It seemed to be a simple, albeit particularly bloody, road rage incident. A man was stopped at a red light in Taylorsville, Utah, waiting for the light to change so that he could make a right turn. The driver behind him got impatient, and started leaning on his horn. The driver in front still couldn’t move, however, as pedestrians were crossing the street in front of his car. And that’s when things got really ugly.
Once the road was clear and the cars started moving again, the driver in front “made a hand gesture” (gee, what could it have been?) “toward the other driver,” according to Salt Lake City’s KSL. Then he turned into the parking lot of a liquor store.
The driver who had been honking, enraged, pulled into the same lot. As the first driver was walking into the liquor store, the second driver pulled out a gun and started firing, hitting the man who had stopped too long at a red light in the arm and back.
The first driver “ran into the liquor store” as the second driver pursued him, “actively firing his gun.” The shooter seemed particularly intent on killing his target: he “didn’t stop shooting until an off-duty Utah Highway Patrol trooper already in the store fired back.” The victim “suffered gunshot wounds to his arm, back and right leg, the charges state. Seven bullet casings were recovered by police.”
It’s weird enough that someone would shoot someone else at least seven times for the crime of stopping at a red light while pedestrians crossed and then flipping him off for honking, but the story gets much, much weirder. The shooter’s name is Tyler Traveon Mhaka. KSL reports that “‘during the investigation, detectives learned that the defendant is a documented Taliban gang member and had just returned from Dubai. Additionally, it’s believed that the defendant has family ties in the Middle East,’ the charges state. The Salt Lake District Attorney’s Office clarified on Friday that the gang Mhaka allegedly belongs to is local, and he was not a member of the militant organization in Afghanistan.”
A Taliban member. In Taylorsville, Utah.
Note that KSL calls the Taliban a “gang.” The Taliban that is well known to the world is actually a designated terrorist organization, according to the U.S. State Department, as well as the ruling government of Afghanistan. But we’re told that that’s not the Taliban to which Mhaka belongs. Apparently there is a gang of some kind in the Taylorsville, Utah area that calls itself the Taliban. According to Salt Lake City’s ABC4, Tyler Traveon Mhaka is “also known as Taliban Tiny.”
The Utah Taliban is apparently not a gang of jihadis, but a gang of criminals who emulate and admire jihadis. And there is apparently at least one other such gang in California. ABC 4 explains that “the Taliban Gang is not associated with the terrorist organization known as the Taliban. According to the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office, there is a local gang in Utah called the Taliban Gang. There is also a Taliban Gang based in California that is not associated with Mhaka or the Utah gang, according to the FBI.”
Related: There Was a Jihad Bombing in New York City, and Here’s How Mamdani and the Media Framed It
One X user in Utah stated: “How did the ‘Taliban gang’ come to be in Utah? You may have been under the impression that the Taliban was the global terrorist network that runs Afghanistan. Well, you see, back in 2021 when Joe Biden decided to lose the War on Terror and cede Afghanistan to the tender predation of the Taliban gang, Utah Governor Spencer Cox wrote a letter to President Biden asking for as many Afghan refugees as they could manage to send us. And they did.”
That may well be the case, but “Tyler Traveon Mhaka” is not an Afghan name; rather, it most often denotes a Zimbabwean origin, and so suggests that the problem here may indeed be mass migration, but not solely migration from Afghanistan. What seems to be happening is that migrants have streamed into the U.S. with virtually no vetting, and once here, have found ways to express their hatred and contempt for the country that welcomed them and gave them refuge. One way to do that, at least in Utah, seems to have been to form a gang with a name that is designed to strike fear in the hearts of Americans, and to signal that the gang members are their enemies.
This is Old Joe Biden’s legacy, and Americans will be paying the price for it for many years to come.
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