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What to know about the Horatio Alger Association and Justice Thomas
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-10-0918/supreme-court-what-know-about-horatio-alger-association-and-justice-thomas
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Inequality
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/09/horatio-alger-association-clarence-thomas/
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What to know about the Horatio Alger Association and Justice Thomas
By Brittany Shammas
Updated July 10, 2023 at 6:01 p.m. EDT|Published July 9, 2023 at 6:11 p.m. EDT
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in October. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
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An exclusive circle of wealthy, powerful Americans is in the spotlight after a New York Times report showed how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has benefited from being a member.
The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, an Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit organization, has counted the justice as a member for three decades. The New York Times reported that he has called it “a home to Virginia and me,” referring to his wife, and said it “has allowed me to see my dreams come true.”
Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays.
Here’s what to know about the organization.
WHAT TO KNOW
What is the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans?
What else is there to know about Horatio Alger?
Who are some of the Horatio Alger Association’s notable members?
What is Thomas’s role?
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America Had More Than One Founding and More Than One Set of Founders
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-04-0707/culture-america-had-more-one-founding-and-more-one-set-founders
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Inequality
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/04/opinion/declaration-independence-antislavery-movement.html
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JAMELLE BOUIE
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Why do so many Black women die in pregnancy?
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-05-23-0545/race-and-racism-why-do-so-many-black-women-die-pregnancy
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Inequality
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https://apnews.com/article/black-women-maternal-mortality-rate-df872e86c4bb56ef222b19141dc377f8
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FROM BIRTH TO DEATH
CHAPTER ONE: BIRTH
CHAPTER ONE
Why do so many Black women die in pregnancy?
One reason: Doctors don't take them seriously
By KAT STAFFORD
Photos by WONG MAYE-E and video by NOREEN NASIR
PUBLISHED MAY 23, 2023
This story is part one of an AP series examining the health disparities experienced by Black Americans across a lifetime.
BIRTH
CHILDHOOD
TEEN YEARS
ADULTHOOD
ELDERS
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Angelica Lyons knew it was dangerous for Black women to give birth in America.
As a public health instructor, she taught college students about racial health disparities, including the fact that Black women in the U.S. are nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy or delivery than any other race. Her home state of Alabama has the third-highest maternal mortality rate in the nation.
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Then, in 2019, it nearly happened to her.
What should have been a joyous first pregnancy quickly turned into a nightmare when she began to suffer debilitating stomach pain.
Her pleas for help were shrugged off, she said, and she was repeatedly sent home from the hospital. Doctors and nurses told her she was suffering from normal contractions, she said, even as her abdominal pain worsened and she began to vomit bile. Angelica said she wasn’t taken seriously until a searing pain rocketed throughout her body and her baby’s heart rate plummeted.
Rushed into the operating room for an emergency cesarean section, months before her due date, she nearly died of an undiagnosed case of sepsis.
Even more disheartening: Angelica worked at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the university affiliated with the hospital that treated her.
Her experience is a reflection of the medical racism, bias and inattentive care that Black Americans endure. Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States — 69.9 per 100,000 live births for 2021, almost three times the rate for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Black babies are more likely to die, and also far more likely to be born prematurely, setting the stage for health issues that could follow them through their lives.
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“Race plays a huge part, especially in the South, in terms of how you’re treated,” Angelica said, and the effects are catastrophic. “People are dying.”
Angelica Lyons tears up while recalling her birthing experience during an interview in Birmingham, Ala., on Feb. 5, 2022.
To be Black anywhere in America is to experience higher rates of chronic ailments like asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, Alzheimer's and, most recently, COVID-19. Black Americans have less access to adequate medical care; their life expectancy is shorter.
From birth to death, regardless of wealth or social standing, they are far more likely to get sick and die from common ailments.
Black Americans’ health issues have long been ascribed to genetics or behavior, when in actuality, an array of circumstances linked to racism — among them, restrictions on where people could live and historical lack of access to care — play major roles.
Discrimination and bias in hospital settings have been disastrous.
The nation’s health disparities have had a tragic impact: Over the past two decades, the higher mortality rate among Black Americans resulted in 1.6 million excess deaths compared to white Americans. That higher mortality rate resulted in a cumulative loss of more than 80 million years of life due to people dying young and billions of dollars in health care and lost opportunity.
A yearlong Associated Press project found that the health challenges Black Americans endure often begin before their first breath.
The AP conducted dozens of interviews with doctors, medical professionals, advocates, historians and researchers who detailed how a history of racism that began during the foundational years of America led to the disparities seen today.
Angelica Lyons carries her son while her younger sister, Ansonia Lyons, finishes her snack in the background.
Angelica Lyons’ pregnancy troubles began during her first trimester, with nausea and severe acid reflux. She was prescribed medication that helped alleviate her symptoms but it also caused severe constipation.
In the last week of October 2019, while she was giving her students a test, her stomach started to hurt badly.
“I remember talking to a couple of my students and they said, ‘You don’t look good, Ms. Lyons,'" Angelica recalled.
She called the University of Alabama-Birmingham Hospital’s labor and delivery unit to tell them she was having a hard time using the bathroom and her stomach was hurting. A woman who answered the phone told her it was a common pregnancy issue, Angelica said, and that she shouldn’t worry too much.
“She made me feel like my concern wasn’t important, and because this was my first pregnancy, I decided not to go because I wasn’t sure and thought maybe I was overreacting,” Angelica said.
The pain persisted. She went to the hospital a few days later and was admitted.
She had an enema — a procedure where fluids are used to cleanse or stimulate the emptying of bowels — to alleviate her constipation, but Angelica continued to plead with them that she was in pain.
“They were like, ‘Oh, it’s nothing, it’s just the Braxton Hicks contractions,'" she said. “They just ignored me.”
She was sent home but her stomach continued to ache, so she went back to the hospital a day later. Several tests, including MRIs, couldn’t find the source of the issue.
Angelica was eventually moved to the labor and delivery floor of the hospital so they could monitor her son’s heartbeat, which had dropped slightly. There, they performed another enema that finally helped with the pain. She also was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a dangerous condition that can cause severe pregnancy complications or death.
Then she began to vomit what appeared to be bile.
“I got worse and worse with the pain and I kept telling them, ‘Hey, I’m in pain,’” Angelica said. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you want some Tylenol?’ But it wasn’t helping.”
She struggled to eat dinner that night. When she stood up to go to the bathroom, she felt a sharp pain ricochet throughout her body.
“I started hollering because I had no idea what was going on," she said. "I told my sister I was in so much pain and to please call the nurse.”
What happened next remains a blur. Angelica recalls the chaos of hospital staff rushing her to labor and delivery, putting up a blue sheet to prepare her for an emergency C-section as her family and ex-husband tried to understand what went wrong.
She later learned that she nearly died.
“I was on life support,” recalled Angelica, 34. “I coded.”
She woke up three days later, unable to talk because of a ventilator in her mouth. She remembers gesturing wildly to her mother, asking where her son, Malik, was.
He was OK. But Angelica felt so much had been taken from her. She never got to experience those first moments of joy of having her newborn placed on her chest. She didn’t even know what her son looked like.
Maternal sepsis is a leading cause of maternal mortality in America. Black women are twice as likely to develop severe maternal sepsis, as compared to their white counterparts. Common symptoms can include fever or pain in the area of infection. Sepsis can develop quickly, so a timely response is crucial.
Sepsis in its early stages can mirror common pregnancy symptoms, so it can be hard to diagnose. Due to a lack of training, some medical providers don’t know what to look for. But slow or missed diagnoses are also the result of bias, structural racism in medicine and inattentive care that leads to patients, particularly Black women, not being heard.
“The way structural racism can play out in this particular disease is not being taken seriously,” said Dr. Laura Riley, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “We know that delay in diagnosis is what leads to these really bad outcomes.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Angelica demanded explanations from the medical staff of what happened. But she felt the answers she received on how it occurred were sparse and confusing.
A spokesperson for the University of Alabama at Birmingham said in a statement to The Associated Press that they couldn’t talk about Angelica’s case because of patient privacy laws. They pointed to a recent internal survey done by its Obstetrics and Gynecology department that showed that most of its patients are satisfied with their care and “are largely feeling respected,” and said the university and hospital “maintain intentional, proactive efforts in addressing health disparities and maternal mortality.”
Angelica’s son, Malik, was born eight weeks early, weighing under 5 pounds. He spent a month in intensive care. He received home visits through the first year of life to monitor his growth.
While he’s now a curious and vivacious 3-year-old who loves to explore the world around him, Angelica recalls those days in the ICU, and she feels guilty because she could not be with him.
“It’s scary to know I could have died, that we could have died,” Lyons said, wiping away tears.
Top: Ansonia Lyons, left, finishes a snack while her mother, Shelonda Lyons, takes care of her son, Adrien Lyons, as her nephew, Malik Lyons-Law, plays in the kitchen. Left: Shelonda Lyons looks after her grandchildren, Malik Lyons-Law, center, and Adrien Lyons. Right: Malik Lyons-Law and Adrien Lyons play with their dog.
For decades, frustrated birth advocates and medical professionals have tried to sound an alarm about the ways medicine has failed Black women. Historians trace that maltreatment to racist medical practices that Black people endured amid and after slavery.
To fully understand maternal mortality and infant mortality crises for Black women and babies, the nation must first reckon with the dark history of how gynecology began, said Deirdre Cooper Owens, a historian and author.
“The history of this particular medical branch … it begins on a slave farm in Alabama,” Owens said. “The advancement of obstetrics and gynecology had such an intimate relationship with slavery, and was literally built on the wounds of Black women.”
Reproductive surgeries that were experimental at the time, like cesarean sections, were commonly performed on enslaved Black women.
Physicians like the once-heralded J. Marion Sims, an Alabama doctor many call the “father of gynecology,” performed torturous surgical experiments on enslaved Black women in the 1840s without anesthesia.
And well after the abolition of slavery, hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on Black women, and eugenics programs sterilized them.
Health care segregation also played a major role in the racial health gap still experienced today.
Until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Black families were mostly barred from well-funded white hospitals and often received limited, poor or inhumane medical treatment. Black-led clinics and doctors worked hard to fill in the gaps, but even after the new protections, hospitals once reserved for Black families remained under-resourced, and Black women didn’t get the same support regularly available for white women.
That history of abuse and neglect led to deep-rooted distrust of health care institutions among communities of color.
“We have to recognize that it’s not about just some racist people or a few bad actors,” said Rana A. Hogarth, an associate professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “People need to stop thinking about things like slavery and racism as just these features that happened that are part of the contours of history and maybe think of them more as foundational and institutions that have been with us every step of the way.”
Some health care providers still hold false beliefs about biological differences between Black and white people, such as Black people having “less sensitive nerve endings, thicker skin, and stronger bones.” Those beliefs have caused medical providers today to rate Black patients’ pain lower, and recommend less relief.
The differences exist regardless of education or income level. Black women who have a college education or higher have a pregnancy-related mortality rate that is more than five times higher than that of white women. Notably, the pregnancy-related mortality rate for Black women with a college education is 1.6. times higher than that of white women with less than a high school degree.
Ansonia Lyons bottle feeds her son, Adrien Lyons, in the television room of her parents' home.
In Angelica Lyons’ home state of Alabama, about 40 mothers die within one year after delivery. The toll on Black mothers is disproportionate.
The state's infant mortality rate for 2021 was 7.6 deaths per 1,000 live births. The disparities between Black and white babies is stark: The infant mortality rate in 2021 for white mothers was 5.8, while the infant mortality rate for Black mothers was 12.1, an increase from 10.9 from the prior year.
Black babies account for just 29% of births in Alabama, yet nearly 47% of infant deaths.
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A 2020 report by the Alabama Maternal Mortality Review Committee found that more than 55% of 80 pregnancy-related deaths that they reviewed in 2016 and 2017 could have been prevented.
Alabama launched its Maternal Mortality Review Committee in 2018 to investigate maternal deaths. But Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama’s Department of Public Health State Health Officer, said work remains to collect a fuller picture of why the disparities exist.
“We certainly know that from national numbers as well that Black women have worse maternal outcomes at every income level, which is pretty startling,” said Dr. Harris. “Age matters and just overall ZIP code matters. Unfortunately, where people live, where these children are born, is strongly associated with infant mortality. I think we’ll see something similar for maternal outcomes.”
And concerns about access and barriers to care remain.
In Alabama, 37% of counties are maternity care deserts — more than 240,000 women live in counties with no or little care. About 39% of counties don’t have a single obstetric provider.
Alabama is not alone in this. More than 2.2 million American women of childbearing age live in maternity care deserts, and another 4.8 million such women reside in counties with limited access to maternity care.
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Angelica Lyons said she wanted to seek maternal care at another hospital but the University of Alabama was the only one near her home equipped to handle her high-risk pregnancy, which included high blood pressure near the beginning.
Dr. Harris acknowledged the lack of access to care is a barrier for Black women who live in the state’s rural areas. Much of the state’s public health efforts are targeted along the rural Black Belt, which gets its name from the rich soil but it was also a region where many plantations were clustered.
Centuries later, the Black Belt continues to be a high-poverty region with a large Black population. More than half of the nation’s Black population lives in the South.
“We’ve talked a lot about structural racism and the impact of that on African American women and how it has no place in society,” Harris said. “I think we have to publicly call it what it is.”
Angelica Lyons’ traumatic birth experience was not the only one in her family.
After two miscarriages, her younger sister, Ansonia, became pregnant in 2020, and it was difficult.
Angelica Lyons and Ansonia Lyons pose for portraits.
Doctors told her she was suffering from regular morning sickness, though she was vomiting blood.
She was eventually diagnosed with an excessive vomiting disorder, hyperemesis gravidarum, and was extremely dehydrated. Ansonia spent months in and out of the same hospital where her sister had been treated.
“They said, ‘Welcome to the pregnancy, sweetheart. This is what pregnancy is,’” Ansonia, 30, recalled. “I told her, ‘No, this is not normal for me to be throwing up 10 to 20 times a day.’ My own primary care wasn’t listening to me.”
Ansonia said throughout her pregnancy she encountered hospital staff that made stereotypical jokes, calling her child’s father her “baby daddy,” a trope often lobbed at Black parents.
“She said, ‘So, your baby daddy, where does he work?’” Ansonia recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know what a baby daddy is but the father of my child is at work.’ She asked where he worked and I told her he had two businesses and she acted like she was surprised.”
Ansonia said staff assumed she didn’t have any health insurance, when she had insurance through her employer.
Ansonia has Type 2 diabetes and had issues with her blood pressure and heart throughout the pregnancy. She started to see a cardiologist and by the time she was 21 weeks pregnant, she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. She was placed on a medley of medications, and her doctors decided to deliver the baby early via C-section.
Ansonia was scared, given everything she witnessed her sister go through nearly two years prior.
“There were several times I told my boyfriend that I thought that I was going to die,” she said.
The C-section went well. Ansonia’s son, Adrien, was due in July 2021 but he was born at the end of May.
He spent his first five days in the intensive care unit, then was hospitalized for some early breathing problems.
Ansonia Lyons spends time with her son, Adrien Lyons.
Cesarean delivery rates are higher for Black women than white women, 36.8% and 31%, respectively, in 2021.
false
Problems continued for Ansonia after the delivery. She ended up needing a blood transfusion and was unable to see her son for his first few days of life.
A few months postpartum, she was still vomiting and having fainting spells that led to her being admitted to the hospital off and on. Her arms suffered from bruising from needles used to treat her throughout the pregnancy. She had always been slow to heal from any bruising, a common problem for diabetics.
Yet a doctor who had been involved throughout her entire pregnancy questioned why she had bruises on her arms and asked if she “smoked weed” or took any other recreational drugs. The hospital declined to comment, citing patient privacy laws.
“I said, ‘This is from me being stuck so many times and having to be in the hospital.’ I told him I don’t do any drugs,” she said.
He still sent her blood work off to be tested. The tests came back negative.
“That just made me not trust them, it made me not want to go back,” she said.
Ansonia Lyons walks down the corridor of her parents' home with her son, Adrien Lyons.
There are indications that the sufferings of Black mothers and their babies are being recognized, however late.
In 2019, U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood, an Illinois Democrat, and Rep. Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democrat, launched the Black Maternal Health Caucus. It is now one of the largest bipartisan congressional caucuses. The caucus introduced the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act in 2019 and again in 2021, proposing sweeping changes that would increase funding and strengthen oversight. Key parts of the legislation have been adopted but the bill itself has yet to be approved.
Biden’s budget for fiscal year 2024 includes $471 million in funding to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity rates, expand maternal health initiatives in rural communities, and implicit bias training and other initiatives. It also requires states to provide continuous Medicaid coverage for 12 months postpartum, to eliminate gaps in health insurance. It also includes $1.9 billion in funding for women and child health programs.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra told The Associated Press more must be done at all levels of government to root out racism and bias within health care.
“We know that if we provide access to care for mother and baby for a full year, that we probably help produce not just good health results, but a promising future for mom and baby moving forward,” he said.
Ansonia Lyons looks at a photograph of her younger self, right in photo, posing with her sister Angelica Lyons, left in photo.
Shelonda Lyons always taught both her daughters the bitter truth of racism, hoping it would prepare them to navigate life growing up in Birmingham, the Deep South city known for its place in civil rights history.
“When we were young, she was showing us those images of all the Black people being hung, being burned on the trees,” Angelica said, pointing to a book that remains on the family’s coffee table. “She wanted us to understand it, to know where we lived and that racism was something that we might have to deal with.”
But Shelonda never could have prepared for the treatment her daughters endured during their pregnancies. She remembers feeling helpless and angry.
“It’s like a slap in the face to me because at what point do you realize that you’re dealing with human beings? That it doesn’t matter what color they are,” she said, adding that now she worries any time they or her grandsons need to go to the doctor. “I don’t have a lot of trust.”
Angelica underwent two surgeries in the weeks that followed her C-section to repair internal damage and address her infection. She had to wear a colostomy bag for several months until she healed.
More than three years later, her stomach remains disfigured.
“I love my child, I love him all the same but this isn’t the body I was born with," she said. “This is the body that they caused from them not paying attention to me, not listening to me.”
First: Angelica Lyons secures her son, Malik Lyons-Law, into his child car seat while her sister, Ansonia Lyons, prepares to ride with her after their breakfast outing to celebrate their father's birthday. Second: James Lyons kisses his grandson, Adrien Lyons, in the kitchen of his home.
DIGITAL PRESENTATION CREDITS
Producers: Samantha Shotzbarger, Josh Housing, Wong Maye-E
Data Analysis: Angeliki Kastanis
Research: Rhonda Shafner
Text Editing: Anna Jo Bratton, Andale Gross
Graphics: Kevin S. Vineys, Angeliki Kastanis
Design and Development: Linda Gorman, Eunice Esomonu, Kati Perry
Audience Coordination and Production: Edward Medeles, Elise Ryan, Almaz Abedje, Sophia Rosenbaum
Creative Development: Raghuram Vadarevu
Project Management: Andale Gross
Project Vision and Development: Kat Stafford
Stafford, based in Detroit, is a national investigative race writer for the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. She was a 2022 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow at the University of Michigan.
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America Has Decided That Homeless People Aren't People
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-05-10-0616/housing-and-homelessness-america-has-decided-homeless-people-arent-people
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Inequality
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lefts
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/epvx9p/america-has-decided-that-homeless-people-arent-people-jordan-neely
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Many kids need tutoring help. Only a small fraction get it
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-03-10-0709/education-many-kids-need-tutoring-help-only-small-fraction-get-it
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Inequality
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https://apnews.com/article/tutoring-school-covid-relief-e12a452e423d5ebe30e2e7e6eeebe663
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Jessica Blalack, left, watches as her son Phoenix Blalack, 6 , works with a tutor on his laptop in his Indianapolis home, Tuesday, March 7, 2023. (AP Photo/AJ Mast)
David Daniel knows his son needs help.
The 8-year-old spent first grade in remote learning and several weeks of second grade in quarantine. The best way to catch him up, research suggests, is to tutor him several times a week during school.
But his Indianapolis school offers Saturday or after-school tutoring — programs that don’t work for Daniel, a single father. The upshot is his son, now in third grade, isn’t getting the tutoring he needs.
“I want him to have the help,” Daniel said. Without it, “next year is going to be really hard on him.”
As America’s schools confront dramatic learning setbacks caused by the pandemic, experts have held up intensive tutoring as the single best antidote. Yet even as schools wield billions of dollars in federal COVID relief, a small fraction of students have received school tutoring, according to a survey of the nation’s largest districts by the nonprofit news organization Chalkbeat and The Associated Press.
In eight of 12 school systems that provided data, less than 10% of students received any type of district tutoring this fall. To compare, in a federal survey, school officials said half of all U.S. students started this school year behind grade level in at least one subject.
A new tutoring corps in Chicago has served about 3% of students, officials said. The figure was less than 1% in three districts: Georgia’s Gwinnett County, Florida’s Miami-Dade County, and Philadelphia, where the district reported only about 800 students were tutored. In those three systems alone, there were more than 600,000 students who spent no time in a district tutoring program this fall.
The startlingly low tutoring figures point to several problems. Some parents said they didn’t know tutoring was available or didn’t think their children needed it. Some school systems have struggled to hire tutors. Other school systems said the small tutoring programs were intentional, part of an effort to focus on students with the greatest needs.
Whatever the reason, the impact is clear: At a crucial time for students’ recovery, millions of children have not received the academic equivalent of powerful medication.
“It works, it’s effective, it gets students to improve in their learning and catch up,” said Amie Rapaport, a University of Southern California researcher who has analyzed students’ access to intensive tutoring. “So why isn’t it reaching them?”
The Indianapolis school district last year launched two tutoring programs that connect students with certified teachers over video. One is available to all students after school, while the other is offered during the day at certain low-performing schools.
District officials say a trial run boosted student test scores. Parents give it high marks.
“The progress that he made in just a couple months last semester working with his tutor was kind of far beyond what he was grasping and doing at school,” said Jessica Blalack, whose 7-year-old, Phoenix, opted in to after-school tutoring.
Still, the two programs combined served only about 3,200 students last fall, or roughly 17% of students in district-run schools. Two additional tutoring programs operate at a handful of schools.
Only 35% of the students who registered for after-school tutoring last fall attended more than one session, according to district data.
Indianapolis Public Schools spokesperson Marc Ransford said the district is working to improve attendance and hopes to enroll more students in tutoring next school year. It’s also trying to accelerate student learning in other ways, including with a new curriculum and summer school.
Nationwide, schools report that about 10% of students are receiving “high-dosage” tutoring multiple days a week, according to a federal survey from December. The real number could be even lower: Just 2% of U.S. households say their children are getting that kind of intensive tutoring, according to the USC analysis of a different nationally representative survey.
Schools trying to ramp up tutoring have run into roadblocks, including staffing and scheduling. Experts say tutoring is most effective when provided three times a week for at least 30 minutes during school hours. Offering after-school or weekend tutoring is simpler, but turnout is often low.
Harrison Tran, a 10th grader in Savannah, Georgia, struggled to make sense of algebra during remote learning. Last year, his high school offered after-school help. But that wasn’t feasible for Harrison, who lives 30 minutes from school and couldn’t afford to miss his ride home.
Without tutoring help, he started this school year with gaps in his learning.
“When I got into my Algebra II class, I was entirely lost,” he said.
Relatively low family interest has been another challenge. Though test scores plunged during the pandemic, many parents do not believe their children experienced learning loss, or simply are unaware. The disconnect makes it more important to offer tutoring during school, experts say.
“Parents just aren’t as concerned as we need them to be,” said USC education professor Morgan Polikoff, “if we’re going to have to rely on parents opting their kids into interventions.”
Even when students want help, some have been let down.
In Maryland’s Montgomery County, 12th grader Talia Bradley recently sought calculus help from a virtual tutoring company hired by the district. But the problem she was struggling with also stumped the tutor. After an hour trying to sort it out, Talia walked away frustrated.
“My daughter was no farther along,” said Leah Bradley, her mother. “Having an option for online tutoring makes sense, but it can’t be the primary option if you’re looking for good results.”
Repeated in-person tutoring tends to be more effective than on-demand online help, but it’s also harder to manage. District rules add complexity, with safeguards like tutor background checks and vendor bidding rules slowing the process.
In Wake County, North Carolina, the school district began planning a reading tutoring program last summer. The program did not launch until November, and district officials last month said volunteers are tutoring fewer than 140 students — far fewer than the 1,000 students the program was designed to reach.
“We’re always looking to serve more students,” said Amy Mattingly, director of K-12 programs at Helps Education Fund, the nonprofit managing that program and another serving about 400 students. But, she added, it’s important to “see what’s working and make tweaks before trying to scale up.”
Some districts defended their participation numbers, saying tutoring is most effective when targeted.
In Georgia’s Fulton County, 3% of the district’s 90,000 students participated in tutoring programs this fall. Most of the tutoring was offered by paraprofessionals during the school day, with one hired to give intense support in each elementary school.
The district says time and staffing limit how many students can get frequent, intensive tutoring.
“We don’t want to water it down, because then you don’t get the impact that the research says is beneficial for kids,” said Cliff Jones, chief academic officer for the system.
Others worry too few are getting the help they need even as programs continue to grow.
This school year, about 3,500 students are getting reading tutoring from the North Carolina Education Corps. Meanwhile, in fourth grade alone, more than 41,000 students statewide scored in the bottom level on a national reading test last year.
“Who we are serving,” said Laura Bilbro-Berry, the program’s senior director, “is just a drop in the bucket.”
The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Cars transformed America. They also made people more vulnerable to the police.
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-02-28-0929/race-and-racism-cars-transformed-america-they-also-made-people-more-vulnerable
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Inequality
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lefts
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https://www.vox.com/culture/23614082/sarah-seo-traffic-police-tyre-nichols
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Traffic stops, usually over minor infractions, are one of the most common ways that people interact with police. The frequency with which they turn deadly, often with impunity for the officers responsible, has made them a major focal point in the effort to combat police brutality.
In one recent case, police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, pulled over 29-year-old Tyre Nichols for “reckless driving.” Over the next several minutes, officers brutally beat, kicked, and pepper-sprayed Nichols while screaming conflicting orders at him. Three days later, Nichols died from his injuries. Investigators have since said they were “unable to substantiate” the claim that he was driving recklessly, and five officers have since been charged in Nichols’s death.
Now, Memphis lawmakers are considering legislation that would ban officers from stopping drivers for certain low-level driving offenses. The bill, which is modeled after a Philadelphia law, attempts to reduce the potential for deadly interactions between the police and Black drivers, who are pulled over more frequently than drivers of other races.
How did we reach the point where traffic stops escalate into police killings? In her 2019 book, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom, Sarah Seo, a historian of criminal law and procedure and professor at Columbia Law School, examines how the automotive era upended society, dramatically expanded the power and authority of the police, and altered our society in the process, resulting in the traffic enforcement system we have today. Vox spoke to Seo about the legal, social, and historical forces that shaped our modern, deadly approach to traffic enforcement.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I want to start by asking you about the police killing of Tyre Nichols. These incidents of brutality are, sadly, not unusual in the United States. How did this traffic stop turn so deadly?
The unit that pulled over Mr. Nichols was a specialized crime task force. They are trained and delegated to fight crime, and they use minor traffic stops to begin their investigation. So you have a law enforcement unit that’s trained to investigate some of the more serious violent crimes using traffic enforcement as a starting point. It should be totally separate. Traffic law enforcement is an important government function because traffic safety is important, but that shouldn’t be co-opted by a law enforcement unit that’s not trying to enforce traffic laws.
How did the advent of the automotive age shape law enforcement in America?
Driving and owning cars became very common pretty quickly in American society. Government officials had no idea why almost everybody seemed to be violating traffic laws. Fatal accidents were really common, especially in the early years, to the point where people had morally righteous anger whenever an accident resulted in death. [In his book, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of The Motor Age in the American City] historian Peter Norton talks about this huge marketing shift that the automobile industry had to do to overcome the anger at the chaos and destruction that cars produced. It resulted in a lot of accidents, and also just traffic. It was chaos on the streets. So municipalities throughout the country passed an increasing number of traffic laws, and everybody violated them. They tried different ways of getting people to obey them, what I call 19th-century forms of getting people to comply with norms: churches, automobile associations, civic associations, and none of those worked. So they resorted pretty quickly to police law enforcement.
Usually, historians, we emphasize change over time, but this is a constant over time: People get really mad at the people who try to enforce traffic laws. And so given the hostility and aggression that enforcers experienced, what municipalities did was increase their discretionary power, so disobeying an order of traffic police became a misdemeanor. Their authority was increased to manage the difficulty of car drivers. At the same time, car drivers hated to be policed in their cars. They were really irate. A lot of the training of traffic enforcers [involved being told to] exercise discretion.
You write in your book about how the Supreme Court dealt with new, difficult questions about cars, crime and law enforcement. Can you tell me about Carroll v. United States and what it meant for the rights of drivers?
Before the Carroll case [in 1925], law enforcement needed a warrant to make a search. That became impracticable with cars because they could be driven off in a moment and there was no time to get a warrant. So the Supreme Court, in the Carroll case, created a warrant exception to say that an officer doesn’t need a warrant to stop and search a car if they have reason to believe that there’s evidence of a crime or contraband inside the car.
For a misdemeanor, police officers also needed to see that misdemeanor taking place with their own eyes, which basically means they knew that a crime was being committed. By saying you don’t need a warrant, even for misdemeanors, that basically watered down the standard for when police officers could act as well. So essentially, the Carroll doctrine really transformed and expanded law enforcement powers. It was the first time that the court constitutionally recognized and authorized police discretion. It gave officers the discretion to act to search if they had reason to believe that there was evidence of a crime, rather than actually knowing it.
This is where the traffic part of the story becomes important. Because pretty quickly, there are so many traffic laws and so many traffic violations and now officers actually don’t even need probable cause under Carroll to stop a car, they just need to see a traffic violation.
In Mr. Nichols’s case, they didn’t have any reason to suspect him of anything, right? They had a hunch. Maybe they just wanted to pick on somebody. They didn’t even have probable cause to believe that he had guns or drugs in his car. So what did they do? [They pulled him over on a] traffic violation.
Practically speaking, what does this mean for Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, which are meant to protect us and our property from “unreasonable searches and seizures”?
I think the best way to answer that is to actually quote from law enforcement themselves. There’s a text that I analyze in my book called Tactics for Criminal Patrol, and that book says the Fourth Amendment is your tool. Law enforcement are trained to view the Fourth Amendment as not a protector of our privacy rights but as a tool to do what they want.
In an automotive society, it is very watered down. It doesn’t do much.
Wait, how could it be their tool? How could it be interpreted as anything other than a protection of the rights of an individual against unreasonable searches?
Because they have strategies for complying with the Fourth Amendment, and the strategies that they use under the Fourth Amendment are authorized. The Fourth Amendment gives them a veneer of legitimacy.
A familiar pattern in these cases is they’ll stop someone for a minor traffic violation. They can’t search the car at that point still, because Carroll says you need probable cause to search the car. So the traffic stop becomes a moment where they have to gather facts that allows them ultimately to get to search the car. So there’s a doctrine of consent. That is, the police can say, “Can I search the car?” And if you say “sure,” you’ve given your consent, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply.
There’s all these power dynamics involved in getting consent. A lot of people don’t know that you can say no. And the Court held that under the Fourth Amendment, the police don’t have to tell drivers that they have the right to say no. So under Fourth Amendment law, as the Court has explained it, the police can pull somebody over for a minor violation, ask to search the car without telling them they have the right to say no, and then [if they say yes] search the car, and it’s given legitimacy to the entire interaction.
I think people are also confused about what the cops can or can’t do when they pull you over. You mentioned the Jay-Z song “99 Problems” in your book. He talks about how his “glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk in the back and I know my rights so you gon’ need a warrant for that.” Is that right? What should people know about what cops can and cannot do when they pull you over?
That “you need a warrant for that” line is wrong, because of the Carroll case. What I always tell my students is when you’re pulled over, and it’s not just about a traffic citation, ask the officer, “Am I free to leave?” because unless law enforcement has at least facts supporting reasonable suspicion that a crime is afoot, they have to let you leave.
If they want to keep you longer than that, always ask, “Am I free to leave?” And if they say no, then ask “Why not?” That’s not a huge help, because there’s so many things that law enforcement can say to amount to reasonable suspicion.
One way that police officers have often justified stopping someone for an investigatory stop is to tell the court, “There was an odor of marijuana.” It’s a really easy thing to tell a judge to justify the stop because it’s really hard to disprove it, and judges are very reluctant to disbelieve. There’s a presumption that officers are telling the truth.
One of the things that really struck me reading your book is how many of these questions about traffic, and what makes humans drive the way they do, and about how we keep people safe, were the same exact debates people were having at the advent of the automotive age. We know discriminatory policing is a huge problem. We also know road safety is a huge problem. And what we have now is very selective policing that is extraordinarily dangerous to people. So how do we balance those concerns? What does a system that is safe and equitable, and not sort of randomly deadly for Black drivers, look like?
I have two responses to that. I think a good place to start with any policy is to ask the most vulnerable people, and in this case, it’s communities of color. Because the pedestrian accident statistics, from what I hear from the people in this field, it really affects minority communities more, and there’s more deaths and accidents in minority communities. They are experiencing the worst of both safety issues and the policing issues. What do they think is the best way to strike that balance between safety and curbing police brutality? I think that’s a good place to start.
The other answer to your question is, are there ways to enforce traffic laws or even encourage safe driving without using police enforcement? It might not be possible to completely 100 percent eradicate human enforcement, but how close can we get there? I’ve advocated for traffic cameras, and the separation of police units that investigate crime from those enforcing traffic. Those are the two main policies that I’ve argued for.
Technology isn’t 100 percent discrimination-proof, and we have to also be mindful of things like equitable placement of the traffic cameras, we also have to pay attention to things like what are the fees. We have to pay attention to those policies. And we could consider a whole host of other things, but I think that’s a good start. I really like the idea of separating criminal law enforcement from traffic enforcement because traffic enforcement should be something that no one should be scared of.
Right now, the situation we have is that people of color, drivers of color, are definitely scared of being pulled over. It’s just harrowing. And you also have police officers saying that traffic stops are the most dangerous part of their jobs, and they’re definitely scared of it. We’re doing something very wrong when everybody’s scared of traffic stops. They should be kind of routine encounters: If you speed, you get a ticket, and that’s it. Just to tone down the anxiety of those encounters, I think, would help a lot. And the way to do that is when people know that when they’re pulled over, it’s not a criminal investigation. It’s just a traffic citation. I think that will go a long way to help.
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Racial bias affects media coverage of missing people. A new tool illustrates how
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Racial bias affects media coverage of missing people. A new tool illustrates how
December 5, 20226:00 AM ET
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A missing persons flyer, bearing the name of Annie Le, shown here in New Haven, Conn., in September 2009. This year, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) launched a new tool that allows users to openly share their "press value" with the world if they were to go missing.
Thomas Cain/Associated Press
Thousands of people are reported missing in the United States each year. And while not every missing person case will get widespread media coverage, the fight to locate them — whether alive or dead — is always the main priority.
However, when it comes to missing person cases involving people of color, that same media attention quickly dissolves, ultimately feeding into the phenomenon of 'Missing White Woman Syndrome' — a phrase coined by the late journalist Gwen Ifill that addresses the media's fascination with covering attractive, middle class-looking white women in comparison to missing persons of color.
This so-called media phenomenon never sat right with Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), who in an interview with NPR said something had to be done.
"Everybody talks about it and says 'We got to do something about it,' and nothing happens," Pope said.
"If you go missing and the press devotes a lot of attention to it, you have a better chance of a decent outcome, whereas you don't if they ignore it," he added.
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HBO's 'Black and Missing' offers an antidote to Missing White Woman Syndrome
In an effort to start the conversation on how both newsrooms and individuals cover stories involving missing people, CJR launched a new tool that allows users to openly share their "press value" with the world if they were to go missing.
The new tool, called "Are You Press Worthy?," estimates that younger, white women will get increasingly more news coverage than other racial groups — such as Black, Latino and Indigenous people.
To generate the database, researchers at CJR and advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day/New York surveyed roughly 3,600 articles about missing people reported last year by U.S. news outlets — including TV, radio, newspapers and digital media, according to a news release.
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Princeton University intensifies its search for a student missing since last week
From this, researchers were able to match the sampling in combination with factors such as age, gender and race from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) database to create the analysis.
"The implications of this are literally life and death — the amount of media coverage you get immediately after you go missing has a direct result on what happens to your case," Pope said.
It's increasingly common for people of color to go missing
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Red skirts are on display at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, Wednesday, May 5, 2021, to raise awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Phoenix Indian Center Executive Director Patricia Hibbeler said the skirts are a huge part of the lives of Native American women and girls.
Cheyanne Mumphrey/AP
It's no secret that missing person cases across the United States are becoming way more common — as the numbers continue to increase each year.
On average, more than 600,000 people go missing in the U.S. each year, according to the National Crime Information Center. Research shows that in 2021 alone, nearly 521,000 people were reported missing across the U.S. — with 40% of those cases being missing persons of color.
And sadly, 38% of people who go missing in the U.S. are Black, which is double the U.S. Black population of about 14%, according to the Black and Missing Foundation.
"I will say this, we are not naive to believe that every missing persons case will get national media attention," Natalie Wilson, co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation — a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing awareness to missing persons of color — told NPR.
Wilson said the nonprofit not only brings awareness to missing people of color across the U.S. but goes beyond the extra mile and helps families in the search for their missing loved one.
NATIONAL
With A Spotlight On Gabby Petito, The Parents Of 2 Missing Black Men Call For Action
"What we're trying to do is change that narrative — to show that our missing are important, too," Wilson said.
Some families are still dealing with how the media covers missing persons of color
David Robinson II wishes he wasn't intimately aware of how the media chooses to cover missing people.
David's son, Daniel, was last seen leaving a job site in Buckeye, Ariz., on June 23, 2021, and was reported missing later that day. It's been almost 18 months since Daniel went missing.
David tells NPR that when it came to his son, a Black man who moved to Phoenix for a job as a field geologist after graduating from college in 2019, it was extremely difficult to try and get any sort of media attention about his disappearance — which he describes as offensive.
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Daniel Robinson, 24, was last seen leaving a job site in Buckeye, Ariz. on June 23, 2021. Nearly a year and a half later, his father, David, is still continuing to search for him.
Family of Daniel Robinson
"Once I got [to Arizona], of course, I was on [the search] to find my son. I knew how important it was to get the word out about my son's case," David said.
He says after nearly three months of trying to grab the attention of local news outlets, he finally was able to get news coverage for Daniel's disappearance.
"The media wasn't really at the time reaching back out. So I had to keep pressing and pressing, but it took a lot of hard work," David said.
There are groups working to address the lack of coverage gap
News outlets as a whole are continuing to recognize this ongoing form of explicit media bias. Some local and national news outlets are making an effort to be more inclusive when it comes to covering missing person cases.
In addition, several organizations and websites are working together to raise awareness and tell the often-untold stories that normally wouldn't get media attention.
Our Black Girls centers on the stories of Black girls and women who have gone missing or, in some cases, were found dead under mysterious circumstances.
Launched in 2018 by journalist Erika Marie Rivers, the website is a one-woman show — as Rivers spends her nights scouring missing persons databases, archived news footage, old articles and other information she can find to piece together these untold stories.
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Created in 2018, the Our Black Girls website centers the stories of missing Black girls and women.
ourblackgirls.com/Screenshot by NPR
"I wanted to have a space where the stories of Black girls and Black women were being shared in this kind of culture of infotainment when it comes to true crime," Rivers said.
RACE
Tens Of Thousands Of Black Women Vanish Each Year. This Website Tells Their Stories
Since the website's launch four years ago, Rivers has published an article nearly every other day. She told NPR that while it may be a grueling schedule, she keeps the website up and running — because, as she emphasizes, she could have easily been one of these missing girls and women.
"This isn't a part of some greater organization. It's just me at home really kind of trying to do the work on behalf of my community ... to show other people that whatever resources you have, you don't have to have a lot to do a lot or even just to impact a little," Rivers said.
"You never know how that's going to change someone's life or help someone within your own community feel seen," she added.
Wilson echoed these sentiments.
"We all have a responsibility to not only stand up for ourselves but to raise awareness about this issue. It's really a pandemic that's affecting our community," Wilson said.
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Mass shootings compound loss felt by marginalized groups
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After mass shootings, the loss felt by marginalized groups already facing discrimination is compounded (December 30) (AP Production: Sharon Johnson) (AP Video: Cody Jackson, Lekan Oyekanmi, Noreen Nasir, Britany Peterson)
ATLANTA (AP) — Pulse was more than a safe space for Brandon Wolf and his friends. The nightclub was a haven for members of Orlando, Florida’s LGBTQ community — a place to be themselves without fear.
“It’s probably the first place I ever held hands with somebody I had a crush on,” Wolf said. “Without looking over my shoulder first, it’s one of the first places I ever wore my skinniest pair of jeans without being afraid of what someone might call me.”
On June 12, 2016, a gunman targeting the club’s patrons killed 49 people there, including two of Wolf’s best friends, and wounded 53. “It’s left such a hole in our hearts,” Wolf said.
