June 11, 2019 10:41 am

Radicalization Concern Trolls and the new Apology Tour

by Tina in Activists,education,identity politics,Politics,Uncategorized

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.

During the 1999 debate in the Georgia General Assembly on the hate crime bill, a Republican state legislator memorably teared up at the podium as he recounted how he had once been rude to his family’s black maid. He refused to kiss the maid goodby when he was going off to college, he said, and therefore, he would be voting in favor of hate crime laws — because, apparently, nothing says ‘sorry for being a jerk thirty years ago’ like systematically destroying the sacred principle of equality before the law for crime victims. And everyone else.

What the legislator was really saying is this: I refused to support the hate crime bill because I was a racist. Now that I have atoned for my racism, I support the bill. Ergo, everyone who refuses to support the hate crime bill like I do is a racist.

After pronouncing his racial guilt in terms that would make a Maoist re-education guard sniffle, the legislator went on to perform his story of regret again and again before rapt audiences. He received awards and went on TV and made a profitable cottage industry out of differentiating between his woke self and the knuckle-dragging neanderthals who didn’t have a family maid to apologize to.

This isn’t to say that coming to terms with one’s own complicity in — or witness to — injustice isn’t a worthy thing to do, if that is really what you are doing. For example, in 1991, then-New York Times editor Howell Raines published Grady’s Gift, the story of the black woman who had worked as a domestic for his family in Birmingham, Alabama. Raines managed to be pretty insightful, chagrined even, at discovering the limits of his role as the teller of Grady Hutchinson’s life and his desire to involve other people in his condemnation of the past.

But that was way back in 1991. Today, the New York Times is less a newspaper than a delirious re-education camp, where “whiteness” and “white privilege” are ritualistically and relentlessly denounced. “Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?” writes Times editor Sarah Jeong.

Wallowing in the pseudoscience of “white privilege” is second only to excusing oneself for global warming in order to take that trip to Paris as the animating pastime of the current elites. This creates a metaphysical problem for the Times: what do you do with a newspaper written mainly by white people and read mainly by white people which aims to denounce white people while still attracting advertisers selling Patak Philippe watches and Samabe Bali resorts?

Enter the apology tour. What you do, if you’re the Times, is curate high-profile opportunities for white people to apologize for being white by lashing out at other white people for not being loudly regretful enough for their own existence. These performances eerily echo the “struggle sessions” imposed on political prisoners in Mao’s re-education camps, and to the same effect: the non-conforming are threatened with consequences and the loudest and most masochistic apologizers are elevated over their less demonstrative peers.

Two articles in the Times this week feature youths performing the exhibitionist rituals of race apology for a national audience. This new willingness by the paper of record to exploit very young people is further on display in a Sunday Times article that profiles a dangerously mentally ill 20-year old who is both taking hormones to grow female breasts and binding those breasts to conceal them, which the Times celebrates as a “rejection of the gender binary.”

In “The Making of a YouTube Radical,” author Kevin Roose promotes the online “apology tour” of 26-year old “college dropout” Caleb Cain. Cain claims he was turned into a racist and sexist by watching videos on YouTube but has since cured himself of his toxic beliefs by watching YouTube videos by leftists accusing conservatives of being racists and sexists.

According to Roose, Cain started out as a “liberal who cared about social justice, worried about wealth inequality and believed in climate change” until he happened upon a Stephen Molyneux video on YouTube and became “radicalized.”

The Times article was originally illustrated with short videos of Jordan Peterson, Milo Yiannopoulos, Joe Rogan, and Ben Shapiro, among others. Though they are not mentioned in the article itself, these (very politically different) men are thus used to illustrate political “radicalism.” The text goes even further, describing the people who purportedly influenced Cain as neo-Nazis and white supremacists — placing Peterson, Yiannopoulos, Rogan, and Shapiro within the author’s sliding scale of “neo-Nazism” to “milder forms of bigotry.”

Using the claims of one attention-seeking young man as a jumping point, Kevin Roose and the Times smear the entire conservative blogosphere as “hate speech.” Using the excuse of concern trolling over YouTube’s algorithms (which are good when they help “cure” Cain of his “radicalism disease” by watching leftists) they also smear conservative speech as being uniquely pathogenic, capable of infecting and sickening unwary viewers merely through passive exposure.

This disease reference is not metaphoric: both Cain and Roose literally believe that Cain was infected with dangerous ideas that took control of him and overpowered his progressive thinking. In other words, YouTube clicks are to white privilege pseudoscience what measuring head circumference is to the pseudoscience of phrenology.

Roose actually illustrates the disease metaphor with a chart showing Cain growing “sicker” as he clicks through purportedly conservative sites (few of which are actually conservative), then healthier as he gradually rediscovers leftist sites. This is a story, Roose theatrically claims, of “a disillusioned young man, an internet-savvy group of right-wing reactionaries and a powerful algorithm that learns to connect the two.”

Caleb Cain’s role in this is to present himself as an innocent victim of ideas packaged so insidiously that he is unable to resist them. It should be noted that Cain is a young man from rural West Virginia who was raised by his “conservative Christian” grandparents. He is thus the sort of person who enters the pages of the Times only as a “whiteness” problem to be solved or an enemy to be vanquished — unless, that is, he can prove his worth by publicly denouncing whiteness, ruralness, conservativeness, and Christianity. Throughout the article, he performs these rituals of denunciation, apologizing abjectly for being things like Christian and male and white, to the beaming approval of Kevin Roose.

Here is Roose’s concern trolling for his little sample-of-one:

Far-right ideology bled into [Cain’s] daily life. He began referring to himself as a “tradcon” — a traditional conservative, committed to old-fashioned gender norms. He dated an evangelical Christian woman, and he fought with his liberal friends. “It was kind of sad,” said Zelda Wait, a friend of Mr. Cain’s from high school. “I was just, like: ‘Wow, what happened? How did you get this way?’”

According to the apology tour template, Zelda Wait is the normal, while Cain’s grandparents, who raised him, are deviants requiring immediate removal from the public square. Cain’s choice to very publicly reject the values of his grandparents — to announce to the world that they are pathological and racist — are the reason he is courted by a Times reporter and rewarded with a feature story, albeit one written with the sort of condescension reserved for lower-caste people who try to ape the mannerisms of Times cognoscenti.

And then Ross Douthat, the Times’ resident “conservative” and professional apology tour surrender monkey weighs in. Does Douthat criticize his Times colleague for smearing people like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Milo Yiannopoulos (would it kill him to Americanize his name?) and Ben Shapiro with the “white supremacist” libel? Do popes shit in the woods? No, they don’t, they shit on gold toilets, but Douthat predictably shits on conservatism while claiming to be worried about it.

It’s not the libelous racism slurs that trouble Douthat: it’s that his pal Kevin Roose just doesn’t get that Ross Douthat is a goody conservative who cares about family dissolution, not a baddie conservative who cares about family dissolution but also stuff like welfare dependency and border control. Here is Douthat’s response to the Times putting all right-of-center ideas into a great big box labelled KKK.

Imagine a furry little ferret adorably sniffing a truffle as he types this:

I have some doubts about categorizations that purport to define the moment when respectable conservatism becomes dangerous extremism.

Gee, thanks Ross. Maybe you and Justin Amash can do some Big Brother Little Brother intervention with Caleb Cain to protect him from the incongruous klavern that includes Milo, Ben Shapiro, and Joe Rogan.

But conservatives aren’t the only victims of this sort of journalism. What sort of long-term psychological effect might it have on a young man like Cain to have his private habits, an early life crisis, and his grandparent’s beliefs dramatized as a morality tale about prejudice in the pages of the Times? Kevin Roose and his editors certainly don’t care. Ross Douthat and his smelling salts don’t care.

The article really only uses the lower-class Cain and his drama to smear a wide range of non-leftist thinkers as racist purveyors of “hate speech.” The article is also a warning to other non-elite Caleb Cains: admit that you are complicit in white privilege, or else. Think and watch and repeat the correct things, or expect to one day be labeled and destroyed.

The other apology tour article, “Few Talked About Race at This School. Then a Student Posted a Racist Slur,”is even more disturbing. Putatively, it is the story of an apologetic white girl and a brave black girl who “confront racism” at their school. In reality, it is the story of a young girl who is attacked online and in public by her friend and her school principal and an army of administrators and diversity professionals and her town and the New York Times and leftists all over the internet after she is videotaped singing along to the lyrics of a rap song she hears in a car.

But it’s for her own good, and the good of humanity itself. Because it starts a discussion of racism.

The Times article begins with large photographs of the two “sheroes” of the tale, the white girl who posts the video of her friend and the black girl who acts out over it to the point of being arrested for some type of violence which the Times and her principal carefully cover up.

Here is how the Times describes the near-riot in the school over the video:

Kloey’s post helped set off a violent clash the following Monday that involved students, teachers and police officers. The scuffle ended with a black 16-year-old girl being tackled and arrested. That prompted the school’s handful of black students to demand that the school take on its culture of racism. Their efforts led to messy, uncomfortable conversations that would have seemed impossible not long ago.

Messy, uncomfortable conversations that would have seemed impossible not long ago. A “violent clash” that “involved” “students, teachers, and police officers.”

How much do you want to bet there’s nothing accurate in either of those descriptions?

The young woman, Kloey, is the grasping ugly American apology tourist here. Like all children indoctrinated in public schools where the adults are eager to find any incident to pump their diversity training into overdrive, Kloey is already fluent in the narrative of race apology. She claims to feel bad for putting her friend on the internet, she says, but she probably did it because she had a relative who used the same slur. Or maybe not, but that’s what she thinks must have happened.

Jane Austen wept.

The person Kloey throws under the bus is her friend who was merely singing along to a song in a car. The slur is a slur sung by a (presumably black) rap star, though nobody is demanding that Sony Music apologize.

Kloey is a bright-eyed girl who has her family and her upbringing and her friend to blame and nowhere to go but up in the hierarchy of race accusation. The article ends with her “awakening,” thanks to weekly diversity trainings and encounter sessions and that consciousness brawl, of course, and being featured in an article in the New York Times,with her face all over the internet as the girl who woke up:

Slowly, Kloey said, she began to understand how the world still viewed black and white people differently. It made more sense, she said, why the word continued to resonate so painfully with black people. “I feel bad,” she said. “I didn’t care what others thought and I didn’t care about others.”

Despite her SAT scores, Kloey can now probably get into college by writing winsome essays promoting her apology tour. Conversely, given the publicity she’s received, it’s doubtful she will be able to get into any college if she fails to enthusiastically make a public spectacle of her shame. This story will define her as she marches through life, pausing to loudly regret her whiteness if she knows what’s good for her. Kloey is 16.

Where are her parents? What sort of teachers and parents and school superintendents and journalists get off on exposing young people to life-altering accusations of racism in the national media and on the internet?

Well, this type:

Jeffrey S. Elstad, the Owatonna superintendent, said that what happened was a “wake-up call” for the predominantly white school. “Race for us is something that we don’t have to think about all of the time because we are white,” he said. “Our students and our families of color think about race all the time. As white people, how are we O.K. with us just, only when it’s convenient, talking about race?”

Cue the drumroll to Jeffrey S. Elstad’s apology tour. It’s a particularly grotesque one. He gets to polish his identity politics street cred by exploiting a bunch of adolescent girls in the New York Times — pure gold for a Minnesota public school official. He gets to cover up multiple acts of violence on his watch by posturing that the minority students who committed the violence were rightfully provoked by some alleged tidal wave of prejudice — really just an adolescent girl singing along to a rap song, but who cares? If you’re Jeffrey S. Elstad, you have to crack a few eggs to get to the magical diversity omelet where everyone ‘talks’ about race or is lectured to about race all of the time, instead of learning stuff like math.

Of course, Elstad also knows what will happen if he doesn’t prostrate himself before the media and start apologizing abjectly. A decade ago, the Obama Justice Department helicoptered into his school district because a student wrote a paper mildly criticizing the influx of Somali refugees and immigrants to the town.

