With it being Fat Tuesday and the beginning of Mardi Gras in New Orleans I decided to honor it with the slang term often heard during the Saints football games. More than a phrase it is a mantra that many have used as a call out, but the origin and history behind the expression is an interesting one which NPR explains in this piece. And with that I am culturally appropriating it today to discuss again the never ending tide of untruths, misinformation and falsehoods that align the only media that apparently matters anymore – Social.
I had never heard of Andrew Tate until I read a Guardian article about his arrest in Romania and largely due to the climate activist, Greta Thunberg, who simply pointed out that he should have tossed his pizza box away first. It was from that box they found him there with his Brother and several women whom he has allegedly trafficked and sexually assaulted. It was a “Who Dat” moment, as I was unaware of his life, his thought or anything about him as all, as I don’t follow Social Media. And certainly not the ramblings of a moron former reality star and his thoughts on Women. Well that is unless he becomes President of the United States then I am all ears! The persona that this individual created is one of the king of “Toxic Masculinity” who is a Misogynist, advocated for Rape and abuse of Women and has made several Racist and other hateful messages throughout his “career” as a social media moron. America has Joe Rogan as the close equivalent and Alex Jones the equally histrionic moron who finally was literally taken to court and taken to the bank to withdraw his supposed millions that he covered by filing Bankruptcy, well that is one way to make your financial records public. There is nothing that says, “I am an angry white man” more than one with bucks and the security of the First Amendment. Britain is so in arms about this Tate bullshit and his fake “university” (hmm who else had one of those?) that they are establishing courses to combat this including hosting assembly’s to combat his hateful messaging, with what appears little success, as the audience of Teen boys are enamored by his supposed wealth and of course his ability to get fucked/laid or find pussy. Well when you traffic in it yes it is easy to get.
And this is where we are in 2023, the “new normal” as a result of the pandemic, the switch to online learning, the long hours in quarantine and the like, the lack of socialization, the rise of social media and living a life online have led to this bullshit as fact. I am not sure why some are more predisposed that others but I have long suspected it is a lack of reading comprehension. I do believe many, and particularly People of Color and those working poor are truly functionally illiterate. I remember when I was called that during University only to pass classes when T.A.’s and Professors had dismissed me. I recall having to sit with a Professor’s wife to learn to write. Did I actually learn to write from her? No, I learned to write what they wanted to read. I learned to direct quote and cite and offer little of my personal opinion. It took me a lot longer to learn that it meant in all aspects of life that keeping my mouth shut and my thoughts to myself were critical for me to work and to be a part of larger society. In other words I am very honest, critically honest, emotional and direct. I have heard more euphemisms for this character quality including “unfiltered” “funny” “sarcastic” and all of them negative. Almost all from Women. Men have never had a problem with it as they assumed a Cock in my mouth would shut me up. Well how long does it take? Three minutes, shove a finger up their ass it’s over fast. See what I mean. It is why I live alone and keep to myself it is pointless to have conversations with people who do not read, do not watch TV, Movies, have hobbies or interests. I spoke with a Woman from the Upper West Side, the same place I had encountered the man who informed me I was WRONG about my opinion and went on and on about his working and living in Pennsylvania. She read no newspapers, no TV news or radio and only read the Upper West Side “newsletter” about how bad it all was. Who the fuck writes it? What is their source and is it fact checked? I am guessing like all Social Media it is extrapolated and taken out of context from real sources. I heard a lunatic on a podcast (Juicy Scoop a comedy podcast that veers into nutty conspiracy shit from time to time) say that the Attorney General of the Virgin Islands (who has since been fired from her job due to the Epstein Investigation) was not speaking to the public and instead gave an interview to the New York Times. This incensed her as she said it is a closed access media as it is behind a paywall. Yes you dumb bitch it is a newspaper and if you want to read it you have to BUY IT. Or go to a Library which usually keeps copies of newspapers. This is what we have for fact checking, and a source supposedly reporting news. Someone who doesn’t read or listen to it.
And this morning I ran down to get packages from our front desk, it was around 5:30 in the morning. There was the Nanny who lives in the building and cares for two Autistic boys and she was down there talking to one of the Desk Attendants. I just wanted to get my packages, have some breakfast and finish reading my newspaper from yesterday. That was not going to happen. She asked me about this Rapper friend of hers and played me his track. I am the LAST person you would ask about that genre of music and when I have those situations I usually answer in a question, such as: “Is that person a working musician or working towards a career in music?” My last foray into Hip Hop was DeLaSoul and with that I did tell her that and that Trugoy had just died last week and I had been listening to their work quite a bit on the radio of late. She did not know he had died and then launched into her work as a consultant for creators and that he had not hired her and was demanding she promote him. For someone supposedly engaged in music, how would you not know that a legend in Rap was dead! Honestly, I am again the last person who gives a flying fuck about this and I just nodded and said, “Not a person engaged in Social Media at all, also Hip Hop, so wrong person here about this subject.” And that is when I said I am so oblivious I had just read about this Andrew Tate person, for the first time in the New York Times and had read that in England they are having classes to counter the crazy shit he says online. He is a Joe Rogan meets Alex Jones type, only if possible, more hateful and misogynist. And she in fact, natch had heard of him. Then she launched into how he speaks truth and that his arrest was planned by the Matrix. The what? The who? Is that Keanu Reeves? I finally stopped her and told her that the only news I have read is from The New York Times, The Post and the UK Guardian, all of which have portrayed him as a Human Trafficker and a horrific human being that may be exaggerating his wealth, getting kids to pay all kinds of money for “classes” that espouse hate. She again goes on and on about how people are after him for being a truth teller. Okay, sure.what.ever. With that I asked her if she had seen or heard or read anything about him, his arrest and his toxic masculinity? She again pulls up You Tube and has him on it saying it is all lies. Okay so you sourcing info about him FROM HIM. What? I believe I have a video of OJ denying his innocence too. I told her that citing him as a source about him is missing something such as an objective opinion by a well known and respected source. And with that I am going to stick with mine and a clock is right at least twice a day and I am sure he has said something anyone could agree with as a result. But his hate speech is that and with that let’s change that to Race or Religion, the messenger is the same but now a new message would then you begin to seek out some alternatives? And all of this, the justification, excuse making, all of this is from a Black Woman. My head is imploding at this point and I feel for her. She is a good person but clearly has no ability to read, to seek out sources of genuine information and truth and I believe it is the failure of public education.
In the course of this never ending pre-dawn discussion we passed over the issue of Trans and what that means to be a Woman. And naturally she was unfamiliar with the JK Rowling/Germaine Greer issues agree with much of what is a similar view. But the issues seem to center that if you think that you are against the Trans community. And again this is a falsehood as we may not fully agree on the issues but we agree that the community is one that needs support. So she railed on and then in turn informed me, the Teacher, of how schools are indoctrinating Gender issues in Kindergarten. I have never personally witnessed it, never seen or heard any source that is legit with examples and the curriculum itself. The only one I could find was a California “suggestion” of the Sex Education curriculum done in 2019. And with that I have not actually heard any Teachers doing so. And only of it again through very suspect sources (note no Principal, nor the Teacher or any other Student interviewed) and with that any Teacher doing so is not doing this with 5 year olds who have them for a half a day and impossible to do so with not a Parent involved. As for older kids in High School if there are Teachers who allow Students to self identify and change pronouns without consent of Parents that is there problem and has nothing to do with me. I don’t Teach with them, don’t have Children under their care and with that if a Child is that afraid to talk to their Parents that may be an entire issue that would require CPS and Intervention and that should be a last resort. Any time I have had a Student inform me of their Gender/Identity change I have said, “Until a roster comes from the office with your new name I cannot legally call you by anything else.” Believe me they come up with all kinds of nicknames and bullshit and this was years ago, so I just address them by a surname. And if a kid is that confused I suggest that they see a Family Physician and their convo is HIPPA protected and they can get the advice, assistance and referrals they need. She informed me that a child cannot speak to a Doctor without parental consent. Uh no that the Parent knows (you know Insurance etc) but they can speak privately. It is not illegal and the Doctor only has to report that if the Patient plans to do harm or commit self harm. Again there are many organizations and entites that help kids and they can go there. Those are the appropriate channels and my job is to teach History and English. Folks I don’t want to be involved. What happened to minding my own business and staying in my lane? I understand that a Parent wants to be able to communicate to their own children but if a Child is afraid then maybe you have failed; however, I and many Teachers I feel do feel the same that we are not appropriate intermediaries. And guess what you don’t have to agree you just have to accept it and move on.
And in reality Trans Teachers are barely surviving as Teachers so why the hell would they take on any additional controversy and conflict? They wouldn’t. I knew one in Tennessee and he left the State as they are busy hating on his people so you do what you do. All his colleagues knew but the Kids did not. So where is this agenda again?
I went back up to my apartment with mixed feelings. This young woman is a fucking hot mess. It doesn’t make her a bad person but a misinformed one. I cannot nor do I want to get into these repeated exchanges they serve no one. She will go back to Tik Tok and YouTube and fuel her head to fuel and secure her beliefs. I tried to explain that we have become so tribal and so narcissistic since the pandemic we have problems just accepting even moderate differences of opinion. And I used Dave Chappelle as an example. He jokes about Trans people, okay we get it and you are “distressed” “disturbed” “confused” or whatever emotion he feels justifies his need to joke about it. One point he has made is that since you are new to the marginalized people group you cannot cut in line. And he and I disagree. There should be no line of import with regards to those whom society has exploited, done harm and in turn ignored. We should be a collective and front together to bring attention and hopefully change. But never once I have I heard Dave Chappelle advocate for harm to those in the Trans community. I have read and heard Andrew Sullivan on the Dishcast, a man who is a Gay Catholic and Conservative mock his own people calling them “Alphabet people”with the Lesbian and Liberal writer, Katie Herzog. They discuss the failure to actually discuss the danger and harm we have in pushing the agenda that maybe drugging and participating in altering gender at an early age is not a good thing, and that many stop or go back. So this tribe is a rather diverse one and with that we have the right to express our thoughts, just not ones that encourage harm. Well Andrew Tate whom this Woman likes has and yet she refuses to believe it. Why?
