Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Sunday, March 12, 2023

A funny but informative lawyer story

Stuff like this helps inform people about how the American justice system works for at least some non-elites. This a total hoot but packed with details about how it works:
When you’re a public defender, you’re pretty useless — until suddenly, you aren’t

I am a public defender.

I am the vanguard of justice. I am the bulwark against tyranny. I am a hoot at dinner parties. I am this author’s Tinder bio. I am venerated by the new progressive zeitgeist.

I am the corporeal manifestation of professional burnout.

I am useless. So fucking useless.

There’s a dull reality to my job, which is that my clients have almost always done the thing they’re accused of doing. And usually the evidence against them is overwhelming — not even a close call. Yet I am duty-bound to poke, prod, and bluff my way into exaggerating a weakness with the government’s case. This usually doesn’t work.

For example, one time a client was picked up for his sixth drunk-driving incident. He had been prohibited from driving eons ago, but that hadn’t stopped him before. In addition to DUI No. 6, he was charged with fleeing the scene after crashing into another car. The fleeing was ineffectual, if only for the fact that he literally imprinted his license plate number onto the other car. I saw the picture of the imprint, with a mirrored alphanumeric sequence perfectly legible on the metal body. Cops found his car billowing thick, black smoke in a parking lot in front of a nearby AutoZone. My client hadn’t gotten far from the scene: He was in the driver’s seat, having already passed out and pissed his pants.

So yeah, when I meet with clients I shrug a lot and give the “what-do-you-want-me-to-do?” look. I try to shift delicately into the gentle social worker persona and talk about damage control, which invariably means telling them that accepting a plea deal is the least bad option. This is one reason why almost everyone chooses to plead guilty. Ninety-four percent of state cases and 97% of federal cases are resolved by a plea deal, to be exact.

All this means I inhabit a different role than you may think based on TV shows or the occasional op-ed about the noble role of public defenders. I’m not a special agent who parachutes into the enemy hideout to orchestrate and negotiate an elaborate hostage release; I’m just the widget inspector. I’m there to sit at the assembly line with a checklist on a clipboard and make sure that my client’s rights are not violated too much throughout the process. And we literally used a checklist for DUI cases — six pages of potential rakes we could only pray a cop stepped on: Yes, yes, you have video of the guy swerving all over the road, his speech is as slurred as mud, and he has a small cargo ship’s worth of empty beer bottles in the back. BUT was the temperature of the liquid simulator solution utilized as the external standard for the breath sample machine measured by a thermometer which was properly certified by the state at the time? Hmmm?

It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally the cops do fuck up. Sometimes they don’t notice the thermometer certification lapsed two days prior, and of course you pounce on that. But this almost never happens, and it also underscores how fungible my own contributions are. Anyone plausibly qualified could replace me and it would not make a difference for the most part.

I’m borderline useless, in other words.

But there are terrifying exceptions to this rote monotony that forever haunt me. Like the one time I cast a spell in court with eleven magic words.

***

This happened early, when I was still a baby public defender. My client (different from License Plate Man above) was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He was already on probation for one DUI when he was caught driving drunk a second time, seven years after the first. A judge released him from jail provided that his family fork over a small ransom for bail and that he agree to having his whereabouts monitored by an ankle bracelet. He would have to come back to address his probation issues in two weeks.

The ankle bracelet company sends me an update a few days later. My client had visited their office, informed them that he intended to flee the country because he was scared of jail, then underscored his statement with a flourish by taking out a knife and cutting off the ankle bracelet in front of them. In terms of the ratio between effort and impact, this was easily one of the simplest ways he could have irredeemably fucked himself over. But I did not have time to dwell on this. His actions meant I had one less client to worry about, since clearly he had decided to take his chances on the lam rather than in court.