Think about that very carefully. The Justice Department threatened a Minnesota high school because an adolescent dared to criticize a federal immigration policy. A Justice Department investigation. And an Education Department investigation. Of a high school. Over one student’s paper:

In 2009, the school was subjected to a joint investigation by the federal Education Department and Justice Department after a scuffle broke out among white and Somali-American students over a paper written by a white student that suggested negative stereotypes about Somali-Americans.

Suggested negative stereotypes. A scuffle broke out.

Does anyone believe either of those two descriptions are accurate?

So perhaps Jeffrey S. Elstad really had no choice but to go full apology tour when the Somali students began breaking out in scuffles again. Perhaps, this time, he was primed to throw any available 16-year old girl under the bus because he knows what happens if he doesn’t feed some disposable, of course non-Somali, white sacrificial virgin to the maw. And the silver lining is, this time, he gets to be the person praised in the New York Times for having that important conversation about race that nobody’s having enough even though it’s really important and it’s terrible that they’re not having it:

School leaders introduced trainings on race for teachers and students. They brought in diversity experts and hosted community events and forums. A mediator was called in to lead meetings in which the white students involved in the racist posts and the black students hurt by them discussed what had happened.

White youths were forced into federally overseen “mediation” with black students, some of whom had physically attacked them, because someone white sang along to Kanye West using the “N” word.

Does anyone really believe that racial apology tourism will remain optional for the rest of us? Two departments of the federal government descended on a school in Minnesota because a kid who was apparently assigned to write a paper about how he felt about mass third-world immigration into his town wrote something that allegedly — allegedly — “suggested” a “negative stereotype”?

If this doesn’t keep you awake at night, what will?

In the comments to the Few Talked About Race article, a “Cloey” (hmm, Kloey, Cloey) posted this:

I attended this high school from 2006-2010, and I am amazed that it took this long for the problem to escalate enough to a point where school administration decided to bring in specialists and work on the problem. This has been a problem in this community for so long, with more community members that the high schoolers struggling with racism. I am proud, however, that a group of strong-willed, passionate teens stood up and started talking about race, a very difficult thing to do in general, but especially in a small town.

Specialists to work on the problem. Teen saviors reporting thought-crimes to the “specialists.” What could go wrong? This comment got the Times Editors Pick and 520 upvotes.

We are all marching towards the re-education camp.

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May 17, 2019 3:31 pm

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

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by Tina in Georgia,Politics

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.

Short of Nan and Stacey donning Guy Fawkes masks and holding Shafer at gunpoint behind an abandoned 7-11 off State Road 16, I can’t for the life of me understand why any member of the GOP would even transitorily entertain supporting the National Popular Vote, let alone sponsor legislation to pass it. So I was curious to get Shafer’s version of events.

When I asked Shafer this week why he had sponsored the National Popular Vote legislation, he said that Newt Gingrich had supported it, and he trusted Newt. It was 2015, he added, a very different political atmosphere than we have today, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. He said he sponsored it along with leftists like Orrock and Abrams because “we sponsor legislation with people from the other side all the time.”

I then asked Shafer how he had come to change his mind and oppose NPV after sponsoring the bill to pass it. He said that State Senator William Ligon (R-3, Brunswick) came to him and explained what was wrong with NPV. “When did that happen?” I asked. Right after he sponsored it, he answered. What he didn’t say is that, despite changing his mind, he didn’t withdraw his name from the bill.

This is a story that needs to be unpacked.

The National Popular Vote is one of those dishonest “3 dimensional chess” schemes that seem to pop up out of nowhere but are actually being pushed by very powerful people behind closed doors and presented to the grassroots as organic social movements. Don’t trust these things. Article V Convention is another one, pushed by the very same people.

These schemes are peddled to the conservative grassroots by people who have no respect for the conservative grassroots. They’re fronted by big GOP names through glittery pseudo-bipartisan nonprofits. The left-wing donors happily put their names on the movement; the libertarian donors hide their donations, and neither the leftists or the libertarians are willing to say where the money is coming from to promote them on the right.

It’s time for the GOP and conservative grassroots to wake up to how they are being manipulated.

Here is a good summary of the NPV scheme. Here is a recent article by Matthew Vadum about the disturbing progress of the NPV movement. Here is a detailed account of the Democrats and leftists, including George Soros’ son, who are helping bankroll NPV. The leftist Tides Foundation, Sandler Foundation, and Silberstein Foundations are all funders.

Why didn’t David Shafer consider this before sponsoring the legislation? Probably because it is being pushed by the libertarians too.

Schemes like NPV always promise a shortcut to circumvent “politics as usual.” But there are no shortcuts to having a winning agenda. Even worse, National Popular Vote is a scheme for eliminating the electoral college while pretending –when addressing the Right — to not be a scheme to eliminate the electoral college. So it isn’t just a dishonest bait and switch foisted on Republicans and conservatives by their own Party thought leaders: it is a dishonest bait and switch foisted on Republicans and conservatives by their own Party thought leaders in cahoots with radical leftists.

The Electoral College Lie

BT (Before Trump), people like Charles and David Koch, the pro-open-borders founders of Club for Growth, still believed they could distract and mislead the conservative citizen grassroots with destructive garbage like NPV. Using ALEC, their state legislative “coalition” actually made up multinational business interests, they pushed NPV with Newt Gingrich as their mouthpiece. In Georgia, Earl Ehrhart, the former national chair of ALEC, led the NPV campaign to convince Republicans and conservatives that NPV was a “state’s rights” movement that would not eliminate the electoral college.

Gingrich and Ehrhart should be ashamed. But if they were capable of shame, they wouldn’t be involved in such things in the first place.

The National Popular Vote movement was founded by John Koza, a computer scientist and Democratic activist. Koza has dedicated his life and fortune to overturning the electoral college. When he talks about NPV to liberals and Democrats, Koza speaks openly about eliminating the electoral college. But because Republicans would not get behind an effort to overturn the electoral college, Koza and his Republican colleagues pretend that NPV would preserve the electoral college when they are speaking to Republicans.

It’s such a stupid lie that it virtually creates its own smokescreen: if you read the literature for NPV with an eye to understanding its effect on the electoral college, you might ask yourself what you’re missing. You’re not missing anything. They’re just lying when they say NPV won’t affect the electoral college.

Understanding NPV is actually very easy. The hard part is comprehending the degree of contempt people like Ehrhart and Gingrich and the Kochs have for ordinary conservative Americans, and how much they’re willing to bed down with leftists and undermine the GOP to enhance their own power.

National Public Vote Tries to Hoodwink the Conservatives

I first started hearing about NPV at TEA Party and GOP meetings around 2015. The usual suspects — Ken Doll-like activists from Koch Foundations — began coming around to groups pushing the NPV scheme. Trump was not yet the candidate (and would never be, if the Ken Dolls had their way), and the GOP was facing a tough primary battle with a huge slate of presidential wannabes. All of these candidates except Trump had the very same mega-donors — Club for Growth, which called everyone from Jeb Bush to Marco Rubio to (sadly) Ted Cruz to John Kasich to Rand Paul and Carly Fiorino to their behind-closed-doors meeting and made them pledge to support CfG’s agenda, which is not publicized but prominently features increased immigration and no border control.

Of course, if Republicans had limited both legal and illegal immigration for the past 30 years, there would be no need to go grasping for fake schemes to try to win-slash-actually-lose the presidency. And of course Trump won our votes largely because he didn’t have to go crawling to Club for Growth and refused to support their open borders agenda.

The National Popular Vote Movement in Georgia

Why does someone like Newt Gingrich push the NPV lie, when it would permanently end Republican hopes of gaining the White House? You’d have to ask him. According to the NPV website — the one that also says NPV will not affect the electoral college — NPV is a “state’s rights” issue because presidential campaigns currently don’t spend money in states that aren’t swing states. Yeah, that’s literally the best argument they can come up with: political advertisers and consultants in some states don’t make enough money in presidential races under the current system. Gingrich is shameless enough to peddle this excuse, but he has other motives as well having to do with positioning Newt Gingrich in the catbird seat even as the country goes up in leftist flames.

Why does Earl Ehrhard push NPV? Because he wants to be Newt Gingrich.

Why did David Shafer push it? Because Newt told him to.

But so did Bernie Sanders, Stacey Abrams, and Nan Orrock. And, bipartisan amity notwithstanding, nobody who thinks inter-party kumbaya is more important than the GOP winning presidential elections should be the chair of the Georgia GOP. Whose job is winning elections. Against Democrats. Including presidential ones. Also, for the GOP, not for Democrats, which apparently needs to be reiterated here.

Somebody at the state convention this weekend needs to ask Shafer why he continued sponsoring the NPV bill after he apparently stopped supporting it. The timeline doesn’t add up. But that’s not really the main point. The main point is that he decided to support the bill in the first place. That demonstrates not only terrible judgment but also contempt for Republican voters. There is simply no way that anybody whose profession is electoral politics could fail to understand the real intent and consequences of NPV legislation.

Unless they’re utterly incompetent to practice electoral politics.

This either/or breakdown is pretty bad.

As a sidenote, Erick Erickson is supporting Shafer for chair of the GOP. He is doing so, he says on the radio, because he believes Shafer is the person who can lead the GOP to the victory it needs in order to be in charge of redistricting in Georgia.

But do we want someone in charge of redistricting who actually fell for or underhandedly pushed the destruction of the electoral college? What sort of sense does that make?

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April 23, 2019 5:02 pm

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

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by Tina in Uncategorized

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.

Once upon a time, groups like Heritage Foundation held the line on difficult issues. Now they have squished and purged into a more acceptable, post-conservative stance on difficult issues. Yet even they don’t think highly of Woodall.

Woodall has abandoned difficulty. And it isn’t difficult to understand why: GA 7th is ground zero for massive immigration, legal and illegal, which has transformed the region and lined the pockets of many politicians willing to, above all else, vigilantly say nothing at all about the illegal immigration and only act as cheerleader for the legal type.

Legal immigration brings with it rapid cultural transformation, much of it good, some of it — structurally — bad. Contrary to the claims of the New York Times, Americans are very good at rapid cultural transformation, so long as they are not demeaned or ripped off in the process. And by “process” I mean seeing new workers from other countries, often people far more wealthy than they are, or subsidized by their own government or their own employers, competing with them for jobs and slots in universities they alone support, with their hard-earned taxes, in their own backyards.

But in the case of illegal immigration, the burden being placed on citizens is far worse — it is wild abandonment of the rule of law itself. That burden is a job market where every elected official except the police are essentially taking kickbacks for ignoring illegal immigration. The kickbacks come in many forms, but the people whom they benefit are, in rough order: big corporations, politicians, the contractors who love them, and wealthy virtue-signalling gated community types who like domestic slave labor so long as the slaves’ children do not drag down test scores in their children’s schools.

Locally, the kickbacks involve subcontractors bidding for county road work while pocketing the extra money they make from hiring illegal workers from that gas station on, say, the intersection of War Hill Park Road and HW 53. Yes, that one. Or the bennies and union clout the teachers get for growing their ranks to educate the children of illegal immigrants, preferably — see above — at completely different facilities from the ones housing their precious moppets.

At the level of Congress, the kickbacks involve the sort of grotesque perks congress-critters get befouling their own district nests while arranging to be airlifted out when they exit office, say to a nice lobbying job in DC, where they are even more removed from the consequences they visited on the irritant folks back home.

So, too hard, thinks Woodall. And says nothing. Too hard, knows Heritage. And they don’t even ask candidates questions about illegal immigration anymore.

Where there is a vacuum, something fills it. In the last District 7 Republican primary, that “something” was decorated Marine veteran Shane Hazel. I’ve met Shane, briefly. I could not have more respect for his career in the military. I like Shane’s vocal criticism of welfare fraud and illegal immigration and his support for the Fair Tax. He is dedicated to finding solutions for veterans subjected to shoddy healthcare.

I am not so sure about his seeming preoccupation with the legalization of pot.

In the 2018 Republican primary, incumbent Rob Woodall defeated upstart conservative Shane Hazel with 72% to 28% of the vote. Then Woodall went on to nearly lose the general election to Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux. It was the closest Congressional race in the country: 140,443 to 140,010 votes. Bourdeaux raised almost twice as much money as Woodall. Like many in the GOP mainstream, Woodall didn’t seem to put up much of a fight.