Again we can be affiliated with a tribe and not agree to be just like the other. In fact why is a tribe a singular nature? With all the talk about diversity we should tolerate, accept and understand diversity of thought, of being and belief. Well guess what? We don’t. We are so wrapped up in our identity, be that of Race, Gender, Sexuality, Politics, Culture, Religion or even Regional (think Sports teams) that we simply cannot understand why someone does not follow the script that has never been written by anyone, never read by anyone and in turn followed by anyone who is an invisible being on the interwebs. I can read a book, listen to a podcast, read an article and not agree with all of it, like any of it or even care about it and I can in turn recommend it or write a review that expresses my opinion. It is not your opinion and it does not mean that I personally will have any affect on you personally. So what you do or don’t is not my problem or concern. It only is if we live and/or work together and then we have to find a middle ground in which to work it out. Wow that compromise thing is so retro. Fuck it I would rather spend my time permanently being affronted for it all.
I did the free write the other day with Gotham’s Writers and the prompts were “What the world needs now” and a “Charming Villain”; well I think as I took the prompt and tuned off. I had other things to do and it was a nice afternoon and I did not feel like writing at that point. What writer has not felt that same pull in another direction?
I had my draft of the other piece completed in the time allowed and was later planning to return to mash them together as I like to do. There is something that the world needs now is a Charming Villain. But that would be who? And why is it a male archetype that seems to fit that definition? Writers are almost always men when it comes to that description it seems. And without even thinking I can go down a barrel list of men, like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway among those who I feel fit a style and type of writer who was always cutting the edges not off of sammies, well Truman might, but were not afraid to write the truth and speak about the pain of being. Ah the pain of being. I just finished Dirtbag, Massachusetts, by Issac Fitzgerald. Less a memoir and more a compilation of essays about his aging in place. And he fits the type as I suspect in real life he would call himself a charming villain as he wrote about in insatiable need to be polite at all costs and when complimented on it he resisted responding, “Thanks it was beaten into me.”
He ends the book reflections on growing up poor and tossed between dueling parents in their own pursuit of pain that is a common theme among Memoirs. Let’s face it we can thank Mary Karr and The Liars Club for setting that as the precedent for how stories of one’s families must be told. The concept of Creative Nonfiction has been the trend for years, the personal essay another and Fitzgerald combines those techniques quite well in the book. It is exactly almost the same word count and depth that Mary did so well in her book years ago. That it is a White Male who is of course Catholic, from perhaps the state that most residents are often called Massholes doesn’t hurt and the poverty to privilege is not lost. I did love the detour to San Francisco, the Biker years and the sideline into pornography that led him back finally to the East Coast after reconnecting with family thanks to a climb to the top of Kilimanjaro. Seriously Lee Gutkind closed Creative Nonfiction when I have a book right here that is a perfect prototype of it. He alludes to drinking, drugs and even White Supremacy has a guest appearance. What Barbershops does he go to? A lot is packed into under 250 pages.
But how, exactly, is the truth in nonfiction determined? How much of what is being told should be true? And who is the final arbiter of truth . . . ? The line between fiction and nonfiction is often debated, but is there a single dividing point or an all-encompassing truth a writer is supposed to tell?—LEE GUTKIND
It is why I decided to switch to fiction. There is a market and with that a lot more work entailed than basically writing and editing my journals. From those stories there is the ability to exaggerate, merge characters. places and condense a story into the whole. We all have stories to tell but maybe our personal ones are not that interesting and yet we all feel and think they are. And yes there is always a mix of good and bad in all memoirs, and when I review the Facebook Author/Writers groups, they usually fall into three camps – Fantasy/Romance/Memoir. I have not actually seen anyone trying to write the next To Kill a Mockingbird, a writer who wrote one book and never picked up a pen again; 50 years later it is a story still worth reading. If I could write that I would. But I am not that writer. What kind of writer? Non fiction that much is clear, but in fact I am an opinion writer. I may have been a great Journalist as I like to dig into a story and find facts and know truths but there is a place there for objectivity and with that could I be so? And I realized yes that is exactly who I am, I see both sides and that is because I am a Libra and always seeking balance. So I can enjoy a book like Dirtbag but see through it as largely bullshit compressed into a story about a man who lived life. Had some bad times, some good times and even better ones but seriously at one point he seemed to pack a lot in a short period, was a Bartender/Bouncer at a Biker bar in San Francisco, then was working overseas for a religious organization in Thailand and then was into the porn arena. Somewhere in there became a Writer. All of this packed into 250 pages? Are you fucking kidding me? I am a dodger and drifter but I can actually point to times in my life where I was for years in one place at one time. And how the fuck do you just go climb Kilimanjaro with your sister and 70 y/o former alcoholic abusive dad; How much does that cost? And why? Were you a family who once loved to hike? It appears that his sister was raised by another woman not his Mother as daddy had a dick problem. And there is another half brother in there as well. All while again rabble rousing as a punk, then going to an elite boarding school. And this was before hitting 18. There is a lot packed into this missive. Why was it published? I suspect as a story of a White Man who may or may not have a drinking problem and been in porn? Unclear as to what the point or purpose is, as he is not a lush or recovered drunk, he is Irish and they like the booze, but otherwise I have no clue. Why it was a best seller? Well it had a lot of shit packed into it and it did have a good review or two. He writes well and is quite reflective; however, the last biography book I read by a White Man was Angela’s Ashes. Go figure. That was a bigger book. And it covered less time frame but that was then this is now. We like our stories shorter I guess. Did I mention that the Proud Boys are in this? Again word count matters folks and this may also be why as it costs less to produce. So the advice here is edit down but cram as much in as possible.
And then this weekend I read two articles regarding writers. The first was NY Times Magazine interview with Walter Mosley, a great Black author who is known primarily for The Devil in the Blue Dress. But he is a much more accomplished writer and has written in many genres. I would say his contemporary is Colson Whitehead who after writing The Underground Railroad was told to write more “like that” when he wanted to branch into other genres. This is what we do to writers, write the same book just different. I have written about the contretemps over American Dirt and that was cancel culture on overdrive. Writers want to write what the feel and hear in their head and the readers who find them will read them with their voices in their head and either like it or not and it may or may not decide if they will do so again. Will I read another book by Issac Fitzgerald? Probably as long as it is not a biography as he is a good writer and frankly an easy read. Mosley claims Americans are getting dumber. I agree. In that interview he makes comments about Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth that I loved and agreed. I feel that way about Joan Didion . Her essays and books were to me always curated “cool” and I not cool, could never identify nor aspire to. Sorry I cannot relate to any of it. And that is what we want to do as writers, find readers who connect even when we are not perfect and not cool. That is our audience and we are as diverse as they are.
The next article I read was about Literary Unions. The book, Lives of Wives, is being released, ironically on Valentines Day, about writers and the interesting successful women they married. The most fascinating story was the one about Roald Dahl who wrote the famous Matlida that continues to live on in film and musicals and film of the musical. Or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a book which is actually quite violent in both tone and nature which was the kind of books Dahl really wanted to write but was not as successful. The irony that the same figure who composed this was an Anti Semite, Misogynist and a Brute is not just irony but in this time of the world would be cancelled. Hypocrisy not lost again, look to Didion who was a conservative often believed to be a liberal. Again coolness masks a myriad of truths. The woman voted for Goldwater! And writers are supposed to be truthful, so read those essays again and see the criticism of those not like her. Which brings me to Dahl. That he, this prodigious writer of Children’s books, was in real life was an abusive boor is surprising as we have an image of those “type” of writers. But what the new book reveals is a truth that during his marriage to the great actress Patricia Neal he was abusive and mistreated her while recovering from a stroke. Now her autobiography praises him but again why would she not? There is always a dichotomy when it comes to telling the truth. It will always be multi sided and so hence the idea of creative non fiction. We can never know what truly happens between any couple in an intimate relationship and with that this book discusses many other marriages of Writers to Women who were famous in their own right and in turn abused or demoralized them; There is no mention of some of the more infamous characters of the day such as Arthur Miller with Marilyn Monroe or Claire Bloom who was married to Phillip Roth, another angry misogynist. Claire did not spare him in her Biography and in true Roth form he chose fiction to debase and degrade her. It is the standard writers room of pain and with that be it fiction or non, we color the story for our audience but also to save face and ultimately sell books. But the writers club room is full of many women, and men, who after years of failed romances and personal struggles killed themselves while leaving many of us searching their living works for clues. They include Virginia Woof, Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Charlotte Perkins Gilman among others. There are many writers rooms of one’s own covered in yellow wallpaper that is for sure.
As readers we will always disagree and have our own take on a work of a writer and what that work means to us. Die hards of Roth I recall last year were in arms when a new work was withdrawn due to the Author’s own issues regarding sexual abuse. My first thought, “It takes one to know one.” I do find fandom to be a disturbing element to all things as it seems to lead to abuse, violence and aggression. That one does not like something you do means NOTHING. Move on and let it go. I often equate this with Swifties whose irate hysteria over Ticketmaster led to Congressional hearings. Any concert goes has known for years about their fees and charges. Ask Eddie Vedder about that one.
I can always spot an angry white man. They are usually of means or not. They are white. They are Straight, they are Gay, they are Conservative, they are Liberal. They are Religious, they are Atheists. They are Professional or they are Blue Collar. They are angry, they are white. And with that they bring that into their relationships both personal and professional. That anger is tied to the past, to the present and to the future. They never had enough, never have enough, worry that it will be taken from them in the future. They are angry and they are never wrong. And when they disagree with you, you are WRONG. It is exhausting to hear that you are wrong and to be belittled for you being you.
