Let’s see – the false allegations against 5 black kids in the Central Park rape case were so “conclusive” the the Chumph took out a full page ad in the Times…
But the wife beating allegations and Court Orders based on evidence of such against several of his white wing thugs are just “baseless allegations”…
Now they want to teach hate and racism in public schools –
Students are revolting at one Alabama high school over the right-wing lesson plan pushed by a government teacher.
Baldwin County School Board members heard complaints Thursday from students about Spanish Fort High instructor Gene Ponder, who assigned at least five books by right-wing talk radio host Michael Savage and compared President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler in one lesson, reported AL.com.
The students complained Ponder relied on outdated published materials and blog posts to back up his political claims the in the AP class and used unscientific reasoning on issues such as gun control.
“This is not a small group of students misinterpreting or challenging a viewpoint,” said student Julia Coccaro, who also raised concerns about Ponder’s summer reading list last year.
The school system pulled that assignment in June, after students complained the reading materials promoted one viewpoint without offering a challenging contrast.
“The taxpayers of Baldwin County are not paying for their children to be indoctrinated,” said Coccaro, who chairs the Alabama High School Democrats. “They are paying to be educated, and we are not being educated in that classroom.”
Parents, local residents and former teachers spoke out against Ponder, who declined to comment.
“The lesson plans I examined appear to be totally extracurricular,” said Cynthia McMeans, a retired teacher. “No teaching materials based on a legitimate course of study in the social sciences would rely on and include information from websites, blogs, articles and interviews found on conspiracy theories and logical fallacies. None of the lesson plans come from reputable sources.”
Another former teacher was more succinct.
“We are teaching hate in our school systems,” said retired teacher Sandra Page.
Superintendent Eddie Tyler said the board would consider some of the suggestions offered, such as having an academic supervisor examine the lessons, but he said some speakers “engaged in character assassination” against the teacher.
One local man defended Ponder, saying he had attended one of the government teacher’s classes.
“I was looking for something to tell me that this teacher was bias (sic) and I didn’t hear it or see it,” Eugene Maye of Fairhope. “We want to believe our kids. But my take from that class is that I didn’t see anything wrong.”
Another example of Chump supporter ‘s sterling character…
Ronnie Lucas Wilson
Police in Tennessee are looking for a member of the white supremacist gang Aryan Nations who allegedly opened fire on a Knoxville police officer Thursday Night, the Knoxville News Sentinel reports.
Authorities say Ronnie Lucas Wilson shot officer Jay Williams in front of a Target store around 8:30 p.m. as the policeman attempted to stop Wilson for speeding. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has added Wilson to the state’s Top 10 Most Wanted list.
Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch said Wilson fired multiple rounds at Williams with a shotgun as the officer pursed him by car. As Knox News reports, Wilson then got out of his car and opened fire once again on Williams. Rausch said the officer did not fire his weapon.
Wilson is wanted on charges of attempted first-degree murder. Authorities say they are “very familiar” with the suspect, noted he’s listed “as a member of the Aryan Nations gang”—the largest white supremacist gang in Tennessee, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The Chumph want only immigrants from white countries, like Norway. What he doesn’t quite understand is folks from those countries consider America a shothole since he took over.
First he came for the Haitians…
Trump moves toward deporting 200,000 longtime immigrants from El Salvador — and, no, they’re not “illegal”
Since Donald Trump kicked off his presidential campaign in 2015 by declaring that Mexican immigrants to the United States are “rapists” and are “bringing crime,” he and his supporters have tried to deny that his opinions on immigration are shaped by racism. Instead, they’ve tried to argue that it’s only illegal immigration that Trump opposes. Trump has even claimed that his proposed wall on the Mexican border would have a “big, very beautiful door because we want the legals to come back into the country.”
Once Trump was in office, however, it became clear that his immigration policy would primarily be shaped around ejecting as many nonwhite, non-English-speaking people as possible. The White House has systematically targeted certain groups of immigrants who have legal status for deportation, through the travel ban placed on Muslim countries (which initially applied to green card holders), rescinding protections for DACA recipients and more recently the targeted attacks on immigrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), who are allowed to live in the United States under a law signed by George H.W. Bush in 1991.
