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Sometimes, you have to take matters into your own hands — and that’s exactly what a group of construction workers just did in North Carolina.

The blue-collar crew in Charlotte reportedly caught a man trying to break into a construction vehicle and steal tools.

In a form of street justice, the men taped the suspect to some nearby scaffolding until police arrived… and the aftermath was caught on video.

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“I gotta do what I gotta do to hold you. You got no business in my truck,” one of the workers explained as the man was trussed up, according to WJZY, Fox 46 in Charlotte.

“I wasn’t breaking into it!” insisted the suspect. “I wasn’t in it! I was just checking it out.”

A bystander recorded the altercation, and told the local news what she saw.

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“You don’t stumble into those things but there I was,” said Tina Quizon, who is also a freelance videographer for WJZY. “The leg is taped to the scaffolding, they put a rope around his waist.”

“I was like, nobody is going to believe this,” she said.

Officers arrived quickly to the scene, and the suspected thief did not appear to be harmed, just embarrassed and indignant.

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After the video was posted on Facebook, it received over 8 million views. Many commenters tried to claim that detaining the suspect was somehow racist or cruel.

“This reminds me of slavery,” one commenter wrote. “They didn’t have to TORTURE him. They should be charged. Next time call the Police.”

The viewer was apparently ignoring that fact that the construction workers were clearly a mixed crew of blacks and Hispanics, and that the police arrived within minutes.

“Humiliating someone should be against the law too!” whined another commenter.

“Notice how most women who never served in this line of work or have any idea how expensive tools can be, are the ones defending this punk?” shot back another respondent.

“My job site got robbed in 2013, Took 8000 dollars worth of tools,” chimed in another Facebook user, who had no sympathy for the alleged would-be thief. “I’m guessing they got all of it in the bed of one truck. It doesn’t take many tools to start adding up to big bucks. It’s absolutely infuriating and that man deserves the humiliation.”

The fact is that a citizen’s arrest is completely legal under the right circumstances.

Like many states, North Carolina has a law — G.S. 15A-404(b) — which permits a citizen’s detention of criminal suspects.

“A private person may stop and detain another person when the private person has probable cause to believe that the other person has committed in his presence ­­a (1) felony, (2) a breach of the peace, (3) a crime involving physical injury to another person, or (4) a crime involving theft or destruction of property,” explained Shea Denning, a professor of public law at the University of North Carolina, in a piece written for the UNC School of Government blog in 2014.

It seems likely that the alleged theft of valuable construction tools falls under that law.

There’s a difference between “playing cop” and stopping somebody who has been caught in the act.

It looks very likely that these construction workers just wanted to do their jobs, until a would-be thief tried to take their hard-earned living away from them.

Strapping a suspect to scaffolding until police arrive may unconventional, but it was probably exactly what needed to be done.

H/T: WJZY News

Share this video on Facebook and Twitter to let everyone know what street justice can look like.

A federal judge has ruled that the State Department must up its efforts to locate emails Hillary Clinton sent in connection to the 2012 Benghazi attack — ordering the State Department to conduct a fresh search for emails from some of Clinton’s top aides.

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled Tuesday that the State Department had not done all it could to locate the emails Clinton sent in relation to the  Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi Libya that killed four Americans — including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

He found that the State Department “has not met its burden of establishing it performed an adequate search” in response to Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act request.

Politico reports that the State Department has so far located 348 Benghazi-related messages, sent to or from Clinton in the months around the attack. However, Judge Mehta said that that wasn’t enough. Instead, he ordered the State Department to search the state.gov email archives of the accounts of former aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Jacob Sullivan.

“If Secretary Clinton sent an e-mail about Benghazi to Abedin, Mills, or Sullivan at his or her state.gov e-mail address, or if one of them sent an e-mail to Secretary Clinton using his or her state.gov account, then State’s server presumably would have captured and stored such an e-mail,” he said in the ruling. “Therefore, State has an obligation to search its own server for responsive records.”

The ruling is in response to a suit filed by Judicial Watch originally in 2015. The conservative watchdog has been central in the quest to get more information about Clinton’s emails, specifically in relation to the Benghazi attack.

“This major court ruling may finally result in more answers about the Benghazi scandal – and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in it – as we approach the attack’s fifth anniversary,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

Fitton also questioned why the conservative watchdog had to fight not only the Obama administration but also the Trump administration on the search for the emails:

“Why are Secretary Tillerson and Attorney General Sessions wasting taxpayer dollars protecting Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration?” he asked.

Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.

Muslims literally hate everyone who isn’t a Muslim, and even in that they hate each other for being Muslim the wrong way. Radical Muslims behead, blow up, run over, and gun down the infidels while moderate Muslims cheer them on for defending Islam. The one constant is that they believe that everything that isn’t Islam is a crime against Islam and must be punished. Liberals refuse to recognize this incompatibility with Western culture and assure us after every cowardly act of terrorism that Islam is the religion of peace and anyone who can’t see it is a bigot.

Mother Jones is as liberal as it gets so they set out to prove that Muslims really are the most civil, tolerant, and peaceful people on the planet, because of course they would. This is a real headline on MJ with an equally real sub-heading:

A New Poll Shows American Muslims Are Less Homophobic Than White Evangelical Christians

So much for the “the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”

To prove their point, they started out with this paragraph:

When Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president, it was just weeks after the Pulse nightclub shooting, in which 49 people were killed in a terrorist attack during the Orlando gay club’s Latin night. He decried “Islamic terrorism” and told the convention crowd, “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”

Really? They are going to prove how non-homophobic Muslims are by starting with a story about a radical Muslim terrorist who killed 49 gay people in the name of Allah? Can anyone at MJ please cite an instance of an Evangelical Christian gunning down 50 or so gay people in the name of Jesus?

Things don’t get much better from there. They refer to a Pew poll that has some absolutely silly information which can’t possibly be accurate. It’s not even clear how this question was asked, but according to the poll US Muslims are more likely to be against targeting and killing civilians than the general population. This needs to be put into context, but it’s not. Does this mean Muslims would be less likely to car-bomb some innocent people? Does this include conducting a military operation in which there might be some collateral damage? This question is meaningless.

But the big piece of evidence is this:

But what’s perhaps more noteworthy, particularly for Trump’s opponents, is Pew’s finding about Muslim Americans’ attitudes toward the LGBT community. Statistically, they’ve become much more accepting of LGBT people: 52 percent of Muslim Americans now agree that homosexuality should be accepted by society—up from just 27 percent in 2007. And while they are not the most accepting group polled, their views have shifted toward being gay-friendly by a greater margin than any other group in the survey. White evangelical Christians remain the least accepting; the group’s views were comparable to those of Muslim Americans in 2007, with 23 percent of white evangelical Christians saying homosexuality should be accepted by society. Today only 34 percent say the same. It’s also worth highlighting that about 80 percent of white evangelicals who voted backed Trump, according to exit polls.

It’s also worth highlighting that in most Muslim countries and societies homosexuality is a jailable offense and even a death sentence. You will notice with this question that some US Muslims say homosexuality should be accepted by society, but they don’t say it should be accepted by Islam. Again, this is a completely bullshit poll question.

Mother Jones promised that they were going to debunk the “myth” that Islam is a violent oppressive hateful foreign ideology. All they have done is show that a handful of US Muslims answered a couple of questions in a way that they thought would portray their religion in a less shitty light. On the other side of the evidence spectrum, there are the daily terrorist attacks, the intolerant Islamic regimes, and the constant jihad waged against the non-Islamic world.

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Since the American people elected Donald Trump as president, liberals have tried everything they could think of to get rid of him. Known as the “Resistance” they have cried, thrown temper tantrums, made threats, resorted to violence, and spread lies but nothing has worked. It’s weird how the freely elected President of the United States gets to serve his term in the face of so much leftist bitching and moaning, isn’t it? The Resistance is not giving up however, they are gathering for a big meeting so they can come up with a rock solid plan to kill democracy, overturn the will of the people, and oust Trump once and for all.

This is no bullshit. The Washington Post, also part of the Resistance, reports:

Liberals gather in Atlanta to plan Trump resistance strategy

Netroots Nation, the activist left’s largest annual gathering, arrives in Atlanta this year with its clearest focus in years: how to resist President Trump.

This thing is a goofball progressive conference started by the Daily Kos. Think of it like Comi-Con for angry leftists. This year’s line-up looks like a hoot:

Former vice president Gore will speak about the threats to the planet from a president who dismisses climate change as a hoax hatched in Beijing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) will ring alarm bells about domestic policy. And 14 discrete sessions will discuss the best ways to fight the White House and Republican Congress. Jon Ossoff, the Democratic star who narrowly lost Georgia’s special House election in June, will also be there.