In fact, over the last decade, Republicans have lost — or maybe abandoned — a massive advantage in the 7th District. The record of the district is potholed with bad choices by the Republican Party.

In 2000, Bob Barr, whose post-office career has been more potholed than most, including a repulsive stint defending Baby Doc Duvalier, combined with another repulsive stint defending DragonCon child molester Ed Cramer, won the 7th for the last time with 55% of the vote to his opponent’s 45%.

Republican John Linder carried the district for the next three races. His margins were 79%, 71% and 62%. Note the decline, as an Edwardian butler would say.

Rob Woodall had four easy elections. In 2010, he won by 67%. In 2012, he won by 62%. In 2014, he won by 65%. In 2016, he won by 60%.

As he was in charge of the district, Woodall oversaw its extraordinary transition without uttering so much as a peep. So maybe it’s not so odd that he was a flaccid candidate in 2018, when, to mangle a metaphor, he screwed the pooch flaccidly, almost losing to college-professor-of-irritating-sweaters-and-socialism Carolyn Bourdeaux by that mere 433 of more than 280,000 votes. Yikes, as they used to say everywhere, when they were more surprised than a flaccid Republican at almost losing to an out-of-nowhere inappropriate-for-the-district Democrat.

I don’t know what happened between 2016 and 2018 … except that Rob Woodall was exposed as a piker, and Trump won the district, and then outside money flowed into Atlanta’s northern suburbs by the buttload from everyplace else in the country from Democrats searching for a narrative that would take them back to the glory days of Barack!2008.

And so we arrive at Lynne Homrich. Homrich gained a little media bump yesterday by releasing a pre-campaign commercial criticizing radical leftist congress-critters Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

The commercial certainly gained attention as a trial balloon. Which it was. I can hear crickets of consultants whispering sibilantly in her ear: it’s just a trial balloon for the hicks. Because, Lynne Homrich is no conservative. She is lying.

Why is she lying? Let me count the ways. She runs a sustainability company (oddly, her website for this firm seems to have been hacked: it is called Homrich Partners and I will not link to it).

She has some alleged nonprofit for girrl empowerment called “She’s a Ten,” which is supposed to convince girls that they don’t need to be judged by others by judging them all to be “a 10.” In the same spirit, you can insert your own ideas about why this is a terrible idea. The nonprofit is also practically impossible to find online without going through Linked-In and other people’s websites, which alerts my compost sensors. Here is their incoherent mission statement:

We create and distribute public service campaigns to redefine what it means to be “a 10” and deliver educational programming to girls where they learn to base their value and worth not on body or looks, but on what matters most – strengths, character and achievements …

In the spirit of elite teenaged girls everywhere … whatever.

Her husband is an executive for the taxpayer-sucking side of the Home Depot executives as opposed to the other side of the Home Depot executives that mostly believes in not vacuuming up tax dollars for personal hobbyhorses.

By far worst of all, she is on the board of the Jimmy Carter Center.

You cannot be on the board of the Jimmy Carter Center and be a conservative. They are open borders radicals, among all the other things that make most Georgians hack up Jimmy’s political legacy like a hazelnut stuck in Ms. Lillian’s hackle. I will leave it to others to explain why, but it’s pretty frigging simple.

It has to do with illegal immigration. Ergo, Lynne is lying. End of story.

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April 18, 2019 11:23 am

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

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by Tina in Outrage of the Week,Political Radicals,Pro-Criminal

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

In 2012, here’s what terrorist fanboy Tom Robbins bathetically wrote in the Times about Clark’s purported path to rehabilitation:

“I was not a good freedom fighter,” she told herself, “but I can be a good captive freedom fighter.” Her role models were Puerto Rican radicals, linked to a group responsible for a string of deadly bombings, who declared themselves prisoners of war after being arrested …

Inmate 83G0313, as Clark was known, was considered a major security risk, her every step carefully tracked. There was good cause for concern. Clark’s radical crew was known for plots like the 1979 prison breakout of Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army leader. At one point, the prison superintendent, Elaine Lord, was assigned a guard. Twice, Lord had to leave prison grounds as a precaution …

… letters from Clark describing the prison’s layout and operations were discovered when a pair of fugitives were captured.

Slowly she began building a life behind bars. Through programs for inmates, she earned a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science followed by a master’s in psychology. When the government ended tuition aid for inmates, she helped persuade local colleges to offer affordable courses. As AIDS arrived in the prison, terrifying inmates and correction officers alike, she calmed things down by educating everyone.

In 1994, a prison-advocacy newsletter published one of her poems and referred to her as a political prisoner. Clark wrote to the editor disagreeing, saying that she felt no pride in what she’d done. “I feel only enormous regret, sorrow and remorse.”

Not long ago, Clark spoke at a Bedford Hills event. Her theme was the Book of Jonah. Like Jonah, she told the audience, she had spent years in self-destructive behavior and had been cast overboard into a stormed-tossed sea for her actions. Like Jonah, she found rescue in the belly of the whale, in her case behind bars. “In prison,” she said, “I learned who I was.”

Tom Robbins, Cop-Killer Apologist

Robbins, who teaches at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where they practically have a minor in how to write about hating cops, was lying. In the same article, he crudely accused the survivors of Clark’s murder spree who objected to her parole as acting with “wrath.” Has he evolved, I wonder?

As I wrote in 2012, contrary to what Robbins claimed in the Times, Judith Clark did actively participate in publishing hate-filled political poetry. And she was still at it years later, spitting out poem after poem denouncing incarceration for anyone but especially for “political prisoners.” Far from arguing against being designated as a political prisoner (unless she was writing to Cuomo asking for her release), she, along with fellow leftist killers happily accepted awards from PEN for their America-hating, cop-hating, prison publications. She also accepted accolades and funding from scores of other so-called “prison abolition” activists who believe that incarceration itself is the only real injustice arising from the crimes she committed.

For example, in the 1997 book, Aliens at the Border: The Bedford Hills [Prison] Writing Workshop, published by the Segue Foundation (you can thank them here) and republished in the New Yorker, which loves cop-killer poetry, Clark wrote about how sad she was, not at killing two police and a security guard, but at being subjected to “the debris of police searches, overturned lives” that made her lose her favorite shirt. Or something.

That witch doesn’t care about anyone but herself.

Clark’s alleged “AIDS Activism” was just another iteration of trendy leftist agitation. All of her activism behind bars has been about about accusing the state, and by extension, taxpayers, of literally murdering prisoners, or cruelly depriving them of things like master’s degrees in anthropology. Her demand that prisoners receive better education wasn’t about readily available GEDs but about institutionalizing limitless, taxpayer-funded access to a plethora of fake university and graduate programs taught by tenured radicals intent on fomenting violence and resentment among the incarcerated.

All of her activism behind bars was and is no different from the primitive demands for attention and communist revolution she once levied at the end of a gun. Only the tactics changed.

And about that gun: in 2012, she, and the Times, and Tom Robbins lied about her use of a gun during the Brinks murders. As I corrected the version offered by the paper of record in 2012:

[W]e’re supposed to believe she didn’t know about the gun in her purse (that happens to me all the time) and that she was only “squirming” towards the gun because she hurt herself playing volleyball some time back before she became a weaponized hate-moppet trying to off an innocent cop, and we’re supposed to believe that she has achieved some cosmic level of rehabilitative bliss while we’re also supposed to believe that she knew nothing of the purpose of the Brinks robbery, which was to secure funds to buy lots of other guns that Clark apparently knew nothing about …

And so on. There were many lies in the Times 2012 campaign to free Judith Clark, but perhaps most dishonest was their effort to cover up the fact that they were publishing long stories about radical leftist killers learning to knit and write bad poetry in prison because they were helping push a parole reform campaign that would force the system to spring killers like Judith Clark on the grounds that they had hobbies like knitting and writing bad poetry. No matter who they killed.

Cliff Kincaid exposed this campaign and the attention lavished by celebrities and politicians on the killers here.

And here is my post about the release of yet another one of Clark’s co-defendants, this one freed by the Obama administration: Marilyn Buck, Cop Killer: Five Less Than Six Degrees of Separation From Barack Obama.

Steve Zeidman: Using Taxpayer Resources to Spring a Cop-Killer?

Meanwhile, Professor Steve Zeidman, CUNY School of Law, has been using his taxpayer-funded school offices to solicit support for the Parole for Judy Clark Campaign for years. Here is his appeal from the website:

Please send your letter to Judy’s legal team who will submit letters to the Parole Board once her next hearing is scheduled:

By email: letters@judithclark.org OR

By mail:

Professor Steve Zeidman
CUNY School of Law
2 Court Square
Long Island City NY 11101

Is this legal? Can anything be done about this?

And here, from the same organization, is a list of Clark’s supporters, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

PAROLE FOR JUDY CLARK: A DIVERSE COALITION OF SUPPORTERS

In April 2019, over 2,000 people representing a cross-section of New Yorkers called upon the New York State Parole Board to grant parole to Judy, the second longest-serving incarcerated woman in the state.

Among the notable supporters:

Robert Morgenthau: Former Manhattan District Attorney, former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and longtime Chair of the Police Athletic League
The Honorable Jonathan Lippman: Former Chief Judge of New York and current chair of the Rikers Island Commission
Four Former New York State Parole Board Commissioners: Robert Dennison, Vernon Manley, Thomas Grant, and Barbara Treen
Elaine Lord: Former Superintendent of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for twenty years, where Judith Clark has been incarcerated
Thirteen former presidents of the New York City Bar Association
Vanda Seward: former Statewide Director of Reentry Services for the Department of Corrections
Norma Hill: a victim of the Brinks robbery who testified against Ms. Clark at her trial
Colleen Kelly: Founder of the Nobel Peace Prize nominated victims’ organization “September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows”
William vanden Heuvel: Former Chair of the New York City Board of Correction and Special Assistant to then-United States Attorney Robert F. Kennedy
Hazel Dukes: President, New York State NAACP
Sonia Ossorio: President, New York State NOW
11 members of New York’s Congressional delegation, including Hakeem Jeffries, Jerrold Nadler, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez
11 State Senators, including Chairman of Committee on Judiciary Brad Hoylman
Jumaane Williams: New York City Public Advocate
More than 150 faith-based leaders

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April 14, 2019 4:48 pm

We Killed the Hate Crimes Bill in Georgia, Again

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by Tina in Georgia,The Hate Crime Racket

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

Why Do We Need Hate Crime Laws?
by Tina Trent | Mar 20, 2019

Nearly two decades ago, after being involved in the movement to pass a hate crime law in Georgia, I was compelled to switch sides. I left the hate crime movement after witnessing troubling discussions about strategies to enforce such laws only in ways that would produce the kind of hate crime statistics the movement desired while avoiding the creation of statistics they wished to suppress.
I realized, earlier than most, that the hate crimes movement is less about justice than about advancing political agendas.

By the time I got involved with the hate crime coalition, I had already been an advocate for crime victims. Whether I was lobbying for truth-in-sentencing of sex criminals or working to get Atlanta’s refugee and immigrant communities to trust the police, I always had the same goal: to provide equal justice to every victim, as well as equal, and appropriate, punishment for every criminal offender, no matter his or her identity.

Hate crime laws reject this notion of equal justice. The way they are enforced and the way hate crime statistics are compiled bear little similarity to other types of crime-fighting, statistics-gathering, or criminal prosecution. Even worse, the leaders of this movement justify abandoning equal justice before the law by relying on what can only be called misrepresentations and frauds.

The first fraud invoked by hate crime activists and their media allies involved claims that white racists were burning scores of black churches across the South in the mid-1990s. Churches indeed were burning, but the congregations (and the arsonists) were both black and white, and the main motives identified by a federal commission ranged from mental illness to mere vandalism to insurance fraud. Even after U.S.A. Today was forced to admit that “analysis of the 64 fires since 1995 shows only four can be conclusively shown to be racially motivated,” President Bill Clinton and advocates for hate crime laws continued to tout a purported tidal wave of racist black church burnings to justify the passage of hate crime laws at the federal level and in the states.