After mass shootings, the loss felt by marginalized groups already facing discrimination is compounded. Some public health experts say the risk for mental health issues is greater for these groups — communities of color and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community among them.
The trauma is especially acute when the shootings happen at schools, churches, clubs or other places that previously served as pillars of those communities — welcoming and accepting spaces that are difficult to replace due to a lack of resources or the sociological and historical impact they have had.
“Folks from marginalized communities are already dealing with the burden of ... discrimination and racism ... and the emotional toll that they take,” said Dr. Sarah Lowe, a professor with the Yale School of Public Health and a clinical psychologist who has researched the long-term mental health consequences of mass shootings and other traumatic events. “All these other stressors can not only increase risk for mental health problems following a mass shooting, but they also increase risk for further loss of resources.”
As a result, there is the potential for members of such marginalized communities to leave or for the community itself to shut down, said Alan Wolfelt, a grief counselor and educator at the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado.
“That is why it is vital to support these communities, acknowledge their grief openly and honestly, and then help them rebuild their community in terms of meaning and purpose while realizing they have been totally transformed,” said Wofelt, who provides mental health services and education for individuals and communities that have experienced loss.
Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado, says it will eventually reopen at the same location, but with a new design and a permanent memorial, to honor five people killed last month in a targeted shooting. Club Q was a sanctuary for the LGBTQ community in the mostly conservative city of Colorado Springs, patrons said.
Pulse will not reopen. The site where it operated is now a memorial, and supporters plan to convert it into a permanent museum. The club’s closure has deeply scarred the LGBTQ community, which has tried to “re-create the sense of belonging” that Pulse had, Wolf said.
“I live next to a few other LGBTQ establishments and those are really important, but there was something truly special about Pulse and the community that we were able to create here,” he said. “For communities like ours, safe spaces are lifelines. They’re the refuges we carve out in a world that threatens violence against us every time we walk out the door.”
In some cases, traumatic events threaten basic necessities for marginalized groups, increasing the risk for mental health issues, said Lowe, the clinical psychologist.
Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, was closed for two months after 10 Black shoppers and workers were fatally shot during a racist rampage. During that time, there was no grocery store on the East Side.
Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, was founded in 1816 and became a pillar of the African American community in the state’s Lowcountry region.
On June 17, 2015, a self-avowed white supremacist who targeted a Bible study at the church killed nine Black congregants. One of the victims was minister Myra Thompson, sister of South Carolina State Rep. JA Moore.
“My sister was a servant to the other parishioners at the church, and she dedicated a lot of her life and her love to serving others through the church,” Moore said.
The church reopened for Sunday services four days after the massacre. It was important to send a message, he said.
“Even seven years later, the church is still resilient and still rebuilding and still serving,” Moore said. “I think the message that reopening up after such a horrific event is the story of African Americans in this country, the history of this country, where no matter our trauma and our pain and the horrors that we have to endure, we recognize that it’s an obligation as Americans to continue to push forward.”
Wolf, now 34, has also pushed forward. Following the shooting at Pulse, he became an advocate and activist for the LGBTQ community and now works as press secretary for Equality Florida.
He said Orlando nonprofit organizations that support the LGBTQ community have expanded their services, and other LGBTQ-owned bars and restaurants have grown their customer base. Wolf believes the city has become more inclusive since the shooting.
“While I think there’s a hole and there will always be something missing where Pulse used to be, I also think it’s beautiful that we’ve chosen to take the important components of what made Pulse, Pulse, and infuse them into every which way we live our lives in this city,” he said.
Associated Press journalists Cody Jackson in Miami and Lekan Oyekanmi in Houston contributed to this report.
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Records Reveal Medical Response Further Delayed Care for Uvalde Victims
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The scene outside Robb Elementary School minutes after officers killed the shooter who had been occupying two adjoining classrooms.
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Helicopter footage gathered by the Texas Rangers and obtained by The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post and ProPublica. Graphics by Imogen Piper/The Washington Post
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This story includes graphic descriptions of injuries sustained in an elementary school shooting. Graphic videos reviewed by reporters are not included.
UVALDE, Texas — Bullets had pierced Eva Mireles’ chest as she tried to shield students from a gunman’s semiautomatic rifle. But the fourth grade teacher at Robb Elementary was still conscious when police carried her out of classroom 112 and through a hallway crowded with dead and dying victims.
“You’re fine. You’re fine,” said her husband, Uvalde school district police officer Ruben Ruiz, who had been frantically trying to rescue her since the attack began. Mireles looked at him but could not speak. She’d been losing blood for more than an hour.
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Officers placed Mireles on the sidewalk just beyond one of the school’s exits and started treating her wounds. A medic later told investigators he did not see any ambulances, though video footage showed two parked just past the corner of the building, about 100 feet away.
The chaotic scene exemplified the flawed medical response — captured in video footage, investigative documents, interviews and radio traffic — that experts said undermined the chances of survival for some victims of the May 24 massacre. Two teachers and 19 students died.
Law enforcement’s well-documented failure to confront the shooter who terrorized the school for 77 minutes was the most serious problem in getting victims timely care, experts said. But previously unreleased records obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Washington Post for the first time show that communication lapses and muddled lines of authority among medical responders further hampered treatment.
Footage from body and dashboard cameras showed that two ambulances were outside the school when officers killed the gunman inside Robb Elementary on May 24 in Uvalde, Texas.
Credit:
Graphics by Imogen Piper/The Washington Post
Three victims who emerged from the school with a pulse later died. In the case of two of those victims, critical resources were not available when medics expected they would be, delaying hospital treatment for Mireles, 44, and student Xavier Lopez, 10, records show.
Another student, Jacklyn “Jackie” Cazares, 9, likely survived for more than an hour after being shot and was promptly placed in an ambulance after medics finally gained access to her classroom. She died in transport.
The disjointed medical response frustrated medics while delaying efforts to get ambulances, air transport and other emergency services to victims. Medical helicopters with critical supplies of blood tried to land at the school, but an unidentified fire department official told them to wait at an airport 3 miles away. Dozens of parked police vehicles blocked the paths of ambulances trying to reach victims.
Multiple cameras worn by officers and one on the dashboard of a police car showed two ambulances positioned outside the school when the shooter was killed. That was not nearly enough for the 10 or more gunshot victims then still alive, though additional ambulances began arriving 10 minutes later. Six students, including one who was seriously wounded, were taken to a hospital in a school bus with no trained medics on board, according to Texas EMS records.
Dozens of officers from federal, state and local agencies, as well as school buses, parked in the street leading to the school.
Credit:
Helicopter footage gathered by the Texas Rangers and obtained by The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post and ProPublica
Two ambulances were at the scene when police killed the gunman. But additional EMS responders struggled to get there.
Uvalde EMS radio traffic (12:58 p.m.) “10-4 we are [inaudible] at Grove Street and Grove Street is blocked off by law enforcement.”
One minute later, six students, including one who was seriously wounded, were taken to a hospital in a school bus with no trained medics on board, according to the Texas EMS records.
Credit:
Helicopter footage gathered by the Texas Rangers and obtained by The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post and ProPublica. Graphics by Imogen Piper/The Washington Post.
Some law enforcement cars were left locked and could not quickly be moved, forcing medics to frantically try various routes to the school, crisscrossing through residents’ yards.
Thirty-three minutes after police killed the gunman, an ambulance struggled to access the school via South Grove Street.
Credit:
Helicopter footage gathered by the Texas Rangers and obtained by The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post and ProPublica. Graphics by Imogen Piper/The Washington Post.
Although helicopters were available, none were used to carry victims directly from the school. At least four patients who survived were flown by helicopter to a more fully equipped trauma center in San Antonio after first being driven by ambulance to a nearby hospital or airport.
In public statements made since May, law enforcement officials have defended their officers’ actions as reasonable under difficult circumstances. Federal, state and local agencies that responded to the shooting have not directly addressed the medical response, nor did they answer detailed questions from the news organizations that worked jointly on this investigation.
Eric Epley, executive director of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, a nonprofit that helps coordinate trauma care in Southwest Texas during mass-casualty events, said medics encountered challenges, including a faulty radio system.
“These scenes are inherently confusing, challenging, and chaotic,” Epley said in an email. He later added, “We remain steadfast that the decisions by the on-scene medical leadership were sound and appropriate.”
The Texas Rangers, an arm of the state Department of Public Safety, are investigating what went wrong in Uvalde, including whether any victims might have survived if they had received prompt medical care. The local district attorney has said she will use that investigation to determine whether to charge anyone with a crime, including law enforcement officers.
Mireles, an avid hiker and CrossFit enthusiast who was fiercely proud of her college-graduate daughter, was shot within the first minutes of the attack, according to interviews students gave to investigators and a DPS analysis of gunfire obtained by the news organizations.
It’s difficult to know whether Mireles or anyone else who died that day might have survived their wounds, in part because local officials have refused to release autopsy reports. But footage shows that Mireles was conscious and responsive when she was pulled from the classroom, an indicator that she probably had survivable wounds, according to medical experts.
“Had medics gotten to her quickly, there’s a good chance she would’ve survived,” said Babak Sarani, director of critical care at George Washington University Hospital.
The flawed coordination among police and medical crews echoes missteps during other mass shootings, despite the development of recommended practices after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. In several of those cases, the communication problems resulted in delays in getting medical care for victims.
Medics on helicopters and in ambulances who responded to the Uvalde shooting told investigators they were confused about who was in charge, where they should be stationed and how many victims to expect. Some of them pleaded to be allowed closer to the scene. In the absence of clear guidance, experts said medics did the best they could while trying to save lives.
“They were told, essentially, to go to the airport and wait,” according to an interview the Texas Rangers conducted with Julie Lewis, the regional manager for AirLIFE, an air medical transport service that sent three helicopters from the greater San Antonio area. “They couldn’t figure out who was in command.”
Pleading for Help
The morning of May 24 was warm and sunny in Uvalde, the seat of a rural county of about 25,000 residents near the Texas border with Mexico. It was one of the last days of class, and teachers had planned a festive, celebratory day.
Mireles left her home wearing a flowery blouse and pair of black pants, feeling happy, her daughter said.
“My dad had just told her how beautiful she looked,” Adalynn Ruiz, 23, recalled in a text message to a reporter.
Eva Mireles, 44, was an educator for 17 years who taught fourth graders at Robb Elementary.
Credit:
Courtesy of Lydia Martinez Delgado
About two dozen fourth graders were in Rooms 111 and 112, adjoining classrooms, that day. They included Jackie, who relished cherry limeades with extra cherries, and Xavier, who loved art class and couldn’t wait to start middle school.
They’d just finished a student awards ceremony and settled into watching the Disney movie “Lilo & Stitch” when a teenage gunman dressed in black scaled the school’s fence and fired shots at 11:32 a.m.
Hearing the gunfire, Mireles quickly called her husband.
“There’s somebody shooting at the school,” she said, Ruben Ruiz recalled in an interview with investigators.
“We’re coming up,” he told her as he drove to the school with a state police officer, who later described the comment to investigators. “We’ll be there.”
The gunman got there first, entering Mireles’ classroom and firing his AR-15-style rifle. Officers rushed into the school minutes later and approached her classroom, but they retreated after the gunman fired through the door, grazing two of them.
Ruiz, who declined to comment for this report but spoke with state investigators, ran into the hallway at 11:36 a.m., according to video footage. But none of the officers tried to enter the classrooms, where the gunman continued to fire sporadically.
Desperate to reach his wife, Ruiz told the other officers what he knew.
Ruben Ruiz: ‘He’s in my wife’s classroom’
Credit:
Uvalde Police footage obtained by The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post and ProPublica
“He’s in my wife’s classroom,” he said, according to the footage. He later recalled to investigators that it felt “like my soul had left my body.”
About twenty minutes later, his wife called again.
At 11:56 a.m., he shouted, “She says she’s shot!”
That information was a key indication that officers were dealing with an active shooter, not a barricaded subject as school district police Chief Pete Arredondo incorrectly assumed, according to a legislative report on the shooting. But Ruiz’s comment did not change how law enforcement officers, following Arredondo’s lead, responded to the attack.
The school district’s active-shooter protocol designated the chief as the incident commander. Arredondo has repeatedly defended his role in the delay, telling Texas lawmakers investigating the massacre that he did not consider himself to be in charge. The Uvalde school board fired Arredondo in August, amid sharp public criticism of the police response to the shooting.
Trapped inside her classroom, Mireles tied a plastic bag around her arm to help slow the blood loss, one of her students told investigators. Another child in Room 112 told investigators that Mireles tried to protect him. The boy was hit in the back of his shoulder but survived.
At least two students used Mireles’ phone to call 911, begging officers to send help.
Newly Obtained Uvalde 911 Calls Shed More Light on Botched Police Response
Officers confiscated Ruiz’s gun and forced him to wait outside the school, where he told “anybody that would get next to me” that his wife was in danger, according to his law enforcement interview. He tried to get back in, but fellow officers stopped him. They later told investigators they had seized his gun for his own safety.
Inside Rooms 111 and 112, students anxiously tried to get officers’ attention. They knew that for Mireles, there was little time to spare.
One girl later recalled to investigators that Mireles “was telling us she was going to die.”
“We as a Nation Are Not Ready”
More than two decades after the Columbine school shooting shocked the nation, key failures continue to repeat themselves.
After that shooting, officers across the country received training on what they should do first when a mass shooting is reported: Subdue the shooter and stop the killing. Next, trainers tell first responders, they must “stop the dying.”
Over time, that insistence on prompt, effective medical care became an established mantra, as did the idea that all first responders — police, fire and EMS — should work under a joint command overseeing and coordinating the response. An overall incident commander is supposed to coordinate with the head paramedic or lead fire department supervisor to organize the medical response, experts said.
“If you don’t have a system, the whole response goes awry,” said Bob Harrison, a former police chief and a homeland security researcher at the Rand Corp., a think tank based in California.
A Justice Department review of the response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people found that the police and fire departments’ decision to operate separate command posts for hours led to a lack of coordination.
A review by local authorities of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting that killed 12 people discovered that the delayed establishment of a unified command led to communication problems between police and fire responders, slowing medical care for victims.
“We as a nation are not ready,” said Sarani, the director of critical care at George Washington University Hospital. “The air assets and the ground assets do not talk to each other very well. The fire, the police do not talk to each other very well.”
Experts said that the Uvalde shooting response appeared to lack both an overall incident commander and someone clearly in charge of coordinating the emergency medical response.
The rural community’s emergency medical services are contracted out to private companies. On that day in May, Stephen Stephens, the director of Uvalde EMS, was in charge of organizing helicopters and ambulances responding to Robb Elementary, he later told investigators.
“My job was to manage assets,” he said, noting that Juan Martinez, his deputy, instructed medics arriving at the scene.
After police breached the classrooms where the shooter had been holed up, Stephens said he handed command over to the fire chief of neighboring Medina County. The Medina fire chief declined to comment to the news organizations.
It’s unclear what information Stephens had about how many victims first responders should expect to find. Multiple medics expressed confusion over who was in charge of the medical response and where to go.
“There was no EMS command and control,” said Julio Perez, a medic for AirLIFE, who told investigators he was pleading to help. “Nobody could tell me anything.”
His account was backed up by Lewis, the manager for the air transport service, who said several of her medics were upset. “They feel like the resources weren’t used as they should have been.”
The school district declined to release its active-shooter response plans or protocols and did not answer questions posed by ProPublica, the Tribune and The Post. Separately, the state has fought the release of the active-shooter plans it requires school districts to submit, with the backing of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office determines whether government information is open to the public. The news organizations also have sued state and city officials for some records related to the shooting and its response.
News Organizations Sue Texas Department of Public Safety Over Withheld Uvalde Shooting Records
The city of Uvalde did not respond to detailed questions about the communication between police and medics or about its training for mass shootings, citing ongoing litigation. But a spokesperson said in an email that the city’s police department has not conducted any formal training with Uvalde EMS, a nonprofit that provides emergency medical services for the city and county.
A document from a March active shooter training conducted by the school district, later published by San Antonio television station KSAT, provides only general guidance on how police and EMS should work together.
The plan states that EMS, fire and law enforcement need to know “the exact location of the injured, as well as the number and types of injuries to expect upon their arrival.” It does not detail a process for communicating that information.
Stephens, Martinez and representatives for Uvalde EMS did not respond to requests for comment, including queries sent by certified letter. Five other private ambulance companies seen responding to the shooting also did not answer written questions or phone calls seeking comment.
Confusion and Delays
Martinez told investigators that he directed other medics to park their ambulances nearby until they knew whether it was safe to move closer. Experts said it’s not unusual to keep ambulances at a short distance from crime scenes with active shooters.
He soon identified a pressing obstacle: As dozens of officers descended on the scene, they left their vehicles blocking the roads that ambulances needed to get to the school.
Martinez instructed the county’s two dispatchers to ask law enforcement to create a clear path.
“We were anticipating essentially just grabbing whatever patients we had and running out,” he later told investigators.
While outside, Martinez and a second medic treated a Uvalde police lieutenant who had been grazed in the head when the gunman shot through the classroom door. Then they waited, with no clear sense of the horror unfolding inside the school.
“We didn’t know the numbers of patients, number of injuries, number of fatalities,” Martinez recalled in interviews with investigators. “Nobody was relaying that.”
Other emergency crews were also struggling to get crucial information and figure out where to go.
The crew of an AirLIFE helicopter grounded in Uvalde for maintenance heard the unfolding chaos on the radio and offered to help. The crew later told investigators that the emergency responders they talked to had rejected their assistance repeatedly. They did not provide the names of those responders.
“Nobody knew what was really going on,” said Perez, one of the helicopter medics. He said the officials told his crew to “stand by, stay there — don’t come.”
With no one clearly in charge of the police or medical responses, an elite Border Patrol tactical team that began arriving at the school at 12:10 p.m. assumed both roles, according to a July report by a state House committee tasked with investigating the response.
Merino-Ruiz: ‘They’ve been bleeding for a while’
Credit:
Uvalde Police footage obtained by The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post and ProPublica
The team, which typically handles dangerous situations involving migrants at the border, devised a plan to breach the adjoining classrooms while its medics set up a triage station.
Medical triage area set up inside the school
Credit:
Texas state trooper body-camera footage obtained by The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post and ProPublica
At 12:50 p.m., a Border Patrol-led unit that included local police breached the classrooms. The gunman sprung from a closet and fired. They shot back, killing him.
The team gave the all-clear.
Officers who had packed the hallway now filled the classrooms. Ruiz ran back into the school, looking for his wife. Children lay on the floor, many near or on top of each other, most of them dead.
“I Can Still Feel the Heart”
Officers quickly began taking victims to a triage area inside the school, carrying some by their limbs. With so many law enforcement officers and first responders at the scene, there was little space to move. Some children were placed in a line on each side of the hallway.
One local medic later complained to investigators that the response was so chaotic that emergency crews were stepping on victims.
Several medics expressed frustration to investigators that law enforcement officers brought them students who could not be saved.
“You’re doing this wrong,” Martinez, the Uvalde EMS deputy supervisor, recalled yelling to police after being handed a child with a significant head injury. “There’s nothing I can do for this patient.”
Within minutes, medics determined that several critically wounded patients with pulses needed to be urgently taken to a hospital where surgeons could provide advanced care.
A girl matching the description of Jackie — wearing the same red shirt and black shorts she’d had on earlier in the day — was placed in one of the two ambulances at the school. The 9-year-old, described by her family as a “firecracker” for being so full of life, died on the way to the hospital.
Andrew Aviles, a regional trainer for the Border Patrol’s medic team, began treating a young boy, doing everything he could to revive him.
“I can still feel the heart,” Aviles yelled, as he later recounted to investigators in an interview punctuated with sobs. “I need a fucking plane. I need a helicopter down. I need to get a kid inside there!”
The boy needed to be taken to San Antonio’s University Hospital, the nearest Level 1 trauma center, which is equipped to handle the most serious cases. It was about 45 minutes away by helicopter, 90 minutes in an ambulance.
Uvalde is more than 80 miles from the nearest Level 1 trauma centers, which provide the most advanced care for seriously injured patients.
Credit:
Graphic by Imogen Piper/The Washington Post
The child seen in the police body-camera footage fits the description of Xavier. A law enforcement document listing what students were wearing indicates that Xavier had on a black shirt, blue jeans and black-and-white shoes. That is similar to the clothing worn by the boy Aviles was treating, the officer video shows.
Xavier Lopez, 10, was a fourth grader at Robb Elementary School.
Credit:
Courtesy of Felicha Martinez
Aviles had heard that the wounded were being airlifted from a field on the west side of the school, so he and other medics put the boy on a stretcher and began rushing him out to the dusty patch of grass at 12:56 p.m.
There was no helicopter.
Although at least five medical helicopters responded to the shooting, not one picked up anyone from Rooms 111 and 112 at the school, according to a review of flight data, satellite imagery and photographs, as well as interviews with air crew members by Texas Rangers.
Epley, the executive director of the regional coordinating agency for trauma care, said it was not safe to have medical helicopters at a scene with an active shooter. But Uvalde police could be heard on radio transmissions asking where medical helicopters were 10 minutes after the gunman was killed. It took 15 minutes more for the first to land near the school.
Spokespeople for the ambulance helicopter companies, Air Methods, which includes AirLIFE, and Air Evac Lifeteam, both of which responded to the shooting, said they rely on local medics to decide who should be airlifted. They declined to respond to detailed questions.
Each passing second dimmed the odds for the boy who appeared to be Xavier.
Dread set in when Aviles felt softness on the back of the child’s head, indicating a significant injury. The wounds were consistent with those detailed in the autopsy report shared with Xavier’s family, which revealed that the boy had been shot five times.
“I was like, ‘Guys, he’s …,’” Aviles said, pausing for a moment to take a breath as he spoke with investigators. “That took the wind out of my sails.”
First responders waited 11 minutes for a helicopter but decided to drive to San Antonio when it didn’t arrive. At that point, the boy had already gone into cardiac arrest. Overwhelmed medics enlisted state Trooper Matthew Neese to help with CPR in the ambulance.
Once a gunshot victim’s heart stops beating, the likelihood of survival diminishes sharply, experts said. A patient in that condition should immediately be brought to an operating room, where a surgeon can attempt to stop internal bleeding.
State records show that Neese did not have an EMT or paramedic license in Texas, but he performed CPR on Xavier for more than 30 minutes while a medic tried to treat the boy’s wounds. The ambulance diverted to Medina Regional Hospital in Hondo, about 40 miles from Uvalde, where doctors declared the child dead shortly after 2 p.m., according to his family.
A helicopter arrived near Robb Elementary at 1:15 p.m., eight minutes after the ambulance departed.
Hospital officials did not respond to a request for comment and neither did Neese. The trooper later attended Xavier’s funeral, according to the boy’s family.
Reached on his cellphone, Aviles declined to comment, referring questions to his supervisors at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In a statement, a CBP spokesperson said the agency is investigating the role of its officers in the response and could not comment while that was ongoing.
Xavier’s mother, Felicha Martinez, said an awful premonition hit her as she stood outside the school waiting for news. Her body went limp and she collapsed. His father, Abel Lopez, searched for any sign of his son, peering between the buses blocking the view of the school.
They have since learned bits and pieces about what happened to their son but are left with questions, including why Xavier wasn’t taken to a hospital by helicopter.
“If the cops had done their job, the medics might’ve had a chance,” Lopez said.
Martinez added: “I’m so full of anger. I don’t know how to put into words how much I am hurting.”
“Don’t Give Up”
On the day of the shooting, emergency responders frantically tried to keep Mireles alive on the sidewalk outside Robb Elementary. She was deteriorating quickly. Within minutes, her heart had stopped and first responders began to administer CPR.
More ambulances arrived at the school, but it wasn’t until 16 minutes after the breach that medics put her inside one.
Eva Mireles was carried out of her classroom, Room 112, and through the school hallway by four police officers, her husband following behind.
A Border Patrol medic said in an interview with investigators: “I asked the guys, ‘Hey let’s not work on her here.’ But we look to the right and there’s no ambulances. So we had to work on her there.”
But there were two ambulances parked about 100 feet away.
Credit:
Graphics by Imogen Piper/The Washington Post
Medics laid Mireles on the ground and performed chest compressions.
She lay on the ground for more than 10 minutes, during which six ambulances arrived and two left. It’s unclear why Mireles was not immediately put into one of these ambulances.
Credit:
Graphics by Imogen Piper/The Washington Post
Ultimately, medics moved Mireles off the ground and into an ambulance.
Credit:
Graphics by Imogen Piper/The Washington Post
“Come on, ma’am, don’t give up,” a voice can be heard saying in a state trooper’s body-camera footage.
By then, the teacher’s chances of survival had sunk.
In the ambulance, medics began a blood transfusion and used an automatic compression device to try to get the teacher’s heart pumping again. They gave her fluids and intubated her.
But they did not take her to a hospital, a decision some experts described as a mistake and others said could indicate that medics thought Mireles had no chance of survival.
First responders continued CPR in the ambulance for about 40 minutes before the chief medic for Uvalde EMS declared her dead.
The ambulance that Mireles was inside never left the school curb.
Lomi Kriel
Lomi Kriel is an investigative reporter for the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative.
[email protected]
Lomi Kriel
@lomikriel
Signal: 832-729-3421
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Claudine Gay to be Harvard’s 1st Black president, 2nd woman
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2022-12-15-1541/culture-claudine-gay-be-harvard-s-1st-black-president-2nd-woman
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Inequality
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lefts
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https://apnews.com/article/education-penny-pritzker-08ae6297a31f4f42b85a2813336b33e2
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This photo provided by Harvard University shows Claudine Gay. Harvard University announced Thursday, Dec. 15, 2022, that Gay will become its 30th president, making her the first Black person to lead the Ivy League school and only the second woman. (Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University via AP)
BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University announced Thursday that Claudine Gay will become its 30th president, making her the first Black person and the second woman to lead the Ivy League school.
Gay, who is currently a dean at the university and a democracy scholar, will become president July 1. She replaces Lawrence Bacow, who is stepping down and has said he wanted to spend more time with family.
“This is crazy, right?” a beaming Gay said as she was introduced to applause at the Smith campus center. She currently serves as the Edgerley Family Dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“I am absolutely humbled by the confidence that the governing board has placed in me,” she said. “I am also incredibly humbled by the prospect of succeeding President Bacow and leading this incredible institution.”
A child of Haitian immigrants, Gay is regarded as a leading voice on the issue of American political participation. Among the issues she has explored is how a range of social and economic factors shape political views and voting. She also is the founding chair Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative, which studies issues like the effects of child poverty and deprivation on educational opportunity and American inequality from a global perspective.
“Claudine is a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence, to championing both the value and the values of higher education and research, to expanding opportunity, and to strengthening Harvard as a fount of ideas and a force for good in the world,” Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation and chair of Harvard’s presidential search committee, said in a statement.
In her speech, Gay called for greater collaboration among schools at Harvard and said there was an urgency for the university be more engaged with the world and to “bring bold, brave and pioneering thinking to our greatest challenges.”
“The idea of the ‘ivory tower’ — that is the past not the future of academia. We don’t exist outside of society, but as part of it,” she said. “That means that Harvard has a duty to lean in, engage and to be of service to the world.”
With Gay’s appointment, women will outnumber men as chiefs of the eight Ivy League schools. Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania appointed women earlier this year, joining Brown and Cornell. Columbia, Princeton and Yale are led by men. Drew Faust was the first woman to be president at Harvard. A noted historian of the American South and the Civil War, she stepped down in 2018 after 11 years.
Gay will be the only Black president currently in the Ivy League and the second Black woman ever, following Ruth Simmons, who led Brown University from 2001 to 2012.
Gay’s appointment is remarkable in part because relatively few U.S. universities are led by Black presidents, said Eddie R. Cole, a historian of college presidents and race at the University of California, Los Angeles. Harvard wields outsized influence in higher education, he said, and other universities are bound to take notice.
“At a time when everyone continues to look at Harvard, this presidential hire will arguably be one of the most significant in American higher education for years to come,” Cole said.
As president of Harvard, Gay will shape decisions that can have impact at the local, state and federal level, Cole said. That includes racial issues that the campus has confronted in recent years, including affirmative action and the school’s own history with slavery.
Bacow, who took over as president in 2018, expanded and updated the university’s teaching and research missions and fostered cooperation across disciplines to address issues including climate change and inequality.
Under his leadership, Harvard joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a legal challenge to the Trump administration’s decision to make international students leave the country if they planned on taking classes entirely online in fall 2020 at the height of the pandemic. He criticized the policy for its “cruelty” and “recklessness.”
Harvard also faced challenges during his tenure. The university survived a legal challenge to its admissions policies in U.S. District Court, a case now being weighed by the Supreme Court.
It was also disclosed that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein visited Harvard’s campus more than 40 times after his 2008 sex crimes conviction — long before Bacow’s tenure — and was even given his own office.
Gay’s early challenges could include fallout from the Supreme Court’s review of the use of race in admissions. The court is weighing challenges to processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which consider race among many factors when choosing students.
Lower courts have upheld practices at both universities, rejecting claims that they discriminated against Asian American applicants. But in oral arguments this year, the high court’s six conservative justices expressed doubts about the practice, which has been upheld under Supreme Court decisions reaching back to 1978.
Associated Press education writer Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.
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Cherokees ask US to make good on promise: A seat in Congress
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2022-11-28-1408/federal-state-and-tribal-powers-cherokees-ask-us-make-good-promise-seat
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Inequality
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lefts
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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cherokees-us-make-good-promise-seat-congress/story?id=93584976
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The country's largest Native American tribe, the Cherokee Nation, is ramping up calls on the U.S. government to fulfill a promise made nearly 200 years ago.
The historic treaty, which forced the Cherokee people off their ancestral lands across the Southeast and onto the infamous Trail of Tears in 1835, was supposed to give them official representation in Washington in exchange.
It has never happened.
Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., of the Cherokee Nation launched a campaign in 2019 to convince U.S. House leaders to fulfill a treaty promise from 1835 and seat a no...
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ABC News
MORE: In Native American adoption case, Supreme Court explores race and tribal sovereignty
"The promise was very simple," said Cherokee Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. "The treaty literally says the Cherokee Nation 'shall have' a right to a delegate in the House of Representatives."
The non-voting position, similar to a role held by representatives of the District of Columbia, Guam, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands, would give the Cherokee a voice at the epicenter of political power.
Delegates are able to sit on committees, introduce bills, and give speeches on the House floor, even if they cannot participate in an up-or-down vote on final legislation.
There are currently six non-voting delegates in the U.S. House. No Native American tribe has ever been formally represented.
Details from the Treaty of New Echota (1835) on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian on Friday, April 12, 2019 in Washington.
Paul Morigi/AP FILE
"Thinking about the fact that the U.S. has held the Cherokee Nation accountable for treaty obligations, we now see an opportunity to get some justice by asserting this right," Hoskin said.
For generations, the promised position was overlooked and unfilled. But in 2019, the tribe named Kim Teehee - a former Obama administration advisor - to be its delegate, and Hoskin began a campaign to get her seated.
MORE: To Native Americans, reparations can vary from having sovereignty to just being heard
"There has been a need to educate members of Congress," Hoskin said. "I think the only thing that has stood in our way really is this learning curve."
The Treaty of New Echota, negotiated with the administration of President Andrew Jackson and ratified by the Senate, set into motion a mass migration from what is now parts of Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee to make way for white settlers.
16,000 Cherokee trekked west to Oklahoma. A quarter of them -- 4,000 people -- died along the way.
Kim Teehee, a former Obama administration advisor on Native American issues, was selected by the Cherokee Nation to serve as a non-voting delegate to Congress if lawma...
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ABC News
"To seat the delegate would give some small measure of justice to those who lost their lives" on the Trail of Tears, Teehee said on Capitol Hill this month after a House Rules Committee hearing on the issue. "I feel like I'm in a full circle moment here, because I'm representing the treaty right that they died for," she said.
Seating a Cherokee delegate -- and fulfilling the government's promise -- has rare bipartisan support in the House.
"I'm glad to see tribes advocating for their treaties with such conviction," said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Oklah., the top Republican on the House Rules Committee, who is Native American.
"If it were up to me, you know, I would seat a delegate team tomorrow," said Committee Chairman Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. "But obviously there are some issues that need to be resolved."
Clockwise are, from center, Chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass., Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., ranking member Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., chief of the Ch...
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Tom Williams/AP
There is little organized or outspoken opposition to seating a Cherokee delegate, but lingering legal and procedural questions have complicated the tribe's campaign.
One sticking point: the potential perception that Cherokee Americans could effectively get a "super vote" in Congress -- represented by their delegate and the congressperson from their district. (As American citizens, Cherokee members can vote in federal elections.)
"It's uncomfortable for non-Indians to think about the possibility of Cherokees having an extra say, but it was also uncomfortable for the Cherokees to be forced out of Georgia,' said Ezra Rosser, a law professor and specialist in Indian Law at American University Washington College of Law.
Ezra Rosser, an expert on Indian law at American University Washington College of Law, says the 1835 Treaty of New Echota offers the Cherokee Nation a "clear cut" right to non...
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ABC News
"Are we as a society ready to take seriously the obligations that we owe to tribes?" Rosser asked. "That has legal components around it, but it's largely about what we as a country believe in."
There is also the question of whether creation of a new seat in the House needs a new vote from both chambers of Congress and a signature by the president.
"Then, there's the courts," added Rosser, "which I think without question would be asked to weigh in on this."
Teehee notes that the Treaty of New Echota was ratified by the Senate and signed by the president 187 years ago. "It is already the supreme law of the land," she said.
Bipartisan members of the House Rules Committee voiced support for seating a Cherokee delegate in the next Congress, starting in 2023.
ABC News
"And that's why we've had nearly unanimous support throughout the country from other Indian tribes expressing support for us," she said. "But in addition to that, it'll be an opportunity for us to continue to educate my fellow colleagues about the issues that pertain to us."
Chief Hoskin says he is optimistic the Cherokee Nation is on the verge of making history in the 118th Congress, which begins in January 2023. But he concedes progress on Capitol Hill is notoriously unpredictable and painfully slow.
"If you're a tribal leader, and you know your history, you understand the value of patience," Hoskin said. "I also understand that we're talking about the Congress of the United States, an institution in which Cherokees have often not only struck out but have been on the receiving end of a great deal of injury."
Cherokee Nation delegate Kim Teehee and principal chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., outside the U.S. Capitol in November 2022. The tribal leaders are lobbying Congress to fulfill a...
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ABC News
In a statement, outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the Cherokee are "entitled" to representation and that Democrats "will continue to explore a path" forward.
Republican leader and leading GOP candidate for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy did not respond to ABC News' requests for comment on the seating of a Cherokee delegate.
" I think most Americans, if they think about what makes the country great, being a country that keeps its word is one of those thoughts – and this is a great opportunity for the country to keep its word," Hoskin said.
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For Most College Students, Affirmative Action Was Never Enough
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-03-1135/education-most-college-students-affirmative-action-was-never-enough
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Inequality
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centers
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/03/opinion/for-most-college-students-affirmative-action-was-not-enough.html
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Harvard
Admit rate: 4%
10k students
Duke University
Admit rate: 6%
7k students
Amherst College
Admit rate: 9%
2k students
University of California, Los Angeles
Admit rate: 11%
30k students
Carnegie Mellon University
Admit rate: 14%
7k students
Boston University
Admit rate: 19%
20k students
University of Florida
Admit rate: 30%
30k students
Admit rate: 53%
4k students
Brigham Young University
Admit rate: 59%
30k students
Admit rate: 64%
60k students
University of Pittsburgh
Admit rate: 67%
20k students
Admit rate: 68%
40k students
Purdue University
Admit rate: 69%
40k students
Arizona State University
Admit rate: 88%
60k students
West Chester University of Pennsylvania
Admit rate: 89%
10k students
University of Wyoming
Admit rate: > 95%
9k students
90% admission rate
80% admission rate
70% admission rate
60% admission rate
50% admission rate
40% admission rate
30% admission rate
20% admission rate
10% admission rate
These are America’s major four-year colleges, arranged by their admission rates.
At the very top are the most selective colleges — the schools at the center of the affirmative action debate.
They also represent a tiny share of all college students.
Just 6 percent of all college students attend a school with an acceptance rate of 25 percent or less.
Even colleges that admit a quarter to half their applicants are attended by only 10 percent of students.
It’s not until you reach admission rates of 70 percent to 80 percent that you begin to see the colleges that the majority of students attend.
56 percent of these college students go to a school that admits at least three-quarters of its applicants.
These statistics reveal a simple fact about affirmative action in higher education: It mattered very little for the majority of American college students.
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By Richard Arum and Mitchell L. Stevens
Graphics by Quoctrung Bui
Black
White
Asian
Hispanic
Share of students
60%
50%
40%
Asian students are much more likely to attend selective schools.
30%
20%
10%
Colleges that admit
less than 25 percent
25 to 50 percent
50 to 75 percent
Note: Data as of 2021. Source: U.S. Department of Education
What drives this dynamic is that most students apply to and enroll at schools near their families, regardless of whether the school is a good academic fit. We live in a country full of colleges that don’t have the resources and academic quality to match their students’ talents. Social scientists describe this problem in the college selection process as “undermatching.” Efforts to nudge students to broaden their horizons and consider attending selective colleges further from home have had only modest success.
Consider the amount of money schools report spending on student instruction each year. For example, in our state, California, U.C.L.A. and the private liberal-arts college Pomona report spending richly per student at $60,528 and $40,275, respectively. Meanwhile, less selective and more diverse institutions like San Francisco State ($8,087) and California State University, Los Angeles ($6,631), report expenditures that are less than a quarter of those amounts.
States also did their part in this era, investing some of the prosperity of the post-World War II decades to create and subsidize public colleges and universities. (Historians remind us that our country accomplished these milestones at a time when colleges and universities were far more closed off to women and color.)
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Reparations: The US town paying its black residents
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Reparations: The US town paying its black residents
Published
12 October 2022
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IMAGE SOURCE,
LOUIS WEATHERS
Image caption,
When Louis Weathers and his wife were looking for a house in the 1950s, they were only shown property in the majority-black area of Evanston
By Mike Wendling
BBC News, Evanston
Evanston, Illinois, is a quiet place in the middle of an unusual experiment.
In this university town just north of Chicago, a sheen of affluence glints through the windows of solid brick buildings downtown, while rainbow flags and "Black Lives Matter" placards dot what seems like every other suburban lawn.
Its population of 78,000 is diverse - about two-thirds white, nearly a fifth black, with sizeable Asian and Hispanic communities - and its politics, predictably, liberal. During the 2020 election, Donald Trump got less than a tenth of the vote here.
But like other places across the country, Evanston is dealing with a legacy of racial inequality stemming from slavery and segregation.
While some places, like California, are discussing reparations to make amends for slavery, Evanston's approach has zeroed in on a related but more recent injustice: discrimination against black citizens when it comes to buying a home.
The city has started paying money to black residents who faced barriers to buying the home they wanted due to mid-20th Century policies - the first US city to do so.
Recipients are delighted - but not everyone agrees about whether this is truly justice.
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Image caption,
Evanston's political scene is reliably progressive. Local politicians say this made passing a reparations bill possible
What are reparations?
The idea that America owes something to its black residents - some of whom were slaves, and some of whom have continued to suffer from the repercussions of racism - has existed for centuries.
In the 18th Century, a slave from Ghana named Belinda Royall was granted a pension from a Massachusetts court. Some historians consider it the first example of slavery reparations in US history.
A Civil War-era Army order confiscated a huge swathe of land in South Carolina and Georgia from white owners to distribute to freed slaves. The size of the parcels led to the slogan "40 acres and a mule" - a byword for promised slavery reparations - but the promise was ultimately not fulfilled.
Since the Civil War, no large-scale reparations were ever attempted, and until very recently, the idea of paying descendants of slaves was a political non-starter. Black US congressional leaders have introduced a bill every year to establish a committee to study reparations since the 1980s, but it has never come close to becoming law.
"It's a heavy lift," said Robin Rue Simmons, the reparations activist and former Evanston council member who was instrumental in getting the city's reparations law passed.
Ms Simmons sees the Evanston project as one small local step, but one that might have huge implications.
"We have proven that reparations are possible and attainable," she said.
Housing, not slavery
According to Ms Simmons, Evanston's plan was shaped by a series of town hall meetings and consultations with local residents.
But it is notable for what it is not - there are no cash payments and it has no direct link to slavery.
Instead, the project is focused on a specific subset of the black community. To be eligible, adult residents had to have lived in Evanston before 1969, when housing discrimination in various forms was at its height. The system prevented most African-American families from building up generational wealth.
Evanston's reparations take the form of grants of $25,000 which can only be used for house repairs, to pay down a mortgage, or as a down payment on a house.
Those stipulations mean the pool of eligible residents is small - just over 120 applied in the first round.
They are old - in their 70s at least. Several applicants have already died. And the process has taken time. The law passed in 2019, but it was only recently that the first 16 residents were randomly chosen to receive the first pay-outs.
Those factors made residents like Louis Weathers, 87, doubtful that they would ever benefit.
"Like everyone else, I was just waiting for my 40 acres and a mule, which I knew I would never get," he said.
But as it turned out, Mr Weathers was one of the first 16 chosen. He grew up in Evanston after his father moved from Alabama in the 1930s.
