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How a serial killer family got away with murdering seven men and a baby

On a Kansas evening in 1872, Julia Hestler immediately regretted her visit to the Bender family. The stagecoach that dropped her off was already racing away, leaving her alone on the prairie in front of a solitary, decrepit cabin.   

When the self-proclaimed “spiritualist” Kate Bender invited Julia inside for their scheduled séance, she was revolted by a strong stench and buzzing flies. She sat across from Kate and held hands to begin, not wanting to insult her hostess. 

But with her eyes closed, Julia felt doom. She looked up to see three Bender family members suddenly standing silently behind Kate. Pa Bender held a heavy tool that shone in the candlelight. Terrified, Julia leapt up and fled. She tumbled down the cabin’s front steps before scrambling to her feet and running for her life across the darkened plains. 

Julia was lucky to survive, as Susan Jonusas writes in “Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier” (Viking), out now. The neighbors she told found the incident more creepy than criminal, but the following spring her fears were validated when eight corpses were found buried beneath the Benders’ apple trees. The Benders would go down in American history as the most infamous family of serial killers.

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Former Maine gubernatorial candidate busted with kiddie porn

A lawyer who ran for governor of Maine twice was arrested on child pornography charges Friday.

Eliot Cutler, 75, faces four counts of possession of sexually explicit material of a minor under 12 after investigators found 10 files of children being exploited on his computer, according to The Portland Press Herald.

Culter may face additional charges as cops continued to look through terabytes of data on devices seized from two of the former Independent candidate’s homes, the article said.

Officials arrested Cutler at his farm in Brooklin even as the probe continued, prosecutors said. He was being held on $50,000 bail.

“Given the incredibly high bail of $50,000 cash, set on a Friday night after banks are closed no less, it is unclear whether the bail will be posted,” Cutler’s attorney Walt McKee told the newspaper.

The investigation stemmed from a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that someone in Maine had downloaded or uploaded an illegal image, the report said.

“It was a known piece of child pornography,” Hancock County District Attorney Matt Foster told the paper.

Cutler, a former member of President Jimmy Carter’s administration, ran for governor in 2010 and 2014 after working as a Washington DC attorney.

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The Kids Online Safety Act Is a Heavy-Handed Plan to Force Platforms to Spy on Young People

Putting children under surveillance and limiting their access to information doesn’t make them safer—in fact, research suggests just the opposite. Unfortunately those tactics are the ones endorsed by the Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 (KOSA), introduced by Sens. Blumenthal and Blackburn. The bill deserves credit for attempting to improve online data privacy for young people, and for attempting to update 1998’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). But its plan to require surveillance and censorship of anyone under sixteen would greatly endanger the rights, and safety, of young people online.

KOSA would require the following:

  • A new legal duty for platforms to prevent certain harms: KOSA outlines a wide collection of content that platforms can be sued for if young people encounter it, including “promotion of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and other matters that pose a risk to physical and mental health of a minor.”
  • Compel platforms to provide data to researchers
  • An elaborate age-verification system, likely run by a third-party provider
  • Parental controls, turned on and set to their highest settings, to block or filter a wide array of content

There are numerous concerns with this plan. The parental controls would in effect require a vast number of online platforms to create systems for parents to spy on—and control—the conversations young people are able to have online, and require those systems be turned on by default. It would also likely result in further tracking of all users.

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ADL Defends Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis: They “Don’t Attack Jews or Jewish Institutions”

The Anti-Defamation League, the leading pro-Israel lobbying group in America, published a Q&A defending Ukraine’s neo-Nazi groups on the grounds that they “don’t attack Jews or Jewish institutions.”

In an article titled, “Why is Putin Calling the Ukrainian Government a Bunch of Nazis?” the ADL interviewed David Fishman, professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary, to explain why Ukraine’s neo-Nazis aren’t so bad.

“There are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just as there are in the U.S., and in Russia for that matter. But they are a very marginal group with no political influence and who don’t attack Jews or Jewish institutions in Ukraine,” Fishman said.

