#felon 2008
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Not me looking for the fastest way to get arrested…👀🥵
@gothidecorem it’s all your fault.
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I love him, your honor….
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yknow something i adore about Felon is that its a movie that doesn't allow you to not care.
In my rewatch a while ago i went in being a cunt, expecting the movie to only be so good in my memory because i was a kid and nostalgia and whatnot, like happened w many other rewatches, and the fact that this movie starts with our protagonist being a fucking idiot doesn't help. I was full on expecting the movie to be just the director being like "killing criminals is ok no matter what 👍" having every character be a tool for this message but that didn't happen, at all.
Movie isn't trying to throw a white and black morality message, all it wants to do is grab you by the hand and have you witness get in more and more awful situations where he just keeps on taking the worst decisions possible. And for as shit as they are they never stop being mildly understandable choices.
It just feels very personal, getting to know deeply the characters and seeing them show new sides of themselves, and it all builds up so slowly and careful you cannot help but be immersed and start to care for their wellbeing. And in doing so it completely destroys my original fears showing there is no such black and white morality. Instead, it tells you that that doens't matter.
But that's probably as much as i can say without getting into heavy spoilers. I just really love this movie and i think it is very underrated. Just an incredible drama and prison movie.
#luly talks#felon movie#felon 2008#also i imagined this movie had a low budget because yknow it has like. 5 settings total. whole movie happens inside the jail#but fucking. 2.9 million. im not too familiarized w budget so i looked up the average and its 50 MILLION.#this all started saying bc i was watching a video about music and the guy was like you wont feel this if you dont allow yourself to do it#and it reminded me of my experience w felon that i mentioned#i didnt WANT to feel but it wasnt a fucking option the movie forces you to care it's so good
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A woman stabbed a convicted sex offender to death over the weekend as police said the felon attempted to rape her inside a Louisiana business in broad daylight.
The attack took place at a laundromat in Lacombe, a small, rural community about a 50-mile drive northeast of New Orleans.
The St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office reported deputies responded about 3:30 p.m. Sunday to a laundromat off U.S. 190 for a report of unresponsive man with an apparent stab wound.
While en route to the scene, deputies were also dispatched to a call in reference to a woman claiming she stabbed a man who had attacked her while she was at the same laundromat.
Arriving officers found 40-year-old Nicholas Tranchant at the business suffering from a stab wound, officials said.
Tranchant was taken to a hospital where he died, according to a press release from the department.
Woman fatally stabs attempted rapist
A preliminary investigation into the death determined Tranchant − a convicted sex offender − entered the business armed with what officials described as a sharp weapon, and attempted to sexually assault the woman.
But she fought back.
"The female was able to gain possession of the weapon, and used it to stab him before fleeing to safety," the department wrote in the release.
Sheriff praises woman for 'fighting back'
The woman was also taken to a hospital to be treated for injuries suffered in the attack, the department said.
“I want to compliment this brave woman on the courage and strength she showed in fighting back against her attacker and ask for prayers for her continued recovery,” Sheriff Randy Smith said.
Convicted sex offender Nicholas Tranchant's criminal history
Court records show Tranchant was convicted in Louisiana in July 2003 on a felony charge of indecent behavior with juveniles.
Then in May 2008, records show, he was convicted of felony attempted aggravated rape and aggravated burglary.
Tranchant was released from jail on those charges on Dec, 21, 2023, the sheriff's office reported, and by law, required to register as a sex offender for life.
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Readers, we need to have a talk...
This author must clarify a few things before one can feel comfortable moving forward. While this author values every single reader, whether critic or fan, it is important to understand a few things.
I have been following this craptastic royal saga since 2016. I have read the darkest of rumors, and I have researched most every lead I can. I've been able to find their mortgage documents and how they put their house in a trust owned by City National. I have even posted them here. I've also posted a ton of their business documents and movements. Evidence is king.
I have researched her degree from Northwestern and know for a fact there is no such thing as a dual-degree. I even have the college catalog for courses pre-2008 showing you couldn't get a dual degree with international studies and theatre. Theatre was her major. But everything out there is suspisciously filtered. Does this author believe there have been manipulations made? Absolutely... but I am getting off track here.
The whole point of this post is to explain to EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU LOVELY PEOPLE that I have heard, read, and seen it all. I am well aware what people say about those children. I am well aware of all the videos of the swaying moon bump. I have seen all the stuff. Remember, Ashli was a dear friend (in the sense we knew one another online).
I would actually recommend people go back and watch all of her videos, as she brought a lot of good intel to light. Some of it though, was a little out there.
If Ashli were alive right now, she'd be the one on the TVs. Not the other people we see, as she called most all of this stuff long before most. But again, I am off track.
The whole point of my post is to say that I am well aware of more than I write about. There is a reason I don't repeat those things.
There are reasons I don't repeat those rumors that Markus and Meghan have Harry blackmailed into a threesome. Or the rumors that Markus fathered the two kids via surragate as Harry is sterile. Rumors that the Clintons or the NWO put Meghan in place to destroy the Monarchy. Or the rumors Doria was a drug dealer in prison. FYI... I HAVE HEARD WORSE. FAR WORSE.
I've heard rumors that Doria killed her own father to take his home and buy out her half-brother. I've also heard the Royal Family are shape-shifting Reptilian demons who pass their spirits down into the next generation, that Diana was forced into a ritual by Lady Furmoy where the Queen and Philip essentially planted a seed in her or some nonsense (That is a sloppy, most-errored recalling).
There is so much more I could say, but I don't and won't.
My glasses aren't darkened or muddied...
If you don't understand by now how I operate, let me tell you. I use their behaviors to call them out for conning techniques that are tricks of the conning trade. I write about the things I have PROOF to write about. If I don't have proof, I STRESS REPEATEDLY AS DONE BEFORE THAT IT IS HEARSAY AND RUMOR.
If you don't like what or how I write, that is your right as a human being. I could care less. I'm not here to bend my blog to people too lazy to write one for themselves.
The insane stories make the stories that are probably true even muddier. Repeating the craziest of the conspiracy theories take away from our credibility.
All of those stories could be true, but I choose not to accuse other people of being drug dealers when I have searched the public records that all convicted felons cannot escape... each state determines what felonies can be expunged, and most times... they aren't capable of being expunged. Especially drug charges.
There is a difference between me seeing one of them using actual conartist tricks to manipulate others, and then exposing that... and me just repeating what others have already said.
Now, I feel my readers deserve fresh content and perspective that looks at the truth of both of them and who they are. I am experienced, and I am credentialed in human behavior.
I used to be experienced and behaviored in spewing nonsense that sounds like a coke binge, but I refuse to do that here.
Do you all not deserve better from me?
If that is your schtick and you want to do that, I will gladly read and support you for it. WE all have the right to say or express whatever we want.
And if that is the vibe I do send, maybe it's time for me to stop writing on this blog at all.
I'm not bashing anyone, but don't come on here telling me what you think I know or don't. There are reasons I write the way I do, and I am perfectly content with it. If you aren't, gladly remove this blog from your list and have a wonderful day!
That is all.
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Val Kilmer’s Filmography - Find Your Birth Year & Tag Yourself (or as close as possible)
(I’m The Island of Dr. Moreau/ The Ghost and the Darkness/ Dead Girl)