If there is one theme I found in Dirtbag was that he when he was told he was wrong he made efforts to fix it, make it right and then once that was accomplished, he lost interest and he moved on. The bars he worked at, the porn studio, the weird religious group he joined, he wanted to make wrong things right. I identified with that same compulsion, as once I was told I was wrong, I never stayed long after I made my efforts to change the perception or I just simply left. Not sure if it was a compulsion to change any of it but when you come from dysfunction you always feel the need to fix things and for years I was as “fixer.” So I too found a connection to him and that is the mark of a good writer. I understood why he did not want children and why he cannot forgive his Parents. I have done neither. Forgiveness is an overrated concept and one he or anyone does not have to bestow. The reality is that concept comes from Religion and once free of religion it frees you of it. It does not excuse bad behavior and the need to apologize but as Issac discusses in his book he is “chronically polite” that it is a detriment. I get it. I really do. I model the respect and dignity that is how I wish to be treated and if ignored I move quickly on but for years I took it. I processed it and from the pandemic it is when I came up with my “no compromises” and since I have no need to carry on, I just simply move forward and onward. Perk of aging and finally realizing fixing things does no one any good.
Perhaps we all need to be a charming villain and give the world what it needs right now, less of you. Hold back the best of yourself and find out what fills your soul and your needs. Ask not for forgiveness but acceptance.
The Earthquake in Syria and Turkey has now led to at least 20K dead. I am not sure what to say but with Syria perpetually in a Civil War and the sanctions that have been a part of the US relations for decades for their support in Terrorism will mean that they will have to be temporarily removed and in turn coordination or efforts to assist a challenge. Turkey, a country we have had a very challenged relationship and largely strategic in nature has been tested with the war in the Ukraine and the NATO sanctions placed upon Russia, which Turkey has largely ignored and in turn Russia despite it all has managed to circumvent them to maintain their economy and war effort. All of this is part of our International news coverage which as I suspect few follow or actually read about. Putting Sunflowers on clothes or flying flags in windows is great and all but what actually do you know about the boots on the ground, the Americans and Europeans who have gone there to help, and in turn what is happening with regards to Russian misinformation, European reliance on them for power and in turn the overall costs that again are not new. We have had a myriad of problems with Russia for decades, Putin has fucked over five Presidents in our country, he has interfered in US elections through the use of bots to flood social media and in turn stir racial unrest. All of this AGAIN is well presented in varying media outlets but AGAIN most people simply refuse or at least even commit to reading, listening to or watching news for even 30 minutes. There are the 24/7 MSNBC, CNN and Fox watchers perpetuating the horseshoe effect that has individuals on either end of the spectrum spout the talking points sure they are getting truths and facts. And with that I move on.
I read three papers and currently flip through the Daily Memphian to read about Memphis and the reports on the Police Violence situation as the investigation is still ongoing. Since his funeral one other Police officer has been fired and the story that circulated aka “rumor” that Tyre was seeing one of the Officer’s ex’s of course has been dismissed but there was a Woman one of the Officers was pursuing or was acquainted with whom he sent the photos he took at the crime scene as Tyre lay dying. The New York Times wrote an extensive update on what transpired that night and the suppression evidence and lying that continued to cover up what really happened. Again, who will know the truth or will it ever get its day in court? Let’s hope.
This now brings me to the role of AI and how it too can be used to create a false narrative and it appear real. The story from the New York Times confirms how convincing it can be to create a newscast using bots aka DEEPFAKE and create a script, now thanks to CHAT AI to make it appear genuine. I will spend some time in another post discussing what I believe will end many writers careers and freelancing efforts with the creation of CHAT AI. The cuts across the white collar industries will only contribute to that with copy writers, content creators and the like being dismissed. There may be only one or two left on a team to do clean up and editing but I suspect more will follow across the board when it comes to this and the role of AI in production.
And with that I did have a “conversation” with a White Man in Manhattan who commented about me reading the NY Times in hand and I responded that I still subscribe to the print edition I like the feel of paper, the ability to spread it out and read story in succession as reading on the phone for me is challenging. He was reading his NYT on his phone and immediately informed me that Turkey/Syria was now at 20K. I knew immediately recognized that as a passive aggressive way of informing me that reading online was superior as it is in real time. I said I had heard on the radio coming over to the city that the death toll had risen and that this tragedy was again a sign of politics and war and the inability of country’s to maintain their labor and work force to promote stability to enact growth and change. It parallels our own country’s brain drains in red vs blue states and in turn also in the Latin countries. When people leave there is no imperative to grow but to maintain power and all at a sacrifice to a country’s own growth. He immediately did what I call the standard white person response – NO YOU ARE WRONG. I put that to the equivalent to the invite, “Hey let’s meet for coffee” and the response is, “I don’t drink coffee.” When you begin a dialogue in the negative you end something before it begins. So in this case I simply tried to explain what I have seen in Nashville and the South with people who want to stay but they eventually cannot as jobs and opportunities dry up, even basic services like grocery stores are lacking, so they leave and these great towns are dying. And then he launched into his story about Religion, working in upstate Pennsylvania and a watch maker he hired, to hiring workers to do things for him and telling me one negative story after another about all the people he knew including former College classmates he encountered at his reunion with their reliance upon religion. I wonder if it was less about them and more about him and he being an utter asshole. After about 5 minutes of this lecture (as that it was it was not a conversation) he jumped up and said, “Enjoy your roll and have a good day.” I looked at my plate which was down to scraps, as I had just sat there shoving it into my mouth to avoid speaking, ignoring my newspaper which is why I stopped in the first place. And I go, “I will and you too.” All I could think was how was this man whom I thought Gay, and usually they are not quite that angry or rude, confirms why I have to stop these random encounters, they are not productive, they are not healthy for me. This was just very New Yorker typical (they are either amazing or utter shit, no grey there) yet although during his rant I gathered he was from Maryland; with that I am not sure if he lives here but he had a white shi zu who seems to be his only friend (he was clutching that do like a child does a stuffed animal) so he had to actually live here or why the dog? And frankly why he felt the need to talk to me another. Don’t initiate a conversation when you have no intent of having one. I was relieved to see them both take a leave and while I too left shortly thereafter my morning not ruined but certainly not one I wished to extend. A bad taste remained, from neither the coffee nor the pain a raisin but from his vitriol.
I truly exhaust myself trying to be “nice” and with that I want to move onto the subject about the shooting in Virginia with the six year old. After spending a day in an Autism classroom with four amazing young men on varying degrees on the spectrum I was looking forward to a couple of days of just being alone and keeping busy with things that matter. People not so much. As the Teacher of that room contracted Covid, meaning all them including the IA was exposed, I did not want to push my luck and I will test on Saturday to see how I am passing the 72 hour mark from exposure to contraction. So these next two days are not only necessary they put me less at risk. I think the IA was shocked that I was not planning to alter my schedule to be there Thursday and Friday as I told her that I already had obligations, she seemed to think that they were flexible and I would of course step in. Again, I have no obligation, no responsibility and am a GIG WORKER who works on my schedule not yours. But later during the day the VP was there for the afternoon and in an exchange with her the IA informed her that with all the Teachers out sick, on leave or for emergency reasons she was being placed in a place that led her to do more work that she was not paid for. I laughed to myself as I feel the same way. You want me to work, pay me, enable me with access to computers, a password, a locker to store my stuff and of course sick leave, health care and the rest. That.Will.Not.Happen. I cobbled together lessons for the boys, they really need constant reiteration and consistency, none that I have actually witnessed in my time in those rooms. So again lack of leadership and direction is evident. And my past exchanges on this subject I am more than aware of how incalcitrant Teachers are to change. This goes with my last post regarding the Doctor who admitted that many of the problems Doctor’s face are due to the lobbying by the AMA to keep the status quo. And it is always about money. Even the comment by the Doctor who said there is an ER that is no safe and that they will travel rather than go there. What does that say about those who don’t have said option?
And this goes not only with regards to medical care but to education and to the judicial system. Those safety nets that are designed to provide equity to those in need or demand are not treated equally. Access and availability are not parsed out fairly but in fact that is what is defined as systemic racism, they are designed to treat the poor, the less well off financially and in turn less educated in how the system works to be treated disparagingly, as if it was a type of intrinsic failure that led them there. And since most of those are faces of color the reality is that yes it is a form of Racism. I was a white woman when I was abused and mistreated by the hospital I was brought to be cared for. It is a public hospital in charge of treating the poor and has a history of issues and problems and it was only sheer fucking luck I survived. They threw me in the street sick and deranged and I sued them on my own. Why? Why not. The Police and the EMT who rescued me, did not help me but in fact went out of their ways to ensure I was further punished as if being in coma and not knowing or caring if I was to come out of it, decided to make sure if I did I would be punished. And I was. The numerous Judges, the Attorneys I hired and fired and the City Attorneys went out of their way to do little to nothing despite my pleas and the checks that cleared. NOT ONE. I was on my own so anyone who thinks I will ever lend a hand anymore is mistaken. I have nothing more to say on this subject but I will say that anyone who thinks that Politicians will change these broken systems are mistaken. Unless people band together to become a Citizen Lobbyist and take charge of their workplace, their community and organize to bring money, yes money, to the varying assholes who run for office and in turn demand and pay for their candidacy, then drive to get them elected and more George Santos’ will take office without shame or guilt.
And with that we should be able to have our children go to local schools, to not have to commute in which to find a basic education. I get that special programs may have to be divided up for financial reasons, that said a child needs to be in the community he/she lives in which to make friends, to build a history and establish roots. And what it says that when you don’t have an opportunity for education and in turn can drop out of school and be left alone to scrub together an existence allows one to remain ignorant. Lessons learned less about fact and more on lies, misinformation, and it opens the door to January 6th. Another Insurrectionist who was sentenced this week seemed to believe his ignorance was an excuse. Funny how hid did not understand anything about history and Democracy yet seemed to think that this was okay. He is married with a family, has a job and he seemed to know enough to get there and carry a Confederate Flag into the Capitol. To quote his Attorney: “He was taught that the flag was a symbol of an idealized view of southern life and southern heritage,” “Lacking an education beyond the ninth grade and lacking even average intellectual capacity, Mr. Seefried did not appreciate the complex and, for many, painful, history behind the Confederate battle flag.”” Really he didn’t know this as he never heard it ever? None of his family had? Yeah it is what I call “willful ignorance.”
