Branch Trumpvidians 3: Too Many Deplorables

[smittykins]

I believe I read that he’s a Marine veteran.

ETA:  He is, according to this article:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/couple-throws-maga-wedding-paying-tribute-to-president-trump/

Edited July 13, 2019 by smittykins

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"CNN interviews Trump superfans, calls them ‘eight Republican women from Dallas’"

Spoiler

CNN had the smart idea of bringing together supporters of President Trump and quizzing them about the controversy of the week. Did they believe that his tweets instructing four Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to their home countries — when three of the four were born in the United States — were in any way racist, as many others had concluded? Did they stick with the president?

No — and oh, yes.

Dena Miller was among the eight Dallas Republicans in the CNN focus group who were interviewed by network correspondent Randi Kaye. “First, the black billionaire is endorsing President Trump,” said Miller. “How can you call him racist?” And so it went. Kathleen Lieberman told Kaye, “Because when you say, you know, don’t you think he’s racist? You’re accusing us. You’re accusing him.”

On Anderson Cooper’s show Tuesday night, the focus-group participants were identified as being members of Trump’s “base.” Kaye herself said they were “eight Republican women from Dallas.” In a segment on Wednesday morning, CNN host Kate Bolduan used the same formulation, saying, “My colleague Randi Kaye sat down with eight Republican women in Dallas.”

True, but incomplete, as critics later pointed out.

Activists!

Miller was profiled in the Dallas Observer in her role as national director for Trumpettes of America. At least two other women in the CNN group, Gina O’Briant and Lieberman, were featured as members of the Texas Women for Trump Coalition in a 2016 story.

The Trumpettes of America even posted a picture on Facebook along with Kaye:

Perhaps because of the concerns about truth-in-labeling, CNN host Ana Cabrera on Wednesday afternoon characterized “several” of the women as being “affiliated with groups that support President Trump." The purpose, said Cabrera was "to see if any of them have changed their minds.”

Now, you can see why CNN may not have included such extensive disclosure in all of its previous segments highlighting the group discussion. That’s because of the “duh” factor: Of course the folks who are “affiliated with groups that support President Trump” haven’t changed their minds. Of course they’re going to say, “I’m glad that the president said what he said because all they are doing is they are inciting hatred and division and that’s not what our country is about" (O’Briant). Of course they’re going to say of the four congresswomen in “the Squad,” “If they’re not racist, how come they haven’t befriended one of their white female congresswomen colleagues?” (Miller).

These Trump faithful are dug in; they’ve been defending this guy for years now; they were with him through Stormy Daniels, through the Mueller investigation and the 3,000 other scandalitos of the past few years. What they told CNN is predictable, de rigueur and barely newsworthy.

We asked CNN for comment and will update this post if one arrives.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

D'Souza is one of the ugliest beings ever:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

3 MAGATS with no brain cells = this video:

 

[thoughtful]

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

D'Souza is one of the ugliest beings ever:

 

Dinesh, you dirtbag -- that hasn't been true since somewhere between 1948 and 1968.

Republicans have been the party of choice for racists for quite a long time now.

[fraurosena]

MAGAt logic makes my head hurt.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I've always despised Chuck Woolrey. The fact that he's a BT just makes him more loathsome in my eyes:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

My word, these two are stupid:

[smittykins]

OT, but that reminds me of the old “‘Ain’t’ isn’t a word because it’s not in the dictionary” argument.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The article doesn't mention it, but I figure they are BTs: "Two police officers fired for Facebook post that suggested Ocasio-Cortez should be shot"

Spoiler

Two Louisiana police officers were fired Monday for a Facebook post that suggested Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) should be shot.

Officer Charlie Rispoli wrote on Facebook: “This vile idiot needs a round........and I don’t mean the kind she used to serve,” referring to a gunshot and the lawmaker’s earlier career as a bartender. It was not clear from the post, which has since been deleted, whether Rispoli knew he was sharing and commenting on a story from a satire website.

The Times-Picayune-New Orleans Advocate originally reported the Facebook post and acquired an image before it was deleted.

The firings come amid a reckoning with racist and violent social media posts by police and federal law enforcement officers. As posts have been made public, firings and investigations have followed across multiple departments.

Ocasio-Cortez and three other minority freshman lawmakers dubbed “the Squad” have become frequent targets of President Trump, who said the four citizens and members of Congress should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

Rispoli’s comment was made in response to a post on a self-described satirical page, tatersgonnatate.com, with the headline “Ocasio-Cortez on the Budget: ‘We Pay Soldiers Too Much.’ ” Rispoli was a 14-year veteran of the Gretna Police Department in Louisiana.

Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post. In an interview, he called Rispoli’s comment “disturbing” and probably in violation of department social media policies, but he stopped short of describing it as a threat.

By Monday afternoon, however, Lawson told reporters that Rispoli and another officer who “liked” the post, Angelo Varisco, had been fired.

“This incident, we feel, has been an embarrassment to our department,” Lawson said during a news conference, according to Nola.com. “These officers have certainly acted in a manner which was unprofessional, alluding to a violent act be conducted against a sitting U.S. [congresswoman], a member of our government [and] we are not going to tolerate that.”

Lawson, who reiterated that he did not think the post was a legitimate threat, said the department had inquired with Facebook to learn whether other officers had liked, commented or otherwise interacted with the post. Rispoli was placed on administrative leave before Lawson announced that he and Varisco had been fired, according to Nola.com. Varisco had served for less than three years.

Both men performed security detail in a local government building that contains a courtroom and Gretna City Hall, and Rispoli recently worked as part of a program that supervised people placed under house arrest. Neither had served on the streets as patrol officers, Nola.com reported, and the only two arrests made between them took place inside the courtroom.

After speaking with Rispoli, Lawson said Monday afternoon that the officer was apologetic for the post. He indicated that Rispoli made a bad decision “in the heat of the moment.”

Belinda Constant, the Democratic mayor of Gretna, a city of about 18,000 outside New Orleans, did not reply to a request for comment. Nor did any of the four city council members. Rispoli could not be reached for comment.

