Arizona Men Arrested For Separate Pew-Pew-Pew Shoot-em-ups And Ballot Arsonings
Officials say one was planning a 'mass casualty event.'
Watch out, “Florida Man,” Arizona Man might be encroaching on your well-earned reputation. Two guys fitting that description have been arrested and charged this week with acts of violence — against property, not people, yet — in the lead-up to the November 5 general election. Both incidents occurred in the Phoenix metro area.
In the lesser crime, asshole Dieter Klofkorn, 35, was arrested after setting fire to a US Postal service mailbox in Phoenix during the wee hours of Thursday morning, damaging or destroying an unknown number of mail-in ballots. Initially, police said it was about 20 ballots but the Arizona secretary of state’s office later said it was “a handful” of ballots, although that might depend on the size of someone’s hands and how much was left of the ballots, no?
In the more worrying case, asshole Jeffrey Michael Kelly, 60, was arrested in connection with a string of four incidents in which he allegedly shot windows on three different occasions at the Democratic National Committee office in Tempe. He was also accused of going to the nearby retirement community of Ahwatukee to place several weird signs that had razor blades and bags of white powder attached to them.
Kelly was arrested Tuesday; law enforcement said that he was planning a “mass casualty” event somewhere in the state, and that a search of his home turned up “120 guns, 250,000 rounds of ammunition, body armor and a grenade launcher.” Add your own grim joke about having a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff. Oh wait, that’s not a joke, somebody did do that once, and killed 58 people and injured more than 500.
Police arrested Klofkorn Thursday as a suspect in the mailbox arson case, and while he was being questioned, he admitted to setting the mailbox on fire. Klofkorn also had an arrest warrant out for him in an unrelated crime, and in a detail that really does suggest he was trying to keep up with Florida Man, he told police that he wasn’t motivated by politics at all, but instead “committed the arson because he wanted to be arrested,” police said, which definitely was a successful plan.
Destroying US mail is a federal felony, so we’re pretty sure that he could just as well have turned himself in on the other warrant. No details have been released on that outstanding warrant, so maybe he wanted the better accommodations to be found in a federal prison?
As for Kelly, he too sounds like a real piece of work, and he left little doubt about his motives, what with repeatedly shooting at the DNC office, first with a BB gun, and then in the later two incidents with an actual gun what shot bullets. Fortunately, the office was empty when Kelly allegedly shot at it early in the mornings of September 16, September 23, and October 6.
The AP notes that Ahwatukee, the community Kelly allegedly graced with his weirdass razor-bedecked signs, is an “affluent suburb of Phoenix where most voters have chosen Democrats in recent elections.”
The AP decorously says the “hand-painted signs were attached to palm trees and appeared to criticize Democrats and their presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.” The Arizona Mirror is unafraid to go with more detail, saying law enforcement officers who were “surveilling” Kelly saw him
placing signs that read “Dems kill Jews,” “Dems Lie” and “Never Harris,” referring to Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. The signs had razor blades and bags of white powder attached to them with the message “biohazard” and “F*** you! Play stupid games win stupid prizes! Guess the poison.”
He sounds nice. Kelly’s attorney, Jason Squires, says his client is a “retired aerospace engineer,” and that hey, no big deal that he has that home arsenal, because like so many patriots who are unfairly accused of extremism (that’s us saying that, not Squires), the kindly retiree is “a sportsman, he has a multitude of firearms as a sportsman.” MMM-HMMM, as one does, etc.
Squires said Kelly’s weapons were all legally obtained and said that there were no grenades found with the launcher, making it merely a “tube.”
Kelly has only been charged in the DNC office shootings-up, but could face additional, more serious charges as the feds and the state investigate what he’s been up to, because they’re the tyrants, remember.
Also too, the Arizona Mirror attacks the good decent nonviolent allegedly shooty and allegedly terroristy patriot simply for exercising his free speech in the past, noting that
Kelly, who is facing charges of terrorism, criminal damage and more, posted unfounded conspiracy theories on a Facebook page found by the Mirror. As far back as 2014, Kelly was engaging in conspiratorial thinking by amplifying the debunked and racist “birtherism” claims about former President Barack Obama.
On January 6, 2021, while rioters were storming the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election for former President Donald Trump, Kelly changed his Facebook banner to a “Stop The Steal” logo, the movement that pushed unfounded claims around the election.
He also posted frequent pro-gun memes, including an Islamaphobic one, and his profile picture is an edit of the infamous photo of Kathy Griffin with a severed head of Donald Trump but replaced with Biden with the caption “this is still funny right?”
Well look, if you think every last violent-sounding conspiracy-filled rant from Trump supporters makes them potential terrorists, you’d have a lot of potential terrorists, now wouldn’t you? And only a few of them actually act out their violent fantasies, which have nothing to do with all that free speech, so we’re stuck with them, good luck the end.
[Guardian / Arizona Mirror / AP]
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Stuart Stevens a former GOP campaign manager who went to Lincoln Project because of evil Trump, did an interview with Vanity Fair. First of all, he thinks Kamala is going to win, and he thinks we will look back at her campaign as the best ever run. "And they’re doing things that no one’s done before, like showing clips of a Trump rally at a Harris rally, which was brilliant. I wish I was in the room and came up with that idea. They’re showing a lot of composure. It’s like sports. They seem very focused, calm. They have a plan. They have unlimited resources." And when asked about the media's presentation of this race he said referencing an interview with Haberman, "She said it was [an industry] that is doing this. And I kind of scratched my head. The classic was a headline they ran about Trump when he went off on his racist, National Socialist nostalgia about genes. And the headline was something like, “He Continues With His Fascination With Genes.” You could have written it about a Nobel Prize laureate. This is “Jeffrey Dahmer and Julia Child: Two Famous Chefs With Different Views Toward Ingredients.” I think it’s a failure. Do I have an easy answer? It took years for the media to grow accustomed to calling Trump a liar, but every article that mentions Trump should refer to him as a felon out on bail."
I agree.
“Dieter Klofcorn”
WTF is this, MAGAT Sprockets?