I think I may have identified one of the democrats biggest problems: Jon Ossoff is considered a “Democratic star.” He lost. Why not find some winners to be the big party stars? Oh yeah I completely forgot, maybe in a party of losers it’s hard to find winners.

“The last couple of years, much of the energy nationally was focused on social justice,” said Netroots Nation spokeswoman Mary Rickles. This year, the focus for nearly 3,000 attendees was back on politics…

I think I have identified another problem: to liberals, social issues are politics. That’s why they lost 1000 seats under Obama’s reign of social engineering. All they run on are stupid social issues that nobody cares about.

Maybe the funniest thing about this is that the WaPo and the Newtroots are convinced that Trump is going to create a false flag catastrophe to expand his power.

One panel will go over ways to challenge Trump’s “xenophobic NAFTA narrative,” while another — more relevant given news from North Korea — will brainstorm ways to oppose Trump if a traumatic event causes people to rally around the flag.

“Hitler used the Reichstag Fire; Putin used the 1999 apartment bombings; and George W. Bush used 9/11,” reads the online description of the panel, which will feature leaders of MoveOn.org and the ACLU. “With Trump, [Stephen K.] Bannon and their allies in Congress, progressives must be prepared to fight back in the first hours and days of a national security crisis.”

Yes, you read that correctly. These liberal lunatics are comparing false flag incidents that tyrants used to come to power with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and a fictitious Trump disaster.

In reality, no information is given on how liberals will learn to resist Donald Trump. Really, it just sounds like more bitching, which liberals already inherently know how to do. This is like having a convention to teach liberals how to be wrong about everything, which may be part of the program, I don’t know. On the upside, this looks like it will be crazy as hell so my fellow Downtrend writers and I should get plenty of good material from it.

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Wednesday on Laura Ingraham’s nationally syndicated radio show, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan warned that if White House chief strategist Steve Bannon were to depart the Trump administration, it would mean the end of economic nationalism, one of the elements of Trump’s 2016 campaign.

After Buchanan had expressed his concern over National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster foreign policy “ideas,” Ingraham asked Buchanan to react to a Wall Street Journal editorial that criticized Bannon for his reported policy differences with McMaster.

Buchanan warned that if Bannon were to depart the Trump administration, which the Journal editorial seemed to suggest should happen, it would have consequences.

“The economic nationalism – I think that would go pretty much out the window,” Buchanan said. “Trump is pretty committed to border control. I think he realizes that is indispensable to his political survival and reelection. But I would be concerned about the foreign policy interventionism, quite frankly, if Bannon were thrown out. But the fact – I haven’t read The Wall Street Journal today, I got up a little late. But I think it also a sign that Bannon must be influential if The Wall Street Journal is clawing the walls.”

Buchanan urged Trump to be loyal to Bannon, calling him a needed “voice.”

“Look, you got to be loyal to your people,” he added. “You need Bannon’s voice in there, quite frankly. He’s the custodian of the populist conservative traditionalist ideas, which are more than half of Trump’s coalition, and also they’re the critical element that got him elected.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

The Wall Street Journal and its publisher Rupert Murdoch appear to be using President Donald Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster as their latest weapon in their continuing battle against Trump’s America-first agenda and movement that enabled Trump to shock the world on election night.

After Trump won the White House, Democrats, the Deep State, and the legacy media have often worked together to delegitimize Trump, which is something Trump has every reason to be angry about. But the Journal, by mimicking Joe Scarborough and attempting to marginalize Trump’s nationalist advisers, is subtly trying to take over Trump’s presidency for the GOP establishment that Trump resoundingly defeated over and over and over again.

In its latest editorial on Wednesday, the paper of choice for Republican globalists hopes that there is more “clean-up duty to be done” for new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. The paper targets White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon for opposing McMaster’s “favoring more troops” in Afghanistan and McMaster’s insistence on not getting out of the Iran Deal.

The Journal laments that the “policy brawls” in a White House in which it often seems like Bannon is the lone America-first nationalist in a cage match with a team of globalists who have never understood Trump’s agenda cause “dysfunction.”

To the Journal, it is a problem that Bannon, whom former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said worked 24 hours a day for Trump’s nationalist agenda, is a street fighter for the working-class Americans who elected Trump and whom the Journal views as mere commodities.