Eva Malecki, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Capitol Police, declined to say whether the agency viewed the posting as a threat. “We do not discuss how we carry out our protective responsibilities for Congress,” she said. A spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez did not respond to a request for comment.

Police officers nationwide have faced waves of scrutiny following investigations of social media posts by 3,500 current and former police officers published by the nonprofit Plain View Project. In Philadelphia alone, 72 officers were pulled from street duty. The department plans to fire 13 of them for violent, racist and homophobic posts.

Rispoli’s comments appear to be on his page marked for friends and friends of friends only. It was not clear how his comments circulated.

“Whether you agree or disagree with the message of these elected officials and how frustrated you may or may not get, this certainly is not the type of thing that a public servant should be posting,” Lawson said.

 

[Soulhuntress]

On 7/13/2019 at 12:11 PM, Howl said:

I have to wonder if the groom is actually in the military.  I'm guessing 50-50 that he is or isn't. 

4 years in Lance corporal.  ?. E2 for life. ?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Inside Liberty University’s ‘culture of fear’: How Jerry Falwell Jr. silences students and professors who reject his pro-Trump politics."

Spoiler

In my first week as editor in chief of the Champion, Liberty University’s student-run weekly, our faculty adviser, Deborah Huff, ordered me to apologize. I’d noticed that our evangelical school’s police department didn’t publish its daily crime log online, as many other private university forces did, so I searched elsewhere for crime information I might use in an article. I called the Virginia Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators to find out what the law required Liberty to disclose. But the public affairs worker there told the Liberty University Police Department, which complained to Huff. She called to upbraid me: Apparently, I had endangered our newspaper’s relationship with the LUPD. Huff and Chief Richard Hinkley convened a meeting inside a police department conference room, and Huff sat next to me while I proffered the forced apology to Hinkley — for asking questions. Huff, too, was contrite, assuring the police chief that it wouldn’t happen again, because she’d keep a better eye on me.

This wasn’t exactly a rude awakening. I’d spent the previous three years watching the university administration, led by President Jerry Falwell Jr. (who took a very micromanaging interest), meddle in our coverage, revise controversial op-eds and protect its image by stripping damning facts from our stories. Still, I stuck around. I thought that if I wrote with discretion and kept my head down, I could one day win enough trust from the university to protect the integrity of our journalism. I even dreamed we could eventually persuade the administration to let the Champion go independent from its supervision. I was naive.

Instead, when my team took over that fall of 2017, we encountered an “oversight” system — read: a censorship regime — that required us to send every story to Falwell’s assistant for review. Any administrator or professor who appeared in an article had editing authority over any part of the article; they added and deleted whatever they wanted. Falwell called our newsroom on multiple occasions to direct our coverage personally, as he had a year earlier when, weeks before the 2016 election, he read a draft of my column defending mainstream news outlets and ordered me to say whom I planned to vote for. I refused on ethical grounds, so Falwell told me to insert “The author refused to reveal which candidate he is supporting for president” at the bottom of the column. I complied. (Huff and the police department declined to comment on the contents of this essay. Falwell and the university did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Eventually I quit, and the School of Communication decided not to replace me, turning the paper into a faculty-run, student-written organ and seizing complete control of its content. Student journalists must now sign a nondisclosure agreement that forbids them from talking publicly about “editorial or managerial direction, oversight decisions or information designated as privileged or confidential.” The form also states that the students understand they are “privileged” to receive “thoughts, opinions, and other statements” from university administrators.

What my team and I experienced at the Champion was not an isolated overreaction to embarrassing revelations. It was one example of an infrastructure of thought-control that Falwell and his lieutenants have introduced into every aspect of Liberty University life. Faculty, staff and students on the Lynchburg, Va., campus have learned that it’s a sin to challenge the sacrosanct status of the school or its leader, which mete out punishments for dissenting opinions (from stripping people of their positions to banning them from campus). This “culture of fear,” as it was described by several of the dozen Liberty denizens who talked to me for this story — most of them anonymously to protect their jobs or their standing — worsened during my four years on campus because of the 2016 presidential election.

By 2016, Liberty’s efforts to limit free expression were already well-established. (“The big victory was finding a way to tame the faculty,” Falwell told the New York Times last year for a story about privileging Liberty’s financial growth over its academics.) But the school’s methods became even more aggressive after Falwell endorsed Donald Trump early that year, according to multiple current and former faculty members. “The closer you get to the president’s office,” says former history professor Brian Melton, discussing a chilling effect at the school, “the worse it becomes.” Falwell’s staff now operates masterfully to squash challenges to his views and his rise in national political influence.

The dissent that did exist — like off-message campus speakers, insufficiently sycophantic board members, student activists and our newspaper staff — was ruthlessly neutralized. Liberty, founded on principles of fundamental Christianity, is now a place that has zero tolerance for new questions and ideas. Those who harbor them must remain silent, or leave.

Falwell, 57, possesses a certain Orwellian gift for painting Liberty as a bastion of tolerance where alternate viewpoints are not just permitted but encouraged. In March, he attended the signing of Trump’s executive order on college free speech and later claimed on “PBS NewsHour” that Liberty was inclusive of all ideas because it had invited Jimmy Carter to deliver its 2018 commencement address and Bernie Sanders to speak in 2015 at the assembly that students are required to attend twice a week. After Falwell learned last month that I was writing this essay, he posted a column on Liberty’s site disputing “sensational stories . . . that we do not allow opposing views.” He wrote, “If there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that there will be a strong and critical response to this article by a few former students and a handful of national media determined to paint Liberty in a completely different light on these issues.”

His Twitter account is a much better reflection of his approach to dissent. Falwell’s profile announces that “Haters will be blocked,” and several students who have disagreed or argued with him on Twitter have met this fate. Falwell outright lied on the platform to Sojourners Web editor Sandi Villarreal — who is now my colleague — when he said he’d removed a Champion op-ed criticizing Trump’s “locker room talk” defense because there was simply not enough room on the page. (The piece was already laid out on the page when he pulled it.) In fact, much of Falwell’s message control has to do with safeguarding Trump.

