Is So Hostile to Israel

 

person 1: So, I was one-quarter Irish and one-quarter Welsh and one-half Swedish and—  

person 2: I think that’s 100% there.  

person 1: Yeah. But I know I have Mongol blood in there somewhere.  

person 2: Sorry. Well, let’s do a 23andMe test someday. My great-grandfather was the grand marshal of the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade, so that kind of makes me Irish royalty. 

But I have no tolerance for Irish antisemitism, and we’ve got it by the boatload.  

person 1: Brendan O’Neill, did you see him, his little video? Brendan O’Neill. You know, he writes for Spiked.  

person 2: Yeah. I have him in my newsletter this week.  

person 1: Yeah, it was really good. He said he, he was good. 

And then, the other British, you know, our friend that was on the cruises.  

person 2: What? Douglas Murray?  

person 1: Yes. Douglas wrote or did a very good interview about Ireland, and it was full of passion. And he was really angry about it, given their moralistic lectures to everybody about—  

person 2: And their history …  

person 1: And their history as an oppressed people. 

And I was really shocked by it. And they wouldn’t even shake the hands of the Israeli athletes after a soccer match. And it’s gonna hurt the—wearing armbands. It’s gonna hurt the Israeli economy. It’s in a wartime footing to begin with, and then if all these countries boycott it in various ways.

If you say you’re boycotting products that were produced by settlement, many industries—it doesn’t really … They’re just gonna boycott anything Israeli. And what I don’t understand is they—there’s a lot of new videos coming out on October 7th.  

So, there’s 1,200 people that went in there that were killed and slaughtered by 5,000 Hamas, but there was also 2,000 civilians that came onward. There were people to rape, people to kill, people to mutilate. 

They had planned it. The 20,000 workers were in on it. Many of them, they were giving surveillance to Hamas. They were hiding weapons in advance. And they committed atrocities. And then nobody … The Irish don’t, the Spanish don’t, the Germans don’t. They don’t. The American Left doesn’t. They never say, “What would you do?” 

All they say is, “Well, this was earned,” or, “This was inevitable.” But there hadn’t been a Jewish person or an Israeli person in Gaza since 2006. But the U.N. had poured in $20-plus billion, most of it from Americans and Europeans. And remember the greenhouses, Jack, where that American philanthropist gave $50 million worth of very lucrative high-tech greenhouses to ship winter vegetables to a very—in a very profitable fashion? 

And what did they do as soon as they got it? They looted it, destroyed it. They’d rather have nothing than have Jewish fingerprints on it. And then they had an election, as they always in one election, one time. And they’re—and so, for the next, what, 18 years, they had their country. It was autonomous. They were short, of course, fuel, power, water. 

I don’t know, 10%, 20% of those necessities were provided by the hated Israelis, and they left them alone. In fact, they kind of favored them. And the wall is very impressive. I’ve seen it in Israel. It’s not a wall of iron at all, the Gaza wall. 20,000 day laborers getting three times the wage, so when somebody does that to you, then what do you do? 

They never tell us. I guess they mean kind of put your little hands up like a little puppy and say, “Please, please, UN, I confess to all my sins. Will you give me absolution because I deserved this massacre?” Would that have worked?  

And then remember, everybody, that the architect of this mini-genocide was Mr. Yahya Sinwar. He’s the one you saw hiding from that drone that took him out. But what you don’t see is nearly 20 years ago, he was a terrorist murderer who was in an Israeli prison for murder, and he got dizzy, Jack. He had a headache, and he had a cancer—a non-cancerous but would’ve been fatal meningioma brain tumor. 

And so, according to Nicholas Kristof, who says the Israelis use dogs and then they defy the laws of biology and zoology and make them perform stunts never been seen before to rape, excuse me, rape Palestinian prisoners. They did something even worse, Jack. They took Mr. Sinwar in and they stripped him of his clothes and they put a humiliating gown on him. 

Then they put him in a sterile white room, almost like a prison, and then they operated, and they cut open his head. Can you imagine that? And they removed—Yes, they did remove the brain tumor, and yes, it did save his life, but it was so traumatic to have Jews do that to you. And he therefore was angry at them, so he organized October 7th. 

Isn’t that a terrible thing to do, is to take a Hamas torturer and operate and take his brain tumor and save his life?  

person 2: Yes. It’s a high point of gratitude, from what we’ve seen. You know, there’s something about the Irish, if I may speak broadly. A few maybe disconnected points, Victor. 

I mean, we know the Irish immigrants, here in the Civil War, they were some of the bravest soldiers.

person 1: Yes, they were. 

person 2: And after the Civil War, you know, when [Gen. George] Custer was wiped out, most of the names killed with him were, were Irish. 

person 1: The 7th Cavalry was mostly an Irish cavalry.  

person 2: Yeah, the “Gary Owen,” which used to be the theme song of our show. But there’s a great sense of victimhood. We talk about victimhood all the time, and the Irish have it … The Irish. A lot of Irish live and dwell and thrill to victimhood status. They have right to be PO’d at England, what England did to Ireland in the 1700s and 1800s. 

But it’s very deeply instilled in many Irish and Irish Americans.  

