The daytime attack on St. Louise Catholic Church, in Bellevue Washington, was caught on a surveillance camera on June 28, 2022. It shows Adam Nota, a man who says he is a woman named “Maeve,” smashing the church’s glass doors with a rock (pictured above) and spray-painting several profane messages, such as “[expletive] Catholics]. He then assaults a church employee, Jonathan Taasan, with the spray paint when Taasan was drawn to the noise.
Nota, who lives near the church, was swiftly found by local police but even then he used a backpack full of spray paint to smash a police car. Criminal court filings for Nota reviewed by AFN show the State of Washington is charging the defendant with two crimes: fourth-degree assault and committing a hate crime for damaging the church property;
Yet the clear case of a “hate crime” got shrugged off by the U.S Department of Justice. A plea agreement with federal prosecutors, reviewed by Fox News this week, reveals the DOJ is recommending three years of probation, and not one day in jail, for a charge of destruction of religious property. His sentencing date for that federal charge is scheduled for June 2.
That Fox News story, as well as others that lean to the right, have pointed out this same Justice Department stubbornly tried – unsuccessfully – to send Catholic pro-life activist Mark Houck to prison even though surveillance footage showed Houck push away an abortion clinic escort who was verbally abusing Houck and his son.
Thomas More Society, the law firm that represented Houck, has told AFN it warned federal prosecutors they would lose in court if they pursued a FACE Act violation. That's because Thomas More had won a similar case against the same Pennsylvania federal prosecutors in 2019, but the abortion-defending Biden administration went after Houck anyway.
Christian apologist Alex McFarland tells AFN the American public is witnessing a weaponized federal government that has refused to investigate more than 100 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and churches after Roe v Wade was overturned. With that lack of justice, and numerous other examples in front of us, McFarland sees some worrisome parallels in world history.
“More than a few people from former communist countries,” he warns, “have acknowledged that when the law is used just against political adversaries, that's the preparation to implement a Marxist police state.”
One person sounding the alarm bell is Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese-American, who was a child during China’s murderous communist revolution under Chairman Mao before her family escaped. The public didn’t know about the Virginia mother until June 2021 when Van Fleet, alarmed by Critical Race Theory, took a turn speaking at a Loudoun County school board meeting. In that one-minute speech, she warned she had witnessed in her homeland what happened when one set of people are told and believe they are victims of others, which the school district’s “equity” lessons about white people vs. minorities clearly suggest.
“The Communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people," she said. "The only difference is they used class instead of race."
Because that brief speech went viral, van Fleet is still telling anyone who will listen she sees a menacing shift in America’s culture, politics, academia, and the media. Using social media, she uses her Twitter account to shares the stories of Chinese citizens, some of them true-believing Communists, who were jailed and killed by their own fanatical family members, students, and neighbors. After a string of terrible shootings in recent weeks, Van Fleet is warning the public not to surrender their firearms out of guilt because others are demanding they disarm to prove they care about children killed by a gunman.
“Americans will be anticommunists,” she wrote this week, “once they understand that Communism is the deadly threat to our country and it came from both the Woke and the CCP.”
McFarland, summarizing the current state of the United States, says Americans are being patient about the rule of law and respect for authority, but that patience cannot go on forever.
“I'm not saying I advocate for this. I'm not saying I desire it. I certainly don't,” he insists. “But if observance of the rule of law, equal protection, equal accountability, and general elections and honestly tabulated votes don't get us back on the constitutional track, I do think we're headed toward the revolution.”