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More Evidence That The US Is Trying To Prolong This War

The Washington Post has a new article out bemoaning the fact that Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon to discuss their operations in Ukraine (I dunno guys, might have something to do with the fact that the US is sharing extensive military intelligence on exactly those operations directly with the Ukrainian government). Tucked all the way down in the eighteenth paragraph of the article, we find a much more interesting revelation: that Washington’s top diplomat has made no attempt to contact his counterpart in Moscow since the war began on the 24th of February.

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict, according to U.S. officials,” The Washington Post reports.

So the US government is continuing its policy of refusing to attempt any high-level diplomatic resolutions to this war despite its public hand-wringing about the horrific violence that’s being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. This revelation fits nicely with a recent report by Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson that sources in the US and UK governments have told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow.

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Biden’s War Drums Spook Americans Who Fear a Potential Military Draft

On Wednesday, the Selective Service System (SSS) announced that “In the event of a draft, our agency would partner with @fema to provide opportunities to conscientious objectors to ensure our nation keeps moving forward.” The announcement rattled Americans, especially those of draftable age who do not want to go fight for a foreign country in which the United States doesn’t have a critical interest.

Why on earth would the government agency responsible for registering young men for the draft start talking about non-combat opportunities for conscientious objectors “in the event of a draft,” unless they know something? Either a military draft is in the works or the agency understands that fighting-age men are worried that it is. Even if a draft was not being considered, the SSS’s announcement is certain to increase anxiety about it.

Newsweek is reporting that a new poll shows most Americans are fearful of getting sucked into a war with Russia:

As the NATO-EU summit on the conflict begins Thursday, the survey from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research revealed Americans’ opinions on the war and President Joe Biden’s handling of it. The poll shows the vast majority of Americans are at least somewhat concerned that the U.S. will be pulled into a war with Russia, with nearly half very or extremely concerned.

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Fauci Finally Admits Natural Immunity

Yes, Fauci has never worried about consistency or even contradicting himself one day to the next, often without explanation. Too often his doling out “the science” has felt like performance art. Still, the record is that Fauci and all his compatriots either downplayed or denied natural immunity for two years. That has been the source of vast confusion.

In fact, this might have been the most egregious science error of the entire pandemic. It amounted to giving the silent treatment to the most well-established point of cell biology that we have. It was taught to every generation from the 1920s until sometime in the new century when people stopped paying attention in 9th-grade biology class. 

After the pandemic broke, Fauci said nothing on this topic for a year and a half. The John Snow Memorandum, written to counter the Great Barrington Declaration, claimed “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.” Mandates and passports have excluded it. Academic, medical, and corporate enforcers have generally refused to recognize it. 

When CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked him specifically, September 13, 2021, Fauci quickly demurred. 

“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that. That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response,” Fauci said. “I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously.”

In other words, no one knows! 

The HHS head refused to say either way, even when grilled by Rand Paul. 

Earlier, the WHO even backed up this denialism, going so far as to change their own definition of immunity in the middle of a pandemic. They eliminated the old sentence on natural immunity and replaced it with a claim that immunity comes from “protecting people from the virus” and not “exposing them to it.” That’s some clever rhetoric right there! 

There’s no question that this effort to deny natural immunity was systematic and pushed from the top. 

How has this changed? In February 2022, the CDC finally published on the topic that they could not forever deny. And now, Fauci himself let the following slip in an interview on March 23, 2022: 

“When you look at the cases they do not appear to be any more severe [than Omicron] and they do not appear to evade immune responses either from vaccine or prior infection.”

What’s critical here is not his debatable claim about vaccines but rather his offhand remark about prior infection. It was tossed off as if: “Everyone knows this.” If so, it is no thanks to him, the CDC, or WHO. 

To be sure, everything we’ve known since two years ago – if not 2.5 thousand years – is that immunity from prior Covid infection is real. Vaccines have traditionally been a substitute version of exactly that. Brownstone has assembled fully 150 studies that demonstrate that immunity through infection is effective, broad, and lasting.

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