1984 Top Secret!
1985 Real Genius
1986 The Murders in the Rue Morgue
1986 Top Gun
1987 The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains
1988 Willow
1989 Billy the Kid
1989 Kill Me Again
1991 The Doors
1992 Thunderheart
1993 The Real McCoy
1993 Tombstone
1993 True Romance
1995 Batman Forever
1995 Heat
1995 Wings of Courage
1996 The Island of Dr. Moreau
1996 The Ghost and the Darkness
1996 Dead Girl
1997 The Saint
1998 The Prince of Egypt
1999 At First Sight
1999 Joe the King
2000 Pollock
2000 Red Planet
2002 The Salton Sea
2002 Hard Cash
2003 Wonderland
2003 The Missing
2003 Blind Horizon
2003 Masked and Anonymous
2004 Spartan
2004 Stateside
2004 Alexander
2005 Mindhunters
2005 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
2006 Summer Love
2006 Moscow Zero
2006 10th & Wolf
2006 Played
2006 Déjà Vu
2006 The Ten Commandments: The Musical
2007 Have Dreams, Will Travel
2008 Conspiracy
2008 Felon
2008 Delgo
2008 2:22
2008 Columbus Day
2008 The Love Guru
2009 The Chaos Experiment
2009 Streets of Blood
2009 American Cowslip
2009 The Thaw
2009 Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
2009 Hardwired
2009 Double Identity
2010 The Traveler
2010 Bloodworth
2010 MacGruber
2010 Gun
2011 Kill the Irishman
2011 Blood Out
2011 5 Days of War
2011 Twixt
2012 Seven Below
2012 Wyatt Earp's Revenge
2012 The Fourth Dimension
2012 Breathless
2013 Riddle
2013 Planes
2013 Standing Up
2013 Palo Alto
2014 Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn
2017 Song to Song
2017 The Snowman
2017 The Super
2018 1st Born
2019 Jay and Silent Bob Reboot
2019 Cinema Twain Mark Twain
2020 A Soldier's Revenge
2020 Paydirt
2021 The Birthday Cake
2021 Val
2022 Top Gun: Maverick
#val kilmer#i thought i'd do one of these for valerie#i'd have to pick#the ghost and the darkness#i haven't seen dead girl#&#the island of dr. moreau#is not my fav
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i would LOVE to hear about your ocs
please may i direct your attention to the absolute dumbassery of mr. wednesday “of course i am a normal and well-adjusted person who has a very normal grasp of my life” bishop and his best friend nemesis husband business associate catalin “life’s a bitch but i’m a bigger one” shea
wendy is a single father and also a semi-retired government assassin and also a full-time florist who is sort of famous for being the only surviving member of the global task force put together to eradicate witchcraft from the planet, but mostly for burning down a few major government buildings that one time
cat is surprisingly NOT a felon despite vibing like one (he’s a scorpio, your honor), and he’s also the hired au pair for wendy’s daughter (he hasn’t actually been paid since 2008), and he’s also the current world record holder in both gaslighting AND gatekeeping (but NOT girlbossing). oh and also he’s the witch who sort of killed the rest of wendy’s team that one time
they’ve been locked in a stalemate of who can piss off the other one more for the last 16 years
#answers#unloneliest#i love you friend i would die for you#universe: witchhunters#wednesday bishop#catalin shea#‘cat and wendy’core
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helloo i am in need of an angsty fic with a happy ending and was hoping youd help me? i was thinking like a evilish snape where he uses crucio on harry during a detention and draco finds out. It would be a great help! thanks x
Hello hello! Unfortunately I don’t know of any stories like that because I usually read post-Hogwarts fics. Maybe my followers can help? In any case here are some of my favorite “angst with a happy ending”. I tried to cover different tropes and lengths, hope they work for you!
Kissed by @potteresque-ire (2015, M, 12k)
Draco Malfoy was attacked by a rogue Dementor on the night of his Azkaban release. He self-exiled to Muggle London and opened a late-night chocolate shop called Kissed.
Between Myth and Man by @slytherco (2020, E, 16k)
Draco, lost and a little broken, navigates post-war reality convinced that people like him should not be allowed to make their own choices. To solve the problem of his self-sabotaging tendencies, he starts taking a few drops of Veritaserum every morning.
Vortex by @xanthippe74 (2020, T, 20k)
Who would want a soulmate who was a schoolyard bully, a Death Eater, and a convicted felon? Certainly not Harry Potter. And Draco is determined to take this secret to the grave.
Vale Sanare by RurouniHime (2011, M, 23k)
Draco’s world gains a new component just when he thought he’d sorted everything out.
Stain of Silence by brummell (2013, E, 28k)
After the war, Draco serves out his sentence in Harry Potter's house.
On One's Knees by pir8fancier (2008, E, 34k)
The war is over and to the victors go the spoils. If you are triggered by infidelity, this is not the fic for you.
As Souls From Bodies Steal by Femme (2012, E, 41k)
Hope may be found in the oddest of places, even in the bleakness of winter.
Kept in Cages by @sweet-s0rr0w (2022, E, 76k)
Deep in the heart of the Ministry lies the Beast Division: a hidden room where ancient beasts roam, and winged creatures soar, and grumpy giant ferrets eat all your biscuits unless you keep them well hidden. Draco Malfoy would know – he’s been working there for five years now, after all.
Super Rich Kids by @thusspoketrish (2020, E, 81k)
Draco Malfoy has become disillusioned by the glitz and glamour of the scandalous lives of the Post-Second Wizarding War Pureblood Elite. Enter: one existential crisis, one group of thieving cynical friends, and several terrible, terrible decisions.
Yours is the Earth (Hold On, Hold On) by chickenlivesinpumpkin (2014, E, 127k)
After a serious accident in the Forbidden Forest, Draco's personality begins to undergo subtle changes. At first, Harry credits this to a new enthusiasm for life. But as the days pass and Draco's behavior becomes more and more mysterious, Harry begins to suspect that something bigger--and darker--is at work.
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By: Bertrand Cooper
Published: Jun 19, 2023
Most of my colleagues are college-educated. I am often the only product of felons, addicts, and foster care whom my peers have encountered outside of time spent volunteering in homeless shelters and group homes. Over the years, whenever affirmative action in higher education has come under threat, these folks have offered their sympathies. They believe that I—a child of a Black father and white mother who grew up in poverty and instability—feel the attacks more acutely. Most Americans seem to think affirmative action sits at the foundation of some beneficent suite of education policies that do something significant for poor Black kids, and that would disappear without the sanction of affirmative action. But the reality is that for the Black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is—no different than before.
In 2012, 6 percent of Harvard’s freshmen identified as Black. At the time, Black Americans made up 14 percent of the population and 15 percent of the country’s young adults. Harvard was then a far cry from racial parity. But in just three years, the university increased the number of Black freshmen by 50 percent. By 2020, The Harvard Crimson was reporting that more than 15 percent of incoming freshmen were Black, which meant the university had acquired perfect representation. This progress—Black progress—appears poised to recede with the expected loss of affirmative action due to the Supreme Court’s coming decisions on the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina cases. But to endure a loss, one must have first enjoyed a gain. Diversity at Harvard was not the result of some intricate system for sourcing talent from the whole of Black America. With the permissions granted in 1978’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Harvard used race-conscious admissions to saturate itself with students drawn from the highest-earning segments of Black America.
The same year that Harvard achieved perfect Black representation, a group of celebrated economists published a study examining income segregation across America’s colleges.
From 1999 to 2004, the years examined by the study, about 16 to 18 percent of American children were living below the federal poverty line. Families living below the FPL struggle to afford enough food, clothing, or shelter to stave off biological decline. In the absence of income segregation, children from poverty would make up a proportional 16 to 18 percent of college students. But according to the study, only 3 percent of the students at Harvard in that time period came from families in the bottom 20 percent. (The researchers later found that the percentage had increased to about 5 percent for a cohort of students at Harvard from 2008 to 2013.)
In October of 2020, Harvard reported 154 Black first-year students. Given that the child-poverty rate in Black America hovers north of 30 percent, in an equitable society, some 40 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The income segregation study did not disaggregate income brackets by race, and neither does Harvard, but the university does disclose that about a quarter of its latest freshman class comes from families with incomes below $85,000, its threshold for full financial aid. This is far above the federal poverty line and therefore not a good indicator of how many poor students attend Harvard. But if we extrapolate the study's findings, only seven or eight of said 154 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The other 140 or so Black students at Harvard were likely raised outside of poverty and probably as far from the bottom as any Black child can hope to be.
Writing in the American Journal of Education in 2007, the Princeton sociology professor Douglas Massey observed that 40 percent of Black students in the Ivy League were first- or second-generation immigrants. Black immigrants are the highest-earning and best-educated subset of Black America.
The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a director of the university’s African American–studies center, once estimated that as many as two-thirds of Harvard’s Black students in the early 2000s were the fortunate sons and daughters of Black immigrants or, to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. A Black woman who was a Harvard senior at the time told The New York Times in 2004 that there were so few other Black students whose grandparents had been born in the U.S. that they had begun calling themselves “the descendants.”
The Supreme Court affirmed race to be an acceptable criterion within a holistic admissions framework in 1978. The regime described here persisted for 45 years without manifesting any progress of note for the Black poor, and it strains faith to imagine that the trickle-down was on its way in year 46. The coming eulogies for affirmative action should acknowledge this history. No policy that hesitates to say class prioritizes the impoverished, and the people we do nothing for should at least enjoy public acknowledgment of their abandonment.