Mark DeMoss was something like Liberty royalty. His late father, Arthur S. DeMoss, gave $20 million to build DeMoss Hall, the school’s main academic building. Mark was also an alumnus, a former chief of staff to university founder Jerry Falwell Sr. and eventually a public relations executive who counted Liberty among his clients. He won a seat on the school’s board of trustees in 1991 after serving as Liberty’s spokesman and became the board’s executive committee chairman in 2008.

In January 2016, days before Trump was scheduled to speak at Liberty, Falwell emailed DeMoss asking whether he should endorse Trump for president. DeMoss says he recommended against endorsing anyone, and Falwell thanked him for the “great advice.” Falwell, at the speech, held back his imprimatur. But a week later, he anointed the billionaire with his support. DeMoss was horrified. “The bullying tactics of personal insult have no defense — and certainly not for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ,” he told The Washington Post at the time. Falwell seemed to take the rebuke in stride, saying he was “disappointed” in DeMoss but understood “that all the administrators and faculty have their own personal political views.”

Within a few months, though, DeMoss would be gone. The night before a Liberty board meeting that April, the executive committee, including Falwell, convened without DeMoss to vote on a motion to oust him from his role as chairman. DeMoss says that his criticism of the endorsement was the cause. (Before the meeting, Falwell called him a pawn of rival campaigns.) DeMoss resigned as a trustee days later, on April 25, 2016, citing “a lack of trust.”

A week after that, Liberty changed the sign on DeMoss Hall to “Arthur S. DeMoss Hall,” making clear that the structure honored the father and not the wayward son. The message to faculty and students was clear: If you challenge Falwell, you will be not only removed but erased.

The culture of Liberty is governed by lists of principles. According to the Faculty Handbook, for instance, professors are expected to “promote . . . free market processes” and “affirm . . . that the Bible is inerrant in the originals and authoritative in all matters.” One cause of perpetual insecurity at Liberty is the school’s militant refusal to award tenure to any faculty member (outside the law school, which must offer it for accreditation). Instructors are instead hired on year-to-year contracts; during the spring semester, they find out whether they will be coming back the next fall.

The result is constant, erratic faculty turnover. One recently fired teacher describes the spring as a cycle of stressed-out, fearful professors wandering into each other’s offices to ask if they had their contracts renewed yet. “If you’re a conservative Christian in the academic world, the chances of you getting a job are nil in many areas,” says Melton, who worked at Liberty as an associate professor for 15 years before resigning because of what he described as the school’s surveillance and fear tactics. “The administration knows that, and . . . they wield that very effectively, keeping people quiet.”

Late-notice faculty removals have also become more commonplace, according to Melton, stemming in part from Falwell’s stated desire to tame the teaching corps. “He considers the faculty to be disposable beasts of burden,” Melton says. Last summer, 14 professors at Liberty’s School of Education were suddenly told that their contracts would not be renewed as part of what former Liberty spokesman Len Stevens called a “reorganization.” This June, a dozen faculty members at Liberty’s School of Divinity were notified that their contracts would not be renewed. By that late in the year, it is too late to find another job in higher education for the fall.

For former faculty members, Liberty’s culture of fear can live on. The school often requires terminated professors to sign a nondisclosure agreement if they want their severance packages, several told me — a practice that is extremely uncommon in higher education, according to Robert Bezemek, a California lawyer who represents labor unions at universities. (As Melton puts it, “They force this NDA on you by leveraging the ability to feed your family against you.”) Even former teachers who hadn’t signed NDAs told me they feared that talking to me on the record would somehow get them blacklisted from jobs elsewhere or imperil their friends who still work at Liberty. One thought my request to speak with him was a trap, calling my previous connection with the school “fishy.” When I contacted another for an interview, she warned me, “The university is on to you.” I confess I harbor a certain paranoia, too, from years of being watched at the Champion. Melton and several other current and former members of the faculty told me that they believe the administration surveils everything they do on Liberty’s server, tracking when instructors complete a task late and searching for evidence of “disloyalty” to Liberty or Falwell, as a former professor put it. Another onetime instructor declined to use his university-issued laptop because he thought Liberty had equipped it with spyware.

One cause for alarm came just before Trump’s inauguration, when then-Provost Ronald Hawkins ordered all campus faculty members to fill out an anonymous survey that asked respondents to rate how politically and socially liberal they were on a scale of 1 to 5. “We are interested in how we compare with other institutions on political and social views,” Hawkins’s office said in a follow-up email to faculty members. But, according to a former professor who talked with others in her department, many initially refused to take the survey out of fear that if a department had too many left-leaning professors, the administration might target it for more oversight or even firings. There is no evidence of Liberty firing a faculty member explicitly for his or her political beliefs, but everyone I spoke to believed that the school could easily manufacture some other pretense. “There is zero trust between the administration and faculty,” Melton says. FIRE, a nonprofit that fights for free speech on campus, put Liberty on its 2019 list of the 10 worst colleges for freedom of speech.

Things aren’t much better for the 15,000 students on campus. In 2009, Liberty withdrew funding and recognition for its College Democrats chapter because, as Mark Hine, the senior vice president of student affairs, put it, the national party defends abortion, opposed the Defense of Marriage Act, supported “the ‘LGBT’ agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.” A.J. Strom, who graduated in May, tells me that several students wanted to revive the College Democrats but no faculty members were willing to advise them, without which Liberty will not recognize a student club. “They said they would love to sign on but that if Jerry saw their name on the club application, they would be fired,” Strom says.

Student leaders have consistently helped administrators enforce the culture. After the Charlottesville rally in August 2017, members of Liberty’s Student Government Association drafted a statement expressing solidarity with Heather Heyer, the protester murdered by a neo-Nazi, and all people demonstrating against white nationalism. Then-SGA President Caleb Johnson refused to release the statement and send it to university administrators for fear of what Falwell might think. (Johnson said in an email this past week that the author was “a self-described ‘Never-Trumper’ ” and that “we would not allow the platform of Liberty Student Government to be improperly used by a political activist with obvious ulterior motives.”) “There’s 100 percent an atmosphere of fear at Liberty,” says Caleb Fitzpatrick, who was then the student government’s speaker of the House and helped draft the statement. “There was a need to avoid being seen as a liberal or progressive, or even being different.”