On Monday, the Trump administration revoked TPS from 200,000 Salvadorans, a group of people that has lived and worked here for 17 years, and in many cases have children who know no other home but the United States. This is the biggest move yet to give lie to the notion that Trump is fine with legal immigration. Instead, it’s becoming apparent that a lightly veiled version white nationalism is the guiding ideology behind Trump immigration policies. Earlier, Trump has revoked TPS from 2,500 Nicaraguans and 60,000 Haitians.
“Over the 17 years that they’ve had TPS, they have been routinely and regularly vetted by the government,” explained Royce Murray of the American Immigration Council, during a Monday press call. “They’ve been vetted 11 times, submitted to background checks and security checks to ensure that they do not present any public safety concerns.”
“I kind of see it as low-hanging fruit,” said Mark Drury, an executive at Shapiro & Duncan, a construction company that employs a number of TPS workers. He noted that undocumented workers “are a lot harder to find” than people who have legal status, after all, and that kicking out people who have “done all the right things” is a much easier task for the Trump administration.
“All my plans for the future just ended,” said Christian Chavez Guevara, who has lived in the U.S. with TPS status for 17 years. Holding back tears, he added, “I don’t want to take my daughter, none of my kids, to a violent environment.”
Salvadoran immigrants were given protected status after an earthquake in 2001, but as Chavez Guevara’s statements make clear, the more pressing concerns in 2018 are economic instability and crime. Right now, the State Department has a travel warning in place for El Salvador, noting the country “has one of the highest homicide levels in the world and crimes such as extortion, assault and robbery are common.” But the Trump administration declined to take those facts into consideration, simply declaring that enough time had passed since the earthquake that it was safe for these immigrants to return home.
Frank Mora of the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center strongly disagreed, arguing that returning all these people to El Salvador “stokes the conditions that actually trigger the instability, the violence and the migration from El Salvador to the United States,” which runs directly counter to the Trump administration’s stated goals.
Remittances — money sent by immigrants back to family and friends in El Salvador — make up 17 percent of that nation’s GDP. Sending all those people back to El Salvador and cutting off that source of income, Mora warned, would exacerbate economic insecurity and likely lead to an escalation of crime. In turn, that will cause more people to leave the country and enter the United States without documentation.
Unsurprisingly, Neil Munro at Breitbart applauded Trump’s decision by characterizing immigrants, en masse, as parasites.
“Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market,” Munro writes. “But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting more than 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.”
Drury begged to differ, saying, “Construction’s at full employment. There are not people sitting at home waiting to take the jobs that these folks are doing. We work hard every day trying to get more people into our industry.”
He added that these potential deportations mean that “El Salvador will get a better prepared work force arriving at their doors,” since most of these people have been building up work experience in the U.S. for years. These workers may well displace less experienced workers in El Salvador, he said, who may well come to the U.S. looking for work, likely as undocumented immigrants.
Attempts to make this debate about economics are best understood as a cover story for a racist agenda. As Matt Yglesias explained at Vox in April, “there is a fairly firm consensus that immigration raises incomes on average for native-born workers” and that inviting immigrants is an effective “strategy for national growth and national greatness.”
Trump and his supporters are clearly motivated by an urge toward ethnic cleansing, whether or not they clearly see it that way, and their economic arguments should be understood as a form of rationalization. The comment section at Breitbart News, full of racial slurs about “anchor babies” and “criminal invaders,” and claims that liberals want the United States to be a “Third World spillway,” make that clear enough. This is why it’s foolish for any liberal to hope the MAGA-hat crowd will turn on Trump after realizing he has broken his promises on taxes, jobs and health care. Mostly they voted for him so he would stick it to people of color, and that is one promise Trump has kept.
White boy shoots himself?
Blame a Negro!
A 20-year-old Arkansas man this week shot himself and tried to blame it on a random black man — but his lies quickly fell apart when he was confronted by his own mother.
Local news station WTVM 9 reports that a 20-year-old man from Jonesboro, Arkansas told a law enforcement officer that he’d been shot with his own gun after a struggle with a black man who had tried to take the gun away from him.