When I was in elementary school, my grandmother told me that I would go to college for free because I was Native American. I’m not Native. Rather, my father is from a light-skinned Black family, and for a long time, families like these presented sharp cheekbones and aquiline noses as evidence of Native roots. In nearly every case, it was plain white ancestry, but Black folks had been denied the supposed dignity of whiteness for so long that even those who had it did not want it. My dad told the Native fiction to my mom, and she told my grandmother, who was white working poor, and her fictions met with my father’s. Like many in her class, she believed that the government was in the business of giving gifts to everyone but poor whites. In her view, the world worked like this: Asian Americans received loans to start businesses. Hospitals gave free medical care to Hispanic children. Native Americans enjoyed juiced-up welfare and free college. Black Americans received preferential hiring and a free education. Because she believed me to be both Black and Native, college appeared to be a given.
My grandmother’s understanding of how college entry worked for Black Americans was shaped by decades of white-poor hearsay about affirmative action. She had no Black friends; ethnic gossip and popular culture were all she had to go on, and these gave her a wildly inaccurate view of what was to be my college experience. But I have found that even wealthier and more sophisticated Americans have absorbed similar fictions.
According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, out of 153,000 Black test-takers in 2005, only about 1,200 scored a 700 or above on either section of the SAT. I was among that handful. Unlike the stories my grandmother told me, a red carpet wasn’t rolled out in front of me. The guidance counselor at my New Jersey public high school said nothing about my test scores and was similarly apathetic when I said I was not going to apply to college at all. When I came back a week later to recant after my father threatened to throw me on the streets if I didn’t apply, my counselor—rather than hand me a blank check from the office of affirmative action—handed me a thin packet about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Being a former foster youth with a missing mother and a father only just released from prison, I was legally eligible for quite a bit of aid via the FAFSA. But without legal documentation of my situation, which no adult around me had kept, acquiring that aid would require me to obtain signed statements from members of the community testifying to my fractured living conditions. As a transient youth suddenly crashing with a father I had known for barely two years and residing in an entirely new town, there was no community to vouch for me. Unable to meet the federal requirements, I slogged through an associate’s, a bachelor’s, and eventually a master’s degree, accruing substantial loans despite eligibility for grants that could have paid for my entire undergraduate education.
Since 2018, I have used what I learned (albeit too late) to help my foster sister navigate college and the FAFSA, which must be renewed every year (including resubmitting community testimony on official letterhead). On more than one occasion, she has been selected for “additional verification,” one of several variations of bureaucratic rigmarole that can result in the delay of aid long enough to force lower-income students to miss a semester if they cannot afford to pay tuition out of pocket. Even when you’re prepared for this, as she and I were, the delay is demoralizing.
Every poor kid with aspirations of college faces a slightly different constellation of obstacles, but those differences abate beneath a homogenous disappointment. The National Center for Education Statistics found that, in 2012, just 14 percent of low-income high-school students obtained a bachelor’s or higher degree within eight years of high-school graduation. Rates of college attendance specifically among Black youth and kids below the federal poverty line—the lowest of low-income—are lower still. Given that the rate for foster or homeless youth is a meager 2 to 11 percent, it’s safe to assume that the one for Black fosters is effectively zero. Meanwhile, compiling data scattered across publications, I’ve calculated that 85 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students go to Black folks raised in the middle and upper classes. For daily life, the result is this: In any office—in any room—where a bachelor’s degree is a prerequisite, the odds that the person next to you has come from poverty, especially Black poverty, are staggeringly low.
Affirmative-action policies are not directly responsible for the impediments that poor Black students face in higher education. Nevertheless, those policies have existed for nearly five decades and have demonstrably not been an obstacle to the formation of a status quo in which so few poor Black Americans obtain a bachelor’s degree. Although that might be viewed as a policy failure, the oral arguments in the Supreme Court cases make this much clear: Affirmative action is not intended to combat the barriers faced by the poor, Black or otherwise. It is meant to achieve racial diversity. Where it finds the bodies does not matter.
In the case of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, all parties involved—the justices, the petitioners, and the respondents—agree that the intention of affirmative action is to produce the “educational benefits of diversity.” As described by Seth Waxman, the respondent on behalf of Harvard, “a university student body comprising a multiplicity of backgrounds, experiences, and interests vitally benefits our nation. Stereotypes are broken down, prejudice is reduced, and critical thinking and problem-solving skills are improved.” The contention of Students for Fair Admissions is that Harvard could use other metrics, particularly socioeconomic status, to achieve educationally significant diversity without the need for racial considerations.
In response to the SFFA plan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that weighting factors such as class in admissions amounts to “subterfuges” for reaching some sort of “diversity in race.” She probed the lawyers in oral arguments by saying that she did not “understand why considering race as one factor but not the sole factor is any different than using any of those other metrics.” The view that Sotomayor lays out here asserts that considering income and wealth, or considering them in conjunction with race, is just a tedious path to the same outcome achieved by considering race alone. But of course, an admissions scheme that considers class would not just be a subterfuge. Even if it yielded a student body with the same degree of racial diversity, the students themselves would be very different.
Many Americans retain a certain dissonance about class, believing simultaneously that it does and does not matter. Would a classroom with one Black student who was raised by parents who met while studying business at Yale benefit from the added diversity of a Black student who was raised in the Cuney Homes projects that produced George Floyd? You would be hard-pressed to find someone who answers “no,” and it is doubtful that Sotomayor would either. But the only way to promote the admission of these two hypothetical Black students is with policies that recognize both class and race. Unfortunately, conversations about diversity too often focus solely on the gaps between Black and white Americans, excluding entirely the issue of class divides among Black Americans.
In 2018, William Julius Wilson—a survivor of Jim Crow and a pioneer in the study of urban poverty—reported that Black Americans had the highest degree of residential income segregation of any racial group: Our top and bottom classes were then the least likely to live alongside each other. That same year, Pew Research Center released a study on income inequality within races. From 1970 to 2016, the top 10 percent of Black workers earned nearly 10 times what the bottom 10 percent of black workers did. For nearly 50 years, Black Americans experienced more income disparity than any other racial group in the country. The report received widespread coverage, including in The Atlantic, but mainly for its findings regarding Asian Americans, who had (temporarily) displaced Black Americans as the least equal group.
I can only cheer on, and envy, the speed at which knowledge of class disparities among Asian Americans has permeated popular culture. I hope it continues, because the Asian parity that Harvard has achieved is certainly not the result of admitting impoverished Burmese Americans. In the time since the 2018 Pew study was released, we have seen not just class-focused journalism, but Always Be My Maybe, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Beef. Each pop-cultural work demonstrates not just that class exists for Asians, but that it drastically alters their lives, their opportunities, and their interactions in ways that—shockingly—mirror how class affects white Americans.
That no similar awareness is burgeoning on behalf of disparities afflicting Black Americans is absurd. The fact that the white upper class had a median wealth more than 20 times that of the white poor helped fuel Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a socialist revival among white youth that continues today. In 2015, the Black upper class had a median wealth 1,382 times greater than the Black poor, along with an incarceration rate nearly 10 times lower than what I inherited. Yet still, some of the best-educated minds in the country claim to not understand how taking this into consideration might yield a qualitatively different student body than what comes from treating Black Americans as a class-free blob.
Powerful as they may be, elite institutions require support from the ground. The social prestige that achieving racial diversity offers and the ability it has to smooth over the appearance of other inequities are too alluring for a university like Harvard to pass up. But, rich as it is, Harvard does not have the capital necessary to employ all of the country’s poor, fix their neighborhoods, and fund their public schools, or the willingness to wait an entire generation for those social changes to generate a cohort of low-income children who are nevertheless academically excellent. It will always be cheaper and more expedient to simply recruit wealthy kids instead. If what comes after affirmative action penalizes the Black middle and upper classes, that is nothing to celebrate. But if we want to erect something that benefits all Black Americans, we cannot expect that to happen without policies that treat class as meaningful.
[ Via: https://archive.is/BimyF ]
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Affirmative action is a perfect example of a Kendiian "antiracist" policy: instituting racism into the admissions system, while benefiting the elite class.
#Free Black Thought#Bertrand Cooper#affirmative action#racial discrimination#elite class#race based admissions#university admissions#college admissions#antiracism as religion#antiracism#Kendiism#systemic racism#religion is a mental illness
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In my life, I’ve had a myriad of jobs, having started doing paper routes as a preteen. Among those jobs were three different call center jobs.
The first one was telemarketing, but mostly limited to calling DirecTV customers to convince them to upgrade, though a few times I had to do cold call credit cards and that sucked. I often had to deal with people angry that I was calling, which I understood completely. Unfortunately I needed a job.
It started as a summer gig, and required 20 hours. I asked to cut my hours when I started the semester at uni but they wouldn’t. I lasted until October with 17 credit hours and 20 hours of work, all intensive classes, before I nearly got hit by a car because I was so tired. When I quit they offered to lower my hours but lol that was too late. I went home and slept 12 hours and focused on school.