The second fraud perpetrated by advocates for hate crime laws involved their efforts to ensure that the “gender bias” category in state hate crime laws would never be used to prosecute even the most prolific serial rapists and killers, even those who kidnapped woman after woman, or boy after boy.

At the 1997 White House Conference on Hate Crimes, which I observed with an audience of invited guests in Atlanta, the particular problem of counting women (or men, or children) as victims of gender-bias hate crime rape was clearly a source of ongoing conflict between Clinton and others in the hate crimes movement.

Now, years later, the recently-released memos passed between Clinton, his legal advisor Elena Kagan, and his point person in the Department of Justice for hate crime laws, Eric Holder, reveal their overwhelming concern in 1997 that heterosexual women would – if these laws were applied as written – represent by far the largest category of victims of serious hate crimes committed in America. Moreover, many of the criminals committing these hate crimes would be minority males.

In order to avoid this undesirable outcome, the leaders of the hate crime movement perpetrated a vast fraud. When asked publicly, they deflected questions about gender bias rape or they said that sex crime victims would, of course, be counted as victims of hate crime based on the same standards applied to any other identity group.

However, when they trained prosecutors and police to implement these laws, hate crime trainers apparently instructed law enforcement officials to not investigate cases of serial, stranger rape and serial murder as gender bias hate, even though these crimes embody the very essence of selecting victims because of their identity and violating them in ways that specifically demonstrate hostility towards that identity.

I say “apparently” here because, although I tried for years, I could not get one elected official, non-profit director, or Office of Justice Programs representative to speak with me on the record about their training regarding hate crimes and rape. One trainer at the Simon Wiesenthal Center admitted that the question of rape as a hate crime “always [came] up” when they were training police officers and prosecutors but that the trainers didn’t “put it in writing.” She said they addressed rape only verbally, during the “Q and A” period of their programs. Her supervisor quickly called me back to tell me that the trainer did not have the authority to speak with me.

Over the last two decades, police and prosecutors in every state with gender-bias hate crime laws have, with absolute consistency, failed to charge even the most prolific serial rapists and rapist-murderers with gender-bias hate crime. After nearly 20 years, across dozens of states with gender-bias laws, these laws are used almost exclusively for a few highly publicized cases involving transvestite or transgender people, and never for more than one to two of the approximately 10,000 women annually, randomly raped or raped and murdered by strangers. Statistics on male victims of stranger-rape and rape-murder are harder to quantify, but they, too, are virtually excluded from being counted as victims of gender-bias hate crime. For example, in 2017, in the entire country, only one presumably heterosexual male and two presumably heterosexual females were counted as victims of hate-based gender-bias sex crime.

The problem with gender bias is far from the only systematic inconsistency in enforcement of hate crime laws. Georgia legislators owe it to crime victims to confront such evidence of systematic bias in hate crime law enforcement in other states before leaping to codify these biases into Georgia’s laws for mere political gain.

We do not need hate crime laws in Georgia. What we need is equal justice for every victim of every crime.

Tina Trent, Ph.D, writes for various publications and lives in Forsyth County.

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March 18, 2019 6:05 pm

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

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by Tina in Hate Crime,The Hate Crime Racket

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

Hate Crimes Legislation Ignores Women’s Plight

By Tina Trent

I used to be a strong supporter of hate crimes legislation. The issue seemed like a no-brainer: [w]ho could oppose laws that would make the police and public more responsive to crime victims who aren’t receiving a fair shake?

But I’ve changed my mind. I’m disturbed by the willingness of those supporting hate crimes legislation to dismiss the problem of violence against women in their pursuit of a media message that highlights less prevalent, and generally less violent crimes.

As recently as 1998, President Clinton told an appreciative crowd of those supporting hate crimes legislation that crimes against women should not be counted as hate crimes because there are simply too many of these crimes. This is an opinion long shared by the Anti-Defamation League and other advocacy organizations.

These groups are concerned that the tens of thousands of rapes committed against American women every year would overshadow the few thousand violent crimes that are found to have a racial, ethnic, religious, or homophobic motivation.

Is it acceptable to write off gender violence on the grounds that there’s too much of it? Certainly nobody would suggest that church burning or gay bashing or synagogue vandalism becomes less urgent as the incidents grow in number. The notion is bizarre, and the casual way these activists speak of rape “diluting” hate crime statistics and “distracting” prosecutors is nothing less than contemptuous.

Disturbing Compromise

Even more disturbing is the compromise position on gender reached by these advocates. In an effort to win crucial support from women’s organizations, advocates of hate crimes legislation added gender bias to the hate crime laws in 19 states, but they did it in bad faith: [t]hey still do not consider a crime like rape to fit the definition of gender-based hatred unless the rapist displays some bias in addition to the rape itself. [note to AJC editors of the past: colons do not indicate new sentences requiring capitalization]

In Michigan, for example, there were 3,206 rapes in 1998, but only two were counted as hate crimes. Minnesota also technically includes gender bias in its hate crimes code, but there is no mention of either gender or rape in the state’s annual hate crimes report. New Jersey has an extensive hate crimes reporting system, but in 1997, none of the 1,730 rapes committed in the state were considered hate crimes.

The very practice of dividing rapes into hate and nonhate categories should raise a red flag for feminists who have been fighting for decades to educate the police, public and prosecutors about the violent nature of the crime. And if rape doesn’t count as a gender-based hate crime, what does? The answer is that, in practice, virtually nothing does. None of the 1,325 incidents prosecuted as hate crimes in New Jersey in 1997 involved charges of gender bias, and a mere handful of gender cases have been tried in other states that include gender in their hate crime laws. Inclusion, in this case, is not what it seems to be.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that rape and other gender bias will be treated any differently under the Georgia Anti-Domestic Terrorism Act [the 2000 hate crime bill]. But even if activists made a good-faith effort to include crimes like rape in the hate crimes code, I still doubt that I could support the legislation.

I no longer think that simply adding gender to a long list of protected victim categories will solve the deeper problems created by a movement dedicated to drawing distinctions between violent crimes that are private and violent crimes with public significance. This distinction has long been summoned to reinforce the notion that crimes like rape and domestic violence aren’t really important because they are private business between a woman and a man.

Double Standard

Even supporters of hate crimes legislation who make a good faith effort to include gender, to think about which crimes against women they should recognize, inevitably fall back on this divide. They say that stranger rapes may be hate crimes, but acquaintance rapes are not. They wonder whether domestic violence is ever a hate crime, given that by definition the perpetrator knows his victim.

And in doing this, they are reinforcing the same double standards that obscure the real cost of all of this violence in women’s lives. And they are applying this standard to women alone: [n]obody in the hate crimes legislation movement would ever suggest that burning a cross in a neighbor’s yard or desecrating a co-worker’s place of worship is any less a hate crime than the same crime committed by strangers.

We live in a culture where violence against women is written off, justified, and ignored. Instead of articulating horror at such circumstances, we tell women to take self-defense classes and not go out after dark. Bookstores stock countless self-help guides teaching women how to avoid attack. We are told to limit our lives and never stop looking over our shoulders. Do we need a hate crimes movement that marginalizes violence against women as well?

I have no problem with enhancing penalties for nonviolent crimes that are motivated by bias. But in the terrain of violent crime, distinctions between the personal and the political already hurt women.

Making these distinctions a part of the law, as the hate crimes bill will do, will only make the violence done to women even more invisible than it is now.

Tina Trent of Atlanta is a doctoral candidate at the Emory University Institute for Women’s Studies and the former director of Georgians for Choice

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March 15, 2019 11:10 pm

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

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by Tina in The Hate Crime Racket

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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March 10, 2019 5:21 pm

Karla Drenner, Why is it worse if you get raped, rather than, say, your 85 year old heterosexual neighbor getting raped?

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by Tina in Georgia,Hate Crime,The Hate Crime Racket

This isn’t a nice blog post headline.

It’s not going to be a nice post.

But, deal with it, because this rape victim is not the one twisting criminal law so that the outcome is that Karla Drenner hypothetically getting raped matters more than the (hypothetical) 85-year old neighbor of Karla Drenner getting raped if Karla’s bill, HB 426, the so-called “hate crime” bill, passes.

As a real rape victim, of a real, violent, torturous stranger rapist who crawled in my window randomly, a crime that would never be counted as a gender bias hate crime by the ethical liars pushing these laws, I take deep and personal and definitely dish served cold offense at the idea that we’re now going to codify the ways we pick and choose among victims whose rapes are politically useful and rape victims who need to be brushed under the rug (as it were) because they don’t advance the appropriate agenda and statistics desired by the Anti-Defamation League and the HRC and the SPLC and CAIR and SCLC and the ACLU and the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Make the Road, and Danny Levitas’ Rural-Urban scumbags and all the other professional liars who make up the various hate crimes thuggery patrol.

Because, and let’s be entirely accurate here, isn’t what they do precisely what the Klan did? Create an hierarchy of victims and offenders based solely on the identity of each, and then decide which crimes matter and which crimes are officially sanctioned or at least at this point denied based on ethnicity and religion and skin color?

I’m looking at you, Karla Drenner. And at Chuck Efstraton, the (desperate-because-district-changing, verbally incoherent HB426 sponsor who, at the least, I must say, has excellent hair, if you like that Twin Peaks thing, which, oddly, goes far in politics).

Also Karen Bennett, who should know better, given the vast internecine crime in her district that needs more money, real cop time, real convictions, real sentences, instead of all this meaningless grandstanding. You know who hurts women and children and other living things in your district. Karen, I know you care. Focus on that.

And Calvin Smyre, who definitely should know better and seems like the type of guy who does care and should give a damn. Come on, Calvin. You’re a smart guy. A decent guy. A good representative. At least that was alway my impression of you.

And Deborah Silcox, whose elite district doesn’t see a lot of this stuff, with the exception of, cough, murder victims like Kay Thomasson, so Deborah may feel she can virtue-signal away in her crafting alcove while the real world burns elsewhere.

And Ron Stephens, who seems to be crudely ignoring the horrific, prolific crime in Savannah to grandstand about this. Let’s drill down into real crime in Ron’s district in an upcoming blog, shall we? Lots of brutalized and abandoned and dead kids, boys and girls alike. I briefly did child protection there, Ron. My advice: even though five-year old abuse victims from the wrong side of the tracks generally suck viz campaign donations unless you accept sticky half-eaten lollipops and haunted eyes, maybe you should occasionally eat some crappy cookies in over-lit community center basements and FOCUS ON HORRIFIC CHILD DEATHS. Beatings. Neglect. The burn marks on the arms I saw there haunt me still; the daddy who bit his child’s pre-adolescent boobies with his back to the camera DFACS had in the “parental visitation” room because he knew where the camera was. Ron, do you think these are hate crimes? Why not? Because the victims are children? Let’s definitely schedule a chit-chat about that. I’m deadly serious. I’ll put my number right here: 813-486-1783. I never saw child abuse like in your district. What the hell are you doing about that?

You’ve got bigger problems than some random name calling and a few street muggings you want to elevate to federal crimes to excite your donor group.

Or, to put it differently, you and your peers are frivolous and power-hungry while ignoring real suffering.

~~~

What hate crime legislation like HB 426 really does is make extraordinarily rare and usually misrepresented and most frequently just mundane interpersonal crimes committed against certain types of people worse than identical crimes committed against other types of people, while also making far worse crime committed that don’t count as “hate” less important than so-called “hate crimes,” which are mostly yelling, and would never even be recorded as crime if police weren’t forced to do so.

Most so-called hate crimes aren’t any different from the usual garbage simple misdemeanor crime committed a thousand times a day in Georgia, only a word said here or a skin color recorded there gets certain politically motivated elected officials thinking they can get some career cred if they play this one right. Shame on all of you.

~~~

For example, if a serial rapist breaks into Karla Drenner’s house and rapes her, maybe using homophobic slurs while he violates her, maybe not, and then if that same serial rapist then breaks into Karla Drenner’s 85-year old neighbor’s house and rapes her, maybe or maybe not using sexist slurs while he violates her, thanks to the legislation Karla Drenner is pushing, the two crimes become completely different things.