And also, Victor, two other things. The Irish left is, is really left. One of their patron saints is Che Guevara, for example. Also, the IRA trained with the Palestinians. So, there’s this, there’s a significant connection between the— 

person 1: That was in the Tom Clancy novel, remember? 

person 2: Yeah, yeah.  

person 1: Yeah.  

person 2: Well …  

person 1: And remember that the Irish prime minister in World War. Eamon de—  

person 2: Valera?  

person 1: Yes. In World War II, not only knew of submarines from the Germans that were off the Irish coast, but he had been warned by Winston Churchill, “If you allow them to land, even though you’re a neutral country, we’re going to consider you a belligerent.” 

person 2: Uh-huh.  

person 1: “And you better have an air force to stop what we’re going to do to you.” So, they had to threaten them. And of course, when Hitler died, he sent condolences to the Nazi Party.  

person 2: I think he went in person.  

person 1: Yeah, I think he did.  

person 2: He went to the German embassy to sign the condolence book. 

person 1: He did. He did. 

He did. So they were pro-Nazi, and we have the Spanish prime minister who was very—probably the most anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish leader in Europe. And we know the history of [Francisco] Franco, who would have joined the Nazis except the price that he demanded from Hitler, a joint invasion by land and sea of Gibraltar to get it, and most of French Vichy Morocco. 

Hitler said it was an eight-hour argument, and I’d rather have my tooth pulled than deal with Franco again. And then we have, of course, the present-day Italians that are very anti-Israel, and we know what [Benito] Mussolini—I think [Benjamin] Netanyahu mentioned that in his speech. So it’s very strange for these people to lecture on morality. 

person 2: Yeah.  

person 1: I did a debate, Jack. It was one of—I’ve had three occasions on Piers Morgan recently. One was with a fanatic professor from the Middle East who was, I thought, just spouted lies. The second one was from a Chinese communist who was parading around as a disinterested professor in Australia who told us that Mao Zedong did not commit any mass murderers. 

I got so angry. It was right after—not too far off my operation, but the first one, my heart rate went up. I have my Apple Watch, 135. The second one was only 125, and then yesterday I did, or maybe it was Monday, I debated a democratic socialist professor who gave me the standard Marxist exegesis that United States was hopeless, its economy was destroyed, socialists were taking over, Europe was going to be socialist. 

And then every time I tried to politely keep calm and said, “Could I just say something? Lowest poverty rate in history last month. Highest per capita family income at $87,000 in history. Your socialist communist China is $10 trillion smaller than our economy despite four times the population. Your socialist EU with 100 million more people is also $10 trillion smaller than our economy. 

And third quarter Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta revised 5% growth they think, economic growth. Record numbers of orders for computers, heavy durable goods, et cetera. Record foreign investment. Unemployment 4.1. 140,000—  

person 2: Just something the other day, Victor, about this, maybe you mentioned the steel factory, yes, in Iowa. Monster investment, $15 billion. 

person 1: So, I was trying to tell him, and what was the socialist … Everybody should, I think, pay attention to this because it shows you what will happen if they take control. The first thing he said is they do three things, and this fits Saeed too. First, it’s ad hominem. 

“What do you do? You’re ignorant. You don’t have any credentials.” OK. I’m a … Second thing, they’re arrogant. “I’m a Ph.D., and I have a university position. I’m an economist.” Second thing.  

Third, they’re vulgar. “You have your head up Trump’s blank blank.” And Piers was just watching us, and I said to him, I said, “Is this serious? Is this a joke? What is going on here?” I couldn’t say a word without him interrupting, and I’m not gonna go on that show. I try to just— 

person 2:  Were you asking Piers that live while this—?  

person 1: Yes, while he was yelling and screaming while I was—he screamed for five minutes, and then it was my turn, and halfway through, he interrupted and he said, “You’re just making up all this data.” 

And I said, “You can find it. It’s out there. It’s in the public domain. You don’t believe we had 140,000 jobs? You don’t think the poverty … “

“You’re lying. It’s all doctored. They … Your GDP is all wrong.”  

Wow. And then he started, you know, “You have no credentials. You’re not educated. I’m a professor.” 

“Get, get … You have your head up blank blank,” very vulgar. Yeah. And Piers, that’s what he does. He invites people on. It’s kind of like a politicized version of Jerry Springer, you know what I mean?  

person 2: Yeah, yeah. 

person 1: And he never tells you, he never tells your … Megan’s a wonderful person that books for me, and he never tells her what I’m going to do. 

He said he was going to … This was the first time after the book was published, so I thought we were gonna discuss the book. But it had nothing to do with the book. He just mentioned it one time, and then it was lucha libre, and he got …  

So, when you go on there, I’m not an extremist, but he thinks that if you get a Chinese communist apologist or an American professor living in the UAE who hates Israel, or you get a commie socialist person who will scream and yell, then I’m supposed to what? 

Refute? You can’t talk to them because they’re complete ideologues. No. So it’s not… You think you go on there for the benefit of our listeners and us who are on the conservative side to try to get out in the public domain that these people are completely bogus, erroneous. But because it’s bloodsport for these TV shows— 

I don’t want them to be on any one side. I would just like them to say, “Please do not interrupt the other speaker. Please no ad hominem attacks. Please get your facts straight about your own credentials versus the other person’s.” 

person 2: If the guy’s being a jerk, turn off his microphone. 

person 1: Yeah.