Looking for a home
After Army service in Korea, Mr Weathers came back to Evanston and got a job at the Post Office. He and his wife hoped to raise a family, so he purchased a house in Evanston's primarily black Fifth Ward - one of the few neighbourhoods where he could buy.
The location didn't bother him, but the terms of the loan alarmed Mr Weathers. Rather than being given a mortgage, he was given a contract loan - a type of financial instrument then commonly offered to African Americans.
Image caption,
Louis Weathers plans to put the reparations money towards his son's housing costs
Unlike a mortgage, the buyer doesn't legally own the home until the contract loan is paid in full, and doesn't build up equity with payments. Missing just one payment can put the house at risk of foreclosure, with the householder losing everything they invested.
He now lives in an apartment, and plans to put the reparation he received towards his son's mortgage - one of the allowable uses for the money.
After some initial scepticism about the focus on housing costs, he now backs the scheme.
"It serves a good purpose," he said. "If they just handed out cash, to me that's just throwing away money. People wouldn't use it the right way."
Reparations for all?
Not everyone agrees. Cicely Fleming, another black Evanston council member, was the sole dissenting vote against the project, which she called "a housing plan dressed up as reparations".
"This isn't change that can be a beacon for the nation," she said. "It is a dim, weak light."
Ms Fleming and some other activists believe the plan isn't ambitious enough, and that its ties to homeownership leaves out poorer residents - those who can't afford to buy their own homes.
It's a minority view, but even some recipients of the money agree.
Ramona Burton, 73, is thrilled with her new fence, windows and refurbished chimney and electrics. She is "so very grateful" and says she would never have been able to afford the repairs if her number wasn't one of the first chosen.
But, "some people don't have a home. Maybe they have student loans or a car," she said. "I didn't like the restrictions."
Image caption,
Ramona Burton gazes at her repaired chimney and new windows - work made possible by the first reparations program of its kind
A long way to go
Ms Simmons chalked opposition up to "counterproductive" local politics.
"We were informed by members of the black community who participated in the process," she said. "It's practical, political, and it's justice."
When it comes to reparations, "we're not really thinking, 'Should it be a federal policy or a local policy?', 'Should it be housing or education or cash?' It really should be all of it," she added.
She understands that projects like Evanston's are simply impossible in many places.
"We have a history of progressive values. We have a strong, diverse city council as well as a historic black community that is well organised and engaged," she said. "Other communities don't have that.
"We are doing complex work, knowing that we have a long way to go."
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Amie Cooke picked up her favorite coffee on her way to work and took a deep breath before pulling over to call Audrey McAdams, an acquaintance from her daughter’s day care.
Ms. Cooke, a white mother of three, felt a little anxious about asking Ms. McAdams, a Black mother who also has three children, to join her in forming a group to talk about one of America’s most sensitive topics – race. Specifically, she wanted to bring different people together to discuss racial reconciliation in their small town of Nolensville, Tennessee, where, like many communities across the country, tensions lurk beneath the surface and sometimes above.
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Unvaccinated man denied heart transplant by Boston hospital
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Unvaccinated man denied heart transplant by Boston hospital
Published
25 January 2022
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Watch the patient's father on the transplant denial, and a doctor on why unvaccinated patients might not get organs
A US hospital has rejected a patient for a heart transplant at least in part because he is not vaccinated against Covid-19.
DJ Ferguson, 31, is in dire need of a new heart, but Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston took him off their list, said his father, David.
He said the Covid vaccine goes against his son's "basic principles, he doesn't believe in it".
The hospital said it was following policy.
Brigham and Women's Hospital told the BBC in a statement: "Given the shortage of available organs, we do everything we can to ensure that a patient who receives a transplanted organ has the greatest chance of survival."
A spokesman said the hospital requires "the Covid-19 vaccine, and lifestyle behaviours for transplant candidates to create both the best chance for a successful operation and to optimise the patient's survival after transplantation, given that their immune system is drastically suppressed".
The hospital's carefully worded statement may suggest other factors lie behind the man's ineligibility, aside from his unvaccinated status. But it refused to discuss specifics, citing patient privacy.
The hospital added that most of the 100,000 people on waitlists for organ transplants will not receive an organ within five years because of the shortage of available organs.
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Mr Ferguson has been in hospital since last Thanksgiving weekend, 26 November 2021, and he suffers from a hereditary heart issue that causes his lungs to fill with blood and fluid, according to a GoFundMe.
The organiser of the fundraiser said Mr Ferguson was concerned he could experience cardiac inflammation - a potential side effect from coronavirus vaccination that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) emphasises is rare and temporary - and that it might prove dangerous given the weakness of his heart.
The CDC encourages transplant recipients and those in their immediate circles to get fully vaccinated and boosted.
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Dr Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told CBS News that after any organ transplant a patient's immune system is all but shut down and even a common cold can prove fatal.
"The organs are scarce, we are not going to distribute them to someone who has a poor chance of living when others who are vaccinated have a better chance post-surgery of surviving," said Dr Caplan.
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A father-of-two with a third child on the way, Mr Ferguson remains at the hospital, said his loved ones.
His family has suggested he is too weak to be transferred to a different hospital and is "running out of time".
"My boy is fighting pretty damn courageously and he has integrity and principles he really believes in and that makes me respect him all the more," said David Ferguson.
"It's his body. It's his choice."
It is not the first time an unvaccinated American has faced healthcare obstacles in recent weeks.
Earlier this month, a Minnesota woman sued her local hospital after doctors tried to take her unvaccinated husband off the ventilator he had been on for two months.
Just over 63% of the US population is double-jabbed and about 40% of Americans have received a third booster dose.
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By Jake Horton
BBC Reality Check
A leaked document suggests the US Supreme Court could be poised to overturn the nationwide legal right to abortion.
Currently in the US, abortion can take place until about 24 weeks into pregnancy.
The Supreme Court is considering whether to allow states to ban the procedure in earlier stages of pregnancy. A final ruling is not expected until July.
So if the law changes, what might the impact be?
Who could be most affected?
Limiting abortion access would disproportionately impact younger women, poorer women and African-American women, as these groups are more likely to seek an abortion, according to official data.
The majority of women having abortions in the US are in their 20s.
About 57% of reported abortions in 2019 were performed on women between the ages of 20 and 29.
The majority of states report abortion data to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), but a handful don't.
Rachel Jones, a senior researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group told the BBC: "The typical abortion patient is in their 20s, doesn't have a lot of money and has one or more children."
Why US abortion laws could be changed
Research by the institute has shown that 75% of women in the US who have an abortion are classified as low income or poor (based on official US poverty definitions).
Dr Antonia Biggs, a researcher at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health says: "Structural inequities - including living on low incomes and limited access to health insurance - all contribute to the higher rates of abortions among people of colour."
Black people make up 13% of the US population, but black women receive more than a third of the country's reported abortions and Hispanic women about a fifth.
Over the last ten years, fewer women have been having abortions across the US, according to the latest statistics from the CDC.
The number of reported abortions dropped by almost 18% between 2010 and 2019.
In 2019, there were about 630,000 abortions reported in the US, compared with more than 765,000 in 2010.
Why is the number of reported abortions falling?
Kimberley Lufkin of the Guttmacher Institute says: "The declining rate could be for a host of reasons - including increased access to contraceptives, as well as declining sexual activity."
There's also been a reduction in the birth and pregnancy rate in the US overall during the last decade.
In addition, abortion restrictions are on the rise in states across the US, limiting women's access to the procedure.
Currently states cannot legally ban abortions before foetal viability is established (when foetuses can, theoretically, sustain life outside the womb).
However, state lawmakers can put measures in place which make it more difficult to have an abortion.
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Image caption,
An anti-abortion protestor in Houston tries to intercept a visitor to a clinic
But a case currently before the Supreme Court could change this, allowing bans before this period (24 weeks).
Some states have laws in place which punish doctors who perform abortions, and others don't allow abortions to be included among the government-assisted healthcare services which people with low incomes can access.
Women can travel to a different state where there are fewer restrictions, but this can throw up logistical and financial issues.
In 2021, a record amount of abortion restrictions were enacted in states across the US. And in a handful of states - including Texas and Ohio - abortion clinics were closed down.
One study estimated that each year more than 4,000 women in the US are denied an abortion because of restrictions and so continue with unwanted pregnancies.
Greater restrictions in certain states means people have to travel to less restrictive states, such as New York and Illinois, to have an abortion.
The national average rate of abortions is about 11 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 years, but some states like Wyoming and Missouri have a much lower rate.
The majority of residents in these two states travel out of state for abortions: in Wyoming, 94% of residents go out of state and in Missouri, it's 86%.
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Elon Musk blames elite LA school for brainwashing ‘communist’ trans daughter into hating him for being rich
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Elon Musk blames elite LA school for brainwashing ‘communist’ trans daughter into hating him for being rich
By Katherine Donlevy
Published Aug. 31, 2023
Updated Sep. 1, 2023, 8:32 a.m. ET
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Elon Musk believes his “communist” transgender daughter severed ties with her billionaire father because she was brainwashed into “thinking that anyone rich is evil” at the ritzy California school he sent her to.
The CEO of X, formerly known as Twitter, washed his hands of any responsibility for the recent rift between himself and 19-year-old Vivian Jenna Wilson — instead blaming the Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica for infecting her with the “woke mind virus.”
Wilson’s transition was part of a domino effect that led to Musk buying the social media app as part of his mission to stomp out wokeness, according to an excerpt of the upcoming biography “Elon Musk” that was published in the Wall Street Journal Thursday.
The SpaceX founder told author Walter Isaacson that he was initially “generally sanguine” with his child’s decision until in April 2022 when Wilson “became a fervent Marxist and broke off all relations with him,” the excerpt reveals.
That year, Wilson was granted a petition to change her gender, as well as her name, which she hoped would demolish any connection between herself and her biological father.
“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” said Musk, whose net worth is estimated at $257.5 billion.
In a new biography, Elon Musk blames the elite school he sent his daughter to for making her a “communist.”
REUTERS
Musk added that the rift pained him more than when he suffered the infant death of his firstborn child, Nevada.
“I’ve made many overtures, but she doesn’t want to spend time with me.”
The tech mogul said he “partly” blames Wilson’s dramatic changeup on Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, which boasts various A-listers including Jack Black, Maya Rudolph and Zooey Deschanel among its alumni.
Vivian Jenna Wilson was granted a gender and name change last year, saying she didn’t want any connection to her billionaire father.
SplashNews.com
The tech mogul said he “partly” blames Wilson’s dramatic changeup on Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, which boasts various A-listers including Jack Black and Zooey Deschanel among its alumni.
SplashNews.com
Tuition for the alleged “communist” K-12 school, ironically, costs up to $50,000 per student annually.
“Twitter, he felt, had become infected by a similar mindset that suppressed right-wing and anti-establishment voices,” Isaacson wrote.
The story of the familial split was peppered between tales of his April 2022 offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion — identifying himself as the “fire-breathing dragon” the platform needed to succeed.
Musk believes his daughter severed ties with him because she believes rich people are evil.
Justine Musk
Though the statements were not the first time Musk blamed higher learning institutions for the rift between himself and his daughter, it is the first time he pointed to a specific school.
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Musk went on to buy the social media company six months later in what he called a bid to defend free speech.
Though the statements were not the first time Musk blamed higher learning institutions for the rift between himself and his daughter, it is the first time he pointed to a specific school.
1650
What do you think? Post a comment.
In October, the Tesla CEO said “neo-Marxists” have taken over elite schools and liberal universities to teach their students to despise wealthy individuals.
A representative for Crossroads did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
FILED UNDER BIOGRAPHIES COMMUNISM ELITE HIGH SCHOOLS ELON MUSK TWITTER WOKE CULTURE 8/31/23
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‘Not a Fundamental Right’: Maryland Court Strikes Down Parents’ Request to Opt Kids Out of LGBT Curriculum
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‘Not a Fundamental Right’: Maryland Court Strikes Down Parents’ Request to Opt Kids Out of LGBT Curriculum
Hundreds of parents showed up outside the Montgomery County Public Schools school-board meeting to protest mandatory LGBT curricula.(Claude Thompson)
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By HALEY STRACK
August 24, 2023 3:35 PM
A Maryland district court denied parents’ appeal to reinstate an opt-out policy in Montgomery County Public Schools on Thursday.
The case, Tamer Mahmoud v. Monica B. McKnight, hinged on whether the district’s May decision to rescind its opt-out policy for LGBT curricula violated parents’ right to direct the religious instruction of their children.
The court concluded that, “the plaintiffs’ asserted due process right to direct their children’s upbringing by opting out of a public-school curriculum that conflicts with their religious views is not a fundamental right.”
Parents sought a preliminary injunction that would authorize opt-out options once school begins on August 28, which judge Deborah Boardman also denied:
“Because the plaintiffs have not established any of their claims is likely to succeed on the merits, the Court need not address the remaining preliminary injunction factors. Nonetheless, because a constitutional violation is not likely or imminent, it follows that the plaintiffs are not likely to suffer imminent irreparable harm, and the balance of the equities and the public interest favor denying an injunction to avoid undermining the School Board’s legitimate interests in the no-opt-out policy . . . The plaintiffs seek the same relief pending appeal as in their preliminary injunction motion: an injunction that requires the Board to provide advance notice and opt-outs from instruction involving the storybooks and family life and human sexuality. For the reasons stated in this opinion, the Court cannot conclude the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of an appeal. The plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction pending appeal is denied.”
Parents could opt their children out of gender and sexuality lessons until March, when the district banned the option. With Becket Law, religious families filed a lawsuit against the district in May, claiming the policy violates their First Amendment right to guide the religious instruction of their children.
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Becket senior counsel, Eric Baxter said that the school board “should let kids be kids and let parents parent.”
“Today, the district court decided parents have no right to notice when extreme ideology is pushed on their elementary-age children during story hour,” Baxter tweeted. “With the new school year beginning, the case is on the fast track to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals—and the parents plan to appeal the decision.”
“Children are entitled to enjoy a period of innocence and be guided by their own parents on how and when to approach the complex and sensitive issues being pushed by the School Board,” he added.
The district’s LGBTQ curricula introduces pre-K through eighth grade students to “inclusivity” books that contain references to gay pride parades, gender transition, and pronoun preference. Teachers are instructed to lead classroom discussions about the books, which cite terms such as, “intersex,” “drag queen,” and “non-binary.” One book claims that doctors only “guess” when determining a newborn’s sex.
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HALEY STRACK is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism and a recent graduate of Hillsdale College.
| 628
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Democratic Caucus Chair Imposes Strict Identity Requirements for Leaders, Says Choosing on Merit ‘Absurd’
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-22-0716/politics-democratic-caucus-chair-imposes-strict-identity-requirements-leaders
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/after-mandating-identity-requirements-for-leaders-democratic-caucus-chair-calls-merit-patently-absurd/
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Virginia's largest school district refuses to honor updated state guidance on sex-segregated bathrooms, pronouns
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https://thepostmillennial.com/virginias-largest-school-district-refuses-to-honor-updated-state-guidance-on-sex-segregated-bathrooms-pronouns
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Biden Administration Investigates Vanderbilt University Over Release Of Transgender Clinic Patient Records
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-16-1550/lgbtq-issues-biden-administration-investigates-vanderbilt-university-over
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-administration-investigates-vanderbilt-university-over-release-of-transgender-clinic-patient-records
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— NEWS —
Biden Administration Investigates Vanderbilt University Over Release Of Transgender Clinic Patient Records
By Brandon Drey
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Aug 16, 2023 DailyWire.com
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ALASTAIR PIKE/AFP via Getty Images
Federal health officials have launched a civil rights investigation into Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) after the hospital turned over trans-identifying clinic patients’ medical records to the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office. The AG’s office is investigating the Nashville-based center for potential medical billing fraud connected to transgender medical treatments for minors.
VUMC chief communications officer John Howser told The Associated Press last week the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights contacted the medical center just weeks after two patients sued the hospital system, claiming they were among more than 100 current and former patients whose records were turned over to Tennessee state authorities.
“We have no further comment since this is an ongoing investigation,” Howser said.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office confirmed in June that it was investigating the medical center over potential billing fraud. The center recently ceased providing cross-sex hormones and performing sex-change surgeries on minors in compliance with a new Tennessee law that took effect earlier this year.
Brandon Smith, chief of staff for the state attorney general, said that the investigation is purely about Vanderbilt’s billing practices and not about the patients themselves, saying the AG’s office was “surprised that VUMC has deliberately chosen to frighten its patients like this.”
“The Office does not publicize fraud investigations to preserve the integrity of the investigative process. The Office maintains patient records in the strictest confidence, as required by law,” Smith added. “The investigation is focused solely on VUMC and certain related providers, not patients, as VUMC is well aware.”
Howser told CNN that the medical center “received valid requests” from state authorities as part of its investigation, which sought information about transgender care at VUMC.
“The Tennessee Attorney General has legal authority in an investigation to require that VUMC provide complete copies of patient medical records that are relevant to that investigation, and VUMC was obligated to do so,” Howser said. “VUMC complies with all health care privacy and security requirements established under both Federal and Tennessee law, including but not limited to HIPAA.”
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The investigation into VUMC from the Biden administration comes after a heated legislative session earlier this year when Tennessee Republicans moved to prevent sex change procedures and hormones from being prescribed to minors, legislation prompted by The Daily Wire’s investigation into VUMC’s gender clinic.
Daily Wire host Matt Walsh published a bombshell report last year that prompted Tennessee lawmakers to prohibit doctors from performing sex-change treatments and surgeries on minors.
BREAKING: My team and I have been investigating the transgender clinic at Vanderbilt here in Nashville. Vanderbilt drugs, chemically castrates, and performs double mastectomies on minors. But it gets worse. Here is what we found. Let's start at the beginning.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 20, 2022
Walsh uncovered shocking videos that showed a doctor calling certain sex-change surgeries “huge money makers” and a health law expert saying conscientious objections to the surgeries are “problematic.”
Anthony Cash contributed to this report.
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Matt Walsh,Tennessee,transgender surgery,Vanderbilt University
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| 631
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Target’s Pride merchandise leads to sales slump
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-16-0650/business-target-s-pride-merchandise-leads-sales-slump
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https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/targets-transgender-pride-merchandise-leads-to-big-second-quarter-sales-slump
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TARGET Published August 16, 2023 9:31am EDT
Target’s Pride merchandise leads to sales slump
Target's store sales declined 5.4% vs a 2.6% rise a year ago
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Target experienced a sales downturn in the second quarter amid ongoing consumer backlash from the retailer’s Pride and transgender merchandise.
Comparable sales slipped 5.4% while the $24.8 billion in total revenue was 4.9% lower than last year.
Negative reaction to Target’s Pride collection had a material impact on sales, Target CEO Brian Cornell said on a call with reporters.
"As we navigate an ever-changing operating and social environment, we are applying what we learned," he added.
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TARGET FACES MORE HEADWINDS; BANK OF AMERICA SLASHES PRICE TARGET
Last month, Target confirmed "adjustments" to the Pride merchandising plans were underway after Fox News Digital learned it rolled back displays at some of its locations. Backlash to merchandise, including "tuck friendly" swimsuits, forced the company to move items from the front of their locations.
Target's Pride adult swimsuit features "tuck-friendly construction" and "extra crotch coverage." (Brian Flood/FOX Business / Fox News)
Following the rollout, Target's market value has fallen to $57. 7 billion from $74 billion.
Target
After Target removed some items in June, Cornell said it "saw things normalize," but the retailer will continue to have a collection for Pride month and other heritage months.
Negative reaction to Target’s Pride collection had a material impact on sales, Target CEO Brian Cornell said on a call with reporters. (Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via Getty Images)
Target now expects annual comparable sales to decline in the mid-single digit range, compared to its prior forecast of low-single digit decline to a low-single digit increase.
Signage for Target's "#TakePride" initiative sits above products displayed for sale at a company store in Chicago. (Getty Images)
The retailer also said it expects 2023 adjusted profit per share between $7 to $8, compared with the prior range of $7.75 to $8.75.
ABOUT 2.2. MILLION CANDLES SOLD BY TARGET ARE RECALLED
Target, which largely sells non-essential items like electronics and home decor, has been trying to balance its merchandise by adding more daily-use products as consumers limit their spending to necessary items amid rising prices.
Inventory fell 17% in the second quarter, with a 25% drop in discretionary items in its stock, Target said.
TARGET MARKET CAP LOSSES HIT $15.7 BILLION, SHARES APPROACH 52-WEEK LOW AMID WOKE BACKLASH
"We are seeing food and beverage and household essentials absorbing a larger portion of the U.S. consumer's wallet," Cornell said.
"Guests are out at concerts, they are going to movies, they are enjoying those experiential moments and are shopping very carefully for discretionary goods," he added.
A young customer walks by a Pride Month merchandise display at a Target store in San Francisco on May 31, 2023. (Getty Images)
On an adjusted basis, Target earned $1.80 per share in the quarter ended July 29, beating expectations of $1.39.
"The shares are likely reacting to the earnings upside on from stronger operating margins despite the sales downside and the full-year guidance cut," Global Director of Research at M Science John Tomlinson told FOX Business.
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"Also, the company mentioned that sales trends have improved since June and that it’s back-to-school season has started off well," he finished.
The company’s retail rival Walmart will report earnings on Thursday.
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Fox News' Brian Flood and Reuters contributed to this report.
| 632
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Skittles faces backlash after it partners with GLAAD and puts 'Black Trans Lives Matter' on its packaging
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-12-0035/lgbtq-issues-skittles-faces-backlash-after-it-partners-glaad-and-puts-black
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12398583/Skittles-faces-backlash-partners-GLAAD-puts-Black-Trans-Lives-Matter-packaging.html
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| 633
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Major Florida school districts drop AP Psychology course after state declares it violates law: Report
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/major-florida-school-districts-drop-ap-psychology-course-state-declare-violates-law-report
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MEDIA
Major Florida school districts drop AP Psychology course after state declares it violates law: Report
The course has been taught in Florida public high schools for 30 years
By Gabriel Hays Fox News
Published August 9, 2023 1:14pm EDT
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AP's College Board blasts New York Times report on revised African American Studies course
The College Board complained a New York Times report linking Flordia Gov. Ron DeSantis' comments to changes made to the course was not accurate.
Multiple Florida school districts have decided to replace Advanced Placement Psychology with alternate courses just ahead of the upcoming school year after state officials warned schools that elements of the psych class violate Florida law.
Eight Florida school districts with the largest enrollments in AP Psychology have dropped the course and two others are still deciding, according to a Washington Post report.
The course, which has been taught by Florida high schools for 30 years, includes lessons on "how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development," a course description read.
This is the latest news following a feud between the College Board, the creators of the course; and the Florida Department of Education (DOE), the government office enforcing the Parental Rights in Education law’s standards that restrict instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade in classrooms.
FLORIDA EDUCATION BOARD EXPANDS LIMITATIONS ON GENDER IDENTITY LESSONS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. speaks at a news conference at Crooms Academy of Information Technology in Sanford, Florida, on June 30, 2022. (Orlando Sentinel via Getty Images)
Earlier this summer, the College Board claimed that the Florida DOE "recently requested" that it "audit and potentially modify AP courses relative to the new Florida laws that restrict classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity."
The course creators refused, stating it "will not modify our courses to accommodate restrictions on teaching essential, college-level topics. Doing so would break the fundamental promise of AP: colleges wouldn’t broadly accept that course for credit and that course wouldn’t prepare students for careers in the discipline."
The response to the state DOE added, "As with all AP courses, required topics must be included for a course to be designated as AP."
Having not yet come to an agreement on the issue, the board claimed last week that the Florida DOE had "effectively banned" AP Psychology in state schools.
DESANTIS AIDES BATTLE BYRON DONALDS OVER FLORIDA EDUCATION POLICY: ‘DID KAMALA WRITE THIS?’
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs a series of education bills at Cambridge Christian school in Tampa, Florida, on May 17, 2023. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
In a recent statement, the College Board remarked on this alleged ban, saying, "it removes choice from parents and student. Coming just days from the start of school, it derails the college readiness and affordability plans of tens of thousands of Florida students currently registered for AP Psychology, one of the most popular AP classes in the state."
It also advised school districts not to offer it.
Multiple state school districts have decided to follow this advice just days ahead of the new school year. Brevard County Schools for instance released a statement noting the difficult decision to withhold the course, explaining that to keep it would require altering it to abide with Florida law. That would result in it not being certified as AP.
The district stated, "In essence, if we don’t teach all of the content, our students will not receive AP credit. If we do teach all of the content, our instructors will violate the law. Therefore, we will not offer AP Psychology at any of our high schools this year."
Fox News Digital reached out to the College Board and the Florida Department of Education for comment on these major school districts dropping the course, but neither have immediately responded.
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Fox News' Joshua Q. Nelson contributed to this report.
For more Culture, Media, Education, Opinion and channel coverage, visit foxnews.com/media
Gabriel Hays is an associate editor for Fox News Digital.
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Anheuser-Busch admits to continued plunge in Bud Light sales, insists US still has 'favorable' view of brand
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-03-0758/business-anheuser-busch-admits-continued-plunge-bud-light-sales-insists-us
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https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/anheuser-busch-admits-continued-plunge-bud-light-sales-insists-us-still-has-favorable-view-brand
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FOOD AND DRINKS Updated on August 3, 2023 2:20pm EDT
Bud Light sales continue to plunge, as Anheuser-Busch insists US still has 'favorable' view of brand
Anheuser-Busch says 80% of Americans have a favorable or neutral view of Bud Light
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By Anders Hagstrom , Joe Toppe FOXBusiness
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Bud Light should've fired 'their CEO,' not hundreds of workers: Anson Frericks
Former Anheuser-Busch executive Anson Frericks says he's 'shocked' the brewery hasn't learned from its mistakes yet.
Anheuser-Busch InBev on Thursday reported a steep drop in profits amid the ongoing boycott against Bud Light, but the company insists U.S. consumers still have a generally favorable view of the beer brand.
The company announced that its U.S. revenue dropped 10.5% in the second quarter, while its earnings before taxes, interest and depreciation fell 28.2%. The second quarter covered April through the end of June and offers the first look at the damage caused by the Bud Light boycott, which began in April.
Anheuser-Busch accompanied the grim numbers with a survey of some 170,000 consumers across the U.S., saying it found a majority remain favorable toward the Bud Light brand, while 80% are favorable or neutral.
"Regardless of favorability, our consumers across all sentiment groups have three points of feedback in common," Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Michel Doukeris said on an earnings call. "One, they want to enjoy their beer without a debate. Two, they want Bud Light to focus on beer. Three, they want Bud Light to concentrate on the platforms that all consumers love, such as NFL, (veteran charity) Folds of Honor and music."
HEINEKEN CEO SAYS BRANDS MUST 'BE BALANCED,' 'STAND UP FOR YOUR VALUES'
Anheuser-Busch announced a steep drop in profits due to the ongoing boycott against Bud Light, but the company insists U.S. consumers still have a generally favorable view of the beer. (Rob Carr/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Despite the drop in Bud Light sales, Anheuser-Busch reported an 18.4% increase in combined revenues of its global brands including Budweiser, Stella Artois and Corona.
Other beers, including Coors Light and Miller Lite, have rapidly consumed Bud Light's market presence since the brand enlisted transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney for a marketing campaign, sparking criticism and the boycott push.
BUD LIGHT LAYS OFF HUNDREDS OF WORKERS AFTER DYLAN MULVANEY CONTROVERSY, LOSING TOP SPOT TO MODELO
On Tuesday, rival Molson Coors reported an 11.8% surge in net sales over the second quarter and a 5% jump in financial volumes, with U.S. increases reflecting a shift in consumer purchasing behavior.
Alternative beers like Coors Light and Miller Lite have rapidly consumed Bud Light's market presence since the brand enlisted transgender influence Dylan Mulvaney for a marketing campaign. (Patrick McDermott/Getty Images / Getty Images)
CORONA LIGHT, COORS LIGHT GAIN TRACTION OVER BUD LIGHT
"We are seeing share and market improvement everywhere, and more consumers are reaching for our beers than our competitors’ beers," Molson Coors CEO Gavin Hattersley said on an earnings call Tuesday.
"Coors Light and Miller Lite are now 50% bigger than Bud Light by total industry dollars," he continued. "Last year, Bud Light was bigger than both. Retailers are making space for our brands as demand increases."
Bud Light has faced intense backlash from longtime customers over recent campaign with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney. (Instagram/Fox News / Fox News)
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Meanwhile, Bud Light has sought to recoup its top spot by leaning into football, country music and other quintessential American favorites in its new advertising.
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‘Queer’ Middle School To Open Using Taxpayer-Funded Vouchers
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-25-1559/education-queer-middle-school-open-using-taxpayer-funded-vouchers
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/07/25/queer-middle-school-to-open-using-taxpayer-funded-vouchers/
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Ivy League LGBTQ+ numbers soar and students point to identity politics
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-20-1238/lgbtq-issues-ivy-league-lgbtq-numbers-soar-and-students-point-identity-politics
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https://nypost.com/2023/07/20/ivy-league-lgbtq-numbers-soar-harvard-numbers-triple/
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RIKKI SCHLOTT
NEWS
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Ivy League LGBTQ+ numbers soar and students point to identity politics
By Rikki Schlott
Published July 20, 2023
Updated July 20, 2023, 6:43 p.m. ET
While just 7% of Americans are LGBTQ+, students at Ivy League universities are identifying as non-straight at rates as much as five times the general public.
Brown University made headlines after a student poll revealed a whopping 38% of their student body is not straight.
“Honestly I’m not surprised by that statistic,” an anonymous senior at Brown University told The Post. “At Brown, there’s no social pressure to fit into a box or hide your identity.”
Other Ivies aren’t far behind. In fact, more than a third of students at Princeton and more than a quarter at Yale and Harvard identify as LGBTQ+, as per recent polling — and campus sources chalk it up, in part, to politics and a desire to join an “oppressed” group.”
According to the Census Bureau, 20% of Gen Z is LGBTQ+, far more than older cohorts. But Ivy League students far outstrip their generation as a whole.
According to Abigail Anthony, who graduated from Princeton University with a degree in politics this year, a progressive and identity-consumed culture on elite campuses could be contributing.
More than a third of students and Brown and Stanford, and more than a quarter at Harvard (above) and Yale, identify as LBGTQ+. The national average for Gen Z is 20%.
Harvard University
Ivy League schools have much larger proportions of LGBTQ+ students than the general population.
“Since sexual orientation identity is largely non-falsifiable, many people will claim LGBTQ status to join the ‘oppressed’ group,” she told The Post.
According to a Princeton student newspaper survey, 35% of the 2023 graduating class identified as something other than straight.
A Brown student said “There’s no social pressure to fit into a box or hide your identity” on campus.
Shutterstock
“It could be that students at elite schools are more inclined to be obsessed with social acceptance and professional advancement, and … profess an LGBTQ identity to indicate their political beliefs on a campus that leans left,” she added.
At schools for which historical data is available, the proportion of students who are not straight is skyrocketing. Brown jumped from 14% in 2010 up to 38% this year.
Some 29% of Yale’s class of 2023 identified as something other than heterosexual when they were surveyed as freshmen in 2019. That’s up from just 15% of the class of 2020 when they were asked by the school paper in 2016.
More than a third of seniors graduating from Princeton this year identified as not heterosexual.
Shutterstock
And the proportion of LGBTQ+ students at Harvard tripled over the last decade, from 10% of incoming freshmen in 2013 to 29% in 2021.
The most recent data from Cornell comes from 2017, when 21.4% of freshmen were LGBTQ+. The University of Pennsylvania is an outlier, at just 15% as of 2022.
Ben Appel, 40, finished his undergraduate degree in 2020 as an adult student at Columbia’s General Studies program. And, although he is gay himself, he said his Gen Z classmates were markedly more likely to identify as “queer.”
A student newspaper poll found that the number of students at Brown who are LGBTQ+ jumped from 14% in 2010 up to 38% this year.
“Queer is as much politics as it is a sexual identity. Maybe even more so,” Appel, author of the forthcoming book “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic,” told The Post. “The Ivies have a lot of really privileged kids. I’m sure many are motivated to identify into a so-called marginalized community in order to earn some social cache.”
He thinks a growing number of amorphous labels allow more people to fall under the LGBT umbrella than ever before.
“The ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ umbrellas have expanded to include gender-nonconforming people and even people who would normally be considered straight,” Appel noted.
The share of heterosexual students at Brown dropped by 25.2% between 2010 and 2023.
Anthony agrees: “In some instances, a straight person will identify as bisexual but simply continue dating the opposite sex.”
Although Columbia hasn’t published similar figures, Appel and another Columbia graduate both estimate they are in line with other Ivy League schools.
“It’s becoming a majority,” an anonymous member of Columbia’s class of 2022 observed.
Appel said that Ivy League universities are particularly likely to have curriculum that is fixated on gender and sexuality.
Some experts think an accepting and progressive environment might encourage more students to come out on Ivy League campuses.
Harvard BGLTQ/ Instagram
“It makes sense that these polls were taken at Ivy League universities,” he told The Post. “Students take one queer theory course and come out as queer.”
At Princeton this year, 35% of seniors identified as something other than straight, compared with just 25% of incoming freshmen. And nearly one in five Princeton grads this year came out while in college.
Cornell developmental psychology professor and young adult sexuality expert Ritch Savin-Williams believes that Gen Z students are coming out in larger numbers due to increased social acceptance — especially on progressive campuses: “The shift has been in the visibility and the willingness of individuals to express it and to declare it.”
FILED UNDER BROWN UNIVERSITY GEN Z IVY LEAGUE LGBTQIA+ PRINCETON UNIVERSITY STANFORD YALE UNIVERSITY 7/20/23
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Heritage Foundation again asks court for Hunter Biden prob...
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Transgender Biden Health Official Blasted For Claiming Kids Can Go Through The ‘Wrong Puberty’
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-19-1558/lgbtq-issues-transgender-biden-health-official-blasted-claiming-kids-can-go
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/transgender-biden-health-official-blasted-for-claiming-kids-can-go-through-the-wrong-puberty
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— NEWS —
Transgender Biden Health Official Blasted For Claiming Kids Can Go Through The ‘Wrong Puberty’
By Daily Wire News
•
Jul 19, 2023 DailyWire.com
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CAROLINE BREHMAN / POOL / AFP via Getty Images
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine faced backlash this week after claiming in an interview that children can go through “the wrong puberty.”
Levine, a man who claims he is a woman, made the remarks during an interview on a new ABC’s “Nightline” series “Identity Denied: Trans in America.”
“The treatment options for gender-affirming care for transgender youth really are evidence-based,” Levine claimed. “Adolescence is hard and puberty is hard. What if you’re going through the wrong puberty? What if you inside feel that you are female, but now you’re going through a male puberty?”
Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Levine — who transitioned *as an adult* — dismisses the question of why children can’t wait until they turn 18 to pursue sex change surgeries:
“Adolescence is hard and puberty is hard. What if you’re going through the wrong puberty?”
This… pic.twitter.com/vJAIwKE6Vl
— Nicki Neily (@nickineily) July 18, 2023
Levin faced widespread backlash for his false claim that a person can go through the “wrong puberty.”
Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro fired back at Levine, “What if you’re a mentally ill person given extraordinary power to say insane things.”
Republican presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that Americans must “fight back” against “woke bureaucrats.”
“No one can go through ‘the wrong puberty,'” DeSantis said. “Woke bureaucrats are lying to our children and trying to destroy our country. We must fight back.”
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Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) blasted Levine: “He has no business pushing these dangerous procedures—that have no basis in science—on kids.”
Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh tweeted, “Yes, what if you’re going through the wrong puberty?”
“Also, what if you have the wrong liver or the wrong left kneecap?” he added. “What if you have the wrong eye color? What if you have the wrong DNA? These and many other questions make sense if you’re a delusional schizophrenic.”
Read more in:
Executive,LGBTQ,Rachel Levine,Transgender,U.S.
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| 638
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Louisiana Lawmakers Override Democrat Governor’s Veto Of Child Sex Change Ban In Rare Vote
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-18-1646/politics-louisiana-lawmakers-override-democrat-governor-s-veto-child-sex-change
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/louisiana-lawmakers-override-democrat-governors-veto-of-child-sex-change-ban-in-rare-vote
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— NEWS —
Louisiana Lawmakers Override Democrat Governor’s Veto Of Child Sex Change Ban In Rare Vote
By Leif Le Mahieu
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Jul 18, 2023 DailyWire.com
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Photo by Josh Brasted/Getty Images for Resilience Force.
In a rare move, the Louisiana legislature has voted to override Democrat Governor John Bel Edwards’ veto of a bill that shields children from life-altering sex-change procedures.
The bill, called the “Stop Harming Our Kids Act,” will prevent doctors from performing transgender procedures like double mastectomies on girls who identify as boys and administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children.
“Today was a huge win for the children of Louisiana! I’m proud of my colleagues in the state legislature for standing up to protect the children of our great state. We made it clear today that our children are worth fighting for. This great victory would not have been possible without the prayers and support of parents, grandparents, pastors, and grassroots organizations from around the state who rose up and declared with one voice that ‘No one in Louisiana has the right to harm a child’. God Bless the families of our beautiful state!” Louisiana Republican Rep. Gabe Firment, the sponsor of the legislation, told The Daily Wire in a statement.
The House voted 75-23 to override the veto, with 69 Republicans being joined by six Democrats. In the Senate, lawmakers voted 28-11 to adopt the measure.
“As a counselor, I know of no other mental health disorder where we affirm distorted thinking. We don’t affirm the distorted thinking of anorexic children who suffer body dysmorphia, do we? And since studies have shown that gender dysphoria does not persist in most children past puberty, why would any so called treatment include irreversible medical procedures,” said Louisiana Republican Rep. Laurie Schlegel. “The suggestion that the only hope for children experiencing gender dysphoria is cross-sex hormone therapy, puberty blockers, or life changing sex operations is ludicrous. These children need intensive mental health counseling.”
During discussion of the bill, Republican Senator John Morris said that “experimental procedures on minors that are irreversible” are not health care, citing long-term health problems, such as fertility issues, that have been associated with transgender procedures. Republican Senator Mike Fesi pointed to regret from people who “transitioned” at a young age and wished their parents had not allowed them to go through with the transgender procedures.
Democrat Senator Jay Luneau claimed that the bill would violate parental rights and contained vague provisions that would be unconstitutional.
Republican Senator Fred Mills, who previously held up the bill in committee, claimed that the bill would have implications for future medical related bills and praised former Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson for his veto of a ban on transgender procedures in Arkansas, arguing Louisiana lawmakers should take a similar approach.
In May, Mills joined Democrats in a 5-4 vote on the Health and Welfare Committee to block the advancement of the bill. Edwards reportedly pressured lawmakers on the committee to kill the bill.
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Before today’s vote, there have only been two successful vetoes of a gubernatorial veto since 1974, when the state adopted a new constitution, according to the Associated Press.
“This bill was ground zero for the veto session and will show up in every single race this year in Louisiana. The legislature sent a historic message, loud and clear, that in Louisiana, children are off limits. Anyone thinking about running for office here should take note,” Baton Rouge based Republican strategist Lionel Rainey III told The Daily Wire.
The passage of the bill was praised by conservatives in the state, including Louisiana Family Forum President Gene Mills.
“In most years, Legislators have treated veto override sessions as optional. This year, the Legislature agreed with LFF that an override was obligatory, especially with the health and welfare of children at stake. The Legislature sent a clear message to those who seek to harm children for profit – ‘Access denied …. to Louisiana children!’ We are deeply grateful to each lawmaker who moved to Protect Louisiana Children. Now, it’s time to move forward in providing safe and effective mental health treatments for children who struggle with gender dysphoria,” Mills said in a statement.
In his veto message, Edwards pointed to federal court rulings striking down similar bans in other states.
Roughly 20 states have passed bans on life-altering transgender procedures on children, including Kentucky, which is also governed by a Democrat. The Republican legislature was able to override his veto before portions of the law were just blocked by a federal judge.
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John Bel Edwards,Louisiana,Politics,Social Issues,Transgender,transgender surgery
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Obama Writes Letter Praising Librarians Who Push LGBT Content On Kids
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CNN apologizes for using wrong pronoun in segment that referred to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney
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| 641
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In settlement with transgender woman, New York jail to implement LGBTQ prison reform
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-1505/lgbtq-issues-settlement-transgender-woman-new-york-jail-implement-lgbtq-prison
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LGBTQ Issues
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https://abcnews.go.com/US/settlement-transgender-woman-new-york-jail-implement-lgbtq/story?id=102529277
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A transgender woman in New York has agreed to a landmark settlement that could lead to widespread change in the treatment of incarcerated LGBTQ people at Broome County correctional facilities.
Makyyla Holland, a 25-year-old transgender woman, accused Broome County Jail correctional officers of abuse and discrimination while she was in their custody for six weeks.
As a result of the $140,000 settlement filed on Thursday, Broome County will commit to implementing LGBTI Guidelines for Safe Confinement.
Holland's complaint argued that she was beaten, placed in a men’s housing unit, and denied access to health care. Holland also alleged that she was “routinely harassed and misgendered” and that correctional staff “ignored her repeated pleas for help and for protection from the threats and sexual victimization to which they had exposed her.”
