(Headline USA) Highlighting, yet again, the double-standard in “terrorism” charges applied by woke blue-state authoritarians seeking to misuse the laws designed to deter mass-casualty events, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer threw the book at a troubled teen with an apparent affinity for hunting.
Meanwhile, leftists in neighboring Wisconsin, under Gov. Tony Evers, continued to shrug off a black supremacist who targeted elderly grandmas and an 8-year-old boy for certain death with vehicular assault during a Christmas parade. Many in the mainstream media shifted the blame for the deadly Waukesha massacre from Darrell Brooks, 39, to the red SUV he was driving.
Michigan prosecutors on Wednesday charged Ethan Crumbley, 15, with terrorism in a deadly mass shooting at his high school—a novel approach made possible by a law enacted after the 9/11 attacks nearly 20 years ago.
The state’s 2002 anti-terrorism law defines a terroristic act as one intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to affect the conduct of a government through intimidation or coercion. Gun-control advocates who track gunfire incidents on school grounds were not immediately aware of similar terrorism charges having been filed in other states.
“It’s not a usual, a typical charge,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said of terrorism causing death, adding that the four students who were killed and seven others who were shot are not the only victims.
“What about all the children who ran, screaming, hiding under desks? What about all the children at home right now, who can’t eat and can’t sleep and can’t imagine a world where they could ever step foot back in that school? Those are victims, too, and so are their families and so is the community. The charge of terrorism reflects that.”’
Crumbley also was charged with first-degree murder, assault with intent to commit murder and gun crimes in Tuesday’s attack at Oxford High School. He faces life in prison on both the terrorism and murder counts.
He pleaded not guilty.
However, mainstream media and leftist media like the Daily Beast already had begun their prosecution based on sparse background details that painted him—and his parents—in the mold of what Attorney General Merrick Garland has labelled “domestic violent extremists.”
Crumbley’s clear pattern of disturbing mental health issues will undoubtedly take second stage to his antisocial behavior.
According to the Daily Beast’s reports, Crumbley was “really quiet, he would never talk to people,” and “He wore all black, I believe he was really into hunting.”
Like Brooks—the accused Waukesha killer—there appears to be a record of intent based on Crumbley’s diaries and at least one social media post.
Unlike Brooks—whom authorities said offered no indication of terrorism and, accordingly, was not charged with it—Crumbley’s attack does not appear at first glance to have been politically or ideologically motivated.
The same cannot be said, however, of the prosecution, according to the Detroit News.
Like many other “woke” prosecutors—often backed by billionaire oligarch George Soros and other radical leftists—McDonald took over this year on a “social justice” platform of “reducing racial disparities,” “alternatives to incarceration” and trying to “reorient” the “focus on juvenile justice”—unless, of course, the assailant fits a particular profile.
Yet, Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard, a Republican, said he “100%” backs the terrorism charge against Crumbley.
“If you weren’t hit by a bullet, it doesn’t mean you weren’t terrorized that day and won’t have nightmares about [it] the rest of your life—whether you’re a parent, a teacher or a student in that class,” he said.
Michigan, unlike federal law and some states with their own anti-terrorism laws, has a broader definition beyond pressuring or retaliating against only the government with violence.
In 2012, the Michigan attorney general’s office for the first time issued a terrorism charge after authorities apprehended a man who fired shots from his car at about two-dozen vehicles along the Interstate 96 corridor.
The law more typically has been used to charge people with making terroristic threats, such as calling in bomb threats, said Matthew Schneider, a former federal prosecutor who is uninvolved in the case and who previously was the state’s chief deputy attorney general.
In 2005, a Michigan teen accused of plotting a massacre at his Macomb County high school was convicted of threatening an act of terrorism and other charges in a county-filed case that appeared to be one of the first in the country to apply anti-terrorism laws to threats of school violence.
“This is why we have this law. It’s for this type of case. This is not just a murder case,” Schneider said of this week’s slayings. “It’s going to terrorize a generation of these kids who were in the school. The impact is on thousands of people.”
He said lawmakers who enacted the law were thinking of terrorism in the traditional sense in the months after 9/11.
“But since that time it’s been used for other things,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that it’s being used improperly because it fits the elements. It fits the language of the statute.”
Schneider likened the state law to the 1970 federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which was written with the mob in mind but now helps prosecute “all kinds of things” including street gangs.
Michigan’s law also was utilized last year when alcoholic state Attorney General Dana Nessel charged several men with providing material support for terrorist acts in plots to kidnap Whitmer and attack the state Capitol.
That plot has since been widely discredited, however, after the ringleaders in the plot were exposed as undercover FBI plants who had effectively recruited and entrapped others into the conspiracy.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