The man, who had been admitted to St. Bernards Medical Center to be treated for the wound, told the officer that a “black male wearing all black ran up to him and pulled a gun from his hip area and pointed it at him.” In the ensuing struggle over the gun, the man said, the black man had fired off a shot and hit him in the hand.
However, the man’s mother knew that this story was complete fiction, as it turns out the man had simply accidentally shot himself. After confronting him about his falsehoods, he eventually went to police and admitted that he made up the entire story.
In reality, the man shot himself after he started playing with a random gun that he happened to find on the ground, and his mother explained to police that he “was scared to tell the truth because he doesn’t want to go to jail.”
The below is a kid trying to fire a 500 S&W, One of the largest handguns made. These guns recoil is so bad, it has been known to break the shooter’s wrists. It is not a toy. There is a 600 S&W which shoots a bullet larger in diameter thena 50 Caliber. Not for the faint of heart… or anyone with an IQ above 10.
You know the old adage..One black person on the street corner is a thief, two a conspiracy, and three…a Riot.
Seems one of the Chumph’s acolytes who was called in to testify by the Grand Jury was terrified by the fact some black folks were selected for Jury duty.
In Washington, DC – a city with over 50% black population, that means unless you got a Republican KKK appointee for a judge…The jury is going to be at least partially black. You hit the racial Trifecta, and it isn’t out of the realm of possibility it could be all black.
When you are a racist white supremacist, who also happens to be guilty of treason…That is terrifying. White boy justice takes on a whole new meaning. No more “poor, pitiful, rich white boy” raping women wantonly and getting a wrist slap.
Your criminal white ass is going to jail.
Not surprisingly the white-wing press is “shocked” and visibly shaken that they would allow black jurors on a case prosecuting a white person!
Things were definitely much better under slavery and Jim Crow!
Nt your typical Jim Crow Jury
News properties owned by Rupert Murdoch have done admirable work in chiseling away at cornerstones of U.S. democracy in service to President Trump. Opinionators at Fox News, for example, have advanced the administration’s plans to deconstruct the administrative state by dissing government in general and the FBI in particular.
Now Murdoch’s New York Post is going a step further, to the extent that’s possible. Here’s the headline on Richard Johnson’s Tuesday story on Page Six: “Russia probe grand jury looks like ‘a Black Lives Matter rally,’ says witness.” Based on the input of a single witness who testified before the Russia grand jury that’s hearing testimony in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, Johnson writes:
Of the 20 jurors, 11 are African-Americans and two were wearing “peace T-shirts,” the witness said. “There was only one white male in the room, and he was a prosecutor.” Mueller was not present.
And:
My source said, “That room isn’t a room where POTUS gets a fair shake.”
From the sound of things, a Trump loyalist came face to face with a group of black people seated together and didn’t like it. So the loyalist leaked to the New York Post, which was happy to get a New Year’s jump on fresh approaches to discrediting the investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. While at the same time weakening confidence in the U.S. criminal-justice system, of course.
When questioned about the piece via phone, Johnson responded, “I respectfully have no comment at this time. I don’t give interviews unless I get permission.”
The Chumph’s white supremacy and making America white again….Driving While Black, long a method to harass and intimidate the American born black population, is used as an excuse to forcibly deport supposedly “illegal aliens” who are black, under a system of trumped up laws and regulations designed to rid the country of it’s immigrant black population.
Although only 7 percent of non-citizens in the U.S. are black, they make up 20 percent of those facing deportation on criminal grounds.
If it were not for the Canadian leaf tattoo on his wrist, Chris Gustave may not be behind bars.
In October, 24 year old Gustave was staying at a weekly motel in Phoenix when police arrived searching for his friend, who had violated parole. At first, “all the attention was on him,” Gustave told me in a phone interview last month. But then, Gustave claimed, an officer noticed the tattoo. “The dude just asked if I was Canadian, the next thing I knew I was in here”—“here” being the remote and sprawling Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Eloy, Arizona.
