Do Ralston and Bottoms Really Want Hate Crime Laws? Because the Atlanta Rioters Are All Hate Criminals. Including Bottoms and Ralston.

June 3, 2020 Leave a comment

Certain politicians and pundits in Atlanta — Double-Dipping Mayor I’ll take two paychecks for that one job thank you very much Keisha Lance Bottoms, disgraced GOP House Speaker David Ralston, job-threatening public-radio-triple-dipper Bill Nigut, and every single Democrat and virtue-signaling Republican want to pass a hate crime law in Georgia.  Because Brunswick.  Because George Floyd.  Because “racism.”  Purportedly against all black men.  Purportedly by all police.

As of this writing, such rhetoric and the riots they birthed have resulted in serious injuries to more than 400 police and several murders of police, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and looting. ... 

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Arrest Mark Rudd For Felony Murder. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Too.

March 6, 2020 3 Comments

Un-prosecuted Weather Underground terrorist Mark Rudd has an op-ed confessing to felony murder in the leftist-terrorist paper of record, The New York Times today.

Rudd must be excited: his stock is going up. The last time the Times gave over their editorial page to a Weather terrorist, it was to his rival-in-love-tenure-and-attention, Billy Ayers. It was also the morning of 9/11, and Ayers’ wispy-bearded mug smirking from the pages of the Times as he bragged about how much fun he had bombing the Pentagon was likely the last thing many people saw before they suffocated and burned to death in the Twin Towers. And, the Pentagon. ... 

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Michelle & Barack & Bernardine & Bill: The Real Story of the Obamas and the Terrorist Couple

February 28, 2020 6 Comments

Welcome back to tinatrent.com! After a years-long hiatus, I am finally ready to start blogging again. I’d like to thank people who took the time to write and ask me where I’ve been. The good news is I re-built a tear-down house in the North Georgia Mountains and tried to start a tomato farm — and will be trying again to start a tomato farm, hopefully without the weeks of 90+ temperatures, poison oak wrestling, verticillium wilt, horrible hornworms, and the dreaded chickweed.

Speaking of terrorists who keep coming back, my first offering isn’t a blog post but a very long piece about the truth about the relationship between Barack and Michelle Obama and Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. ... 

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Radicalization Concern Trolls and the new Apology Tour

June 11, 2019 4 Comments

In 1999, when I was lobbying to defeat Georgia’s hate crime bill for the first time, I coined the term “Apology Tour” to describe grasping politicians who try to score points by very publicly proclaiming their guilt for some racist act in their distant past.  

Such timed confessions aren’t really about atoning for personal error: they are one-upsmanship attempts to project accusations of racism onto anyone who doesn’t apologize as loudly as you do — and also fall in line with your politics. ... 

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David Shafer Sponsored the National Popular Vote Bill With Stacey Abrams. He Has No Business Being the Chairman of the Georgia GOP.

May 17, 2019 Leave a comment
Did This Happen?

On Saturday, the Georgia GOP will hold their statewide convention in Savannah. Former State Senator David Shafer is one of the three candidates to head the state party. I spoke with Shafer this week at an advance event for the convention. He was gracious. He amassed a good record in the state senate. He seems like a nice guy.

But David Shafer has no business running the state party because he sponsored the National Popular Vote bill, a bill that would existentially devastate the GOP in Georgia — and everywhere else in the United States. Worse, he co-sponsored the bill with our party’s sworn enemies, people like Stacey Abrams and “Venceremos Brigade” Nan Orrock, who was my representative for 20 years, during which time I came to understand very well just how radical she is.  ... 

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Is Lynne Homrich a Conservative? She Says Yes. But I Have Some Questions First.

April 23, 2019 Leave a comment

This is a post about Georgia’s 7th Congressional District. If you want to read about Lynne Homrich, you can skip to below. But first, I want to talk about the Georgia 7th District because the fortunes and failures of mainstream Republicans in the 7th speak volumes about the future of the Party itself.

Currently, Rob Woodall, a mainstream GOP foot soldier, holds the 7th.  Woodall is typical of a certain type of Republican.  He takes easy positions on obvious issues and refuses to take a stand on difficult ones, especially illegal immigration. ... 

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No, Judith Clark Isn’t A “Reformed Prisoner.” Yes, Her Victims Are Still Dead. And Guess Which Congressional Freshman Supported Her Parole.

April 18, 2019 Leave a comment

Judith Clark in Court Laughing about Cops and Security Officer she Murdered

Cop-hating rag of record the New York Times is once again grotesquely trying to peddle the story that Brinks Robbery cop-killer Judith Clark is now a “reformed person” who deserves the parole Andrew Cuomo just orchestrated for her.  “Ms. Clark, 69 . . . evolved during her long incarceration from a left-wing extremist to a model prisoner known for good works,” the Times lied today.

The “reform” game is one they’ve been playing with unrepentant leftist terrorists like Clark for years.   But as I wrote in 2012, Judith Clark’s purported prison house “good works” are no such thing: they are the same leftist extremism repackaged for a dumber generation of Times subscribers.

Curiously, in 2012, the last time the Times tried to spring Clark, they did so on the grounds that she was still a radical, but a . . . radical for good.  Then, the headline read: “Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation.”  Yes: they actually made a pun about killing two cops and a security guard.

This time they’re saying she “evolved.”  Just like the language commissars at the Times.

Judith Clark With Dogs She Didn’t Help Gun Down Mercilessly ... 

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We Killed the Hate Crimes Bill in Georgia, Again

April 14, 2019 1 Comment

20 years ago, I singlehandedly took on the SPLC and the ADL and the NAACP and the incredibly sleazy Rural Urban Summit and the HRC and a score of other alphabet soup organizations and helped kill the hate crimes bill in Georgia with a well-placed op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution that argued these laws are in fact oppressive to speech and destroy equality for victims before the law.

And, oh yeah, that the hate crime activists are bunch of liars about the real uses of these “laws.”

I’m looking at you, Bill Nigut.  Unlike some of your victims, you can’t get me fired by throwing your ADL-abetted weight around, pal.  And trust me, I still remember the first time you twisted a story in my presence — to my benefit because I was a Democrat at the time — but I saw it and had the decency to be appalled for the pro-life activists you were perjuring on the other side.

Some of us have non-selective scruples.  Also, I know who you got fired.

A long, long time ago, when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, Bill Nigut taught me everything I needed to know about media bias.  Maybe I should write a children’s book about it.  Bill would be the grasshopper twisting arms and accusing people of prejudice in order to destroy their lives, then he would hop back to his nest (do grasshoppers live in nests?) and cash all his many checks from public, academic, nonprofit, and private agencies paying him to work some 900 hours a week because he’s that special kind of grasshopper.  Nice gigs if you can get them.  Maybe the state or the IRS should investigate exactly how much time he clocks at all those different jobs.

Probably it would be too gross to be a children’s book.  For example:

Bill Nigut, Investigative Reporter

So here is my anti-hate crime bill editorial this time.  Jesse Smollett helped me write it.  In a way.

Insider Advantage, Georgia ... 

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My 2000 Atlanta-Journal Constitution Op-Ed Opposing the 2000 Hate Crime Bill in Georgia

March 18, 2019 2 Comments

In 2000, I published an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution opposing a hate crimes bill that eventually passed out of the Georgia Legislature and was signed into law, but not before it was amended to exclude victim categories — in other words, it was amended so that it would apply to anyone, not just to members of certain identity groups.

A sort of ecumenical hate crimes law, like those “coexist” bumper stickers, only not like the people who have them on their cars, who, oddly, strongly prefer both exclusion of and differentiation between all peoples into bloody warring sectionalism when it comes to anyplace other than the rear bumper of their Volvo.

A few years later, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned Georgia’s 2000 non-identity-specific hate crime law on the grounds of vagueness, which is an interesting story for another day.

I can’t seem to find my op-ed in the AJC’s digital archive.  I think they didn’t archive all op-eds at that time because some of my other ones are there.  Or, it’s a vast conspiracy.  Very much likely the former.

I have a crude photocopy of a photocopy that wouldn’t do to reproduce here, so here is the text re-typed by hand.  If anyone better at using this Interweb thing than I, which is virtually all people, can find a link or a legible copy, I’d certainly appreciate it.  Meanwhile, my enemies will certainly attest to its legitimacy.  In terms of it existing, that is.

As for me, in some ways I cringe reading this, though the younger me does make some good logical points.  What a fussy feminist academic hectorer I was!  I’m far less mincingly logical now, yet simultaneously no less accurate.  We’re talking about legislation, for God’s sake, not reality.