The second time was university fundraising, ostensibly connected to the alumni association, which included updating demographic information. Got a lot of folks who were out of work, so I was able to direct them to the alumni career center. I found out later it was only available for people less than 5 years past graduation—when I needed it, of course. That one was dependent on whether there were enough computer stations for everyone who showed up. I was in between undergrad and grad school, so one such night that I was sent home, I got a call from them and it was hilarious.
The last one was a summer job during graduate school, and involved administering telephone surveys. It was also an election year (2008, Obama versus McCain), so some of them were less surveys and more attempts to campaign or smear the opponent. I learned a lot about crappy surveys during that time.
A lot of the folks I worked with were felons and couldn’t vote, but they were all good folks and we ate lunch together daily and chatted. Probably one of the least drama-filled of any place I’ve worked. And of the call center jobs I’ve worked, probably the least annoying—I genuinely enjoyed getting folks to take the surveys and most people were polite. I only worked there one summer because the company shut the place down to downsize. I would’ve gone back.
I don’t have to do those types of jobs anymore because I can pick up adjuncting gigs now, but they were interesting experiences. The latter I used when teaching field research practices in classes, even.
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As the Supreme Court anticipated when it overturned Roe v. Wade, the battle over abortion rights is now being waged state by state. Nowhere is the fight more intense than in Ohio, which has long been considered a national bellwether. The state helped secure the Presidential victories of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, then went for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Its residents tend to be politically moderate, and polls consistently show that a majority of Ohio voters support legal access to abortion, particularly for victims of rape and incest. Yet, as the recent ordeal of a pregnant ten-year-old rape victim has illustrated, Ohio’s state legislature has become radically out of synch with its constituents. In June, the state’s General Assembly instituted an abortion ban so extreme that the girl was forced to travel to Indiana to terminate her pregnancy. In early July, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana obstetrician who treated the child, told me that she had a message for Ohio’s legislature: “This is your fault!”
Longtime Ohio politicians have been shocked by the state’s transformation into a center of extremist legislation, not just on abortion but on such divisive issues as guns and transgender rights. Ted Strickland, a Democrat who served as governor between 2007 and 2011, told me, “The legislature is as barbaric, primitive, and Neanderthal as any in the country. It’s really troubling.” When he was governor, he recalled, the two parties worked reasonably well together, but politics in Ohio “has changed.” The story is similar in several other states with reputations for being moderate, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania: their legislatures have also begun proposing laws so far to the right that they could never be passed in the U.S. Congress.
Ohio’s law prohibits abortion after six weeks—or even earlier, if doctors can detect fetal cardiac activity—unless the mother is at risk of death or serious permanent injury. Dr. Bernard noted that the bill’s opponents had warned about the proposed restrictions’ potential effect on underage rape victims. “It was literally a hypothetical that was discussed,” she told me. Indeed, at a hearing on April 27th, a Democrat in the Ohio House, Richard Brown, declared that if a thirteen-year-old girl “was raped by a serial rapist . . . this bill would require this thirteen-year-old to carry this felon’s fetus.”
The bill’s chief sponsor, State Representative Jean Schmidt, is an archconservative Republican who represents a district east of Cincinnati. At the hearing, she responded to Brown by arguing that the birth of a rapist’s baby would be “an opportunity.” She explained, “If a baby is created, it is a human life. . . . It is a shame that it happens. But there’s an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is, to make a determination about what she’s going to do to help that life be a productive human being.” The rapist’s offspring, she suggested, could grow up to “cure cancer.” Her remarks were deemed so outlandish that they were denounced everywhere from the Guardian to the New York Post.
According to David Niven, a political-science professor at the University of Cincinnati, a 2020 survey indicated that less than fourteen per cent of Ohioans support banning all abortions without exceptions for rape and incest. And a 2019 Quinnipiac University poll showed that only thirty-nine per cent of Ohio voters supported the kind of “heartbeat” law that the legislature passed. But the Democrats in the Ohio legislature had no way to mount resistance: since 2012, the Republicans have had a veto-proof super-majority in both chambers. The Democratic state representative Beth Liston, a pediatrician and an internist in Ohio, who voted against the bill, told me, “Doctors are going to be afraid of providing ordinary care. Women are going to die.”
In a referendum on August 2nd, Kansas voters strongly rejected an abortion ban, indicating that even voters in deep-red states—when given the chance to express themselves—oppose radical curtailments of reproductive rights. Yet Ohio voters have had no such recourse, and the General Assembly is poised to pass even more repressive restrictions on abortion when it returns from a summer recess. State Representative Gary Click—a pastor at the Fremont Baptist Temple and a Republican who serves the Sandusky area—has proposed a “Personhood Act,” which would prohibit any interference with embryonic development from the moment of conception, unless the mother’s life is endangered. If the bill passes, it could outlaw many kinds of contraception, not to mention various practices commonly used during in-vitro fertilization. In an e-mail, Click told me that “the ultimate question that needs to be answered” is “When does life begin?” He added, “I believe the answer to that question is self-evident.” Click is a graduate of an unaccredited Christian school in Michigan, Midwestern Baptist College, whose Web site says that “civil government is of divine appointment” and must be obeyed “except in things opposed to ‘the will of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ ”
Click acknowledged that the story of the ten-year-old rape victim is discomfiting, adding that “we all have a visceral reaction” to such a scenario, “regardless of one’s political leaning.” But the news had not made him question his position; rather, he questioned the girl’s story, calling it “suspicious,” and noting that the incident “fit too neatly” with the pro-choice agenda. (According to law-enforcement authorities, a twenty-seven-year-old Ohio man confessed to twice raping the girl when she was nine. He has since pleaded not guilty.) Click also echoed an argument made by Ohio’s Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, who claimed that the ten-year-old—“if she exists”—would have qualified for the new statute’s medical-emergency exception. This assertion, however, has been disputed by various doctors, including State Representative Liston. “I don’t know the child’s health condition,” she acknowledged to me. “But it’s hard to say that simply because she is young she would meet the requirement of risk as defined by the new law.” Mortality rates are generally higher for pregnant girls who are younger than fifteen, but, Liston said, “there’s nothing in the law that states that age is a sufficient exception.”
Click, who is a close ally of the Republican congressman Jim Jordan, is one of Ohio’s most extreme legislators, but he’s hardly out of place among the General Assembly’s increasingly radical Republican majority. Niven, the University of Cincinnati professor, told me that, according to one study, the laws being passed by Ohio’s statehouse place it to the right of the deeply conservative legislature in South Carolina. How did this happen, given that most Ohio voters are not ultra-conservatives? “It’s all about gerrymandering,” Niven told me. The legislative-district maps in Ohio have been deliberately drawn so that many Republicans effectively cannot lose, all but insuring that the Party has a veto-proof super-majority. As a result, the only contests most Republican incumbents need worry about are the primaries—and, because hard-core partisans dominate the vote in those contests, the sole threat most Republican incumbents face is the possibility of being outflanked by a rival even farther to the right. The national press has devoted considerable attention to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, but state legislative districts have received much less scrutiny, even though they are every bit as skewed, and in some states far more so. “Ohio is about the second most gerrymandered statehouse in the country,” Niven told me. “It doesn’t have a voter base to support a total abortion ban, yet that’s a likely outcome.” He concluded, “Ohio has become the Hindenburg of democracy.”
Three days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, I went to a luncheonette in Columbus, Ohio, to meet with David Pepper, an election-law professor, a novelist, a onetime Cincinnati city councilman, and a former chairman of the state’s Democratic Party. Pepper, who is fifty-one, looked boyish and preppy in a polo shirt. He had recently become a small phenomenon on Twitter, having posted videos in which he delivered impassioned short lectures, punctuated with frantic scribbles on a whiteboard, about the growing crisis of democracy in America’s state legislatures. When he attended Yale Law School, in the nineties, his geniality and Buckeye boosterism had led his classmates to name him the Most Likely to Be President of the Cincinnati Board of Tourism, but he spoke to me with an almost desperate alarmism.
Last year, Pepper wrote a book, “Laboratories of Autocracy,” whose title offers a grim spin on a famous statement, attributed to the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, calling America’s state legislatures “laboratories of democracy.” The subtitle of Pepper’s book, “A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines,” is a bit more hopeful. He is determined to get the Democratic political establishment to stop lavishing almost all its money and attention on U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial races (say, the current Senate race in Ohio between Tim Ryan and J. D. Vance) and to focus more energy on what he sees as a greater emergency: the collapse of representative democracy in one statehouse after another.