In September 2018, nearly a year into the #MeToo movement, Liberty invited conservative provocateur Candace Owens to speak at an assembly. A few days before her visit, Owens tweeted that the women accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault were “making it up.” In response, Addyson Garner, then president of a libertarian club on campus, organized a rally to support victims of sexual assault, called #LUforMeToo, which would occur right after the Owens speech. The day before, Jacob Page, then the student body president, summoned her to his office, where he and Vice President Derek Rockey pressured her to cancel the event, Garner told me in May. She left the office in tears, but she and her fellow organizers decided to protest anyway. About 25 students attended, a rare show of defiance on a campus that discourages political dissent. (In an email this past week, Rockey said he thought students should attend a public dialogue on these topics rather than stage a protest. Page said he and Rockey “support bringing awareness to victims of sexual assault” but “felt it was unproductive to engage in partisan protests.”)

Guests at the school who deviate from the prescribed philosophy can be targeted, too. In October 2017, the anti-Trump pastor and writer Jonathan Martin arrived at the invitation of the Christian musical duo Johnnyswim, who were performing on campus that night; Martin also announced on Twitter that he would lead a prayer meeting with students the next morning. Falwell took it as an unauthorized protest, and the LUPD sent three armed officers to remove Martin from campus, telling him he’d be arrested if he returned. Martin tweeted that it was “evidently in response to my strong criticism of @JerryFallwellJr’s alignment not only with the darkest contours of Trumpism, but expressly with Steve Bannon & the alt-right he represents.” Falwell told the Champion that Martin’s forcible removal was “a matter of safety.”

A similar episode unfolded in 2015 when Jonathan Merritt, a Liberty alumnus and Christian writer, was disinvited to speak on campus after authoring an article critical of Hobby Lobby, the company permitted by the Supreme Court in 2014 to deny its employees contraceptive health-care coverage. The Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, is close with Falwell. “You don’t seem to remember who your friends are,” Merritt remembers Falwell saying over the phone.

One afternoon in April 2016, when I was still a cub reporter during my sophomore year, I received a one-sentence email from Deborah Huff, our adviser: “need to talk to you about SG,” the subject line read. I should call her that night. She copied the editor in chief, a senior. I was clearly in trouble.

“SG” stood for Scott Garrett, a traditionalist conservative who represents Lynchburg in the state legislature. According to records I had found through the Virginia Public Access Project, he owned millions of dollars in stock, some from companies that lobby lawmakers in Richmond. A few days earlier, I interviewed him for the Champion about possible conflicts of interest stemming from his assets.

After dinner, I called Huff. She sounded annoyed. When I described my reporting to her, she told me the Champion would not run my story, because Garrett was afraid that the article would hurt his reputation. The message was clear: I had no business heckling Liberty’s friends and allies. (“I don’t remember the incident in question,” Garrett emailed me this week when I asked him for a comment. “And I don’t understand why I would say the article would hurt my reputation because there was no conflict of interest.”)

Out of fear that arguing with her would end my career at the paper — she selected which students would advance to editorships — I apologized for looking into Garrett’s finances and assured her that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen again. I understood that her job, and by extension mine, was to protect our righteous, evangelical university. Before becoming a Liberty teacher and then supervisor of the Champion, Huff worked for the Fundamentalist Journal, a now-defunct Falwell-owned periodical. I didn’t see defending the faith as the main purpose of journalism, and I wasn’t out to safeguard Liberty. But in the face of a mentor I trusted, I believed I must have been in the wrong.

Looking back on the emails from that episode three years later, I’m embarrassed by my naivete — and my willingness to abandon a scoop with obvious journalistic merit. The scales began to fall from my eyes as, over the next 18 months, I saw how in every issue of the Champion the administration strategically manipulated or erased stories. Huff discouraged us from following leads that might disrupt the image of Liberty as a prestigious, respectable evangelical institution. In pitch meetings, she made it clear that the Champion would not cover Liberty scandals, even those that appeared in mainstream news outlets (such as the Falwells’ secret business relationships and the wave of Liberty alumni who sent back their diplomas after Falwell defended Trump’s comment that there “very fine people” on both sides of the white nationalist Charlottesville rally).

By the time I became the Champion’s editor, the censorship I hoped to stop was already shameless. In February 2017, I wrote an article on a higher-education task force that Trump had asked Falwell to lead. Falwell emailed me his personal edits, removing every quote from an expert concerning possible conflicts of interest that Falwell created by accepting the position (in the end, the task force was never formed). Months later, Huff ordered that my story about Martin’s expulsion from campus include lines about how Liberty is inclusive of different political beliefs, in the face of obvious counterevidence. An administrator spiked a news report about an on-campus swing dancing club that was temporarily banned. When film students drafted a petition in early 2018 objecting to “The Trump Prophecy” — a hagiographic tale about a firefighter who said he had prophesized Trump’s election, which Liberty students were compelled to produce in order to receive their degrees — faculty at the film school crafted our coverage into a fluffy bit of PR highlighting students who looked forward to working on set. Champion reporter Jack Panyard was so disgusted, he removed his byline from the piece. Then there was sports editor Joel Schmieg’s column about “locker room talk” after the “Access Hollywood” video came out; Falwell blocked it from publication.

This interference frequently caused shouting matches with, and passive aggressive emails from, administrators. “Too bad the editor and chief of The Champion penned this editorial for the homecoming edition without any effort to learn all that is being done at Liberty to prevent and react appropriately to sexual assault,” Liberty General Counsel David Corry wrote to Falwell and Huff about my column on campus sexual assault. Instead of sticking up for the journalists she supervised, Huff emailed me to complain that I did not “make sure Liberty was separated from the conversation or address what Liberty does that is different than other schools.” Later that day, the piece was removed from the website without my consent. (In his preemptive statement last month, Falwell seemed to address these episodes. “In the past few years, some students screamed ‘censorship’ when they didn’t get their every word published in our campus newspaper,” he wrote. “But that standard isn’t even attained within the newsroom of commercial newspapers.”)