Far better to be the vigorous yeoman hectorer of today.

~~~~~~~~

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March ??, 2000 ... 

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The Problem Isn’t That Morris Dees is a Scumbag. The Problem is That the SPLC is a Scumbag Organization

March 15, 2019 Leave a comment

We all know it, OK?  We in the industry of analyzing “anti-hate activism,” as it were, have always known that Morris Dees AND the organization he uses as a Caribbean tax shelter are scummy.  Even people who support hate crime laws know that the SPLC isn’t exactly singing in the choir: they’re in the back parking lot pimping other people’s pain for serious profit.

Note, for example, this comment from Harper’s Magazine, those well-known Bircher-Strangelove fellow travelers.  You have to pay for this longer story from Harper’s, but it’s worth it.

Better yet, for free, see what James Simpson, Matthew Vadum, Renee Nal, and I have said about this organization over the years.

The tern ineffable comes to mind.  Also, predictable.

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Georgia Rep. Chuck Efstration and Others Need to Answer Questions About Their Hate Crime Bill, HB426

March 6, 2019 Leave a comment

So Georgia has another hate crimes bill pending,

HB 426 is sponsored by the following legislators:

Chuck Efstration, Calvin Smyre, Karen Bennett, Deborah Silcox, Karla Drenner, and Ron Stephens.

As I have documented for years, hate crime laws aren’t accidentally discriminatory and dishonest: they were designed to be discriminatory and dishonest. The drafters of hate crime legislation in 1997 — Bill Clinton, Eric Holder, Elena Kagan, and a bunch of politically motivated activists — weren’t driven by the desire to oppose hate whenever and wherever it happens. They were motivated to create a false picture of an America as a nation where ‘ordinary crime’ was not as important as the crimes they deemed “hate.”

To do this, they created hierarchies of victims.

They destroyed our highest principle of equality before the law.

They empowered unelected activists to dictate what was and was not hate, destroying the way that our democracy and our criminal justice system is supposed to work.

They made justice itself into just another identity politics shell game.

The biggest problem with selling the hate crimes racket to the American public was and is the problem of crimes committed against women for being women. There are just too many such “gender bias” crimes to … “count ’em,” as Bill Clinton laconically intoned to adoring audiences: if we counted all those crimes against women, then hate crime laws would just become about serial rapists and serial killers and other guys who snatched random women (or men, or boys, or girls) off the streets.

The hate crime activists — who were and are anti-cop leftists and race activists and gay activists and Jewish and Muslim groups and advocates for illegal immigrants — sure didn’t want that sort of outcome, especially as it carried with it the problem that many, if not most, hate crime offenders might end up being minority men. And they certainly didn’t want that, either.

So they cooked the books. Over the next few weeks as we try to stop the hate crimes bill in Georgia for the second time, I will tell the story of how the hate crimes industry started cooking the books in 1997 to get the statistics they desired, and how they have succeeded in pulling off the greatest statistical hoax in American history.

You can read the whole story right now by reading this PDF: Rape is Not A Hate Crime Against Women.

You can also read some of my earlier hate crime articles in the categories: “hate crimes” and “The Hate Crimes Racket” on this blog.

We need to get the sponsors of HB 426 to answer some hard questions about the bill they’re pushing on Georgia. If you live in their districts, please try to get them to answer the questions I have posed below for each of the bill’s sponsors. If they respond, I’ll post their responses, with or without your name. Also please feel free to ask me anything about hate crime laws and why I oppose them. If you email me with a good question, privately, I won’t use your name in my response here, but I like to know to whom I’m speaking off the blog itself.

This is a pro-cop blog, and I ALWAYS keep police and other law officials’ identities private. If you are a law enforcement officer or a state or federal statistician or prosecutor who wants to share information about the way you were taught to enforce (and not enforce) hate crime laws, I promise you I will never reveal your identity. I have references from police who will vouch for me. Believe me, I know what’s at stake.

Here are some questions for the sponsors of Georgia HB 426. Feel free to share it widely!

Questions for Sponsors of HB 426

Rep. Chuck Efstration, Dacula:

• Do you believe Ed Kramer, the infamous child predator and convicted child molester who has repeatedly eluded justice and recently was caught once again preying on a young boy in your district, should be charged with gender bias hate crime under your bill? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Why do you feel the need to prioritize so-called hate crime legislation this session when prolific sexual predators such as Kramer are still clearly not being properly monitored or incarcerated, leaving them loose in your district to prey on even more child victims?

• Why is prolific, Atlanta-based serial killer Michael Darnell Harvey, who mutilated and reportedly lynched by hanging at least some of his female victims while raping and murdering them, never cited among the notorious killers used to justify the alleged need for hate crime laws? Do you believe he should be added to the HCSA statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Do you believe violent serial rapist Blair Malachi Washington, arrested in your district, should be charged with gender bias hate? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Do you believe James Hiram Akil Watkins, arrested in your district for stabbing, beating, torturing and murdering his 77-year old neighbor, should be charged with a hate crime? If not, why not?

• Do you believe accused murderers Glenda Carter, Russell Williams, and Zarius Williams, charged with killing one man with a baseball bat and nearly murdered another in your district should be charged with hate crime murder and hate crime attempted murder under your bill? If not, why not? Do you believe they are hate criminals? If not, why not?

• Do you believe Franecha Torres, Nicholas Evans, and Khalil Miller, charged with brutally murdering a 21-year old man in your district, should be charged with hate crimes? If not, why not?

• Do you believe serial killer Charles Lendell Carter, convicted in your district, who killed three women, should be counted as a hate criminal in the federal HCSA (Hate Crime Statistics Act) statistics collection that may be updated in Georgia if your legislation passes? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Do you believe Samuel Little, who may be the most prolific serial killer of women in America, should be added to the federal HCSA statistics and other hate crime lists, such as those used to educate schoolchildren? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Do you believe the as-yet unidentified rapist who has left DNA at seven rape and attempted rape sites in Clayton County since 2015 should be counted as a gender bias hate criminal? A race bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

Rep. Deborah Silcox, Powers Ferry/Cobb County

• Do you believe prolific serial rapist Christopher Charles Sanders, who was released from prison five times and was most recently arrested for rape in your district, should be charged with gender bias hate crime? If not, why not? And if so, do you understand that the bill you are sponsoring will not count crimes such as his as gender bias hate?

• Do you believe Sanders’ sometimes co-conspirator, Ryan Neal Walker, should also be charged with hate crime for gang-raping at least one woman with Sanders? If not, why not?

• Although Sanders and Walker left DNA at the 2006 rape site and Sanders left DNA at other rape sites, due to lack of attention and resources, their DNA samples were not tested for years, during which time Sanders committed more rapes. How do you justify trying to pass legislation that knowingly, deceptively excludes rape victims from being counted as victims of gender bias hate (thus denying these victims and other women law enforcement resources) while rape victims in your district continue being ignored and denied justice in such egregious ways?

• Do you believe Aeman Lovel Presley, who murdered your constituent Karen Pearce in a random attack in Decatur and also killed three homeless men, should be categorized as a hate criminal for all four murders or just a hate criminal for some of his crimes, such as the crimes against homeless men?

• Do you believe serial killer Gary Michael Hilton, arrested in your district, who tortured and killed at least several women and one man, including Meredith Emerson in Cumming and Cheryl Dunlap, whom he decapitated, should be counted as a hate criminal in the federal HCSA statistics collection that may be updated in Georgia if your legislation passes? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Why is prolific, Atlanta-based serial killer and torturer Michael Darnell Harvey, who mutilated and reportedly lynched by hanging at least some of his female victims while raping and murdering them, never cited among the notorious killers used to justify the alleged need for hate crime laws? Do you believe he should be added to the HCSA statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

Rep. Karen Bennett, Stone Mountain:

• Do you believe the man who snatched a 13-year old child off a railroad track in your district and raped her should be prosecuted as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Do you believe serial rapist Corey Griffin, who terrorized, beat, tortured and and raped multiple women in Clarkston and Stone Mountain, should be prosecuted as a hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Why is prolific, Atlanta-based serial killer and torturer Michael Darnell Harvey, who mutilated and reportedly lynched by hanging at least some of his female victims while raping and murdering them, never cited among the notorious killers used to justify the alleged need for hate crime laws? Do you believe he should be added to the HCSA statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Your district has one of the highest crime rates in the state. Astonishingly, your constituents have a one in 13 chance of becoming a crime victim. How many of these crimes do you view as hate crimes? How do you distinguish between hate crimes and other crimes in your district?

• How many of the murders in your district are what you would call hate crimes?

• Don’t you think you should be doing more to focus on the terrible crime rate in your district instead of advocating on the vague and politicized issue of so-called hate crimes?

Rep. Calvin Smyre, Columbus:

• Do you believe Carlton Gary, the prolific serial torturer, rapist, and murderer of women in your district, should be counted as a gender-based hate criminal in the federal HCSA statistics collection that may be updated in Georgia as a result of your proposed legislation? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Do you believe Samuel Little, who confessed to killing at least three women in your district, and who may be the most prolific serial killer of women in America, should be added to the federal HCSA statistics and other hate crime lists, such as those used to educate schoolchildren? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Columbus, your district, saw more than 1,000 reports of sexual assault in 2018 alone. Do you view some of these as potential gender-bias hate crimes? If not, why not? Do you view all of these as potential gender-bias hate crimes? If not, why not? How would you differentiate between gender-bias rape and non-gender-bias rape?

Rep. Ron Stephens, Savannah:

• Do you believe Reinaldo Rivera, serial killer, rapist and torturer of women, including at least two in your district, should be added to the federal HCSA statistics as a gender bias hate criminal? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Do you believe Samuel Little, who confessed to killing at least two women in your district, and who may be the most prolific serial killer of women in America, should be added to the federal HCSA statistics and other hate crime lists, such as those used to educate schoolchildren? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Do you believe Edward Charles Wilkins, convicted in 2007 of murdering three prostitutes in your district, should be counted as a gender-bias hate criminal in the federal HCSA statistics collection that may be updated in Georgia if your legislation passes? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Do you believe serial rapist Theron Morrell Hendrix, convicted of kidnapping and raping a child and two adult women in Savannah, should be added to the federal HCSA statistics. Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