What happens to Karla then becomes a gender bias hate crime, while what happens to her neighbor is officially deemed mere “non-hate sexual violation of an 85-year old woman.” Because thanks to Eric Holder , Elena Kagan (back in the day) and Bill Clinton, “ordinary” sexual slurs used in the commission of crimes against women, even rapes, don’t count as hate crime. They wrote secret exceptions into the laws when in it came to gender, and then the NOW under Kim Gandy lied to their membership to make them not ask questions. They are all scum.

As I learned at the Georgia Dome this week, the sponsor of HB 426, Chuck Efstraton, who is too dishonest to admit this outcome, is desperately trying to shut this conversation down.

In Karla’s case, if, hypothetically, she was raped, suddenly the cameras would show up. Even the national ones. The full weight of the hate crimes industry, empowered by the media, and the federal government, and the GBI’s special units, and local politically ambitious police hate crime unit commanders, and the entire hate crime activist cabal would show up with their little candles burning in dixie cups with popsicle handles and condemn her rapist and pressure legislators to put every resource into solving and denouncing and punishing Karla’s rapist as a hate criminal — while her neighbor’s rape case would get, you know, the usual average attention. Then, the usual inattention.

This is not because cops don’t want to solve it, but because the people further up to whom cops answer couldn’t give a damn. Nobody in the federal government or the GBI or all the other politicized ratholes that give decent cops a bad name would be the least bit interested in some 85 year old heterosexual sex crime victim when there’s an exciting and headline-grabbing and career-promoting hate crime to solve.

Even though it’s the same rapist. Committing the same crime.

And if that rapist were to be caught, based on all the hate crime rape cases I’ve identified in other states over 20 years (yes, Chuck, there are records you should have look at before sponsoring the bill), Karla’s rapist would get far more time for raping Karla than for raping her 85-year old neighbor, merely because Karla’s an “out” lesbian and her neighbor is just an old lady who got raped.

Don’t believe me, Chuck Efstraton, as you called me a liar in the hallway of the capital the other day, and refused to take my very nicely collated and summarized analysis of 20 years of enforcement of hate crime rape regarding the gender bias category and sex crimes against women.

Here’s some free advice that will serve you extremely well as time goes by, if, that is, you survive the transition of your district to Democrat, which is the entire point of you acting this way. Even if you have nothing but contempt for the person to whom you’re talking, take the damn paper they’re handing to you. Don’t tell them to deliver it to some other person who will be available at some other time in an unknown location the future. Important as you may feel at times, the Georgia General Assembly isn’t an episode of Dr. Who. It’s the frigging Georgia legislature, and your job there is to smile and nod and say thank you, not jump into the Tardis and put 2,000 years and ten galaxies between you and things you don’t want to hear.

In other words, when you get off that elevator the next time, I’ll be right there waiting for you. With the same piece of paper in my hand. There is no time travel in the Assembly: in fact, there’s the exact opposite of time travel. Time slows down to a metaphysically near-impossible stasis there. A decade passes, a whole frigging decade, and the very same person grasping the very same piece of paper in her hand is waiting for you when the elevator doors slide open, admittedly, weirdly slowly, and you have to get past her to the Chamber.

Just a helpful observation, that one.

If you feel particularly febrile and bruised, just circular file what the person hands to you, and they won’t even know. But when you refuse to even hold three pieces of paper in your precious manicured hands, you’re just creating an inappropriate problem that in no way needed to be created in the first place.

~~~

More advice: when you sponsor a law that affects several complex aspects of the criminal code in cases involving interpreting enforcement of complex-yet vague definitions of “gender” versus “sex” versus “women” versus “children,” and all involving the bouncing balls of sex violation and speech limitations and rights, not to mention the vast subject of intent and incredibly complex issues of enforcement, don’t gobstoppingly announce that you have nothing to do with how the law you’re proposing gets enforced because that’s not your job because you just wrote the bill and it’s up to other people to interpret it.

I am very, very rarely at a loss for words. Chalk one up for you there, big guy. Wow.

Also, even if I was too lazy to read an oppo piece on a bill I’d sponsored, I wouldn’t be too lazy to hand it off to one of my interns bought by mommy’s donations, who actually are there to do more than get you coffee and dangerously stroke your ego. Several of them are really quite smart; several are a whole lot smarter that you. Given some them some real work.

Do you really not understand ANY of this stuff?

Let’s get back to the bill at hand

So, Chuck, see, for example, the case of the nine victims raped by Mark Anthony Lewis in Chicago in 2000. Thanks to hate crime law, Lewis was charged with hate crime rape in eight of the rapes he committed against minority women, but the ninth victim, who was white, was considered a lesser victim because of her skin color, and Lewis’ punishment for raping her was far less than the other rapes he committed.

SERIAL RAPIST MARK ANTHONY LEWIS

Does this sort of distinguishing between the relative horror of rapes based on the skin color of the victim remind you of something?

Think hard.

Bueller? Bueller?

Yes. If we can all stand to be as excruciatingly honest as the situation demands, it should remind you of the way the Klan used to administer justice. And this is precisely what you’re proposing with HB 426.

Yes, it is very ironic.

For, the identity-based legal protocols the hate crimes movement wants to impose on us all could have been lifted word for word from some fusty Ku Klux Klan Klavern newsletter circa 1920. The only difference is which people are the people who get systematically dehumanized by the current identity politics — and who gets to get away with the dehumanizing this time.

~~~

I challenge Karla Drenner to explain why she wants a law that says raping her is more heinous and merits a longer prison sentence than raping her 85-year old neighbor, or any other heterosexual woman.

Seriously, Karla. You’re a smart woman. You sponsored the law. You chose to be the poster child for this scuzzy act of bias and hatred against virtually all victims of rape.

And while you’re at it, I’m still waiting for an answer to these questions:

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 federal hate crime statistics as a gender-bias hate criminal? Do you believe he is an anti-homosexual, gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?
Do you believe the man who snatched a 13-year old child off a railroad track in Stone Mountain 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?
Do you believe Wayne Williams, the convicted murderer of two of Atlanta’s “Missing and Murdered” male children, some of whom disappeared in the previous area of your district, should be added to the federal hate crime statistics as a race-bias and/or gender bias hate criminal in the federal statistics collection? If not, why not?
Why is prolific, Atlanta-based serial killer and torturer Michael Darnell Harvey, who mutilated and actually lynched by hanging at least some of his female victims while raping and murdering them, never cited among the notorious killers used by grandstanders like you to justify the alleged need for hate crime laws? His many victims may include at least one of your constituents. Do you believe he should be added to the federal 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?
Last year, suspect Corey C. Griffin was positively identified through DNA in a string of attacks in Clarkston, in your district, including at least one rape and probably more. Do you believe Corey Griffin should be prosecuted as a gender-bias hate criminal? If not, why not?

Now, Karla, you sponsored the legislation.

You should damn well know how to answer questions like this.

I suggest you start taking.