And that same type of ignorance is what happened in Virginia at Richneck Elementary School on the day a six year old shot his Teacher. None of it makes sense and yet all of seems to be one of willful intent. He planned it, he discussed it, he demonstrated prior acts of violence and with that he waited until a moment arrived to KILL HER. Did I mention he was Six? When he was Five he strangled a Teacher. Again this is all odd as if he was trained to do this. As few six year olds I have met have that amazing skill set to find guns, unlock them, carry them and in turn use them. To strangle someone with that much force to render a Teacher near unconsciousness. He told classmates and with that his need for attention led him to share it with other Students, threaten them and in turn be dismissed without recourse. And his Parents brought him to school and after a brief period felt it was not necessary to accompany him any further. Really? There is so much missing from this story but what isn’t is that take a look at the School, the lack of training, the lack of doors, the entire inability to respond to a crisis. The Principal not in the loop and the VP running the show. I have seen this many many times. A young Teacher with no support system in which to help her and a class of 24 or more which is WAY TOO BIG for children that age and no IA’s to assist. This district sucks but hey the Governor has made sure no CRT is being taught! And all following a pandemic when this Boy was 4 he had no oversight nor care to diagnose what is happening and enters Kindergarten already in a state and progressed what appears to be a new school for First grade. Where were his history or file? This is not exclusive to this school, this is EVERYWHERE. And what is the solution? Vouchers for Private Schools or more Charters. Yeah that is the solution or in other words kick the can down the road. This is a child not a can of pop. And the affect of this on all the other children will only exacerbate what I have come to believe a loss of a generation interrupted due to the pandemic. Ages 2-20 will fucked up for years to come. And it is why I will not spend more than three days in a school as the adage goes: Company like fish stink after three days. And why I quit doing both Elementary and Middle school as they are not easy in the best of times and these are not the best of times.
How Richneck Elementary failed to stop a 6-year-old from shooting his teacher
By Hannah Natanson and Justin Jouvenal February 10, 2023 The Washington Post
Abigail Zwerner was frustrated.
It was Jan. 4. A 6-year-old in her first-grade class at Richneck Elementary School had stolen her phone and slammed it to the floor, apparently upset over a schedule change, according to text messages Zwerner sent to a friend.
Administrators, she wrote, were faulting her for the situation.
The 6-year-old “took my phone and smashed it on the ground,” Zwerner wrote in a text message obtained by The Washington Post, “and admin is blaming me.”
Two days later, the 6-year-old told classmates at recess he was going to shoot Zwerner, showed them a gun and its clip tucked into his jacket pocket, and threatened to kill them if they told anyone, according to an attorney for the family of a student who witnessed the threat, offering the first account of events leading to the shooting from someone in Zwerner’s class.
That afternoon, the 6-year-old did as he promised, authorities said — firing a bullet through Zwerner’s upraised hand and into her chest as she was midway through teaching a lesson.
Zwerner’s lawyer and other educators at the Newport News, Va., school have alleged the shooting came after school administrators downplayed repeated warnings from Zwerner and other teachers about the boy. The incident sparked a staffing shake-up at Richneck and the ouster of Superintendent George Parker III.
The Washington Post interviewed 34 people — including teachers, parents and children at Richneck — and obtained dozens of text messages, school emails and documents to reconstruct what happened inside Richneck that day and in the days and weeks before the shooting, revealing new details about the administration’s failure to manage the 6-year-old’s disciplinary issues and to respond to other reports of troubling student behavior.
The Post learned that the 6-year-old was moved to a half-day schedule due to poor conduct in early September,and was suspended for a day after slamming Zwerner’s phone. But educators had long been vexed by the student, who previously attempted to strangle his kindergarten teacher, according to two school employees and records obtained by The Post.
Diane Toscano, Zwerner’s lawyer, has said teachers relayed several warnings to administrators on the morning of the shooting, including at least three reports that the boy had a gun. The Post interviewed a kindergartner who said the boy threatened to punch her at lunch that day and that she informed a staffer — but that the staffer did little more than give the boy a verbal warning.
In the direct aftermath of the shooting, two second-grade classes were left briefly wandering the hallways in search of a safe place to hide because their classroom was not equipped with doors and they had not rehearsed safety drills, according to one second-grade teacher, one fifth-grade teacher and a parent of a second-grade student, as well as text messages obtained by The Post. A second-grade teacher told The Post she had asked to have doors installed but administrators refused, saying the doors would be too expensive.
Many people interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because the district has asked teachers not to talk with reporters or because they wanted to protect their families’ privacy.
James Ellenson, an attorney for the family of the 6-year-old boy, declined to comment directly on the new reporting but said in a statement that Newport News schools “had a duty to protect all the parties involved, especially the child who needed to be protected from himself.”
Newport News school district spokeswoman Michelle Price declined to comment for this story, as did Parker, the former superintendent, and Toscano, Zwerner’s attorney.
‘We were scared’
Teachers’ fears about the 6-year-old date backto his kindergarten year, when he tried to strangle his teacher, according to a letter Zwerner’s attorney sent to the school system Jan. 24 announcing her intent to sue. The letter was first reported by the Daily Press.
“The shooter had been removed from the school a year prior after he chokedhis teacher until she couldn’t breathe,” says the letter, obtained by The Post through a public records request. It was not immediately clear how a boy so young could have choked an adult. The Post was not able to learn other details of the incident and authorities have not released information about the boy.
Early this fall, as Richneck teachers sought to settle their new crop of students inside the low-slung red-brick building nestled amid trees, news of the 6-year-old’s troubled history circulated swiftly among the staff, according to text messages between teachers.
Less than a week into September, officials switched the 6-year-old to a half-day schedule due to misbehavior — but administrators were already lagging in efforts to accommodate the student, according to Toscano’s letter and to text messages sent between Zwerner and a friend of hers who teaches at the school.
It was not clear what specific incident triggered the schedule change.Toscano wrote in her letter that the 6-year-old “constantly cursed at the staff and teachers and then one day took off his belt on the playground and chased kids trying to whip them.”
On Sept. 5, Zwerner wrote in a text message to her friend that officials were being slow to offer updates on how to handle the child.
“I still haven’t gotten any info about [the student’s] half day schedule,” Zwerner wrote.
The friend wrote back that the 6-year-old “needs to be half days … They better stick to that for your sake.” The friend added that administrators’ “communication and accountability aren’t good again this year.”
As the year progressed, concerns did, too.
Though the 6-year-old was a particular challenge, teachers alleged that administrators’ response to discipline issues was generally lackluster, both for Zwerner’s class of roughly two dozen students and elsewhere in the building.
Harold Belkowitz, an attorney for Richneck parents with a child in Zwerner’s class, said his clients’ child was physically and verbally bullied by classmates during the current school year.He said his clients raised concerns with Richneck and Newport News school officials “numerous times” but that administrators took no action to stop the behavior.
Text messages and a photo shared between teachers show that a student in Zwerner’s class reportedly hit a teacher so hard with a chair that her legs became dotted with green and purple bruises — and that, at another point, a kindergartner was accused of pushing a pregnant teacher to the ground and kicking her in the stomach so hard that she feared for her unborn child, two weeks shy of giving birth. It was not immediately clear how administrators responded to those episodes, although one educator wrote in a text this fall that the bruised teacher had “heard nothing from admin.”
On Nov. 9, the second-grade teacher wrote in a text message to a colleague that she was applying to work in another district because of “how bad the first graders are right now put together with the fact we don’t have doors.”
The second-grade teacher added, referencing administrative failures, “It’s only gonna get worse.”
‘Again nothing was done’
About two months later, on the morning of Jan. 6, the 6-year-old slipped his mother’s gun into his backpack before heading to school, Newport News police have said. Ellenson, the lawyer for the boy’s family, has said the weapon was kept in the mother’s closet under a gun lock. It remains unclear how the boy was able to obtain the weapon.
The boy arrived on campus around 11 a.m., passing a school sign that still wished students “Happy New Year” in capital letters. He was accompanied by his mother, according to a second-grade teacher who said she spoke with the mother in the hallway.
Before that day, due to an unspecified disability, the boy followed a special schedule in which his parents shadowed him to and during class, the family said in a statement last month. On Jan. 6, for unknown reasons, the parents discontinued that plan: “The week of the shooting was the first week when we were not in class with him,” the statement said.
Around 11:05 a.m., the boy was slated to leave Zwerner’s classroom and head along the gray-tiled hallway to lunch, which is held jointly for kindergartners and first-graders, according to a copy of a Richneck schedule obtained by The Post.
Inside the lunchroom, which a Richneck teacher said has white walls lined with posters advising students how to behave respectfully, a kindergarten student was sitting at her lunch table when she spotted the boy, she said in a video call with The Post this month. The girl was interviewed beside her mother; both spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy.
The kindergarten student said she had long wanted to become friends with the 6-year-old. When she saw him that day, she said, she looked steadily in his direction to attract his attention.
Noticing her gaze, she said, the boy walked close to her table and asked, “What are you looking at, little girl?” before jumping forward and shoving himself close to her. He raised his fist to eye level and said, “I’m going to punch you in the face,” she recalled. Scared and sad, the girl raced from her table to grab the nearest school staffer, she said.
The school staffer warned the 6-year-old that punching another student could force a visit to the principal’s office, according to the kindergartner and her mother. The girl’s mother said the staffer spoke on the phone with her about a week after the shooting to try to explain the decision-making process in that moment — and to confess that the boy with the raised fist was the same one who, hours later, shot his teacher.
“They felt that they did the best they could by addressing it to the child,” the kindergartner’s mother said, declining to identify the staffer. “But I disagree.”
By 11:30 a.m., reports that the boy had threatened another child reached Zwerner, according to Toscano, Zwerner’s attorney. Toscano wrote in her letter to the school district that Zwerner took theinformation directly to Assistant Principal EbonyParker,who is not related to the former superintendent with the same last name.
Zwerner visited the assistant principal’s office and told her about the threat, reporting “that the shooter was in a violent mood,” Toscano wrote. “Yet … absolutely nothing is done.”
At 12:20 p.m., after the first-graders finished lunch and sat through a brief “Reading” period, they were supposed to head outside for recess, according to the Richneck daily schedule.