Rep. Carla Drenner, Avondale:

• Do you believe Wayne Williams, the convicted murderer of two of Atlanta’s “Missing and Murdered” male children, some of whom disappeared in the vicinity of your district, should be counted as a race-bias and/or gender bias hate criminal in the federal HCSA statistics collection that may be updated in Georgia if your legislation passes? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Why is prolific, Atlanta-based serial killer and torturer Michael Darnell Harvey, who mutilated and reportedly lynched by hanging at least some of his female victims while raping and murdering them, never cited among the notorious killers used to justify the alleged need for hate crime laws? His victims include your constituents. Do you believe he should be added to the HCSA statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

• Do you believe serial killer and gay prostitute Howard Milton Belcher, who tortured and killed at least four gay men, including one in your district, should be added to the HCSA statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? Do you believe he is a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

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It Takes a Village to Kill A Cop — R.I.P. Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos

December 21, 2014 5 Comments

scenecops

These are officers Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos:

They were assassinated in cold blood by an anti-cop protester in Bedford-Stuyvesant today.

Earlier in the week, protesters including Eric Linsker, a CUNY poetry professor, attacked police by trying to throw a garbage pail down on them, then kicked and stomped two police officers.  Linsker ought to be tried for attempted murder.  His poetry sucks too, but you don’t need to be competent to succeed in the academic humanities today: what you need to do is demonstrate the appropriate level of hatred against the appropriate scapegoats.  Bad poet Linsker got a job teaching poetry at the taxpayers’ expense because his bad poetry is about killing cops.  It takes a village to kill a cop, and academicians like Linsker are the idiot troubadours of that village.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama and Eric Holder, along with professors associated with Harvard School of Law, may be preparing to help pardon another cop-killer, Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard).

Shakur is responsible for the murders of several cops.  In 1971, she ordered the murder of a random white cop in Atlanta, and her followers went out and killed the first white cop they found: James Richard Greene.  The 26-year old Atlanta cop was gunned down at random for no reason other than being white and a cop.  He was eating breakfast at the intersection of Boulevard and Memorial Drive in Atlanta when he was murdered.

I lived within blocks of that intersection for 20 years.  The intersection lies in civil rights icon John Lewis’ district.  But Lewis is not really a civil rights leader anymore because he does not support civil rights or human rights for everyone.  If he did, he would treat the racist political murders of police in New York City — and in his district — as civil rights violations more severe and noteworthy than what happened to him.  He was beaten, once, but he survived.

If John Lewis really opposed race murder, he would memorialize the sacrifice of James Richard Greene.  He would advocate for the murdered cop to be honored with an historical marker, at least.  But instead, Lewis sides with the virulent anti-cop lynch mob.  It takes a village to kill a cop, and John Lewis is a politician in that village.

If you went and spoke to the well-off hipsters who live in the area of Greene’s murder today, I believe nine out of ten of them would express solidarity with the cop-killers and at best vague discomfort or (more likely) jubilation at the mention of murdering a cop.  The Occupy movement demonstrated their jubilation at killing cops repeatedly.  It takes lots of idiots to populate the village of killing cops.

Shakur’s attorney, Soffiyah Elijah, was honored with a high post at Harvard Law — not because she is accomplished in any other way but because she supports the murder of cops.  She is even an apologist for Castro’s prisons.  This sort of garbage is what passes for legal scholarship at our Ivy League schools — advocating cop killing is a stepping-stone to a successful career at Harvard Law.  It takes a village to kill a cop, and Harvard Law is the barrister of that village.

The Obamas are close to another Assata Shakur supporter — the rap artist Common.  Common is famous as a “politically relevant” artist because he sings songs celebrating Assata Shakur’s cop-killing, and the Obamas invited him to the White House to celebrate that music — not despite his pro-cop killer stance but because of it.  The Obamas are the aristocracy of the village that supports killing cops.

On the week Barack Obama and Eric Holder held the infamous “beer summit” to scapegoat a police officer for being white and doing his job, several cops were murdered.  Obama and Holder could have used the “beer summit” to honor or at least mention these murdered police, but they didn’t, of course.  Murdered police weren’t important to them on that day: what was important was the opportunity to ritually abuse a cop for the color of his skin.  Holder has also, of course, been instrumental in acquiring pardons for other cop-killers and terrorists.

Eric Holder is the law in the village that supports killing cops.

The executive branch of our government is filthy with people who support cop-killing.  It is time to call this bunch the name they deserve.  They are a lynch mob.  They are the first lynch mob to control the White House since Woodrow Wilson approvingly screened Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915.  100 years later, all that’s changed is the target.

It is time for decent people to come together and hold a march on Washington showing solidarity for the humanity and human rights of cops.  We need a pro-cop, anti-lynching-of-cops movement.

Sad that any civilized nation would need such a thing.

 

 

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Cliff Kincaid on Larry Grathwohl and Bill Ayers

July 9, 2014 1 Comment

Larry Grathwohl, who died last July, risked his life to infiltrate the Weather Underground and stop their domestic terrorism campaign against police, soldiers, and ordinary Americans.

Disappointingly, Fox News recently featured Bill Ayers in an over-hyped interview with Megyn Kelly.  Instead of challenging Ayers’ many lies about Larry Grathwohl and other subjects, Kelly gave Ayers free publicity and a national platform.

Cliff Kincaid set the record straight:

Will Megyn Kelly Help Bring Ayers to Justice?

Cliff Kincaid  —   July 2, 2014

Bill Ayers shouldn’t be interviewed; he should be jailed. Megyn Kelly’s interview of Ayers, made reference to the role of Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in the bombing-murder of San Francisco policeman Brian V. McDonnell. Unfortunately, Ayers lied his way through the interview, which aired over two nights on her nightly Fox News Channel show, “The Kelly File.”

But this is what happens when a professional liar like Ayers does a “shocking” TV interview. The exchange may achieve high ratings, but nothing good will come out of the interview unless Kelly now follows up with the “Justice for Victims of the Weather Underground” campaign we have been waging for five years for the “cold case” bombing murder of Sergeant McDonnell to be reopened and examined by a federal grand jury. . .

read the rest here

Friends of Larry Grathwohl are putting on a “Blog About Larry” day on July 18 — the first anniversary  of his untimely death.  You can read about it at the Bringing Down America website.  If you’re a cop or a soldier, please take the time to learn about Larry Grathwohl, a Vietnam Vet who stood up to cop-killing radicals at the risk of his life.  If you have a blog, or a podcast, please join us in remembering Larry on Friday, July 18.

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Another Hate Crime That Was The Wrong Kind of Hate

July 7, 2014 3 Comments

Among the many toxic effects of hate crime laws, the worst is that they destroy the ethic of equality before the law.  This ethic was the cornerstone of the civil rights movement and its most compelling argument, and for forty years — from 1955 to 1995 — appeals for equal treatment before the law for both victims and offenders swayed white Americans to understand minorities’ plight.

All of this changed when Eric Holder and Bill Clinton shoved through a highly politicized hate crimes regime in the late 1990’s.  From the beginning, this regime wasn’t about punishing hate wherever it happened; it was about weaponizing identity politics where they least belonged: in the courts.  It was about freezing America like a scared rabbit before the image of eternal imaginary Klansmen eternally burning down black churches and eternally lynching minorities.

The hate crimes movement also helped distract from the real “tidal wave” of crimes being committed by offenders who frequently happened to be minorities (as were most of their victims).  The “tidal wave of racially motivated church burnings” in the nineties which was ostensibly the motivator for creating the modern hate crimes regime actually didn’t happen, but that didn’t matter to Clinton or Holder either: they just lied about it.

Hate crime laws were really about re-racializing the justice system.

Holder and Clinton knew that these laws were never really intended to “combat hate” but to create a legal spoils system to reward political friends, punish political enemies and super-charge racial divisiveness.  The winners were the various race and ethnic hustlers and the losers were everyone else.

The hate crimes regime that exists today has succeeded beyond Clinton and Holder’s wildest dreams in sowing divisiveness and inequality before the law.  Sadly, nobody even expects these laws to be enforced equally anymore.  Yet nobody in the Republican Party in the states — most hate crime laws are state laws — has the backbone to try to repeal these laws anymore, though doing so would likely be a popular, politically attainable goal.  The racism card and various other prejudice cards, played endlessly, have successfully reduced Republican elected officials to a quivering silence.

Back in the 1990s, Holder and Clinton still bothered to assure the public that hate crime laws would be applied equally — except, they said with a wink and a nudge, where women are involved because there’s just too many female victims of random rapes, not to mention random sexual slurs and random subway assaults and anti-female graffiti and all those other serious and unserious crimes that result in federal investigations when the writing on the dorm room wall is directed at blacks, or Muslims, or (liberal) Jews, or gays, or lesbians, or transvestites, or Latinos, or homeless people, or any of the other groups selectively empowered to demand mobilization of the hate police.

The N.O.W. under Kim Gandy and several other (not all) feminist organizations cheerfully swallowed this double-standard because they:

(A) were known to cheerfully swallow absolutely anything Bill Clinton told them to swallow.

and

(B) were so dominated by the political lesbians and minorities in their ranks that they really did not care if heterosexual white women were subjected to anything from rape to harassment on a public street — heterosexual white women have long been no more than the feminist movement’s whipping boys.  [And yes, to the Judith Butlerites out there, I know on the one hand that I shouldn’t use the term “boys” to describe women, but you (or “u” or “it” or “shoe” or whatever you call yourselves now) must admit that I’m at least disrupting cissexual gender normativity by doing so.]

Back in the nineties, Clinton and Holder swore that white victims of racial violence and abuse would “be counted” alongside other victims (it’s all about the counting).  They swore that these laws wouldn’t diminish other victims of crime.  They promised a lot of things that never happened, but these things were never really intended to happen in the first place.  White people were never intended to be protected against anti-white hate.  Women were never intended to be “counted” as victims of hate.  “Gender bias” was always intended for only non-biologically-born females, not hatred against females, because there’s just too much of it.