Gustave is one of more than half a million black unauthorized immigrants in the United States—about 575,000 as of 2013. Last week, The New York Times reported that the presence of immigrants from Haiti and Nigeria, who together represent roughly 20 percent of the foreign-born black population, vexed president Trump. The Haitians “all have AIDS,” Trump said in a June meeting with his top advisors according to the Times, while the Nigerians would not “go back to their huts” after seeing America, he said. (The White House denied the comments.)
Research suggests that because black people in the United States are more likely to be stopped, arrested, and incarcerated, black immigrants may be disproportionately vulnerable to deportation. The criminal-justice system acts like a “funnel” into the immigration system, said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a University of Denver law professor who studies the nexus of policing and immigration law. New York University law professor Alina Das said black immigrants are “targeted by criminalization.”
While the Obama administration prioritized immigrants with felony convictions for deportation, President Trump’s executive orders effectively made anyone in the country illegally a target for removal. Arrests of non-criminals more than doubled, and among those who have been charged with a crime, the top three categories are “traffic offenses – DUI,” “dangerous drugs,” and “immigration,” which means illegal entry, illegal reentry, false claim to US citizenship, and trafficking, according to ICE. In fiscal year 2017, almost 74 percent of people arrested by ICE had a criminal conviction—arrests the agency uses to argue “that its officers know how to prioritize enforcement without overly prescriptive mandates.”
But Hernández sees something different in the large number of criminal convictions among ICE detainees. “Racial bias present in the criminal-justice system plays itself out in the immigration context,” he said. “There are so many entry points” to deportation, said Das, “when you are a person of color who is also an immigrant, you face a double punishment.”
A 2016 report by the NYU Immigrant Rights Clinic, where Das is the co-director, and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration found that although black immigrants represent about 7 percent of the non-citizen population, they make up more than 10 percent of immigrants in removal proceedings. Criminal convictions amplify the disparity: Twenty percent of immigrants facing deportation on criminal grounds are black.
Today, almost 10 percent of the black population in the United States is foreign-born, up from about 3 percent in 1980. As the number of black immigrants has grown, so, too, have the linkages between cops, courts, and the immigration system.
Aside from ICE’s splashier arrests within so-called “sanctuary cities,” most apprehensions nationwide happen inside jails once an immigrant has had contact with local police. This collaboration is a result of decades of legislation and executive action by both Democrats and Republicans. Two years after the passage of his controversial crime bill, former President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996. Known as IIRIRA (pronounced “ira-ira”), the law expanded mandatory detention and the number of deportable crimes. As the federal inmate population doubled, prison-like immigrant-detention centers rose up in tandem. In the early 1990s, there were around 5,000 immigrants detained each day; by 2001, the populationquadrupled. And the Trump administration wants to keep that number growing: The president’s 2018 budget called for increasing the daily detainee population to 51,000, a 25 percent bump over last year.
“Additional detention space does make Americans safer,”argued Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter enforcement. Detention also ensures that undocumented immigrants don’t “disappear into the woodwork,” Vaughan said. “The benefit of keeping illegal aliens in custody,” she said, is that “it prevents the release of criminal aliens back into the community to have the opportunity to re-offend.”
While the prison population has begun to dwindle in recent years—the incarceration rate fell 13 percent between 2007 and 2015—immigration detention remains “one of the fastest-growing sectors of the carceral state,” said Kelly Lytle Hernandez, a University of California, Los Angeles, historian who studies the origins of U.S. immigration control.
ICE’s Secure Communities program—which began under former President George W. Bush; was expanded, then killed, under his successor Barack Obama; then reinstated by Trump—provides local police with a national fingerprint database to check suspects for immigration violations. ICE can also deputize local law enforcement to make immigration arrests, a power authorized by IIRIRA. Some 60 law-enforcement agencies across 18 states participate in that program.
“Local police are some of the biggest feeders into the immigration-enforcement system,” said Will Gaona, the policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona. “And that’s more true in Arizona”—where Gustave was picked up—“because of S.B. 1070.” That 2010 state law, which has since been emulated in dozens of states, requires police to ask about immigration status if they suspect someone is in the country illegally….
I think everyone except white-wing evangelicals agrees that a forcible sex act is rape.