By this point, rumorswere spreading that the boy had brought a weapon to school, according to Toscano. One teacher searched the 6-year-old’s backpack at around 12:30 p.m., Toscano wrote, but found nothing.
Zwerner told a colleague she had glimpsed “the shooter take something out of his backpack and put it in his pocket” and feared it might be a gun, spurring that colleague to bring concerns to Assistant Principal Parker, Toscano wrote in her letter. But Parker ignored the teacher, Toscano wrote, suggesting the boy’s pockets were too small to contain a gun: “Assistant Principal Parker was made aware at the beginning of recess that Ms. Zwerner was afraid the shooter had a gun in his pocket. And again nothing was done.”
Meanwhile, outside at recess, the 6-year-old approached three other students and told them he intended to shoot Zwerner, according to Emily Mapp Brannon, an attorney who is representing the parents of four Richneck families. Brannon provided a statement that details an account of that day given by a boy enrolled in Zwerner’s class.
The 6-year-old showed his fellow students the gun, which he had concealed in the pocket of his jacket, revealing the clip, according to the statement.
“The shooter also threatened the other classmates that if they told on him, he would shoot them,” the statement says.
Two students immediately ran away terrified, according to the statement.
The statement said the boy told the shooter that he wanted to go play in another area of the playground and left for the monkey bars. Not long after, the boy told a teacher about the gun, Brannon said.
Toscano described a similar incident in her letter to the district, writing that a teacher alerted to the recess gun threat by a student told another teacher, who told Assistant Principal Parker. But Parker “responded that she was aware of the threat and the shooter’s backpack had already been searched,” according to Toscano’s letter.
Around the same time, a school guidance counselor also approached the assistant principal to warn her the student might have a gun — marking at least the third warning about a gun Parker received that day.
The guidance counselor “asked Assistant Principal Parker if he could search the shooter’s person for the weapon,” Toscano wrote. “Assistant Principal Parker’s response was no, because the shooter’s mother would be arriving soon to pick up the shooter.”
Parker did not respond to requests for comment for this story. An attorney for Briana Foster Newton, who was Richneck principal at the time, said in a statement that “it would be imprudent to comment on discussions that Mrs. Newton was not a part of.” She has said Newton, who has since been reassigned, was not told the boy might have had a gun that day.
At 12:50 p.m., first-grade recess wrapped up, per the school schedule. The first-graders filed back into Zwerner’s classroom for what was listed on the schedule as math class.
Shortly before 2 p.m., Toscano wrote in her letter, Zwerner “was sitting at her reading table when the shooter, who was sitting at his desk, pulled the gun out of his pocket.” He squeezed the trigger.
‘We all went under the teacher’s table’
Several things happened almost at once after the shot was fired, according to Newport News police. Surveillance video shows between 16 and 20 students fleeing the classroom to seek shelter across the hall. Another school employee ran into Zwerner’s room to restrain the student and continued holding him until police officers arrived on campus. The 6-year-old was ultimately taken to a hospital for a mental health evaluation.
Zwerner was the last to leave her classroom, police have said. She made a right turn and traveled down the hallway before looking back “to make sure every one of those students was safe,” Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew has said.
The rest of the school was plunged into confusion and terror. Alyssa Dooley, who is 8 and in third grade, said a lockdown was announced over her classroom’s loudspeaker shortly after the shot was fired.
“We all went under the teacher’s table,” Alyssa said. “There was crying, and we were scared.”
Down the hall from Zwerner’s classroom, two classes of second-graders had no idea where to go, according to one of the second-grade teachers. Not only did their shared classroom lack doors, but the school had failed to hold a lockdown drill that school year, two Richneck teachers said, leaving the second-grade teachers without a plan.
The second-grade teachers began trying classroom doors until they found the computer lab unlocked, one said. They hustled students inside and sought to keep them calm for about an hour, according to the teacher and a parent of a second-grader, before the principal and police began circulating the building unlocking classroom doors. The adults led the children to the gym to await reunion with their parents.
At the same time, parents began learning of the shooting from news reports — frustrating some, who said they wanted to hear directly from the school.
Mark Anthony Garcia, a parent of a second-grade boy, said he learned of the shooting when his wife called him, herself having gleaned the news from local station WAVY-TV.
“My wife told me to get to the school because there was a shooter at Richneck Elementary,” Garcia said.
Garcia said he jumped in his car and sped to Richneck. He got about a mile and a half away before hitting a police roadblock. A woman said he could park his car in her driveway. He left the vehicle and hurried to the school, where hundreds of parents stood waiting in an area cordoned off by yellow police tape.
As the minutes ticked on, parents paced nervously. Others cried. Some were irate. By 2:45 p.m., Garcia said, police began reuniting anxious mothers and fathers with their children.
Garcia captured the moment on video.
“Everybody have their ID in their hand,” an officer shouted through a megaphone. She told the crowd to form a single line.
Parents burst through the yellow tape toward the school. One woman shouted, “Go! Go!”
Garcia said he met his son in the gym. He gave the boy a big hug and told him he was a hero.
Garcia and his son then drove to a gas station, where they met up with Garcia’s wife, who had been stranded on a different side of the school. The family spilled out of their cars and gathered in a group hug.
Then, together, the boy and his parents said a prayer.
An expression used to discuss the issues facing Great Britain is one that may have relevance, no, not the crowing of King Phillip or anything to do with Monarchy but about Police and their issues there regarding Racism and Misogyny, two issues that plague our own Police across this country.
Standard Police there do not carry guns, so their rate of killing individuals is nowhere near the level of equivalency here, which is about three a day; However, they are no less guilty of concocting charges, beating accused or assaulting them which they do. Police aka Constables are not the charming Bobbies that we see on Television or in Film, they are Officers of the Court in the same way our Police are and with that they often work with impunity. They may not have immunity and Supreme Court decisions that often have enabled if not permitted Police here to rage on, this week a story about a 12 year old in Wisconsin being put in a chokehold with a knee in 2022 at her High School has surfaced, hmm where have we heard of that before? And yet a six year old can have a gun on his person all day and no one would bother to properly search him. Another example of our overwhelming failure to “police” properly. And as the fall back of Memphis continues I would like to take a look at Great Britain and their Police.
**note** I write about this issue because it matters. It matters to me as a Citizen, a Voter, a Woman, a Teacher and Victim. Walk in my shoes for one hour then tell me it does not matter.**
Again there are stories about how the forces often use Race and Gender in which to intimidate and harass individuals. The issues of Racial Profiling is one used in almost all Police dogma. Add to that Culture and Religion have also face of how Police respond and London is a melting pot of many and with that the same issues that we face they face. Poor housing, lower wages and of course increased use of violence often associated with the same groups and with that the rising crime and generalizations about how young men are categorized. It is the same old same old.
I have reprinted one article below about one Officer and his terrorizing women, a man convicted of 48 sexual assaults during his 17 year plus career. They suspect more but the level of this is disturbing to read. This comes after the Murder, Kidnapping and Rape of another woman in Britain during the lockdown by another Officer. And with that protests and numerous accusations by Women about similar stories and encounters with Police regarding these issues. Irony that there Britain as they investigated found it to be widespread and not the “one bad apple” Yes I wrote about that very expression the other day and with that you have to ask what it is that draws these individuals into this work? Power, control and utter disregard for humanity I guess.
There are stories about how many Black men have been railroaded into criminal charges without proper representation and in turn convicted of crimes they have not committed. Sound familiar? Stop and Frisk, yeah they have it there too. It was in fact taken from the American playbook.
I urge you to read this horrific tale of this Police Officer and his reign of abuse and terror on Women and know that it is everywhere, anywhere, all at once.
Rape, False Imprisonment and Threats: A London Officer’s Crimes Laid Bare
The New York Times
A sentencing hearing for David Carrick, who pleaded guilty to 49 counts of sexual assault and rape involving at least a dozen women over 17 years, revealed new details of his shocking abuse.
The police officer told one woman he was the “safest person she could be with,” before threatening her with a gun and raping her repeatedly. He shut another woman in a small closet under his staircase, holding her there for hours on end. One of the women he sexually assaulted was a fellow police officer.
At a sentencing hearing in London on Monday, prosecutors laid out the shocking details of the sexual violence carried out by the officer, David Carrick, who raped, assaulted, and abused at least 12 women during his nearly two-decade police career.
The case of Mr. Carrick, whose crimes went unpunished for nearly 20 years despite earlier reports of violence against women, is the latest and among the most damaging to cast a spotlight on abuse perpetrated by some members of the Metropolitan Police, the force which covers London.
The service has been plagued by scandal in recent years, as a number of crimes against women by current and former officers have come to light. Critics say the force has made little progress in changing a culture where officers have long acted with impunity and closed ranks when accusations emerged.
The sheer scale and brutality of Mr. Carrick’s crimes, along with the horrific killing in 2021 of a young woman, Sarah Everard, by another London officer, have raised profound questions about how such violence by serving members of the force has gone unchecked.
Mr. Carrick, 48, joined the Metropolitan Police in 2001, before later transferring to a unit tasked with parliamentary and diplomatic protection duties. Last month, he pleaded guilty to 49 charges of carrying out crimes against 12 women, including 24 counts of rape, as well as numerous charges of sexual assault, controlling and coercive behavior and false imprisonment.
The crimes took place over 17 years from 2003 to 2020, according to prosecutors, and all were committed at the time he was a serving officer with the Metropolitan Police Service.
During the sentencing hearing that began at Southwark Criminal Court in London on Monday, Tom Little, one of the prosecutors on the case, called Mr. Carrick’s crimes a series of “violent and brutal sexual offenses” against multiple victims. All of the women were granted anonymity, as is customary for the victims of sexual crimes.
One of the women Mr. Carrick attacked was a fellow police officer who revealed that he attacked her when they were working together in 2004. She said that she had been reluctant to report the assault because of the culture in the police force at the time.
Mr. Little described how Mr. Carrick had threatened another victim, with whom he was in a relationship, with his police baton and sent her photos of his police-issued gun, telling her that she had to obey him. He watched her on a camera in their shared home, and falsely imprisoned her, “punishing” her with acts of violence or shutting her in a small closet under the stairs, Mr. Little said.