As a consequence of these lies, we’re now at a place where randomly killing a heterosexual woman is not as important to our justice system as killing certain other types of people, and mugging a white man is not as important as using a slur word against a minority, and mugging a black man, if the mugger is also a black man, is not as important as a slur word uttered by a white.  Neither types of muggings is likely to be investigated much, if at all, while the right kind of slur word uttered by the right kind of person actually brings out federal troops to investigate and denounce the crime.

It is important to remember that all of this is by design.

The best example of the selective dehumanization of victims created by the hate crime regime was, for a long time, for me, the beating murder of a transgender prostitute in Cordele, Georgia in 1999.  Tracy Thompson managed to seek help before dying from terrible injuries.  Before she died, she said “her boyfriend” had committed the crime, but it was uncertain whether she meant a John or someone she knew.  It was thus also uncertain whether the killer knew that she was biologically a man dressed as a woman and if that knowledge factored at all into the crime.

And so, the real intentions of hate crime laws were horrifically laid out: if Thompson’s killer was angry at her for being transgender — if he had picked her up with the intent of buying sex and “discovered” male genitalia under her skirt then beat her to death because of it, that was a hate crime.  But if her killer just decided to kill a female prostitute, that wasn’t hate.  It wasn’t a crime that would bring federal intervention; it wasn’t as serious a state crime, sentencing-wise; the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) would not get involved; the activists would not march in the streets; the exploiter organizations, from the SPLC to the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal (the source of the church burning deceptions) to the ADL to the NAACP to the HRC to the NOW (special shame on their heads) would not given a damn; the crime wouldn’t be recounted in the pricey “teaching tolerance” manuals sold by the SPLC and shoved down childrens’ throats at school; it wouldn’t be solemnly memorialized at civil rights events by Eric Holder and Bill Clinton or by Eric Holder and Barack Obama some dozen years later.

If the male genitalia under the skirt didn’t matter to the killer, then it wasn’t an important injustice like killing Matthew Shepard: it was just your run-of-the-mill kidnapping and brutally beating to death of a woman in a lonely field.

At that moment, hate crime laws made “biologically-born” women officially less human than transgendered women and a whole slew of other specially designated people, and this inequality in the courts has only grown stronger since that time.

Nowadays, nobody even expects hate crime laws to be enforced with a facade of even-handedness.  Nobody expects equality before the law anymore, and that lack of expectation is horrifying in its normalcy.  We gave away a lot in 1999.

And so we come to just the latest ethical and practical mess the hate crimes industry has made of our entire justice system.  From the moment Shaima Alwadi was found murdered in her home in California, with a note denouncing the soon-to-be divorced housewife as a “terrorist” nearby, it was well understood that the note was likely a hoax.  But the hate crimes industry cannot let pass any opportunity to accuse Americans of being racist because that is their primary purpose, and so the candles in the cups appeared, and the vigils, and the marchers, and teach-ins on college campuses and elementary schools: the entire apparatus of the for-profit non-profit hate crimes industry struck up the band.  As the media reported: “The case reverberated across the nation because at first, it was thought to be a hate crime.”  So we have trained people to react and also to not react when the victim is just the usual: black-on-black, or black-on-white, or male-on-random female, or, frankly, male-on-male victim when it’s a sex crime.  The latter never gets counted as gender bias, because that’s not what gender bias laws are for.

From the beginning, there was ample evidence that Alwadi’s murder was some type of domestic violence, including her own recent warning to her sister that she would be killed by her husband.  But we have primed a generation of young people to believe above all else that an easily dismissible note with a racial slur is more important than a woman’s beaten and murdered body.  And so the mob assembled, and when the killer’s laughable ploy was revealed, the mob did not retreat: they simply claimed, as they always claim, that it was a “teachable moment” about white racism nonetheless.

The hate crime activists simultaneously demeaned the real victim and created a fake one.  Alwadi simply wasn’t politically useful if she had just been killed by her husband.

Shaima Alwadi’s husband was convicted for murdering his wife in San Diego this week.  Her killing was not prosecuted as a gender-bias hate crime because it was just an angry man killing a woman because she tried to leave him.  Of course, the question of whether his anger arose from his Muslim beliefs in women’s submissiveness would never be “counted” as potential grounds for hate crime charges — not only because feeling such things about women doesn’t officially count as hate, but also because Muslims are among the groups who are systematically designated only as victims of hate crimes,  not as perpetrators of them.

If we enforced hate crime laws in ways designed to actually fight hate, even this domestic murder might be investigated as a form of gender bias.  But if we enforced hate crime laws equally, the Muslim terrorists of 9/11 would count as the most prolific hate criminals in our country’s history (3,000 dead thanks to anti-American nationality hatred); Major Hasan would be one of the worst individual hate criminals in history (13 dead thanks to anti-infidel hatred), and female victims of serial, stranger rapists would be by far the largest category of hate crime victims (gender bias hate) and male victims of serial, stranger rapists who targeted men exclusively would be a significant cohort of gender bias hate crime victims as well.  If anti-white slurs and targeting of random whites were counted as hate, as it should be, minority males (and increasingly females) would rank the highest among hate crime offenders for crimes ranging from robbery to gang assault.

The vast majority of hate crime victims would be white, and the vast majority of hate crime offenders would be from several of the minority populations whose advocates control the deceptive enforcement machinery of these laws today.  These activists could not, of course, allow the truth to be told this way.  To maintain their hate-filled, false vision of America, they must make sure that these laws are never enforced equitably.  Until conservative elected officials find the backbone to address this terrible injustice, we should cease pretending that equality before the law is an ideal or practical matter in our courts.

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Hillary Clinton and Thomas Alfred Taylor’s Underpants: It Takes a Village to Rape a Child

June 20, 2014 6 Comments

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Or maybe we should say: It Takes a Village to Get Away With Raping a Child.  

This is Hillary Clinton in 1975.  She was on her way to becoming a “feminist icon,” so of course she stepped up to defend a 41-year old man who admitted to raping a child — a twelve-year old child.  There were two witnesses to the crime — another man and a teen boy who were in the car with the rape victim.  The offender plied the child with alcohol and then raped her.

As reported in The Washington Free Beacon in a well-researched article by Alana Goodman, Clinton, in 1975, by her own giggly admission, knowingly orchestrated a fraudulent test of the evidence from the crime in order to try to deceive the jury about her client’s guilt: she sent a part of the rapist’s underpants that had no fluids on it to a lab in New York and then threatened to use the negative lab result to disprove the prosecutor’s other evidence.  She also made false claims about the victim’s mental state, calling her an unstable liar.  Ultimately, despite powerful evidence condemning the rapist, the prosecution let Clinton’s client plead down to little more than time served.

There are lessons for everyone in this story.

Academic Feminists (a category that includes many feminist journalists) are now piling on anyone who deigns to criticize Clinton for using dirty tricks forty years ago to help a child rapist get off with a slap on the wrist.  This may sound odd, but Academic Feminists have never been interested in putting real rapists into real prisons.

In fact (a fact you won’t learn in women’s studies classes), from the very beginning of the modern feminist movement, Academic Feminists have been far more interested in playing identity politics than in punishing rape.  At the first meetings of the N.O.W., violence against women wasn’t even going to be included as a platform of the group, out of fear that condemning violence against women would result in some minority men getting convicted for the rapes they committed.

Couldn’t have that.

Better to throw all rape victims under a bus than hold black rapists responsible for their rapes  — of mostly black women and children.  From the beginning of modern feminism, racial and ethnic sensitivity — who committed a crime — was more important than the victim or the crime itself, let alone the ethic of justice for all.

[It should be noted that this attitude disgusted a critical mass of other feminist women who started working with police to protect women and children anyway — regardless of the color of their offender.  These service provider types generally like to stay away from politics, and they shouldn’t be confused with Academic Feminists and other political bottom feeders]

Fast-forward to today: the Academic Feminists have spent the last several years perfecting their March Towards Universal Guilt But No Prison Time Only Re-Education For All Men But Especially White Fraternity Brothers.

Academic Feminists have always just been leftists who care more about emptying the prisons than about real victims of crime.  They would rather exploit rape cases for political ends than imprison rapists.

For example, Amanda Marcotte at Slate is wagging around her frayed invisible Code of Defense Lawyer Ethics to explain why Clinton wasn’t merely right to use deceit and character assassination of a 12-year old rape victim to get her rapist client off: according to Marcotte, Clinton was super-right to use deceit and character assassination of a 12-year old rape victim to get her rapist client off  because she’s Hillary Clinton:

Defense attorneys have an unpleasant but necessary job, and Clinton did what she was obligated to do, which was to give her client a constitutionally mandated adequate defense. … As long as juries keep acquitting based on this myth that women routinely make up rape accusations for the hell of it, defense attorneys will continue to use it. The problem here is a larger culture that promotes rape myths, not defense attorneys who exploit these myths in last-ditch attempts to get acquittals for rapists who have overwhelming evidence against them.

According to Marcotte, everyone else uses rape myths, so the legal standard is to use rape myths, so Clinton was just giving her client the benefit of a really good defense by using rape myths and she should be praised for doing this because it had to be super hard for her to shed her principles that way, but, by the way, if a frat brother uses a rape myth, even if there’s no rape involved, even if he’s just making a bad joke, he deserves to be destroyed, preferably by Amanda Marcotte, Hillary Clinton, and millions of other women.

Yes, this is the way the Academic Feminists think.  I think it has something to do with all that mascara intersecting ink from bad tattoos and shards of bad prose by Judith Butler in the dark little place where your heart’s supposed to be.  Other people just call it identity politics.

Amanda Marcotte, Defense Ethics Specialist, With Cat ... 

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Alex Jones and Eric Holder Sing the Same Cynical Song About Police Brutality — And Then Cops Die

June 11, 2014 Leave a comment

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 Alex Jones (the politically elastic InfoWars host) and Attorney General Eric Holder (no introduction needed) both routinely rally their troops by crying wolf about police brutality.  Jones encourages his libertarian followers to harass police and to view them as stormtroopers; Holder uses the power of the Executive Branch to warp criminal justice via the race card, imposing punitive oversight over state and local police on the grounds of “racial discrimination,” and encouraging minority populations to view police as racist persecutors.

