Summer vacation is here and the criminal youth are already out doing their dirty deeds.

A kid in Turlock recently fired paintballs at pedestrians near Turlock High School to injure them. They were frozen paintballs so they would hurt more. I saw photos of the torn flesh on one innocent kid hit and they also fired on a little lady.

It takes the internal fortitude of a gutless coward to shoot at people from a car with tinted windows. In a perfect world, they’d catch him and give him a dose of his own medicine by firing a few frozen paintballs at his hide so he doesn’t think about repeating this act of cruelty again.

And the day after Pittman High School senior Dylan Dooling graduated, he was stabbed to death while leaving a party in a nice area of Turlock. The young men who confronted Dooling fled as cockroaches will.

When you hear stories like this you know that some parents should never have been parents.

* * * * *

Summer is here – time to hit the lakes, go camping and all that fun outdoor stuff.

Last week the research team at Gambling.com conducted a data study to discover the best states in America for fishing, but unfortunately for anglers, California has been named the second worst state for fishing in the country. California received a disappointing overall fishing score of 27.7 out of 100! But not because the fishing is no good; it’s because of state government.

According to the study, it’s the California fees which are the key contributor to the state’s horrible score, where the cost of a fishing license is the highest in the country at $59, versus Hawaii which is priced at just $6.

Seems like everything in California costs the most and it shouldn’t. But that’s because of who rules state policies.

* * * * *

The stonewalling of the corrupt FBI is appalling.

Congress wanted the FBI to turn over Form FD-1023 that alleges Joe Biden was bribed as vice president for $5 million by a foreign national in exchange for influence in federal policy decision making. It finally relented after weeks of FBI Director Christopher Wray failing to comply with a subpoena by the House Government Oversight and Accountability Committee.

There are two standards of justice in America today: One that protects powerful liberals like Biden and persecutes Donald Trump who is a threat to their corrupt control.

* * * * *

Our world is going through something very dark and very sinister.

It’s a spiritual deception that God warned about us a long time ago. There would be a day in the future in which evil will be called good and good evil. Wrong will be right and right will be wrong.

That day is here.

Multitudes are falling for the deception. You even see it locally. 

Channce Condit, a Stanislaus County supervisor from Ceres, openly championed the deceived groups, who are confused about gender and identity, and he does so with a wide grin on his face for a photo op celebrating Pride Month. But hey, that’s politics, right? That’s one group of activists who would shut your political ambition in a heartbeat.

Then there were the words coming from former Gov. Schwarzenegger which were a total slap in the face of God in a recent exchange: “It reminds me of Howard Stern’s question to me,” Schwarzenegger recalled. “‘Tell me, governor, what happens to us when we die?’ I said, ‘Nothing. You’re six feet under. Anyone that tells you something else is a f---ing liar.’”

“Except in some fantasy,” Schwarzenegger added. “When people talk about, ‘I will see them again in heaven,’ it sounds so good, but the reality is that we won’t see each other again after we’re gone. That’s the sad part. I know people feel comfortable with death, but I don’t.”

Schwarzenegger may have been raised Catholic but his words come from the pit of hell. He is deceived and called God a liar. Apparently he hasn’t read the Bible which is saturated in promises of an afterlife.

* * * * *

To borrow from the concept of radio legend Paul Harvey’s “If I were the Devil” routine, I thought of this as I was running the other Saturday and seeing the garbage scattered about my way.

If I wanted a trashy community I would …

• Convince people that their one little soda cup or candy bar wrapper or fast food wrapping aren’t a big deal or matter to anyone.

• Teach teenagers that it’s okay to drink their mini bottles of Vodka and beer bottles while driving around and throw them in the center median to lose the evidence.

• Get people not to keep their Big Mac box and McDonald’s bags in their car until they can dispose of them when they got home or at the office, rather toss it out the window instead.

• Create parents who don’t impress upon their kids to pick up after themselves at home because they’ll grow up thinking they can mess up the outside world too.

• Encourage people to call concerned folks names like “Karens” or “Kevins” for posting examples of homeless camp messes and trash on social media.

• Discourage those who stroll down the sidewalks not to get a little exercise by bending over and picking up pieces of trash and carrying it to the next trash can. After all, it’s not their problem, right?

• Convince those who walk their dogs to carry along those plastic poop bags to collect Fido’s feces only to fill them up and throw them in the flower beds or along the sound wall. 

• Make it that residents could care less if someone dumped an ash tray or Starbucks cup at the gutter next to their property and have no desire to pick it up.

• Create selfish generations of people who don’t want to be inconvenienced by walking 10 to 20 feet to the garbage can in the park to deposit their KFC meal debris, instead toss it all into the gutter, chicken bones and all.

• Encourage people to ignore the law that forbids the posting of yard sale signs so they can tape them to the multiple sign posts within the blocks of their home – and not bother to take them down. And I’d have them attach the yard sale signs with that Gorilla tape or duct tape that won’t ever come off; or in the case of wooden poles drive nails in so the guy who climbs that pole can get ripped up.

• Make it sport for young people to throw glass bottles on the ground just for the laughter of friends.

• Tell police officers to ignore those pushing shopping carts down the road since it’s state law that they must remain on the shopping center premises.

• Have people live such messed up lives they become drugged out homeless people who make huge messes everywhere they go owners.

• Have renters dump discarded furniture and refrigerators on the street rather than arrange for a friend with a pickup to help them out.

• Convince people with loads of garbage in their pickups headed for the dump not to cover their load and ignore it as it blows out on the way to the transfer station.

• Lastly, tell the garbage truck driver to look the other way after they know contents of our cans didn’t end up in his collection bin.