One victim, Darciane Nunes Da Silva, 43, waived her right to anonymity and has told British news outlets that she believes there may be more victims of Mr. Carrick who have yet to come forward.
Mr. Carrick’s defense attorney spoke briefly on Monday to say that his client’s guilty plea signaled that he “accepts full responsibility” for his actions.
The hearing will continue on Tuesday. Mr. Carrick faces a sentence of up to life in prison.
Last month, after Mr. Carrick pleaded guilty, Shilpa Shah, the senior crown prosecutor in the case, said that the vast number of charges for rape and serious sexual assault over a 17-year period was “one of the most significant cases” with which prosecutors had dealt.
“It was harrowing seeing how victims were relentlessly manipulated; they were financially cut off and isolated from their friends and family and repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted,” Ms. Shah said in a statement. “Carrick took so much from them both physically and mentally.”
Mr. Carrick was officially fired by the Metropolitan Police last month after his guilty plea. His case is the latest in a series of crimes of violence against women attributed to serving and former London police officers. Perhaps most prominent was the 2021 killing of Ms. Everard, who was abducted and killed by a London police officer and whose death set off a national reckoning.
That officer, Wayne Couzens, who also worked for the Metropolitan Police, used his position of authority to lure Ms. Everard to her death. He confronted Ms. Everard as she walked home from a friend’s house, said he was arresting her for supposedly breaking pandemic restrictions, ordered her to get into his car, and then abducted, raped and murdered her.
In 2021, Mr. Couzens was sentenced to life in prison for Ms. Everard’s murder.
For a time, Mr. Carrick was assigned to the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command, which contained hundreds of officers and was the same unit that Mr. Couzens worked in.
Amid the pressure building on the force, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Cressida Dick, announced that she was stepping down last February.
Last month, her replacement, Mark Rowley, who took over in September, said that the force had “a practical plan for turning things around” but warned that the public should “prepare for more painful stories” to emerge as the force began to review a series of allegations.
The police service is reviewing 1,633 cases of alleged sexual offenses and domestic violence that involve more than 1,000 officers and staff members.
Right after thoughts and prayers, comes the denial about access and availability of guns, followed by a demand for mental health and better treatment and diagnosis prior to the maniac LEGALLY buying the guns and the ammo, the camo/body armor gear and the rest needed to carry out their plan. This plan is loosely defined but often spelled out or ruminated on social media as a type of acknowledgement and of course elegy as I presume that in many of these cases the maniac believes that he will be killed during his onslaught of rage, if they don’t commit suicide first as the Cops come barricading through the door, or sauntering through after about an hour or so of debate and discussion on the maniac and his fire power capabilities.
In the last few active shooting cases few have died at their own hand. Las Vegas and Walmart are the two that chose to kill themselves prior to capture or despite of it. Do we ever really know what prompted the Vegas shooter? Yeah I don’t either. There was the Naval Yard shooter, remember him? Yeah I don’t either. But this was written in 2013 after the attack and there has little changed with regards to stats. But the AK 15 is the weapon of choice and has been used to kill at this point 36 people but the year is not over folks!
As for the remaining shooters, many are taken into custody in a routine traffic stop, in Buffalo, Highland Park, or walking home as in the case of the North Carolina shooter (remember that one? No me either) or the Stoneman Douglas shooter or the Michigan Shooter who was going home to parents who had fled the scene and a manhunt took place to find them, so there you go. Many parents were killed prior to the onslaught and the problem with parental supervision and of course their own role in purchasing the weapon does little to stop the violence. Some parents were notified regarding the mental health of their child and some had contacted authorities regarding their child – Santa Barbara and Colorado Springs shooter are examples of such. Michigan shooter’s parents literally ignored the signs and we know that the Mother of Sandy Hook shooter purchased the gun but was aware of her son’s struggles and it was all too little to late. The Buffalo shooter hid the signs and it appears that the Grandmother of the Uvalde shooter took in her Grandson as he had problems with his Mother as well. Who doesn’t have a problem with their Mother but killing her or anyone else does not solve it in the least. But guns are often used to resolve disputes. This is a list of all the mass shootings in the US in 2022. All of them are mental health issues?
I reprint the article below from The Washington Post about a Mental Health Nurse who tried to end her own life and after release from care she returned the job that led her down her own path to struggle with mental health. I know that this year after being abused by the Neighbor in 946 and the endless bullshit at Ferris High School by a sole Administrator I debated on ending my life. I had survived attempted murder and rape being drugged and left for dead and with that sustained Traumatic Brain Injury which one of the many side effects is Suicide Ideation. I am not sure it was the injury itself that contributed to it but the endless conflict and issues that came thereafter, from the supposed Justice System to the Medical Industrial Complex, but they did little to help resolve my endless spiral downwards into Depression. I left for perhaps the worst place in America to seek help, Nashville Tennessee, but in spite of it I did get out and in some ways better than I arrived. It took a pandemic to finally heal me, irony no lost. But the reality is that I did it with my own methods and plans and since that time I rely on them as I have the last six years in recovering from perhaps the worst thing that happened to me and inevitably led me here today. When I say I want to be alone I do mean it; however, I do not object to some human contact but it must be on my terms – No compromise.
The story of this Nurse is telling it also explains the drain you see on many who work in the Medical Industrial Complex and why frankly it is so fucking shitty. She is not capable of handling the demands and the resources available lack in which to provide assistance. Shocking that in all places the liberal mecca of Seattle does not have it figured out. Been to San Francisco, the bookend of that? Not any better. Read San Francsicko to understand how often Liberal policies do more harm than good with regards to the crisis that lives in their streets. But alas good Liberals like good Conservatives don’t do well with criticism.
I grew up in Seattle where being Liberal was expected and accordingly accommodated with the idea that like a uniform, their is a code, a speech, a manner of being that is conformity in unity. In other words: Being different like everyone else. With that there is little tolerance for dissension among the ranks and you will be ostracized and demonized the same way Liberals are in Nashville. They are tolerated as long as the check clears but like Seattle is a city of shiny keys and they dangle them to attract the migrants and the money and with that you too must conform or you will be an outsider looking in. Nashville is still the Bible Belt it is in Tennessee where the red coats are not just the uniform of the chosen it is a way of living. It is zealotry at its finest and with that many of the laws and rules you are seeing appear in other red states began as a lab experiment there first. It is a nightmare of which I am glad this time I am awake. The South woke me to the real problem in America, sinister poverty and religion, which are the true twins of America’s endless Civil and Cultural wars.
Mental health is too broad and too complicated to say that it is a single issue behind gun violence. We don’t have enough medical care providers to adequately treat and diagnose issues that emerge and we have become a nation dependent upon pharmacopia to fix that what ails you. We are truly fucked here without dinner. I can count the two Therapists I found useful in my time and one Suicide Hotline woman who just last month talked me off the ledge of desperation. Too few and too far in between frankly. And this woman’s story explains why.
Fixing the broken lovelies
As American cities deteriorate, a psychiatric nurse reckons with the high price of compassion
By Eli Saslow The Washington Post November 20, 2022
SEATTLE — She’d been released from the psychiatric ward with advice on the best ways to limit additional trauma and stress, so Naomi Morris, 46, walked back into her nursing job carrying a notebook of reminders. “You are not Atlas,” she’d written. “The city’s suffering does not fall on your shoulders.” She paused in the hallway to do a deep-breathing exercise and then sat down in a conference room with a half-dozen of her co-workers at a nonprofit program that served people who were homeless or formerly homeless.
“So, what all did I miss?” she asked.
“Pretty much more of the same,” one of her co-workers said, as he turned on a projector screen and pulled up a complete list of their clients, 84 of the sickest and most vulnerable people in Seattle. Most of them had been chronically homeless before getting placed into subsidized apartment buildings downtown. Many suffered from severe psychiatric disorders, at least half were addicted to methamphetamine or opioids, several were homicidal and suicidal, and ever since the pandemic began altering the character of American cities, almost every one of them had been getting progressively worse.
“He assaulted his neighbor and started a fire in his room last night,” read a caseworker’s daily report about one of Naomi’s patients, as she took out a pen and began to write notes. “Delusional. Paranoid. Police and fire called to the scene.”
“Spotted walking through traffic wearing bizarre attire,” read another daily report, on her next patient. “Menacing, disheveled, open wounds to face and ear.”
“Using a bucket as a toilet,” read another.
“Lonely. Sent texts asking how to hold a gun in case she decides to shoot herself.”
For the last two and a half years, this was how Naomi and her team of caseworkers, clinicians and addiction specialists at the nonprofit Downtown Emergency Service Center had started each morning: by making a day-by-day accounting of the rising mental health crisis that had overwhelmed and transformed Seattle and so many other places in the country. Just like most major metropolitan areas, from New York to Denver to Los Angeles, the greater King County area had experienced a historic spike in homelessness, suicides, homicides and drug overdoses in the last few years, overwhelming its already under-resourced mental health systems. The average wait time for inpatient psychiatric treatment had risen to a record 44 days. The Seattle Police Department had lost 27 percent of its force in the last two years and was increasingly reluctant to intervene in any situation involving a mental health crisis because of new laws limiting use of force. The government-run crisis team that had once responded within hours to evaluate and detain people who were considered an imminent danger to themselves or to others was now backlogged by weeks or sometimes months.
“So many parts of the system are breaking down,” one King County politician had said, and that meant it was increasingly Naomi alone who responded to each of her patients’ medical emergencies, who tried to administer their monthly antipsychotic medications, who tested their drugs for deadly traces of fentanyl, who treated them for lice, who coaxed them into appropriate clothing, who counseled them through violent delusions, who was herself often threatened and sometimes assaulted, and who occasionally went to conduct routine welfare checks and found her patients dead.
And it had been Naomi again whom King County chose to represent all of its front-line health-care workers in August and September, when she stood alongside local leaders as they declared a citywide mental health emergency and proposed a $1.25 billion tax levy in part to fund five new mental health crisis centers. “We need to fix what’s broken, and I’m part of what’s broken,” she’d said from the lectern in August, and then two months later she’d taken the day off from work, sent a few goodbye messages, and tried to poison herself by overdosing on insulin. She’d spent three days in the hospital and five more in the psych ward processing all of her recent trauma, and now she’d come back to work to find out if what had happened to her and to her city over the last few years was in fact still fixable.