So when police get assassinated by violent black power thugs or drug-addled white power wannabes, as happened to Officers Beck and Soldo in Las Vegas this week, Eric Holder and Alex Jones both deserve censure.  Did they put the guns in the assassins’ hands?  No.  But they encourage such events, and then they exploit them for cheap political gain while police attend their colleagues’ funerals then put themselves on the line of fire again. ... 

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If You’re Still Thinking Bob Barr Might Make A Good Candidate Despite That Baby Doc Thing . . .

May 19, 2014 Leave a comment

I urge you to take a few more strolls down memory lane.  Let’s take the older post first.  Note the date:

September, 2011: Gaming The System: DragonCon Founder Edward Kramer Caught With Another Boy 

“Are we actually supposed to believe that Bob Barr and his partner, Edwin Marger, knew nothing about Ed Kramer’s real physical condition when they claimed he was too sick to attend court in 2009, or that he had basically fled what little court-ordered control they had managed to wrangle for him under extremely questionable circumstances?  Well, here’s some clues:

Ed Kramer sporting a Barr ’08 button

Here’s Ed Kramer in either 2007 or 2008.  He claimed he was too sick to stand trial for molestation, but he looks like he was having a really good time campaigning for his lawyer, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr.  If anyone knows more about this photo, please contact me.

Ed Kramer at the 2008 DragonCon ... 

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Will Privatizing Child Protection Protect Georgia’s Children? Yes and No.

March 18, 2014 Leave a comment

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As Georgia prepares to follow in Florida’s footsteps in privatizing child protection services, there has been a lot of politicking but little talk about the real issues that lead to failures to protect children “in the system.”  Privatization in Florida has been a very mixed bag, with some counties improving their performance and other counties mired in scandals involving the private non-profit agencies hired to protect children.  It’s reasonable to expect that Georgia will fare a little better, but don’t expect the failure rate to drop — or rise — significantly.

The failures lie in policies enforced by the courts, and nobody is talking about reforming those policies.

Like Florida, Georgia plans to eventually privatize the services that come after an investigation has determined a child is in danger, namely: foster care, family “reunification” interventions, and adoption.  State workers will continue to be responsible for investigating abuse, and courts will still be responsible for deciding if a child should be removed from a home, returned to a home, or adopted.

Private agencies do a great job with adoption, and some of them do a better job than the state in supervising foster care.  Much of this care is already done through public-private partnerships in Georgia.  But in all the politicized talk about private versus public, little has been said about the real  problem with our child protection services.

The problem is the mandate to keep families together or achieve “reunification” as soon as possible.

Approximately a decade ago, many states began to move towards a model of keeping families together, no matter the cost.  Florida went further than Georgia, though it wasn’t an issue tied to privatization because that part of child protection is still performed by state agencies.

And now Florida is counting the bodies.

In an extraordinary report, the Miami Herald investigated the deaths of 477 children who  had prior contacts with child protection services.  477 — since just 2008.  The Herald makes a strong case for blaming the mandate for “family preservation” for many of those deaths:

They tumbled into canals and drowned, baked in furnace-like cars, were soaked in corrosive chemicals, incinerated, beaten mercilessly, and bounced off walls and concrete pavement. One was jammed into a cooler posthumously; others were wrapped like a mummy to silence their cries, flattened by a truck, overdosed and starved. An infant boy was flung from a moving car on an interstate. A 2-year-old girl was killed by her mom’s pet python.

The children were not just casualties of bad parenting, but of a deliberate shift in Florida child welfare policy. DCF leaders made a decision, nearly 10 years ago, to reduce by as much as half the number of children taken into state care, adopting a philosophy known as family preservation. They also, simultaneously, slashed services, monitoring and protections for the increased number of children left with their violent, neglectful, mentally ill or drug-addicted parents.

Public or private, the child protection system is dealing with multigenerational problems that are far more severe than most people realize.  It’s easy to criticize government social workers, or to lash out at efforts by private agencies.  The hard part is acknowledging that “family preservation” may be the wrong goal:

Rather than go to court to force parents to get treatment or counseling, the state often relied on “safety plans” — written promises by parents to sin no more. Many of the pledges carried no meaningful oversight. Children died — more than 80 of them — after their parents signed one or, in some cases, multiple safety plans.

• Parents were given repeated chances to shape up, and failed, and failed and failed again, and still kept their children. In at least 34 cases, children died after DCF had logged 10 or more reports to the agency’s abuse and neglect hotline. Six families had been the subject of at least 20 reports.

The decision to prioritize family unification was made by bureaucrats and politicians from across the political spectrum.  Liberals defend state agencies and argue that biological parents should receive as many resources as possible to keep their children; conservatives argue for the primacy of family and against state involvement.  Failure is bipartisan:

“It’s the system that’s broken. When numbers take over instead of outcomes for people, you are doomed to failure,” said James Harn, a 30-year law enforcement officer who spent his last nine years as a commander supervising child abuse investigators at the Broward Sheriff’s Office before leaving a year ago. “They want to keep families together, but at what cost?”

Prioritizing family preservation is just one policy error.  Others involve the increasingly hands-off attitude towards the family arrangements of women living on public services and the leniency granted to serial offenders in the courts.  

Social workers have had little power since the 1960’s to insist that women on welfare live alone with their children, rather than inviting a boyfriend, or a series of men into their state-subsidized homes.  These unattached men frequently abuse the children they are living with:

The night before Aaden Batista died, his killer played a baseball game on his Xbox, smoked marijuana and gave the toddler a bath.

As Aaden’s mother, Whitney Flower, worked as a medical assistant at a nearby hospital, Jason Padgett Sr. prepared the toddler for bed, putting on his diaper before, ultimately, viciously shaking him and slamming his head on the floor. . .

Aaden became part of the yearly count of children killed at the hands of paramours — child welfare’s oddly genteel term to describe boyfriends or girlfriends of custodial parents. Protecting children from abusive paramours is one of the great challenges facing the Department of Children & Families.

“Paramours are a huge red flag,” said Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as chairman of child welfare at the school. “They are enormously over-represented as the slayers of young children.”

Under-prosecution and under-incarceration, especially for domestic violence, presents another problem.  Expect this problem to grow worse as “Right on Crime” Republicans, left and right-wing libertarians, leftists, and liberals join forces to shrink our criminal  justice system and empty the prisons.  Their political kumbaya moment is going to mean more violence, more crime, and more murders.   You need only peruse the Miami child death report to find evidence of hundreds of people who have been granted serial leniency in our allegedly-harsh justice system:

In the pre-dawn hours of May 5, 2009, Jasmine Bedwell had to make a decision: Take more blows or more chokes — but try to rescue her son from the clutches of her enraged boyfriend — or go find help. She left and borrowed a cellphone to call 911.

 
 

 
 

  ... 

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Maureen Faulkner: Stop Mumia Abu Jamal’s Lawyer, Debo Adegbile, From Department of Justice Appointment

March 4, 2014 1 Comment

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There is a Change.org petition drive you need to act on TODAY!

Vote “No” to the Confirmation of Debo Adegbile to the Department of Justice
Petition by Maureen Faulkner
Los Angeles, CA

PLEASE SHARE THIS PETITION WITH FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND COLLEAGUES!

As early as Tuesday [UPDATE: THE VOTE HAS BEEN DELAYED UNTIL WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5], the Senate will vote to confirm Debo Adegbile as the next Assistant Attorney General to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. This confirmation must be stopped.

Thirty years ago, Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was violently murdered by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a member of a racist group that advocated violence against police. A jury convicted him and sentenced him to death for the brutal crime.

In the three decades that followed, Abu-Jamal filed appeal after appeal – each rooted in lies, distortions and allegations of civil rights violations. Today, as Officer Faulkner lies in his grave, Abu-Jamal has become a wealthy celebrity and continues to spew his vitriol from prison.

Old wounds were ripped open again, and additional insult was brought upon our law enforcement community when President Obama nominated Mr. Adegbile for the Department of Justice post. Mr. Adegbile previously led the Legal Defense Fund at the NAACP. In that position, Mr. Adegbile chose to throw the weight and resources of his organization behind Abu-Jamal. Attorneys working under Mr. Adegbile’s supervision have stood before rallies of Abu-Jamal supporters and openly professed that it was “an extreme honor” to represent the man who put a hollow based bullet into Officer Faulkner’s brain as he lay on the ground wounded, unarmed, and defenseless.

While Mr. Adegbile may be a well-qualified and competent litigator, through his words, his decisions, and his actions he has clearly and repeatedly demonstrated that he is not the best person to fill this position. Clearly there are others with similar qualifications that would be better choices.

The thought that Mr. Adegbile would be rewarded, in part, for the work he did for Officer Faulkner’s killer is revolting. Please set aside any partisan feelings you have and do the right thing when you vote on Mr. Adegbile’s confirmation. Please vote “no.”

………………………………………………….

Previous TINATRENT.COM Posts On Officer Faulkner and the Pro-Mumia Movement: ... 

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Martin Preib versus the Innocence Industry

February 23, 2014 4 Comments

An amazing article by Martin Preib, a Chicago cop who exposes the dark underbelly of the “innocence” industry, in which scores of law and journalism students and their professors resort to deception in their desire to play Atticus Finch to criminals who aren’t really wrongful convicted:

Wrongful conviction settlements are big business, but they are not always sensible. Chicago settles millions of dollars in cases where convicted offenders claim they were wrongfully convicted.

For a number of law firms, suing the city over wrongful convictions has become a kind of cottage industry. Inmates claim they were tortured and coerced into confessing. The offenders are freed from prison. Attorneys quickly initiate civil lawsuits against the city. Many people assume that a settlement signifies the police were culpable and had something to hide.

But this is not the truth in several key wrongful conviction cases, none more so than the Anthony Porter case, a double murder in 1982 in Washington Park on the South Side.

Preib shows how students and professors at Northwestern University and post-conviction lawyers didn’t even bother to interview the detectives involved in the conviction of Anthony Porter when they tried to exonerate Porter years later:

One common theme permeates the entire wrongful conviction movement: the police are crooked, willing to coerce confessions from the wrong man, willing to frame the wrong man, torture him, even. Police are often accused of racism in wrongful conviction cases, that they don’t care about African-American suspects or their communities. Many of these accusations were lobbed against the detectives in the Porter case, one of the most crucial wrongful conviction cases in the state’s history.