Two weeks pass and I’m in court. Just a normal day: I review the sign-in sheet to see which defendants, of the cases I had prepped, did me the courtesy of showing up. Our caseloads aren’t always as bad as advertised because many of our clients don’t come to court, for reasons ranging from malicious (they’re reenacting a certain 1993 thriller starring Harrison Ford) to banal (the notice was lost in the mail).

Then I see his name — Bracelet Cutter. I turn and scan the row of benches in the gallery and he’s quietly sitting in the back, apparently oblivious to the shitstorm of his own creation he has walked into.

I motion for him to step out in the hallway and my first question is “What the FUCK are you doing here?” He looks down, ashamed, and explains he realized that if he had fled, his family would have remained liable for the bond they put up to get him released. “I am here to take responsibility,” he says.

There was no need for me to pillory him any further. He panicked and fucked up, but that was done. Unfortunately, I was completely ill-prepared to handle his case, as I had reasonably assumed he had successfully peaced out of the country (and out of the justice system’s grasp) by now. We went in front of the judge and I announced that my client was turning himself in to jail so that I could better prepare for his case. We’d be back in court in another two weeks.

***

In part because of those aforementioned stats on the frequency of guilty pleas, public defenders have garnered a reputation for being trial-averse, for pressuring clients to cop a plea just to keep the machine humming along. I think this reputation is ill-deserved. It’s completely counter to my own experience, at least, as few things are talked about with as much awed respect among one’s public-defender peers as the number of trials you have accumulated. It’s the functional equivalent of an attorney’s XP level.

Jury trials are sexy and cool and exciting, even despite the abysmal prospects for acquittal. But the understandable focus on dramatic moments can cause people to lose sight of potentially far more consequential proceedings that lack the luster and allure. Like probation hearings.

I hate probation hearings so much.

The gravitational center of the criminal justice system is not the judge, but the prosecutor. Prosecutors can summon criminal charges from the ether or dispel them into nothingness, if they so choose. The Trial Tax is real, so if you want to avoid getting resolutely fucked at sentencing, your best bet is to play nice from the start. This is what makes accepting a plea deal so irresistible to so many clients. Judges say they ultimately decide — sure, whatever — but in practice, a prosecutor’s offer recommendation is virtually guaranteed to be adopted. Judges are busy, and the vast majority used to be prosecutors themselves. A current prosecutor’s blessing on a deal is generally all the oversight a judge cares to invest. If the deal recommends no jail time, you’ll get no jail time. This is what I told all my clients, and it was always true.

But there’s a caveat, in that many little- or no-jail deals are paired with a laundry list of legal obligations that are monitored by the courts for many years. In addition to not committing new crimes, the obligations can be as simple as attending a class about how drugs are bad. Courts enforce this scheme by imposing the statutory maximum amount of jail time (a year for most misdemeanors), but simultaneously suspending nearly all of it. Think of it as setting aside a bucket of jail days that can be doled out as needed if a client didn’t adhere to the agreement.

Doling from the bucket was what the probation calendar was for. Clients who had already pled guilty were summoned back to court because they had fucked up somehow and needed to explain themselves to the judge.

During these probation hearings, the prosecutor would recite the list of violations and recommend a sanction. My job was to come up with a plausible-sounding justification and make a counteroffer for sanction, and the judge would probably just split it down the middle. Sometimes it’s 30 days of house arrest. Sometimes 90 days of jail. If jail, sometimes clients had a week to turn themselves in. Sometimes the court marshals were summoned to take them to jail immediately. All this in the span of 5-10 minutes per person, one after the other. Assembly line humming.

***

Generally, we had no way of knowing when someone would be summoned back to court for a probation hearing until it was scheduled. Our paralegals scanned the calendars and dove into our archives to retrieve a client’s file. I tried to call my clients prior to court appearances, but this was often a lost cause as numbers were frequently disconnected, out of service, or linked to full voicemail boxes. The best that you could eventually hope for was for the client to actually show up to court so that you could confer for the requisite five minutes in the adjoining hallways and stairwells before the proceedings.