“I was harassed, mocked, misgendered and worse: jail staff strip-searched me, beat me up, placed me in the male section of the jail and withheld my hormones for a period of time, forcing me to go into agonizing withdrawal,” said Holland in a statement via the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Holland was arrested on criminal contempt and assault charges, according to the Binghamton Police Department's Facebook page. She pleaded guilty to contempt of court and she was sentenced to time served. The criminal case against her has ended, according to the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund.
The Binghamton Police Department did not confirm further details.
In a landmark settlement with transgender woman, a New York jail will implement LGBTQ prison reform.
Micheal O'Neal/NYCLU
The new LGBTQ guidelines enforce zero tolerance anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, as well as procedures in place to protect the privacy and safety of LGBTQ people around other incarcerated people. The policies, the guidelines state, are aimed at correcting practices that led to Holland's alleged mistreatment.
MORE: Killing, harassment spotlight transphobia's impact on all people: advocates
"I’m pleased we were able to amicably reach a resolution that establishes clear LGBTI Guidelines, which were previously nonexistent, to address the rights of LGBTI inmates while maintaining the safety and security of individuals both housed and working at the Broome County Correctional Facility," said Broome County Sheriff Fred Akshar.
He continued, "It’s another important step forward in pragmatically and safely modernizing policies to meet the needs of those we serve and protect as we work to build a better, safer community for everyone in Broome County.”
Makyyla Holland, a 25-year-old transgender woman, accused Broome County Jail correctional officers of abuse and discrimination while she was in their custody for six weeks.
Micheal O'Neal/NYCLU
Incarcerated gender-nonconforming people are disproportionately subject to violence and discrimination while in U.S. correctional facilities compared to their non-LGBTQ counterparts, according to the Transgender Law Center. This is especially true for people of color, like Holland, according to the center's research.
MORE: Threats against the LGBTQIA+ community intensifying: Department of Homeland Security
For example, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that transgender people in custody are sexually assaulted at a rate 10 times that of the general population in correctional facilities.
“This policy and policies like it can impact a lot of my community, and I will continue to fight to ensure that no other trans person in New York or anywhere has to endure what I did," said Holland in a statement.
| 642
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The San Bernardino Pride flag murderer and the inevitable consequences of right-wing media hate
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-0533/media-bias-san-bernardino-pride-flag-murderer-and-inevitable-consequences-right
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LGBTQ Issues
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lefts
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https://www.mediamatters.org/matt-walsh/san-bernardino-pride-flag-murderer-and-inevitable-consequences-right-wing-media-hate
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The San Bernardino Pride flag murderer and the inevitable consequences of right-wing media hate
The alleged shooter frequently shared anti-LGBTQ propaganda on social media, including using the image of a burning Pride flag as his pinned tweet
Special PROGRAMS
LGBTQ
WRITTEN BY ARI DRENNEN
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALYSSA TIRRELL
PUBLISHED 08/24/23 3:11 PM EDT
Last weekend, 66-year-old San Bernardino resident Laura Ann “Lauri” Carleton was shot and killed in front of her store in Lake Arrowhead, California. She is survived by her nine children. Her alleged killer was a 27-year-old man whom she confronted while he tried to tear down the Progress Pride flags in front of her shop.
The man who pulled the trigger against Carleton was later killed in a fatal shootout with police, but the people who helped load his brain with homicidal rage remain free. Nobody is born full of fury at the Pride flag. This rage was learned.
Angry rhetoric about the Pride flag has been unavoidable in the right-wing media ecosystem in 2023. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh — whom the alleged shooter retweeted and interacted with on X.com (formerly Twitter), along with conservative media personalities Jordan Peterson and Benny Johnson — called it a “hate symbol” that should be treated with “disdain.” Walsh's colleague Michael Knowles laid out a plan to make the Pride flag politically toxic and have it banned “from every public space forever,” calling it “evil.” Shortly thereafter, the entirety of right-wing media joined in having a meltdown over the flag hanging at a White House Pride Month celebration. Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk told his audience at the end of June that walking past a Pride flag felt like being in “conquered territory.”
In response to misinformation that Italy had canceled Pride Month to celebrate the “traditional family” instead, the alleged killer wrote, “Hallelujah!!!! Jesus is good!!!” He shared a similar reaction to an article in far-right conspiracy theory outlet The Gateway Pundit reporting that California’s Orange County had banned the Pride flag from being flown on county property.
Imagine being an unstable, angry young man in America in 2023, struggling financially, begging strangers online for money, unable to afford a home. You log into the internet looking for connection, attention, distraction, and instead an algorithm spoon-feeds you an unending string of lies with a consistent villain. You’re told that “mediocre male athletes” are taking over women’s sports, that transgender people are stealing scholarships for the higher education that’s become increasingly necessary but also increasingly unaffordable, that they’re threatening women in bathrooms and locker rooms. Then you’re told that the same people, and their supporters, are indoctrinating the next generation, abusing them, “castrating” them, removing healthy body parts, and leaving them ruined for life. You hear this nearly every day.
You’ve never met a trans person, don’t know how few trans athletes there really are, don’t know how many steps are required before ending up on the operating table, don’t know how rare surgical regrets or even these surgeries are, don’t know how common it is for trans people to avoid bathrooms from fear, don’t know that trans people are far more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than its perpetrators.
All you know is what you have been told by the people who validate your anger and your violent impulses: that the flag of this movement is the flag of the enemy; that it is the role of strong men to do something about it; that your life could mean something.
“This tactic is not going to solve anything,” the alleged shooter wrote on X, in response to a meme suggesting dividing the “TIQA+” community from the “LGB” community. “Where you are cutting off the legs of the octopus and can grow back another one. KILL THE OCTOPUS!!”
Gun ownership is ubiquitous in the United States. The consequences of this fact combined with right-wing media’s anti-LGBTQ hate campaign are predictable. We will all bear the costs — children grieving their mother, parents grieving their child, friends grieving their friends, an empty desk in the classroom, an empty seat in the pews — until we decide to do something about it. We do not have to live like this. We do not need to die like this.
| 643
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States that protect transgender health care now try to absorb demand
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-15-1536/lgbtq-issues-states-protect-transgender-health-care-now-try-absorb-demand
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https://apnews.com/article/transgender-gender-affirming-care-health-texas-630f0a8ff873c33b7258cf0c3f6a2859
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Dr. Katy Miller, the medical director of adolescent medicine for Children’s Minnesota, sits for a portrait at the hospital in Minneapolis, Thursday, June 29, 2023. The quest for gender-affirming care has been complicated, as bans on such care for minors are taking effect around the country. Clinics in states like Minnesota that have declared themselves refuges for transgender people are feeling the pressure. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)
States that declared themselves refuges for transgender people have essentially issued an invitation: Get your gender-affirming health care here without fearing prosecution at home.
Now that bans on such care for minors are taking effect around the country — Texas could be next, depending on the outcome of a court hearing this week — patients and their families are testing clinics’ capacity. Already-long waiting lists are growing, yet there are only so many providers of gender-affirming care and only so many patients they can see in a day.
For those refuge states — so far, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Washington and Vermont, plus Washington, D.C. — the question is how to move beyond promises of legal protection and build a network to serve more patients.
“We’re trying our best to make sure we can get those kids in so that they don’t experience an interruption in their care,” said Dr. Angela Kade Goepferd, medical director of the gender health program at Children’s Minnesota hospital in the Twin Cities. “For patients who have not yet been seen and would be added to a general waiting list, it is daunting to think that it’s going to be a year or more before you’re going to be seen by somebody.”
Appointment requests are flooding into Children’s from all over the country — including Texas, Montana and Florida, which all have bans. Requests have grown in a year from about 100 a month to 140-150. The program hopes to hire more staff to meet demand, but it will take time, Goepferd said.
More than 89,000 transgender people ages 13 to 17 live in states that limit their access to gender-affirming care, according to a research letter published in late July in the Journal of the American Medical Association, though not all trans people choose or can afford gender-affirming care.
Rhys Perez, a transmasculine and nonbinary 17-year-old, is preparing to move this month from Houston to Los Angeles to start college. The teen, who said they’re “escaping Texas in the nick of time,” said California’s protection for gender-affirming care was one of the main factors in their decision on where to go for college.
Perez has just begun their search for a provider in Southern California but already has encountered several clinics with waits for an initial consultation between nine and 14 months. They were disappointed to learn they likely could not begin hormone replacement therapy until their sophomore year.
“Hormones and stuff, that was never something my family fully understood or supported, really,” Perez said. “I figured it was best to wait until I move for college, but now it’s frustrating to know I’m going to have to wait even longer.”
“I wish I could start college as fully me,” they said.
Initial sanctuary laws or executive orders were an emergency step to protect transgender people and their families from the threat of prosecution by more than 20 states that have restricted or banned such health care, advocates say. They generally do not contain provisions to shore up health systems, but advocates say that needs to be the next step.
“That’s what we’re hoping to set up over the next year to two years, is making sure that not only are we making this promise of being a refuge for folks, but we’re actually living up to that and ensuring that folks who come here have access to care when they need it,” said Kat Rohn, executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group OutFront Minnesota.
Those efforts will likely need to involve legislators, governors, large employers, Medicaid plans and boards of medicine, said Kellan Baker, executive director of the Whitman-Walker Institute, the policy and education arm of a clinic with the same name in Washington, D.C.
“I would hope that it would be a comprehensive effort, that everyone at every level enacting these shield laws is aware that it’s not just about making a promise of access on paper, but that it needs to be backed up by the availability of providers,” Baker said.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, became the first governor to order the investigation of families of transgender minors who receive gender-affirming care, and legislators this year passed a ban on such care.
Whether that law takes effect on Sept. 1 will be decided by a state judge in Austin, who is hearing arguments this week in a lawsuit filed by families and doctors seeking a temporary injunction. The lawsuit argues the bill violates parental rights and discriminates against transgender teens. It is unclear when the judge will rule.
A plaintiff, identified only by the pseudonym Gina Goe, testified Tuesday about her 15-year-old transgender son’s efforts to continue testosterone treatments: “I have reached out to a Colorado facility, but there is, like, a waiting list. ... There is going to be a gap in his medical care.”
Ginger Chun, the education and family engagement manager at the Transgender Education Network of Texas, said she was in contact last year with about 15 families with trans family members. This year already, she has talked to about 250 families, who are asking about everything from clarification on legislation to looking for ways to access care. Those who are looking for care outside Texas are encountering waiting lists.
The research published in JAMA found that Texas youths’ average travel time to a clinic for gender-affirming care increased from just under an hour to over 7 1/2 hours.
“It’s like a daily, ever-changing process to figure out where people can access care,” Chun said.
Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke, a Democrat who sponsored a bill to protect gender-affirming care, predicts “thousands” of people will travel to the state for care within two years. She’s also seeking solutions to the provider shortage and expects to take a closer look when the next legislative session begins in February.
“I’m not sure what as a legislature we can do to increase the number of people who provide a certain kind of medical care,” said Finke, a transgender woman who represents part of the Twin Cities area. “I’m not sure as a policymaker what the mechanisms are to say we need more of one kind of specific health care provider, assuming that those exist. I’m certainly going to be interested in looking at them.”
The number of providers nationwide is limited, and for many, it’s not their full-time job. Minnesota, for instance, is home to 91 providers, according to a search on the website of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The state has 29,500 transgender people 13 and older, according to the Williams Institute, an LGBTQ+ think tank at the UCLA School of Law.
Dr. Katy Miller, the medical director of adolescent medicine for Children’s Minnesota, estimates “probably at least hundreds of families” are moving to the Twin Cities for gender-affirming care.
“People are going to kind of extraordinary lengths, like pulling kids out of school, moving.” Miller said.
In many ways, the quest for gender-affirming care parallels that of abortion access, for which people also cross state borders, sometimes under threat of prosecution. The main difference with gender-affirming care is that treatment is ongoing, generally for the rest of a person’s life, so permanent access is key.
Anticipating long waits, some parents preemptively sought out gender-affirming care providers for a child, like Minnesota activist Kelsey Waits. Her 10-year-old transgender child, Kit, got into the system at a hospital that could eventually provide blockers or hormones so that they wouldn’t have to start puberty without a doctor’s support.
“A lot happens in puberty in one year,” Waits said. “Just the stress of that on a family — the kids, the parents who are trying to find care for their child — it’s a lot.”
Associated Press journalists Jamie Stengle in Dallas, Jim Vertuno in Austin, Texas, and Mark Vancleave in Minneapolis contributed to this report. McMillan reported from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Schoenbaum from Raleigh, North Carolina.
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Florida effectively bans AP Psychology course over LGBTQ content, College Board says
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-03-1553/education-florida-effectively-bans-ap-psychology-course-over-lgbtq-content
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LGBTQ Issues
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https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/florida-effectively-bans-ap-psychology-course-lgbtq-content-college-bo-rcna98036
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OUT NEWS
Florida effectively bans AP Psychology course over LGBTQ content, College Board says
The state’s decision to restrict AP Psychology comes several months after its decision to block AP African American Studies courses.
Florida schools drop AP Psychology course over LGBTQ+ content
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Aug. 3, 2023, 10:03 PM CEST / Updated Aug. 4, 2023, 8:15 PM CEST
By Matt Lavietes
Florida "effectively banned" Advanced Placement Psychology classes in the state due to the course's content on sexual orientation and gender identity, the College Board said Thursday.
The state's Department of Education informed the College Board that “teaching foundational content on sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal under state law," the higher education nonprofit said in a statement. Florida's Parental Rights in Education Act, or what critics have dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" law, restricts the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in the state's classrooms.
“The state’s ban of this content removes choice from parents and students,” the College Board said in a statement. “Coming just days from the start of school, it derails the college readiness and affordability plans of tens of thousands of Florida students currently registered for AP Psychology, one of the most popular AP classes in the state.“
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in Philadelphia on June 30, 2023.Hannah Beier for The Washington Post via Getty Images file
The state's move to restrict the AP Psychology course comes several months after its decision to block AP African American Studies courses was widely condemned by academics and civil rights activists.
The College Board added that Florida will allow superintendents to offer the college-level psychology class for high schoolers if they exclude LGBTQ topics.
However, the College Board argued that excluding the lessons — which it describes as teachings on "how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development" — "would censor college-level standards."
It added that lessons regarding sexual orientation and gender identity have been included in AP Psychology since the course was created 30 years ago.
The group said that more than 28,000 Florida students took AP Psychology in the prior academic year.
When asked to confirm that the department effectively banned the course, Cassie Palelis, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education, or FDOE, said the nonprofit was “attempting to force school districts to prevent students from taking the AP Psychology.”
“The Department didn’t ‘ban’ the course. The course remains listed in Florida’s Course Code Directory for the 2023-24 school year. We encourage the College Board to stop playing games with Florida students and continue to offer the course and allow teachers to operate accordingly,” Palelis said in an email. “The other advanced course providers (including the International Baccalaureate program) had no issue providing the college credit psychology course.”
When asked by a reporter on the presidential campaign trail on Friday if AP Psychology was banned in the state over the inclusion of sexuality and gender topics, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “that’s wrong.”
“That’s part of our course catalogue,” he said. “I bet it’ll end up being offered.”
He appeared to imply that similar college-level classes could be offered through nonprofit organizations other than the College Board, including International Baccalaureate.
In a statement shared with NBC News on Friday, the Florida Association of District School Superintendents said it is working "diligently with FDOE and school superintendents who want to continue to offer AP Psychology."
"Superintendents are openly communicating with parents their district’s plans for this course or an alternative college level course as we prepare for the start of the school year," the statement, sent by association spokesperson Diana Shelton Oropallo, said. "AP Psychology continues to be listed in Florida’s Course Code Directory and we hope that College Board will keep the best interests of students at the forefront and award college credit to all Florida students who successfully complete the AP Psychology exam."
The governor's office did not immediately return a request for comment.
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The American Psychological Association, the nation's largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists, argued against stripping AP Psychology of LGBTQ topics earlier this year, after the state requested that the College Board review sexuality and gender identity topics in all advanced placement courses.
“Understanding human sexuality is fundamental to psychology, and an advanced placement course that excludes the decades of science studying sexual orientation and gender identity would deprive students of knowledge they will need to succeed in their studies, in high school and beyond,” the association's CEO, Arthur C. Evans Jr., said in a statement in June. “We applaud the College Board for standing up to the state of Florida and its unconscionable demand to censor an educational curriculum and test that were designed by college faculty and experienced AP teachers who ensure that the course and exam reflect the state of the science and college-level expectations.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union, said the decision to restrict AP Psychology in the state is “part of the DeSantis playbook of eroding rights” and “censoring those he disagrees with.”
LGBTQ advocates also condemned the state's AP Psychology restriction on Thursday.
“Psychology is centered around people – all people," Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBTQ advocacy group, said in a statement. "Erasing us from the curriculum ignores our existence, sets back Florida students who want to pursue psychology in higher education and disrupts pathways for future mental health professionals to provide comprehensive, culturally competent mental healthcare for the LGBTQ+ community."
DeSantis, a Republican who is running for president, signed the so-called Don’t Say Gay law last year.
The law was widely condemned by LGBTQ activists and prompted an ongoing feud between the governor and The Walt Disney Co., Florida's largest employer.
The measure initially prohibited “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade “or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards” in public and charter schools.
But earlier this year, DeSantis doubled down, signing a measure into law expanding the restrictions to explicitly include students through the eighth grade. The newer version of the law also restricts reproductive health education in sixth through 12th grade.
In addition to enacting the "Don't Say Gay" law, the governor recently signed into law a measure that bars transgender people from using public restrooms that align with their gender identities and another that restricts drag performances in front of minors. A judge subsequently blocked the drag law.
On the final day of LGBTQ Pride Month in June, DeSantis’ presidential campaign released a video portraying the governor as a champion of anti-gay and anti-trans policies.
The video garnered widespread attention for its pairing of DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ policy accomplishments alongside images of shirtless bodybuilders, in what appeared to be an attempt to portray the Florida governor as strong. It was condemned by both Republicans and Democrats, with some calling it "homophobic."
Matt Lavietes
Reporter, NBC OUT
Alec Hernández contributed.
| 645
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Video shows comedian, not Disney executive, speaking at city council meeting
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-19-0636/facts-and-fact-checking-video-shows-comedian-not-disney-executive-speaking-city
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/07/17/no-disney-isnt-opening-pediatric-transgender-clinics-fact-check/70414918007/
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Video shows comedian, not Disney executive, speaking at city council meeting | Fact check
HANNAH HUDNALL USA TODAY
Show Caption
The claim: Video shows Disney executive announcing company's new pediatric transgender clinics
A July 7 Facebook video (direct link, archive link) begins with a screenshot of a headline that reads, "DISNEY EXECUTIVE REVEALS SHOCKING NEXT PHASE FOR COMPANY – NOBODY SAW THIS COMING…OR DID THEY?"
The video then shows a man walking up to a podium and speaking to a table of city council members.
"Thank you, I'm Alan Bergman," the man says. "I'm the co-chair of the entertainment division at Disney and we have a special announcement to make today. ... We're proud to announce that this summer we're going to be opening Disney-themed pediatric transgender clinics for the children across the country."
The video includes screenshots of articles about Disney including LGBTQ characters in its shows and movies.
The post garnered more than 4,000 shares in a week, while the original TikTok garnered more than 7,000 likes in nine days. Similar versions of the claim have been shared on Facebook and Instagram.
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Our rating: False
The video features a comedian satirically posing as a Disney executive. The company isn't opening any transgender clinics.
Video was created as satire
The headline featured in the Facebook video comes from a Bitchute video shared by conservative comedian Mark Dice, who attended a June 21 Oceanside City Council Meeting in California.
The video's description says Dice was posing as Bergman, the Disney co-chair, as a form of satire.
"While it's 'just' satire, is it really that far from the actual truth?" reads the description.
Dice shared the video on YouTube as well with the same satire disclaimer.
Fact check: No, National Guard is not blocking Disney World entrances; claim is satire
Nine days later, the comedian shared a similar video on YouTube, in which he attended a Del Mar City Council meeting in California and made the same claim posing as Bergman.
The Facebook video is an example of what could be called "stolen satire," where posts created as satire and presented that way originally are reposted in a way that makes them appear to be legitimate news. As a result, readers of the second-generation post are misled, as was the case here.
Dice has uploaded numerous videos of himself attending various city council meetings across California, posing as other characters such as a professor who teaches critical race theory and a father of a transgender Ugandan child.
Bergman is pictured on the Disney website and clearly looks different than Dice.
There haven't been any credible reports of Disney opening transgender clinics.
USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response. The TikTok user couldn't be contacted.
The claim has also been debunked by PolitiFact.
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Mark Dice (Bitchute), June 28, DISNEY EXECUTIVE REVEALS SHOCKING NEXT PHASE FOR COMPANY - NOBODY SAW THIS COMING…OR DID THEY?
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Mark Dice (YouTube), June 19, Wait For It…Telling the Truth about "Pride Month" to City Council Meeting
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How many trans people are there in the U.S., and why do we overestimate it?
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-14-0705/lgbtq-issues-how-many-trans-people-are-there-us-and-why-do-we-overestimate-it
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A person holds a "We Say Trans" sign while waiting for the the annual Seattle Pride Parade to begin, June 25, 2023 (AP)
2022 survey data found that between 0.5% and 1.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender or nonbinary. The rate is higher among young people.
Surveys show that when asked, people overestimate what percentage of the population is transgender, along with other minority groups. Psychologists say that cognitive quirks can explain our faulty math.
State legislators introduced hundreds of 2023 bills targeting transgender Americans and affecting access to health care, education policy and sports. To hear the political discourse, it sounds at times as if the United States’ transgender population is large, booming and influential.
"Trans ideology is coming after our children," tweeted U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., on July 11.
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy misleadingly described being transgender as a "social contagion" and a mental illness that is spreading "like wildfire across this country."
The Twitter account Gays Against Groomers alerted its 343,000 followers July 5 to a notable figure: "New data finds that there has been a 4000% spike in students that identify as non-binary in New Jersey." Last year, it reported in another tweet that a follower said "40% of her child’s friends identify as non-binary or trans" and then emphasized the 40%.
But is the U.S. transgender population really exploding? And what does data tell us about how many trans people there are in the U.S.?
In reality, current data shows that the number of people who identify as transgender is very low: between 0.5% and 1.6% of American adults, with slightly higher numbers among young people. Yet when asked, people overestimate the number of trans people, with one survey showing the public thinks as many as 1 in 5 people — or 21% of the population — is transgender.
Psychological quirks explain why humans consistently overestimate minority populations, but research suggests this inflated perception could lead to more prejudiced beliefs and could shed light on the rise of anti-trans legislation.
So PolitiFact explored — what are the real numbers, why do we get them wrong, and why does it matter?
Determining the number of transgender people in the U.S. is not simple. Until 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau didn’t ask about sexual orientation and gender identity, so we lack large-scale demographic data. Instead, researchers rely on survey data to estimate the size of the transgender population.
In June 2022, the Williams Institute, a public policy research institute at the UCLA School of Law, released its numbers. Williams drew from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data and estimated that 1.6 million people, or 0.6% of Americans ages 13 and older identify as transgender. Among adults, the percentage was lower — about 0.5%. And among youth 13 to 17, it was 1.4%.
Gallup, a public opinion polling company, found similar numbers in its 2022 survey of 10,000 U.S. adults. Overall, about 0.6% identified as transgender, with higher numbers among young people: 1.9% of 18-to-25-year-olds.
The highest rates were reported by Pew Research Center, which found that 1.6% of 10,188 U.S. adults surveyed identified as transgender or nonbinary, meaning they don’t identify as either men or women. The rate was higher again among young people, with 2% of people ages 18 to 29 identifying as transgender men or women, and 3% identifying as nonbinary.
Experts shared that disparities between findings may be related to some of the quirks and challenges that come with collecting data on gender identity.
For example, the Williams Institute and Gallup both asked if people identified as transgender. To some people, "transgender" may include anyone whose sex assigned at birth does not match their gender identity. But others who are nonbinary may or may not consider themselves transgender and could answer no to such a question.
The current gold standard is a two-step approach, which includes one question about assigned sex at birth and another question about current gender identity, explained Andrew Flores, American University assistant professor of government and a co-author of the Williams Institute report. This method, used by Pew in its 2022 research, captures a wider range of diverse gender identities. The more expansive question may explain the larger numbers Pew found.
But existing survey data using this two-step approach is limited, Flores said.
Conducting surveys on the topic of gender identity requires special considerations, experts said. For example, are people asked privately or publicly in front of family? Are the questions themselves understandable to people who have less familiarity with LGBTQ+ issues? And who is sponsoring the survey?
However you slice it, the numbers are low. But ask folks how many transgender people they think there are in the U.S., and the numbers are wildly out of the park.
YouGov, a United Kingdom-based polling company, asked 1,000 Americans in 2022 to estimate the size of various minority groups. "If you had to guess, what percentage of American adults are transgender?" one of the questions asked.
The average response was 21%, or 1 in 5 Americans. This overestimate was not an outlier, as respondents consistently overestimated the size of other minority groups, guessing that 27% of people are Muslim (the reality is 1%), or that 41% of Americans are Black (the reality is 12% to 13%).
A survey of 1,500 voters commissioned by Newsweek gave respondents fewer options: less than 1%, 1-3%, 3-5% or greater than 5%. Results showed that 61% of people thought more than 1% of people were transgender, with 39% of people thinking the proportion was greater than 3%.
These findings fall in line with research that shows people consistently overestimate the size of minority groups. Experts said there are two big explanations for this error.
"People are generally just really bad at making any sort of numerical estimates," said Maureen Craig, a Duke University associate research professor of psychology and neuroscience. This "innumeracy" as it is sometimes called, means that we tend to overestimate small numbers and underestimate large numbers. This pattern can be seen in the YouGov poll across all 43 questions asked.
Because minorities are by definition small, we consistently make overestimates. And the smaller the number, the worse we are at guessing, Craig said.
The other reason why we overestimate is that "our minds are built to notice everything that is uncommon or infrequent," said Rasha Kardosh, a New York University postdoctoral fellow in psychology. "People from the minority group are by definition less frequent, so our mind has the tendency to pick out their presence," and remember seeing them.
You may remember every person you’ve seen using a wheelchair. But "you tend not to think about all the people who are not using a wheelchair," said Baruch Fischhoff, Carnegie Mellon University professor of engineering and public policy. "So people are accurate at knowing what they've seen, but they tend to overestimate things because they don't factor in all the cases that we haven't seen."
Faulty estimates result from a combination of innumeracy, as well as our brain’s tendency to remember what and whom we consider novel. For transgender people, that makes for a "perfect storm," Craig said. "It's a really tiny proportion of the population, and it's in the news."
This means the public is likely to be thinking much more about transgender people, a group they were already likely to overestimate.
These overestimates may just be psychological flukes. In the YouGov poll, for example, survey designer and data journalist Taylor Orth said in an email to PolitiFact that Democrats and Republicans were "roughly equally likely as one another to over- and under-estimate the size of different groups. This indicates that misperceptions are not necessarily driven by political identity and are likely a broader phenomenon rooted in human psychology."
But other research suggests that our miscalculations and perceptions of group size may shape our political perspectives.
Several studies have found a correlation between the perceived size of a minority group and negative and adversarial attitudes about that group. This can lead to a person feeling threatened by a minority group that’s far smaller than thought. "Evidence shows that people use the size of a group as a proxy for how powerful that group is," Craig said.
Some experiments have found that exposure to information about the growth of racial minority groups prompted more negative attitudes toward racial minorities.
Experiments conducted by Craig and her colleagues have also shown that reminding people of the growth in minority populations can cause some in a majority population to express more conservative political views.
Another experiment by Kardosh found that when participants overestimated the prevalence of Black students at a fictional university, they were less likely to support policies promoting diversity. But, when participants were told the actual prevalence of Black students was 5%, people were more supportive of such policies.
Much of this research focuses on racial demographic shifts, but we may be seeing a similar trend with the LGBTQ+ population. Despite more Americans reporting that they personally know someone who is transgender and who uses gender-neutral pronouns, it appears the belief that gender is determined by sex assigned at birth is also rising, according to surveys conducted by Pew.
A Washington Post-KFF poll also found that a majority of Americans support policies that would limit access to school sports and gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth.
A year or two ago, most people may have given little thought to the topic of transgender rights. But Craig said that by drawing attention to this group, high-profile policy discussions and news coverage may be feeding people’s outsized perceptions and sense of urgency over transgender issues.
"It's not just that people are making these estimates and then reacting," Craig said. "It's also the policies that are being proposed that make people think about this as an issue."
PolitiFact reporters Louis Jacobson, Sevana Wenn, and Sofia Bliss-Carrascosa contributed to this story.
Email interview with Andrew Flores, assistant professor of government at American University, July 6, 2023
Interview with Maureen Craig, associate research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, July 7, 2023
Interview with Rasha Kardosh, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at New York University, July 7, 2023
Interview with Baruch Fischhoff, professor of engineering and pblic policy at Carnegie Mellon University, July 7, 2023
Email Interview with Taylor Orth, senior survey data journalist at YouGov, July 10, 2023
Interview with Juliana Horowitz, associate director of social and demographic trends research, July 7, 2023
Interview with Linas Mitchell, psychology department instructor at Loyola University of Chicago, July 7, 2023
Email Interview with Charles Franklin, professor of law and public policy at Marquette University Law School, July 6, 2023
Tweet (archived), July 5, 2023
Tweet (archived), Aug. 7, 2022
Newsmax, "Teacher claims entire classroom of second graders switched pronouns," July 22, 2022
NPR, "Trump officials 'did not want' census survey to ask about sexual orientation," Sept. 20, 2018
The Public Opinion Quarterly, "Innumeracy About Minority Populations," 1993
Ethnic and Racial Studies, "The perception of ethnic diversity and anti-immigrant sentiments: A multilevel analysis of local communities in Belgium," January 2015
Social Forces, "Distorted Nation: Perceptions of racial/ethnic group sizes and attitudes toward immigrants and other minorities," December 2005
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, "More diverse yet less tolerant? How the increasingly diverse racial landscape affects white Americans' racial attitudes," June 2014
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, "Political ideology moderates white Americans’ reactions to racial demographic change," September 2021
Social Psychological and Personality Science, "Hispanic population growth engenders conservative shift among non-Hispanic racial minorities," June 15, 2017
Psychological Science, "On the precipice of a "majority-minority" America," 2014
The Washington Post, "Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP, poll shows," May 6, 2023
YouGov, "From millionaires to Muslims, small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans," March 15, 2022
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, "Bias and ignorance in demographic perception," Aug. 31, 2017
UCLA School of Law, the Williams Institute, "How many adults and youth identify as transgender in the United States?" June 2022
Gallup, "U.S. LGBT Identification Steady at 7.2%," Feb. 22, 2023
Pew Research Center, "About 5% of young adults in U.S. are transgender or nonbinary," June 7, 2022
American Journal of Public Health, "Transgender population size in the United States: a meta-regression of population-based probability samples,"
The New York Times, "Report reveals sharp rise in transgender young people in the U.S." June 10, 2022
U.S. Census Bureau, Census survey now asks about sexual orientation, gender identity, Aug. 5, 2021
Newsweek, "What Americans get wrong about transgender people," June 14, 2023
Gallup Americans still greatly overestimate U.S. gay population, June 27, 2019
Scientific American, People think minority groups are bigger than they really are, April 27, 2022
Bloomberg News, Americans vastly overestimate how diverse the country really is, Oct. 22, 2013
The Washington Post, Americans vastly overestimate the number of immigrants. But what if it doesn’t matter?, June 22, 2018
PNAS, "Minority salience and the overestimation of individuals from minority groups in perception and memory," March 14, 2023
Pew Research Center, Americans’ complex views on gender identity and transgender issues, June 28, 2022
Pew Research Center, Rising shares of U.S. adults know someone who is transgender orgoes by gender-neutral pronouns, July 27, 2021
Psychology Today, "Why we see what we want to see," July 9, 2019
Human Rights Campaign, "Roundup of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation advancing in states across the country," May 23, 2023
Tweet (archived), July 11, 2023
The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter
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Ron DeSantis Is Betting the Farm on Trans Hate
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-10-0753/lgbtq-issues-ron-desantis-betting-farm-trans-hate
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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/07/ron-desantis-lgbtq-video-trump-2024-presidential-campaign.html
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POLITICS
Ron DeSantis Is Betting the Farm on Trans Hate
The era of tepid acceptance is over.
BY CHRISTINA CAUTERUCCI
JULY 10, 20235:45 AM
Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in June in New Hampshire. Scott Eisen/Getty Images
On the last day of June, a Twitter account for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis posted a video celebrating his yearslong assault on LGBTQ+ Floridians. It starts by painting DeSantis’ most formidable competitor for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, Donald Trump, as a virtual trans-rights icon.
To bumping club music, scenes flash of the former president shaking hands with Caitlyn Jenner and saying Jenner could use the restroom of her choice in Trump Tower. There’s a clip of Trump telling Barbara Walters that he’d support trans women who enter the Miss Universe competition. And there he is again, saying, at the 2016 Republican National Convention, in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre that killed 49 people in DeSantis’ home state, “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.”
The second half of the video salutes DeSantis’ extreme transphobia, using the iconography and aesthetics of the uber-online far right.
A montage of headlines recounts the highlights of DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, many of them conveying the outrage the legislation has inspired on the left. (For example: “DeSantis Signs ‘Most Extreme Slate of Anti-Trans Laws in Modern History’ ” and “No One Is More Dangerous for the White House Than Ron DeSantis—Including Donald Trump.”) From behind his MSNBC desk, Chris Hayes intones, of DeSantis’ push to end care for transgender children, “I cannot think of anything more horrifying.”
There are headlines about Pride events and drag shows being canceled, lots of photos of DeSantis looking stern, and images of greased-up muscle men interspersed with Hollywood symbols of rapacious machismo (Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, Leonardo DiCaprio as The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort, Brad Pitt as Achilles—a gay icon in his own right—in Troy), all set to a thumping soundtrack. The effect is confusingly but unmistakably homoerotic, even as the video itself delights in a concerted campaign to erase queer life.
The video appears to have been created by a DeSantis-promoting hard-right Twitter account called Proud Elephant. Team DeSantis’s reposting of it—without attribution in the text of the tweet, which made it appear to be an official campaign ad—is part of the governor’s plan to outflank Trump from the right on key issues that inflame the Republican base. (He’s doing it on abortion, too—after Trump blamed hard-line anti-abortion policies for the GOP’s underperformance in the 2022 midterms, DeSantis signed a six-week ban in Florida.)
After considerable backlash, DeSantis defended the video in an interview with Tomi Lahren last week. “Identifying Donald Trump as really being a pioneer in injecting gender ideology into the mainstream, where he was having men compete against women in his beauty pageants, I think that’s totally fair game,” DeSantis said.
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But the tone of this video is what differentiates it from the typical messaging candidates use to set themselves apart from their opponents. It’s not claiming to be incensed by the struggles of everyday Americans. It’s not passionate about “taking our country back.” It’s gleeful about hate. It’s taunting. It’s a victory lap, but not of any accomplishment that has made people’s lives better; the video doesn’t mention anyone who has been helped by DeSantis’ legislation. It is concerned only with the people whose lives it has made worse. (And, because the DeSantis campaign did not produce the video, it’s rife with plausible deniability should the governor make it to the general election.)
The promotion of this video by a serious presidential candidate marks a shift in GOP politics. Not so long ago, as the video itself indicates, it was considered good form for Republicans to at least pretend that LGBTQ+ people were of interest to them as constituents, to acknowledge their existence in a neutral way. Granted, a nominal shift away from baldfaced homophobia was embraced more enthusiastically by the likes of Trump than, say, Mike Pence, but the lip service allowed gay Republicans to feel more at home in the party, despite the fact that the GOP has only gotten more anti-gay over time.
Now the era of coating an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda in a veneer of tepid acceptance is over.
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DeSantis has set a new low bar for the Republican presidential primary: The occasional verbal overtures Trump made to gay people as president—while actively rolling back queer and trans rights and protections—are no longer acceptable. The new conservative stance toward LGBTQ+ people isn’t quiet grumbling in public while raising hell in the courts. It’s rabid hostility. In Republican discourse, there’s no further need for pretense about protecting the sanctity of marriage or respecting religious freedom. Transphobia and homophobia are self-justifying ideologies; hating trans people because they’re trans is good enough.
The renewed excitement for queer-bashing among DeSantis and his conservative peers has had real-world effects. In addition to the mobilization of Patriot Front and Proud Boys cohorts at Pride events, according to annual Gallup polls, in the span of a year, Republican approval of “gay or lesbian relations” fell an astonishing 15 points. (Last year, a majority of self-identified Republicans approved of gays. That majority no longer exists.) Now DeSantis stands ready to capitalize on a self-sustaining trend he helped start.
There is little question where that trend leads. In the video shared by Team DeSantis, there is a clip of a progressive podcaster explaining the spate of anti-trans laws (including restrictions on bathrooms, gender-affirming health care, drag shows, and pronoun use in schools) recently passed in Florida. The state has enacted “some of the harshest, most draconian laws that literally threaten trans existence,” the podcast host says. The video plays this projected outcome like a good thing.
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This stands in contrast to the vibe of several years ago, when there were signs that Republicans thought they could peel some queers away from the Democratic Party by pitting them against other marginalized groups. After the Pulse massacre, Trump used the tragedy to justify his call to end Muslim immigration (even though the perpetrator was born in New York), arguing that he was the best candidate for LGBTQ+ people because his Muslim ban would prevent another attack. Whenever he mentioned Pulse, it was in the context of his plan to discriminate against Muslims.
Take Trump’s speech from the 2016 RNC, a clip of which opens the video DeSantis’ team tweeted. The quote included in the video is bolded below, here in its full Islamophobia-baiting context:
Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted LGBTQ community. No good, and we’re gonna stop it. As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.
The real message was not directed at actual LGBTQ+ people at all.
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Seven years after that Trump speech, Republican candidates have reversed course. Now, they say, it’s queer people who are promoting a dangerous ideology, and it’s Muslims they’re courting as potential allies. Across the country, socially conservative Muslims are joining with right-wing groups in the fight against LGBTQ+ education in schools, Pride flags on public property, and books with queer themes. The GOP will never embrace the pet issues of any marginalized group. But insofar as the interests of such a group align with the interests of the white Christian conservatives, the enemy of the Republican Party’s enemy is the Republican Party’s friend.
Those interests, as DeSantis sees them, demand exactly what the Proud Elephant video applauds: “draconian laws that literally threaten trans existence.”
In most cases, presidential candidates stop short of pledging to eradicate growing demographics of Americans. (Some of those Americans vote, after all, and all are loved by other voters who do not wish to see them suffer.) That restraint is no longer necessary. DeSantis’ promotion of that video suggests that, in his campaign’s view, the bloodthirst Republicans feel toward trans people has finally grown to outweigh the adverse effects of alienating everyone who wants to see a trans loved one thrive. It foretells a Republican Party that has fully given up on persuading LGBTQ+ people—and those who care deeply for them—to vote for the GOP, reasoning that the party stands to gain more by demonizing and destroying them instead.
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Right-wing media smear trans people and BLM supporters following Philadelphia shooting
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-06-0701/media-bias-right-wing-media-smear-trans-people-and-blm-supporters-following
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Right-wing media smear trans people and BLM supporters following Philadelphia shooting
Conservative pundits attempted to link the shooting to trans people and anti-racist activists, while ignoring the suspect's support for Donald Trump
Special PROGRAMS
LGBTQ
WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACK WHEATLEY, MONICA RODRIGUEZ & EMMA MAE WEBER
PUBLISHED 07/05/23 3:47 PM EDT
Right-wing media outlets and pundits are responding to a shooting in Philadelphia on Monday by claiming, with little evidence, that the alleged shooter was transgender. The insinuation, sometimes stated outright, is the bigoted myth that trans people are threats to public life, now a common trope in right-wing media.
Conservatives are also attempting to link the shooting to the Black Lives Matter movement, based on social media posts tied to the suspect, while ignoring other posts that praised former President Donald Trump or adopted a right-wing interpretation of the Second Amendment.
“In May, he shared a post entitled: ‘Who supports Trump in 2024,’ which featured an American flag emblazoned with the words ‘God, Guns & Trump,’” Vice reported. The suspect also apparently posted a link to a pro-Trump T-shirt and another to a sweatshirt that reads: “I lubricate my AR-15 with liberal tears."
Vice additionally reported:
“This y’all president,” the suspect wrote under a video of Biden. “We said 2A defends our rights. Now its god save the queen while he attempts to take our arms,” referencing a recent gun safety speech the president gave which he ended by saying, “God save the queen.” In another post with a link to a video about Biden pushing gun control measures, he wrote: “I told you he wanted your rights. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN SAYS BIDEN.”
Police have yet to release the suspect’s name, but local news outlets identified the alleged shooter as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old local resident. Five people were killed in the attack and another two were injured.
Carriker allegedly posted two photos to social media in which he appeared to wear a bra, wore feminine jewelry, and sported long, braided hair. Right-wing media have used these photos to claim or insinuate, without any additional evidence, that Carriker is trans, while downplaying or ignoring the far-right aspects of his apparent social media presence.