Pepper understands that few Americans share his obsession. “No one knows anything about statehouses,” he said. “They can’t even name their state representatives. And it’s getting worse every year, since the local media’s dying and the statehouse bureaus are being hollowed out.” Columbus has an unusually strong press corps, but it is an exception. And it is precisely because so few Americans pay attention to state politics that the legislatures have become ideal arenas for manipulation by extremists and special interests—who often work in tandem. “I’m banging my head against the wall,” Pepper told me. With a nod to the political consultant James Carville, he added, “My God, Democrats, don’t you see it? It’s the statehouse, stupid! That’s where the attack is happening!”
Pepper scoffed at recent claims, made by conservative Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the state legislatures are more suited than the judiciary to adjudicate the divisive issue of abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, Brett Kavanaugh issued a concurring opinion in which he argued that the Court was merely restoring “the people’s authority to address the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self-government.” Pepper said of Kavanaugh’s concurrence, “It’s so disingenuous—total gaslighting. Many statehouses no longer have representative democracy. Because they’ve been gerrymandered, they don’t reflect the will of the people.”
With Trump, he believes, the situation became a lot worse—the former President “made people a little more willing to be lawless, and he gave oxygen to white supremacy.” But Pepper thinks that “people make a huge mistake when they equate the attack on democracy entirely with him.” In his view, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, who have portrayed Trump as a singular aberration are failing to see that “the Republican attack on democracy preceded him”—and that “if Trump was locked up tomorrow it would continue.”
The shift began, Pepper believes, with the shock of Obama’s 2008 victory. The election of the country’s first Black President provoked a racial and cultural backlash, and many Republican officials panicked that their party, which was overwhelmingly white, was facing a demographic demise. Swept out of power in Washington, the Republican Party’s smartest operatives decided to exploit the only opening they could find: the possibility of capturing state legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. They knew that, in 2011, many congressional and local legislative districts would be redrawn based on data from the 2010 census—a process that occurs only once a decade. If Republicans reshaped enough districts, they could hugely advantage conservative candidates, even if many of the Party’s policies were unpopular.
In 2010, the Supreme Court issued its controversial Citizens United decision, which allowed dark money to flood American politics. Donors, many undisclosed, soon funnelled thirty million dollars into the Republicans’ redistricting project, called redmap, and the result was an astonishing success: the Party picked up nearly seven hundred legislative seats, and won the power to redraw the maps for four times as many districts as the Democrats.
Gerrymandering the shapes of districts to create safe seats is an old trick that has been used by both sides in American politics. I recently spoke with Jonathan Jakubowski, the chairman of the Republican Party in Wood County, Ohio, and the author of “Bellwether Blues: A Conservative Awakening of the Millennial Soul,” and he emphasized that, in the nineteen-eighties, it was the Democrats who gerrymandered the state’s districts. “We’re all equal-opportunity offenders,” he said. But the redmap project—powered by advances in digital mapping and by billionaire donors such as the fossil-fuel magnates Charles and David Koch—took electoral distortion to a new level. And Ohio, which had become one of the most fiercely fought battleground states in Presidential politics, was subjected to an especially tortured dissection.
The journalist David Daley tells the story of redmap in his 2016 book, “Ratf **ked.” By 2012, he writes, the Republicans’ plan had already begun to pay off handsomely: even though Obama was reëlected in Ohio that year, by three percentage points, and Sherrod Brown, a progressive Democrat, was easily reëlected to the Senate, Republicans had a resounding triumph in the state legislature. They won a 60–39 super-majority in the House.
The Ohio statehouse has grown only more lopsided in the past decade. Currently, the Republican members have a 64–35 advantage in the House and a 25–8 advantage in the Senate. This veto-proof majority makes the Republican leaders of both chambers arguably the most powerful officeholders in the state—and they proved it when they undermined Governor Mike DeWine’s initial public-health-minded approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. DeWine is a Republican, yet he was a leader in imposing such emergency health orders as mask mandates and the closing of schools and businesses. Ohio voters had widely supported these measures. But anti-vaccine and anti-mask extremists in the statehouse passed a law stripping the Governor and his health director of the authority to issue such orders. (One Republican lawmaker, a doctor, suggested that “the colored population” was more vulnerable to COVID-19 because “they do not wash their hands as well as other groups.” The lawmaker was subsequently named the chairman of the Ohio Senate’s health committee.) Since the legislature’s rebellion, DeWine—once regarded as a centrist conservative—has increasingly capitulated to his party’s radical base, on public-health policy and much else. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Governor said that “we disagree with that sentiment.”) Daley told me that the redmap campaign “took a state that was slightly red and gave it a hue more like Elizabeth Taylor’s lipstick,” adding, “The upshot has been some of the most far-right, noxious, pay-for-play politics we’ve seen over the last decade. That’s what gerrymandering enables. When voters lose the ability to throw the rascals out, the rascals do whatever they please.”
Matt Huffman, the influential president of the Ohio Senate, recently said as much himself. Speaking in May to the Columbus Dispatch about the Republicans’ super-majority, he said, “We can kind of do what we want.”
For Pepper, the state’s transformation has been crushing. He has watched the reputation of Ohio’s public-school system slide as Republicans have siphoned off public funding to support failing, politically connected charter schools. In 2010, Education Week ranked the state’s schooling as the fifth best in the country; in 2021, U.S. News & World Report ranked it thirty-first. Last year, F.B.I. agents told USA Today that public-corruption cases in Ohio were the most egregious in the country. In the past five years, the state has had five speakers of the House, because two were forced out as a result of the biggest bribery scandals in Ohio’s history. Larry Householder, who was removed from office in July, 2020, is scheduled to be tried on federal racketeering charges this coming January.
This wasn’t the path that Pepper had foreseen for his state. A native of Cincinnati, he grew up in a relatively apolitical, upwardly mobile household: his father climbed the ranks at one of Ohio’s largest companies, Procter & Gamble, ultimately becoming its chairman. After Pepper graduated from Yale Law School, he returned to Cincinnati and clerked for Nathaniel R. Jones, a Black federal judge, who ignited in him an interest in public service. In 2001, Pepper ran for the city council, and to everyone’s surprise he won, partly owing to a catchy slogan: “Just Add Pepper.” After two terms in office, he moved up to the county commission, eventually presiding over it, and in 2010 he was recruited by the state’s Democratic governor, Strickland, to run for auditor, a statewide office. At the time, the auditor was one of five state officials on a commission overseeing the redistricting process, and could therefore act as an effective curb against gerrymandering. On the campaign trail, Pepper recalls, “I was running around, talking about gerrymandering, and no one knew what the hell I was talking about.” Meanwhile, his opponent was getting a torrent of suspicious contributions from people who worked for out-of-state energy companies—many of which, Pepper deduced, had ties to the controversial coal baron Bob Murray, the chief executive officer of Murray Energy, an Ohio-based company. Such donations initially made little sense to Pepper—the auditor’s role had nothing to do with coal mines—until he discovered that redmap had targeted his state, and that his candidacy stood in the project’s way. He lost the race. In 2014, he made a second bid for statewide office, running this time for Ohio attorney general. Again, he was defeated. In 2015, he became the chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, a position that he stepped down from at the end of 2020.
Pepper had become consumed by the problem of gerrymandering, but the subject drew only blank stares from Democratic Party officials. To counter this apathy, he told me, he decided “to write a novel about gerrymandering—which, of course, is a horrible idea.” In the book, “The People’s House,” a Russian oligarch modelled on Vladimir Putin rigs an American election after figuring out that, thanks to gerrymandering, he needs only to flip a few dozen swing districts. The book appeared in the summer of 2016, when Putin’s clandestine efforts on behalf of Trump were making headlines; Politico called the book “the thriller that predicted the Russia scandal.” Pepper was pleased about the media attention, but he was disappointed that more people didn’t focus on the novel’s message: “how bad gerrymandering is.” With evident frustration, he told me that media and political insiders prefer “to talk about politics in terms of personalities.”