But as much as Bracelet Cutter fucked up his prospects in other ways, at least there wasn’t any question as to whether he’d show up for his hearing — he was in jail, after all. I swung by with an interpreter (his English was passable, but not great) to fill him in on the details and answer his questions. I felt ready for the hearing.

The day came. Bracelet Cutter’s mother, wife, and children were in attendance in the gallery. The court churned through its list of cases until it was our turn.

Recall how plea deals are structured, and how the entire purpose of a suspended jail sentence is to dangle the anvil over someone’s head to “encourage” them to do the things they’re supposed to do. The bargain means you avoid jail time so long as you meet your obligations. But what if, perhaps through your repeated and extended frittering away of your opportunities to stay out of jail, there is no realistic expectation you’ll ever meet your obligations to the court? Rather than continue burning up the court’s resources, judges could instead impose a hefty jail sentence now and just close the file. This is affectionately known as “Impose & Close.”

On this day, luckily, the prosecutor was not feeling particularly bloodthirsty. He was going to recommend the mandatory minimum sanction of 48 hours in jail, which my client had more than already served by now, and leave the rest of the jail time suspended, meaning he wouldn’t have to serve it as long as he behaved himself. I was more than happy to cosign on that recommendation, excited to see the judge rubber-stamp our joint agreement.

Despite the good sign, though, I was still cautious — I had not walked into the hearing with much confidence. I knew that my client’s decision to cut off an ankle bracelet and threaten to flee to Mexico was going to be on the judge’s mind, and I knew that the worst approach with her would have been to ignore the issue completely. After effusively agreeing with the prosecutor’s recommendation, I got ahead of the issue. I started by acknowledging what happened, framing it from the standpoint of a poor guy panicking in a stressful situation, and highlighted the extended meeting I had with him while he was in jail. His family members in the gallery served as helpful props in my argument. After all, why would he flee the country when *gesturing widely* his family is right here?

This did not work. The judge said that she had no confidence that my client would be able to meet his legal obligations. She then turned to the prosecutor and asked what the recommended jail sentence was to close the file out. Which meant Impose & Close was happening.

This was a full-blown red alert moment, and by far the worst possible outcome. Now that a probation period appeared to be off the table, the prosecutor was no longer tied to asking for just two days in jail. The price to close the file would be 180 days. I stood up and did my best to slide in and emphasize that neither party requested to close out the file, and repeated my spiel.

The judge politely listened and then imposed 180 days in jail. The reactions came in waves — my client’s mom yelled out in anguish first because she could understand the judge, and then her son followed after the court interpreter delivered the bad news in Spanish. My client was handcuffed and slumped in his chair, disconsolate. This didn’t just mean six months in jail; ICE kept watch over the local jail rosters, so the sentence was not only long but virtually assured his deportation.

I tried to focus, to ignore the sudden cacophony reverberating around me. I remained standing and stared at nothing in particular. Fifteen seconds passed. What now? Was there anything I could do? Was there anything I should do?

Thirty seconds passed, and the only audible sound was the shuffling of paper and murmurs across the gallery. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try, so I strung together a hastily improvised request to the judge — hereafter known as the Eleven Magic Words:

“Is there anything the court would like to review to reconsider?”

There are words recognized within legal circles to have near magical properties. The Supreme Court will tell you that all you need to immediately and forcefully end a police interrogation is to unambiguously ask for a lawyer. Declarations etched in steel by a dying man have the power to move trillions in assets. Even the lowly comma, or the absence thereof, can overturn entire industries. But the eleven words I uttered that day are not valorized or dissected by any scholars. They shoulder no inherent legal significance. And yet, they earned their title for what happened next.

Nothing but silence now. The judge peered directly at me over her glasses. She then asked for the file back from the clerk and barely even opened it before announcing, “All right. Mr. Meskhout, I’ll go ahead and give him an opportunity. Since you have asked.”

The judge then imposed two days in jail. Two days instead of one hundred and eighty.