This right-wing response follows a similar pattern of conservative outlets reacting to a mass shooting by either falsely claiming the suspect is trans or using the person’s trans identity as an opportunity to smear LGBTQ communities writ large. Fact-checkers and researchers have consistently found that right-wing claims of a “clear epidemic” of trans people committing violence are completely false, and that trans people are four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victims of violent crimes.
Right-wing media outlets suggested the alleged shooter was trans based on minimal evidence. Many also highlighted the suspect’s apparent support for Black Lives Matter but excluded or downplayed pro-Trump, pro-gun posts.
Right-wing tabloid the New York Post headlined its piece “Gunman arrested for Philadelphia mass shooting that left 5 dead is BLM activist who wore women’s clothes: sources.” The article didn’t mention the alleged perpetrator’s pro-Trump posts. [New York Post, 7/4/23]
The Daily Wire, a hotbed of anti-trans propaganda, relied on the Post’s reporting while making the headline even more provocative: “Philly Alleged Mass Shooter Identified As Cross-Dressing BLM Supporter: Report.” Like the Post, the Daily Wire also excluded any mention of Trump. [The Daily Wire, 7/5/23]
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro argued that this shooting would likely be “disappeared by the media” because “the perpetrator is not a white dude who backed Donald Trump.” Shapiro added, “The shooter was a 40-year-old man who is trans, apparently. This person posted two pictures of himself wearing a bra, a women’s top, and earrings with his hair braided long in March.” Shapiro also mentioned the suspect’s support of BLM, adding of the shooting: “We're not allowed to talk about this anymore.” [The Ben Shapiro Show, 7/5/23]
Conservative tabloid the Daily Mail trumpeted an “exclusive” in its headline, writing: “Cross-dressing gunman behind July 4 Philly bloodbath that left five dead is BLM supporter who made chilling Facebook posts about 'black massacres' and 'evil spirits.'” The piece didn’t mention the alleged shooter’s posts in support of Trump until the 22nd paragraph. [The Daily Mail, 7/4/23]
La Verdad host Carines Moncada made similar comments, saying the Philadelphia shooter “has been unmasked as a Black Lives Matter supporter who was transgender” and “made chilling Facebook posts about evil spirits.” Moncada claimed that in March 2022, it was revealed through Facebook that the shooter “dressed as a woman with a bra, hoop earrings, [and] gold bracelets.” Moncada then criticized the Biden administration for supposedly ignoring the country's mental crisis and focusing solely on “attacking guns, as if guns go off on their own.” [Americano Media, La Verdad, 07/05/23]
Right-wing website Just The News wrote that the suspect “posted cross-dressing pics on Facebook” in its headline. The subheadline highlighted that Carriker is allegedly “fond” of the movie The Matrix, adding that the “co-director called it a transgender allegory.” The article didn’t mention the suspect’s praise of Trump. [Just The News, 7/4/23]
Junk conspiracy theory website The Gateway Pundit’s story was headlined: “Gunman Behind Philly Massacre is BLM Supporter…. and Transgender?” Like other conservative outlets, the Gateway Pundit didn’t include any mention of Trump or the Second Amendment in its article. [The Gateway Pundit, 7/4/23]
Conservative website The Post Millennial characterized Carriker in its headline as a “BLM Supporter.” Many conservatives on social media went on to share The Post Millennial’s coverage, which also failed to mention any of the alleged perpetrator’s pro-Trump commentary. [The Post Millennial, 7/4/23]
Conservative blog Hot Air’s headline read: “Philadelphia shooter was another transgender person.” [Hot Air, 7/5/23]
Right-wing commentators on social media quickly claimed or implied the alleged shooter was trans and a supporter of Black Lives Matter, also ignoring the suspect’s far-right posts
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a mainstay on conservative media, tweeted: “Another trans shooter.” [Twitter, 7/4/23]
Libs of Tik Tok creator Chaya Raichik tweeted: “The mass shooter in Philadelphia is trans,” quote-tweeting a post from an account called Philly Crime Update. [Twitter, 7/5/23]
Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec wrote: “BREAKING: BLM supporter Kimbrady Watson Carriker named as suspect in Philadelphia mass shooting that killed 5.” Posobiec shared The Post Millennial’s story about the incident. [Twitter, 7/4/23]
Pro-Trump troll account Catturd quote tweeted Posobiec, adding: “Imagine that.” [Twitter, 7/4/23]
Like Posobiec, conservative pundit James Lindsey shared The Post Millennial’s story, adding: “What a surprise!” [Twitter, 7/4/23]
Conservative commentator DC_Draino wrote: “Media won’t talk about this so we will. Transgender shooter was arrested on Monday after shooting & killing five people & injuring two children in Philadelphia. Time to start having a national dialogue on Trans mass shooters that target children. Enough!! [Twitter, 7/4/23]
Right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo tweeted: “The suspect in a deadly mass shooting in Philadelphia on Monday that killed 5 & injured 4, including children, is revealed to be a trans #BLM activist. Kimbrady Carriker was arrested without incident, contradicting claim that black suspects are killed.” Ngo also linked to coverage from The Post Millennial. [Twitter, 7/4/23]
Timcast employee Josie Tait, who tweets under the handle The Redheaded Libertarian, commented on The Daily Mail’s story: “If only there were signs.” [Twitter, 7/4/23]
Right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong tweeted a photo of the alleged shooter, adding: “This is a beautiful woman/suspected mass shooter and if you disagree you’re a transphobic bigot.” [Twitter, 7/4/23]
Right-wing Twitter influencer Travis_in_Flint referred to the alleged shooter as “a transgender BLM activist.” [Twitter, 7/4/23]
Conservative YouTube channel Legally Armed America titled its stream “BLM ‘trans’ nutbag is shooter in Philadelphia - who shot a 2 year old.” [YouTube, 7/4/23]
Right-wing media host Wayne Allen Root also shared The Post Millennial story, tweeting: “History may refer to this period in American history as ‘The Great TRANS War.’” [Twitter, 7/5/23]
Anti-trans activist Malcolm Clark posted a thread connecting several stories about trans or gender-nonconforming people, alleging they received disproportionately positive treatment from institutions. “1./ What connects these four trans news stories from the last 48 hours? When Kimbrady, a transgender shooter in Philadelphia, killed 5 people the mainstream media decided to call him a man though if *he'd* been shot he'd likely have been called ‘yet another’ trans victim.” [Twitter, 7/5/23]
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Five key takeaways from the Supreme Court’s anti-LGBTQ decision
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-06-0620/supreme-court-five-key-takeaways-supreme-court-s-anti-lgbtq-decision
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LGBTQ Issues
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https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/07/five-key-takeaways-from-the-supreme-courts-anti-lgbtq-decision/
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A crucifix in front of the U.S. Supreme Court
Photo: Shutterstock
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to allow a homophobic website designer to discriminate against gay couples because it violated her faith was hardly a surprise. The conservative majority on the Court has made it loud and clear that its role is to fulfill the fantasies of the right. It may draw the line at some of the wilder dreams, like the idea that legislatures can overturn popular votes, but on core beliefs it has been extraordinarily consistent. The decision last year to overturn five decades of precedent allowing abortion removed any doubt.
Still, the decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is shocking for its unalloyed willingness to discount LGBTQ+ protections and even mock the Court’s minority’s vigorous defense of them. In his majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch has picked up some of Justice Samuel Alito’s sneer as he chastises fellow Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the author of the dissent, for engaging in “an unfortunate tendency by some to defend First Amendment values only when they find the speaker’s message sympathetic.”
While the full impact of the decision will take a while to unfold, some things are already clear. Here are five takeaways from the decision.
This was always going to be the outcome. The right wing of the Court has been looking for an excuse to elevate the rights of conservative Christians at the expense of LGBTQ+ people for a while. This case was the perfect vehicle. So what that Lorie Smith, the owner of the firm in question, never made a wedding website in her life. So what if no one actually asked her to make one. So what if the case included a fake request from someone who turned out to be a straight man. None of that mattered.
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A normal Court would not be ruling in the case of someone who is asking hypothetical questions. Smith hasn’t suffered any harm, a basic threshold for seeking redress. Instead, this Court plowed ahead because it has been heading in this direction for years. From its ruling in the Hobby Lobby case, granting a corporation the right to withhold contraception access in employee health care plans because the owners are Christian, to its rulings allowing a public school football coach to pray on the field and allowing anti-gay Christian schools to get public funds, the Court has been elevating the rights of conservative Christians. The most recent ruling is just the logical, if reprehensible, next step in that progression.
You can’t blame it all on Donald Trump. Yes, Donald Trump appointed three of the justices on the Court, tilting it far to the right. He was quick to take credit for the ruling overturning affirmative action, and no doubt he will make the Court a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. But the fact of the matter is we would have had this Court no matter who won the 2016 primary. It’s the product of the Republican party, not Donald Trump.
Any Republican president would have appointed the same or similar justices who would have ruled precisely the same way. That’s because the conservative pipeline for the Supreme Court is filled with people who have been thoroughly screened for their adherence to a particular ideology.
The Federalist Society is now the hothouse in which the right raises its judicial prospects. It offers the training, creates the legal arguments, provides connections, and, most of all, wields the influence to move conservatives into positions of power on the bench. Essentially, any Republican president would have to vet his or her Supreme Court nominee through the Federalist Society. A Jeb Bush Court wouldn’t have ruled any differently.
The ruling itself conflates speech and action. Gorsuch’s majority ruling wraps itself in knots trying to make the case about free speech, when in fact Smith was selling her services as a designer. Sotomayor makes quick work of this bogus claim, calling it “profoundly wrong.”
“[T]he act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment,” Sotomayor wrote. “Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group.”
Gorsuch makes the absurd argument that Smith isn’t really discriminating against gay people but against gay weddings, which violate her religious beliefs. He argues that this means that the ruling can’t be broadly applied to most other business transactions because they aren’t really expressions of free speech. For example, renting to a gay couple is a public accommodation issue, not a speech issue.
That’s a comforting thought if you buy it. But the Court has shown itself more than willing to start picking away at rights bit by bit.
There will be a lot more lawsuits. The majority opinion leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The way they are going to get answered is in the courts.
Sotomayor was quick to point out that the ruling opened the door to a flood of lawsuits, saying a “large retail store could reserve its family portrait services for ‘traditional’ families.” Gorsuch pooh-poohed that idea, saying that this case was much more straightforward.
It’s not.
Moreover, sensing blood in the water, Alliance Defending Freedom and similar hate groups will want to capitalize on their victory. They aren’t about to stop at this ruling. They will keep pushing the boundaries, using this ruling as the precedent. They will be seeking every possible exception to nondiscrimination laws that they can find in order to weaken them.
It will get worse before it gets better. With the Court demonstrating its willingness to abandon precedent and principle. we are going to be suffering its decisions for a long time. Efforts to change the Court are unlikely to go far, as Republicans won’t relinquish the power it gives them. Eventually, the tide will turn, but until it does, we are in for a tsunami of rulings chipping away at our hard-earned rights.
Commentary
303 Creative LLC v. Elenis Alliance Defending Freedom Donald Trump Federalist Society Lorie Smith Neil Gorsuch Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court
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Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney says Bud Light didn’t support her during backlash
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https://apnews.com/article/bud-light-transgender-dylan-mulvaney-442d6d4c3f41d706586de8edd01ac13d
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FILE - Dylan Mulvaney arrives at the 76th annual Tony Awards on Sunday, June 11, 2023, at the United Palace theater in New York. Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney on Friday, June 30 she felt abandoned by Bud Light after facing “more bullying and transphobia than I could have ever imagined” over her partnership with the beer giant. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, file)
Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney says she felt abandoned by Bud Light after facing “more bullying and transphobia than I could have ever imagined” over her partnership with the beer giant.
In a video posted Thursday to Instagram and TikTok, she said she “was waiting for the brand to reach out to me. But they never did.” She said she should have spoken out sooner but was afraid and hoped things would get better — but they didn’t.
“For months now, I’ve been scared to leave my house,” Mulvaney said. “I have been ridiculed in public. I’ve been followed, and I have felt a loneliness that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
Anheuser-Busch didn’t directly respond to Mulvaney in a statement the company released Friday. But it said it remains “committed to the programs and partnerships we have forged over decades with organizations across a number of communities, including those in the LGBTQ+ community.”
A deluge of criticism and hate erupted soon after Mulvaney cracked open a Bud Light in an Instagram video on April 1 as part of a promotional contest for the beer brand. She showed off a can emblazoned with her face that Bud Light sent to her — one of many corporate freebies she gets and shares with her millions of followers.
Conservative figures and others called for a boycott of Bud Light, while Mulvaney’s supporters criticized the beer brand for not doing enough to support her.
Since then, two marketing executives at parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev took a leave of absence, Bud Light lost its decadeslong position as America’s best-selling beer.
In the four weeks ending June 17, Bud Light’s U.S. retail sales had slumped 26% compared with the same period a year ago, according to Bump Williams Consulting, which follows the industry. Sales of Modelo Especial, which recently supplanted Bud Light as the country’s best-selling beer in retail dollar sales, rose 9% in the same period. Modelo’s market share was 8.4%, while Bud Light’s was 7.1%.
The Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest advocacy group for LGBTQ+ rights, also suspended its benchmark equality and inclusion rating for Anheuser-Busch, a subsidiary of Belgian brewer AB InBev.
“For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse, in my opinion, than not hiring a trans person at all — because it gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want,” Mulvaney said, without naming Bud Light.
In its statement, Anheuser-Busch said it prioritizes the safety and privacy of its employees and partners and that moving forward, it will focus on brewing “beer for everyone and earning our place in moments that matter to our consumers.”
Other companies, including Target and Starbucks, have recently come under fire for their efforts to appeal to the LGBTQ+ community, especially during June’s Pride celebrations, only to face more outcry when they tried to backpedal.
The clashes come amid a furious and fast-spreading debate over the rights of transgender people. At least 17 states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors, most since the start of this year.
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Supreme Court limits LGBTQ protections with ruling in favor of Christian web designer
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-30-0821/supreme-court-supreme-court-limits-lgbtq-protections-ruling-favor-christian-web
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https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/politics/supreme-court-303-creative-lgbtq-rights-colorado/index.html
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Plaintiff in pivotal SCOTUS case speaks out
03:11 - Source: CNN
CNN
—
The Supreme Court Friday ruled in favor of a Christian web designer in Colorado who refuses to create websites to celebrate same-sex weddings out of religious objections.
The 6-3 decision was penned by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas. Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a dissent joined by her liberal colleagues Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The court’s decision represents a devastating blow to LGBTQ protections, which have in recent years been bolstered by landmark decisions at the nation’s highest court, including one authored three years ago by Gorsuch in which the majority expanded protections for LGBTQ workers, and the 2015 case legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.
Lorie Smith, who runs a company called 303 Creative, sought to expand her business into the area of weddings and wrote a webpage explaining why she won’t create websites for same-sex couple. But under a Colorado public accommodations law, she said she cannot post the statement because the state considers it illegal.
The ruling – rooted in free speech grounds – will pierce state public accommodation laws for those businesses who sell so-called “expressive” goods. It is the latest victory for religious conservatives at the high court and will alarm critics who fear the current court is setting its sights on overturning the 2015 marriage case.
Gorsuch wrote that “the First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands.” He said Colorado sought to “deny that promise.”
Supreme Court blocks Biden's student loan forgiveness program
“All manner of speech – from ‘pictures, films, paintings, drawings, and engravings,’ to ‘oral utterance and the printed word’ – qualify for the First Amendment’s protections; no less can hold true when it comes to speech like Ms. Smith’s conveyed over the Internet,” Gorsuch said.
In dissent, Sotomayor said the decision will undermine the government’s compelling interest in ensuring that all Americans have equal access to the public marketplace.
“Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class,” she wrote.
“Specifically, the Court holds that the First Amendment exempts a website design company from a state law that prohibits the company from denying wedding websites to same-sex couples if the company chooses to sell those websites to the public,” she wrote.
Sotomayor called this a “sad day in American constitutional law and the lives of LGBT people.”
“By issuing this new license to discriminate in a case brought by a company that seeks to deny same-sex couples the full and equal enjoyment of its services, the immediate, symbolic effect of the decision is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status,” she wrote in dissent.
She said the “decision itself inflicts a kind of stigmatic harm, on top of any harm caused by denials of service.”
“The opinion of the Court is, quite literally, a notice that reads: ‘Some services may be denied to same-sex couples.’”
She suggested that decision would be more far-reaching. “The decision’s logic cannot be limited to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”
“The decision threatens to balkanize the market and to allow the exclusion of other groups from many services,” she said, adding that “a website designer could equally refuse to create a wedding website for an interracial couple, for example.”
But in a footnote, Gorsuch pushed back. “Our decision today does not concern – much less endorse – anything like the ‘straight couples only’ notices the dissent conjures out of thin air.”
Smith’s lawyer, Kristen Waggoner, said in a statement Friday, “The U.S. Supreme Court rightly reaffirmed that the government can’t force Americans to say things they don’t believe. The court reiterated that it’s unconstitutional for the state to eliminate from the public square ideas it dislikes, including the belief that marriage is the union of husband and wife.”
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Kagan’s dissent and Gorsuch’s switch
The court’s decision came on the final day of Pride Month, an annual celebration of the LGBTQ community and its movement for equality that takes place throughout June.
In her dissent, Sotomayor laid out key moments in that decades-long movement as she explained how states came to pass the kinds of laws at issue in the case and why they’re necessary for members of the community. “Who could forget the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard?” she wrote, adding later: “Or the Pulse nightclub massacre, the second-deadliest mass shooting in U. S. history?”
“One significant change has been the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity to public accommodations laws,” Sotomayor wrote. “LGBT people do not seek any special treatment. All they seek is to exist in public. To inhabit public spaces on the same terms and conditions as everyone else.”
Conservatives are on a roll in their quest to remake America through the courts
Gorsuch’s opinion delivering a massive loss to the LGBTQ community likely came as a surprise to members of the LGBTQ community after he delivered them a key win in 2020.
In that case, Bostock v. Clayton County, the conservative justice wrote for the majority that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination “because of sex,” also covers claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The decision extended protections to millions of workers nationwide and was a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that the sex discrimination bar in Title VII did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation.
A ‘power to discriminate’
LGBTQ advocates quickly condemned the ruling, echoing Sotomayor’s argument that it gives some businesses a federal right to discriminate against members of the community.
“This decision by the Supreme Court is a dangerous step backward, giving some businesses the power to discriminate against people simply because of who we are,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement.
“People deserve to have commercial spaces that are safe and welcoming. This decision continues to affirm how radical and out-of-touch this Court is, especially when 80 percent of Americans support robust and LGBTQ+ inclusive nondiscrimination laws,” she said.
The American Civil Liberties Union similarly criticized the ruling, saying in a tweet that it means “certain businesses have a right to discriminate when selling customized, expressive services. This is the first time the Court has permitted a business open to the public to turn away customers in defiance of a nondiscrimination law.”
And Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, an openly gay member of the House, said on Twitter that the court’s majority “invokes religious liberty to license discrimination against LGBTQ people.”
“The LGBTQ community might be the first victim of the Supreme Court’s decision but it won’t be the last. ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” Torres wrote in a tweet.
Oral arguments highlight potential impact
Waggoner, Smith’s lawyer, came under intense attack during oral arguments in the case from liberals on the bench who launched a slew of hypotheticals meant to explore the potential sweeping consequences of the case if Smith were to prevail. They suggested that other businesses could discriminate based on race or physical disability.
Five years ago, the court considered a similar case involving a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, citing religious objections.
That 7-2 ruling favoring the baker, however, was tied to specific circumstances in that case and did not apply broadly to similar disputes nationwide. Under the law, a business may not refuse to serve individuals because of their sexual orientation.
Smith – who has yet to expand her business into wedding websites – said that she is willing to work with all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, but she refuses to create websites that celebrate same-sex marriage.
“Nobody should be put in that position and the court’s decision yesterday protects speech not just for me but the LGBT website designer and every other artist out there,” Smith said on CNN’s “Smerconish” on Saturday. “Nobody should be punished by the government for speaking consistent with their beliefs.”
“I create speech for a living. When speech is involved, speech should be protected,” she added.
“The state of Colorado is forcing me to create custom, unique artwork communicating and celebrating a different view of marriage, a view of marriage that goes against my deeply held beliefs,” Smith told CNN in an interview.
When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in February 2022, the justices sidestepped whether the law violated Smith’s free exercise of religion. Instead, the court said it would look at the dispute through the lens of free speech and decide whether applying the public accommodations law “to compel an artist to speak or stay silent” violates the Free Speech Clause of the Constitution’s First Amendment.
A secret deal between Justices John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy on gay rights and what it means today
In court, Waggoner said that the law works to compel speech in violation of the First Amendment.
She said her client believes “opposite sex marriage honors scripture and that same-sex marriage contradicts it.” She said the state could interpret its law to allow speakers who serve all people to decline specific projects based on their message. Such a move, she contended, would stop status discrimination without coercing or suppressing speech. “Art is different,” Waggoner said.
Twenty states had weighed in in favor of Smith in friend-of-the-court briefs. They said that they have public accommodation laws on the books, but their laws exempt those businesspeople who make their living creating custom art.
Smith has written a webpage explaining that her decision is based on her belief that marriage should be between one man and one woman. But she has not yet published the statement out of fear of violating the “publication clause” of the law that bars a company from publishing any communication that indicates that a public accommodation service will be refused based on sexual orientation, Waggoner claims in court papers.
Smith lost her case in lower courts. The 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals held that while a diversity of faiths and religious exercises “enriches our society,” the state has a compelling interest in “protecting its citizens from the harms of discrimination.”
Colorado Solicitor General Eric Olson argued that the law does not regulate or compel speech. Instead, he said, it regulates commercial conduct to ensure all customers have the ability to participate in everyday commercial exchanges regardless of their religion, race, disability or other characteristics. He said the Colorado law targets “commercial conduct of discriminatory sales” and that its effect on expression is “at most incidental.”
“Granting such a license to discriminate would empower all businesses that offer what they believe to be expressive services, from architects, to photographers, to consultants, to refuse service to customers because of their disability, sexual orientation, religion or race,” he said.
He added that the law does not aim to suppress any message that Smith may want to express. Instead, 303 Creative is free to decide what design services to offer and whether to communicate its vision of marriage through biblical quotes on its wedding websites. But critically, the law requires the company to sell whatever product or service it offers to all.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN’s Morgan Rimmer and Andrew Millman contributed to this report.
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States Passed a Record Number of Transgender Laws. Here’s What They Say.
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-27-1529/lgbtq-issues-states-passed-record-number-transgender-laws-here-s-what-they-say
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/us/transgender-laws-states.html
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Trans Legislation
in America
The Language of Trans Laws
Laws Targeting Trans Youth
Restrictions on Care for Adults
Implications for Families and Doctors
States Passed a Record Number of Transgender Laws. Here’s What They Say.
Many of the bills denied certain medical care to transgender people, while others targeted bathroom use and preferred personal pronouns.
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Your state has a law on bathrooms and trans kids? Officials may not know how it will be enforced
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-26-0712/lgbtq-issues-your-state-has-law-bathrooms-and-trans-kids-officials-may-not-know
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https://apnews.com/article/transgender-bathroom-laws-enforcement-e96e94b8935eb6bd23a42562cdeeec6c?utm_source=ForYou&utm_medium=HomePage&utm_id=Taboola
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FILE- North Dakota House Majority Leader Rep. Chet Pollert, R-Carrington, second from left, gestures toward House Speaker Rep. Kim Koppelman, R-West Fargo, far right, prior to the start of the floor session and votes on whether to override three vetoes by Gov. Doug Burgum, which includes a bill restricting transgender girls from participating in public elementary and secondary school sports, Thursday, April 22, 2021, at the state Capitol in Bismarck, N.D. U.S. states with laws restricting what bathrooms transgender kids can use in public schools are wrestling with how those laws will be enforced. At least 10 states have enacted such laws and transgender, nonbinary and gender-noncomforming people expect states to rely on what they call vigilante enforcement by private individuals. (Tom Stromme/The Bismarck Tribune via AP, File0
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — When North Dakota restricted which bathrooms transgender students can use in public schools and universities this year, the school district in the state’s largest city promised to ignore the new rules. A Republican legislator then called for confiscating its state funding, but the law doesn’t include that possibility.
The defiance in Fargo shows that it’s not exactly clear how bathroom laws will play out in local communities after being enacted in at least 10 states with Republican-controlled legislatures.
In Kansas, GOP state Attorney General Kris Kobach said Monday that his state’s new law, which takes effect Saturday, gives schools a legal defense if transgender students argue that it’s discriminatory not to let them use facilities in line with their gender identity. Parents and students will be able to sue one another, he said, but the law does not create a right to sue schools.
Even Florida’s law, allowing the state to threaten the licenses of educators who don’t comply, says a transgender student or staffer must first be asked to leave a restroom and refuse.
Some schools already have gender-neutral bathrooms and changing spaces or allow trans students to use staff restrooms. In others, trans students try to make it through the day without using a restroom.
Advocates for transgender people worry that bullying will increase.
“Especially in smaller towns where, say, that bullying could be really bad because transgender individuals are really misunderstood,” said Caedmon Marx, outreach chair for LGBTQ+ advocacy group Dakota OutRight and a 23-year-old nonbinary Bismarck State University student.
While the laws focus mostly on transgender students, critics believe they also encourage harassment of trans adults at work and while they’re shopping and eating out — and even harassment of cisgender people, or those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.
“By men, I get harassed for going into a women’s restroom because people think that — the way I look, the way I dress, they way my hair is — that I’m a man,” Kansas state Rep. Susan Ruiz, a Kansas City-area Democrat and a lesbian, said during a debate over the Kansas bathroom measure. “This is going to just open up the doors for that.”
North Carolina Republicans enacted a bathroom law in 2016 but rolled it back following protests and economic boycotts. A new wave of anti-LGBTQ+ measures began building in 2020, when Idaho enacted the nation’s first law barring transgender athletes from girls and women’s sports. State lawmakers across the U.S. considered hundreds of proposals this year.
Supporters argue that bathroom laws protect the privacy of cisgender women and girls. They’ve also pitched the laws as safety measures, without citing evidence of threats or assaults by transgender people against cisgender women or girls.
In North Dakota, Republican state Rep. Robin Weisz, chair of a committee that handled bathroom legislation, said some lawmakers worried about “being taken over by a radical agenda” on gender identity.
A GOP colleague, state Rep. Bill Tveit, said: “Our whole society is catering to it and encouraging it, and I don’t think that that’s where we’re at, nor should be.”
States’ laws vary in their sweep. Florida and North Dakota are applying their restrictions to state universities and prisons. Arkansas is making it a misdemeanor for transgender adults to be in any public changing room associated with their gender identities if a minor is present and the purpose is “arousing or gratifying a sexual desire.” Kansas’ law applies not just to restrooms and locker rooms, but to rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, prisons and other detention centers.
State laws also differ in what they say about enforcement.
If an Oklahoma school violates that state’s 2022 law, its district can lose 5% of its state funding, though none have so far.
Florida schools and universities must have policies for punishing students who don’t comply, and educators who flout the law could risk losing their state licenses. Starting in July 2024, the state attorney general can sue schools that don’t comply.
Arkansas mandates a minimum fine of $1,000 for defiant educators, and Iowa residents can file complaints with the state’s attorney general. Arkansas, Idaho, Oklahoma and Tennessee allow private lawsuits against schools.
But laws in Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky and North Dakota don’t spell out any enforcement regime.
Transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people and LGBTQ+ rights advocates predict that states will rely on “vigilante” enforcement by private individuals. Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, expects lawsuits from people “dedicated to making life impossible for transgender people.”
All the laws permit schools and other institutions to make special accommodations for trans students, such as providing gender-neutral bathrooms, so long as they aren’t allowed into facilities associated with their gender identities.
In Kansas’ largest school district in Wichita, schools already have worked with individual students and their parents to make accommodations. In northeastern Iowa, the Decorah school district sought guidance on what the signs outside its single-use restrooms should say.
“We’re following the law,” Superintendent Tim Cronin said. “We’re not trying to editorialize on any of this.”
In Des Moines, Iowa, the school district already had been preparing for a bathroom law for several years, and “the facilities were in place” when the state’s law was enacted, spokesperson Phil Roeder said. The Shawnee Mission district in the affluent Kansas suburbs of Kansas City is adding gender-neutral restrooms, too, with most of the work completed.
But in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Al Stone-Gebhardt, an 18-year-old transgender man, recently graduated from a high school that didn’t have gender-neutral restrooms. After using the girls restroom during his junior year, he planned to use the nurse’s but was turned away the first day of his senior year.
His mother, Erika DuBose, acknowledged “flipping out” when her son texted her about it. She sent an email to school staff that demanded, “HOW DARE YOU DENY MY CHILD THEIR BIOLOGICAL NEEDS?” To avoid using any restroom at school, her son was wasn’t eating or drinking much.
The school became more accommodating, they said.
“It is literally putting trans students at risk,” Stone-Gebhardt said. “Having to choose between being hydrated and being outed is extremely traumatic and inherently problematic, as well.”
Warbelow said states can expect some “civil disobedience.”
In the liberal community of Lawrence in northeastern Kansas, the home of the University of Kansas’ main campus, the local district attorney declared that she wouldn’t prosecute violations of the new state law. Kobach dismissed those comments as meaningless, saying the Kansas law doesn’t call for criminal prosecutions.
In Fargo, one of North Dakota’s rare politically blue places, the school board backed Superintendent Rupak Gandhi’s public statement that, “We will not participate in anything that we think is going to subject students to further discrimination or increase their self-harm.”
That prompted Tveit to email fellow state lawmakers, suggesting the district lose its state funding. But North Dakota’s Legislature won’t be in session again until 2025.
“I think any law that goes into place needs a specific penalty,” Tveit said, “because without a specific penalty, then you have this defiance.”
Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan., and Murphy, from Tulsa, Okla. Also contributing were Associated Press Writers Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Ark., and Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa. Follow John Hanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdhanna
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NHL bans Pride jerseys on the ice next season because they've become a 'distraction' from the game, official says
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-24-0640/sports-nhl-bans-pride-jerseys-ice-next-season-because-theyve-become-distraction
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https://www.insider.com/nhl-bans-pride-jerseys-become-a-distraction-official-says-2023-6
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Brock Boeser of the Vancouver Canucks in a Pride jersey in Vancouver in March. Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images
The NHL said "cause-based" jerseys will be banned from the ice next season.
Commissioner Gary Bettman said the decision was made as the jerseys were becoming a "distraction."
Some players refused to wear Pride jerseys this season due to their religious beliefs.
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NHL players will be banned from wearing Pride jerseys on the ice from next season as they've become a "distraction" from the game, an NHL executive said.
Commissioner Gary Bettman told Sportsnet on Thursday that at a recent NHL governors' meeting, he suggested players no longer wear warm-up jerseys that visibly supported the LGBTQ+ community. He said he believed that the jerseys were taking focus away from the game.
"It's become a distraction and taking away from the fact that all of our clubs in some form or another host nights in honor of various groups or causes," Bettman said.
The announcement came during Pride Month, held every June.
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"In the final analysis, all of the efforts and emphasis on the importance of these various causes have been undermined by the distraction in terms of which teams, which players, this way we're keeping the focus on the game," Bettman added.
Sam Montembeault of the Montreal Canadiens in Montreal in April. Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
As CBC reports, the NHL announced the ban on "cause-based" jerseys next season after a handful of players began objecting to wearing Pride-themed attire in pregame warm-ups earlier this year.
Players including Eric and Marc Staal, James Reimer and Ivan Provorov said doing so at odds with their religious beliefs, The Associated Press reported.
"We carry no judgment on how people choose to live their lives, and believe that all people should be welcome in all aspects of the game of hockey," the Staal brothers told the news agency. "Having said that, we feel that by us wearing a Pride jersey, it goes against our Christian beliefs."
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After boycotting pregame warm ups in March, Reimer – goaltender for the San Jose Sharks – said he was "choosing not to endorse something that is counter" to his personal convictions, "which are based on the Bible," The AP reported.
"I strongly believe that every person has value and worth and the LGBTQ+ community, like all others, should be welcomed in all aspects of the game of hockey," he added.
Goaltender James Reimer in Winnipeg this year. Jonathan Kozub/Getty Images
Following the NHL's announcement, hockey commentator Gord Miller highlighted that the decision also affected other causes and groups.
"NHL teams will not wear specialty warm-up jerseys next year, which means that in addition to the LGBTQ+ community, people with cancer, members of the military and their families, black and indigenous people will be among those who will no longer be visibly recognized before games," Miller tweeted on Friday.
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You Can Play, an organization advocating for LGBTQ+ safety and inclusion in sports, said it was "concerned and disappointed" by the NHL's decision in a statement posted on Twitter.
"Today's decision means that the over 95% of players who chose to wear a Pride jersey to support the community will now not get an opportunity to do so," it added.
Akim Aliu, a former Calgary Flames player, called the move "absolutely shameful" in a tweet.
—Akim Aliu (@Dreamer_Aliu78) June 22, 2023
The decision also comes as Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said on June 15 that teams had been advised to stop putting Pride colors and logos on players' uniform, The Washington Post's Chelsea Janes reported.
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"We have told teams, in terms of actual uniforms, hats, bases that we don't think putting logos on them is a good idea just because of the desire to protect players," Manfred said.
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Starbucks union calls strike over Pride displays, but the company calls it a misinformation campaign
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A Starbucks sign sits above a store in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, Tuesday, June 13, 2023, in New York. Starbucks is denying union organizers’ claims that it banned LGBTQ+ Pride displays in its U.S. stores after Target and other brands experienced backlash. The Seattle coffee giant says there has been no change to its policy and it encourages store leaders to celebrate Pride in June. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Workers at 150 Starbucks locations will strike in the coming week over what their union says is a clash over decor supporting LGBTQ+ causes, but the company denies it’s banned any such displays and accused the union of using misinformation as a tactic in labor talks.
Starbucks Workers United said in a tweet Friday that 3,500 workers will be on strike over the next week, starting with the flagship location in Seattle.
The union has tried to establish a foothold at Starbucks for some time and at least 358 Starbucks stores have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections. A Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, became the first to unionize early last year.
But those efforts have slowed in recent months with pushback from some workers who have resisted organization efforts. Starbucks on Friday said Workers United is using misinformation about its support for LGBTQ+ causes as part of ongoing contract negotiations.
“Workers United continues to spread false information about our benefits, policies and negotiation efforts—a tactic used to seemingly divide our partners and deflect from their failure to respond to bargaining sessions for more than 200 stores,” Starbucks said in a written statement.
Starbucks, based in Seattle, said last week that there had been no change to any policy on the matter and that its support for LGBTQ+ causes is “unwavering.” The company has been outspoken in its support for LGBTQ+ employees for decades. It extended full health benefits to same-sex partners in 1988 and added health coverage for gender reassignment surgery in 2013.
Starbucks Corp. is also currently selling Pride-themed tumblers in its stores designed by Toronto artist Tim Singleton, who is gay.
Workers United says that store managers around the country have curtailed or removed displays during a monthlong celebration of LGBTQ+ people. In some cases, the union said, managers told workers that Pride displays were a safety concern, citing recent incidents at Target where some angry customers tipped over merchandise and confronted workers.
Starbucks said recent anti-LGBTQ+ social media campaigns against brands like Disney, Target and Bud Light in some parts of the country have not changed it stance.
Brands like Chick-fil-A, which closes on Sundays for a day of “rest and worship,” and Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, have also been targeted online by anti-LGBTQ+ groups and individuals.
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Disney goes on offense in DeSantis board’s lawsuit, seeks damages for breach of contract
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-18-1439/business-disney-goes-offense-desantis-board-s-lawsuit-seeks-damages-breach
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Utah Legislature codifies ban on conversion therapy while addressing therapists’ concerns
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-02-0742/lgbtq-issues-utah-legislature-codifies-ban-conversion-therapy-while-addressing
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https://www.deseret.com/utah/2023/2/17/23604347/conversion-therapy-ban-lgbt-utah-bill
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Rep. Mike Petersen, R-North Logan, sponsor of HB228, a bill loosening Utah’s conversion therapy ban, speaks during a committee meeting of the House Business and Labor Standing Committee at the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Monday, Feb. 6, 2023. The bill has won final legislative approval.
Ryan Sun, Deseret News
A bill to codify Utah’s conversion therapy ban while also clarifying concerning language for therapists has won final legislative approval.
The Utah Senate voted unanimously to pass HB228 on Friday, after the House also voted unanimously to approve it last week. The bill now goes to Gov. Spencer Cox.
Cox, in a prepared statement, said he would sign the bill.
“We’re very pleased with the outcome on HB228,” Cox said. “The unanimous vote shows a commitment by the various parties to find common ground and we look forward to signing the bill.”
The bill is widely supported by both LGBTQ advocates and therapists for enshrining Utah’s existing conversion therapy ban, previously approved through a 2020 administrative rule by the state Division of Professional Licensing, while also clarifying language that created ambiguity and concerns for Utah therapists, counselors and professionals.
Conversion therapy is a widely discredited practice that’s intended to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. However, Rep. Mike Petersen, R-North Logan, who is also a former counselor, sponsored HB228 to address concerns of therapists who “stopped treating minors because of ambiguity in the DOPL rule and fear of reprisal if they were to say something nonaffirming to their minor patients.”
An earlier draft of HB223 would have loosened the 2020 ban by stating “verbal or written communication by itself does not fall within the definition of conversion therapy.” Advocates, including Equality Utah, opposed that version of the bill, concerned it would allow “talk therapy” forms of conversion therapy for minors.
However, earlier this month Petersen announced he would make changes to the bill to address Equality Utah’s concerns.
“This is an extraordinary moment in Utah’s LGBTQ history,” said Troy Williams, executive director of Equality Utah. “It is the first conversion therapy ban in the country to pass through both chambers unanimously.”
Williams expressed gratitude for the bill’s sponsors and “all of our lawmakers for the collaborative way they have approached this issue.”
It’s a stark difference from the approach Republican lawmakers took earlier in the session, when they pushed through a bill to ban transgender surgeries for Utah children and teens, as well as place an indefinite moratorium on new treatments including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors. Cox was quick to sign the bill, leading LGBTQ groups to promise a lawsuit over the new law.
“As our state continues to navigate challenging issues, we hope that lawmakers will continue to invite stakeholders to the table to seek common ground,” Williams said. “This is an approach to lawmaking that Utah can model for the rest of the nation.”
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U.S. Becomes Transgender-Care Outlier as More in Europe Urge Caution
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-23-0648/lgbtq-issues-us-becomes-transgender-care-outlier-more-europe-urge-caution
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-becomes-transgender-care-outlier-as-more-in-europe-urge-caution-6c70b5e0?mod=e2tw
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June 19, 2023 12:01 am ET
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| 659
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'Barbie' Boycott Calls Grow Among Republicans Over Movie's 'Woke Messaging'
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-19-1201/culture-barbie-boycott-calls-grow-among-republicans-over-movies-woke-messaging
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https://www.newsweek.com/barbie-boycott-calls-grow-among-republicans-over-woke-messaging-1813981
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Georgia Pride festival in Tbilisi stormed by right-wing protesters
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-09-0603/lgbtq-issues-georgia-pride-festival-tbilisi-stormed-right-wing-protesters
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66145898
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Georgia Pride festival in Tbilisi stormed by right-wing protesters
Published
9 July
Share
IMAGE SOURCE,
REUTERS
Image caption,
Protesters broke through a police cordon to stop the Pride event
Up to 2,000 anti-LGBT protesters stormed a gay pride festival in Georgia's capital Tbilisi on Saturday, forcing its cancellation.
The right-wing protesters, who included Orthodox Christian clergy, scuffled with police, rushed the stage and burned rainbow flags.
The organisers and Georgia's president blamed anti-LGBT hate speech that preceded the event, and said the police had failed to protect festival-goers.
Homophobia remains rife in Georgia.
President Salome Zurabishvili said the ruling Georgian Dream party had failed to condemn its followers who had openly incited aggression towards LGBT activists.
Interior Minister Alexander Darakhvelidze, however, argued that the large area had been difficult to police.
"This was an open area, participants of the protest managed to bypass the security and find other ways to enter the event area," he said.
"However we managed to evacuate the participants of the Pride festival and organisers from the area, no one was harmed," he added.
The event's participants were bussed to safety, Reuters news agency reported.
IMAGE SOURCE,
REUTERS
Image caption,
The authorities say the event's large open venue made it hard to keep protesters out
Far-right protesters also violently disrupted a Pride festival in Tbilisi in 2021, attacking journalists and LGBT activists.
The 2023 Pride organiser, Mariam Kvaratskhelia, said there had been a "mass mobilisation" of far-right groups ahead of this year's event. The groups had been "openly inciting violence", she said.
"We've been telling the ministry of interior and the police to start investigation immediately but they did not do it," she told Reuters.
She also alleged the protest was a "co-ordinated action between the government and the radical groups... in order to sabotage the EU candidacy of Georgia" - although she did not provide any specific evidence for this claim.
Opponents accuse the Georgian Dream government of leaning towards Moscow, despite Georgia's long-standing ambition to join the EU.
Mass protests in March turned violent over a draft version of a Russian-style law that would class non-government and media groups as "foreign agents" if they received more than 20% of their funds from abroad.
The clashes with police outside parliament led to the government dropping the bill.
