A 68-year-old man widely known and loved as “Polk County Santa,” who has portrayed Santa Claus at major Florida Christmas parades, events, and photo shoots for nearly a decade, was arrested for allegedly trying to pay $200 to have sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Thomas Allen Hicks of Lakeland was one of 19 suspects taken into custody during “Operation Child Protector VIII,” a multi-day, multi-agency undercover sting led by the Polk County Sheriff’s Office that targeted individuals seeking to sexually exploit minors.

Sheriff Grady Judd announced the arrest during a press conference on Wednesday.

Judd held up Hicks’ booking photo as well as photographs of him in his Santa garb.

“We arrested Santa Claus,” Sheriff Judd said. “I want all the children who are watching to know that it is not the real Santa Claus. This is a guy, though, who is well-known in Polk County, Central Florida, and Lakeland as a for-hire Santa Claus.”

Judd added, “He’s not going to be Santa Claus this next year.”

“Thousands and thousands and thousands of children have sat on this guy’s lap thinking he was Santa Claus when, in fact, he was a child sex predator,” the sheriff emphasized.

WATCH:

According to the official arrest affidavit, an undercover detective posted an ad on a known prostitution site posing as a human trafficker offering his fictitious 13-year-old daughter for sex acts.

Hicks responded, continued communicating after learning the girl’s age, negotiated $200 for one hour, and explicitly told the undercover officer he “would be gentle.”

The Sheriff’s Office said in a press release:

Hicks sent social media messages to an undercover detective who was posing as a 13-year-old girl’s guardian. He told the UC that he would pay $200 to have sex with the girl and was explicit in describing the sex acts he wanted to perform on the child, but said that he would be gentle. He told detectives that he has been married over 50 years, but regularly goes onto known “prostitution sites” looking for prostitutes or companions.

The sick pervert showed up at the arranged meeting spot, a retail parking lot, carrying $382 in cash, and was immediately arrested.

Hicks also claimed to have been a preacher for more than 40 years.

When he wasn’t playing Santa, Hicks worked in marketing for Tri-County Behavioral Health/Human Services in Polk County. He has also worked in the Lakeland Christmas Parade since at least 2017 and has been hired by multiple local photographers for children’s holiday photo sessions.

Tri-County Human Services issued a statement confirming he has been terminated and they are cooperating with authorities.

Fox 13 reports:

Hicks, according to the document, admitted that he knew the ad was for a girl who was 13 years old, and acknowledged that he should not have had continued contact or sexual thoughts about her.

The document states that Hicks said he wasn’t sure if he would have tried to have sex with the child victim if he knew she was real.

According to the affidavit, the suspect was calm while being interviewed, but did show emotion when asked about his wife or his reputation.

Hicks faces multiple felony charges, including human trafficking for commercial sexual activity involving a minor, traveling to meet a minor for unlawful sexual conduct, unlawful use of a two-way communication device, and using a computer to solicit a parent/guardian for access to a child.

This is the latest in Sheriff Grady Judd’s long-running series of aggressive “Child Protector” stings that have removed dozens of predators from the streets in recent years.

Auburndale Police Chief Terry Storie urged parents to be vigilant in protecting their children because there are so many more predators out there.

“The most frustrating thing they’ll say is, ‘I just want to give my kids privacy.’ That is a load of crap,” Storie said. “You get one chance to raise your children, and you need to be involved in every aspect of their life and digging deep into that cell phone, and seeing what they’re doing online and who they’re chatting with.”

The post DISGUSTING: Popular ‘Polk County Santa’ Busted in Massive Florida Child Sex Sting, Tried Paying $200 to Have Sex with 13-Year-Old appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Woke CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer has said that in the seconds after a gunman opened fire near him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, his first thought was, “Is he trying to shoot me?”

Blitzer, who was only a few feet from the attacker by a security checkpoint outside the Washington Hilton ballroom, has repeatedly described the encounter as “very frightening” and “terrifying” in interviews since the April 25 shooting.

In a live CNN interview on the night of the attack, Blitzer recounted leaving the men’s restroom, seeing a man with “a very, very serious weapon,” hearing three to six deafening shots, and being thrown to the ground by a police officer who shielded him as the suspect kept firing just a few feet away.

He said he was then escorted back into the restroom with about 15 other men to shelter in place, all while wondering who the gunman was aiming at and whether he himself was about to be shot.

Authorities say the suspect, identified in multiple reports as 31‑year‑old Cole Tomas Allen of California, tried to charge a Secret Service checkpoint at the hotel with multiple firearms, prompting officers and agents to subdue and arrest him as President Donald Trump and other officials were rushed from the ballroom.