The cacophony started up again — outcries of joy (and some confusion) this time rather than anguish. I gathered that neither my client nor his mom quite understood what the fuck had just happened. I certainly didn’t.

“Since you have asked.”

My heart rate skyrocketed and my eyes twitched. I remained standing and did my best to maintain composure.

“Since you have asked.”

I kept replaying that sentence over and over in my head. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work. I was not supposed to have this much power. I’m supposed to be useless, remember? A widget inspector. There was something thoroughly unconscionable about what had just transpired. I uttered eleven magic words in the right combination and this man’s life trajectory shifted radically, likely from near-assured deportation to continued freedom in the United States. I am not supposed to have this much power.

To say that I felt fear is an understatement. But I kept all of this to myself. This was my last hearing for the morning and I could go back to my office now and process at my pace.

I hastily scrawled my signature on the court order and walked out of the courtroom. My client was escorted out by the jail guard right behind me. Normally, inmates get their hands and feet shackled together before they step out. My client was completely unshackled. And normally, the jail guards waste no time heading to the security elevator they have exclusive access to, but my client was headed in the opposite direction.

I saw where he was going. His children had been sitting on a bench in the hallway. My client ran forward and bent down to embrace them both, and all I remember him exclaiming was “¡Niños!” The jail guard was calmly walking right behind this unfolding security breach beaming and carrying the shackled chain in his hands. My client finished hugging his children then promptly stood up and placed his hands behind his back to be shackled again. The guard and my client continued taking the long way to the security elevator.

I was awestruck by the unexpected display of humanity by the guard. I have no idea when they negotiated this, but he broke all kinds of protocol just to let my client have this brief embrace with his children.

I walked into the main elevators by myself, watched the doors close, and waited for the cab to start moving. Once I knew I was alone and safely insulated by several layers of steel and concrete, I finally let out the primal scream I had been holding in this whole time.

Once the heart palpitations calmed, I reflected on what transpired. I certainly would love to believe it was the Eleven Magic Words that did the trick that day — that would reflect well on my legal acumen and provide me a modicum of agency within this chaos. But that is a self-serving delusion that would also imbue the criminal justice system with a patina of legitimacy it has no rightful claim on.

In all likelihood, the judge changed her mind because fuck you — that’s why. They’re human after all, subject to the same tempestuous emotional storms as the rest of us, including the same impulses that might prompt you to idly fantasize about a horrific vehicular rending of the guy who just cut you off on the road. Despite that human fallibility, they’re nevertheless endowed with a terrific amount of real power over other people’s lives. Maybe if they’re addressed as “Your Honor” enough times per minute, they’ll believe it and act accordingly.

Or maybe I should jettison the fake humility and just take credit. Based purely on the sequence of events (I said something, a thing happened), I have a legitimate basis to exploit this story to flatter myself and impress attractive individuals. Yet this too has horrifying implications.

Either way, every day since, I wonder whether I will clock out at the end of the day as the mild-mannered widget inspector I normally am. Every morning I wonder whether that day has Eleven Magic Words and, if it does, whether I’ll be able to figure them out. And every day that potential scares the shit out of me.

And yet, I still do the work. I’m still a public defender.

Well, at least I thought that was funny.

Yea or nay?

I stumbled across this video this morning and was really taken by it.  I’m not in the habit of hero-worship anymore, like in my younger days, but Steve Schmidt says this so well (as usual) that I felt it was worthy of an OP here on DisPol.

So, if you have 7-8 minutes to spare (the video is really quite captivating, but you only need to see the first half to get the gist), I think it’s well worth the view. 

Some important points that were made:

- Leadership is a character test

- It should be tempered with a sense of idealism

- The candidate must be fearless about losing

- They must believe in something

- Leadership cannot be ceded to the craziest elements of a society who should be institutionalized

- A leader must be honest, including telling people about  inconvenient truths

________

After viewing, here are the questions:

Q1: Do you disagree with any of Steve’s comments?