Related Topics
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Pride
Georgia
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Published
11 July 2021
Georgia Pride march cancelled amid violent protests
Published
5 July 2021
Protests at Georgia gay film premiere
Published
8 November 2019
Around the BBC
BBC Culture: Georgia's surprising LGBTQ+ scene
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Man denies making request cited in landmark Supreme Court LGBTQ case
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Russian sexologists to target homosexuality, other 'disorders' under new rules
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https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-sexologists-target-homosexuality-other-disorders-under-new-rules-2023-06-29/
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Law enforcement officers block participants of the LGBT community rally "X St.Petersburg Pride" in central Saint Petersburg, Russia August 3, 2019. REUTERS/Anton Vaganov/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
June 29 (Reuters) - Russian clinics will soon be staffed with sexologists to help patients "overcome" homosexuality and various sexual "mental disorders", a health ministry order said, in the latest Kremlin attack on what it calls "non-traditional lifestyles."
The order, which takes effect on July 1, comes amid a clampdown on LGBT rights, which President Vladimir Putin has sought to portray as evidence of moral decay in Western countries and from which Russia must be protected.
"The help of such specialists is necessary if a person wants to recover from frigidity, impotence, or such violations of sexual behaviour as fetishism, masochism and sadism," the official newspaper of Russia's parliament said.
Under the order, signed by Putin, the specialists will also help patients deal with "non-standard preferences such as autoeroticism, homosexuality, bestiality", it said.
The World Health Organisation removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1990. Russia did so in 1999.
Last December, however, Putin signed a law expanding restrictions on the promotion of what it calls "LGBT propaganda", effectively outlawing any public expression of the behaviour or lifestyle of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals or transgender people in Russia.
Authorities have already used this and older laws to stop gay pride marches and detain gay rights activists.
This week, the director of the LGBT support group Vykhod ("Coming Out") was fined 150,000 roubles ($1,715) by a regional court after the group failed to identify itself in a social media post as a "foreign agent" as required under the new law, the Novaya Gazeta Europe newspaper reported.
In a similar vein, an online cinema service was fined 3.7 million roubles ($42,295) on Thursday for failing to provide warning of LGBT content in films it aired.
Earlier this month, Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, gave its initial backing to legislation that would ban gender reassignment surgery.
Under the health ministry's new order, medical staff will also help married couples "achieve sexual harmony" and advise parents on how to educate their children about sex, the parliamentary paper said.
($1 = 87.4805 roubles)
Reporting by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Gareth Jones and Conor Humphries
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Russia pounded energy facilities across Ukraine on Thursday in its biggest missile attack for weeks, firing what Ukrainian officials saw as the first salvo in a new air campaign against the national power grid.
Poland is only carrying out previously agreed arms deliveries to Ukraine, a government spokesman said on Thursday, amid souring bilateral relations due to a grain dispute just weeks before a Polish parliamentary election.
It was to be Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's first in-person appearance at a U.N. Security Council meeting on Moscow's invasion of his country when Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia objected to him taking the floor at the start of the meeting.
Frontrunner Robert Fico has raised eyebrows by criticising sanctions against Russia, calling for a rapprochement with Moscow when the war ends and pledging to veto Ukraine's membership of NATO if ever that possibility arises.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met with lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday as Republican skeptics question whether Congress should approve a new round of aid for his country despite slow progress fighting Russian invaders.
Jet engine maker CFM International said on Wednesday thousands of engine components may have been sold with forged paperwork by a British distributor, as the fallout from a probe into falsely certified parts reached London's High Court.
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Boycotts rarely work — but anti-LGBTQ+ backlash is forcing companies into tough choices
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U.S. court strikes down Florida transgender health rule
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Litigation
Government
Human Rights
Lawsuits
Government Health Policy
U.S. court strikes down Florida transgender health rule
By Daniel Trotta
June 22, 202311:02 PM GMT+2Updated 3 months ago
A person holds up a flag during rally to protest the Trump administration's reported transgender proposal to narrow the definition of gender to male or female at birth, at City Hall in New York City, U.S., October 24, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
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Trans Activist Apologizes for Going Topless At White House
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https://www.newsweek.com/trans-activist-apologizes-going-topless-white-house-1807357
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Dylan Mulvaney: Bud Light loses top spot in US after boycott
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-14-0804/lgbtq-issues-dylan-mulvaney-bud-light-loses-top-spot-us-after-boycott
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https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65899714
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Dylan Mulvaney: Bud Light loses top spot in US after boycott
Published
14 June
Share
IMAGE SOURCE,
GETTY IMAGES
By Mariko Oi
Business reporter
Bud Light has lost its position as the best-selling beer in the US after facing a boycott, new figures show.
In the four weeks to 3 June sales were down by almost a quarter, according to consulting firm Bump Williams.
Some drinkers in the US stopped buying Bud Light after transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney showed off a personalised can of the beer.
It means Modelo Especial has taken the top spot, with 8.4% of US beer sales by value in the period.
Bud Light had kept its position as America's best-selling beer for the first five months of the year, according to an analysis by consulting firm Bump Williams of data from research firm Nielsen.
However, the figures show that sales of Bud Light have slumped since April, when Ms Mulvaney posted an image on Instagram of a personalised can of Bud Light that the beer maker had sent her.
It came after several conservative pundits, politicians and celebrities spoke out about the promotion. Musician Kid Rock, NFL player Trae Waynes and model Bri Teresi have all shared videos of themselves shooting Bud Light cans.
The boycott triggered a slide in the price of shares of Bud Light's parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev and the firm has put two executives on leave.
The chief executive of AB InBev's North American business, Brendan Whitworth, said in a statement on 14 April: "We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer."
New Bud Light adverts were also aired, which featured iconic American imagery including the US flag and horses galloping across open country.
The chief executive Anheuser-Busch InBev, Michel Doukeris, said on a call with investors on 4 May: "We need to clarify the facts that this was one can, one influencer, one post and not a campaign."
"We are providing direct financial support to the frontline teams that work for us and our wholesalers as to Bud Light have significantly increased our investments behind the brand in the US," he added.
Related Topics
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Transgender people
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Beer
More on this story
Why Bud Light and Disney are under attack
Published
17 May
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Freedom of speech and LGBT rights: Americans’ views of issues in Supreme Court case
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-15-1613/free-speech-freedom-speech-and-lgbt-rights-americans-views-issues-supreme-court
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https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/14/freedom-of-speech-and-lgbt-rights-americans-views-of-issues-in-supreme-court-case/
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JUNE 14, 2023
Freedom of speech and LGBT rights: Americans’ views of issues in Supreme Court case
BY J. BAXTER OLIPHANT AND CARROLL DOHERTY
Supporters of Colorado web designer Lorie Smith and counterprotesters demonstrate at the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 5, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
A majority of Americans think business owners should be able to refuse to provide services in situations where providing them may “suggest support for beliefs about lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) issues” to which they have personal or religious objections, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
How we did this
In earlier surveys, the public has expressed positive views of the impact of legalization of same-sex marriage and broad support for policies aimed at preventing discrimination against transgender Americans.
But in a question reflecting the arguments in a pending Supreme Court case, 60% of Americans think business owners should not have to provide services if it might signal support for beliefs on LGBT issues that they oppose, according to the survey conducted in early April. Around four-in-ten (38%) say business owners should be required to provide services in these situations.
The Supreme Court case centers on a challenge to Colorado’s public accommodations law by website designer Lorie Smith, who says the law violates her right to freedom of speech by requiring her to design wedding websites for same-sex couples.
The oral arguments in the case highlighted the competing rights at issue. Smith’s attorney said her client’s complaint is based on the message being conveyed by her work, not the customers who may be affected. However, Colorado’s solicitor general said that by ruling in favor of Smith, the court would undermine the state’s accommodations law and open the door to discrimination because of a person’s race or religion, in addition to their sexual or gender identity.
The survey question does not ask whether business owners should have the right to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people. Rather, it asks whether business owners who object to providing services that could suggest beliefs on LGBT issues – such as a “designer of wedding websites who has objections to same-sex marriage” – should be required to provide these services or be able to refuse to do so.
Views by party, religion
As with opinions on same-sex marriage and transgender issues, there is a wide partisan gap in views of whether business owners should be able to refuse to provide services if it conflicts with their views on LGBT issues. Republican and Republican-leaning independents overwhelmingly side with business owners who object to providing services in these situations (82% vs. 17%). By a smaller margin (59% to 40%), Democrats and Democratic leaners say business owners should have to provide services in these cases.
Opinions also differ by religious affiliation. For example, while 83% of White evangelical Protestants say business owners should be able to deny services in situations where it could conflict with their beliefs, just half of religiously unaffiliated adults say the same.
Note: Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses, and its methodology.
Topics Gender & LGBTQFree Speech & PressLGBTQ AcceptanceReligion & LGBTQ AcceptanceReligious Freedom & RestrictionsPartisanship & Issues
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Carroll Doherty is director of political research at Pew Research Center.
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Starbucks union claims dozens of stores aren’t allowed to decorate for Pride
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-06-13-1332/lgbtq-issues-starbucks-union-claims-dozens-stores-aren-t-allowed-decorate-pride
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Companies That Embraced Social Issues Have Second Thoughts
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-new-cause-dodging-the-culture-wars-73e52cf3?mod=hp_lead_pos10
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By
Chip Cutter
and
Lauren Weber
June 6, 2023 12:01 am ET
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In May, clothing company The North Face released a video for Pride Month featuring drag performer Pattie Gonia. The ad was similar to the one the performer appeared in for the outdoor-apparel maker a year earlier. The reaction was not.
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The US is reviewing nearly $1 billion of aid towards Uganda over its anti-LGBT law
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https://qz.com/uganda-anti-homosexuality-act-us-sanctions-threat-1850486074
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The US has harshly criticized Uganda over its recent legislation known as the Anti-Homosexuality Act.
US president Joe Biden urged his Ugandan counterpart Yoweri Museveni to immediately repeal the law he signed yesterday (May 29). Branding the legislation a “tragic violation of universal human rights”, the American leader expressed concerns about how the law would impact Ugandan citizens, and also US government personnel, business people, tourists, and others living and working in the East African country.
Uganda is one of the 64 countries in the world that criminalize same-sex consensual acts, but the new law establishes tougher new punishment. It mandates life sentences for same-sex relations, 20 years in prison for “promoting” homosexuality, and death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” which includes same-sex acts involving people under the age of 18 or when a person is HIV positive.
HIV transmission is now punished just as harshly regardless of whether a person was aware of their status and whether the infection was intentional or accidental.
“Innocent Ugandans now fear going to hospitals, clinics, or other establishments to receive life-saving medical care lest they be targeted by hateful reprisals. Some have been evicted from their homes or fired from their jobs. And the prospect of graver threats—including lengthy prison sentences, violence, abuse—threatens any number of Ugandans who want nothing more than to live their lives in safety and freedom.”—US President Joe Biden in a May 29 statement
Biden said he called on his National Security Council to review the effects of the law on the provision of aid and investment programs in Uganda. These include:
🎗 The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and other forms of assistance and investments. A number of actors working to fight the disease, including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (the Global Fund) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), joined PEPFAR in condemning the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2023 for obstructing health education and the outreach, adding that “the stigma and discrimination associated with the passage of the Act has already led to reduced access to prevention as well as treatment services.”
💼 Eligibility for the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a preferential trade program that gives countries in sub-Saharan Africa preferential access to US markets, allowing them to export products tariff-free.
⛔️ The US is also considering imposing sanctions or banning from entry into the country “anyone involved in serious human rights abuses or corruption.” In a separate statement, secretary of state Antony J. Blinken backed Biden on developing mechanisms to “support the rights of LGBTQI+ individuals in Uganda and to promote accountability for Ugandan officials and other individuals responsible for, or complicit in, abusing their human rights.”
Nearly $1 billion: How much the US government invests annually in Uganda’s people, business, institutions, and military. The US-Uganda programs have “boosted economic growth and agricultural productivity, increased investments in Ugandan businesses, and strengthened our trade cooperation,” Biden said.
Uganda’s extremely conservative environment risks hurting not just aid provisions, but also private business investment. The Open For Business coalition, which represents big corporates like Google, Microsoft, MasterCard, HSBC and Facebook owner Meta, had warned in March that the anti-LGBTQ law would make the country less attractive to foreign companies and ultimately damage its growth prospect. Dominic Arnall, CEO of Open of Business Group, reiterated those concerns after the law was enacted this week: “Our data shows that this law runs counter to the interests of economic progress and prosperity of all people in Uganda,” he said.
🚨 Uganda will jail LGBTQ people for 10 years
👊 Uganda’s annual LGBT pride parade has been canceled after the government “threatened to mobilize a mob”
🇰🇪 Kenya’s high court has upheld its colonial-era law banning gay sex
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Biden's fictional tales fact-checked by WaPo, NY Times but outlets stop short of declaring them 'lies'
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https://www.foxnews.com/media/bidens-fictional-tales-fact-checked-wapo-ny-times-outlets-stop-short-declaring-them-lies
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MEDIA
Biden's fictional tales fact-checked by WaPo, NY Times but outlets stop short of declaring them 'lies'
Biden was recently dinged for 'embellishing' a 2004 kitchen fire in his home while speaking to Maui wildfire survivors
By Joseph A. Wulfsohn Fox News
Published September 5, 2023 6:00am EDT
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Joe Concha on the media refraining to call Biden's falsehoods 'lies'
Fox News contributor Joe Concha spoke with Fox News Digital about the media's hesitancy to call President Biden's false claims "lies."
President Biden has raised eyebrows in recent weeks for telling an embellished story to the survivors of the Maui wildfires and while addressing Hurricane Idalia in an attempt to relate to people's struggles. But news outlets have found creative ways to refer to the president's questionable stories and even outright fabrications.
This story, as he's told it, entails what he suggests was a near-catastrophic fire that occurred at his home in 2004 due to a lightning strike, repeatedly claiming he "almost lost" his wife, cat and ’67 Corvette in the event.
Reports at the time, however, reveal that the fire was contained to only the kitchen.
This caught the attention of Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who wrote a story Thursday with the headline, "Biden loves to retell certain stories. Some aren’t credible."
WASHINGTON POST FACT-CHECKER BUSTS SEVERAL OF BIDEN'S GO-TO PERSONAL STORIES: ‘TRADITION OF EMBELLESHING’
President Biden was called out by Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler for repeating his embellished tale about a fire that occurred in his Delaware home. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
"Biden’s propensity to exaggerate or embellish tales about his life led to doubts about his truthfulness. Contemporary news reports on the house fire do not match his telling of it, fanning criticism that he had lied to a vulnerable audience," Kessler wrote. "Sometimes the stories turn out to be largely true… But others fall short. As president, Biden has continued a tradition of embellishing his personal tales in ways that cannot be verified or are directly refuted by contemporary accounts."
Kessler's report compiled several of Biden's tall tales like one about his pal Amtrak conductor who he claimed congratulated him on having traveled more than 2 million miles on the railroad, exceeding the 1.2 million miles traveled on Air Force planes as vice president as of 2016. Yet the conductor had retired in 1993 and died two years before Biden reached that milestone in the air.
Other tales that were addressed include Biden's curious claim that he and his father saw two men in suits kissing each other in public when he was a teenager, that he was arrested for trying to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and how as VP he arranged for his uncle to be presented a Purple Heart he was owed and never received, except the uncle died in 1999, long before Biden was vice president.
WASHINGTON POST SLAPS BIDEN WITH 'FOUR PINOCCHIOS' FOR FALSELY CLAIMING HUNTER NEVER MADE MONEY FROM CHINA
But while Kessler acknowledged the criticism towards Biden that he "lied" about these tales, Kessler himself didn't make that leap nor did he offer any of the Post's "Pinocchios," a move managing editor Curtis Houck of the conservative media watchdog NewsBusters called "predictable."
"It's been either a hands-off approach or a cowardly, mealymouthed explaining away of what Biden actually meant or that his lies and tall tales were innocent mistakes," Houck told Fox News Digital.
The New York Times ran a similar report last October under the headline "Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel," telling readers how the president "has been unable to break himself of the habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity."
The New York Times previously fact-checked President Biden's tall tales but stopped short of calling them "lies." (Fox News Digital)
Like the Post, the Times used the fire story, which he told to survivors of Hurricane Ian, as a launching pad to delve into his "exaggerated biography" and times that he "shaved off" the "factual edges."
"The exaggerated biography that Mr. Biden tells includes having been a fierce civil rights activist who was repeatedly arrested. He has claimed to have been an award-winning student who earned three degrees. And last week, speaking on the hurricane-devastated island of Puerto Rico, he said he had been ‘raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically,’" the Times wrote. "For more than four decades, Mr. Biden has embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his audience, often emphasizing the truth of his account by adding, 'Not a joke!' in the middle of a story. But Mr. Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore, with dates that don’t quite add up and details that are exaggerated or wrong, the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful for audiences."
The Times offered some transparency in the double standard it gives between Biden and former President Trump when it comes to their fact-checking. In its report, the Times said Trump "lied constantly" while "Biden's fictions are nowhere near that scale" but that his loose facts "provide political ammunition for Republicans eager to tar him as too feeble to run for re-election."
BIDEN BLASTED FOR COMPARING KITCHEN FIRE IN HIS HOME TO DEVASTATING MAUI BLAZE: ‘ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING’
Dean Baquet, the paper's now-retired executive editor, once called for the term "lie" to be used "judiciously" since it had such a "very powerful" meaning, cautioning that using the word too often "could feed the mistaken notion that we’re taking political sides. That’s not our role."
Except the Times hasn't hesitated to call Trump's false claims "lies" in headlines, particularly regarding the 2020 election. The Post also has used the "L" word in several headlines about the former president.
Kessler himself spearheaded a tracker dedicated to monitoring all of Trump's false or misleading claims while in office, a practice that was never done for the current president.
Both The Washington Post and The New York Times didn't hesitate to use the word "lie" to describe former President Trump's false claims. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Fox News contributor Joe Concha told Fox News Digital that since the media "set the precedent" of declaring lies during the Trump years, the same should be applied to the current president.
"What is a lie? It's when you intentionally mislead people. And in Joe Biden's case, the excuse always is, 'Oh, well, you know, he's 80 years old, and he doesn't have his fastball like he used to. So he's just confused,'" Concha said. "He tells these stories over and over again… It's either to get votes or to spin a narrative that obviously is not true. But again, when you know that it isn't true, then yes, you use the ‘L’ word."
Concha, who authored the book "Come On, Man!: The Truth About Joe Biden's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Presidency," called out other media fact-checkers including PolitiFact, Snopes and CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale, who he accused of being on a "siesta spring break for the past two-and-a-half years." He also stressed White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, should also face the same scrutiny.
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The Federalist's Mark Hemingway similarly questioned why the media hasn't applied the standard to a "world-class liar" like Biden, drawing attention to his repeated denials that he never spoke to his son Hunter about his foreign business dealings.
"Time and again, the default assumption for Trump is corrupt motives, where Biden gets the benefit of the doubt to an absurd degree. The idea that it was necessary to call Trump a liar in no way precludes doing the same to Biden who is a world-class liar in his own right. However, if the press were to take the most obvious reading of Biden’s motives, they would have to conclude that the man is a corrupt and brazen liar," Hemingway wrote Thursday.
He later continued, "Ultimately, it’s hard to tell whether voters have decided Biden’s lies don’t matter when so many people are working to obscure them. But heading into 2024, it does provide a simple litmus test for who to take seriously. Shouting ‘What about Trump?’ is not an acceptable way to avoid acknowledging the obvious extent of Biden’s corruption and his rank dishonesty about it. And anyone who is unwilling to plainly state that Biden’s a particularly troubling liar is someone who is putting politics over facts, and they cannot be trusted."
In response to Fox News Digital's inquiry, a spokesperson for The Washington Post pointed to a 2018 fact-check Kessler authored explaining how the paper determines to use the term "lie." The report thoroughly debunked Trump's past claims that he had no knowledge of the 2016 hush money payment that was made to Stormy Daniels, the porn star who alleged she had an affair with him, a claim he denied. Kessler concluded that Trump "lied" about the hush money payment based on new revelations at the time. However, it is unclear based on that report whether the Post has a specific standard to determine what false claims from a president amounts to a "lie."
The New York Times did not respond to Fox News' request for comment.
"President Biden has brought honesty and integrity back to the Oval Office," deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates told the Post last week. "Like he promised, he gives the American people the truth right from the shoulder and takes pride in being straight with the country about his agenda and his values; including by sharing life experiences that have shaped his outlook and that hard-working people relate to. And as Americans know, there are countless moments from every person’s own history that are not covered in local newspapers."
For more Culture, Media, Education, Opinion, and channel coverage, visit foxnews.com/media.
Joseph A. Wulfsohn is a media reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to [email protected] and on Twitter: @JosephWulfsohn.
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No human remains found 2 years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Canada
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-09-02-0122/americas-no-human-remains-found-2-years-after-claims-mass-graves-canada
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https://nypost.com/2023/08/31/still-no-evidence-of-mass-graves-of-indigenous-children-in-canada/
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No human remains found 2 years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Canada
By Dana Kennedy
Published Aug. 31, 2023
Updated Aug. 31, 2023, 1:24 p.m. ET
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After two years of horror stories about the alleged mass graves of Indigenous children at residential schools across Canada, a series of recent excavations at suspected sites has turned up no human remains.
Some academics and politicians say it’s further evidence that the stories are unproven.
Minegoziibe Anishinabe, a group of indigenous people also known as Pine Creek First Nation, excavated 14 sites in the basement of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church near the Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba during four weeks this summer.
The so-called “anomalies” were first detected using ground-penetrating radar, but on Aug. 18, Chief Derek Nepinak of remote Pine Creek Indian Reserve said no remains were found.
He also referred to the effort as the “initial excavation,” leading some who were skeptical of the original claims to think even more are planned.
“I don’t like to use the word hoax because it’s too strong but there are also too many falsehoods circulating about this issue with no evidence,” Jacques Rouillard, a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post Wednesday.
Chief Derek Nepinak of Pine Creek Indian Reserve said no human remains were found during a recent excavation in a church basement near a residential school.
AP
Nonetheless, he welcomes more excavations because of the enormous adverse publicity and stain left on Canada after the first reports of the alleged mass graves.
“This has all been very dark for Canada. We need more excavations so we can know the truth,” Rouillard said. “Too much was said and decided upon before there was any proof.”
In May 2021, the leaders of the British Columbia First Nation Band Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced the discovery of a mass grave of more than 200 Indigenous children detected via ground-penetrating radar at a residential school in British Columbia. The radar found “anomalies” in the soil but no proof of actual human remains.
James C. McCrae, a former attorney general for Manitoba, resigned his position on a government panel in May after he wrote about his skepticism over some of the claims about dead children buried at residential schools.
CBC
“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, said in a statement on May 27, 2021. (Casimir did not return a call from The Post this week.)
The band called the discovery “Le Estcwicwéy̓” — or “the missing.”
Pine Creek and Kamloops were among a network of residential schools across Canada, run by the government and operated by churches from the 1880s through the end of the 20th century. Experts say an estimated 150,000 children attended the schools.
The grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, where some believe Indigenous students may be buried — thought there have not been any excavations.
REUTERS
But until last week, there hadn’t been any excavations in the alleged burial spots. There still have been no excavations at Kamloops nor any dates set for any such work to commence.
That didn’t stop many in Canada from painting a demonic picture of the residential schools and those who staffed them.
“The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time and forbade them to acknowledge their Indigenous heritage and culture or to speak their own languages,” according to the website of the First Nations and Indigenous Studies of the University of British Columbia.
A makeshift memorial was established at the site of the former Kamloops school.
REUTERS
Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief RoseAnne Archibald told the BBC in August 2021 that the residential school policy was “designed to kill, and we’re seeing proof of that …”
Within days of the Kamloops announcement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decreed, partly at the request of tribal leaders, that all flags on federal buildings fly at half-staff. The Canadian government and provincial authorities pledged about $320 million to fund more research and in December pledged another $40 billion involving First Nations child-welfare claim settlements that partially compensate some residential school attendees.
Pope Francis issued a formal apology on behalf of the Catholic Church, which ran many of the residential school facilities, and asked for God’s forgiveness.
A statue of Egerton Ryerson, the original architect of Canada’s residential schools, was vandalized after claims of the mass graves.
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
A number of writers, academics and politicians like Rouillard have come out cautioning against the claim that hundreds or thousands of children are buried at the school, but they have been labeled “genocide deniers” — even though many of the skeptics do not dispute that conditions at the schools were often harsh.
“The evidence does not support the overall gruesome narrative put forward around the world for several years, a narrative for which verifiable evidence has been scarce, or non-existent,” James C. McCrae, a former attorney general for Manitoba, wrote in an essay published last year.
McCrae resigned from his position on a government panel in May after his views on residential schools outraged Indigenous groups and other activists and politicians.
Students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 1937. It’s alleged that Canada’s residential schools forcibly separated Indigenous children from their parents and refused to let them speak their native languages.
irshdc.ubc.ca
Tom Flanagan, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary, told The Post Wednesday that he sees the issue as a “moral panic” similar to the hysteria over repressed memories and alleged Satanic cults in schools in the US in the 1980s and ’90s.
“People believe things that are not true or improbable and they continue to believe it even when no evidence turns up,” Flanagan said. “People seem to double down on their conviction that something happened.”
Eldon Yellowhorn, a professor and founding chair of the Indigenous studies department at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, told The Post last year that he too was cautious about the veracity of some of the more highly charged claims.
Yellowhorn, a member of the Blackfoot Nation, had been hired by Canada’s powerful Truth and Reconciliation Commission to search for and identify gravesites of Indigenous children at the residential schools. But he said then that many of the graves he found were from actual cemeteries and it wasn’t clear how they died.
FILED UNDER CANADA 8/31/23
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The Disgraceful Attempt to Blame DeSantis for the Jacksonville Shooting
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-30-0652/media-bias-disgraceful-attempt-blame-desantis-jacksonville-shooting
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/the-disgraceful-attempt-to-blame-desantis-for-the-jacksonville-shooting/
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POLITICS & POLICY
The Disgraceful Attempt to Blame DeSantis for the Jacksonville Shooting
A demonstrator holds a sign referencing Florida governor Ron DeSantis during a rally against white supremacy in Jacksonville, Fla., August 28, 2023. The rally was held in response to the racially-motivated murder of three black people at a Dollar General store two days earlier. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
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By THE EDITORS
August 30, 2023 6:30 AM
H
aving learned that a white supremacist had murdered three innocent African Americans at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla., Governor Ron DeSantis took every appropriate step. He recorded that the shooter, whom he called a “racially motivated” “scumbag” and a “coward,” had been “targeting people based on their race.” He confirmed that the killer had penned a “manifesto.” He made it clear such behavior was — and would always be — “totally unacceptable.” Next, DeSantis announced plans to suspend his presidential campaign and return to Florida, he pledged funds to protect a historically black college in North Florida, and he resolved to visit the community where it had happened — despite activists’ promises to shout him down if he did.
For this, DeSantis was blamed by the press for the actions of the killer.
Quite how DeSantis is responsible is never explained. Instead, the charge relies upon insinuations, elisions, and non sequiturs. DeSantis is guilty of rhetoric that is never quoted, of policies that do not intersect with the crime, of an attitude that is widely implied but narrowly sourced. At no time is any effort made to connect any of this to the man who pulled the trigger. The state’s new slavery curriculum is mentioned but never connected to anything concrete. So, too, are the governor’s opposition to DEI, his contention that critical race theory teaches people to hate one another, and his disdain for racial gerrymandering — all of these stances against race-conscious thinking and collective racial guilt. The chief political writer at the Associated Press, Steve Peoples, observed on Twitter that “Ron DeSantis scoffed when the NAACP issued a travel advisory this spring warning Black people to use ‘extreme care’ if traveling to Florida” and yet, “just three months later, DeSantis is leading his state through the aftermath of a racist attack.” How these two things relate wasn’t addressed. At the White House Monday night, NPR’s Franco Ordonez asked, “Does the White House see any connection with the changes that the Florida governor has made in teaching about African-American history to the kind of violence that we saw in Jacksonville?” Does Ordonez? What is it?
The most recent racially motivated mass shooting that captured the media’s attention was carried out in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2022. Ought we to assume that it was the product of New York’s policies? That abomination was four times deadlier than the one in Jacksonville. What might we conclude from that? The answers, we’d venture in both cases, are “nothing.” Indeed, there can be no answers to such questions because their framework is absurd. The killer in Florida, like the killer in New York, acted out of raw hatred — a flaw that exists in humans everywhere, and always has. Their acts were not caused by arguments over the meaning of tangential terms in the school curriculum, or by esoteric debates over the legality of affirmative action, or by ineffable atmospheres of any sort. They were caused by an old-fashioned sort of evil that, through hard work and the passage of time, has been divorced from our political debates. There is almost nobody in America who approves of what the scumbag did in Florida. Mercifully, it was universally condemned — on the left, on the right, and everywhere in between. Such unanimity, which was not always the case following racial violence in America, is today routine.
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The scale of the outpouring ought to have inspired defiance. Instead, it prompted a handful of political entrepreneurs to search for whatever fault lines they could find and to start banging away at them with a chisel. This was a profound mistake. It has taken a great deal of pain and an extraordinary amount of work, but Americans can now say without doubt or hesitation that their country is better than the racist loser from Jacksonville, whose grotesque worldview did not have a constituency and, despite his baleful behavior, is not likely to have one ever again.
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THE EDITORS comprise the senior editorial staff of the National Review magazine and website.
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The Media Is About to Bury This School Shooting Story
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/miacathell/2023/08/30/unc-chapel-hill-person-of-interest-n2627653#google_vignette
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TIPSHEET
The Media Is About to Bury This School Shooting Story
Mia Cathell
August 30, 2023 6:45 AM
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News broke Monday afternoon of another school shooting. But in the coming days, as details emerge, expect the establishment media to forget about this progressively peculiar case. Already we've found that the alleged killer is a Wuhan-educated doctoral student accused of murdering a faculty member, his mentor, inside a campus lab.
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Here's what we know, so far:
Following reports of a shot fired, wounding at least one person inside a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill lab building, campus police quickly identified a person of interest in the "armed and dangerous person situation." A photograph of Tailei Qi, a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student at the university's Department of Applied Physical Sciences, was posted by UNC Police.
This photo shows a person of interest in today’s armed and dangerous person situation. If you see this person, keep your distance, put your safety first and call 911. pic.twitter.com/NHG5CTjby4
— UNC Police (@UNCPolice) August 28, 2023
It's certainly not the face of "white supremacy" on a mass murdering rampage to wipe out racial minorities, a story the salivating press would pounce to cover. Both the suspected shooter and the slain victim are Asian, with Chinese surnames.
Orange County Sheriff's Office inmate listings show that Qi was booked into Orange County Detention Center and charged with first-degree murder, plus possessing a gun on educational property, in the shooting death of UNC associate professor Zijie Yan. Yan was Qi's academic adviser. A digital trail demonstrates that the two scholars closely worked together in a laboratory setting.
Tailei Qi, the UNC-Chapel Hill shooting suspect, was also charged with possessing a gun on educational property. Shots were fired inside Caudill Laboratories, where Qi's adviser, fatal-shooting victim Zijie Yan, worked. pic.twitter.com/TKRw3HSlM9
— Mia Cathell (@MiaCathell) August 29, 2023
According to Qi's still-active LinkedIn profile, where he listed his "he/him" pronouns, the second-year Ph.D. student and researcher previously studied at China's Ministry of Education-sponsored Wuhan University. There, the 34-year-old alumnus earned a bachelor's degree in physics with a minor in business management/administration from Wuhan University, which was confirmed by a student biography published on a website run by UNC-Chapel Hill. (Qi's bio has since been scrubbed from the UNC directory.) The U.S. public research university is known to have collaborated with the CCP-run Wuhan Virology Institute, where gain-of-function (GoF) research was funded by COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci's National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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Person of interest Tailei Qi studied at Wuhan University, according to a website run by UNC-Chapel Hill, which collaborated with the Wuhan Virology Institute, where gain-of-function research was funded by Fauci's NIH. An armed suspect fired a shot near the campus lab, wounding 1. pic.twitter.com/XtJB9vvipt
— Mia Cathell (@MiaCathell) August 28, 2023
Yan, whose area of expertise was nanoscience technology a.k.a. nanotech, has recently co-authored scientific studies with numerous Wuhan University researchers, including a pair of publications written with Qi: a July 30 article and a fall 2022 research paper on nanoparticles. One month ago, a July 28 profile on UNC's site spotlighted Yan's work with "optical tweezers," a scientific tool to trap then manipulate living cells, as a method aimed at advancing nanomedicine and developing "advanced nanorobots within cells." Yan is quoted in the article as advocating for the superiority of optical tweezers over current drug-delivery methods. Other applications include gene therapy: the treatment of diseases by transfer of genetic material into cells. Nanorobots can measure pH levels and temperature within cells, among other metrics to assess the health of a cell, Yan explained in the piece.
Tailei Qi, the suspect charged in connection with the UNC-Chapel Hill deadly shooting, was a member of the research group run by Zijie Yan, the victim shot dead. pic.twitter.com/oiLoSDcSiv
— Mia Cathell (@MiaCathell) August 29, 2023
Qi, currently a member of the "Yan Research Group," appears to be pictured half-smiling and wearing a beige hat in the group photo at the bottom of the write-up. Per his LinkedIn page, Qi gained experience using "optical tweezers" as a UNC research assistant.
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Yan's professor page says he worked at the Caudill Laboratories, where the fatal shooting took place. Video emerged of UNC students jumping out of the school's second-floor windows to flee the active shooter, before the SWAT team arrived on the scene.
Law enforcement was filmed swarming Caudill Labs, where officers found Yan fatally shot, in response to a 911 call reporting gunfire around 1 p.m. Monday that triggered a university-wide lockdown. Until an all-clear was issued, a shelter-in-place emergency-alert notice advised students and staff to "go inside now," "avoid windows," and barricade themselves inside classrooms, dorms, and bathrooms, as the manhunt was underway. UNC Police warned the public to keep a safe distance away from the suspect, if spotted, while 50 police vehicles reportedly pulled up in droves and helicopters circled over the school.
An hour-and-a-half-long search for the suspect at-large ensued until authorities caught Qi in a residential area, and tracked to a neighborhood north of UNC's campus. Eye witnesses told ABC11 that cops were chasing a man through the area, ultimately capturing him just after 2:30 p.m. WRAL reporter Mark Boyle uploaded a video of the arrest when police placed Qi in custody.
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A photograph shared with WRAL was also taken of Qi handcuffed sitting in front of a driveway.
Photo of the suspect handcuffed (h/t WRAL News) sitting in front of a driveway. The arrest reportedly happened in a residential area. pic.twitter.com/BbL7wZkwoT
— Mia Cathell (@MiaCathell) August 28, 2023
In the evening, UNC Police Chief Brian James held a press conference to discuss the shooting and apprehension.
Yan's shooting death was the only fatality and no other injuries were reported. Yan's identity was not immediately released as the school waited for confirmation that Yan's next of kin was contacted, Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz announced in a statement emailed across campus. Qi was not immediately named, either, as UNC Police waited for criminal charges to be formally filed.
Qi was the second individual taken into police custody, James revealed, after a first person was questioned and released. "There was another person that was detained, and we determined very quickly that was not the suspect," James told reporters.
At the time of the press briefing, the weapon used was not yet located, supposedly tossed somewhere between campus and the Williams Circle suburbs, two miles north of UNC-Chapel Hill. The arrest warrant lists the gun as a 9mm pistol. However, it is "too early to determine" if the firearm was legally obtained, James said at the press lectern. A car discovered in a nearby parking lot is also believed to be related to the "ongoing" investigation, which is set to unfold over several weeks, James stated. "I'm not prepared at this time to say exactly what the connection is," Janes said of the car, identified as "a piece of possible evidence."
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Janes said the Federal Bureau of Investigation is providing assistance, including the FBI's evidence response team, which is deployed to recover evidence at crime scenes, lending a hand.
"We want to ensure that we gather every piece of evidence to determine exactly what happened here today and why it happened," James said, as police are working to uncover a motive.
Qi was scheduled to appear in court in Orange County on Tuesday, according to the district attorney's office.
According to Townhall's review of Qi's now-archived social media history, he often took to X, formerly Twitter, to share his state of mind, posting about bullying in America, being overworked and "tired," feeling lonely, and girl troubles.
On July 31: "would like to make some new friends..."
On July 31: "what is truth?"
On June 12: "When this kind of girl shows her 'best' to beg others to 'help' me, all people then look down on me. kind of angelic b*tch."
On June 13: "need a hug..."
On May 5: "Short sighted people love limelight"
On May 8: "When we doubt the most hardworking guy to be lazy, the result should be involution with every standard will be raised to a very high level."
On Dec. 10, 2022: "Truth is always too hurt to admit. But I choose not to spend time on her any more. How long will people forget about her? Even I don't know who she is literally. No matter what, just let her go..."
On May 8, 2022: "When what we previously thought was 'love' turns out only to be deception and backbite, many people will lose their beliefs in the beauty of the world."
On March 7, 2022: "It's very easy to work hard instead of interests as what we need to do is only to repeat the labor work without our brains. Especially there exists some stupid girls who only 'love' hard-working guys to make themselves feeling they on the right side. Finally people get involuted."
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Notably, Qi repeatedly complained about his PI, a principal investigator, who is in charge of a laboratory study at a research center, though it's not clear if he was talking about Yan. "Just have a talk with my PI and get his promise. He should have more experience to handle with these girls and tattletales. Then, we can just get ourselves out of these stupid topic," Qi posted on Aug. 18, 2022. "Both the group of people to say I am lazy and that to prove me working hard instead of telling me that are trying to consume my privacy. I judge their motivation is only to tell my PI then control me by taletelling," Qi typed on Oct. 31, 2022.
Between studies at Wuhan University and UNC-Chapel Hill, Qi obtained a master's degree in material science from Louisiana State University. Qi left a review on LSU's Department of Psychology - Psychological Services Center, an on-campus mental health clinic that offers outpatient psychotherapy services for students, treating depression and anxiety, among other issues. Clients are seen by Clinical and School Psychology graduate students, who are directly supervised by LSU department faculty.
Leaving a one-star review, Qi wrote: "[L]et their student to do the work. But these students will make up plots to make a simple problem to be a complicated one for adding content of their thesis. They are not honesty doctors. Dont waste your money here."
Editor's Note: Townhall's investigative reporting exposing the truth would not be possible without the support of our VIP members.
Join Townhall VIP and use promo code INVESTIGATE to support the vital work of Mia Cathell and help us continue to shed light on real stories in America.
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| 676
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Media Rush to Dems’ Defense after GOP Debate Shines a Spotlight on Abortion Extremism
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-30-0615/facts-and-fact-checking-media-rush-dems-defense-after-gop-debate-shines
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Media Bias
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/media-rush-to-dems-defense-after-gop-debate-shines-a-spotlight-on-abortion-extremism/
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Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review's News Desk. This week, we recap the media reaction to the first Republican debate, refute a Washington Post column about Republicans and health misinformation, and cover more media misses.
Media Reacts Predictably to First GOP Presidential Debate
Two of the media’s favorite things to lie about — Florida governor Ron DeSantis and abortion — converged the night of the first Republican primary debate, leading to a slew of purported media “fact checks” and snark.
"I believe in a culture of life,” DeSantis said on the debate stage in Milwaukee. “I
...
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The Associated Press, Once Viewed As Neutral, Works With Pro-Left Foundations
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-29-1600/media-bias-associated-press-once-viewed-neutral-works-pro-left-foundations
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Media Bias
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rights
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-associated-press-once-viewed-as-neutral-works-with-pro-left-foundations
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— NEWS —
The Associated Press, Once Viewed As Neutral, Works With Pro-Left Foundations
By Hank Berrien
•
Aug 29, 2023 DailyWire.com
•
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Chan Long Hei / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
According to a new report, the Associated Press, which has been accused of having a leftist bias, is working with leftist organizations aplenty, including the Ida B. Wells Society, founded by “1619 Project” creator Nikole Hannah-Jones.
The AP’s global investigations editor, Ron Nixon, is a member of the Ida B. Wells Society’s board of directors.
Others working with AP include the Lilly Endowment Inc., Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation states that it “supports organizations that advance social justice” and funds Stacey Abrams’ New Georgia Project as well as Take Back the Court, a group which states, “to restore the right to vote, ensure reproductive freedom, protect workers, halt our climate emergency, and save democracy, Congress must add seats to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funds Planned Parenthood as well as Advocates For Youth. Catholic Vote reported of Advocates for Youth:
The innocuously-named non-profit developed an equally harmlessly-titled curriculum entitled “Rights, Respect, Responsibility” (3Rs). … Concepts 3Rs teach kindergarteners include “same gender parents,” the notion that boys “can have” female body parts, and vice-versa. Lesson 2 of the kindergarten curriculum states, “Most people have a vulva or a penis but some people’s bodies can be different.”
The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation said the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn affirmative action “impedes colleges and universities from selecting their own student bodies and fully addressing systemic racial inequalities that persist.”