In the wake of these run-ins, members of our staff often gathered in my office to daydream about taking the paper independent or grouse about Huff, whom we felt was gaslighting us. What kind of newspaper adviser would denounce our attempts to keep Liberty accountable and make us repeatedly apologize to administrators for trying? By this point, it was clear that the principles of investigative journalism I was learning in class were verboten when it came to Liberty itself. The Champion could never be an avatar of press freedom or truth-telling.

I grew up in a politically conservative household and was active in my denomination; my values changed at Liberty as I embraced a more inclusive and open vision of the church. My views of Liberty, and of the values I saw Falwell profess on a daily basis, changed as well. I considered transferring schools or resigning from the paper. The weekly fight for the right to publish was exhausting. Still, I decided to stay because I saw that, on the occasions we won — when we either persuaded administrators to leave an article alone or worked around their objections — we sparked dialogue among students on Twitter and in classrooms that challenged Liberty’s status quo. But ultimately, our fraught relationship with our overlords was untenable, and something had to give.

The end finally came for the Champion when a left-leaning faith group, the Red Letter Christians, organized a “Lynchburg Revival” in April 2018 to protest Falwell’s support of Trump and what the group called “toxic evangelicalism.” Two days beforehand, Liberty’s police department notified RLC leader Shane Claiborne that he would be arrested if he set foot on campus. The Champion had already decided to cover the event, but the stakes were higher now. Huff told us it would be too controversial for print, but the other editors and I didn’t think we could ignore it.

The day before the gathering, Falwell sent an email to Erin Covey, our assistant news editor: “Let’s not run any articles about the event. That’s all these folks are here for — publicity. Best to ignore them.” When we explained our dilemma to RLC organizers, they tipped off a reporter at the Religion News Service, which ran a piece detailing Falwell’s censorship. Covey gave on-the-record quotes. Panyard, who was set to succeed me as editor in chief in a few weeks, briefed the reporter on background, as did I. (Vox also picked up the story and amplified it, and I imagine it galled Falwell to be depicted as an insecure tyrant in a liberal publication.)

The school’s response was swift. Falwell convened a tele-meeting with Bruce Kirk, who was then dean of the School of Communication, and our entire staff. They reprimanded us for talking to the press, and Falwell justified his censorship by arguing that the Red Letter Christians were “not keeping with the values of the university.” Then he spoke candidly for the first time about, as he saw it, the virtues of censoring us. “That’s what you kids are going to run into when you get into the real world and start working for for-profit newspapers. That’s what they’re going to expect of you, and I want you to learn that while you’re here.” Kirk, who was sitting with us for the meeting, chimed in, agreeing with Falwell’s depiction of the “real world” of journalism. Being censored by a higher-up in the media industry is “just a part of life,” he said. (Before he began at Liberty, he worked for a local news station operated by Sinclair Broadcasting.)

After the meeting, I felt sick. I hadn’t said a word while Falwell flayed us for trying to practice basic journalism and act with integrity. I went into my office, closed the door and waited until most of the staff members left the newsroom. Then I sat down at my desk and wept.

A week and a half later, Kirk called Panyard and Covey into his office and told them they were being let go as part of a “reorganization.” Nobody else was affected; they’d been fired. It was the most aggressive and direct action the administration had ever taken to silence the Champion. I was not fired — I was a lame duck anyway — but I resigned and refused to take part in the production of the last edition of the year. I cleaned out my office that same day. Soon after, I learned I would be the last student editor in chief of the Champion and that from now on the paper would be run directly by the school. (Kirk did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this story.)

Even at Liberty, there are still those who publicly reject Falwell’s diktats. A petition supporting Mark DeMoss won more than 70 student signatures when Falwell ousted him in 2016. During the presidential election, free speech lived a little when Liberty United Against Trump, a student group, scored national media attention for its stance that the school did not uniformly approve of Falwell’s endorsement. It said it accumulated more than 2,000 student signatures for its statement.

Panyard, the deposed editor, launched a new independent newspaper, the Lynchburg Torch, with the help of other refugees from the campus weekly. In the past year, it has published stories that the Champion’s overseers would have blocked, such as a report on LGBTQ students who oppose Liberty’s position on same-sex relationships. Addyson Garner put on another rally this year to support queer Liberty students after transphobic comments from Falwell and his wife, Becki. (“We’re raising her as a girl,” Becki Falwell said of their granddaughter Reagan, as her husband looked on. “We’re not letting her have a choice.”) Dozens of students participated, according to Garner and posts on social media. It was the first time I had ever seen the rainbow pride flag flown openly on Liberty’s campus. The school is changing.

But in significant ways, it is not more tolerant, and it certainly does not celebrate “the open exchange of competing ideas” that Falwell described in his column. In a discussion with the incoming Champion staffers after I left, Kirk said, “Your job is to keep the LU reputation and the image as it is.” The students who recall a more open time at Liberty, before Trump, have now graduated. All those who remain chose to go to Falwell’s school after he endorsed Trump, forming a much more compliant student body that generally accepts and even supports Falwell’s crackdown culture.

I graduated in 2018. Since then, I’ve tried to put Liberty — and the stress and self-doubt that officials there saddled me with — behind me. But I still fume when Falwell spews dumbfounding conspiracies online or retweets a bigoted rant from Trump, and I still become uneasy when I see my diploma, which is sitting in a cluttered drawer at my parents’ house. I made amazing friends and memories on campus, but I’m realizing the extent to which I internalized the fear tactics; I still sometimes self-censor my thoughts and writing. How can a college education stifle your freedom of thought? When people ask me if I regret going to Liberty, as many do, I usually pause. I don’t know.

 

[fraurosena]

The smug look on his face, the utmost conviction, is what’s most disturbing.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Man charged with assault after punching anti-Trump protester outside Cincinnati rally"

Spoiler

Protesters were waving signs outside President Trump’s rally in downtown Cincinnati on Thursday when a red pickup truck pulled up to the crowd. Someone in the passenger seat started yelling, WCPO reported, and a few protesters shouted back. Suddenly, the door flew open and a man in a green polo hopped out, fists cocked.