In March, the Journal, as Breitbart News noted, criticized Bannon’s “signature issues of economic nationalism and border security” as unacceptable positions that were responsible for “polarization” even though those issues united working-class Democrats and Republicans in the Rust Belt to deliver Trump his election-night win. The Journal has always been right in this sense—the greatest divide between Wall Street and Main Street has been on issues like amnesty for illegal immigrants that put internationalist-first globalists against America-first nationalists. And in 2016, the Journal was consistently on the wrong side of this divide.

When former Florida Governor Jeb Bush was resoundingly criticized for his “act of love” remarks about illegal immigrants during the 2016 election cycle, it was the Wall Street Journal that rushed in with a flurry of pro-Jeb! articles, with one editorial suggesting that Tea Partiers and America-first nationalists were racists. Desperately hoping Bush could win the nomination without abandoning his support for open borders, the Journal egged on Bush to not waver from his pro-amnesty views, saying at one point that Bush’s stance on illegal immigration was not an “insuperable barrier to the nomination.”

Bannon so often has to throw haymakers for Trump’s voters because nearly all of Trump’s top advisers in the White House are Democrats or GOP globalists.

Democrat Jared Kushner, whose personal taxpayer-funded spokesperson reportedly donated to Hillary Clinton as late as October of 2016, already committed political malpractice by foolishly convincing Trump that Democrats would greet FBI director James Comey’s firing like many in the Republican establishment were convinced that Iraqis would greet American troops with “sweets” and “flowers.”

Democrat and Hillary Clinton donor Gary Cohn has been trying to push Trump to adopt more globalist policies that Wall Street and Davos elites favor.

Internationalist H.R. McMaster, who may be allergic to saying “radical Islamic terrorism,” seems to have spent more energy in the first months of his job purging Trump’s loyalists from national security posts and trying his best to convince Trump that radical Islamic terrorism, to use the words of Trump’s adviser Dr. Sebastian Gorka, is just the “flu” as opposed to a “cancer” that needs to be annihilated.

Then there is McMaster’s globalist deputy Dina Powell, the Scarborough ally who the Journal knows will get even more influence if Bannon, as Scarborough begged Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly to do, is sidelined.

Trump essentially put a stake in the heart of Bushism in 2016, but Powell is the one in Trump’s White House who carries whatever flickering flame is left of Bushism—the disastrous combination of neoconservatism abroad and corporate cronyism at home that made the nation hate Republicans.

But as Vogue noted in a glowing profile, Powell “also is good friends with [former President Barack] Obama’s former senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett,” who persuaded Murdoch to go even more all-in on comprehensive amnesty legislation while Obama was in the White House. The day after Murdoch reportedly requested to sit next Jarrett at a dinner in 2014, he penned an op-ed in his Wall Street Journal in which Murdoch declared that amnesty for illegal immigrants and an unlimited number of high-tech visas for Silicon Valley just “can’t wait.”

The Associated Press reported this week that the dispute between McMaster’s more interventionist approach in Afghanistan and Bannon’s non-nation building strategy represents a greater tension between the Republican establishment that McMaster represents and Trump’s movement of “America-first” voters, whose views Bannon best embodies in Trump’s White House.

Murdoch–as Joshua Green reported in his book Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency–seems to have always held those working-class nationalists in contempt.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka reportedly wanted to break the news that her dad was going to enter the presidential race to Murdoch at a lunch. But Murdoch had so much disdain for Trump’s pro-nationalist platform and was so dismissive of Trump’s potential candidacy and chances of winning that he royally dissed Trump and his daughter right to their faces:

Soon after the three of them were seated and the waiter brought their soup, Ivanka spoke up: “My father has something to tell you.”
“What’s that?” Murdoch said.
“He’s going to run for president.”
“He’s not running for president,” Murdoch replied without looking up from his soup.
“No, he is!” she insisted.
Murdoch changed the subject.
Trump nursed the slight for months. “He didn’t even look up from his soup!” he’d complain.

The Journal is trying to get the best of both worlds by attempting yet again to marginalize Bannon. They want Trump to turn into globalist George H.W. Bush and move away from the pro-nationalist and America-first agenda that won Trump his historic election. Murdoch’s establishment Republican paper is trying to convince Trump to chase the mythical and overhyped “No Labels” voters (there may be more dead armadillos than these “No Labels” middle-of-the-road voters).

So long as Trump adopts the Journal’s globalist agenda, the paper of record for the GOP permanent political class seems like it would be perfectly fine if Trump was booted out of office in 2020 and branded as one of history’s biggest losers. That would actually be a win-win for the Journal and a lose-lose for Trump and his historic movement.