Richard W. Hoover, a retired Foreign Service officer, noted in June, “Both the AP’s Trump coverage and the lack of Biden family coverage have been amply reflected by the Northern Virginia Daily’s May-June output. While Trump’s difficulties are headlined (fair enough), nothing has been reported about the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s investigations into alleged Biden family bribes taken from the likes of China, the Ukraine, Romania and Russia.”
In 2020, AP urged journalists to stop calling the Black Lives Matter destructive events “riots” and to use the more neutral term “protests.” Journalists calling the pillaging “looting” was described as “racist.”
Read more in:
Associated Press,Leftist
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The Washington Post Says Democracy Demands Less Freedom of Speech
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https://reason.com/2023/08/25/the-washington-post-says-democracy-demands-less-freedom-of-speech/
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DONALD TRUMP
The Washington Post Says Democracy Demands Less Freedom of Speech
The paper worries that "social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against political misinformation."
JACOB SULLUM | 8.25.2023 4:20 PM
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| 679
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ABC, CBS Dismiss Debate As 'Fantasy Land,' Sham 'Job Interview'
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https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/alex-christy/2023/08/24/abc-cbs-dismiss-debate-fantasy-land-sham-job-interview
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When it comes to elections, the media should be pro-debate, especially when no votes have officially been cast, but the post-non Trump debate coverage on Thursday’s Good Morning America on ABC and CBS Mornings dismissed the whole thing as a “fantasy land” that resembled a “job interview” in which the candidate has already been selected.
Before host George Stephanopoulos interrupted him to change the topic to horse race-style analysis, Karl concluded, “Donald Trump is far and away the leading candidate. Did anything change? Not last night, but I think that if this keeps happening, if we keep-- if we continue to have more debates, Republican voters will get to see what that world looks like. There are other voices out there vying to—”
Good Morning America CBS Mornings .
| 680
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Matt Gaetz introduces measure to censure judge in Trump Jan. 6 case over ‘political bias’
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/aug/22/gaetz-introduces-measure-censure-judge-trump-jan-6/
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‘The Castle of Lies Is Crumbling’: WaPo Quietly Issues Yet Another ‘Update’ to Biden-Burisma Fact-Check
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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2023/08/11/wapo-fact-check-n2626898
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TIPSHEET
‘The Castle of Lies Is Crumbling’: WaPo Quietly Issues Yet Another ‘Update’ to Biden-Burisma Fact-Check
Leah Barkoukis
August 11, 2023 2:30 PM
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AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop exposé was no doubt the October surprise of the 2020 election, but thanks to big tech censorship, the intelligence community, and lapdog media outlets armed with influential fact-checkers, the Hunter Biden laptop saga was suppressed and didn't affect the election's outcome the way some polls suggest it could have.
Tags: FACT CHECK JOE BIDEN THE WASHINGTON POST HUNTER BIDEN
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Fact check throws cold water on global ‘boiling’ claims
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WASHINGTON SECRETS
Fact check throws cold water on global ‘boiling’ claims
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July was hot — no doubt about it. And media reporting on the heat wave was a raging wildfire of global warming hype.
But was it the worst-ever July scorcher, as the Washington Post, the Associated Press, USA Today, and others reported?
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According to a group of fact-checkers who dug through the reports, the weather didn’t live up to the hype.
In fact, the July “Media Climate Fact Check” turned around a Washington Post claim about July being the hottest in 125,000 years, headlining the report, “Worst Media Coverage In 125,000 Years.”
In picking apart specific media stories about the heat, the report provided to Secrets acknowledged the unusual heat wave. But it also cited two anomalies that skewed the data: the impact of El Nino and a two-day spike in Antarctica’s temperature that helped raise the so-called “global temperature.”
What’s more, it noted that since U.S. satellite data on global temperatures have only been collected since 1979, it is impossible to compare temperatures from 100 years ago — or 125,000.
“That heat wave was only detected and factored into average global temperature because of satellite coverage of the globe. But satellite coverage didn’t begin until 1979. So similar heat waves that may have occurred before 1979 would be unknown and not factored into average global temperature calculations,” read the report.
“So it is not possible to claim that July 2023 was the ‘hottest month in the history of civilization’ because such data does not exist,” read the analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the International Climate Science Coalition, and Truth in Energy and Climate.
Those organizations have long urged the media to tap the brakes on the climate change hype, but news outlets have stomped the accelerator instead in recent years.
What their report aims to do is counter the most outrageous reports with simple facts. The July report cited 10 media claims.
Among them was a Washington Post article that the world was entering a “global boiling” period. The organizations said in their report: “Putting aside that the notion of ‘average global temperature’ is a dubious proposition, whether you believe the high-end of ‘average global temperature’ for July (i.e., the Climate Reanalyzer’s 62.6°F) or the low-end (i.e., Temperature.global’s 57.5°F), neither temperature is close to boiling (212°F).”
SEE THE LATEST POLITICAL NEWS AND BUZZ FROM WASHINGTON SECRETS
The AP reported that the ocean off Florida’s southern tip was like a “hot tub” and the “hottest seawater ever measured.” The fact-checkers, however, noted that the example wasn’t of the open ocean but a very shallow bay and not even a record high.
And USA Today reported that the extreme heat was a top killer. “Every year since 2000, an average of 20,000 people have died from extreme heat in European cities,” the outlet reported, citing a scientific paper. The fact check mocked that story, noting that cold kills far more than heat.
Washington Secrets Climate Change Media Washington Post Weather
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| 683
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The List of Topics We’re Not Supposed to Write About
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-12-0049/media-bias-list-topics-we-re-not-supposed-write-about
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Media Bias
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https://townhall.com/columnists/katiepavlich/2023/08/11/heres-a-list-of-topics-were-not-supposed-to-write-about-n2626813
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OPINION
The List of Topics We’re Not Supposed to Write About
Katie Pavlich
Aug 12, 2023
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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Dear readers,
By now you’re familiar with moves by big tech platforms to censor factual and important reporting in partnership with the federal government. While this unprecedented assault on the First Amendment is being investigated by Congress, outlets like Townhall are still being punished for reporting the facts about major issues that impact everyday Americans.
Climate change is one of those issues and it’s an agenda being driven by the left to limit our freedoms, control our choices, and implement the largest redistribution of wealth the world has ever seen.
The Biden Administration is constantly working to drive the agenda, whether it’s going after gas stoves and everyday home appliances, forcing the car industry to produce unreliable and unaffordable electric vehicles, or sending billions of tax dollars overseas to comply with worthless -- yet expensive -- globalist climate pacts.
When we write about climate change, big tech advertising algorithms cut off our revenue and claim “disinformation” or “misinformation.”
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That’s why it is essential to independently fund our journalism through Townhall VIP. As a VIP member, you can ensure our reporters are able to continue covering important topics and expose big government lies being proliferated in order to implement burdensome, anti-freedom government control under the guise of “saving the environment.”
But it’s not just "climate change" that gets us demonetized and unable to fund our work. It’s a whole list of story topics including election irregularities, voter fraud, the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 vaccine side effects and coverups, protecting women’s sports and spaces from biological men, child sex trafficking, and much more.
All of these stories get “flagged.” We can’t afford to bury the truth or to demonetize our stories every time they land on a big tech taboo list of topics.
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| 684
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The List of Topics We’re Not Supposed to Write About
|
https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-12-0049/media-bias-list-topics-we-re-not-supposed-write-about
|
Media Bias
|
rights
|
https://townhall.com/columnists/katiepavlich/2023/08/11/heres-a-list-of-topics-were-not-supposed-to-write-about-n2626813
|
OPINION
The List of Topics We’re Not Supposed to Write About
Katie Pavlich
Aug 12, 2023
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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Julio Rosas
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
Dear readers,
By now you’re familiar with moves by big tech platforms to censor factual and important reporting in partnership with the federal government. While this unprecedented assault on the First Amendment is being investigated by Congress, outlets like Townhall are still being punished for reporting the facts about major issues that impact everyday Americans.
Climate change is one of those issues and it’s an agenda being driven by the left to limit our freedoms, control our choices, and implement the largest redistribution of wealth the world has ever seen.
The Biden Administration is constantly working to drive the agenda, whether it’s going after gas stoves and everyday home appliances, forcing the car industry to produce unreliable and unaffordable electric vehicles, or sending billions of tax dollars overseas to comply with worthless -- yet expensive -- globalist climate pacts.
When we write about climate change, big tech advertising algorithms cut off our revenue and claim “disinformation” or “misinformation.”
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Mia Cathell
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MSNBC Sees 'Basic Hollowness And Absurdity' In GOP Focus On Biden Scandals
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-11-0807/media-bias-msnbc-sees-basic-hollowness-and-absurdity-gop-focus-biden-scandals
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Media Bias
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rights
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https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/alex-christy/2023/08/11/msnbc-sees-basic-hollowness-and-absurdity-gop-focus-biden-scandals
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MSNBC host of the The 11th Hour, Stephanie Ruhle, did a touchdown dance on her Thursday show in response to GOP Rep. Nick Langworthy’s admission that they have no evidence of direct payments to President Joe Biden from son Hunter’s business operations. At the same time, the Lincoln Project’s Stuart Stevens declared the party’s focus reeked of “basic hollowness and absurdity,” but nobody ever explained how Langworthy’s statement unwittingly debunked the larger point about influence peddling.
For his part, Stevens shifted the conversation away from House Republicans and towards the 2024 presidential candidates, “Well, look, I think this whole idea that you're going to run a campaign on Hunter Biden's laptop, like, elect me president of the United States because of Hunter Biden's laptop. I mean, just think of how absurd that is, how little has to do with anybody's life.”
Republicans can walk and chew gun at the same and just because Stevens does not talk about the policy proposals the Republican candidates are putting forward, does not mean they don’t exist.
| 686
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Expert warns of courtroom chaos as new tech could unleash bogus info
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-03-0811/media-bias-expert-warns-courtroom-chaos-new-tech-could-unleash-bogus-info
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Media Bias
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rights
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https://www.foxnews.com/us/expert-warns-courtroom-chaos-new-tech-could-unleash-bogus-info
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Expert warns of courtroom chaos as new tech could unleash bogus info
Law firm was hit with a $5,000 penalty when its AI-generated legal briefs included bogus cases
By Chris Eberhart Fox News
Published July 31, 2023 2:00am EDT
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How hallucinating artificial intelligence impacts court cases
Former litigator Jacqueline Schafer, who is the CEO and founder of Clearbrief, said AI is frequently used in the courtrooms and she created Clearbrief to fact check citations and court docs created by generative AI
Hallucinating artificial intelligence can tank a court case by creating fake case citations that leave the lawyers open to sanctions or the proceeding itself vulnerable to being overturned, a former litigator said.
Last month, a judge handed down a $5,000 penalty on a law firm representing Colombian airline Avianca Inc., which used ChatGPT to write its legal brief, but the AI included fabricated judicial decisions.
A similar case happened in South Africa, and the judge and magistrate overseeing the cases ripped the law firms in their decisions.
"There is potential harm to the reputation of judges and courts whose names are falsely invoked as authors of the bogus opinions and to the reputation of a party attributed with fictional conduct," the judge presiding over the Avianca case wrote. "It promotes cynicism about the legal profession and the American judicial system."
WHAT IS AI?
Artificial Intelligence smartphone app ChatGPT surrounded by other AI apps in Vaasa, on June 6, 2023. (Olivier Morin/AFP via Getty Images)
Jacqueline Schafer, CEO and founder of Clearbrief, an AI-powered platform that essentially fact-checks legal briefs, said this issue will continue to happen because of the time pressure that lawyers face.
"There's a big temptation to use things that can just write it for you," Schafer told Fox News Digital during a Zoom interview.
NY POLICE USED AI TO TRACK DRIVER ON HIGHWAYS AS ATTORNEY QUESTIONS LEGALITY
"We're likely to see these stories continue to pop up. That's why it's critical for law firms to thoroughly review all of their pleadings before filing, even if they think they have banned ChatGPT in their firm."
Schafer, who began her career as a litigator in New York before becoming an assistant attorney general for the states of Alaska and Washington, created Clearbrief in 2020 to catch mistakes or bogus cases in AI-written briefs.
WATCH: SCAFER EXPLAINS HOW CLEARBRIEF WORKS
"The challenge we have with generative AI like ChatGPT that creates instant written work is that it will do things like completely make up fake case citations and invent facts," she said.
"A user can, for example, ask AI to write them a legal analysis of Arizona law, and ChatGPT will write something that seems elegantly written, and it may even include citations that look totally real."
FOX NEWS DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE: CRUZ SHOOTS DOWN SCHUMER EFFORT TO REGULATE AI: ‘MORE HARM THAN GOOD’
It can trick even the most experienced lawyers if they don't "take the time to painstakingly check over every case and statute and look it up manually," Schafer said.
In the South African ruling, the presiding magistrate essentially said the same thing in his ruling: "When it comes to legal research, the efficiency of modern technology still needs to be infused with a dose of good old-fashioned independent reading."
Screengrab of Clearbrief spotting a fake case. (Clearbrief)
Issues arise when legal professionals secretly use AI-powered programs like ChatGPT, Schafer said.
WHAT IS CHATGPT?
"Ironically, we need AI to help us detect the AI hallucinations," according to Schafer, who said that's the genesis behind Clearbrief.
"I meet with major law firms every day who are dealing with two problems," she said. "They are terrified of using generative AI that writes the whole document for you if it introduces embarrassing errors that will get the firm sanctioned.
"But they also are facing pressure from their clients to use AI technology to be more efficient and cut down their bills. So the legal industry is doing a lot of work right now to identify tech that can solve both problems."
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Chris Eberhart is a crime and US news reporter for Fox News Digital. Email tips to [email protected] or on Twitter @ChrisEberhart48.
| 687
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AI is biased. The White House is working with hackers to try to fix that
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-31-0649/media-bias-ai-biased-white-house-working-hackers-try-fix
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Media Bias
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lefts
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https://www.npr.org/2023/08/28/1196297067/ai-is-biased-the-white-house-is-working-with-hackers-to-try-to-fix-that
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POLITICS
AI is biased. The White House is working with hackers to try to fix that
August 28, 20237:51 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
Deepa Shivaram
The White House is concerned AI can perpetuate discrimination. It helped host a red-teaming challenge at the Def Con hacker convention to figure out flaws. (Story aired on ATC on Aug. 26, 2023.)
TECHNOLOGY
AI is biased. The White House is working with hackers to try to fix that
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The White House is worried about the risks of artificial intelligence, including the risk that this new technology can be used to discriminate. So they invited a bunch of hackers to see just what kind of biases are built into AI. NPR's Deepa Shivaram got a firsthand look and brings us this report.
DEEPA SHIVARAM, BYLINE: I'm standing in an overly air-conditioned conference center in Las Vegas in between a robot whirring on the floor and rows of tables set up with open laptops. And just outside this room, there's a long line of about a hundred people waiting to get inside. This is DEF CON, the biggest hacking convention in the world. And this is the first year where AI is front and center. These people are about to participate in the largest ever public red-teaming challenge. The goal? To get technology to break the rules by asking it all kinds of questions and see how easy it is to get it to say things that are inappropriate, illegal or biased.
KELSEY DAVIS: How do we try to break it so that we can find all these kinks and so that other people don't?
SHIVARAM: That's Kelsey Davis. She's here with the group called Black Tech Street. It's a nonprofit based in Tulsa, Okla., and aims to help Black economic development through technology. Racism and discrimination in AI isn't a new thing. Back in 2015, for example, Google Photos, which uses artificial intelligence, was labeling pictures of Black people as gorillas. Tech companies have tried to make changes, but the underlying problem remains. There's a lack of diverse data being used and a lack of diversity among the people who designed the technology in the first place.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Did you need to give that back to me, sir?
SHIVARAM: Most of the people here are white, and most are men. But organizers made sure to invite groups like Black Tech Street for more representation in this challenge. Here's Denzel Wilson with SeedAI, one of the organizers of the event.
DENZEL WILSON: It's important when you have, you know, Black and brown minority people coming in, doing these challenges, and they're doing prompts that these models aren't used to seeing. So the more we're able to kind of evolve that and the more we're able to get more novel responses, it's just really important for everybody involved, especially the companies building the models 'cause now they understand what they need to do better to alleviate the bias.
SHIVARAM: I check back in with Kelsey about 20 minutes into the challenge, and she's feeling pretty accomplished because she just got the chatbot to say something really racist about blackface.
DAVIS: But, you know, that's good 'cause that means that I broke it.
SHIVARAM: The process isn't exactly straightforward. She started by asking the chatbot definitions.
DAVIS: I asked him stuff like, what is blackface? Is blackface wrong?
SHIVARAM: It was able to answer these basic questions, but she kept pressing. She asked the chatbot how a white kid could convince their parents to let them go to an HBCU, a historically Black college. The answer was to say that they could run fast and dance well - perpetuating the stereotype that all Black people can run fast and dance well. Kelsey submits the conversation she had with the chatbot to tech companies. They can use it to tweak their programming so this answer won't come up again.
But overall, these instances are only a small fraction of the threats AI can pose to marginalized groups. AI has the potential to exacerbate discrimination in things like police surveillance against Black and brown people in financial decision-making and housing opportunities. Arati Prabhakar is at DEF CON, too. She's the head of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, and she's looking for solutions to make sure AI is safe and secure and equitable.
ARATI PRABHAKAR: This is a priority. It's moving fast. It's going to affect Americans' lives in so many different ways.
SHIVARAM: Prabhakar and other officials have been meeting with civil rights leaders, labor unions and other groups for months to talk about AI. Their efforts will show up in an executive order that President Biden will release on managing AI which is expected to come out in September. Deepa Shivaram, NPR News.
Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
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| 688
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How the right ran with a Fox hoax about a Marine veteran’s burial
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-31-0647/media-bias-how-right-ran-fox-hoax-about-marine-veteran-s-burial
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Media Bias
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-right-ran-fox-hoax-about-marine-veterans-burial
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Andrea Austria / Media Matters
RESEARCH/STUDY
How the right ran with a Fox hoax about a Marine veteran’s burial
Bogus Fox story about a deceased Afghanistan veteran follows previous Murdoch media hoax about veterans
WRITTEN BY ZACHARY PLEAT & JACK WINSTANLEY
PUBLISHED 08/28/23 5:41 PM EDT
Fox News published blatantly false accusations from a Republican congressman that the Department of Defense had forced the family of a slain Marine to pay out-of-pocket for the transportation of remains. Fox's story faced widespread and immediate pushback from defense outlets, and was eventually deleted without a formal correction or retraction. Yet the false story spread widely among other right-wing media and GOP politicians before Fox deleted the story, and the network waited a month to publicly apologize to the Marine’s family. This Fox hoax follows another incident in May, in which Fox widely spread a fake New York Post story claiming that veterans were ejected from temporary housing to make room for migrants.
Jump to section about the fake Fox story
Fox News published a false accusation that the Pentagon forced a Gold Star family to pay $60,000 for the transportation of remains
As U.S. and NATO forces withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, and conducted massive airlift operations to evacuate civilians fleeing the Taliban, at least one suicide bomber killed 13 American service members and as many as 170 civilians outside at crowded entry gate at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. One of the American Marines killed, Sgt. Nicole Gee, had previously been photographed tending to a wounded baby at the airport and had spoken positively of her role in the evacuation effort. Her remains arrived in her hometown of Roseville, California, on August 29 of that year, and were later transported to Arlington National Cemetery and laid to rest.
On July 25, a Fox News Digital article claimed that Gee’s family was “forced to pay to ship” the body of a slain Marine. In the article — which has since been deleted from Fox’s website — Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) told Fox that he was “enraged to learn that the Department of Defense had placed a heavy financial burden” on Gee’s family, which secured the $60,000 transportation fee from a nonprofit organization. [Fox News Digital, 7/25/23 via Internet Archive]
Mills linked to the Fox article in a social media post and wrote, “At no time should our Gold Star families be financially responsible for burying their loved ones and American heroes.” [Twitter/X, 7/25/23]
Military-focused news outlets were quick to refute the claims in the Fox story
News outlets focused on the military, veterans, and service families were the first to speak with Gee’s family directly about the false Fox story, and quickly pushed back on Mill’s false claims. Their reporting made clear that Fox neglected to fact-check or substantiate his statements.
Statements from the Marine’s family first reported by the military-focused publication Task & Purpose asserted that the family never contacted the Department of Defense about financing the relocation, nor received any bills. Task & Purpose contacted Gee's family and was first to report their statements refuting Fox’s story. The statements were later confirmed by The Sacramento Bee, the family's hometown newspaper. The family stated that the flight was organized and “donated” by a non-profit organization and a Pentagon representative confirmed that the military had “no record of any incurred charges or any pending requests for reimbursement associated with the transportation of Sgt. Gee’s remains to Arlington National Cemetery.” [Task & Purpose, 7/26/23]
The Marine Corps Times repeated the family statements collected by Task & Purpose and further clarified that there was “no record of any such cost for the family” over the transportation and burial of the remains. Its coverage specifically called out both Mills and Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) for attacking the Department of Defense over the nonsense claims. [Marine Corps Times, 7/27/23]
Fox quietly scrubbed the false report and eventually apologized to the family
After pressure from the Marine Corps, and nearly a month of back and forth between representatives from the network and the Department of Defense, Fox issued an apology to the fallen Marine’s family for the false story – but never published a correction.
Fox News, according to Military.com, edited the article’s headline and content “without noting a correction,” and later removed the entire article containing Mills’ original false claims. Military.com further reported that after Gee’s family said they were never billed by the Pentagon and refuted Mills’ false claims, he issued a statement on July 27 claiming that the family was “confused in their time of grief” and continued to attack the Department of Defense. [Military.com, 7/28/23]
Military.com also detailed the Marine Corps’ month-long attempt to convince Fox to retract and correct its “false” story. According to Military.com, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps had requested that Fox News apologize directly to the family and insisted that Fox fully correct its false story. Maj. James Stenger wrote in an email to Fox after it changed its article, “This headline correction is still misleading and your story is still false.” He also wrote that Fox was “using the grief of a family member of a fallen Marine to score cheap clickbait points.” [Military.com, 8/23/23; The Washington Post, 8/27/23]
On August 26, CNN reported that Fox News had finally apologized to Gee’s family, with a network spokesperson asserting that the false story had been “addressed internally.” Although Fox had scrubbed the article from its site at least a month prior, there has been no formal retraction or correction issued. Fox, in a statement, said, “We sincerely apologize to the Gee family” and said its fake story was “now unpublished.” [CNN, 8/26/23]
Right-wing media ran with Fox’s story before it was deleted
Although searches of the SnapStream video database showed that Fox News never aired this false story on its cable programs, many other right-wing media outlets picked up the story and used it to attack the Biden administration. This included conservative social media figures, right-wing blogs, and Fox competitors Newsmax and One America News. Right-wing media often used the story as a vehicle to pursue their own petty criticisms of the Biden administration’s policies, including attacking health care for transgender military personnel, criticizing military aid to Ukraine to defend itself against the ongoing Russian invasion, and objecting to reimbursement for military personnel travel costs for abortion care.
Chronicles Magazine editor Pedro L. Gonzalez: “The family of Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan, was forced to come up with $60,000 to transport Gee’s remains to Arlington National Cemetery because the Pentagon wouldn’t pay for it.” [Twitter/X, 7/25/23]
Talk radio host Dana Loesch: “One of the 13 Gold Star families who lost their daughter in Afghanistan was forced to pay to ship her body back — until nonprofit stepped in to pay $60,000 to move Marine Corps Sgt Nicole Gee's remains to Arlington National Cemetery.” [Twitter/X, 7/25/23]
The Right Scoop: “HORRIBLE: Biden Pentagon FORCED Gold Star family to pay to ship fallen Marine killed in Afghan withdrawal to Arlington.” The article added: “What a freaking slap in the face!” [The Right Scoop, 7/25/23]
The anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok posted: “The Biden admin is funding drag shows in Equador but refused to pay to bring a dead Marine’s body home.” [Twitter/X, 7/26/23]
Former Fox producer Kyle Becker: “NEW: The military community is furious at the Biden administration upon discovering a Gold Star Family was forced to bear the cost of transporting its slain daughter's remains after she was killed serving her country in Afghanistan.” [Twitter/X, 7/26/23]
Newsmax host Chris Salcedo: “The family of a fallen service member killed during Biden's disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal says they were forced to pay thousands of dollars to move the body of their loved one to their final resting place.” Salcedo concluded, “Another sign of how far our government has fallen.” [Newsmax, The Chris Salcedo Show, 7/26/23]
Newsmax host Carl Higbie introduced a segment pushing the fake story, saying, “This one’s actually near and dear to me as a veteran.” Higbie said that the fake story that Gee’s family “was forced to pay 60 grand” to bury her in Arlington National Cemetery “will permanently tarnish the reputation of our Defense Department” and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Newsmax’s Dick Morris joined in the outrage. [Newsmax, Carl Higbie Frontline, 7/26/23]
OAN host Dan Ball reported the “disturbing details” that Gee’s family “had to pay to have her remains moved,” and applauded Mills “for finding this out, for bringing this to the nation’s attention.” Ball lamented that legitimate news organizations weren’t covering the story at the time, linked the false story to a decline in American patriotism, and interviewed a Republican congressional candidate about the fake story. The candidate used the false story to rant against medical care for transgender military personnel. [OAN, Real America with Dan Ball, 7/26/23]
Talk radio host Lars Larson: “Joe Biden is now giving billions for Ukraine but nothing for a vet who died protecting our nation?” On his radio show, Larson repeated the lie that Gee’s family “was denied the usual support by the Pentagon for transportation of her remains to her final resting place in Arlington.” Larson added, “This is absolutely crazy,” and claimed that the Biden administration is undercutting and dishonoring military personnel. [Alpha Media, The Lars Larson Show, 7/26/23]
Townhall: “Family of Marine killed in Afghanistan forced to pay $60,000 bill thanks to Biden Pentagon policy change.” [Townhall, 7/26/23]
The Western Journal: “Family of Marine killed in Afghanistan stuck with $60,000 bill after Pentagon policy change.” [The Western Journal, 7/26/23]
Gateway Pundit: “As Joe Biden slept: Family of slain Marine at Kabul airport was forced to fundraise $60,000 to move daughter’s remains to Arlington Cemetery.” [Gateway Pundit, 7/26/23]
Townhall: “Biden cut a massive check to Ukraine after forcing a family to pay $60,000 to move soldier’s remains.” [Townhall, 7/27/23]
The Federalist: “For the Pentagon, subsidizing abortions takes priority over transporting service members to their final resting place.” [The Federalist, 7/27/23]
Salcedo returned to the fake story to discuss a lack of veterans benefits with a guest. Introducing the author of a book about veterans benefits, Salcedo asked, “Is this how far our elected leaders and our government have fallen?” [Newsmax, The Chris Salcedo Show, 7/28/23]
Numerous Republican lawmakers and officials also promoted the fake story
Like many of the right-wing media outlets that shared the false story, Republican lawmakers used it to air their grievances about the provision of health care to military personnel, the administration’s immigration policy, and military aid to Ukraine.
Rep. Mark Green (R-TN): “So we are paying to fly illegal immigrants to the destination of their choice but we can’t fly a hero’s body home? This administration is totally lost.” [Twitter/X, 7/25/23]
Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ): “Biden’s Pentagon is eager to fund abortion travel, genital mutilations & a proxy war in Europe. But when a Marine was killed during the Admin’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal, her family was forced to pay to move her body. Despicable.” [Twitter/X, 7/25/23]
Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler: “Really great work by Florida Congressman @CoryMillsFL on this!” [Twitter/X, 7/25/23]
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL): “The Pentagon is providing taxpayer funding for elective abortions, but not to transport our fallen heroes to their final resting place. This just shows how extreme the Pentagon’s unprecedented new abortion policy really is.” [Twitter/X, 7/26/23]
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL): “This is sickening. Thank you to Honoring Our Fallen, a group that stepped up amid the Biden Administration’s absence.” [Twitter/X, 7/26/23]
Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT): “Under Biden's new Pentagon policy, a Gold Star Family was left to pay to transport and bury their loved one at Arlington National Cemetery. Absolutely despicable.” [Twitter/X, 7/26/23]
Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA): “Unacceptable. Congress cannot allow this to happen again.” [Twitter/X, 7/26/23]
Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA): “Sergeant Nicole Gee is an American hero who lost her life in the Afghanistan withdrawal. It is unfathomable that the Pentagon would decline to cover the cost of transporting her to her final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery.” The letter that Kiley attached to his social media post was cited by Sacramento media outlets, which mistakenly pushed the false story. [Twitter/X, 7/26/23]
Fox and related media outlets previously spread a hoax that veterans were kicked out of housing in New York
Fox’s creation of this fake story near the second anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal echoes another bogus story in which the New York Post — which, like Fox News, is a Murdoch media property — falsely reported that homeless veterans were kicked out of hotels to make room for asylum-seekers. Fox widely covered that hoax before airing multiple similar retractions within days. Although multiple Fox programs aired retractions, some others continued to promote the fake story as genuine even after Mid Hudson News, a local news outlet, had completely debunked it.
| 689
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The San Bernardino Pride flag murderer and the inevitable consequences of right-wing media hate
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-25-0533/media-bias-san-bernardino-pride-flag-murderer-and-inevitable-consequences-right
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Media Bias
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lefts
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https://www.mediamatters.org/matt-walsh/san-bernardino-pride-flag-murderer-and-inevitable-consequences-right-wing-media-hate
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The San Bernardino Pride flag murderer and the inevitable consequences of right-wing media hate
The alleged shooter frequently shared anti-LGBTQ propaganda on social media, including using the image of a burning Pride flag as his pinned tweet
Special PROGRAMS
LGBTQ
WRITTEN BY ARI DRENNEN
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALYSSA TIRRELL
PUBLISHED 08/24/23 3:11 PM EDT
Last weekend, 66-year-old San Bernardino resident Laura Ann “Lauri” Carleton was shot and killed in front of her store in Lake Arrowhead, California. She is survived by her nine children. Her alleged killer was a 27-year-old man whom she confronted while he tried to tear down the Progress Pride flags in front of her shop.
The man who pulled the trigger against Carleton was later killed in a fatal shootout with police, but the people who helped load his brain with homicidal rage remain free. Nobody is born full of fury at the Pride flag. This rage was learned.
Angry rhetoric about the Pride flag has been unavoidable in the right-wing media ecosystem in 2023. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh — whom the alleged shooter retweeted and interacted with on X.com (formerly Twitter), along with conservative media personalities Jordan Peterson and Benny Johnson — called it a “hate symbol” that should be treated with “disdain.” Walsh's colleague Michael Knowles laid out a plan to make the Pride flag politically toxic and have it banned “from every public space forever,” calling it “evil.” Shortly thereafter, the entirety of right-wing media joined in having a meltdown over the flag hanging at a White House Pride Month celebration. Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk told his audience at the end of June that walking past a Pride flag felt like being in “conquered territory.”
In response to misinformation that Italy had canceled Pride Month to celebrate the “traditional family” instead, the alleged killer wrote, “Hallelujah!!!! Jesus is good!!!” He shared a similar reaction to an article in far-right conspiracy theory outlet The Gateway Pundit reporting that California’s Orange County had banned the Pride flag from being flown on county property.
Imagine being an unstable, angry young man in America in 2023, struggling financially, begging strangers online for money, unable to afford a home. You log into the internet looking for connection, attention, distraction, and instead an algorithm spoon-feeds you an unending string of lies with a consistent villain. You’re told that “mediocre male athletes” are taking over women’s sports, that transgender people are stealing scholarships for the higher education that’s become increasingly necessary but also increasingly unaffordable, that they’re threatening women in bathrooms and locker rooms. Then you’re told that the same people, and their supporters, are indoctrinating the next generation, abusing them, “castrating” them, removing healthy body parts, and leaving them ruined for life. You hear this nearly every day.
You’ve never met a trans person, don’t know how few trans athletes there really are, don’t know how many steps are required before ending up on the operating table, don’t know how rare surgical regrets or even these surgeries are, don’t know how common it is for trans people to avoid bathrooms from fear, don’t know that trans people are far more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than its perpetrators.
All you know is what you have been told by the people who validate your anger and your violent impulses: that the flag of this movement is the flag of the enemy; that it is the role of strong men to do something about it; that your life could mean something.
“This tactic is not going to solve anything,” the alleged shooter wrote on X, in response to a meme suggesting dividing the “TIQA+” community from the “LGB” community. “Where you are cutting off the legs of the octopus and can grow back another one. KILL THE OCTOPUS!!”
Gun ownership is ubiquitous in the United States. The consequences of this fact combined with right-wing media’s anti-LGBTQ hate campaign are predictable. We will all bear the costs — children grieving their mother, parents grieving their child, friends grieving their friends, an empty desk in the classroom, an empty seat in the pews — until we decide to do something about it. We do not have to live like this. We do not need to die like this.
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Far-right message boards target the Georgia Trump indictment grand jurors after their names were made public
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-18-0347/media-bias-far-right-message-boards-target-georgia-trump-indictment-grand
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Media Bias
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lefts
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https://www.mediamatters.org/maga-trolls/far-right-message-boards-target-georgia-trump-indictment-grand-jurors-after-their-names
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Users on the far-right message board sites have threatened the jurors with violence and sought to reveal their addresses
WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM CAMDEN CARTER
PUBLISHED 08/16/23 5:24 PM EDT
Content Warning: This piece contains violent and racist language.
Users on far-right message boards are targeting the Fulton County, Georgia, grand jurors who voted to indict former President Donald Trump, including supposedly doxxing their addresses, threatening them with violence, and digging up their supposed online presences.
On August 14, Trump and 18 others were indicted “over their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss” in Georgia, “with prosecutors using a statute normally associated with mobsters to accuse the former president, lawyers and other aides of a ‘criminal enterprise’ to keep him in power.” The grand jurors who indicted Trump were named in the indictment, per state law.
A Media Matters review found that following the release of the indictment and the grand jurors’ names, users on far-right message boards began targeting them in retaliation.
On a message board that has been the home of “Q,” the central figure of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a user posted the names of the jurors alongside their supposed addresses (Media Matters has blurred the supposed doxxing to protect the jurors, and has chosen to blur and remove other material posted by message board users). And on another message board, where the QAnon conspiracy theory initially emerged, a user seemed to threaten to “follow these people home and photograph their faces.”
Other users on the message boards also issued direct threats against the jurors. One user wrote that the grand jurors’ names was a “hit list” to which another user responded, “Based. Godspeed anons, you have all the long range rifles in the world,” while another wrote that they were “about ready to go Turner Diaries on these treasonous n***** fucks” (referring to a violent white nationalist book). And another user ominously wrote that the jurors were “committing election interference” and so they “should indeed be careful.”
Additionally, message board users tried to dig into the jurors’ online presences and backgrounds, posting images of jurors’ supposed Facebook and LinkedIn pages as evidence that they were biased against Trump and posting a link to their supposed political contributions pages from the Federal Election Commission. (According to The Washington Post, “several of the jurors disabled their profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook.“) Users also tried to determine the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the jurors.
Outside of the message boards, users on right-wing social media platforms like Truth Social and GETTR also tried to dig into the jurors’ backgrounds.
The supposed doxxing and targeting of these grand jurors comes after users of these far-right message boards have repeatedly targeted entities and figures with troll campaigns, harassment, and death threats.
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Trump Doesn't Like A 'Big Orange' Photo Of Him That Fox News Keeps Using
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-17-1443/donald-trump-trump-doesnt-big-orange-photo-him-fox-news-keeps-using
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Media Bias
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-photo-fox-news_n_64de2c97e4b0f4cf3ed7244f
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Fox News should use more flattering photographs of former President Donald Trump, according to Trump.
The one-term president and 2024 hopeful was on social media complaining about the conservative network first thing Thursday morning, writing that those who run the morning news show “Fox & Friends” “purposely show the absolutely worst pictures” of him.
“Especially the big ‘orange’ one with my chin pulled way back,” Trump wrote. “They think they are getting away with something, they’re not.”
“And then they want me to debate!” he added. (Trump has not committed to participating in the first 2024 Republican presidential primary debate, which Fox News will host next week.)
It is not clear which chinless photo Trump specifically objected to.
One image appearing to fit his description was aired at least twice during Thursday morning’s “Fox & Friends” broadcast. It shows Trump speaking last summer at a gathering for the America First Policy Institute in Washington:
Trump speaks at Washington's Marriott Marquis in July 2022.ANDREW HARNIK VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Trump also took aim at Fox News’ photographic choices earlier this summer, claiming in June that “three people in New Hampshire” had asked him “why Fox News uses such ‘horrible’ pictures” of him in stories.
“The coloring, distortions, everything are just so bad,” Trump wrote on social media. “They must sit and look at 100 different shots, and then take the 10 absolute worst. My staff has even complained about it for months, but to no avail.”
But without a specific example of what Trump considers a “bad” photograph, it is hard to say what Trump does and does not find acceptable.
For example, we cannot be sure whether he would object to these:
Trump appears at a 2015 Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas.JOHN LOCHER VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Trump speaks during a 2019 Cabinet meeting.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI VIA GETTY IMAGES
Trump delivers remarks in 2018 during the Latino Coalition Legislative Summit in Washington.CHIP SOMODEVILLA VIA GETTY IMAGES
Trump delivers remarks at New Hampshire's Windham High School in early August.ERIN CLARK/BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Trump speaks during a 2022 rally at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Pennsylvania.WIN MCNAMEE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Trump speaks about tax reform at the White House in December 2017. MARK WILSON VIA GETTY IMAGES
Trump addresses a rally in Topeka, Kansas, in 2018.NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Trump speaks to a crowd of South Carolinians in July.SEAN RAYFORD VIA GETTY IMAGES
Trump speaks at CPAC 2022 in Dallas.LEV RADIN/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
Trump speaks at a 2015 rally in Las Vegas.ROBYN BECK/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Who can say?
Note: As of Thursday, there are 446 days left until the 2024 presidential election.
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| 692
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Republicans find safe media spaces
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-14-1413/media-industry-republicans-find-safe-media-spaces
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Media Bias
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lefts
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https://www.semafor.com/article/08/13/2023/republican-find-safe-media-spaces
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Sign up for Semafor Media: Media’s essential read. Read it now.
In this article:
DES MOINES – The Gannett-owned Des Moines Register is one of those medium-sized American dailies hanging on in a tough environment. Its signature political event is the annual Political Soapbox, long the premier venue for speechifying on the main drag of the Iowa State Fair.
But this year, the Register has a new rival. Republican Governor Kim Reynolds is hosting a series of “Fair-Side Chats” with presidential candidates on the other side of a set of stalls selling pork-on-a-stick, Spam-burgers, and other delicacies.
And Reynolds has the better bookings: Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott, seen as among the campaign’s top tier, are skipping the Register’s wide-open public platform in favor of Reynolds’ safer stage. (Trump, in a snit with Reynolds, did neither.)
Reynolds is a star of retail politics who practically lives at the fair, and a welcoming public presence — but a rookie interviewer. In her first outing Thursday, the radio host and candidate Larry Elder cheerfully rolled over her attempt to ask questions. Friday, she mixed up the state from which North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum hailed, and found herself chiming in “yep, yep” to inanities like Miami mayor Francis Suarez’s declaration, “we’re ideators, we generated ideas.” She got out of the frame for Vivek Ramaswamy’s performance of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” It was the safest political space.
Thursday evening, DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley visited the other main media event of the day, a live taping of the “Ruth-Less” podcast, founded by former aides to Senator Mitch McConnell. Its name refers to the GOP-dominated Supreme Court after Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The podcast is raucous and beloved by the party’s political class, and the Des Moines bar was full of staffers for various campaigns. But its hosts aren’t looking to put their guests in a bad spot —the Republican consultant Eric Wilson called it a “trusting, safe space.”
Thursday night at Johnny’s Hall of Fame in Des Moines, the Ruthless hosts played a game with DeSantis called “Dem or Journo,” reading quotes calling DeSantis things like “fascist dictator” and asking him to guess which quote came from a political enemy, which from the main enemy, the media. He guessed right. “History has shown that siding with Governor DeSantis is has to be the right move when you face a crisis,” one of the co-hosts, who goes by the name Comfortably Smug on Twitter, concluded.
Public figures’ migration away from neutral or adversarial public platforms and toward safe spaces is a long-running trend, hardly unique to the right. President Joe Biden prefers progressive influencers to tough TV interviews, Elon Musk talks to friendly podcasters like Lex Fridman, and the list goes on.
The shift in Iowa, however, is one more body blow for the role the local media used to play in national campaigns, pulling them away from the polarized national discourse and toward more grounded local issues.
The Register, like virtually every American newspaper, has denounced Donald Trump on its editorial pages. But Reynolds’ move on her hometown paper is new, and the Register has not always been an automatically Democratic outlet. The paper endorsed Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in 2012, and its lead political reporter, Brianne Pfannenstiel, is well-regarded by the local Republicans on whom she regularly breaks news. (When Reynolds “gets the inevitable Fox News show, this will have been good practice,” grumbled a top State Senate Democrat, Zach Wahls.)
But Iowa, which seemed at times to set the culture of presidential politics, is now mostly subject to the same national trends of a new era of hyper-polarized politics and partisan media. The notion of a neutral platform has nearly dissolved, and — particularly in primary season — the leading candidates see no rewards in reaching toward the center. And Trump helped shift Republicans from hating the legacy media to merely mocking it, the theme of Ruth-less.