That Martin Preib could singlehandedly, with no resources, uncover more evidence than armies of well-connected, well-funded professors, students, and lawyers speaks volumes about the dynamics of post-conviction criminal justice activism.

The media repeats the claims of the Innocence Industry uncritically and dumbly parrots their nonsensical “statistics” about so-called “causes of wrongful conviction” — statistics and causes that are a pure fabrication.  If the Innocence Project were actually trying to create real wrongful conviction statistics, they would have to do several things they don’t do now — first and foremost contextualize their cases within the numerical universe of rightful convictions.

They would also have to stop inventing “causes of wrongful conviction” that highlight only one aspect of a case, often something minor or irrelevant to the conviction but that serves their ideological interests.

They would have to acknowledge that the most common “cause” of wrongful conviction is being a criminal and running with other criminals.  Lying for a criminal friend, being a non-DNA depositing co-conspirator in a murder that leaves no witness, dealing in stolen items from the crime, and letting your own brother go to prison in your place are all causes of wrongful conviction that you won’t find anywhere in the Innocence Project’s highly touted “statistics.”

Several of the Innocence Project’s most high-profile clients are serial rapists popped for the wrong crime BECAUSE they were committing similar crimes in the area or had done so elsewhere.  The media avoids mentioning this part of the story because they want to act out their own Atticus Finch drama.  Fabulist journalists go looking only for the story they want to hear, as Prieb demonstrates:

One wonders when journalism professors started teaching students to get only one side of a story. It turned out that, during the Innocence Project  investigation, the detectives say that neither Protess [head of the Innocence Project at Northwestern] nor his journalism students ever attempted to sit down with the detectives and listen to their account.

Finally, many Innocence Project clients were not actually innocent at all.

See here and here for examples of the misbehavior of activists wanting to spring guilty men to gratify their own self-regard.

I have repeatedly urged Innocence Project activists to use some of their vast resources and manpower to try to identify offenders who got away with murder and rape.  Merely saying this is a great way to get laughed at — or accused of racism, the movement’s eternal fallback pose.

The Martin Preibs of this world toil on their own in the shadows to correct grotesque injustices, as the defense bar and their media lackeys labor to spring anyone and everyone from prison, regardless of their crimes.

Imagine if someone made that into a movie.

Crossing Lines: What’s Wrong with the Wrongful Conviction Movement by Martin Preib

Martin Preib’s Amazon Page

 

 

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The Daryle Edward Jones Case Grows Worse

February 11, 2014 1 Comment

Yesterday, I posted about yet another heinous sex crime committed by yet another felon who should have been in prison but was granted leniency and was free on the streets.

The information I had yesterday was limited to what I could find in public incarceration records, but today the Athens (Georgia) newspaper has more details about Jones’ criminal history.

And they are damning, not only because he got out early for a murder he committed in 1994, but even after he got out early and immediately committed another crime, the state essentially passed on an opportunity to put him behind bars for that crime for a substantial period of time.

Here’s the story:

Jones was paroled in 2010 [for the 1994 murder], but he was quickly back in prison.

In August 2011 he was arrested on stalking and terroristic threat charges for having threatened to murder a woman, according to records. The arrest sent him back to prison for a parole violation but he was paroled again in October 2013.

Two months later, on Dec. 23, Jones was convicted for the 2011 stalking and terroristic threats charges and sentenced to 200 days of incarceration with six years of probation. He was given credit for time already served.

Jones has been treated to serial leniency, which is the default choice of our justice system nearly all the time.  In 1994, he was allowed to plead (presumably down from murder) to voluntary manslaughter, which put him back on the streets.  Then he was given a mere 200 days (with credit for time served, no days, actually) for stalking and terroristic threats committed in 2011.

These aren’t “nothing” sentences.  But they do reflect the normalization of reduced sentencing throughout the criminal justice system.  Academicians, the media, and leftists relentlessly accuse our justice system of being too harsh on offenders.  But exactly the opposite its true.  It would not have been too harsh to sentence Jones to life without parole for murder in 1994, but he got 20 years instead, and then he got released four years early, originally serving only 16 years for taking a life.   And while we don’t know all the details of the 2011 case, I doubt it would have been “harsh” at all to sentence him to something more than time served for stalking and threatening to kill a woman.

Serial leniency has now resulted in a 14-year old girl being kidnapped, raped and tortured:

 [L]ast Wednesday, Athens-Clarke County police said that Jones lured a 14-year-old girl into a vehicle then locked the doors so she could not escape.

He allegedly drove the girl to an isolated location where he pulled a gun and sexually assaulted her, police said.

Jones, of Oak Hill Drive, was arrested two days later on charges of rape, kidnapping, aggravated assault, aggravated child molestation and aggravated sodomy.

Chalk up another rape to the anti-incarceration activists who shill the fantasy that our prisons are stuffed with victims of harsh, unjustly long sentencing — “victims” who must be petted, celebrated, sympathized with, released early, and “re-entered” into society on our dime.  That little girl’s horrific ordeal is more blood on your hands.

 

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Let Out Early for Voluntary Manslaughter, Now Accused of Kidnapping and Rape

February 9, 2014 1 Comment

Here’s another one.

Another what?

Another offender who should have been in prison but was let out early, and some innocent child paid the price.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that Daryle Edward Jones kidnapped and raped a young girl in Athens, Georgia:

Jones, 41, has been charged with rape, aggravated assault, aggravated child molestation, aggravated sodomy and kidnapping in the case. He remained in the county jail Saturday afternoon.

Here’s what they did not report: Daryle Edward Jones was supposed to be in prison until April.  Or at least that is how long he would have served, had he served his entire previous sentence.  Which, of course, nobody ever does, but isn’t it nice to imagine that somebody, somewhere, even once, would serve all their damn time?

In April of 1994, Jones committed voluntary manslaughter.  It’s hard to know from the online records what he really did, but suffice to say that getting 20 years in 1994 was the maximum for that crime and serving nearly all of it was unusual, so I suspect at least one of two things:

  • The crime was particularly heinous and the voluntary manslaughter was offered only with an agreement to serve a long sentence.
  • Jones, who was 21 at the time, must have had a terrible juvenile record, likely sealed.

So Darlye Jones went to prison for voluntary manslaughter in April, 1995 (he’d probably had a year in jail before that) and got out June, 2010, fifteen years later.  Then he was back in prison from January, 2012 to October, 2013, possibly for a parole violation because no other crime is listed.  Four months after finally being released, he has committed a heinous kidnapping/rape.

What is there to learn from this?

Under-prosecution may be the problem.

My guess — and it’s just a guess — is that Jones had a prolific and violent criminal career before being put away at the age of 21.  Yet he was only charged with one crime, which is entirely typical, even today.  Contrary to what all liberals and all those Right on Crime Grover Norquist types and Reason libertarians believe, our criminal justice system is wildly lenient towards nearly all criminals and expends the resources to put away only a tiny fraction of people who commit even serious crimes.

And given his current crime and the severity of his previous sentence, he may have been a sex offender but the sex offense was not kept on the table for some reason.  He’s not in the sex offender registry, as far as I can tell.

There is troubling talk across the Right today about prosecutorial over-reach.  I consider such talk to be almost entirely anecdotal and wildly out of touch with reality in our criminal courts — and motivated in large part by Alex Jones and his ilk, who have it out for police in an utterly personal and unhinged way.

Yes, the Department of Justice in Washington and Eric Holder in particular are troubling, and Holder is openly contemptuous of the rule of law and treats victims of crime with contempt — except those who fit certain categories of so-called hate crime that he invented in 1999.  Holder is pro-criminal, anti-victim and almost entirely lawless, but Eric Holder does not represent law enforcement in the states.

The sort of leniency that lets a killer walk free to rape a child is what too often represents criminal justice in the states.  We need longer sentences and more law enforcement, not less of both.  How many times do we have to see stories like this?  Let’s talk about what the feds are up to, certainly.  But don’t conflate that with state courts where, especially in urban areas, crimes like burglary aren’t even being investigated, let alone prosecuted anymore, and prolific criminals still have most of their charges dropped against them every day.

Here is a terrific response by “David” to yet another anecdotal complaint about “over-prosecution” from the Right.  It is in response to this (uncharacteristically) lazy screed in what is usually an excellent source on crime policy, City Journal:

Before every reader of this article jumps on the “let’s bash prosecutors” bandwagon, the good professor’s thoughts warrant a bit of careful consideration. Professor Bhide is, after all, a PROFESSOR of law, not a practitioner. And his online list of accomplishments shows that he has never practiced criminal law at any time in his illustrious career. Indeed, his expertise lies more in the realm of business and, perhaps, economics. Having said this, Professor Bhede is correct to be outraged by Ms. Khobraghade’s arrest and the humiliating and inexcusable way she was treated while incarcerated. Professor Bhede is also correct when he expresses concern about the proliferation of federal criminal laws. And perhaps Professor Bhede is also on to something when he quotes the following from the ABA (though this organization is not particularly well-known for either its objectivity or its lack of bias): “‘Individual citizen behavior now potentially subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing proportions.'”

But the key words in the quote Professor Bhede uses from the ABA are “potentially subject”. For even though there are too many federal criminal laws, it has been my actual experience that the feds prosecute only a tiny fraction of the cases they could file. Additionally, the feds file ONLY when they are assured of victory (not the standard for filing a criminal charge, contrary to Eric Holder’s excuses to the contrary) and potential good press. Professor Bhede lists a number of activities that Congress has criminalized since our Constitution’s ratification. But the impetus for the “busybody Congresses” that pass these laws usually takes the form of busybody groups and individuals who believe this or that activity should be criminalized. Prohibition readily comes to mind. …