A recent study by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonpartisan nonprofit, documents how deeply right-wing extremism has infiltrated U.S. statehouses. Of the 7,383 people who served in state legislatures in the 2021-22 session, eight hundred and seventy-five had joined far-right Facebook groups. (All but three were Republicans.) The study describes the fringe beliefs that many of these members shared, including “the idea that Christians constitute a core of the American citizenry and/or that government and public policies should be reshaped to reflect that.” A group promoting this view, the Ohio Christian Alliance, counts eleven Ohio state legislators among its Facebook members, including Gary Click. Last year, the organization helped block a bill, the Ohio Fairness Act, that would have barred housing and employment discrimination against the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
State Representative Casey Weinstein, a second-term Democrat from a suburban swing district between Akron and Cleveland, and one of the General Assembly’s two Jewish members, told me that he’s recently become “really concerned” about a new level of extremism. On January 23, 2022, a protest outside his house shattered a peaceful Sunday afternoon with his wife and young children. Some thirty vehicles blocked the entrance to his driveway; one had a flag bearing the message “Kneel for the Cross.” Weinstein told me, “I thought it was a Trump group, but it turned out to be a church, Liberty Valley, near Macedonia, Ohio. Some of these churches are militant, and some are basically militias operating under the guise of religion. They’re weaponizing religion into a power grab.” He went on, “So, I’m the Jew, and they came to my house to try to intimidate me and my family. That’s what’s happening, and where this is going.”
Weinstein became further alarmed this past March, when Republicans in the statehouse pushed legislation prohibiting public-school teachers from teaching “divisive concepts.” The bill, aimed at censoring class discussions of critical race theory—which was never part of the Ohio public-school curriculum to begin with—threatened teachers with suspension unless they neutrally instructed students about “both sides of a political or ideological belief.” When Morgan Trau, an enterprising statehouse reporter for a television station in Cleveland, pressed one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Sarah Fowler Arthur, for details, the lawmaker provoked an uproar by offering the Holocaust as an example of a topic that required a “both sides” approach. “You should talk about these atrocities that have happened in history, but you also do have an obligation to point out the value that each individual brings to the table,” Fowler Arthur said, adding that students should consider the Holocaust “from the perspective of a German soldier.” As Fowler Arthur went on, she seemed to misunderstand both the scope and the nature of the Holocaust, referring to it as an event in which “hundreds of thousands,” rather than six million, Jews were killed, and suggesting that victims were murdered “for having a different color of skin.” Weinstein and other Jewish leaders in Ohio vociferously denounced what came to be known as the Both Sides of the Holocaust Bill. “That was enough for me,” Weinstein told me. “What unique value did the German Nazis bring to the table?” He noted that Fowler Arthur, who sits on the Ohio House’s Primary and Secondary Education Committee, “was homeschooled her entire life, has never set foot in a public school, and elected not to go to college.” Weinstein added, “There’s nothing wrong with that, until she starts censoring what can and cannot be taught in public schools.” (Fowler Arthur declined to comment.)
The real intent behind attacking public-school curricula, Weinstein believes, was to “fire up the Republican base” about the teaching of slavery, the Civil War, and the civil-rights movement—in other words, to get out the conservative vote by inflaming the racial grievances of white Ohioans. The “divisive concepts” bill championed by Fowler Arthur opposes teaching any reading of American history suggesting that “the United States and its institutions are systemically racist.”
Pepper noted that the efforts to control the curriculum in Ohio are “very similar to the meltdown in democracy in other places.” Like Russia’s attempts to censor what is taught to students about Ukraine, he said, the legislation promoted by Fowler Arthur represents an attempt to put forth a sanitized view of history—in this case, “to ban teaching parts of our history that cast a bad light on white America.” Pepper asked me, “If this was happening in another country, what would you say? You’d say, ‘Oh, my gosh—your democracy is under attack!’ Well, it’s happening in Columbus.” Indeed, he warned, it’s happening in state capitols across the country.
Ohio Republicans put the “divisive concepts” bill on hold after the idea of teaching neutrally about the Holocaust provoked national condemnation. But Ohio’s General Assembly otherwise proceeded at a breakneck pace this past spring—debating a bill enabling the inspection of the genitals of transgender student athletes, and passing a raft of legislation about guns. Many of these new laws were so extreme that they inspired fierce protests from Ohio residents.
A 2018 poll conducted by Baldwin Wallace University, in Berea, Ohio, showed that Ohioans, by clear majorities ranging from sixty-one to seventy-five per cent, wanted the state legislature to enact new gun-control laws: banning high-powered semi-automatic rifles, including the AR-15; banning extended ammunition magazines; banning bump stocks that, in effect, make semi-automatic rifles automatic; enacting a mandatory waiting period for gun purchases; raising the minimum age to buy semi-automatic rifles from eighteen to twenty-one. But no such measures were passed. Instead, the state legislature has turned Ohio into a so-called “stand your ground” state, where it is legal for residents to kill a trespasser without first attempting to de-escalate the situation. Lawmakers also passed a bill that allows Ohioans aged twenty-one or older to carry concealed handguns virtually anywhere, without first obtaining a permit or undergoing a background check and firearms training. In response to the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, the Ohio General Assembly rushed through a law that enables any school board to arm teachers and other staff—including cafeteria workers and bus drivers—after only minimal gun training. The legislation was written by a lawmaker who owns a business in tactical-firearms training, and the lawmaker’s business partner gave testimony in the Ohio Senate in support of the bill, which specified that armed school personnel needed only twenty-four hours of firearms training. (Law-enforcement officers in Ohio must undergo some seven hundred hours of training.) The bill was so extreme that it was denounced in hearings by more than three hundred and fifty speakers—including representatives of the Ohio Federation of Teachers and of the state’s largest police organization, the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio.
In an interview, Michael Weinman, the head of government affairs for the Ohio chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents some twenty-four thousand law-enforcement officers, described the new gun laws as “dangerous” and “insane.” Thanks to the legislation, he explained, “anyone can come into Ohio and carry a concealed firearm,” and need not mention having the gun if stopped by law enforcement. Weinman pointed out that the law about arming school employees contains no provision requiring that lethal weapons be locked safely, adding, “Can you imagine a kindergarten student sitting down to be read to, and there’s a gun in the kid’s face?” He noted that, other than teachers, most employees of a school “haven’t been taught how to discipline people—and most school shooters are students.” Melissa Cropper, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, told me, “It’s unbelievable. The more guns you have in schools, the more accidents and deaths can happen, especially with such minimal training.” She added, “We are every bit as bad as Texas and Florida when it comes to these laws. We are becoming more and more extreme.”
Weinman said that the rightward turn on guns in Ohio has been driven, in no small part, by “very aggressive gun groups,” some of which profit from extremism by stoking fear. This helps to sell memberships and to expand valuable mailing lists. “These groups are very confrontational,” Weinman said. He recently testified in the Ohio General Assembly against loosening state gun laws; afterward, he told me, Chris Dorr, the head of a particularly militant group called Ohio Gun Owners, chased him out of the room and down a hallway, demanding that he be fired. In an online post, Dorr, who maintains that the National Rifle Association is too soft in its defense of gun rights, posted a closeup shot of Weinman with the caption “remember this face,” adding in another post that Weinman is “the most aggressive gun-rights hater in Ohio.” Dorr and his two brothers, Ben and Aaron, operate affiliated gun groups around the country, which share the slogan “No Compromise.” During the pandemic, the Dorrs’ groups expanded into other vehemently anti-government causes, and helped lead anti-mask and anti-vax protests. Niven, the political scientist, said that the Dorrs “cultivate relationships with the hardest-right members of the state legislature, and can get their bills heard.” Ninety per cent of Ohio voters favor universal background checks for people trying to buy guns, Niven noted, “but the Democrats can’t get a hearing.”
Teresa Fedor, a Democratic state senator who has served in the General Assembly for twenty-two years, described Ohio’s new gun and abortion laws as the worst legislation that she has ever witnessed being passed. She told me, “It feels like Gilead”—the fictional theocracy in Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Fedor added, “We’ve got state-mandated pregnancies, even of a ten-year-old.”
The issue is personal to her. Fedor, a grandmother, is a former teacher; in her twenties, when she was serving in the military, she was raped. She had an abortion. Fedor was a divorced single mother at the time, trying to earn a teaching degree. “I thought my life was going to be over,” she said. “But abortion was accessible, and it was a way back. To me, that choice meant I’d be able to have a future. I feel like I made it to the other side, and have the life I dreamed of as a little girl, because I had that choice.” Without the freedom to have an abortion, she said, “I wouldn’t be a state senator today.”
In 2015, during a floor debate over abortion policy, Fedor testified about her experience. As she was speaking, she was enraged to notice that another lawmaker, who opposed her view, was chuckling. She said that Republicans who serve in districts that have been engineered to be impervious to voters are “just not listening to the public, period—there’s no need to.” Many of the most extreme bills, Fedor believes, have been written not by the legislators themselves but by local and national right-wing pressure groups, which can raise dark money and turn out primary voters in force. Nationally, the most influential such group is the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that essentially outsources the drafting of laws to self-interested businesses. In Ohio, Fedor told me, it is often extreme religious groups that exert undue influence. She then noted that one such organization is about to have “an office right across from the statehouse chamber.”