Q2: What would you add to Steve’s comments?

Q3: Do you believe there are any potential POTUS prospects that meet the requirements that Steve sees as necessary?  If yes, who would that be?

Thanks for chiming in.

News bits: About the persistence of poverty; Anti-woke is pro-discrimination, anti-democracy

Sociologist Matthew Desmond has studied the sources of persistent poverty and finds that insufficient spending is an important root cause. He argues the evidence points to an imbalance of power between poor people and those who are not poor. It is even more important than diversion of welfare dollars by states for non-welfare spending.  Desmond writes for the NYT Magazine:  
A fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. But this does not fully solve the puzzle of why poverty has been so stubbornly persistent, .... [isn’t that some kind of fraud?]

There are, it would seem, deeper structural forces at play, ones that have to do with the way the American poor are routinely taken advantage of. The primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets.

As a theory of poverty, “exploitation” elicits a muddled response, causing us to think of course and but, no in the same instant. The word carries a moral charge, but social scientists have a fairly coolheaded way to measure exploitation: When we are underpaid relative to the value of what we produce, we experience labor exploitation; when we are overcharged relative to the value of something we purchase, we experience consumer exploitation. For example, if a family paid $1,000 a month to rent an apartment with a market value of $20,000, that family would experience a higher level of renter exploitation than a family who paid the same amount for an apartment with a market valuation of $100,000. When we don’t own property or can’t access credit, we become dependent on people who do and can, which in turn invites exploitation, because a bad deal for you is a good deal for me.

Our vulnerability to exploitation grows as our liberty shrinks. Because undocumented workers are not protected by labor laws, more than a third are paid below minimum wage, and nearly 85 percent are not paid overtime. Many of us who are U.S. citizens, or who crossed borders through official checkpoints, would not work for these wages. We don’t have to. If they migrate here as adults, those undocumented workers choose the terms of their arrangement. But just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative conditions doesn’t make those conditions any less exploitative. Sometimes exploitation is simply the best bad option.
See why I keep harping on the critical importance of always keeping track of where power and wealth flows? See why I keep pounding on the radical right for attacking and shrinking civil liberties and deregulating businesses while empowering business over consumers? 

I continue to argue that what we are witnessing right now is a gigantic war between the organized, disciplined, well-funded authoritarian radical capitalist and Christian theocratic forces against the messy herd of cats forces fighting for democracy and civil liberties. The authoritarians are fighting for concentrated power and wealth for the elites. The democrats are fighting for somewhat more distributed wealth and power for the masses 

That’s my narrative and I’m sticking to it unless some really compelling contrary evidence comes on the scene.

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Personal safety tip: Always keep an eye on personal power flows.

Anti-woke = pro-discrimination, pro-authoritarian/theocracy, and anti-democracy: If one is paying attention, one will certainly have noticed by now that radical right anti-woke measures in laws usually change how power is distributed. 

Power usually flows from targeted groups, usually minorities such as the LGBQT community, to businesses and corporations or to inherently authoritarian/theocratic red state governments or religious organizations. In essence, the anti-woke movement is focused on withdrawing civil liberties and consumer protection powers from the federal government and individuals and redistributing it to elites.

Accumulating more power is what the anti-woke movement is primarily focused on. A secondary focus is rewriting and whitewashing inconvenient history.** Hence the book bans that anti-woke elites are heavily promoting in their dark free speech campaign.

As we all know, more wealth usually comes with more power. The anti-woke movement serves the elites at the expense and freedom of the masses.

Or, is there a lethal flaw or two in that reasoning?


** For example, this is the kind of inconvenient history that radical right anti-woke authoritarians and theocrats are whitewashing by forcing it to be removed from public schools:
‘Slavery was wrong’ and 5 other things some educators won’t teach anymore

To mollify parents and obey new state laws, teachers are cutting all sorts of lessons

Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on the New York Police Department’s use of force, analyzed by race.