So for those who are ready to jump up and say, “Professor Bhide is absolutely correct! Federal prosecutors need to be reigned in!”, I would respond that too often these very same prosecutors do too little with regard to crimes that directly impact the safety and welfare of our society. And I say this because I spent almost 20 years as a state prosecutor, in a major metropolitan area, where I concentrated primarily on handling felony narcotics dealing and firearms offenses. (To those who would protest and say that I was part of the problem because I was part of the “War on Drugs”, I would respond as follows: Please go tell this to the little 75 or 80 year old woman who is afraid to go out on her front porch because a group of punks–usually armed–are slinging crack, coke, or meth in her neighborhood. This person lives in fear for her life every day. Tell her that the street in front of her house is not a war zone. She’ll say you’re wrong.) Very little assistance was provided prosecuting these crimes by any of the U.S. Attorneys and their staffs in the city where I worked. I don’t know what, exactly, were the priorities of our resident U.S. Attorneys (several of them came and went during my time as a deputy prosecutor), but I do know that they couldn’t be bothered to help make our city’s streets and outlying areas safer. With the laws available to them, U.S. Attorneys can do a lot to put really bad people out of commission for very long periods of time. But if a certain crime (or group of crimes) aren’t on some important politician’s radar, well, such crimes won’t be prosecuted by a U.S. Attorney. …

Too many laws? Perhaps. Not enough use of many of the laws already in existence? Yes. …

 . . . read the whole thing here 

 

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On Adria Sauceda’s Murder

January 22, 2014 Leave a comment

Thanks to a commenter for saying what needs to be said about Adria’s murder:

“I’m Mexican, I live in Mexico and I don’t understand why the inmates’ families want mercy when they didn’t show any with their victims. They took away their lives, they took away all their dreams and hopes. They should be grateful they are going to die via lethal injection, not in a bizarre way their victims did.”

Heartbreaking photos of the child:

And the young woman, before she died:

And her parent’s hands, holding her:

 

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Common Core: It Will Take A Village to Fight Their Village

January 8, 2014 3 Comments

Recently, anti-Common Core activists in Florida and Georgia (and other states) were treated to the nugatory charms of the “listening tour.”  State education officials carefully concealed the piles of crumpled twenties that Bill Gates shoved in their knickers and turned out to quote listen to the public unquote.

 

In other words, they pretended to give opponents of Common Core little snippets of time to speak on a vast, all-encompassing education reform that they, the elected officials in charge of education policy, have been laundering like illicit meth profits behind closed doors for years.  And so of course the activists sounded outraged and often emotional: how on earth do you address a sweeping, transformative, mostly-concealed program that touches every aspect of the education system and have been foisted on the public through backdoor methods we still only barely understand — all in three minutes or less?

The real objective of the listening tour, of course, was to shut up opposition to Common Core by claiming they have listened to us and heard what we had to say so they can get back to doing politics without any more interference from the little people.  I’m not saying that all the officials sitting on the dais acted that way.  If you know your elected official, then you can gauge the spirit in which he or she participated.  And frankly, the only way to even register our opposition to Common Core is to turn out for such events.

That’s why it is so important to get to know your elected official and give them a chance to prove themselves to you.

Bad politics exist everywhere, but good politics are usually local politics.

The lesson of the listening tour is that we will need to work together better in the future if we are going to be effective against a highly-coordinated coalition made up of wealthy foundations, professional poverty activists, elected officials, education bureaucrats, ed school professors, PBS, Chamber of Commerce boosters, and teacher’s unions.

We have taken on a very large task: we are demonstrating the audacity of asking an entire bureaucracy to behave as if it actually works for the people.  So as they’re wiping the tears of mirth from their eyes, we need to be ready with a well-coordinated offense.  For this fight, we need parents, taxpayers, our own education professors, home-schoolers, retired teachers, researchers, lobbyists, organizers, and, most importantly, effective foot soldiers in every corner of every state.

It will take a village to take our villages back.  For some reason this makes me think of the fight scene in Anchorman (the first one, not the highly disappointing sequel).  Remember, PBS were the bad guys in that, too.

Listening tours are dog-and-pony shows that always entail a certain measure of showmanship and deception.  How could we have done better, with just three minutes each to speak?  If we had coalitions in place, it would have been easier to meet beforehand to coordinate a series of responses — small pieces adding up to a larger response.  A coalition also commands more media attention, and with that we could issue press releases in response to the listening tour format itself.  The education bureaucracy does not want to be put in the position of having to fight on an even playing field — this is why they have been resistant to agreeing to public debates while presenting the “listening tour” they control as their solution for public input.

Like the fight scene in Anchorman, the Common Core fight is a fight among interested parties — the public is largely sitting this one out.  Maybe they’re traumatized by childhood memories of WholeLanguage learning or just too busy working that second job to pay for somebody else’s healthcare — I don’t know.  But the Common Core advocates have made this a difficult fight by making the Common Core materials themselves difficult, if not impossible to access, and there are only so many hours in the day.  That’s another reason to put some energy into working together more efficiently.

Despite being a veteran of many public hearings, I came away from the Common Core listening tour surprised by the degree of contempt some (not all) elected officials involved felt comfortable heaping on their audiences . . . also known as their constituents . . . also known as their employers.  We are facing a situation the ancient Greeks referred to as catching your elected official with his hand stuck in the cookie jar, so feelings are understandably running high.  But that is no excuse for some of the behavior I witnessed.

In Dawsonville, Georgia, State Representative Brooks Coleman (R – 97), Chairman of the House Education Committee, set a particularly dismissive, hectoring tone.

And that was before he began grabbing people by the arms and berating them.

At a meeting that started in the evening after most attendees had clocked a day of work, Coleman played every time-wasting, status-asserting game in the book.  He delayed the meeting to indulge in obsequious, long-winded praise for the public college officials who gave him use of a school auditorium (in other words, state employees who work for us opened up a room that belongs to us, for our use).  To their credit, the officials looked embarrassed at Coleman’s faux fervent gratitude.  Then, he could barely contain his ire throughout the event.  Afterwards, as he worked the crowd, he actually grabbed my arm and shook it while hissing that I was wrong about Georgia accepting Gates funding to implement Common Core.

Of course, I was right and he was wrong.  What’s more interesting is that we both knew it, yet he hung onto my arm and stuck with the lie, too.

Prove it, he said.

I just did.  Again.

Moments like these can tell you everything you need to know about a political fight.  Here are some of the things I observed:

They know the gig is up, and sunlight is pouring in.  Both Brooks Coleman and I knew that we were standing in an auditorium built with my tax dollars, at an event subsidized by my tax dollars, and that he, an elected official paid with my tax dollars, was lying to me about money the state Department of Education had received from an unelected, unaccountable third party: Bill Gates.
 At that moment, Coleman felt indebted to Bill Gates in ways that he does not feel indebted to the actual citizens and taxpayers of Georgia — the people he is legally sworn to represent and is being paid to represent.  Coleman felt indebted enough to Gates to lie to hide the fact that Gates and his cohort are calling the shots within our education system.
Coleman keeps saying — and his counterparts in Florida say the same — that opponents of Common Core don’t know what the real curriculum looks like.  This is true — because they are doing everything in their power to keep the public from perusing it.  So we should follow his lead: the first thing we should do is demand access to all curricular materials.  Then we can have the debate about what is being taught in the schools that should have preceded the adoption of Common Core in the first place.  Thanks, Brooks.  Great idea.

Elsewhere, Coleman fibbed to the incurious mouthpieces who pretend to be political reporters at the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  To the mouthpieces, he said that the public at the speaking tours had delivered the following message to him: “Stick with the national set of academic standards called Common Core, superintendents, teachers and parents have told them.”  Of course this is not true.  The superintendents and teachers  may have said so, but during them time set aside for the public to comment, the attendees were overwhelmingly anti-Common Core.

Coleman also told the story that Common Core was actually the invention of southern governors — and he was in on it — and so, he scolded, we don’t know what we’re talking about when we oppose it and talk about involvement by the federal government.  “Bet’cha didn’t know that” he challenged.  Since Mr. Coleman did not listen to my response that night, let me offer it again here:  Yes, I do know about the educational standards envisioned by the southern governors.  I also know about E.D. Hirsh’s admirable efforts to introduce dense, traditional content in K – 12 classrooms in New York City, efforts which are similarly cited as inspiring Common Core.

But there’s a catch.  Neither the southern governors’ nor E.D. Hirsch’s vision are much in evidence in Common Core today.  They may have had a good idea at one time, but that good idea is not the thing that plops into your child’s hands from the pricey, jargon-laden textbook program firing up on Bill Gates’ donated tablets.

The southern governors invented the idea that became Common Core.  That doesn’t make the current boondoggle more palatable: it just makes them more culpable for it.  Culpable for the Boondoggle is my idea for a slogan for this movement, by the way, but I’m flexible about that.

So the listening tours were a colossal waste of time.  That was a feature, not a bug: they wasted your time and put you down and wore you out, and when you didn’t fall in line anyway, they simply lied to the media about what you said, and the media broadcast their lies for them.  Oh, and they made certain everyone saw the armed security guards at the entrances so they could make it seem as if we were a dangerous bunch.  That’s a strategy too.

You still have to go back if there is another listening tour.  Just know what they’re going to pull this time, and be ready.

The really exciting thing about the Common Core listening tours was that people showed up who don’t even participate in the anti-Common Core movement, and they had interesting arguments against Common Core.  There were professors of education and parents and retired teachers and principals.  No matter how hard the media works to make the movement seem like a fringe group, they are failing because that is a lie, too.  They will keep trying, and they will keep failing.

Now is the time for us to assess who is with us and what we have to offer to each other.  In Florida, the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition is holding a coalition-building meeting on January 11.  If a representative from your group wants to attend — FSCCC is a coalition of groups, not individuals — contact Chrissy Blevio at their website, or contact this blog, tinatrent2@yahoo.com.  I will be running the training.

Even if you aren’t in Florida, read Dr. Karen Effram’s essential analyses of Common Core legislation.  If you are in Georgia, the good ladies at the Educational Freedom Coalition are doing amazing work (order their bookmarks), as is Jane Robbins from the American Principles Project; Mary Grabar at Dissident Prof, and researcher extraordinaire Robin Eubanks at Invisible Serfs Collar — buy her book, Credentialed to Destroy:

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The Heritage Foundation, Eagle Forum, and Concerned Women for America are on board, along with hundreds of Tea Party and 9/12 groups around the country.

Mary Grabar has a book review for Terrence Moore's The Story Killers out in the Selous Foundation magazine.  She writes:

Every concerned parent, grandparent, and citizen should read this, for Moore cuts through the obfuscation to reveal Common Core as “a complete consolidation and nationalization of a public education in America.” It’s the final step in a 50-year process of the progressive takeover of education.