Officials and later fact‑checks have said early indications are that the attacker was seeking to target Trump administration figures, not Blitzer or other journalists, though investigators are still reviewing motive.

Clips of Blitzer’s CNN appearance, including his remark that his first thought was “Is he trying to shoot me?”, went viral on X, Instagram and TikTok, drawing mockery from some users who accused the cringe anchor of exaggerating his fear and finding a way to make the event all about himself.

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This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire

By John R. Lott Jr.

Violence motivated by political differences has emerged as a defining, if alarming, feature of 21^st -century American civil life. Neither side in our nation’s increasingly dangerous ideological divide has a monopoly. But one side, the Democratic Party and its allies, refuses to acknowledge the increase in mayhem from the left.

This is true even in the face of the campus assassination of beloved conservative activist Charlie Kirk – or the very public attack against a televised banquet featuring the president of the United States in a ballroom room full of politicians and journalists.

On Sunday, well after authorities released Cole Tomas Allen’s anti-Trump administration screed, former President Barack Obama posted on X that the attacker’s motive remained unclear. Actually, Allen’s writings made his radical leftist views perfectly clear, along with his rage against conservatives and President Trump himself.

This brought to mind ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s stubborn insistence that Tyler Robinson, the man arrested for shooting Charlie Kirk was part of “the MAGA gang.” He wasn’t, of course. His own mother told investigators that her son, who was in a relationship with a gay man transitioning to female, had “become more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”

But willful self-deception has become a default position for liberals, who have convinced themselves for years that political violence is the province of the far right. It might still be, as some claim that might be the case of one Minnesota’s couple murder and another wounded in their homes, though the murderer had hundreds of  “No Kings” flyers and was appointed to advisory boards by two different Democrat governors. But the arson and violence that accompanied many of the George Floyd riots; the Lafayette Square riot near the White House, where more than 150 law enforcement officers were injured; the fire-bombings and attacks on pro-life facilities following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision; the plot to kidnap and kill  Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the 2024 ambush murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson – all came from the left.

On Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, whose own vitriolic rhetoric has been aimed at the president, whether he had any second thoughts in the wake of third assassination attempt against Trump. Raskin has repeatedly labeled Trump as “authoritarian” and exhibiting “fascism” and declared that Trump wants “to be a dictator.”

Raskin seemed surprised by the question and responded by doubling down: “The authoritarianism like we saw on display in Minneapolis where two of our citizens were gunned down in streets simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. Renee Good, Alex Pretti. And others have died in custody.”

This response not only ducked the question about whether elected Democrats’ intemperate rhetoric is spurring fringe Americans to violence, it also misstated the facts. Renee Good struck an officer with her car and ignored verbal orders from an officer. Alex Pretti put himself between officers and people they were trying to arrest, disobeyed orders from officers to stop, got into a physical confrontation with officers, and was carrying a gun.

Raskin isn’t alone. Democrat after Democrat seems incapable of discussing whether their own incendiary rhetoric has caused violence. After Saturday night’s frightening attack at the Washington Hilton, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries was asked about his comments urging Democrats to “maximum warfare” in the gerrymandering battles. “I don’t give a damn about the criticism,” he said. “Get lost.”

Even more bizarrely, Jeffries invoked the fire-bombing of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion while Josh Shapiro and his family were home and said Republicans should get their own house in order. But Shapiro’s attacker, who pleaded guilty, cited left-wing talking points about Gaza and his motivation.

This kind of confusion comes even from those who should know better. A frequently cited source used by the media to try to show that most violence is from the “right” is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Its latest annual report claims, “This is the third year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings.” According to the ADL, between 2022 and 2024 there were 34 so-called “right-wing extremists” murderers, with 23 of them (68%) carried out by white supremacists. They say those attacks took 61 lives.

Claiming that all the extremist murders are by “right-wingers” sounds dramatic, and the ADL report received extensive uncritical news coverage in media outlets including CNN, The Economist, and PBS. But it’s untrue. None of the cases listed by the ADL involved a right-winger murdering a political target.

Serious questions surround how the ADL defines “right-wing extremists.” Does it always classify all white supremacists as “right-wing”? Does it automatically label every mass murderer who targets a gay bar as a “right-winger”? At the ADL, the answer appears to be yes.

Consider Payton Gendron, the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooter who murdered 10 black shoppers. The ADL labeled him a right-wing extremist because of his racism. However, his own writings complicate that characterization. Gendron said he hated black people because he believed they had too many children, which he thought harmed the environment. In his manifesto, he identified himself as an “eco-fascist national socialist” and even called himself part of the “mild-moderate authoritarian left.”