I know. All of the above is already taking place and it’s sad to see.

* * * * *

I have been collecting examples of how the leftist media employs little tricks to advance their causes. Most progressives are go-easy-on-criminals because they have bleeding hearts – for the wrong people.

It was overt in a Huffington Post piece pushed by Microsoft which I saw last week headlined, “Missouri wants to execute Michael Tisius tomorrow despite widespread pleas to spare his life.” The teaser ran with a photo of him as a little boy.

Tisius is not a little boy. He is 42 and when he was 19 he killed two jail guards in a botched plot to free a cellmate of his at the time. The same article had a family photo of him as a baby as if the poor little baby killed two men.

I’m wondering why were there no family photos of the killed jail employees with their families that were robbed of their time with them?

Killing someone is the worst crime of all, regardless if the killer is 19 and has a brain that isn’t developed as apologists like to tell us. When I was 19 I certainly knew it was evil to kill someone. Because of Tisius, two men were deprived of a life with their families and we are supposed to feel sorry for him?

Jessica Schulberg, the author of the article, took great efforts to suggest why this budding prison artist should have been spared of death himself. She even included a link to a “clemency appeal” video where a person could show support for poor Michael, that victim of his rotten childhood and crummy parents and impressionable jailhouse inmate. Yet no effort to reach out to the children of the men he killed.

Maybe have a bleeding heart for the innocent but not for the guilty who shed innocent blood?

For the record Michael Tisius was executed last week more humanely than how he killed his victims. The real problem is why are Death Row inmates allowed to live so long after their crimes? Tisius committed his murders in 2000 and he was in prison for nearly 23 years!

* * * * *

You know America is in trouble by what happened last week on a public street in Reading, Penn. 

A so-called Pride event was being staged across the street from where Damon Atkins was and within 60 seconds of his arrival to protest, Atkins was arrested. Why? He shouted Bible verses at a group of LGBTQ who were staging their own expression of free speech.

An officer told Atkins: “Let them have their day. Respect it.”

Atkins replied: “You know who’s cheering for us? The people that are in hell. So you do you and I’m going to do me. This is public property.”

The cop was visibly angered and said, “That’s it, you’re done.”

The sign Atkins was holding read, “Jesus said I am the way, the truth and the life.”

And if I were Damon Atkins, I would consider suing the Reading Police Department for the violation of my first amendment rights to free speech.

When Newsweek reported about this travesty, it tossed in the boycotts on companies like Bud Lite and Target pushing their Woke nonsense. The reporter felt the need to search out a liberal professor in Justin Wolfers at the University of Michigan, who was quoted as saying the boycotts were “economic terrorism, literally terrorism, creating fear among the workers and forcing the corporations to sell the things you want, not sell the things you don’t.”

It’s intellectually dishonest for any lib professor to call Americans who boycott certain stores as terrorists. Americans aren’t terrorists when they refuse to do business with companies which push values contrary to their own. It’s called freedom, not terrorism!

Progressives call foul when conservatives boycott businesses but what do they do when you say something they disagree with? They will get in your face and try to shut you up and close you down.

Ask me how I know. They tried that with me. In 2020, a Ceres resident named Jaspinder Mann started an online petition urging me to resign. He apparently didn’t like my conservative points of view so he made up all kinds of lies about me to convince people to dogpile on me. He specifically was upset that I disapproved of Woke radicals burning down American cities like Portland that summer and me likening them to “spoiled 13-year-olds.”

Mann’s petition concluded that: “Benziger should not be able to attack an entire generation on such a big and influential platform simply because they do not match his agenda.”

How ironic that he suggested I “should not be able to attack” points of view while he was busy not only attacking me but trying to inflict scorn and dispense economic suffering to me. Maybe he skipped civics class during the time they were teaching about American freedoms like freedom of press and speech to absolutely SHOULD and AM ABLE to criticize rioters in the street.

And they tried to shut me down for that! Imagine what they might do to a person they really hate like Donald J. Trump. Oh wait, we are seeing the maniacal obsession with destroying him, aren’t we? 

There’s a huge difference between calling someone out for destructive thoughts and shutting them down and trying to cause upheaval in a person’s life.

* * * * *

It’s hilarious that California Democrats who voted in favor of sanctuary state status are now as mad as a wet hen that other state governors are sending illegal immigrants to their states since Biden is “catching and releasing.”

The childish Newsom suggested Ron DeSantis be charged with kidnapping – even though the migrants fully agreed to take their “free” trip to the land of fruits and nuts.

Democrats might be careful what they wish for – at the risk of looking like total hypocrites.

* * * * *

Last week the failed governor proposed to reduce crime, not by stricter sentences and building more prisons, but attacking Second Amendment gun rights.

Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher (Yuba City) did not mince words when he said “Newsom’s proposal is a poorly thought out, attention-seeking stunt from a governor desperate to distract from his ever-growing record of failure. If Newsom is this disinterested in leading California, he should let the lieutenant governor take over so he’ll be free to chase the national spotlight full-time.”

Ouch, but hey, true.

Specifically the wannabe president wants to see a 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would make it law for universal background checks, raising the firearm purchase age to 21, instituting a firearm purchase waiting period, and barring the civilian purchase of assault weapons.

This is not rocket science, folks. Gun laws don’t stop criminals. Thugs who kill and rob with guns don’t follow any gun laws to acquire them. They steal them or buy and trade them on the black market.

This column is the opinion of Jeff Benziger, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Ceres Courier or 209 Multimedia Corporation.  How do you feel about this? Let Jeff know at jeffb@cerescourier.com