I concur: it’s an amazing book.  Read Mary’s review, and check out the Selous Foundation’s other education reports.

They’ve had fifty years to break education: we’ve had just a few months to begin to figure this thing out.  We’re at the beginning of a long fight to bring back proven, traditional education.  They’re at the end of the time during which they thought they could get away with anything quietly.  The first public confrontation — the “listening” tours — gave us a lot of ammunition.  We know their excuses and we know what they think of us . . . and of themselves.  Read The Story Killers, get with a group, and get ready for the session.  This fight has just begun.

 

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Why Build Permanent Coalitions to Fight the Common Core? Because This Fight is Going to be a Long One.

January 5, 2014 Leave a comment

The fight against Common Core is not going to end with the defeat of Common Core.

Too much damage has been done to education.  The damage emanates from the education schools, which were taken over by radicals back in the 1960’s and then became the stomping grounds for the most intellectually dim and narcissistic domestic terrorists of that era — people like Bill Ayers.    It was clever of the bomb-throwers to pack up their dynamite and turn to their daddies’ rolodexes to score jobs training future teachers, but they alone did not radicalize teacher education, of course.  It was the work of many hands. ... 

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An Academic Friend, See Thru Edu, and a Great Book on Great Books and the Common Core

December 27, 2013 Leave a comment

The subtitle for this blog is:   Academia.  Crime.  Politics.

It has been pointed out to me on several occasions that the slogan is redundant.  I agree.

But there are still a few people in academia who stand up to the gaseous tyrants who make up ever-larger portions of the tenured class.  Bob Paquette of Hamilton College is one of them.  Dr. Paquette is a much-respected historian of slavery, with decades of accolades for his work.  But when he spoke out in defense of teaching Western Civilization and against the unhinged radicalization of academic programs at his college, he found himself on the receiving end of the usual, intellectually incoherent backlash.

How unhinged and intellectually incoherent?  The details are the stuff of vaudevillian humor:

So a Weather Underground terrorist, Ward Churchill, and a Raelian sex cult cloning scientist walk into a faculty lounge in upstate New York . . .

Read the rest here.

Paquette blogs at the website See Thru Edu, which is an essential resource on higher education for conservatives.  He takes the Tea Party movement seriously (like few in academia).  I want to point readers to two recent blog posts he wrote, one about the treatment of Sarah Palin, and this essay, which I encourage you to read and share with anyone who has or will have children attending college:

How Our Universities Breed Intolerance

[T]he Tea Party … have elicited a torrent of denunciation on elite college campuses and have spurred restless nights for the barons of both the Republican and Democratic parties. [They] have an independent, populist, and anti-elitist bent.  No matter who is manning the presidential helm, they have concluded, the country they love remains tossing and turning in waters ever more dangerous to them and to their traditional values, which they once thought were mainstream.  They see themselves being squeezed in a vise in which the turning device, attached to the upper clamp, manufactures the energy for the lower clamp to screw from below. In their search for a moral social order, they feel increasingly betrayed by many of the country’s most important institutions:  government, churches, unions, and schools.

… [Tea Partiers] represent legions far more diverse than your typical university faculty. They wear blue collars as well as white collars, populate northern and southern climes, and collectively groan under growing burdens of taxes and statist regulation.

The essay offers advice to parents of college-bound students, with more to come in future work:

Take this advice.  The brand of elite colleges is overrated and has more to do with the screening process of able admissions officers than the value-added during four years of matriculation.  Many of the chaired professors at elite universities have little intensive contact with undergraduates. Few bear the onerous tasks of intensively grading exams and papers. Outstanding teachers exist at every major institution of higher education in the country.  The trick is locating them. For that you need an insider. A professor whom you can trust to direct your son or daughter to the best, that is the most knowledgeable, demanding, and nurturing professors in their fields, those willing to spend time with serious students, is worth his weight in Ivy-League tuition dollars.

With its focus on higher education, See Thru Edu does not often discuss Common Core.  But Mary Grabar of Dissident Prof has posted there, and she recently introduced me an amazing new book: Terrence Moore’s The Story-Killers.  I’m only one chapter into it, but I can’t recommend it highly enough, as both a great read about the importance of literature instruction and a devastating, substantive critique of contemporary education reforms.

Moore is a teacher (and former Marine) — if you’re going to read one book about Common Core, this is it.

And if you’re in Atlanta area, Terrence Moore is coming to Gainesville on January 13 to speak with Jane Robbins of the American Principles Project and State Senator William Ligon in an event sponsored by the Georgia Concerned Women for America.

The fight has only just begun.

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Political Science’s Hateful Pseudoscience: Harvard’s Theda Skocpol Wants The Tea Party to Stop Participating in Politics

December 20, 2013 Leave a comment

Unlike literature professors, whose impenetrable secret twin languages and embarrassing fixation on their own genitals tend to keep them off the editorial pages, political scientists are always with us, especially during elections, when they slap on their wizard hats to make predictions that range from the pseudo-wise (I predict there will be . . . an election on November 7) to the pseudo-scholarly (Obama is magic!).

Political science just keeps getting worse as the last holdouts from a generation that at least feigned objectivity die off and get replaced by ideologues who are so far removed from objectivity that they’re feigning scholarship instead.

Nowhere is this tendency more obvious than in the growing field of Tea Party Studies.  No, they don’t call it that, but they might just have to invent a name to tell the paramedics.  Tenured political scientist types contemplating this citizen participation movement become so unhinged that their normally pseudo-scientific discourse spins off into something that virtually needs to be translated back into English from banshee.  All the shrieking is surely tough on those last five unreconstructed poly-sci professors cowering at the end of the hall, longing for the days when they could quietly feed voter lists into the Harwell Dekatron.

I’ve been trying to read the growing crop of academic Tea Party books alongside the growing crop of academic Occupy books, but it’s like watching a coven try to stab their mothers to death while using a Ouija Board to wake up the chicken they had for dinner last week.  One would think, based solely on evidence from the library shelf, that the many, many millions of highly constructive participants in the Occupy movement managed to cure cancer using only the consensus model of decision-making while the two dozen or so Tea Partiers were busy out back burning tires and forcing the womenfolk to mend their pointy hoods for them.  And I realize that last bit is not funny, but it is a not-inaccurate description of what academicians think about the Tea Party: they think (to use the word loosely) that Tea Partiers are murderous, calculating-yet-stupid racists who need to proactively be wiped from the earth, or at least the voter rolls, if ever American politics can be made to emanate goodness and light again.

Take, for example, this essay by the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, Theda Skocpol.  There’s a lot to laugh at, from Ms. Skopol’s breathless Cosmo style of describing her own scholarship (she deploys a “full panoply of research”) to her bizarre euphemism for virtue: “active government.”  Then there’s her evidence for proving that the Tea Party is stupid: Tea Party members, she tells us breathlessly, sometimes vote for different people during primaries:

During the last election cycle, no far-right candidate ever consolidated sustained grassroots Tea Party support, as those voters hopped from Rick Perry to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum.

For those of you unschooled in the full panoply of the academic method, what Skocpol is saying here is that Tea Partiers are so stupid that they actually hold differences of opinion, unlike Democrats, who are demonstrating only intellectual prowess when they, say, dump Hillary Clinton in the 11th hour because Barack Obama’s handlers managed to paint a big R on her forehead while his aides snapped photos of themselves drunkenly fake-raping a cardboard cutout of the former First Lady.

Once you get the hang of the theoretical framework (Democrats good: Conservatives eeevil; Tea Party rrracist), the rest of Skopol’s work isn’t hard to grasp — because there isn’t any of it.  It also can’t be very hard to write, which at least makes her efficient at playing faux populist while carrying water for the insider trading billionaires, hedge fund owners, real estate developers, trust fund babies and other secretive Democracy Alliance types who pay her and her fellow intellectuals to criticize the Tea Party . . . by accusing them of being dupes for secretive billionaires, hedge fund owners, real estate developers, and trust fund babies.

Out here in the non-academic air, such behavior is called psychological projection, or just dishonesty, but in academia it goes by the name of civic engagement, and Ms. Skopol is one of the most civic engagers around, being director of the Scholars Strategy Network, which describes itself as “a federated membership association for civically engaged scholars at colleges and universities across the United States.”  It is really a multi-campus-based propaganda tool for the Democratic Party.

The practice of political science was bad enough when its confidence men merely combined the calculated dishonesty of political operatives with the logorrhea of the intellectual class.  But now that academia has tipped to full-throttle leftism, it has grown both more shrill and less intelligent, even at its own invented games.  Ms. Skocpol actually presents, as evidence of Tea Party malfeasance, the fact that Tea Parties sometimes produce voter’s guides.  The voter’s guide is an entirely ordinary political tool used, of course, by all political parties, but in the hands of the Tea Party it becomes, to Skocpol, a de facto weapon of malevolence:

[V]arious right-wing tracking organizations … keep close count of where each legislator stands on “key votes”—including even votes on amendments and the tiniest details of parliamentary procedure, the kind of votes that legislative leaders used to orchestrate in the dark.

Horrors.  The Tea Party is so actually civically engaged that its members want to know how congressional voting works and to share that knowledge with others.  How dare they question the totemic rituals performed by our Capitol Hill Overlords.  This sort of thing would be funny if it were not disturbing that an endowed Chair at Harvard would argue that citizens should not look too closely at politics — and that she does so in the name of civic engagement.

But the kicker is this: Skocpol doesn’t just think the Tea Party is full of stupid people.  She wrote the editorial in question in order to dumb down her “research” to make it accessible to the little people on her own side, the ones who agree with her politics.  That is the mission of the Scholars Strategy Network, though of course they put it differently on their homepage.  It is a measure of how little she thinks of the little people of the Left that she doesn’t admit to them that Scholars Strategy Network itself promotes political report cards as she denounces the Tea Party for using political report cards.

And so Theda Skocpol efficiently conflates all the magical beliefs driving political science today: if the Right does something like voting, it’s bad; if the Left does anything, it’s noble — and — if political scientists are doing it, it’s obviously above reproach.

 

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