GEORGIA STATE REPRESENTATIVE KARLA DRENNER

~~~~

You too, Mr. Efstration. I know you sponsored this bill because your district is changing and you want to pander to the right types of left identity activists. But you will not get to this finish line without actually answering some real questions first. So I suggest less time grandstanding and more time actually researching the garbage you sponsored.

Because, your current answers to specific questions are incoherent, and you don’t even know the tissue-paper thin defenses that comprise the best arguments your side can muster. You suck at doing this.

Hate crime laws are ugly, biased, identity-politics-addled, ideological motivated and selectively enforced legislation, and virtually everyone knows it. The hate crimes movement is the real hoax. Jesse Smollett is a piker compared with the people really running this racket. And all the crazily dishonest bull-hockey you said to me in the hall, particularly impugning former GBI directors and other officials, state and federal, as being too dumb to enforce the extra-perfect hate crime law as you imagine it will be enforced under your guidance because you’re super-special-guy, just served to underscore your possibly dangerous or just lazily wacky ignorance of the bill you are running around seeking camera time to defend.

So here’s my last piece of free advice, if you won’t take any of my other advice: lie better.

Georgia State Representative Chuck Efstration

No comment?

March 6, 2019 7:30 pm

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

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by Tina in Georgia,Hate Crime,The Hate Crime Racket

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?

• 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?

No comment?

December 21, 2014 2:06 am

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

5 comments

by Tina in war on cops

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.

5 comments!

July 9, 2014 1:46 pm

Cliff Kincaid on Larry Grathwohl and Bill Ayers

1 comment

by Tina in war on cops

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.

1 comment...

July 7, 2014 9:51 am

Another Hate Crime That Was The Wrong Kind of Hate

3 comments

by Tina in Federal Policy,Hate Crime,The Hate Crime Racket

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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June 20, 2014 5:56 am

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

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by Tina in Academia,Academicians on Crime,crime statistics

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

The Academic Feminists are certainly showing their tushes with this defense-of-Hillary-defending-the-child-rapist-thing. At least the masks are off.

Wicker Women

But there is another story here, one that it would behoove the conservative critics of Academic Feminism to remember as they fight back against the guilt-by-identity regime. The lesson is this: in the real world, in real courts, real rape victims are still being subjected to such horrific, humiliating injustices, and real rapists and child molesters are still walking away from their crimes in nearly every case.

Forget the idiotic academic fake statistics that claim one in five women are raped in college for a moment: in the real courts, one in five rape victims don’t ever get a day in court. Hell, more than four in five rape victims don’t ever get a day in court. So while you’re busy fighting the Academic Feminists, do not make the mistake of believing that what you see happening on college campuses has any bearing on the real criminal justice system.

And when you’re done demanding justice for yourself, you should demand justice for victims of real rape, lest you become like the Campus Feminists you’re fighting — lest you become interested in injustice only when it affects you and people who look like you.

Once you’re done being disgusted by the glee that Hillary Clinton expressed in recounting her clever deceits that freed a child rapist, don’t get gleeful yourself over Clinton’s comeuppance: there’s still a child victim involved, and nothing about what happened to her is funny. There’s still an injustice to be righted.

The Hillary Clinton rape defense is also an important story because it lays bare the perverse lies that pass for criminal defense and the sleazy tactics that warp rules of evidence. If conservatives really care about right and wrong and justice and injustice and toppling identity politics, they cannot draw a circle around these real injustices committed against rape victims and say: this has nothing to do with me because I’ve been persecuted by the Campus Feminists.

There are many thousands of rape victims, hundreds of thousands of them, victims of real rape, who have been denied justice. Hillary Clinton’s giggly story shows how easy it was in 1975 to get a rapist off, and things haven’t changed as much as one might think today.

We need conservative men to be willing to stand up for these victims, because the campus feminists don’t care about them. That little raped girl isn’t responsible for speech codes and campus tribunals against frats. Rapists still routinely walk because of warped rules of evidence and prejudiced jurors who believe they’re sticking it to the man, or sticking it to some feminist, or playing Atticus Finch by springing a predator back onto the streets. Child molesters still routinely plead down to time served, or less. If the conservative movement is going to engage the subject of rape, they should also stand up for these rape victims instead of putting all their energy into battling feminists in the fantasy-realm of academia. It would be nice to see Minding the Campus and Truth Revolt and Phi Beta Cons expand their interrogation of injustice and rape to include the real courts.

Scoring political points isn’t everything. Only people like Amanda Marcotte and Hillary Clinton should be guilty of an accusation like that one

6 comments!

June 11, 2014 1:24 pm

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

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by Tina in Activists,Federal Policy,war on cops

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.

Officer Alyn Beck

Officer Igor Soldo

Of course, Eric Holder is the most powerful person in law enforcement in America while Alex Jones is just a radio talk show host. But both of them are tearing away at the social fabric relating to law enforcement in similar ways.

It is perverse that we have, in Eric Holder, an Attorney General who has repeatedly sided with violent cop-killers and against police. Throughout Holder’s private and public career, he has taken extreme positions against police safety, agitated for the release of cop-killers and terrorists, and even secured the release of terrorist cop killers via Bill Clinton’s presidential pardons. Holder does not oppose the spilling of police blood so long as the cop killer is a leftist; he only cares when he can score political points by accusing anyone and everyone on the right for cop killings committed by fringe, allegedly right-wing types.

Holder also has the power to define the system’s response to crimes, and he is largely responsible (along with Elena Kagan and Bill Clinton back in 1997) for the creation of hate crime laws that make the murders of some types of people more important than the murders of other types of people.

Thanks to Eric Holder, the murders of Las Vegas Police Officers Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck will not be counted as hate crimes because the Department of Justice doesn’t count police as victims of hate. If they did — if they counted as hate crime not only the killings but the assaults, attempted murders, verbal abuse, and other hatred directed generally at police, then police would rank among the most vulnerable hate crime victims in America.

But Holder would never let that stand.

Alex Jones is just a radio talk show host, but he uses his bully pulpit to dehumanize police in other ways: he accuses them of crimes against humanity and of taking part in ornate deceptions of the public through “false flag” events. Though Jones claims that he is really blaming the government and not ordinary police officers for “false flags,” that claim is a lie: he spews rage about police “stormtroopers,” and his websites are festooned with images of cops purportedly responsible for beating and torturing civilians.

Jones tells his listeners that police are guilty of perpetrating atrocities against the American public: he says they are the ones who helped the U.S. government cover-up its role in the terrorist attacks that killed thousands on 9/11. He says they are the ones who murdered the schoolchildren in Sandy Hook, if there were any children murdered at all. He says the police set off the bombs at the Boston marathon, if there were bombs at all and that police were the killers in the Aurora movie theater massacre, if there was a massacre at all. Jones really says these things: every time he calls these massacres “false flag” events what he is saying is that either people didn’t really die or the police are the ones who killed them at the behest of our government.

As I wrote in 2010:

[P]olice everywhere are paying the price for the anti-cop rhetoric surfacing in political speech and political activism across the political spectrum these days. This anti-cop drumbeat is always the same, whether it comes from the White House or a fringe anti-government website, from libertarian hysterics on the right or criminal rights activists on the left.

In 2009, four Seattle Police were assassinated in cold blood by Maurice Clemmons as they sat in a restaurant in a town near Seattle. Clemmons, a violent career criminal and rapist, had told numerous people of his plans to assassinate police, and after the killings he became a cause celebré among anti-cop leftist activists in Seattle and California. Before the killings, he had been granted leniency by half a dozen judges and also by then-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who has refused to apologize for his role in freeing Clemmons, who went on to rape, brutalize and murder dozens of victims in several states, including these fallen heroes.

fallen

Seattle Police Sergeant Mark Renninger and Officers Tina Griswold, Ronald Owens, and Greg Richards, murdered by Maurice Clemmons in 2009.

Also in 2009, serial rapist Lovelle Mixon became a left-wing counterculture hero for gunning down four police officers in Oakland, California. Occupy protesters and activists from Oakland’s deeply anti-cop culture celebrated Mixon after the murders, just as they have long celebrated Mumia Abu Jamal, another cold-blooded cop killer.

4up

Sergeants Ervin Romans, Daniel Sakai, Mark Dunakin, and Officer John Hege murdered in Oakland in March, 2009 by Lovelle Mixon

Also in 2009, Richard Poplowski, a white supremacist, murdered three police officers and severely wounded two others during a domestic violence call to his mother’s home. Killed by Poplowski were Officers Paul Sciullo, Eric Kelly, and Stephen Mayhle.

Unknown-1

Officer Paul Sciullo

Unknown

Officer Stephen Mayle

Officer Eric Kelly

In each of these cases and also in the Las Vegas killings yesterday, men with long histories of violence, mental instability, race hatred, substance abuse, and animosity towards law enforcement ambushed or assassinated police officers. But you would not know the similarities in these cases by reading your daily newspaper or even looking up official statistics about police killers: newspapers, taking their cues from leftist organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Eric Holder’s Justice Department, identify only the right-wing killers as “political” killers of police.

Alex Jones is half-right when he says that he is being singled out for blame for the Las Vegas killings because he is a conservative: he is right that conservative anti-cop agitators get singled out while left-wing agitators don’t get singled out for identical behavior. But the solution isn’t to give Jones a pass: the solution is to blame left-wingers who incite anti-police violence as well.

Left-wing political cop killers like Mumia Abu Jamal and the fugitive serial cop assassin Assata Shakur are celebrated and defended by the New York Times and by professors at our most prestigious universities. They are mooned over by ethical buffoons like Terry Gross of NPR. They are given radio shows on the taxpayer’s dime on NPR to spew their race hatred and hatred of police. NPR and Terry Gross and the New York Times and all the Harvard professors agitating for Mumia and sheltering Assata Shakur deserve the same sort of blame that Alex Jones gets.

That would be fair. Also fair: investigating Eric Holder for bias and fraud whenever he and his favorite propagandists at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League create deceptive “statistics” and “reports” that are no more than bombastic political lying designed to blame the Tea Party for violent acts committed by others.

In addition to perverting the mission of the Justice Department by playing partisan politics, Holder, the SPLC, the ADL and the mainstream media are all missing (or actively suppressing) the real story of a dangerous anti-police movement that gains its power not from the Tea Party (a law-abiding, peaceful movement which has been much maligned) but from an unholy alliance of druggy leftist anarchists, druggy right-wing anarchists, and druggy individuals with no discernible politics who nonetheless feed off the paranoia of sites such as InfoWars on the far right, Critical Resistance on the far left, and Cop-Watch on the fringes of both fringes.

As soon as news of the police murders in Las Vegas broke, Alex Jones went on the air and predictably declared the event a “false flag” designed by the government to discredit . . . Alex Jones. The SPLC’s Mark Potok hit the news circuit with his own false flag, trying to tar the Tea Party with the actions of the Vegas killers despite the fact that killers Jerad and Amanda Miller were kicked out of the only patriot citizen event (at the Cliven Bundy ranch) they were known to have attended (and even the Bundy ranch standoff was not widely endorsed by Tea Party activists). CNN shamelessly regurgitated Mark Potok’s line, reporting that the Millers had been seen at the Bundy Ranch but leaving out the fact that the Bundy family made them leave. On his radio show, Alex Jones shamelessly ranted for hours about how he was the real victim of the Vegas shootings. In coming weeks, Eric Holder will doubtlessly use the shootings to ramp up the Department of Justice’s scrutiny of Tea Party groups and military veterans (though the Millers were neither veterans nor members of any known Tea Party).

Not the Tea Party

To Eric Holder, cop killers present opportunities for cold-blooded political calculation; to InfoWars’ Alex Jones, they represent an opportunity to grow audience share by egging on viewers to believe they are being persecuted by a”military-industrial police state.” As I wrote in 2011, it takes a village to kill a cop. The village invented by these two ideologues is a very ugly place to be.

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May 19, 2014 10:19 am

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

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by Tina in Child Molestation,Politics

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

Here’s Ed Kramer hanging out at DragonCon when he was supposed to be housebound and in such serious pain from a “spinal injury” that he couldn’t stay awake for trial. Hundreds of people saw him hanging out at a hotel in downtown Atlanta after midnight, chilling with some guy in latex shorts carrying a bongo drum. What, they couldn’t pick up a phone when they saw the following story in the newspaper a few months later? You know . . . acting to protect kids from getting raped, like their favorite superhero might do?

Read the rest of my 2011 post here

Now fast-forward a mere 26 months. Bob’s client didn’t waste much time after Barr got him sprung from protective custody . . . again, check the date:

December, 2013: Ed Kramer Guilty of Child Molestation: Now Will Bob Barr Face Consequences for His Role in the Deception?

“After leaving Congress in 2003, Georgia Congressman Bob Barr reinvented himself politically in dramatic ways. He aligned with the ACLU, began advocating for the legalization of marijuana, and ran for president on the 2008 Libertarian Party ticket. Now Barr is attempting to rejoin the Republican and conservative mainstream in a bid to secure Georgia’s 11th District congressional seat, where he is currently a leading contender.

Barr’s about-face on issues that alienate conservative voters left many wondering what he really stands for. His role in the notoriously corrupt defense of now-convicted child molester Ed Kramer should raise more questions in voters’ minds. Here is my previous post on Kramer’s decade-long manipulation of the justice system.

Edward Kramer, co-founder of the sci-fi and fantasy convention, Dragoncon, pled guilty in a Georgia courtroom yesterday to three counts of child molestation in a case that has been delayed thirteen years, thanks to repeated efforts by Kramer himself to claim medical incapacity. Barr served as Kramer’s attorney until early 2013, when he decided to run for office again. But Barr did not just serve as Kramer’s lawyer: he held the sci-fi purveyor up as the victim of a religion-fuelled witch-hunt; he helped him deceive the court regarding his client’s capacity to sit through a trial, and he helped him acquire an eyebrow-raising bond agreement that enabled Kramer to flee the state illegally, resulting in Kramer’s arrest in 2012 for endangering another child — a 14 year old boy Kramer had in his motel room in Connecticut.