But what about a coworker looking at another and saying “Damn, she’s fine”?
Stealing a kiss in what you think is a romantic moment to find out she/he isn’t that in to you? I mean, in the old movies, that always seemed infamously to lead to slap a la Cary Grant and Doris Day.
Trying to force a coworker into a sexual encounter? No question this is wrong.
Can a woman be accused of sexual misconduct in attempting to coerce an unwilling male?
So where exactly are the lines?
And what can we do as a society to make sure everyone is on the same page? What is and is not acceptable is rapidly changing. As well as out view of “who” is believable. Misconduct isn’t going to be swept under the rug (unless you are a Republican).
The almost infinite shades of creepy misbehavior on display are challenging the legal and cultural categories used to describe them.
“Enough is enough,” proclaimed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand at a December 6 press conference. Whatever the details of her colleague Al Franken’s sexual misbehavior, said Gillibrand, who has been aggressively pushing for Congress to tackle its harassment problem, he needed to step down. “I think when we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping, you are having the wrong conversation. You need to draw a line in the sand and say: None of it is OK. None of it is acceptable.”
It most definitely is not. But as the public outrage over sexual misconduct gains force, it is swallowing up an increasingly diverse range of allegations, from the relatively petty (such as those lodged against Franken) to the truly monstrous (such as the claims regarding Harvey Weinstein and Roger Ailes). In between those poles exist almost infinite shades of creepy—which, sadly, will necessitate a great many discussions about how to deal with, and even talk about, the different types of offenses and offenders.
This is, in some ways, uncharted territory. In the past, questions of culpability were largely left to the legal realm: As long as a man didn’t get arrested or lose a lawsuit—and sometimes even if he did—he could get away with an awful lot while suffering little more than a bad-boy reputation. But the current reckoning is different, a rising tide of public shaming driven in part by shifting attitudes and expectations among younger women. Going forward, it’s hard to tell how the new lines will be drawn, much less where. Women should be respected. Period. But not all offenders are created equal. The pattern of coercive harassment of employees allegedly perpetrated by chat show host Charlie Rose or former Representative John Conyers is not the same as the fumbling, drunken stupidity of which The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush stands accused. Thrush may or may not deserve to lose his current job for having made booze-fueled passes at, and subsequently talked smack about, female colleagues at his previous job. But his alleged offenses pale when compared to, say, ex-ABC pundit Mark Halperin’s alleged practice of groping, rubbing his erections against, and even masturbating in front of junior staffers—and then threatening to kill the careers of those who rebuffed him. (Like many of the men caught in this whirlwind, Halperin disputes at least some of the allegations against him.)
Some of the misbehavior being detailed is flat-out bizarre. Comedian Louis C.K. admitted to being a nonviolent but nevertheless intrusive exhibitionist-masturbator. It remains a public mystery precisely what Garrison Keillor did to get his radio show killed. (Something about touching a woman’s bare back when her shirt fluttered open?) Representative Joe Barton had every right to text naked pics of himself to one of his girlfriends, but threatening to use the Capitol Police to keep her quiet about their relationship was a no-no. As for former Representative Trent Franks, who felt it appropriate to pressure multiple young aides to serve as surrogate mothers for him and his wife: Someone needs to explain that The Handmaid’s Tale is dystopian fiction, not a how-to guide.
Then, of course, there are the many and varied accusations circling President Donald Trump, not to mention his own boasts in this area—none of which he has addressed in a remotely coherent, much less persuasive fashion. (The Access Hollywood tape is empty locker room talk! No, wait, it’s a fake! He has never met these women! Not even the ones he’s been photographed with! Or the one who was on his show!) But that, alas, is a special topic to be saved for another day.
It is precisely because this movement is so powerful that it’s important to avoid (through frustration or disgust, exhaustion or confusion) sweeping every bad act and actor into the same mushy heap. That kind of sloppiness breeds excess and backlash. Right now, even our language is inadequate to the moment. Shoving Weinstein and Ailes under the same umbrella of sexual “misconduct” or “misbehavior” as Franken or Thrush renders such terms all but meaningless. Weinstein terrorized scores of women—psychologically, professionally, and physically—for multiple decades and is currently under investigation for rape. That’s not “misconduct” or “harassment.” It’s an atrocity, possibly wrapped in multiple felonies. Both genders need to find a way to address some of these qualitative distinctions without sounding like anyone is being let off the hook.
