My article featured in the September 15, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:
A Black Lives Matter supporter was killed by police yesterday after he shot a rookie Kentucky State Trooper to death following a high speed chase.
This murder is the latest in a series of cop-killings nationwide committed by aggrieved African-Americans who falsely claim blacks are perennial victims of racial discrimination at the hands of law enforcement. The virulently racist Black Lives Movement, which formed after the death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, in 2012, has been promoted by President Obama who has gone out of his way to foment race-based resentment and cop-hatred. The movement’s members, who idolize convicted, unrepentant cop-killers Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal, have declared “war” on law enforcement and openly call for police officers to be assassinated.
Following Obama’s lead, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) officially endorsed the increasingly violent Black Lives Matter movement whose unhinged radical left-wing members accuse police nationwide of systemic anti-black racism and of extrajudicially executing black Americans. In other words, it is now official Democratic Party policy that there are roving death squads manned by police officers who specifically stalk and execute without trial black men, women, and children across America.
The man who killed Trooper Joseph Cameron Ponder has been identified as convicted felon Joseph Thomas Johnson-Shanks. The perpetrator reportedly lived in Florissant, Missouri, near race riot-torn Ferguson, and apparently participated in local demonstrations protesting the death last year of Michael Brown, a young black man killed by a white Ferguson police officer after he tried to take the officer’s handgun. There is evidence that Johnson-Shanks was so preoccupied with the Brown case that he even attended Brown’s funeral and graveside service.
Johnson-Shanks, a 25-year-old black man, earned his infamy late Sunday when Trooper Ponder, a 31-year-old white man, pulled his vehicle over on Interstate 24.
Johnson-Shanks fled from the stop and was pursued by Ponder. The officer’s vehicle collided with the back of the perpetrator’s car after he stopped abruptly following a nine-mile chase. Johnson-Shanks opened fire on Ponder who succumbed to his injuries about an hour and 20 minutes later at Caldwell Medical Center in Princeton, Kentucky.
Around 7 a.m. Monday troopers caught up with Johnson-Shanks in a wooded area near the interstate. He reportedly pointed a gun at them, ignored demands to drop the weapon, and was fired on by police. About an hour and 20 minutes later Johnson-Shanks died at the same hospital where Ponder had passed away almost nine hours earlier.
Ponder, who joined the state police force earlier this year after graduating from a police academy, was a U.S. Navy veteran and a former SEAL. He was offered a track scholarship to Western Kentucky University but turned it down to serve his country.
He was also a track star in high school who stayed in touch his track coach, James Webb, and babysat his children, WHAS-TV in Louisville reports. Webb, a black man, said “I care about all my athletes, it was just a special relationship from the times he was in Hawaii and stationed everywhere, he always kept me abreast on what’s going on.”
But how do we know Johnson-Shanks was a Black Lives Matter supporter?
Because he made it abundantly clear on Facebook.
On Johnson-Shanks’s Facebook page, which is registered under the pseudonym Jay MileHigh, offers insights into what he believed.
The final visible post, dated Oct. 30, 2014, protests the death of three young black men at the hands of police in and around St. Louis, Missouri. Under the heading “Justice for Mike Brown,” it reads, “Why is it taking so long to arrest those officers[?] All We Want Is Justice!!!!!”
Brown refers to convenience store robber Michael Brown, whom white then-police officer Darren Wilson shot in self-defense in Ferguson in August 2014.
Johnson-Shanks posted mountains of photos on his Facebook page showing he attended Brown’s funeral at which racial arsonist Al Sharpton delivered a fiery eulogy. There are also scads of photos posted of protests around Ferguson. There is at least one “selfie” photo of Johnson-Shanks at protests. In another photo Johnson-Shanks poses, perhaps ironically, with police.
Another decedent referenced in the post is VonDerrit Myers Jr., who was shot by police in Shaw, Missouri, in October 2014. Myers was shot after reportedly firing upon a police officer three times during a chase. At the time Myers was wearing a monitoring ankle bracelet as a condition of bail from a recent gun case.
The final decedent is Kajieme Powell, an apparently mentally disturbed man whom police said committed “suicide by cop.” In St. Louis not far from Ferguson, police responding to a shoplifting report. Upon arriving they encountered a knife-wielding Powell who shouted “Shoot me! Shoot me! Shoot me now, motherfucker!” at them. As he moved toward the policemen he ignored commands to stop and drop the knife and officers shot him.
One of the re-posts Johnson-Shanks put on his Facebook page buys into the myth that there is such a thing as white privilege and that black Americans suffer because of it. The post is titled, “Watch This Young Black Man Give A Near Perfect Response To A White Male Who’s Ignorant About The Systematic Oppression of Black People[.]” It features a video from PBS last year in which black, Marxist, community organizer Phillip Agnew of Dream Defenders lectures white American Spectator contributor and talk radio host Ross Kaminsky about white privilege.
“I’m mad at a system every day that stakes its claim on saying that there’s a certain segment of society that is a criminal element,” Agnew says, spewing the stuff of paranoid leftist fantasy.
The Dream Defenders website describes the group as “an uprising of communities in struggle, shifting culture through transformational organizing.” Its mission statement calls for “the destruction of the political and economic systems of Capitalism and Imperialism as well as Patriarchy,” and for “an immediate end to the police state and murder of Black people, other people of color, and other oppressed peoples in the United States, the immediate release of the 2.5 million prisoners of the United States’ War on the Poor, and trials by juries of our peers.”
And as Heavy reports
Johnson-Shanks had a criminal record in his native Missouri. In August 2014, he was arrested for interfering with an officer. Then in January 2014, Johnson-Shanks was arrested for destruction of property. That same month, Johnson-Shanks was the recipient of $1,000 from the Missouri State Lottery. The St. Louis Police Department later said that in May 2015, Johnson-Shanks stole lottery tickets from a gas station in the city. He won $385 in prizes.
In addition, criminal convictions for a “Joseph T. Shanks” of Florissant, Missouri, born February 1990, appear in public records. According to Nexis, this individual pled guilty in St. Louis in November 2007 to burglary in the second degree, a class C felony. On the same date he also pled guilty to “theft/stealing,” also a class C felony. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment. It is unclear if he actually served time.
Joseph Thomas Johnson-Shanks will be remembered for what he was: a cop-killing hood who seized an opportunity to strike a blow for an evil, racist, anti-American cause.