Facing Ohio’s Greek Revival statehouse is a vacant six-story building that is slated to become the new headquarters of the Center for Christian Virtue, a once obscure nonprofit that an anti-pornography advocate founded four decades ago, in the basement of a Cincinnati church. In 2015 and 2016, the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center classified the organization as a hate group, citing homophobic statements on its Web site that described “homosexual behavior” as “unhealthy and destructive to the individual” and “to society as a whole.” The group subsequently deleted the offending statements, and, according to the Columbus Dispatch, it has recently evolved into “the state’s premier lobbying force on Christian conservative issues.” In the past five years, its full-time staff has expanded from two to thirteen, and its annual budget has risen from four hundred thousand dollars to $1.2 million. The group’s president, Aaron Baer, told me that the new headquarters—the group bought the building for $1.25 million last year, and plans to spend an additional $3.75 million renovating it—is very much meant to send a signal. “The message is that we’re going to be in this for the long haul,” Baer said. “We’re going to have a voice on the direction of the state—and the nation, God willing.”
The center already commands unusual influence. E-mails obtained by a watchdog group, Campaign for Accountability, show that Baer has been in regular contact with Governor DeWine’s office about an array of policies. The center’s board of directors includes two of the state’s biggest Republican donors, one of whom, the corporate lobbyist David Myhal, previously served as DeWine’s chief fund-raiser. A third director, Tom Minnery, who has served as the center’s board chair, is a chairman emeritus of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a powerful national legal organization that was created as the religious right’s answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. And, until earlier this year, a fourth director at the center was Seth Morgan, who is currently the vice-chairman of the A.D.F.
The most recently available I.R.S. records show that the center and the A.D.F. share several funding sources—notably, the huge, opaque National Christian Foundation—and have amplified each other’s messages. In April, the center celebrated the A.D.F.’s legal defense of an Ohio college professor who refused to use a student’s preferred pronouns. In addition, the center works in concert with about a hundred and thirty Catholic and evangelical schools, twenty-two hundred churches, and what it calls a Christian Chamber of Commerce of aligned businesses. Jake Grumbach, a political scientist specializing in state government who teaches at the University of Washington, told me that the center illustrates what political scientists are calling the “nationalization of local politics.”
The Center for Christian Virtue appears to be the true sponsor of some of Ohio’s most extreme right-wing bills. Gary Click, the Sandusky-area pastor serving in the Ohio House, acknowledged to me that the group had prompted him to introduce a bill opposing gender-affirming care for transgender youths, regardless of parental consent. The center, in essence, handed Click the wording for the legislation. Click confirmed to me that the center “is very proactive on Cap Square”—the Ohio capitol—adding, “All legislators are aware of their presence.” Click’s transgender bill isn’t yet law, but a related bill, also promoted by the center, has passed in the Ohio House. It stipulates that any student on a girls’ sports team participating in interscholastic conferences must have been born with female genitals. The legislation also calls for genital inspections. Niven observed that “many anti-trans sports bills were percolating” in Republican-ruled statehouses, but “leave it to Ohio to pass a provision for mandatory genital inspection if anyone questions their gender.” He went on, “That’s gerrymandering. You can’t say ‘Show me your daughter’ and stay in office unless you have unlosable districts.”
In a phone interview, Baer told me that his mother and father, who divorced, were Jewish Democrats. But his father converted to Christianity, and became a Baptist pastor. After a rocky adolescence, Baer himself converted to a more conservative form of evangelical Christianity. He told me that the only “real hope for our nation is in Jesus, but we need safeguards in the law.” He described gender-confirming health care for transgender patients as “mutilation.” Baer believes that the Supreme Court should overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage, and he opposes the use of surrogate pregnancy, which he called “renting a womb,” because it “permanently separates the children from their biological mothers.” He supports the Personhood Act—State Representative Click’s proposal to ban abortions at conception. As for Ohio’s much publicized ten-year-old rape victim, Baer told me that the girl would have been better off having her rapist’s baby and raising it, too, because a “child will always do best with the biological mother.”
“Even if the mother is in grade school?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
Baer is untroubled by the notion that gerrymandering has enabled minority rule. “I think the polls that matter are the polls of the folks turning out to vote,” he said.
The vast majority of Ohio residents clearly want legislative districts that are drawn more fairly. By 2015, the state’s gerrymandering problem had become so notorious that seventy-one per cent of Ohioans voted to pass an amendment to the state constitution demanding reforms. As a result, the Ohio constitution now requires that districts be shaped so that the makeup of the General Assembly is proportional to the political makeup of the state. In 2018, an even larger bipartisan majority—seventy-five per cent of Ohio voters—passed a similar resolution for the state’s congressional districts.
Though these reforms were democratically enacted, the voters’ will has thus far been ignored. Allison Russo, the minority leader in the House, who is one of two Democratic members of the seven-person redistricting commission, told me, “I was optimistic at the beginning.” But, she explained, the Republican members drafted a new districting map in secret, and earlier this year they presented it to her and the other Democrat just hours before a deadline. The proposed districts were nowhere near proportional to the state’s political makeup. The Democrats argued that the Republicans had flagrantly violated the reforms that had been written into the state constitution.
This past spring, an extraordinary series of legal fights were playing out. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the map—and then struck down four more, after the Republican majority on the redistricting commission continued submitting maps that defied the spirit of the court’s orders. The chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court was herself a Republican. Russo told me, “If norms were being obeyed, we would expect that there would have been an effort to follow the first Ohio Supreme Court decision. But that simply didn’t happen.”
The Republicans’ antics lasted so long that they basically ran out the clock. Election deadlines were looming, and the makeup of Ohio’s districts still hadn’t been settled. “They contrived a crisis,” Russo told me. At that point, a group allied with the Republicans, Ohio Right to Life, urged a federal court to intervene, on the ground that the delay was imperilling the fair administration of upcoming elections. The decision was made by a panel of three federal judges—two of whom had been appointed by Trump. Over the strenuous objection of the third judge, the two Trump judges ruled in the group’s favor, allowing the 2022 elections to proceed with a map so rigged that Ohio’s top judicial body had rejected it as unconstitutional.
On Twitter, Bill Seitz, the majority leader of the Ohio House, jeered at his Democratic opponents: “Too bad so sad. We win again.” He continued, “Now I know it’s been a tough night for all you libs. Pour yourself a glass of warm milk and you will sleep better. The game is over and you lost.”
Ohio Democrats, including David Pepper, are outraged. “The most corrupt state in the country was told more than five times that it was violating the law, and then the federal court said it was O.K.,” he told me. “If you add up all the abnormalities, it’s a case study—we’re seeing the disintegration of the rule of law in Ohio. They intentionally created an illegal map, and are laughing about it.”
Russo likens the Republicans’ stunning contempt for the Ohio Supreme Court to the January 6th insurrection: “People are saying, ‘Where is the accountability when you disregard the rule of law and attack democracy?’ Because that’s what’s happening in the statehouses, and Ohio is a perfect example.”
Pepper has resorted to giving nightly Zoom lectures to small groups of Democratic activists and donors from across the country, in the hope of opening their eyes to what’s happening at the ground level in the statehouses. Meanwhile, he recently co-founded a group called Blue Ohio to fund even seemingly doomed races in deep-red local districts. Even if these Democratic candidates lose in 2022, he says, they will at least be making arguments that voters in many districts would never otherwise hear. “You can’t just abandon half the country to extremism,” he warns.
As Pepper sees it, Republicans understand clearly that, “if it were a level playing field, their positions would be too unpopular to win.” But “this is not a democracy to them anymore.”
He told me, “There are two sides in America, but they’re fighting different battles. The blue side thinks their views are largely popular and democracy is relatively stable—and that they just need better outcomes in federal elections. The focus is on winning swing states in national elections. The other side, though, knows that our democracy isn’t stable—that it can be subverted through the statehouses. Blue America needs to reshape everything it does for that much deeper battle. It’s not about one cycle. It’s a long game.” ♦
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I never tried the option myself bc it'd probably mean skipping the Reason You Suck speech at the end (fire for speedrunners though) but I Love that you can frame your Phoneys in 3, especially so if you've already killed the previous two. Like yeah couldn't send you off to die so i'll let the goverment do it for me 🧸 like its just Peak evil imo.