Or take Anderson Lee Aldrich, who murdered five people at Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, in 2022. The ADL classified him as a right-wing extremist because he targeted LGBT people. Yet Aldrich identified as nonbinary and used they/them pronouns – facts the ADL left out of its framing. Those identifiers are hardly the hallmarks of right-wing ideology, especially when the ADL itself emphasizes the “LGBTQ+” nature of the venue.

Meanwhile, the ADL conveniently leaves other mass shooters off its list entirely:

• In 2022, transgender shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale attacked the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, and murdered six people. In her writings, she raged against “white privilege,” vowed she wanted to “kill all you little crackers,” and resented the wealth of the students at the school. The Nashville Police report also noted her support for gun control.
• Robert Crimo murdered seven people in Highland Park, Illinois, in 2022. He made no secret of his hostility toward Trump.
• In 2023, Connor Sturgeon murdered five people in Louisville, Kentucky. He had previously praised the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and posted sharp criticism of police violence and Donald Trump.
• That same year, Kimbrady Carriker murdered five people in Philadelphia. Carriker supported Black Lives Matter, wore women’s clothes, and called for defunding the police.

These crimes claimed a total of 38 lives. Yet the ADL claims that people on the left committed none.

The ADL also makes other questionable assumptions. The Aryan Brotherhood, a white gang with roots in the California prison system, is certainly racist, but it has no political ideology beyond racism and making money through racketeering, drug trafficking, and murder. None of the Aryan Brotherhood murders the ADL cites were politically motivated. Most involved disputes with other gang members, or in one case, the killing of a two-year-old girl the perpetrator had sexually assaulted, and in another, the murder of an 11-year-old girl living on the same property. Removing these cases cuts six murders from the ADL’s tally.

Three of the murderers were neo-Nazis, who murdered one person each. They are again classified as right-wingers based on their being racist even though they are “national socialists.” But again, none of these murders had anything to do with anyone’s political views, with one murdering his aunt.

Other cases are listed as right-wing because the perpetrators held antisemitic views. But given the recent anti-Israel riots, those views can hardly be considered right-wing. One of the killers, tied to QAnon and anti-vaccine beliefs, murdered his wife. Another case involved a man who beat his five-year-old to death. Why do any of these killings qualify as a political murder?

If we exclude the Payton Gendron and Anderson Lee Aldrich shootings, along with the Aryan Brotherhood murders – but still include neo-Nazis and other debatable cases – the numbers show roughly as many “left-wing” murders as “right-wing” ones. The media treats the ADL’s selective definitions and exclusions seriously only because they support a political narrative rather than reflect the full reality.

Regardless of how one counts the cases, left-wing violence remains a serious problem – undoubtedly the most serious.

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It was announced over the last week that the DOJ indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left extremist group that has only gotten more radical over the years but still masquerades as a non-governmental “civil rights” organization whose business model is based strictly on bilking the American taxpayer.

The crux of the indictment centered on the SPLC committing fraud by pro-actively financing “far-right” extremist groups it officially deems opprobrious and deserving of condemnation – groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi organizations.

One of the most damning items revealed by the indictment was that the SPLC had “secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups.”

Of that $3 million, it was uncovered that $270,000 of monies were disbursed to an individual who helped organize the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” demonstration in 2017, which the mainstream media relentlessly gaslit into a political lightning rod for President Trump – who no doubt suffered harms to both his reputation and political prospects as a result of the manufactured controversy.

The indictment to SPLC is a welcome first step, but it also speaks to a much deeper issue about how government directly funds putative apolitical groups, or groups that go under the banner of “civil rights” but in truth conduct nefarious activities which, in turn, cause serious damage to the country.

This subversion has most prominently been in the form of undermining a duly elected President and his agenda, while stigmatizing those who valiantly serve the movement out of polite society.

Going a few steps further, some of the most loyal associates of the President have faced steep penalties to their livelihoods, reputations, and civil liberties over the last decade – bearing brutal financial costs to pay off lawyers while facing potential imprisonment, merely for exercising fundamental rights and remaining true to their convictions the entire time.

All the media gaslighting is slowly but surely being revealed as a concerted effort by shadowy actors that receive government funding to attack the very movement which has made its mandate to flush out the swamp of Washington, DC, and restore some semblance of authority and democratic accountability back to the American people.

What is more, there is no doubt that if the SPLC is being financed to run counter-ops on groups it purports to go after, other groups who fall under that nebulous NGO banner are certainly also doing the same thing.