These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, as they face pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination and administrators wary of controversy, as well as a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.
Making power flow from the people to the elites,
and making ignorance flow to the people

Kevin McCarthy and the KYMS tactic

In an astonishing WaPo opinion piece, Dana Milbank writes about how completely ignorant of inconvenient facts and truths House speaker Kevin McCarthy claims to be. He is the true master of the KYMS (keep your mouth shut) propaganda tactic. Milbank writes:
Not since the Know-Nothing Party disappeared in the 1850s has a public figure boasted about his ignorance with as much gusto as Kevin McCarthy does.

It doesn’t seem to matter what you ask the speaker of the House. He hasn’t read it, seen it or heard about it.

The explosive documents from the Dominion case showing Fox News hosts privately said Donald Trump’s election lies were hokum but promoted the lies on air anyway?

“I didn’t read all that. I didn’t see all that,” McCarthy told The Post.

The way Fox News’s Tucker Carlson (predictably) manipulated the Jan. 6, 2021, security footage McCarthy (foolishly) gave the propagandist, giving the false appearance that the bloody insurrection was “mostly peaceful”?

“I didn’t see what was aired,” McCarthy asserted.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, in an implicit rebuke of McCarthy, blasting the Carlson propaganda while holding up a statement from the Capitol Police chief denouncing Fox News’s “outrageous,” “false” and “offensive” portrayal of the insurrection?

You guessed it. McCarthy “didn’t see” McConnell do that.

The benighted McCarthy has been amassing this impressive body of obtuseness for some time. If ignorance is bliss, the California Republican has been in nirvana for years now.

How about Trump’s speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, provoking the sacking of the Capitol?

“I didn’t watch it,” McCarthy said
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) calling the insurrectionists’ rampage a “normal tourist visit”?

“I don’t know what Congressman Clyde said,” quoth McCarthy, and “I didn’t see it.

When his own designated negotiator reached a bipartisan agreement to form a commission to probe the Jan. 6 attack (a commission McCarthy ultimately killed)?

I haven’t read through it.”

Trump, in a recorded phone call, demanding Georgia’s secretary of state “find” enough votes to overturn the election results?

I have to hear it first.”
Obviously McCarthy is lying about not knowing anything about anything inconvenient. We know he is lying and he knows it too. But KYMS is so popular because it works. By doing KYMS, it is impossible to PFIM (put foot in mouth) and be embarrassed. 

Kevin, we know what you are doing
and we're not fooled!
Stop lying to us!
Lies don't make bad things go away,
and neither does feigned ignorance

Saturday, March 11, 2023

News bits: The authoritarian radical right silences even Sir David Attenborough; What the radical right wants for America

Evidence of severe damage the damage that radical and hyper-radical politics and cancel culture is inflicting on inconvenient truth, free speech and secularism continues to accumulate. This is not just about America. It is about the human condition. This one really, really pisses me off. The Guardian writes:
BBC will not broadcast Attenborough episode over 
fear of ‘rightwing backlash’

The BBC has decided not to broadcast an episode of Sir David Attenborough’s flagship new series on British wildlife because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians and the rightwing press, the Guardian has been told.

The decision has angered the program-makers and some insiders at the BBC, who fear the corporation has bowed to pressure from lobbying groups with “dinosaurian ways”.

The BBC strongly denied this was the case and insisted the episode in question was never intended for broadcast.
The radical and hyper-radical right In America and everywhere else silences as much inconvenient truth as possible whenever possible by any means possible. I don’t believe the BBC’s bullshit excuse it was never intended for broadcast. If it was was never intended for broadcast, then why was it made? 

We all know exactly what this is about. The forces of evil tyranny and lies are defeating the forces of democracy and truth one at a time. The BBC has fallen.