As if these facts aren’t bad enough, Barr used the molester’s defense to promote his new libertarian politics. You cannot separate the Kramer case from the person Barr is offering to voters, even if he tries to distance himself now.

In 2007 Barr told an audience at the Federalist Society that Kramer was a victim of his new pet peeve, prosecutorial over-reach. Despite the fact that it was Kramer himself who had created the delays, Barr insisted that it was the fault of the state. The video of Barr promoting Kramer’s case as a civil rights issue has, curiously, been scrubbed from the internet in the last 24 hours, but Barr’s incredibly sophomoric amicus brief on behalf of Kramer is going to be harder to erase. Barr should be called on to re-release the video: he isn’t running for dog-catcher; he’s running for Congress, and his behavior and expressed beliefs between 2003 and 2013 should not be hidden from voters this way.”

Read the rest of my 2013 post here

Now — back to the future: for those of you gearing up to send in whiny comments about how “everyone deserves a defense lawyer,” don’t bother. Of course they do. What child molesters don’t deserve is decades on the run while their lawyers use dirty tricks to keep them from facing justice in a courtroom. And that is what Bob Barr did for this piece of human trash. I don’t see how anyone could seriously believe Barr did not know that his (now former) client’s alleged “profound disability” was and is a stunt.

Porter on [April 2013] called two witnesses who testified about seeing Kramer, a science-fiction author and film buff, at movie sets in Kentucky and Connecticut taking behind-the-scenes pictures and video clips. Both the witnesses, one who was a makeup artist and another who was an audio/visual producer, testified that Kramer seemed to have no serious problem breathing, standing or walking around. They also said Kramer did not have an oxygen tank with him at the movie sets

Someone in the media ought to ask candidate Barr how much he billed his client — cough, the taxpayer — AND cost the court system — cough, the taxpayer — for everything from Ed Kramer’s faux vapors before every court date for over ten years to the medical privileges he demanded in prison to the gas mileage on the cop car that had to haul Kramer back from his 2012 woodland adventure in Connecticut. Some details are here, but it’s hardly the final tally.

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March 18, 2014 5:41 pm

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

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by Tina in Child Protection/Foster Care,Crime Denial,failures to prosecute,Florida,Politics,The Guilty Project

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.

By the time Bedwell, 17, returned to her apartment, Richard McTear was gone with the baby,Emanuel Murray Jr. Emanuel’s body was found on the shoulder of Interstate 275. He was wearing a blue onesie. . .

The first hotline report about the couple was received in April, alleging McTear had beaten Bedwell, sending her to the hospital. The investigation determined he had previously kicked in the apartment door — twice — and threatened to come back with a gun and kill her and Emanuel. The background check showed a 17-arrest criminal history, including kidnapping, child abuse and domestic violence charges. At DCF’s urging, Bedwell signed a safety plan agreeing to stop seeing McTear. She filed for a restraining order but did not complete the process.

In the early hours of May 5, Bedwell returned to her Hillsborough County apartment after staying with a friend and found McTear waiting inside. He is accused of punching and choking her, and throwing Emanuel onto a concrete floor. When Bedwell ran for help, McTear grabbed the boy and sped off in his car, tossing him out along the interstate, where he died of blunt impact and skull fractures. Emanuel was 104 days old.

Seventeen arrests — how many other unreported crimes? Then there’s Jason Padgett:

In Padgett’s case, investigators did not request all the law enforcement records. Those records would have revealed he was a violent man with a lengthy record — arrested 22 times on charges including aggravated battery, robbery and domestic violence. He had physically abused his mother, ex-wife, three former girlfriends and his then-girlfriend, Flower. A judge had granted his mother a non-expiring restraining order.

Padgett and McTear came to the attention of authorities only because they killed children. Between the two of them, they had been arrested 39 times and for a score of serious crimes, but neither had served significant time for any of those charges. Again, the problem is not the police or even the child protection workers: the problem is the courts and the leniency of judges. Maybe we should try privatizing them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here are 475 more children killed in Florida between 2008 and 2014, thanks to our too-lenient system of justice. Every empty-the-prisons obsessive across the political spectrum should spend some quality time working their way through this database.

No comment?

March 5, 2014 4:04 pm

Mumia Activist Voted Down for DOJ Civil Rights Position!

3 comments

by Tina in war on cops

This is what justice looks like:

“Senate rejects Obama appointment of Debo Adegbile to top civil rights post”

We need to thank Democrats and Republicans who voted against this nomination:

Casey Statement
on Debo Adegbile Nomination

Washington, DC- Today, U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) released the following statement on the nomination of Debo Adegbile to the position of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights:
“I believe that every person nominated by the President of the United States for a high level position such as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights should be given fair and thoughtful consideration as senators discharge their responsibility of ‘advise and consent’. I respect that our system of law ensures the right of all citizens to legal representation no matter how heinous the crime. At the same time, it is important that we ensure that Pennsylvanians and citizens across the country have full confidence in their public representatives – both elected and appointed. The vicious murder of Officer Faulkner in the line of duty and the events that followed in the 30 years since his death have left open wounds for Maureen Faulkner and her family as well as the City of Philadelphia. After carefully considering this nomination and having met with both Mr. Adegbile as well as the Fraternal Order of Police, I will not vote to confirm the nominee.”

3 comments!

March 4, 2014 12:00 pm

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

1 comment

by Tina in Politics,Pro-Criminal,war on cops

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:

Mumia Abu-Jamal and Marty Hittleman: California Teachers Endorse a Cop Killer, Get Caught, Blame Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Maureen Faulkner is Right: The Fight Against Mumia Will Never Be Over, as Amnesty International Proves with Their Holiday Catalogue

Martin Preib versus the Innocence Industry

4 comments

by Tina in The Guilty Project

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

4 comments!

February 11, 2014 7:06 pm

The Daryle Edward Jones Case Grows Worse

1 comment

by Tina in Georgia,Just Not Putting the B******s Away,Sentencing

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.

1 comment...

February 9, 2014 6:12 pm

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

1 comment

by Tina in Academicians on Crime,Georgia,Recidivism,sex crime

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

1 comment...

February 3, 2014 6:14 pm

I Will Be on Cliff Kincaid’s Roku Show Wednesday Night Talking About Immigration . . .

no comments

by Tina in Politics

. . . the plight of American workers, and why Republicans and Libertarians don’t seem to care.

Who’s with us

Who’s against us

Who’s hiding behind trees pretending they have “no position at all”

Tune in to the show on the America’s Survival website at 9:00 or on Roku at the America’s Survival channel. Writes Cliff:

. . . watch it live on our homepage on Wednesday night at 9:pm Eastern www.usasurvival.org by clicking on the Roku image on the right side.

No comment?

January 22, 2014 2:25 pm

On Adria Sauceda’s Murder

no comments

by Tina in victims

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:

No comment?

January 8, 2014 2:02 pm

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

3 comments

by Tina in Common Core,Political Organizing Notes

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:

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.

3 comments!

January 5, 2014 8:08 pm

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

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by Tina in Common Core,Political Organizing Notes

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.

I was at a Tea Party meeting in Manatee County and a retired teacher (you meet many retired teachers in the Tea Party) told me an interesting story: when she started in education, the college students who were training to become teachers were among the most conservative students on campuses. A few years later, they had become the most radical. What happened? For one thing, the end of the war in Vietnam coincided with the demise of the two-parent household among the poor — so, as activists flocked to education schools looking for new causes, K – 12 classrooms were becoming more chaotic and unstable because of broken homes. It was a perfect storm.

That was more than forty years ago.

It is hard to quantify the harm that has been done to the discipline of teaching teachers in just a few generations. Like everything else in higher education, radicalism protected by tenure grows exponentially, blotting out other possibilities for students and teachers, and many teaching schools are now largely irredeemable. Today, a professor of education who so much as deigns to correct the grammar of his graduate students can face violent shaming and forced re-education at their hands, with full cooperation by the administration. Few education professors remain who disapprove of such behavior, and fewer still are courageous enough to oppose it out loud.

Radicalism has been rendered so normative in higher education that the Maoist theories of Paulo Friere rank among the most-assigned readings for aspiring teachers throughout the United States. To get a sense of the crisis in teaching teachers, read this 2009 essay about Paolo Friere and teacher’s colleges, by Sol Stern:

Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses. These course assignments are undoubtedly part of the reason that, according to the publisher, almost 1 million copies have sold, a remarkable number for a book in the education field.

The odd thing is that Freire’s magnum opus isn’t, in the end, abouteducation—certainly not the education of children. Pedagogy of the Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.

Also ironic? Sol Stern himself, who with E.D. Hirsh was a strong advocate for returning to the teaching of traditional texts in classrooms, has come out as a staunch defender of Common Core, which he claims will achieve that goal. Stern is technically right that Common Core standards were first conceived as a way to introduce more traditional content in classrooms that had long ago ceased to teach anything resembling traditional content. But it is a measure of the damage that has been done to schools of education that Stern’s good intentions gave rise to the Common Core boondoggle we’re dealing with today. It is also a shame that Stern himself is not able to see this — likely because he was given some latitude under Bloomberg to shape the development of Common Core standards for New York City, so he could develop materials that remain somewhat true to his original vision.

In the rest of the nation, we are not so lucky. The lesson for the rest of us is that any reform filtered through the highly radical waters of the teaching schools will emerge highly radicalized. And any reform that concentrates power in the hands of the Department of Education and the teacher-training establishment will only amp up the influence of their Frierian-Marxist, anti-western claptrap. Common Core is nothing new under the sun: it is merely a non-optional centralized delivery system for all the bad ideas that were planted before it.

The anti-Common Core activists are coming to this fight in the 11th hour. There is a great deal we must learn about the depth of the crisis in education schools and the maze-like education bureaucracy.

The only solution to the crisis in teaching schools is to create alternative institutions. Conservative colleges like Hillsdale and Patrick Henry need to start franchising schools of education. The only solution for the crisis in K – 12 education is to fight against Common Core, defeat it, then keep fighting. We need to create permanent partnerships to start taking back K – 12 education, piece by piece. No matter what you think of Sol Stern’s current stance on the Common Core, read his article about Paolo Friere and the education establishment: these are the stakes of the long-term battle to come.

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December 27, 2013 2:16 pm

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

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by Tina in Academia,Political Organizing Notes,Politics

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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December 20, 2013 3:04 pm

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

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by Tina in Political Organizing Notes,Politics

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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December 17, 2013 6:11 pm

Case Update: Frederick Lee Gude’s three murders

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by Tina in Atlanta,Crime and Justice Blog,Just Not Putting the B******s Away

Recently, William Steele wrote to this blog asking about the latest murder conviction involving Frederick Gude, who killed Mr. Steele’s father in southeast Atlanta (my old neighborhood) in 1969. Gude received a life sentence for that crime but walked out of prison a mere eight years later — eight years for taking a life. He was sent up again in 1983, got out again, then killed a second time. For that “voluntary manslaughter,” Gude was sentenced to five years. He walked out of prison for a third time in September 2003, then four months later he stabbed his girlfriend to death with an ice pick. Along the way, he accumulated the usual, heinous, un-prosecuted and under-prosecuted acts of domestic violence, and other serious crimes. Earlier this year, AJC reporter Steve Visser interviewed Gude’s adult daughter, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel who said this of her father:

“There are some people who shouldn’t walk amongst us” [she said] … “This is his third killing. This is the third one that we know of” … [S]he knew her father as a child – when he wasn’t in prison – but her mother quickly left him behind after he was released from prison the first time. He used to beat her mother and he stabbed at least one relative. Violence, she said, was her father’s defining characteristic. “Some people kill in the heat of moment,” the Marine said. “For him, every moment is the heat of the moment, if you say something he doesn’t like.”

Frederick Gude: Three-Time Killer

Run-of-the-mill criminals don’t attract elite legal help, but once you’ve accumulated a body count like Mr. Gude’s, and capital punishment is on the table, the suits show up. For his latest murder defense, Gude secured Atlanta defense attorney Thomas West (on the taxpayer’s dime, undoubtedly).

Thomas West: Not Atticus Finch

Mr. West is one of those defense attorneys who market themselves as civil rights heroes with the assistance of corrupted civil rights groups like the once-storied Southern Christian Leadership Council(SCLC), which long ago stopped doing anything but stealing their donations, accusing each other of stealing, and giving “Drum Major” awards to defense attorneys like West who specialize in returning brute killers back to the communities they victimized before and will victimize again.

For their part, Mr. West and his defense bar peers may fancy themselves modern-day Atticus Finches, but they sure don’t bill in croker-sacks of turnip greens, as the fictional Finch did while helping poor white and black sharecroppers avoid entailment, malnutrition, and lynching.

Today’s defense attorneys deploy sleazy technicalities to help serial predators escape consequences while bleeding taxpayers dry. Or, as West puts it on his website:

Again and again, the law firm is complimented for the intense attention it pays to each detail of a client’s case, and its willingness to explore every legal angle in order to come up with the best possible outcome for each client.

In client Gude’s case, Thomas West obstructed justice for nine years, at a cost of many hundreds of thousands of dollars to taxpayers (and into his pocket). Of course, it takes a village to really obstruct justice, and West had help from many quarters, including Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore, who simply didn’t bother to set a trial date as witnesses died and victims hung in limbo. See here for my previous post on West’s manipulations of the justice system on behalf of Frederick Gude. That was nearly five years ago, and the case just resolved in 2013.

By holding the justice system hostage with a blizzard of pretrial motions on behalf of Frederick Gude, Thomas West finally succeeded in getting Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard to take capital punishment off the table, as Steve Visser reported last February:

District Attorney Paul Howard, who said Gude’s age persuaded him to drop the death penalty request after Gude turned 69 in July, contended that the lengthy wait not only undermined the case, but also cheated the victim’s family and taxpayers. Two key eye witnesses died while awaiting the trial. By the calculation used by the sheriff’s office, housing Gude cost more than a quarter of a million dollars.

“They have a legitimate question to ask Fulton County about why are you taking so long to dispense justice,” Howard said. “This will make the third person he has killed in our county and he is allowed to sit in jail for nine years. It is unconscionable.”

Also unconscionable? Thomas West’s vicious remarks belittling the victim of Gude’s latest crime. West urged the court to go easy on his client, explaining that Gude had done nothing “heinous” because he just stabbed a woman to death with an icepick. Gude’s crime wasn’t a hate crime, you see, because he picked a woman to chop away at forty times (and left her 94-year old aunt locked in a bathroom near the body, where the elderly woman nearly froze to death, but hey, who’s counting?).

Here is West’s explanation for not considering icepick murder + attempted murder heinous:

“We contended it was cruel and unusual to seek the death penalty in a case where you are just accused of killing your girlfriend and not something more heinous. … In the past, the district attorney has not sought the death penalty in these circumstances.”

“Just killing your girlfriend.” “Not something more heinous.” Some people’s lives are just more valuable than other people’s lives. A murder with the right mix of victim and offender will bring out the activists and the mayor marching around all puffed up with candles in little paper cups. But Gude killed politically insignificant humans using non-heinous icepick torture, so, no heartfelt politician parades for his victims.

Yet despite West’s claim that the murder wasn’t heinous, he acknowledged that the crime scene photos of Gude’s last victim presented some “visual issues” that might have convinced even Fulton County jurors to vote for death.

Visual Issues. Is there any limit to the degradation this man heaps on innocent victims of crime?

Thomas West was enabled in his serial lies about Frederick Gude’s murders by a criminal justice system that has spent sixty years institutionalizing such lies. Words like heinous and hate have been warped beyond recognition in the criminal courts. Unlike criminal investigations and trials in other western nations, our courts have become mechanisms for excluding facts, instead of seeking and weighing them. Criminal justice is treated like a game, instead of the fullest pursuit of truth. And so people like Frederick Gude and Thomas West game the system over and over again, with nary a peep from the tens of thousands of law professors and judges who are supposed to address such travesties.

When the justice system is in such institutionalized disarray that a murder trial can be delayed for nine years while attorneys file motions quarreling about how many thrusts of the icepick count as heinous, or a child rape trial can be delayed for more than a decade while Bob Barr and his peers argue about whether a professional fantasy role-player’s pretend illnesses can get him cut loose from the ankle-bracelet that is keeping him from raping more little boys, it’s time to start talking about whether the problem is something other than over-incarceration.

The worst part, besides the denial of justice, is that we actually pay these jerks to make such arguments.

Appallingly, Mr. West now uses his defense of Frederick Lee Gude as an advertising tool, featuring Gude’s case prominently on his website. Gude will probably start appealing to be released early due to his advanced age any day now, which likely means more money in Thomas West’s pockets. Nice little justice system we’ve got here.

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If anyone has information about Frederick Gude’s trial or his other crimes, please contact this blog. Identities must be confirmed but will be kept anonymous.

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December 16, 2013 4:46 pm

Common Core: The Bluest Eye Debate

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by Tina in Child Molestation,Common Core,Political Organizing Notes

I’m coming late to the discussion about the inclusion of Toni Morrison’s novella Bluest Eye on high school reading lists (it is a popular choice for high school and college English classes as well as women’s studies classes, and this popularity predates the relatively new Common Core standards debates). Some activists who became aware of the Toni Morrison book through their opposition to Common Core are arguing that Bluest Eye endorses child molestation because the book contains a character who is a molester speaking in the first person, and Morrison herself has made comments to the effect that she is trying to get readers to see his point of view, comments that are being taken out of context and misconstrued. Incidentally, the book is also extremely graphic, more graphic than many people who are weighing in to defend it seem to be aware of — I suspect many of them didn’t actually read the book.

I don’t think The Bluest Eye is in any way an endorsement of pedophilia. But I also don’t think that it, and other “problem story” books like it, are appropriate for literature classes — nor that they are put on the curriculum for their qualities as literature in the first place. We’ve turned English and literature classes (excuse me, language arts) into social problem encounter sessions — sessions that often devolve into narcissistic competitions between varying claims of victimization.

This isn’t a new development: when I attended high school in the early 1980’s, Ordinary People was the “problem story” we were spoon-fed. I remember embarrassing classroom discussions where the teacher seemed to be screening us for The Warning Signs of Suicide Attempts By Nice Middle-Class Kids, and to this day I also remember the general horror when she tried to make us talk in class about references to masturbation in the story. To make things worse, rather than just being about thinking about Elizabeth McGovern, who played the love interest in the film version, masturbation was presented therapeutically — as the solution to anxiety recommended to the main character by his earthy white-ethnic psychiatrist — so there were layers upon layers of creepy psychologizing and equally creepy racial stereotyping being imposed on us.

I remember thinking at the time that the moral lesson of Ordinary People was the opposite of the moral lesson of Johnny Tremain. I also thought it might be a sneaky exercise in making us appreciate reading Shakespeare. For that, at least, it was effective: I gladly embraced the rigors of Elizabethan verse after wallowing in the claustrophobic wimpiness and snide references to female WASP frigidity unleashed by Robert Redford in his unpleasant movie version of that unpleasant, practically anti-literary novel.

Poor Mary Tyler Moore, too.

The Bluest Eye isn’t appropriate for children. Full stop. And though it is generally recommended only for 11th and 12th graders, I don’t think it’s appropriate for them, either, because any protracted classroom discussion forces students to engage in a sort of competitive demonizing — whites and child molesters being the targets — while simultaneously forcing discussion of extremely graphic sexual assaults, which is not appropriate for any literature classroom — including college classrooms.

Yet, Bluest Eye doesn’t endorse pedophilia. It accurately depicts the ways pedophiles view their crimes — how they seek tacit approval from society while abusing and grooming their victims. It’s a powerful book for that, though the ways I have seen it taught have much more to do with creating tension between students of different races based on the child character’s feelings about whiteness. And the way Morrison conflates “whiteness” with child molestation from the victim’s perception is disturbing.

It might be a good book for a college or graduate-level psychology or criminology course if the purpose of the assignment was learning about the dynamics of sex offenses involving children. It’s also beautifully written, though I think Morrison cribs an awful lot — pretty much everything stylistic — from Faulkner.

The justification given for such readings — the claims that “social problem” books should be taught to “sensitize” and give voice to victims and help them speak out — is largely just self-aggrandizement by educators.

The activists who became aware of The Bluest Eye through their scrutiny of Common Core materials are certainly on the right track. Through fighting Common Core, they are gaining an ever-deepening understanding of what academia has become. The movement is maturing impressively fast, and the deeper they dig, the more evidence they’re uncovering about the ways that Common Core is both a new threat to local control of education — and just the latest iteration of the political and emotional manipulation that took over K – 12 classrooms a long time ago.

But to say that The Bluest Eye is sympathetic to child molesters is not defensible.

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December 9, 2013 5:14 pm

Political Organizing Notes: The Irony of ALEC versus Better Georgia (and Their Apologists at the AJC)

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by Tina in Political Organizing Notes

I have no use for monied special interests of any political stripe. But conflating the conservative business lobbying group ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) with the Trayvon Martin tragedy, as Jim Galloway of the Atlanta Journal Constitution does here and has done elsewhere, is unspeakably sleazy.

Jim Galloway: Giving Indignation a Bad Name

The AJC used to practice some standards in its political reporting. No matter where Galloway’s predecessor stood on issues, he made an effort to be even-handed, and this sort of character assassination was not routine. No more: Jim Galloway sets a deeply nasty, unprofessional, uninformed tone.

How uninformed? It’s amazing how fast sloppiness takes over when the newsroom stops even trying to present a facade of objectivity. This AJC story uncritically apes a press release from the vaguely-named, doesn’t-practice-what-they-preach group, Better Georgia. And by being busy with such uncritical aping, Jim Galloway and his trusty polysci sidekicks miss some pretty glaring flaws — one might call them ironies — in the Better Georgia report.

But “miss” is not quite the right term: “cover-up” is better, as I’ll explain below.

By all means take a look at the ALEC report from Better Georgia — you’ll see revelations of a bunch of $12 lunches and so on. Horrors! Is it really possible that giant special interests buy legislators lunch, send them to conferences, and give them money for their campaigns?

The point is not that these are good things: outsized influence in politics is not good, but, contrary to what Better Georgia wants you to believe with their breathless exposé, everyone in politics does it. Verizon does it and the ACLU does it; Apple Corporation does it; the Eagle Forum does it; Planned Parenthood does it; the Christian Coalition does it.

More to the point, Better Georgia does it, but what is even more ironic than just doing it is how they do it: they do it by engaging in precisely the same tax-deductible sleights-of-hand that they condemn in ALEC and others. They do it with money funneled through various nonprofit schemes, some unaccountable, some with changing names, some using precisely the same tax reporting loopholes they scream about when other groups use them.

Ironically, Better Georgia is the real fake grassroots organization with a top-down agenda — an accusation they falsely fling at ALEC, which doesn’t pretend to be what it is not. Better Georgia is the Georgia office for ProgressNow, a Soros-funded network of powerful leftist political operators who use their state-level groups to gain credibility in the media (a not-too-difficult task with sycophants like Jim Galloway to carry their water) and to present a local face. Depending on the state, chapters of ProgressNow focus on different issues to mobilize local activism, but they focus mainly on the progressive/leftist/Democrat/public school employee/NEA agenda.

After all, that’s where state political power resides: educator unions are pretty much the biggest leftist power base, especially in Republican-controlled states. In right-to-work Republican states, they’re among the few unions powerful enough to make demands at all. Teacher’s unions and other progressive groups use Better Georgia as a shell organization as scores of lefty foundations and donors from elsewhere help perpetuate and bankroll the fraud. It’s a way for Democratic Party operatives to extend their state-level reach through faux-local politics. Just take a look at their website: it’s a confection of professionally manufactured vagueness, right down to the neutral-sounding name and odd lack of detail.

Contrast this with ALEC, which openly names its corporate members and openly promotes its political agenda, no matter what you think of that agenda.

Better Georgia could not perpetrate this fraud without armies of lackeys in the media and in academia. Ironies abound: in thousands of newspaper stories and a growing dungheap of pseudo-academic “studies,” the Tea Party, which is an actual grassroots movement, is attacked by the Jim Galloways of the world for being an astroturf group. Meanwhile, Galloway and his editors at the AJC help perpetrate a deception by reporting on Better Georgia as if it were a real “grassroots” group arising spontaneously from citizen action, rather than the brainchild of a group of professional DNC operatives.

In some ways, Better Georgia has a similar profile to Americans For Prosperity, a national nonprofit of the right that partners (and I mean partner) with Tea Party groups. I realize heads might explode at this comparison, but I think it’s apt in several ways. In both cases, a national nonprofit that is not entirely transparent about its motives and organization creates state offices to maximize its influence on state-level legislation. In both cases, the big nonprofit claims membership from among the ranks of local activists and purports to speak for those activists on a wide range of issues and legislation. Both have people who join locally, but Better Georgia, being part of a leftist, union-driven movement, probably speaks more seamlessly for individual members’ interests because those interests — growing the government dependency culture, defending union and public worker turf, opposing school choice, socializing medicine — march in lockstep with its members’ paychecks and pocketbooks. The relationship between AFP and Tea Party groups is much more voluntary, and often much more rocky, a fact that speaks well for the Tea Party and even sometimes for AFP — at least when they play fair, which isn’t always the case.

AFP tries to use the power of the grassroots to advance their agenda, but the Tea Party and related groups are fiercely independent and genuinely citizen-led. While they often have common cause with AFP, AFP is not the Tea Party, though in Florida in particular they pretend as if they run the movement, and I have seen some very ugly efforts in that state to try silence Tea Party activists. I doubt Better Georgia has such problems — precisely because a victory for Better Georgia generally means that the taxpayers, and not their members, are on the hook for one thing or another: taxpayers are the grudging involuntary “partners” in Better Georgia’s every scheme.

And of course the media hysterically demonizes the Koch brothers, who make many jobs in this state and elsewhere and are reportedly very ethical employers, no matter the problems with AFP. ALEC is similarly the victim of relentless media smears, a trend that is accelerating with this recent Better Georgia report — and the reports simultaneously generated in other states by other ProgressNow “affiliates.”

Better Georgia’s report on ALEC is pure partisan agitprop. I haven’t had much time to look at it, but one thing immediately jumps out: the research selectively focuses on donations to Republicans in this state while ignoring donations made to Democrats by the very same companies. This is a very useful side-effect of the state-based pseudo-activism model. For example, in Republican-majority Georgia, ProgressNow’s front group Better Georgia can attack every company that donates to Republicans; meanwhile, their group in California, Courage Campaign, can avoid criticizing the same companies when those companies donate to the Democratic elected officials there. That’s political expediency at its slickest (check out the website of Better Georgia’s California partner to see a less covert version of the group’s radical aims).

Also, when it takes three paragraphs to describe how a school choice bill for handicapped students is a Tool of the Man, you’re either not very good at producing agitprop, or you are very good at it. It’s hard to tell, however, how good Better Georgia really is at manufacturing agitprop because they’re getting such a helping hand from the media — and the taxpayers, who were forced to fund that Grady High School video.

If there were real political reporters left at the AJC, there would be some semblance of nuance in discussions about Better Georgia, ProgressNow, ALEC, AFP, the Tea Party, and a host of other political issues. Readers might even learn something when they read the AJC, which changed its slogan a few years ago from Covers Dixie Like The Dew to the highly funny yet less amusing following non-trifecta: Credible. Compelling. Complete.

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