This may sound obvious, until, for instance, you wander into an angry Twitter mob of John Conyers supporters demanding to know why the ex-congressman’s sins are seen by many to be worse than Franken’s. Well, for starters, Franken didn’t use tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to secretly settle an aide’s harassment claim. As for the underlying misconduct, if one believes the accusations, Conyers’s transgressions—committed repeatedly against his own employees in direct abuse of his power over them—were empirically more egregious and revolting. (Asking an aide to touch his junk or else find him another woman who would? Come on.) This isn’t to say that Franken didn’t behave like an entitled pig. But, until the drip, drip, drip of low-level grope-and-slobber stories accumulated, the case for his being pushed from office was not nearly as clear as the one against Conyers….More...
Not real surprised at this.
Democrats are absolute idiots for bending over to get rid of Franken.
He said – She said gets into some ambiguous territory at times. Doesn’t mean that sexual harassment in the workplace isn’t common. Just means there is a lot of room for misinterpretation of motives. Invited a woman on my staff some years ago to a group happy hour where I bought a round of drinks for my staff.. Either I didn’t make the invitation clear enough, or she misunderstood my meaning. She responded saying she had a boyfriend. I was a bit taken aback, and felt it was necessary to explain it was an invitation to join the group of 30 or so staff. and my meaning wasn’t to suggest some sort of private get together.
So, it is possible to say something or do something which is misinterpreted. Sure there are jackasses out there…But firing of people without some sort of due process is getting way out of hand,
In this case the “accuser” turns out to be a paid Republican troll, with a history of false allegations…
Now the “polite” official announcements say Omarosa resigned…But the line in DC is she got shidtcanned and marched out of the building by the Secret Service after launching into a profane tirade.
And despite official announcements trying to play the ugly scene down…Her “official day” was last night.
She had long overstayed her welcome, overplayed her hand, whose only function has to be a brown spot in the Chumph’s publicity photos.
Omarosa Manigault, the former “Apprentice” star and adviser to President Donald Trump, was dramatically fired from the Trump administration on Tuesday.
While the White House announced that Manigault resigned from her position as director of communications for the White House’s Office of Public Liaison, American Urban Radio Networks’ April Ryan reported on Wednesday that chief of staff John Kelly fired Manigault, who reacted angrily.
“Omarosa is alleged to have acted very vulgar and cursed a lot and said she helped elect President Trump,” Ryan tweeted, adding that Manigault was reported escorted out of the White House and “off campus.”
Manigault’s role had recently come under scrutiny in the media, with reports suggesting her position was vague and undefined, a point of frustration for her colleagues.
In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced that Manigault resigned on Tuesday “to pursue other opportunities” and that her official last day will be January 20…
Manigault, who struggled to develop functioning relationships between the Trump administration and black lawmakers and communities, has a history of sparking workplace drama.
Sources say General Kelly did the firing and Omarosa is alleged to have acted very vulgar and cursed a lot and said she helped elect President Trump. The word is a General Kelly had it and got rid of her.
According to multiple sources Omarosa did not resign. She was even escorted out of he building and off campus.
Wow! The White Supremacist Right is whimpering in outrage that a brown guy escaped their planned lynching.
As to Faux News and other racist white right outlets…Major meltdown. Even the Chumph had a few more racist comments to add.
And of course Michelle Malkin, the white wing’s favorite brown meat hole.
Rich white kid attacks woman with Claw Hammer…
What happens?
It all goes away and he becomes a Republican Party Official.
You got money, and are white…
Stuff that would wind up locking a poor(er) kid away for 20 years to life…Just magically goes away, and you a free to join the white wing criminal cartel.
The Republicans of Broward County, Fla., knew little about Rupert Tarsey when he ran for an open slot on the local party’s executive committee. But the young man had some decent political cred.