As the crowd gasped and screamed, the man, later identified by local media as 29-year-old Dallas Frazier, landed a quick volley of punches to the face of Mike Alter, 61. Within a few seconds, a police officer rushed in to handcuff Frazier.

Another protester captured video of the beating, which quickly went viral.

Frazier has now been charged with assault, according to Hamilton County court records. He’s due in court at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, WXIX reported.

The confrontation came hours before another physical tussle ended with an arrest at a political rally 1,800 miles away in Tempe, Ariz. At a campaign event for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a man in the crowd was charged with assault after arguing with members the AZ Patriots, a conservative group, The Washington Post’s Annie Linskey reported. AZ Patriots members said he tried to grab one of their cellphones as the group was being escorted out of the rally, and police said the man, who hasn’t been identified, refused their orders to leave.

Trump has faced repeated accusations and legal claims that he has encouraged violence against protesters at his rallies. When demonstrators interrupted his speech inside U.S. Bank Arena in Cincinnati on Thursday, the president used the moment to further his recent attacks on big, liberal cities.

“You must have a Democrat mayor,” he told the crowd. “Come on, law enforcement.”

That protest ended peacefully, unlike the scene outside the arena.

Alter, who spoke with WCPO, said protesters had been yelling back and forth with a few Trump supporters headed into the event when the red truck approached and Frazier started shouting.

“These guys pulled up in the pickup truck, everyone was yelling back and forth at them,” Alter told the TV station.

Frazier, who reportedly lives about an hour south of Cincinnati in Georgetown, Ky., then hopped out of the truck, flipped off his hat and raised his fists. Alter took off his own hat and gestured at him, but he later told WCPO that he wasn’t trying to encourage a fight.

“I was more questioning him,” Alter told the station. “Like really, you want to fight?”

That’s when Frazier let loose, landing at least three punches to Alter’s face before another protester shoved him back toward his truck. An officer then quickly arrested him.

Alter, who said he was attending his first anti-Trump demonstration, told WCPO his first thought was, “What the hell? . . . He started just whaling on my head.”

Police also labeled Frazier as the aggressor. In a report obtained by WCPO, the arresting officer says he “exited the vehicle, stated ‘you want some,’ then struck the victim multiple times in the face.”

The man driving the red pickup truck was also handcuffed, but it’s not clear if he was charged with a crime.

As police led Frazier away from the scene, his arms secured behind his back, the crowd of protesters modified a favorite chant from Trump’s rallies.

“Lock him up!” they yelled.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The article doesn't indicate that the man is a BT, but it seems likely: "A man assaulted a 13-year-old because he was ‘disrespecting the national anthem,’ witness says"

Spoiler

A Montana man allegedly slammed a boy’s head to the ground at a county fair because the 13-year-old kept his hat on during the national anthem, a witness told local news outlets.

In a news release, Mineral County Sheriff Mike Boone said witnesses identified the suspect as 39-year-old Curt James Brockway. Brockway was apprehended at the fairgrounds, located in the western Montana town of Superior, and charged with assault on a minor — a felony crime.

The sheriff’s office declined to provide additional information on the alleged assault, including motive. But Taylor Hennick, who attended the event, told local news outlets that she overheard the attack near the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo’s entrance, just as the national anthem began to play.

The woman said she heard a “pop,” and turned to see the boy writhing on the ground.

“He was bleeding out of his ears, seizing on the ground, just not coherent,” Hennick told the Missoulian. As startled spectators closed in on Brockway, Hennick said he offered a simple defense for his actions.

“He said [the boy] was disrespecting the national anthem, so he had every right to do that,” she added.

Police say the child was rushed to a hospital Saturday, then flown to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Wash. KPAX, a CBS-affiliated news station, reports the boy suffered temporal skull fractures in the incident. His mother told the station her son’s ears bled for six hours after the alleged assault.

By Tuesday, the boy was released from the hospital and recovering at home, she said.

“It’s just a lot of pain in my head. I don’t remember anything — the rodeo — the helicopter — nothing,” the 13-year-old said in an interview with the station.

Controversy surrounding the national anthem dates back to 2016, when then-National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick called attention to police brutality and racial injustice by kneeling as the song was performed before games. The silent protests were largely condemned by many on the right, including President Trump — who in September 2017 encouraged team owners to fire NFL players who knelt.

It was not clear if Brockway had an attorney, though he was scheduled to be released on his own recognizance Tuesday. The Missoulian reports he was charged with assault with a weapon in 2010, resulting in a 10-year probation sentence.

Brockway’s arraignment is set for Aug. 14.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

On 8/7/2019 at 9:07 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

The article doesn't indicate that the man is a BT, but it seems likely: "A man assaulted a 13-year-old because he was ‘disrespecting the national anthem,’ witness says"

  Hide contents

A Montana man allegedly slammed a boy’s head to the ground at a county fair because the 13-year-old kept his hat on during the national anthem, a witness told local news outlets.

In a news release, Mineral County Sheriff Mike Boone said witnesses identified the suspect as 39-year-old Curt James Brockway. Brockway was apprehended at the fairgrounds, located in the western Montana town of Superior, and charged with assault on a minor — a felony crime.

The sheriff’s office declined to provide additional information on the alleged assault, including motive. But Taylor Hennick, who attended the event, told local news outlets that she overheard the attack near the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo’s entrance, just as the national anthem began to play.

The woman said she heard a “pop,” and turned to see the boy writhing on the ground.

“He was bleeding out of his ears, seizing on the ground, just not coherent,” Hennick told the Missoulian. As startled spectators closed in on Brockway, Hennick said he offered a simple defense for his actions.

“He said [the boy] was disrespecting the national anthem, so he had every right to do that,” she added.

Police say the child was rushed to a hospital Saturday, then flown to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Wash. KPAX, a CBS-affiliated news station, reports the boy suffered temporal skull fractures in the incident. His mother told the station her son’s ears bled for six hours after the alleged assault.

By Tuesday, the boy was released from the hospital and recovering at home, she said.