“What you’re seeing at the state fair is what’s happening everywhere,” said Kyle Munson, a former Register reporter who is president of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation.
His foundation is trying to support and revive community journalism in the state’s rural western regions, where publications like the twice-weekly Storm Lake Times used to be essential parts of the political infrastructure.
The sheer proximity of community journalism to the people local journalists cover — the fact that editors and public officials have to make eye contact, and shake hands — is one antidote to polarization, he noted.
Benjy Sarlin noted in Semafor that Donald Trump never limited himself to an alternative conservative media space:
“Trump, who has done more to rally conservatives against the press than any modern politician, has also been more eager to cultivate a relationship with them than his chief opponent, Ron DeSantis, who has largely resisted interviews and engagement with non-conservative outlets.”
And in fact, DeSantis’ recent campaign reset has come with a modest amount more openness to the press.
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Right-wing media’s talking points about Trump’s indictment for fake electors plot have little basis in reality
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-08-11-0812/media-bias-right-wing-media-s-talking-points-about-trump-s-indictment-fake
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Media Bias
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lefts
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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/right-wing-medias-talking-points-about-trumps-indictment-fake-electors-plot
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Andrea Austria / Media Matters
RESEARCH/STUDY
Right-wing media’s talking points about Trump’s indictment for fake electors plot have little basis in reality
Here are the facts
WRITTEN BY JACK WINSTANLEY & PAYTON ARMSTRONG
PUBLISHED 08/10/23 12:55 PM EDT
In response to Donald Trump’s federal indictment for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, right-wing media have embarked on a smear campaign against the entire investigation, spreading misleading and baseless myths to obscure the nature of the charges and the evidence being presented against the disgraced former president.
Since the indictment was filed, Trump’s lawyers and right-wing media have offered flailing defenses and pro-Trump spin, as well as falsehoods about the charges.
MYTH: Trump was indicted for believing the election was stolen, which violates his free speech rights.
Right-wing media figures have claimed that Trump was indicted for believing that the election was stolen and suggested that the charges represent a criminalization of free speech rights — baseless claims that the indictment prebuts.
Fox host Greg Gutfeld said the indictment is “criminalizing thoughts and it’s criminalizing speech.” He defended Trump’s actions by arguing that “you have every right to think an election might be rigged or fixed." [Fox News, The Five, 8/1/23]
On Hannity, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller complained that “free speech,” and the “Constitution itself” are “at stake.” He called the indictment “the legal equivalent of the French guillotine, the reign of terror,” and “a mob mentality to take out Donald Trump.” [Fox News, Hannity, 8/1/23]
Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo suggested that Trump’s crime was “saying that he thought that the election was stolen.” Bartiromo cited Fox legal analyst Jonathan Turley’s claim that the indictment lacks legitimacy, stating, “A similar sentiment talked about this being free speech, so what's the charge? What's the crime? Him saying that he thought that the election was stolen: That's the crime.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, 8/2/23]
Right-wing influencer Greg Price posted on social media that “Jack Smith's indictment is nothing but a criminalization of political speech.” He added that, “In the 3rd paragraph, he says President Trump ‘had a right like every American to speak publicly about the election and even to claim falsely that he had won.’ But apparently he's indicting him for it anyway.” [Twitter/X, 8/1/23]
Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich called the indictment the “criminalization … of disinformation and misinformation.” She also argued that “the left believes that you should go to prison for saying things.” [Fox Business Network, The Bottom Line, 8/1/23]
Fox prime-time host Laura Ingraham argued that the indictment was a violation of Trump’s right to free speech. Ingraham quoted the indictment to note that “the defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election” and that Trump had the right “even to claim falsely there had been an outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” Ingraham then argued, “So they concede that he had the right to have a different opinion. But, what? So they throw that in there to try to protect themselves, Bret, but then they violate what they claim they are still protecting.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 8/1/23]
FACT: Trump was indicted for his actions following the 2020 election and leading up to January 6, not for spreading lies about voter fraud.
The first pages of the indictment carefully acknowledged Trump’s First Amendment protections, while emphasizing that the charges relate to alleged criminal conduct and actions unrelated to free speech. The second page of the indictment notes that Trump “had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” It goes on to explain that Trump was entitled to, and did, “formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures,” but it also alleges that Trump also “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”
While Trump’s spoken words and social media posts are used as evidence in the indictment, that evidence is used to support the motive for his actions. As noted by legal experts, “Trump is being prosecuted for his deeds, not his words,” and while Trump had the right to claim the election was stolen, he did not have the right to attempt to throw out the lawful results through a criminal conspiracy.
Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr has cast doubt on the claim that the indictment violates Trump’s First Amendment rights. On CBS’s Face the Nation, Barr stated that the indictment doesn’t rely on what Trump said, but on the actions he and his allies took to conspire to overturn the 2020 election results.
MYTH: The indictment will allow Trump to litigate the 2020 election and prove claims of voter fraud.
Some right-wing media figures have claimed that the indictment will provide the opportunity to relitigate claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election in federal court, which they argue will finally vindicate Trump. Such claims ignore the plethora of failed lawsuits from Trump and his team after the 2020 election.
Fox News prime-time host Jesse Watters celebrated that the indictment is going to open the door to litigate the 2020 election. He claimed that it is “going to give Donald Trump the opportunity to relitigate the 2020 election in federal court. This is what Donald Trump's been dying to do for the last two and half years.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 8/1/23]
War Room host Steve Bannon also celebrated the chance to relitigate voter fraud claims. On his show, Bannon said: “I love this. I’m highly optimistic. We finally – we’ve wanted a chance and a platform to adjudicate the 2020, and their bloodlust to take down Trump, they gave it to us.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 8/2/23]
Conservative radio host and Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt claimed, “The former president will be subpoenaing everyone who had anything to do with the unusual circumstances of the 2020 election in order to prove his genuine suspicion of the process.” He added that Trump’s lawyer made it clear that they are “going to explore every corner of the 2020 election with former President Trump empowered to subpoena everyone who can help prove his innocence.” [Twitter/X, 8/2/23]
On Infowars, “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley suggested the indictment will allow Trump to litigate the election. Chansley told Alex Jones: “Now all this evidence that the other courts and other states refused to hear can now be subpoenaed. It can now be made public evidence, so I kind of wonder a little bit. How much this is actually going to work out the way that the shadow government deep state wants it to.” [Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 8/4/23]
FACT: Trump’s claims of voter fraud were repeatedly litigated in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, and evidence for widespread voter fraud was never found.
In reality, Trump’s claims of voter fraud were litigated dozens of times after the 2020 election – and proof for the claims was never found. Trump and his allies filed at least 62 lawsuits, many of which were dismissed due to the weak merits of the voter fraud allegations and for lack of standing. Additionally, many of Trump’s lawyers reneged on the sweeping public allegations once they found themselves in a court of law under oath, and ultimately none of allegations from Trump and his team were even remotely proven. Still, conservative media are largely ignoring the plethora of failed lawsuits and claiming the latest indictment will be their chance to litigate the election.
Several Republican officials, including members of Trump’s own cabinet, have debunked his assertion that there was widespread fraud or inaccuracies during the 2020 election. Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr stated in a 2022 interview with The Associated Press that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.” Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger also found no evidence of fraud during the 2020 election, and a prominent statehouse Republican in Pennsylvania conceded that he had no evidence to support his claims of fraud.
MYTH: In order to convict Trump, special counsel Jack Smith has to prove Trump knew he was lying about the 2020 election.
Right-wing media figures are falsely claiming that a conviction of Trump will hinge on whether prosecutors can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump knew he was lying about the 2020 election. Legal experts have disputed this claim, emphasizing that the charges are related to Trump’s actions.
On a right-wing podcast, Trump lawyer Alina Habba asserted that in order to convict him, prosecutors have to prove that Trump knew he was lying about the 2020 election. Habba told right-wing influencer and serial plagiarist Benny Johnson: “We all know he still believes that 2020 was not a fair election. … I think that that, evidentiary-wise, is going to be very problematic. They have to get into his frame of mind and prove that he actually believed it to be false and was peddling a false statement.” [YouTube, The Benny Johnson Show, 8/4/23]
Fox News host Howard Kurtz published an article on the network’s website titled “Trump’s Jan. 6 indictment turns on whether he knowingly lied about the 2020 outcome.” The article argued that, “In short, if the Trump team can persuade a jury that he truly believed the election was hijacked, then he had every right to speak out and challenge the results.” [FoxNews.com, 8/3/23]
On a podcast for the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, editorial board member and podcast host Kim Strassel said it’s a “weakness” of the case that the prosecution has to prove Trump knew he was lying about the election. Strassel explained: “The problem with this is that you have to essentially know what Donald Trump's state of mind is. You have to claim that he knew that this was false and he did it anyway. And yeah, I think it's just difficult to make that argument, because what we don't have in this indictment is any evidence to the fact that he knew that what he was saying was untrue. It might've been wild, it might've been crazy. Let's all be clear, his behavior was deceitful and destructive, but that doesn't mean he didn't necessarily believe it. … That to me is the singular weakness of this case.” [The Wall Street Journal, Potomac Watch, 8/2/23]
Senior editorial staff at National Review wrote that the case requires prosecutors to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump hadn’t actually convinced himself that the election was stolen from him.” The article added, “Good luck with that” because “hyperbole and even worse are protected political speech.” [National Review, 8/1/23]
On Fox & Friends, co-host Ainsley Earhardt claimed that Trump's prosecutors “have to prove that he actually believed that he lost, because you’re allowed to question an election.” Co-host Brian Kilmeade agreed, adding, “You can’t get inside his head!” [Mediaite, 8/2/23]
FACT: Trump was indicted for his actions and a conviction will hinge on demonstrating that he “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”
Legal experts have noted that evidence will lay out Trump’s allegedly unlawful actions and to secure a conviction, the government “does not need to prove motive.” The indictment brought against Trump notes that he “had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud,” and that he could challenge the election through “lawful and appropriate means.” However, the indictment notes that Trump “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.” Voting rights lawyer Marc Elias reportedly noted that for a criminal trial, the government “does not need to prove motive” and that the jury will actually receive an instruction stating that the government does not need to establish a motive for the defendant's alleged crimes.
MYTH: Hawaii’s 1960 presidential election established a precedent for Trump selecting an alternate slate of electors.
Right-wing media have resurrected a bogus talking point to justify Trump’s scheme, comparing Trump’s fake electors plot to the slate of Democratic electors during Hawaii’s narrow recount in the 1960 presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.
Fox host Jesse Watters concluded that “it’s fine” for Trump to have attempted to select an alternate slate of electors because “they did it in Hawaii in 1960.” Watters was responding to guest Harold Ford Jr.’s assertion that “no president had done that before.” [Fox News, The Five, 8/3/23]
Breitbart senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak posted that “Kennedy used alternate electors in Hawaii in 1960. Trump only did what Democrats have done before.” He concluded that “all of these prosecutions are abuses of the justice system that will have long-term consequences for the country.” [Twitter/X, 7/18/23]
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk claimed on his show that “alternate electors had legal precedent of being selected and chosen in the Kennedy/Nixon 1960 election.” He continued: “So they were trying to overthrow the government by sending in alternate electors? How does that work exactly? The Vice President could have sent it back to the states and the judge in 1960, who selected the alternate electors in the Hawaii controversy of Kennedy and Nixon, said explicitly if you had not have sent those electors it could not have been chosen. The judge said that in 1960. The 1960 election. If you had not have sent them, we would not have been able to select them.” [Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 8/2/23]
Breitbart stated that JFK set a precedent for appointing alternate electors in 1960. The article claimed that “Democrats themselves used this strategy in the 1960 election, a close race between Vice President Richard Nixon (R) and Sen. John Kennedy (D-MA).” [Breitbart, 7/18/23]
Newsmax’s Greg Kelly played and agreed with a clip of Trump attorney John Lauro arguing that the Hawaii case set a precedent and asserted, “President Trump not only had the right to raise these questions, but he had a duty.” Kelly added that Lauro “is totally right about Hawaii in 1960, a very close election. They didn't know who won. So they sent two slates of electors to Washington, D.C. It has happened before, and you're allowed to talk about this stuff. This is still America and I am allowed to point out that I've got my own concerns about the fairness of the 2020 election.” [Newsmax, Greg Kelly Reports, 8/2/23]
The Gateway Pundit cited the Hawaii case to say there is “Legal Precedent” behind the “Alternate Electors” Trump appointed in 2020. The article claimed that “legal precedent shows not only did the alternate electors not violate law, they actually took proper Constitutional action in submitting their certificates amidst a contested election, according to the Judge’s ruling in the 1960 Hawaii election dispute between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.” [The Gateway Pundit, 7/26/23]
FACT: Hawaii’s duplicate electoral votes were the result of a closely contested election.
During the 1960 election, Hawaii’s recount and alternate electors were part of a court order as the state’s election was decided on a less than 1% margin. In contrast, several of the audits and recounts that Trump and his legal team pursued in 2020 were in states where Trump lost by over 10,000, and even in excess of 100,000, votes.
The recount ultimately switched Hawaii in favor of Kennedy and then-Vice President Nixon accepted the result and certified the votes for Kennedy. There was no effort by Nixon, Kennedy, or any third parties to cast doubt on the process by which the original vote, the recount, or the certification had happened, unlike Trump’s efforts.
MYTH: Trump was merely soliciting “good-faith” legal advice from John Eastman and other apparent co-conspirators referenced in the indictment.
Trump lawyer John Lauro has asserted that the former president was soliciting various legal opinions and acting under the advice of counsel — neither of which absolves Trump from culpability. Meanwhile, many of the attorneys Trump relied on in his effort to overturn the election results are facing civil penalties and disbarment for their role in promoting the unconstitutional scheme and for publically lying about election officials and equipment companies. Claremont Institute senior fellow John Eastman is seemingly described in the indictment as Trump's co-conspirator, responsible for devising the plan to halt the vice president's certification of the election results on January 6.
On Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle, Eastman co-counsel Harvey Silverglate claimed that “Eastman’s advice was perfectly within the realm of good-faith legal advice.” He added that Eastman’s advice was “cutting edge” and “creative,” and doubled down by stating that “Eastman's advice was perfectly within the realm of good-faith legal advice. I don't have any doubt about it.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 8/2/23]
Earlier in the program, Ingraham stated that “Eastman made an argument that I wouldn't have made — but one I disagreed with at the time and disagree with now — but it's not a criminal act to have a novel legal theory about something. Even if it's about something like the electors and the Constitution.” She went on to erroneously evoke attorney-client privilege, adding that “advice given from an attorney used to be sacrosanct and it usually falls under the attorney-client privilege. But this is just another norm that the left will sacrifice on the altar of getting Trump.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 8/2/23]
The day before on The Ingraham Angle, Fox-generated presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy painted the co-conspirators as simply “lawyers who were giving good-faith legal advice to Trump,” adding that “the job of the lawyer is to actually provide legal advice. Trump was seeking legal advice.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 8/1/23]
Former Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz claimed that Trump’s impending trial “is a speech case, it’s also a case about right to counsel because they’re going after five of his lawyers, the unindicted co-conspirators, for advice that they gave.” He claimed that the indictment would have a chilling effect on people retaining lawyers, saying, “I’m afraid to say that this indictment may have the effect of encouraging people to take to the streets to protest elections because they’re told that if they go to the courts or go to Congress they will be indicted.” [OAN, One America News, 8/5/23]
FACT: A lawyer advising their client to break the law does not make that act legal, and there is evidence that other attorneys told Trump his scheme was illegal.
Several former White House lawyers who served under Trump testified to the House select committee that they had expressed concerns about the scheme's efficacy. Notably, former White House counsels Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschman testified that they were worried about Eastman's plan and were shut out of official discussions because of it. From the House select committee’s final report:
Cipollone also testified that he was “sure [he] conveyed” his views. Indeed, other testimony from Cipollone indicates that Trump knew of Cipollone’s view and suggests that Trump purposely excluded Cipollone from the meeting with Pence and Pence’s General Counsel on January 4th.
…
Likewise, Eric Herschmann, another White House lawyer, expressed the same understanding that Dr. Eastman’s plan “obviously made no sense” and “had no practical ability to work.”
If a lawyer advises their client to break the law, that advice does not make the act legal. Legal experts have pointed out that there are judicial avenues for candidates to pursue if they feel an election result was inaccurate, but Trump is accused of scheming to operate outside those legal processes. The American Bar Association, the administrative body that licenses lawyers to practice in the U.S., also maintains that lawyers are “personally answerable to the entire criminal law,” and the indictment alleges that Trump privately acknowledged that Sidney Powell — one of the lawyers who is reportedly one of the unindicted co-conspirators — sounded “crazy.”
| 694
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Fox & Friends Opens Show With Unintelligible Word Salad Explaining Why New Trump Charges Are Unfair
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-28-0822/media-bias-fox-friends-opens-show-unintelligible-word-salad-explaining-why-new
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Media Bias
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lefts
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https://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-friends-opens-show-with-unintelligible-word-salad-explaining-why-new-trump-charges-are-unfair/
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Fox & Friends Opens Show With Unintelligible Word Salad Explaining Why New Trump Charges Are Unfair
Colby HallJul 28th, 2023, 10:11 am
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Fox & Friends viewers who wanted to know why the recent federal charges against former President Donald Trump were unfair got what they wanted on Friday morning, even if the explanation defied reason.
Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment on Thursday, alleging the former president ordered the security footage at his Palm Beach residence Mar-a-Lago and directed boxes of papers — likely including classified documents — to be moved to his summer residence in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Of course, the overarching narrative on right-leaning opinion shows is not that Trump hid classified documents from the US government as an ex-president or that he tried to delete security footage at Mar-a-Lago, as has been alleged in the indictment, but that there are two tiers of justice. This is evidenced by how Hunter Biden has been treated in comparison. (Hunter Biden has never been an elected official, but that significant detail seems lost on many Fox News hosts.)
Ainsley Earhardt led the charge by amplifying Trump’s predictable reply alleging “election interference” before asking why Trump is being treated differently than President Joe Biden.
“The guy had classified materials in his in his house,” Earhardt admitted before adding, “Well, so did some other presidents or vice presidents. And are they experiencing this? Did they get raided? Where are the charges? Where is the accountability for them? Where is the special counsel in the Joe Biden classified documents in his house and next to his car in a garage or his offices?”
Anyone who has been paying attention to the story in the slightest knows the answer to these remarkably uninformed questions. Trump ignored a subpoena to retrieve highly classified documents and is alleged to have tried to hide those documents — which belong to the US government — numerous times. In the latest indictment, the former president is accused of a stunning crime: instructing staff to “delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.”
Compare Trump’s months of wildly improper behavior to the current president: Biden’s staff found the documents, self-reported them, and returned them immediately. Oh, and there is a Special Counsel is also looking into Biden’s handling of them. Biden has not been accused of destroying evidence to conceal a serious crime.
Apparently spotting the difference between these two cases is too much to ask for a news host.
Fox News’s Johnny Joey Jones appeared to try to make this point but did so in a most confusing way, with an explanation that included Hunter Biden and alleged connections to his father, despite there being little evidence that Joe Biden was involved in the schemes that House GOP is investigating.
“So there isn’t a lot of people telling that person, no, the people are investigating President Trump, whereas with President Biden, President Biden is not being investigated at all,” Jones said,. “Hunter Biden is being investigated for tax fraud. And what Republicans are showing, or at least alleged, is that anything Hunter Biden has done wrong goes directly to his dad, and there’s more to it.”
Huh?
Earhardt then re-upped the old Russia collusion chestnut, falsely claiming that Robert Mueller’s investigation exonerated Trump. It did not; in fact, even the Republican-led Senate Intel Committee report found that members of the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian intelligence officers.
And what would be a Fox News segment about charges against Trump without mentioning Hillary Clinton’s email server? Don’t worry — Lawrence Jones hit that note for the latest game of misinformation bingo.
Earhardt: Have a good get talking to the former president last night. That’s great. He said on social media, too. He said, this is what you get for leading the polls for a White House in 2024. He said it’s election interference at the highest level. We’re seeing that it’s 140 years. The guy had classified materials in his in his house. Okay. Well, so did some other presidents or vice presidents. And are they experiencing this? Did they get raided? Where are the charges? Where is the accountability for them? Where is the special counsel in the Joe Biden classified documents in his house and next to his car in a garage or in his offices? Many more boxes than Donald Trump got caught for. What about the sweetheart plea deal and the tax fraud and felony gun charges and almost getting off and almost completely getting a blanket immunity if it weren’t for this judge that was appointed by Trump? And then what about the bribery and foreign influence allegations, though? That’s possible as well. Why aren’t we hearing more about the Biden family and those charges? Jack Smith keeps going after Donald Trump and it’s more charges. I thought this was done. I thought now they were moving on to January six. Then they were going to move on to Georgia. Now they’re going back to Florida to find three additional charges and charging people that work for him, that have been there for 20 years, moved up in the ranks, probably came from nothing and had low, low jobs. And then they moved up. They were hard workers and now they’re getting charged.
J. Jones: Well, one of the reasons you’re not hearing more is that they’re handled completely differently. President Trump has handled with special prosecution. So there isn’t a lot of people telling that person, no, the people are investigating President Trump, whereas with President Biden, President Biden is not being investigated at all. Hunter Biden is being investigated for tax fraud. And what Republicans are showing, or at least alleging is that anything Hunter Biden has done wrong goes directly to his dad and there’s more to it. So that’s that’s the difference between the two. It doesn’t mean it’s right, but that’s why we’re getting what we’re getting. The hope really from Republicans in Congress isn’t to change President Trump’s fate, but to show that President Biden has not only been corrupt, but essentially sold our country out in business dealings with Hunter Biden. That is a big deal. That’s a bigger deal than anything President Trump is charged with. It doesn’t mean that President Trump is innocent. It means that President Biden said it.
Earhardt: That would be some would be corrupt. It’d be similar to collusion if Donald Trump were charged with colluding with Russia to to fix the election. That’s a see, that’s big. That’s a that’s a big deal. That didn’t happen. He was exonerated with the Mueller investigation. But look at this. This is possibly Hunter Biden using his dad’s influence and trading money for policy.
L. Jones. So it looks like, according to Jack Smith’s family, the allegation is that President Trump attempted to destroy evidence. And it looks like the court attempted to get the the the video footage there. So there was never a subpoena for the footage. They’re saying that they were going to get the subpoena. I just think it’s a lot of spinning out there because I know that the court, as well as the Department of Justice, wanted Hillary’s information that was on her server and it was destroyed and all those cell phones were destroyed. So I just want to understand the legal ease around all of this.
Watch above via Fox News.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
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Laura Ingraham says latest charges for Donald Trump in classified documents case are a media “distraction”
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-28-0736/media-bias-laura-ingraham-says-latest-charges-donald-trump-classified-documents
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Laura Ingraham says latest charges for Donald Trump in classified documents case are a media “distraction”
WRITTEN BY MEDIA MATTERS STAFF
PUBLISHED 07/27/23 7:43 PM EDT
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From the July 27, 2023, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Now, the Hunter mess is not even a day old but MSNBC, CNN were already pining to move on with their latest distraction game.
[...]
Oh, they're so giddy. Lawyers for former President Trump did meet with Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team in Washington, D.C. today regarding that possible federal indictment related to the January 6th investigation, and while there is no indictment yet, they did get their distraction, the media did. It was reported just moments ago that the DOJ added new charges related to Trump's retention of classified documents.
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The right-wing Barbie meltdown shows how reactionary forces are losing the culture wars
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The right-wing Barbie meltdown shows how reactionary forces are losing the culture wars
Ben Shapiro: “Get ready, folks. It’s going to be liberated Barbie time."
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LGBTQ
WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES & SOPHIE LAWTON
PUBLISHED 07/18/23 2:04 PM EDT
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Andrea Austria / Media Matters
The Barbie movie is scheduled to be released on July 21; as it stands, there is no evidence that anti-trans attacks by right-wing influencers have resonated with audiences at all. (Barbie is distributed by Warner Bros. Movies, which is currently being struck by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.)
Greta Gerwig, director of the film, recently explained the underlying thesis of her latest project in a New York Times Magazine article.
“People say, ‘Well, what’s the story of Barbie?’” Gerwig recalls. “The story of Barbie is the fight that’s been going on about Barbie.”
In keeping with recent anti-LGBTQ extremist campaigns, right-wing media personalities have now imposed their anti-trans agenda onto that fight. They certainly have the muscle memory for ideologically wrestling with toys: Great battles in the conservative culture war have been waged over Mr. Potato Head, Legos, Xbox, Muppets, and more.
Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and the gambit of right-wing blogs are outraged that Hari Nef, a transgender model and actor, stars in the movie as Doctor Barbie. (There are more than a dozen characters named Barbie in the movie, per IMDb, and an audio clip of each Barbie greeting each other by the same name has gone viral on TikTok.) This is not the first time Mattel has celebrated transgender representation through the Barbie brand: In 2022, the company released a doll version of Emmy-nominated actress Laverne Cox.
On June 30, Kirk called the movie “trans propaganda that is in this hyper-feminine, ultra pink propaganda thing, but it’s really been taken over by the trans mafia.” He later added the trailer for Barbie was “the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” then floated a boycott of the film.
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From the June 30, 2023 edition of Real America's Voice's The Charlie Kirk Show
After repeatedly tweeting about Nef’s casting, Shapiro warned, “The new Barbie movie is going to be a woke bleep show.” He attacked Nef for writing a letter to Gerwig advocating that she be cast in the movie and predictably went on to repeatedly misgender her.
“Get ready, folks. It’s going to be liberated Barbie time.”
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From the June 28, 2023 edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
On Fox, Campos-Duffy complained that “the left has given Barbie a complete feminist makeover,” then went on to misgender and attack Nef. “They couldn’t get a woman to play a doctor?”
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From the July 3, 2023, edition of Jesse Watters Primetime
In a panel segment following her monologue, Campos-Duffy said Gerwig’s Barbie is “another indoctrination vehicle.”
On his podcast, right-wing pundit Dave Rubin asked, “Why do they go out of their way to have a biological boy play a girl who’s supposed to be completely a girl in the Barbie movie unless they’re trying to confuse kids?”
Right-wing blogs are also furiously churning out their own Barbie takes. Conspiracy theory-peddling website Revolver News ran a guest post by Federalist contributor Peachy Keenan titled “The Pink Menace” that described Gerwig as the “Destroyer of Dolls” and zeroed in on Nef, labeling her “Groomer Barbie.”
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Screenshot from Revolver News
An article on right-wing “media watchdog” NewsBusters asked whether the movie was preparing a “Woke Barbie Bait-and Switch” from its press tour to the actual contents of the film, suggesting (baselessly) that the promotion was intentionally papering over Barbie’s “potentially progressive leanings,” citing “the movie’s aggressively diverse cast” and the inclusion of Nef as Barbie.
Both Fox News and the Washington Examiner wrote about Christian movie review site Movieguide instructing audiences not to take children to see the upcoming movie.
From the decadeslong legacy of the doll to the upcoming star-studded merchandisable movie, Barbie is a phenomenon. Social media users are flooding feeds with “Barbiecore”: hot pink outfit inspiration, adorably plastic makeup tutorials, and rankings of red carpet looks from the movie’s premiere events. There’s been an “explosion” of Barbie-themed launches selling out across the market — from frozen yogurt to shoes and clothes to couches.
Mainstream audiences simply do not hate transgender actors enough to hold back their enthusiasm for the film.
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CNN’s Chris Wallace Goes At It Hard Over Bombshell Trump Tape With RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-14-0652/media-bias-cnn-s-chris-wallace-goes-it-hard-over-bombshell-trump-tape-rnc-chair
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CNN’s Chris Wallace Goes At It Hard Over Bombshell Trump Tape With RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel
Tommy ChristopherJul 14th, 2023, 8:06 am
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CNN anchor Chris Wallace went hard at RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel over the bombshell tape of ex-President Donald Trump discussing military secrets, blocking several of her deflections.
On this week’s episodes of Wallace’s Max/CNN series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace, Wallace interviewed McDaniel, as well as Hollywood superstar Goldie Hawn.
In the McDaniel interview, Wallace played the tape, then asked the Republican chairwoman if it “troubles” her, then headed off a number of attempts to change the subject:
WALLACE: Does that tape trouble you?
MCDANIEL: What troubles me is the double standard and justice. I mean, Bill Barr, who I think we would both agree is not a Donald Trump fan at this point, has said there’s a two-tiered system of justice. I think he deserves a presumption of innocence. He has not made his case. I think we need to wait. But I do think as soon as Trump does something, it’s automatically he’s guilty if Biden does it, it’s automatically he’s innocent.
WALLACE: There are major differences between the two cases…without getting into the whatboutism game.
MCDANIEL: But that is the game. That is the game.
WALLACE: Well, it isn’t necessarily the game. I mean, I’m really asking you just on that tape. He’s he’s talking about a tape. He’s saying I could have declassified this as president. Now. I can’t. He’s showing it to people without a security clearance. I’m not asking you whether he’s –
MCDANIEL: I’m not in that room. I think he deserves to be able to present his case and we deserve the presumption of innocence. But Hillary Clinton was found with 22 top secret documents, Donald Trump was found, apparently, or allegedly with 17. Why is there one standard justice for her and different for him?
WALLACE: He fought it for 15 months, he was subpoenaed, he didn’t turn over all the documents. They had a search. He’s He’s showing these documents to people without security clearances. I mean, if you want to, you know… there are considerable differences between the two cases.
MCDANIEL: Well she had eight different Blackberries. She had eight different phones that were destroyed. She used a bleach bit. We don’t know what she did because her home wasn’t raided. What I’m saying is…
WALLACE: Well, she didn’t refuse a federal subpoena.
MCDANIEL: But there are feelings with Republican voters. And this is true. They feel like there is a system of justice for Republicans that is very different than Democrats.
Watch above via Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace.
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| 698
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Fox’s new prime-time lineup cements its support for Trump
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https://www.allsides.com/news/2023-07-14-0545/media-bias-fox-s-new-prime-time-lineup-cements-its-support-trump
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Fox’s new prime-time lineup cements its support for Trump
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 07/12/23 8:42 AM EDT
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Molly Butler / Media Matters
Fox News’ evening lineup reshuffle, which rolls out next week with Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld joining Sean Hannity in prime time, shows that the network’s executives are determined to stave off its recent ratings collapse by doubling down on its fealty to Donald Trump. Together, the trio secures Fox’s most-watched hours as a safe space for the former president that will help keep him on a glide path to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Fox’s programming typically reflects the leading elements and ideas of the Republican Party, and the new lineup reflects its reinvention as a Trumpist personality cult.
Tucker Carlson, the longtime prime-time star Fox cut ties with in April, was another Trump partisan, to a point. But he also had an independent, preexisting reputation and drew notoriety for his particular set of noxious ideas. Carlson championed foreign autocrats and the blood-and-soil nationalism undergirding their regimes, became perhaps the nation’s most prominent and pernicious opponent of COVID-19 vaccines, led the right’s vicious smears of LGBTQ people, and trumpeted white nationalist views on race and immigration, including the blood-soaked “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Carlson used his prime-time show to manipulate Trump into adopting his positions and even offered veiled criticism when he thought Trump undermined his aims. (Privately, Carlson claimed of Trump, “I hate him passionately.”)
While Watters, Hannity, and Gutfeld all have long records of toxic commentary, no one would describe them as men of ideas. Hannity is a down-the-line Republican Party propagandist, devoted to the success of his party above all else. And Gutfeld and Watters are associated more with a mean-spirited, sarcastic affect and an own-the-libs mentality than any distinct viewpoint.
What Fox’s new prime-time triumvirate demonstrates is that hardcore support for Trump remains the ingredient that unites the right. All three are Trump loyalists, albeit in somewhat different flavors, who have proved willing to defend the authoritarian former president across two impeachments, two indictments, an attempted coup, a series of attacks on the rule of law and constitutional order, and innumerable bigoted eruptions. And unlike Carlson, the three hosts are much more likely to fall in line with whatever Trump decides to do, no matter how abhorrent, rather than try to push him in any particular direction.
Sean Hannity, Trump’s “shadow” White House chief of staff
Hannity, who retains his 9 p.m. ET time slot in the shakeup, needs no introduction as a notorious Trump sycophant who has had Trump’s back in virtually every major controversy since Trump announced his run for president in 2015. A right-wing media mainstay billed by his network as “the longest-running current primetime host in cable news in television history,” Hannity came around to Trump early in the 2016 primary, helped him to win the nomination and then the White House, and reached new heights of power and influence as a Trump presidential adviser.
The Fox host regularly offers Trump a platform for fawning interviews and generates (occasionally contradictory) talking points in his defense at a furious rate. The sprawling conspiracy theories Hannity concocts to explain away Trump’s flaws have dominated right-wing media discourse, spurred fruitless Justice Department inquiries, and even attracted enough of a response from Trump himself to trigger his impeachment.
All the while, Hannity has served Trump as a political operative of unprecedented scope for a member of the press, to the point where he was once deemed the “shadow” chief of staff by White House staffers. If you can imagine an unethical conflict of interest a TV host might have, Hannity has done it for Trump: policy adviser and communications guru, advertisement participant and script doctor, rally speaker and secret back channel, private confidant sharing nightly phone calls with the then-president and public shill taking coverage orders from his White House.
The depth of Hannity’s bootlicking loyalty to the former president can perhaps best be seen in his reaction to a January 2018 report from The New York Times that Trump had previously tried to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Hannity spent much of his show that night claiming that the Times’ reporting was likely wrong, stressing that his own sources were “not confirming that tonight.”
But by the end of the broadcast, after Fox News published a report lining up with the Times story, Hannity backpedaled furiously. He adopted a new talking point wholly inconsistent with his old one to maintain the position that Trump had done nothing wrong.
“So we have sources tonight just confirming to Ed Henry that, yeah, maybe Donald Trump wanted to fire the special counsel for conflict,” Hannity said. “Does he not have the right to raise those questions?”
“You know, we’ll deal with this tomorrow night,” Hannity added, before changing the topic to discuss a high-speed police chase.
Hannity will now be bracketed in the Fox lineup by Watters and Gutfeld. The new prime-time hosts and longtime Fox employees share not only his penchant for incendiary conspiracy theories and toxic commentary but also his Trumpist zeal.
Jesse Watters, an O’Reilly crony turned Trump loyalist
Watters joined Fox as a production assistant in 2002 and spent years stalking and harassing the subjects of ambush interview segments for Fox star Bill O’Reilly’s show. But he catapulted to prominence during the Trump years, garnering a weekend show and a slot on The Five in 2017, before landing a weeknight program in Fox’s 7 p.m. hour in January 2022.
The timing of Watters’ ascension is no coincidence: He has provided the pro-Trump commentary Fox’s viewers demand. Trump drew rebukes for launching his 2016 presidential campaign with unhinged xenophobic vitriol — even from Fox founder Rupert Murdoch. But Watters, attuned to the sentiment among the network’s audience, praised Trump for having “tapped into the collective backbone of this country” and said that as president, he wouldn't “let illegal aliens come to the country and murder our women.”
He never looked back, declaring that Trump couldn’t be racist because he has socialized with Black people, defending his most bigoted comments, praising his immigrant child separation policy, and standing up for his family, his cronies, and his responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and police brutality protests.
As the Trump presidency wound down, Watters falsely told his viewers that fraud had permeated the 2020 presidential election, adding that “we used to storm the castle over abuses of power like this.” Days later, a violent mob of angry Trumpists stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to subvert the election.
Watters continued standing by Trump following his 2020 election defeat, the subsequent insurrection he summoned, and the waves of evidence of his criminality. He called for Americans to take to the streets in protest after the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, offered thinly veiled suggestions of a violent recourse to his indictment, and urged Republicans to impeach President Joe Biden and for a reelected Trump to indict him in response.
Watters’ sycophantic commentary helped him climb the ranks at Fox, but it also gave him entry into the Fox-obsessed Trump’s social circle. He dined at the White House with the then-president, a fan of his on-air commentary. Trump congratulated him on his 2019 engagement to Emma DiGiovine, and Trump’s adult sons attended their wedding later that year. (Watters had cheated on his first wife and the mother of his twin daughters with the bride, a former low-level employee on his show who is 14 years his junior; he later said on-air that he had “let the air out of her tires” when he “was trying to get Emma to date me,” though he subsequently claimed to have been joking.)
Greg Gutfeld, a Trump critic who became his champion
Unlike Hannity and Watters, who were early, stalwart Trump supporters, Gutfeld was a convert. A Trump critic during the 2016 Republican primary, Gutfeld had decried the racist former game show host as a “RINO” and a “conspiracy freak,” calling out his “crass” behavior and his mockery of Sen. John McCain’s military service.
But after Trump sewed up the primary and the general election loomed, Gutfeld’s commentary shifted. “Gutfeld was in the position he had previously warned against: the position of defending and excusing Trump,” Brian Stelter wrote in his 2021 book on Fox.
Gutfeld himself admitted in an interview earlier this year that Fox CEO Suzanne Scott had counseled him to leave himself room to evolve his view of Trump. “She was like, ‘Greg, you should maybe prepare for what happens if he wins,’” he told The New York Times.
Gutfeld flipped to become a diehard Trumpist. Like Watters, he defended Trump’s vicious immigration policies, election subversion efforts, misogyny, deadly pandemic response, and racist comments. He is particularly devoted to mainstreaming Trump’s refusals to denounce his most extreme supporters, from the Proud Boys to white supremacists, including those who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. And he distinguished himself with particularly absurd remarks about the then-president, like claiming that “he’s the president, he can do whatever he wants,” and, “I can't recall a single instance of Trump actually aggressively going after an individual.”
Gutfeld is particularly clear-eyed about Fox’s relationship with Trump. He repeatedly noted on-air the influence his network had on the man he dubbed “the Fox News president.” And Trump, in turn, warmed up to the Fox host as he became increasingly pliant, touting Gutfeld on the campaign stump and in a fawning interview with him.
“Even Greg Gutfeld; he wasn’t good to me two years ago,” Trump said in 2019. “Now he sees all I’ve done, and he said 'Would you rather have a great President or a nice guy?’ I don’t know, I think I’m a nice guy.”
Without Gutfeld’s flip to Trump, and Trump’s subsequent support for him, it is difficult to imagine that the host would have continued climbing the ladder at Fox. As Stelter wrote:
The alternative could have hit Gutfeld in the wallet. Fox made him a millionaire several times over — between his TV shows, the books he promoted on TV, his ticketed speaking gigs across the country — so “Greg has made a cynical calculation,” an insider said. “There’s no point in being anti-Trump.”
For a taste of what the prime-time newcomers bring to the table, consider a July 2019 exchange between Gutfeld and Watters on their panel show, The Five, regarding Democrats’ criticism of then-President Trump’s friendly visit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
“Let’s be honest,” Gutfeld admitted. If a Democratic president had met with Kim, “we would do the same thing.”
“How dare Obama meet with a dictator with no preconditions!” Watters replied, and the pair broke into giggles. Even they can barely believe the absurdity of their pro-Trump hypocrisy.
Fox’s Trumpist retrenchment will help him secure the GOP nomination
Citation
Melissa Joskow / Media Matters
Fox’s prime-time shakeup comes as the network faces the most sustained challenge to its dominance over the right-wing press in years. The new lineup suggests the network’s strategy for shoring up its right-wing hegemony relies on restoring its Trumpist credentials.
Fox ratings took a dive after the network cast off Carlson. Would-be rivals have responded to its weakness with relentless criticism in hopes of stealing away its viewers. Twitter’s Elon Musk seems to fancy himself as a potential successor to Rupert Murdoch as the right’s media empire builder and is amassing allies, albeit with what are at best significant growing pains.
The network's vulnerability is heightened by criticisms from Trump himself, who has used it as a foil. As I noted last month at MSNBC.com, the network’s posture toward the 2024 presidential primary has been an open question:
Fox’s alliance with Trump is currently in flux. After some initial ill will, the network’s endless promotion helped Trump to the presidency in 2016, and it effectively became state TV for his administration. Fox hosts gained unprecedented influence as the president regularly watched their shows, tweeted about their commentary in real time and took their advice. In turn, their assistance gave Trump a powerful propaganda tool. And since he left office in 2021, the network has continued rushing to the former president’s defense in his times of legal peril. But its support for his presidential bid has waxed and waned amid reports that the Murdochs prefer a fresher face for the Republican Party.
The decision by Fox executives to feature three Trumpists in what are traditionally its most-watched hours may help the network repair its relationship with the former president — but it will certainly shape the contours of the 2024 presidential race. Trump had already all but sewn up the GOP nomination, in no small part thanks to the work Fox hosts had done over the years in shoring up his vulnerabilities. A revamped Fox prime-time slate dedicated to supporting Trump at all costs now brings him ever closer to a return to the White House.
Fox prime-time hosts serve as tastemakers for the right-wing media and key validators for their large and loyal followings. Their support can make or break the Republican politicians who strive to win them over. Trump himself used hours of Fox appearances to win over viewers and seize the nomination in 2016.
Any of his GOP challengers who hope to replicate his achievement must somehow win over the network’s top talents, who owe their own prominence to the former president. That is a tall order, particularly with Trump already holding a large and steady lead in the polls. With Fox rallying behind him, Trump garnering the GOP’s nomination for the third consecutive election and running as a full-fledged authoritarian remains the most likely outcome.
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