“Attacked his oven and other appliances last night in what he says was self-defense,” went the next daily report, and Naomi closed her eyes and counted her breaths.
“Refusing meds and making disturbing comments about children — concerning given his history.”
“Oh no. Not again,” Naomi said. She’d been visiting that patient in his downtown apartment throughout the pandemic, and when he was taking his antipsychotic medication, he could be charming and polite. But whenever he stopped taking his medication, he acted out in frightening ways around the city. He’d been arrested and briefly jailed for trespassing, use of a weapon, harassment, indecent exposure and at least a half-dozen assaults.
“I don’t want this to turn into the next major incident,” she said. “He’s really talking about kids?”
“Yeah. It’s not headed in a good direction,” her co-worker said.
“Do we have a plan?” she asked, and she looked around the table for a moment even as she realized she already knew the plan, because it was the same for every patient on her list. At least nine people were spiraling into full-fledged crisis, and she was the only nurse on her shift.
“I’ll go see what I can do to help him,” she said.
She’d spent the last decade working as a psychiatric nurse in the most destitute parts of the city because she thought every crisis could be overcome. She’d dealt with mental illness in her own family. She’d bounced through foster care systems and abusive relationships, and she’d been homeless in Seattle herself in the late 1990s before going back to school. Her life had convinced her that anyone was capable of getting better, but lately that belief was being challenged, because each time she went to see a patient she found herself preparing for the worst.
She put up her hair so nobody could yank it. She took out her earrings so they wouldn’t get pulled. She packed a bag of antipsychotic drugs and overdose-reversal medications and then drove downtown to a subsidized apartment building called the Morrison, with 200 units reserved mostly for people with severe and persistent psychiatric disorders. Outside the entrance, six people were huddled together smoking methamphetamine. A middle-aged man in the lobby was banging his head against a trash can. A woman wearing no pants stepped off the elevator, spotted Naomi, and started throwing punches at the air. “You African,” she shouted. “You filthy Nigerian.”
“Good morning, lovelies,” Naomi said, smiling and greeting each person by name. She walked deeper into the lobby and saw the patient she’d come looking for, the man who had been refusing his medication and having delusions about children. He was mumbling to himself, pacing and spooning yogurt into his mouth with his fingers. Naomi walked over and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Okay, my friend. What arm are we doing today?” she asked, hoping to catch him off guard and administer his shot of medication quickly, so there was no time for indecision or debate.
“Huh?” he asked. “Who sent you?”
“Nobody. It’s just time again for your monthly dose,” she said, as she pulled out a vial of the long-acting medication that helped to keep him stable and limit his delusions. “Right arm or left?”
He tucked his arms behind his back. “No way,” he said. “There’s bad stuff in there.”
“It’s the same medication you’ve been taking for years,” she said. “It’s been good for you.”
“You don’t understand. People are trying to kill me!” he shouted, and he slammed his yogurt into a trash can and hurried past her. Naomi put his medication back into her bag, walked into the office of the building’s clinical director and shook her head.
“No luck, huh?” Tim Clark said. He pulled up a file on his computer and showed Naomi the patient’s latest incident report, from a few days earlier: “He said, ‘Someone is poisoning me and wants me to hurt a boy. I don’t hurt children. I don’t want to. But she said that’s the only way she would stop poisoning me.’”
“He’s decompensating,” Naomi said. “It’s probably going to get worse.”
“What the hell do we do?” Clark asked. Before the pandemic, the plan would have been fairly straightforward. Whenever people became an imminent threat to themselves or to others, the staff at the Morrison would call for one of the designated crisis responders (DCRs), the only people in King County with the legal power to evaluate and then commit someone to mandatory mental health treatment. Usually, within a few days, the person in crisis would be evaluated and then probably hospitalized for weeks or often months, until they’d stabilized enough to return to the community. But now hundreds more people were in crisis all across King County, those crises were becoming ever more urgent, and the understaffed DCR teams couldn’t keep up with a record number of requests.
Their average wait time to evaluate someone exhibiting homicidal or suicidal tendencies in King County had tripled during the pandemic, to an average of 277 hours. The staff at the Morrison had been waiting two months for a crisis evaluation on a resident who often ran through the hallways naked and compulsively flooded her apartment with so much water and human waste that it ran down the hallway, into the elevator shaft, and through the ceiling in the main lobby, causing more than $60,000 in damage to the building. They’d been waiting several weeks for crisis response on a resident who kept threatening people with a pocket knife; and on another, who had spent four weeks walking around with a dislocated arm, his condition worsening as he remained too disoriented to accept treatment; and on another, who was hoarding garbage in his apartment and defecating on the floor.
It increasingly felt to Clark like many of his residents were being neglected by the system, left to suffer and unravel in any variety of horrific ways. Thirty residents had died inside the building since the beginning of the pandemic, more than four times the normal rate. Overdoses had doubled, and assaults were up.
“I hate that he keeps talking about kids,” Clark said. “I’d sleep a lot easier if he’d just take his medication. He’s capable of some pretty scary stuff.”
“We can’t force him to take it, but I’ll keep trying,” Naomi said. “I’ll come back every day. I’ll be here tomorrow.”
“But what about between now and then?” Clark asked.
“I’m going to try not to think about it,” she said.
Her therapist had told her she was suffering from post-traumatic stress and work-induced anxiety. Innocuous sounds startled her several times each day. Her hands sometimes shook involuntarily. “Clear evidence of both personal trauma and secondary trauma,” her therapist had called it. She’d suggested that Naomi consider changing jobs, but Naomi wasn’t ready to abandon her patients, so each morning she kept going into work with a list of people who required urgent care.
The next morning, she was back at the Morrison, hoping to try again with the patient who was talking about children. She knocked on his door and called out his name. “I’ve got your medicine,” she said, but he didn’t respond. She took out her notebook, put a question mark next to his name, and moved on to the next patient on her list.
It was a man lying shirtless in his apartment and compulsively rubbing his head. There was a dead mouse in his kitchen and a plate of rotting food in the microwave. “Why are you here? Did I start killing people or something?” the patient asked, genuinely confused, and then he started to cry. “No. You haven’t killed anybody,” Naomi assured him. “You’re doing just fine.” He refused to take his medication, so she picked up some of his trash and left the pills next to his bed.
Next on her list was a man who took off his shirt and kept trying to hug her as she gently pushed him away. Next was a woman who had overdosed two days earlier at a nearby public fountain. Next was a woman who refused to acknowledge that she had cancer and instead believed she was pregnant with 100 snake babies. Next were three more patients, who needed monthly antipsychotic injections, and then finally there was only one name left on her list — a patient suffering from paranoid schizophrenia who was five days overdue for his medication and had started harassing neighbors and punching walls.
“Can you come down to the lobby for your shot?” she asked him, over the phone, and to her surprise a few minutes later he was striding off the elevator, smiling at her, flashing a thumbs up. He followed her to a small room in the apartment lobby and rolled up his sleeves as he watched her prepare the shot. She showed him the label on his medication and explained all the likely side effects: drooling, vomiting, restlessness, headaches.
“I don’t like being scared,” he said.
“You’re safe,” she reassured him. “I’m here to help.”
“Just don’t poison me, okay?” he said, and as he watched her put on her gloves, he began to fidget and whisper to himself.
“Go away,” he said. “Shut up. … No, stop that.”
“Are you all right?” Naomi asked. “Do you still want to do this?”
He nodded at her and then clenched his fist and banged his thigh. “Get out of my head, idiot,” he said to himself. “Go away! … I won’t do that. … I refuse.”
“It’s just me here,” Naomi said, gently massaging his arm, as she looked out the doorway to see if anyone else was nearby in case he became more agitated. The lobby was empty. The person who usually sat at the front desk was outside smoking a cigarette. She tried to focus on giving the injection instead of thinking of all the ways during the pandemic that patient interactions had sometimes gone horribly wrong: The 14 times in the last year when she’d been pushed, grabbed, slapped, sexually harassed or verbally assaulted. The nurse in a similar job who had recently torn tendons in her shoulder while fighting off an attempted rape in a patient’s room. The Seattle social worker who had been meeting with a mental health client in her office in 2021 when he stabbed her 12 times, killing her.
And then there was the last time Naomi had been alone with this same patient sitting across from her now, just a few months earlier, when he’d looked at her with wild eyes and started growling and saying something she couldn’t quite understand. “What was that?” she’d asked him. “Are you a martyr?” he’d said, and she was confused. “What?” she’d asked again. “Are you a martyr?” he’d screamed, and then he’d gotten out of his chair, grabbed her shoulders and ripped off her N95 mask. He’d pinned her against the wall and pressed his hands against her face, repeating something about blood and sacrifice until someone in the lobby overheard the assault and pulled him away. “Oh, Naomi. I’m so sorry,” he’d said, a few moments later, once the delusion had passed. “Please don’t call the police. I’m sick. I need to take my medicine.” She’d accepted his apology and given him the shot, because that was her job, and now she’d come back to administer his medication again.
“Try to relax your shoulder,” she told him.
“To all the Gods and all the saints, please forgive me,” he said to himself, as he nodded and stared up at the ceiling. Naomi took a deep breath and raised the needle.
“No!” he shouted. He jumped out of his chair and stared down at her. She raised her hands and backed away. “It’s me. It’s Naomi,” she said.
He banged his fist against his knee. “Someone will pay,” he said, and then he turned around and ran out of the room.
A few nights later, she sat down for tea with her newest colleague on the nonprofit team, a nurse whom she’d started calling “White Jesus.” Josh Potter arrived from Tennessee a few months earlier with long hair, a deeply religious background and a pious selflessness when it came to caring for their patients.
“How are you feeling about this crazy job?” Naomi asked him.
“We get to care for some really broken people,” he said. “It’s about total nonjudgment and seeing the value in every human life.”
“Compassion. Harm reduction,” she said, nodding, because they believed in the same things. She drank her tea and looked at him again.