Before the 2016 presidential election, he told them, he knocked on thousands of doors and got 50 Republicans in the liberal enclave to register to vote to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He worshiped at the same church as the committee’s vice chair and headed a local chapter of the Catholic fraternal group Knights of Columbus. He came from a wealthy California family and followed four generations into a real estate career.
Within months of joining the local party, the 28-year-old was elected secretary in May, defeating two challengers who’d been around longer.
But something felt off about Tarsey for Bob Sutton, chairman of the committee. After a few months, Tarsey went after Sutton’s position, members said, by working to persuade the committee to unseat him. That’s when Sutton started getting phone calls warning him that Tarsey was not quite who he seemed.
“Houston, we’ve got a problem,” he said one caller told him.
It wasn’t long before the story of Tarsey’s past unfolded.
It began a decade ago, some 2,700 miles away at the exclusive Harvard-Westlake High School, a private college preparatory academy where tuition this year is $37,100 and which is a magnet for the children of Los Angeles’ elite.
Rupert Ditsworth, a 17-year-old from Beverly Hills, was a senior. One day in May, he finished an Advanced Placement exam and was waiting for a friend when he saw another schoolmate, Elizabeth Barcay. He invited her to lunch in his Jaguar.
They’d known each other for two years and eaten together before. She accepted.
They took the Jaguar to a Jamba Juice and sipped smoothies. After lunch, Ditsworth asked Barcay if she would go with him to mail something on the way back to school. She agreed.
Soon after, according to court records, he drove past a mailbox and detoured to a quiet residential street, parking at a dead-end with the passenger door up against a wall. There, he told Barcay he had thoughts of suicide. She suggested he drive back to school and see a counselor.
Instead, according to court records, he reached inside his backpack, pulled out a claw hammer and started swinging. Ditsworth delivered dozens of crushing blows, smashing Barcay’s nose and leg, splitting her scalp and giving her two black eyes, the records say. Her family said they counted at least 40 visible wounds.
During a struggle, the weapon broke. So Ditsworth grabbed Barcay’s throat and tried to strangle her, she testified during a preliminary hearing.
Barcay said she bit down on his finger to stop the attack. He let go.
“I’m done,” he screamed.
Bloody and wounded, Barcay managed to escape from the car before collapsing in front of a nearby home.
She survived the attack, emerging with fierce resolve. Five days later, she went to prom — in a wheelchair — and was crowned queen, the high school’s student newspaper reported at the time. Barcay could not be reached for comment for this article.
Prosecutors filed three felony charges against her attacker: one count of attempted murder and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. If convicted of those charges, Ditsworth was facing the rest of his life behind bars.
But he never spent a day in jail.
What followed instead was a series of moves that gave the teenager a near-clean criminal slate, allowing him to reinvent himself in Florida.
“When you have a lot of money, you can kind of get away with stuff,” said Celeste Ellich, vice chair of the Broward County Republican Party, who had supported Tarsey’s secretary bid before she knew about his past. “They thought they had it buried.”
Deputy Dist. Atty. Ed Nison, who prosecuted the case in California, told The Times that because Ditsworth was relatively young, had no prior record and suffered from psychiatric issues, putting him in jail “would not serve the purpose that it’s supposed to serve.”
“The goal was to avoid a reoccurrence of this kind of behavior,” Nison said. “And simply locking him up wouldn’t have done anything to prevent future behavior under these circumstances.”
But at the time, others saw the situation differently.
“You should have gone to prison,” David Barcay, the victim’s father, told Ditsworth at a dramatic court hearing in 2010. “Instead, you’re going to school and making friends and enjoying the outdoors and posing for pictures with your fraternity brothers with paintball guns in army fatigues …. You have moved to Florida and created a life that has allowed you to forget.”… The Rest Here…
Ta-Nehisi Coates take on the Chumph….
Disagree with Coates on the CHumph being the first. That dishonor would fall to Woodrow Wilson. I feel there are massive parallels between Wilson and the re-segregation of the Federal Government and the Chumph’s “ethnic cleansing” of the government as well as Wilson’s relationship with the KKK just like the Chumph’s relationship with the KKK and Neo-Nazis.
The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.
IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible….Read the rest here...
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