“It’s just a lot of pain in my head. I don’t remember anything — the rodeo — the helicopter — nothing,” the 13-year-old said in an interview with the station.

Controversy surrounding the national anthem dates back to 2016, when then-National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick called attention to police brutality and racial injustice by kneeling as the song was performed before games. The silent protests were largely condemned by many on the right, including President Trump — who in September 2017 encouraged team owners to fire NFL players who knelt.

It was not clear if Brockway had an attorney, though he was scheduled to be released on his own recognizance Tuesday. The Missoulian reports he was charged with assault with a weapon in 2010, resulting in a 10-year probation sentence.

Brockway’s arraignment is set for Aug. 14.

 

AAAND, it's confirmed that he's a BT: "A man assaulted a boy for ‘disrespecting’ the national anthem. His lawyer says Trump told him to do it."

Spoiler

An attorney for the Montana man accused of slamming a 13-year-old boy’s head into the ground for not removing his hat during the national anthem says President Trump’s “rhetoric” is partially to blame for his client’s actions.

Earlier this week, Mineral County Sheriff Mike Boone identified 39-year-old Curt James Brockway as a suspect in the alleged Saturday night assault. According to court documents filed in Mineral County, Brockway reportedly told investigators that he asked the boy to take off his hat as the anthem began to play at a local rodeo. When the youth cursed back at him instead, Brockway claimed, he “lifted him into the air, and slammed the boy into the ground.”

The attack reportedly fractured the boy’s skull and left him with a concussion.

Brockway was apprehended Saturday at the fairgrounds, located in the western Montana town of Superior, and charged with assault on a minor — a felony charge that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

The man’s attorney, Lance Jasper, told the Missoulian on Wednesday that his client is a U.S. Army veteran who was honorably discharged for disability after sustaining a traumatic brain injury in 2000 while on active duty in Fort Lewis, Wash. As a result, Jasper said, Brockway believed he was following orders from “his commander in chief” while attacking the teenager.

“[President Trump] is telling people that if they kneel, they should be fired, or if they burn a flag, they should be punished,” Jasper told the Missoulian. “He certainly didn’t understand it was a crime”

Jasper did not return several phone calls from The Washington Post requesting comment on the case Thursday. Brockway served in the U.S. Army for more than two years as a metal worker, said Will Sharp, an Army spokesman. He was discharged in May 2001, though Sharp declined to describe the nature of his discharge, citing privacy reasons.

A witness mostly corroborated Brockway’s description of the incident, according to the affidavit, though she did not hear him ask the boy to remove his hat. Taylor Hennick, who attended the event, told local news outlets that she overheard the incident, which took place near the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo’s entrance, just as the national anthem began to play.

The woman said she heard a “pop” and turned to see the boy writhing on the ground. She did not return messages from The Post requesting comment.

“He was bleeding out of his ears, seizing on the ground, just not coherent,” Hennick told the Missoulian. As startled spectators closed in on Brockway, she said, he told them “[the boy] was disrespecting the national anthem, so he had every right to do that.”

According to the affidavit, Brockway told investigators that when he asked the child to remove his hat “because it was disrespectful,” the child replied, “F--- you.”

Police said the boy was flown to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Wash., for emergency treatment. The 13-year-old suffered a concussion and fractured skull, according to the affidavit. In a hospital interview with local media, he said he can’t “remember anything” from the rodeo. The boy’s mother, Megan Keeler, told KPAX that her son’s ears bled for six hours after the alleged attack.

“All of the witnesses I have talked to said this was completely random,” Keeler told KPAX, a CBS-affiliated news station. “He targeted [my son], grabbed him and took him down.”

Keeler declined a request for comment from The Post, citing an ongoing investigation into the case. The boy was reportedly released from the hospital Tuesday and is recovering at home, his mother said.

Controversy surrounding the national anthem dates back to 2016, when then-National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick called attention to police brutality and racial injustice by kneeling as the song was performed before games. The silent protests were largely condemned by many on the right, including Trump — who in September 2017 encouraged team owners to fire NFL players, like Kaepernick, who knelt and otherwise protested the anthem.

During a 2017 rally in Alabama, Trump said: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’” Speaking with Fox News later, Trump suggested NFL players who don’t stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” shouldn’t be in the United States at all.

“You have to stand proudly for the national anthem. You shouldn’t be playing; you shouldn’t be there. Maybe they shouldn’t be in the country,” he said.

Jasper told the Missoulian he will seek a mental health evaluation for Brockway, whose brain injury affects his frontal lobe and impairs his cognitive function. Jasper likened Trump’s words surrounding the anthem and those who protest it to a presidential order. The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on Jasper’s claim that his client was motivated by the president.

“Obviously, [Brockway] owes a big portion of accountability for what took place, but it’s certain that there was other things at work here that definitely contributed,” he told the newspaper. “Trump never necessarily says, ‘Go hurt somebody,’ but the message is absolutely clear. … I am certain of the fact that [Brockway] was doing what he believed he was told to do, essentially, by the president.”

The accusation from Jasper’s attorney comes as the nation reels from two weekend mass shootings that have renewed conversation surrounding Trump’s rhetoric. Authorities have looked closely at an anti-immigrant screed allegedly written by the suspect named in Saturday’s attack on a Walmart in El Paso, which warned of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Trump has used the word “invasion” repeatedly to describe immigrants who enter the United States through the southern border, and some El Pasoans believe the president’s rhetoric has heartened anti-immigrant groups.

The Missoulian previously reported that Brockway was charged with assault with a weapon in 2010, resulting in a 10-year probation sentence. Jasper told the outlet Brockway’s brain injury was considered during his sentencing in that case. He was granted early release from the probation after seven years for good behavior.

“Obviously it’s a tragedy whenever someone is injured, especially a young kid, but with my client being a veteran with a traumatic brain injury, it is absolutely fair to say he got caught up in a heightened animosity and a heightened rhetoric that too many people are engaged in,” Jasper said, according to the Missoulian.

Brockway’s arraignment in the latest charge is scheduled for Aug. 14.