In other words, the fraud is widespread: extremist groups resort to the 501(c)(3) label to actively run psychological operations, cover their shady tactics with the guise of legal formalities, and related campaigns to hurt the MAGA movement.

Thus, SPLC is at the tip of the spear of a much broader deep-state operation that interlocks government with outside groups to manufacture outrage on behalf of the powers that be, who benefit from the longstanding Uniparty-driven status quo.

If the fraud is so extensive – and the SPLC indictment, particularly if it leads to a conviction, would seem proof positive that it is – then it only further bolsters the President’s (strong) assertion that 2020 was a stolen election, illegitimated, in part, by government-driven psyops designed to attack the integrity of the policies and standing of President Trump.

There is no doubt that so much of the outrage that took place during the summer of 2020, supposedly triggered by George Floyd’s death, was also a psyop designed to undermine the 2020 race later that year by fomenting violence with government-funded groups, under the pretext of Antifa and BLM, to generate a portrait of public disorder and mass outrage.

The media attempted to paint the protests as organic, spontaneous displays of righteous indignation, which quickly turned into a countrywide phenomenon, national reckoning or “reawakening” to combat racial injustice.

While there is no doubt that many Americans were brainwashed via agitprop into joining the movement on their own, the professional agitators, the paramilitary arms of the protests that incited the most chaos, could have just as well been paid off by shadowy backchannels similar to what has been revealed through this recent SPLC indictment.

The timing between the protests, their disproportionate scale relative to the incident that allegedly jumpstarted them (the death of a drug-addled felon), and the lead-up to the 2020 race, all would point to a similar fraud akin to the SPLC discovery – though significantly magnified.

Lest it be forgotten, right before covid broke out, in December of 2019, President Trump had been enjoying near-record approval ratings, boosted by a roaring economy.

At that point he was at his then all-time peak in terms of political capital.  Knowing this, and knowing that he was poised to face off against a historically weak (in every sense of the term) counterpart in Joe Biden, who spent most of the 2020 race, due to undisclosed illness and cognitive decline, campaigning from a basement, leftist and deep state alarm bells were raised, prompting them to resort to norm-breaking, even extralegal, maneuvers so that a second Trump term, which looked more and more probable, would be avoided at all costs.

We all know that the faux gaslighting incidents, like Charlottesville, occurring earlier in the first Trump term, were trial runs and part of a collective lead up to that one chaotic summer of 2020, which was the crescendo moment by the Left which did a lot to dismantle the President’s chances of re-election.

Beyond that, the summer of 2020, which caused billions of untold damages to property nationwide, and which paled, demonstrably, in comparison to the trivial damages rendered in the January 6^th protests, nevertheless offered a blueprint for national pandemonium that helped fuel the outrage which made January 6^th possible.

It was not as if the J6 protestors operated in isolation either: they had just lived through that long, terrible summer of organized anarchy, bearing witness to their cities burning down, businesses looted, and cultural landmarks desecrated, in service to a woke secular martyr.

Thus, their resentment was not something that came out of a vacuum but driven by an existential feeling that America was on the brink.

These facts would make the fraud even more sinister – because of its systematic nature: it sought institutional damage through psychological manipulation created by manufactured outrage and consensus, and government funneled NGO paramilitary operations were mobilized to simulate support for their broader psychological operation.

These possibilities compel further investigation by prosecutorial agencies and authorities.  They also compel legislative action – particularly, passage of the Save America Act.

The latter would go a long way towards solidifying election operations, particularly in the wake of relentless sabotage and subterfuge by an increasing number of threats, both foreign and, as the 2020 race and the lawfare on President Trump would prove, domestic.

The persistence of the deep state against the President, which is underscored by the Russian collusion hoax of the first administration, and Operation Arctic Frost and related efforts by the Biden Justice Department to quash President Trump’s political resurrection during the wilderness period of 2021-2025, raises the already extraordinarily high stakes for adopting the Save America Act.

It should not be forgotten the lengths the government went to undermine the democratically elected President and destroy the MAGA movement for good – this, of course, included an FBI-sponsored raid on the President’s own private residence, as well as four unprecedented indictments, the most radical exhibition of weaponized justice ever made in American history.

If government is working against the American people directly, exhibited by the above facts, it further underlines why election integrity is so critical – protections must be instated, by law, to preserve the right to the franchise, in order so that Americans only, not deep-state actors, have power and control over their governing institutions, so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people might be restored and preserved beyond just the remainder of President Trump’s term in office.

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