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A NYT opinion by Michelle Goldberg lays out the plan. The takeover over the US Supreme Court by the radical right was just the start of its massive social engineering plan for America. Goldberg’s information is based on investigative reporting and research by ProPubica and Documented. She writes:
Leonard Leo, a leader of the right-wing Federalist Society, an extraordinarily effective legal organization, is broadening his ambitions. Leo is hoping to transform American culture the way he transformed the judiciary. In the words of an investigative report produced by ProPublica and Documented, he aims to build a sort of “Federalist Society for everything,” devoted to helping reactionaries consolidate power in realms like Wall Street, Silicon Valley, journalism, Hollywood and academia.

“I spent close to 30 years, if not more, helping to build the conservative legal movement,” Leo said in a video for the organization at the heart of his strategy, the Teneo Network. “And at some point or another, I just said to myself, ‘If this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’” That includes “wokeism in the corporate environment, in the educational environment,” biased media and “entertainment that is really corrupting our youth.”

Given Leo’s past success, he should be taken seriously. As Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations, he helped put Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom have close Federalist Society ties, on the Supreme Court, making him central to the demise of Roe v. Wade. Leo has access to enormous resources; last year a conservative financier donated around $1.6 billion to a dark-money group that he controls. And since many elites resent the congeries of behavioral norms and linguistic innovations denigrated as wokeness, the Teneo Network will start from a place of strength, pushing on an open door.

After all, the nearly 50-year project of ending Roe is complete. Stirring crusades against Communism and then against radical Islam have subsided. The cult of personality around Trump has splintered. Many on the right would still like to obliterate the welfare state, but they’re deeply defensive about it. Hatred of wokeness is a brittle foundation for political identity, but it’s almost all that’s left.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, declared during his January inaugural address that “Florida is where woke goes to die.” Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state and a possible presidential candidate, recently tweeted, “Our internal threats — especially those trying to corrupt our kids with toxic wokeness — are more serious than our external threats.” Last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said, “Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.”
Goldberg goes on to argue that wokeness is too weak a glue to hold together a radical political movement that would do to America generally what the radical theocrats did to Roe v. Wade. I very much doubt that. I think Goldberg is wrong. As far as I can tell, all the necessary cognitive biology and social behavior elements are there for the radical rage against abortion social and political movement to morph into just as much or even more rage against wokeness. To me, the emotional, social and intuitive factors for deranged abortion hate look to be about the same as they are for deranged woke hate. I think Leo has found a plausible cognitive-social pathway to kill democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law, secularism, pluralism and inconvenient truth. Of course, that is just my opinion, but it is a firm opinion. 

So, what is the identity politics and policies of wokeness? Radical, aggressive authoritarian-theocratic intrusion into people's lives like this:
  •  Three Texas women are sued for wrongful death after allegedly helping friend obtain abortion medication. In the first lawsuit of its kind since Roe v. Wade was overturned, a husband seeks damages from women who allegedly helped his ex-wife obtain the medications to terminate her pregnancy.
A focus on demolishing American democracy like Viktor Orban did to Hungarian democracy:
  • Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary. The bill, of course, is only one part of DeSantis’s culture war. His administration has already limited what can be taught to K-12 students about race, sex and gender. “DeSantis seems to be putting into practice some of the political lessons Orban has to teach the American Right,” Rod Dreher, an American conservative living in Budapest, recently wrote with admiration.
Vicious mendacity, slander and bigotry like this (from Goldberg’s NYT opinion):
  • A 2020 video that ProPublica and Documented found, in which the Teneo Network’s co-founder Evan Baehr described how he believed the left operates. He asked his audience to imagine a luncheon at the Harvard Club featuring a billionaire hedge funder, a movie producer, a Harvard professor and a writer for The New York Times. “The billionaire says, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if middle school kids had free access to sex-change therapy paid for by the federal government?’” Baehr said. “Well, the filmmaker says, ‘I’d love to do a documentary on that; it will be a major motion film.’ The Harvard professor says, ‘We can do studies on that to say that’s absolutely biologically sound and safe.’ And the New York Times person says, ‘I’ll profile people who feel trapped in the wrong gender.’”
  • Laws are being passed all over the country targeting trans people, particularly trans kids, and the right’s language has turned openly eliminationist. (One speaker at CPAC said, Transgenderism must be eradicated.”)
What the radical right has in store for us is a terrifying, morally rotted, dystopian tyranny-Christian theocracy. The radical right monster will be built mostly (~97% ?) on lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation, vilification of allegedly evil minorities (especially non-heterosexuals), and plenty of deranged crackpottery replete with blue space lasers, microchips in vaccines, and bigoted and racist false crackpot narratives. 