#luly talks#i do relinquish in the pain and the agony but dont get me wrong the thought of any of them 3 getting jailed makes me SO sad#rog esp since he's the one im writing about and the biggest nerve wreck#gingi voice they'll be the last one to pick the board game for prison-game-night..........#actually yknow i wonder if rog would end up almost believing it after all when you try to gaslight him for the shits and giggles#(as in: telling HE was victim of the bite of 87 and the like) he tells you to not do that bc his brain is already scrambled or something#so there's a chance perhaps he'd believe it if he had everyone constantly accussing him of it?#not like it'd matter much i have no hopes for the dsaf justice system i know its been 35 years since jack got framed but still#i just remembered when the option popped up i said ''god im really becoming steven 😭''#first time i made the joke too was when i said ''imagine your boss sucks so bad you turn suicidal'' no clue what the context was#OH YEAH JAKE SAYING HE'D RATHER FUCKING DIE THAN KEEP WORKING HERE yeah. poor guy.#anyway im derailing my own post again uhhh. yeah. yeah i dont trust any phoney is avoiding the death sentence#dsaf#roger jones#dsaf roger#btw just for the sake of yapping longer i truly cant decide whether harry or jake would survive better in the enviroment#probably jake to be honest. I mean Harry has a lot of experience inside freddy's but he didnt really live outside it muhc#jake is so confrontational though#hey did you guys watch the hit movie felon? sure that guy wasn't framed but. i feel like jake would end up w that attitude#except for. you know. everything else that happens in the hit movie felon.#hey actually forget about this game go watch the 10/10 movie Felon from 2008 starring Val Kilmer and Stephen Dorff#because its one of my all time fave movies and probably the saddest i've seen#not bc there arent movies that are more tragic but bc no movie was able to break thru my walls of idgaf and make me cry anyway#yeah you thought i couldnt bring up my movie fixations on my different fandom posts well you were WRONG in fact#im gonna go tag my other post i left untagged yesterday bc my ass was Cooking
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A bill passed in the South Carolina Senate on Thursday would allow gun owners to carry their weapon in public without a concealed carry permit and would provide free firearms training.
The bill was approved by a 28-15 vote after nearly two weeks of debate surrounding concerns from some lawmakers and law enforcement officials over the open carry aspect. The addition of free firearms training is what led to a compromise and ultimately ended the debate.
The proposal now returns to the House, where representatives will need to agree to the Senate's addition of the free firearms training, and other changes, in order for the bill to make it to Gov. Henry McMaster's desk.
If signed into law, South Carolina will join 27 other states – including nearly every one in the Deep South – that allow open carry without a permit.
MARYLAND BILL WOULD BAN GUN CARRY FOR OWNERS WITHOUT INSURANCE POLICY OF AT LEAST $300K
The Senate's amendments to the bill also include a required statewide advertising campaign to inform South Carolinians of the free concealed weapons permit training classes while also informing residents that guns can be carried openly by those over 18.
The proposed bill does not change the fact that convicted felons cannot legally carry guns and also keeps places like hospitals, schools and the Statehouse gun-free zones. Gun owners would also not be allowed to carry in other businesses that have decided to ban weapons.
The bill also includes new state penalties of at least five years when a felon is convicted of a crime using a gun, enhanced penalties for those convicted of carrying a gun in prohibited areas, and up to three additional years in prison for someone convicted of a gun crime who has not taken the concealed weapons permit class.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said the bill probably would not have passed the Senate without the aforementioned changes, according to The Associated Press. Though he does not have a formal estimate on how much it will cost the state per year to host at least two free training classes per week in all 46 counties, he guessed it would be at least $4 million based on the number of concealed weapons permits issued in South Carolina each year.
CALIFORNIA JUDGE BLOCKS GUN CONTROL LAW REQUIRING BACKGROUND CHECKS FOR AMMO PURCHASES
Republican Sen. Shane Martin celebrated the bill passing in the chamber and said allowing open carry has been a goal of his since he was elected to his position in 2008.
"I don’t think it's going to cause as many problems as they think it’s going to because the one thing we have to remember is the criminals are always going to be carrying," the senator from Spartanburg County said, adding that the bill wasn't exactly what he wanted, but the compromises were needed for it to pass.
Sen. Mia McLeod, an independent who often votes with Democrats, said she is concerned the bill will turn South Carolina into the "Wild, Wild West" with "no licenses, no training [and] inadequate background checks."
Law enforcement leaders have expressed worry over people carrying guns without training or experience, and the possibility of encountering armed people at a shooting scene and not being able to determine who is a threat and who is trying to help.
The concerns from law enforcement are what initially caused many Republican lawmakers to question the bill.
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A right-wing talk show host running in a high-profile special election in Georgia allegedly voted illegally nine times while serving probation for felony convictions, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Monday.
The candidate, Brian K. Pritchard, is running in a Jan. 3 special election to replace former Georgia Speaker of the House David Ralston, who died last month shortly after winning re-election. Pritchard is running against Sheree Ralston, the late legislator’s widow, in a safe Republican seat that David Ralston won uncontested last month.
Pritchard, who is now accused of voting illegally, has also falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from former President Donald Trump, and accused Republican state officials of being “complicit,” according to the Journal-Constitution.
When Pritchard first registered to vote in Georgia in January 2008, he was still on probation after he pleaded guilty in 1996 to felony forgery and theft charges in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. In Georgia, former felons aren’t allowed to vote until they’ve completed their sentence, which includes probation.
In February 2021, Georgia’s State Election Board accused Pritchard of voting while serving a felony sentence, one of dozens of voter fraud cases referred to prosecutors at the time, according to the Clay County Progress. At the time, Pritchard’s attorney said Pritchard was not aware he was considered a felon when he cast his ballots, according to the Journal-Constitution.
And last week, the office of Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr—one of those officials Pritchard accused of being “complicit” in the “stolen” election, according to the Journal-Constitution—said in a filing that Pritchard had broken the law each time he voted, the Journal-Constitution reported.
Carr’s office said Pritchard voted five times in 2008 and four times in 2010, according to August-based TV station WDRW. Carr’s office has requested a hearing in Fannin County, where Pritchard lives, for the week of Jan. 9, after the special election.
Pritchard could face up to $45,000 in fines, but he hasn’t been criminally charged and he wouldn’t be disqualified from serving in the legislature if he wins the election, according to the Journal-Constitution.
Pritchard has vehemently denied the accusation and appeared to imply he was targeted due to his candidacy. “I’ve not done anything wrong here,” Pritchard, who also owns a media company called FetchYourNews, told the Journal-Constitution Monday. “I guess if you’re apprehending public enemy No. 1, here I am.”
“I will not be intimidated,” Pritchard told the Dawson County News last week. “I will not be bullied.”
Pritchard said in a press release when he announced his run last week that he “will always support our law enforcement.”
“The safety and well-being of our citizens will alway be a top priority of mine,” Pritchard said in the release. “Keep Atlanta crime out of our mountains!”
These accusations haven’t stopped Pritchard from spreading lies about the 2020 election. Pritchard accused Carr and Gov. Brian Kemp of being “complicit” in a stolen election during an April episode of his web show.
“I don't believe 81 million people voted for [Joe Biden],” Pritchard said at the time. “When they stole an election, and Brian Kemp was complicit, the Governor of Georgia, and Chris Carr the Attorney General was complicit in Georgia, and you see Joe Biden…this is what they did to us.”
During the same episode, Pritchard said that Biden has dementia and called Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock a “false prophet.”
#us politics#news#georgia#2022 midterms#2022 elections#2022#Atlanta Journal-Constitution#Brian K. Pritchard#illegal voting#Sheree Ralston#David Ralston#special elections#Clay County Progress#Chris Carr#WDRW#FetchYourNews#Dawson County News#Gov. Brian Kemp#president joe biden#biden administration#Sen. Raphael Warnock#vice news
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DC v. Heller (SCOTUS) 2008 [excerpt]
Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues.
The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.
Emphasis added
So it wasn't until 2008 that a wrongly-decided case with the five conservative Justices affirming Heller that the possession of guns for the defense of 'hearth and home' was legalized.
The bizarre misconstrual of the Framers' intent with the 2nd Amendment reached its ultimate low point in 2022 with New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, decided by the SCOTUS as prohibiting any restriction on 'concealed carry'.
It remains a mystery how the conservative Justices can divine the intentions of men who lived 250 years ago; the Justices who repealed the protections of Roe v. Wade also determined that since spousal abuse wasn't a recognized crime in 1775 it could not be grounds currently for prohibition of firearms possession. That appears to be the pinnacle of perverse logic bent to a specific result.
Is it any wonder that the once august Supreme Court is now held in lower esteem than used car salesmen? They have been revealed to be craven political operatives dancing to their organ grinder's music.
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