 

[fraurosena]

10 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

AAAND, it's confirmed that he's a BT: "A man assaulted a boy for ‘disrespecting’ the national anthem. His lawyer says Trump told him to do it."

  Hide contents

An attorney for the Montana man accused of slamming a 13-year-old boy’s head into the ground for not removing his hat during the national anthem says President Trump’s “rhetoric” is partially to blame for his client’s actions.

Earlier this week, Mineral County Sheriff Mike Boone identified 39-year-old Curt James Brockway as a suspect in the alleged Saturday night assault. According to court documents filed in Mineral County, Brockway reportedly told investigators that he asked the boy to take off his hat as the anthem began to play at a local rodeo. When the youth cursed back at him instead, Brockway claimed, he “lifted him into the air, and slammed the boy into the ground.”

The attack reportedly fractured the boy’s skull and left him with a concussion.

Brockway was apprehended Saturday at the fairgrounds, located in the western Montana town of Superior, and charged with assault on a minor — a felony charge that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

The man’s attorney, Lance Jasper, told the Missoulian on Wednesday that his client is a U.S. Army veteran who was honorably discharged for disability after sustaining a traumatic brain injury in 2000 while on active duty in Fort Lewis, Wash. As a result, Jasper said, Brockway believed he was following orders from “his commander in chief” while attacking the teenager.

“[President Trump] is telling people that if they kneel, they should be fired, or if they burn a flag, they should be punished,” Jasper told the Missoulian. “He certainly didn’t understand it was a crime”

Jasper did not return several phone calls from The Washington Post requesting comment on the case Thursday. Brockway served in the U.S. Army for more than two years as a metal worker, said Will Sharp, an Army spokesman. He was discharged in May 2001, though Sharp declined to describe the nature of his discharge, citing privacy reasons.

A witness mostly corroborated Brockway’s description of the incident, according to the affidavit, though she did not hear him ask the boy to remove his hat. Taylor Hennick, who attended the event, told local news outlets that she overheard the incident, which took place near the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo’s entrance, just as the national anthem began to play.

The woman said she heard a “pop” and turned to see the boy writhing on the ground. She did not return messages from The Post requesting comment.

“He was bleeding out of his ears, seizing on the ground, just not coherent,” Hennick told the Missoulian. As startled spectators closed in on Brockway, she said, he told them “[the boy] was disrespecting the national anthem, so he had every right to do that.”

According to the affidavit, Brockway told investigators that when he asked the child to remove his hat “because it was disrespectful,” the child replied, “F--- you.”

Police said the boy was flown to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Wash., for emergency treatment. The 13-year-old suffered a concussion and fractured skull, according to the affidavit. In a hospital interview with local media, he said he can’t “remember anything” from the rodeo. The boy’s mother, Megan Keeler, told KPAX that her son’s ears bled for six hours after the alleged attack.

“All of the witnesses I have talked to said this was completely random,” Keeler told KPAX, a CBS-affiliated news station. “He targeted [my son], grabbed him and took him down.”

Keeler declined a request for comment from The Post, citing an ongoing investigation into the case. The boy was reportedly released from the hospital Tuesday and is recovering at home, his mother said.

Controversy surrounding the national anthem dates back to 2016, when then-National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick called attention to police brutality and racial injustice by kneeling as the song was performed before games. The silent protests were largely condemned by many on the right, including Trump — who in September 2017 encouraged team owners to fire NFL players, like Kaepernick, who knelt and otherwise protested the anthem.

During a 2017 rally in Alabama, Trump said: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’” Speaking with Fox News later, Trump suggested NFL players who don’t stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” shouldn’t be in the United States at all.

“You have to stand proudly for the national anthem. You shouldn’t be playing; you shouldn’t be there. Maybe they shouldn’t be in the country,” he said.

Jasper told the Missoulian he will seek a mental health evaluation for Brockway, whose brain injury affects his frontal lobe and impairs his cognitive function. Jasper likened Trump’s words surrounding the anthem and those who protest it to a presidential order. The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on Jasper’s claim that his client was motivated by the president.

“Obviously, [Brockway] owes a big portion of accountability for what took place, but it’s certain that there was other things at work here that definitely contributed,” he told the newspaper. “Trump never necessarily says, ‘Go hurt somebody,’ but the message is absolutely clear. … I am certain of the fact that [Brockway] was doing what he believed he was told to do, essentially, by the president.”

The accusation from Jasper’s attorney comes as the nation reels from two weekend mass shootings that have renewed conversation surrounding Trump’s rhetoric. Authorities have looked closely at an anti-immigrant screed allegedly written by the suspect named in Saturday’s attack on a Walmart in El Paso, which warned of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Trump has used the word “invasion” repeatedly to describe immigrants who enter the United States through the southern border, and some El Pasoans believe the president’s rhetoric has heartened anti-immigrant groups.

The Missoulian previously reported that Brockway was charged with assault with a weapon in 2010, resulting in a 10-year probation sentence. Jasper told the outlet Brockway’s brain injury was considered during his sentencing in that case. He was granted early release from the probation after seven years for good behavior.

“Obviously it’s a tragedy whenever someone is injured, especially a young kid, but with my client being a veteran with a traumatic brain injury, it is absolutely fair to say he got caught up in a heightened animosity and a heightened rhetoric that too many people are engaged in,” Jasper said, according to the Missoulian.

Brockway’s arraignment in the latest charge is scheduled for Aug. 14.

 

If he really has brain damage, then I can have some sympathy for him. If it impairs his ability to discern right from wrong and he truly believes he must do what he perceives his commander in chief is telling him, then he is mentally disabled and can't be completely held accountable for his actions. If all of this is true, then I don't think the man is a true BT, but rather misguided by his inability to logically think things through; and he urgently needs treatment because he's a clear danger to his environment.

If it isn't impaired, then he's a horrible piece of shit BT.

[GreyhoundFan]

Tommy Lee (drummer for Motley Crue) is sick of BTs too:

 

[47of74]

 

Thing around here lately are pickups with full size US flags hooked to the back. I see those I automatically make two assumptions. First who the owner supports. Secondly the size of their equipment.

[GreyhoundFan]

What a nutjob