By now if one does not sense and oppose the grave danger the radical right poses to democracy and civil liberties, then one (i) denies or downplays it, (ii) mostly does not care, or (iii) implicitly or openly supports it. If there are significant states of mind other than denial, apathy or support, it’s not clear to me what they are, e.g., vincible ignorance.


Vincible ignorance -- a 4th state of mind?

OK FOLKS, How is THIS helpful?

 I found the following OpEd offensive. Sure, it makes some good points, BUT............ we tend to blame the Right for our uncivil discourse, and here we have a piece attacking uneducated whites from Red states and we wonder WHY they get pissed at us more educated Leftists from Blue states.

However, after reading the following piece, if you feel it hit all the right notes, you are more than welcome to dispute my feelings about this OpEd, which I find divisive and insulting.

Opinion: Uneducated Rural Voters Have Ruined America

After every election, social media feeds are filled with maps showing how much of the country is red. These maps show surface area rather than population density, but that doesn’t matter to ignorant people.

I grew up in a rural area so I know what rural voters are like. I remember being in classrooms where there would be mini-mutinies because the students couldn’t figure out the course material. I always thought it was a colossal waste of time to have to go over the same things over and over and over again.

It was like my classmates were allergic to facts. In algebra, kids would say, “When are we ever going to use this?” Then they’d refuse to study.

Most of the people I went to high school with are still in the same town. If I come home to visit, I can go to the bar on Main St. and it’s like a class reunion. Few of them even attempted college and most of those that did dropped out.

Many of them work on family farms that only function because they qualify for regular subsidy checks from the government. That’s fine. I don’t mind that program. Our nation needs to make sure it has an adequate food supply.

But that’s also socialism.

I think it’s ridiculous that people who spend their whole lives being supported by government subsidy checks turn around and lambaste the “evils” of socialism. I guess it’s really easy to be self-righteous when you never hold yourself to your own standard.

If you don’t like “socialism,” then don’t deposit any government money into your bank accounts.

Then the red states sit around and complain about “socialism” even though they are the ones cashing the checks.

In many ways, our whole country reminds me of my old algebra class from high school. There are a few people who try to get the most out of their opportunities. They work hard. They educate themselves. They go on to achieve something.

All the while, they have to sit and listen to the howling of obnoxious people who think it’s a form of righteousness to remain ignorant. You’ve got people who haven’t read a book their whole lives who think they know more than renowned experts in their fields.

It’s time for the United States of America to cultivate some respect for the people who have proven they have discipline and drive. Everyone should have an opportunity to get an education. If more people were educated, perhaps there would be fewer ignorant voters in rural areas who supported policies that are detrimental to our nation’s future.

https://original.newsbreak.com/@walter-rhein-563121/2945032088257-opinion-uneducated-rural-voters-have-ruined-america

Questions: Is the above an over-simplification, is it insulting and self-congratulatory? Is it mocking and disingenuous? Is it stereo-typing?

OR are the points valid? Is what the author said needed to be said? Are rural Red State voters "ignorant" because of their lack of education?

Moreover: Do pieces like the above serve to enlighten us, Or do they serve to alienate a large part of the U.S. population? Do OpEds like the above only make rural voters angrier and see urbanites as snooty and acting "superior?"

Weigh in.