“But doesn’t it make you exhausted?” she asked
He shrugged. “Some days, but it’s something I believe in. We’re making a difference.”
“That’s how I used to feel,” she said, and then she started to tell him about the ways that both the city and her perspective had begun to shift during the pandemic, after commuters, tourists and even most other social workers stopped going downtown and many of her patients were left increasingly on their own without the adequate medical care or societal guardrails to keep their illnesses in check. She’d put on a mask, suffered through three rounds of covid and continued to visit her patients each day. Her team’s goal was to help people improve and then graduate to less-intensive levels of care, but in the last three years she could only think of a half-dozen patients who had graduated. “No wins and so many brutal losses,” she said, and she told him about the 19-year-old who had been found dead inside her tent, the patient who had jumped out a seventh-story window, and the 56-year-old whom she’d discovered in his apartment a few days after his death.
She had yet to tell her all of her co-workers about what had been happening to her during those months, even as she’d started talking to a therapist about the hardships of her work. She’d taken up crochet. She’d booked a vacation to Belize. She’d rallied her co-workers to fight for better working conditions. And when none of that seemed to alleviate her anxiety, she’d moved out of Seattle to a quiet condo in the suburbs with a view of a lake, where it turned out she still couldn’t get away from her fears, her depression or her rising sense of anger and hopelessness for both her patients and herself, until one morning in early October when she decided to call in sick. She stayed on her couch and watched birds fly over the lake. She ignored a phone call from work. She took out the insulin she used to treat her diabetes and decided in that moment to give herself several times the normal dose, which made her start to feel dreamy and numb. She texted a co-worker to please take care of her cat. She texted her sister goodbye. She took another massive dose of insulin, which made her blood pressure drop as she slipped in and out of consciousness, and the next thing she remembered she was riding in the back of an ambulance with paramedics who explained that her sister had probably saved her life by calling 911.
“Sorry you ended up with a nursing partner who’s such a hot dumpster fire,” she told Josh, and his smile seemed so kind and understanding that she told him what she’d been thinking about over the last several days. The doctors in the psych ward had recommended a partial hospitalization program to help her deal with trauma, which would require her to leave work for at least a few months. Maybe she’d come back after that, or maybe she’d look for a different nursing job where she could see more evidence of healing.
“I have nothing left,” she said. “I need to go away for a while.”
“Get yourself right,” he said. “Take some time.”
“I know it’s what I need, but I’m not sure how I’m going to do it,” she said. “I’m a psychiatric nurse. That’s who I am. We have all these people suffering, and I’m just going to leave them behind?”
“You can’t help anyone by running yourself into the ground,” he said, and she nodded and then thanked him.
“I have a few things I still need to do,” she said.
Early the next morning, she drove back to the Morrison and saw an ambulance and a police car parked outside. “Oh, no,” she said. She hurried to the elevator and took it up to the room of the patient who had been having delusions about children and then knocked on his door.
“Hello? It’s Naomi,” she called out. She waited a few seconds and then knocked again. She leaned into the door to listen, and she heard the sound of shuffling feet and then footsteps coming closer in the hallway behind her. She swung around and braced herself.
“Good morning, Naomi,” said one of the building’s employees, smiling and carrying a cup of coffee.
“Oh, God. You scared me,” Naomi said. She pointed toward the apartment door. “Have you seen him? I noticed the police outside.”
“Oh, that was for someone else — a fight in the elevator,” the employee said. “But I did see him a while ago wandering around upstairs. He needs that shot bad.”
She thanked him and went upstairs to another apartment where her patient sometimes went to use heroin, and where he’d overdosed and been revived by a friend a few months earlier. The door was partway open. She called out, but nobody answered. “God, I hate this,” she said. She reached into her bag to locate her overdose-reversal medication and then peered through the door, half-expecting to find her patient on the floor. She could see four used syringes on the kitchen table and dozens of fast-food wrappers scattered across the ground. A handwritten sign had been taped to the wall: “Home of the forgetful and the forgotten.”
“Anyone here?” she asked, and she was about to step into the room when her cellphone rang. It was one of her co-workers, calling to tell Naomi about another patient who said she was being held captive in her apartment by a man who wanted to hurt her. “Is it real or a delusion?” Naomi asked, and the co-worker said she wasn’t sure. “I’ll go check,” Naomi said, but before she could hang up, the co-worker started telling her about another patient, who was running naked in a public stairwell. The woman’s landlord had notified the county’s designated crisis responders, but they said they wouldn’t be able to come for at least another week.
Naomi hung up and tried to decide which emergency to respond to first, but before she could make up her mind, she heard a door open behind her and saw the patient she’d been searching for step out into the hall. He was shaking his head erratically and mumbling to himself.
“Hey!” she said, trying her best to sound cheerful.
“Get lost,” he told her.
“I just want —”
“Get the hell away from me! I’m on a mission,” he said, as he clapped his hands and rushed by.
“I’m trying to help you,” Naomi called out, but all she could do was watch as he went out the doors and into the city. She stood alone in the hallway.
Regardless if you have had Covid or not, the issue of “Long Covid” is one that will be a secondary one for decades to come. Will it become a reason for many to be declared disabled and in turn require them to enroll into Social Security Disability? Be added to the list of Disabilities currently on the EOC protected list? And will it become a diagnosed condition as listed by the American Medical Association? Well if money is involved yes. What will be the problem is will insurance cover the treatments and how is this diagnosed in a way that can enable providers to be sure this is what defines “Long Covid” as there is no string nor consistent symptoms that follow the protocol of most illnesses. And let’s be honest, the Medical System fails on many counts to diagnose properly outright, so I don’t expect this to be different.
America’s Doctor, Fauci (who again I personally loathe but hey go at it you be you and love the guy) has claimed Long Covid will be an insidious health emergency in the future. So there you go folks more is coming.
I have written many posts on the Cognitive Bias by Physicians and with that the most recent on how they treat and mistreat the Disabled. Since the nascent days of Covid where the largest portion of individuals diagnosed with Covid were elderly (check), of color (check), had Comorbidity (check check), largely poor and/or uninsured it may explain the rising deaths, the failures to diagnose properly and in turn offer the care that would have enabled many to recover quickly without long term care needs. And that it appears that access and availability raises its ugly head when it comes to Covid deaths.
Anyone who has had an experience in an American Emergency Room knows it is a crapshoot where the house wins and you lose on average. I read this in the Guardian from a reporter who was so afraid of taking her partner to the ER she nearly contributed to her death. That is some reticence right there, but I get it I really do. Health equity and parity exists when it comes to medical care and quality long (pun intended) before Covid.
It appears that Women seem to suffer more from “Long Covid” over men, and that said at the present the numbers are switching to more White people being hospitalized currently from Covid than those of Color. And with that I suspect that is also defined by the politics of the vaccine and the lack of even simple safe protocols that would at least reduce transmission not followed for the same reasons. Which does lend to this issue that States which are the definitively “red” in their color with regards to their Legislative component, the life expectancy of the overall population is reduced. A study found:
“Especially strong associations were observed between certain domains and specific causes of death: between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labour domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and CVD [cardiovascular] mortality.”
According to the National Council of State Legislatures, as of June this year Republicans controlled 61% of state legislatures and Democrats 35%. In terms of whole state governments, Republicans controlled 46% and Democrats 12%, with 12 states divided.
The study authors also noted that American life expectancy as a whole is lower than in most high-income countries, “fall[ing] between … Cuba and Albania”.
Yes, Cuba has better medical care. And irony it is right near Florida, where the old go and well die. Yes folks the majority of deaths from Ian were the elderly and with that the official death toll is like all of them, rigged, as they don’t count deaths that were connected but not caused by the hurricane. In other words your ventilator stopped due to no electricity but you did not drown or get blown out of your house and crushed. Okay then. But those who did survive are left with little to nothing often making one wonder if the Golden Years is less gold.
But mortality is being challenged in both Red and Blue States, due to both drugs and guns. Again this week another BOY, yes he was all of 19, took a cadre of arsenal to the school he had just graduated from the prior year and managed to ONLY kill two before he was taken down by Police. And of course he cited, loneliness, no friends, no girlfriend and being isolated that led him to become violent. Well folks that describes a big portion of the population and yet we don’t feel compelled to take arms and kill. But then again that the age of these shooters are now in their teens is not surprising. The age is declining while access to guns is rising and that enables them to get them legally and without issue to act upon their most base of emotions – anger. To say that sex and access to having healthy normal functioning relationships also contributes to this and the rise of the Incel is being tracked by the FBI. And with the issues surrounding sexual identity, education, book banning, and the like expect more to follow.
And with this it means going to the local ER that may or may not be prepared to handle these kinds of injuries and if they are children we know that many communities are closing children’s wings and services which means they do not have the medical equipment and staff trained to handle smaller bodies and their specific needs, so they will likely die or have serious traumatic injuries that will result from delayed response. Good times here folks!
We are fucked here without dinner. If Climate Change doesn’t end the world a 19 year old boy armed with an AK 15 will do it for you. The loss of working age men and women to drugs and the endless script of pharmacopia being dealt will destroy another generation. And lastly disease and lack of medical care and treatment. We know the vaccine works in offsetting the worst aspects of Covid but that also means that Paxaloid does as well, either/or but soon neither/nor as the Government has purchased what we believe is the last of Boosters, Vaccines and treatments and soon those will be on the backs of the Insured or not. So what costs us nothing now may soon be very very expensive. And with that we are on our own. Well we always were. Hmm does that mean I can get a gun or some drugs to ease the pain? Well one I need a Doctor, the other just head to retail store or Craigslist. Kind of amusing I think I can get drugs that way too.
While the Supreme Court Decision overturning Roe was a salvo to the religious right it was also a great reward to White Supremacists. They are sure that Immigrants and “others” are taking over the position of majority in America. The fear of interracial marriage, Gay Marriage and in turn their role in Surrogate parenting are all issues that these odd groups have in common. Add to the idea that one can change Gender and be in your private male spaces, locker rooms and toilets, terrify them. What if one of them found themselves with a woman who was in fact once a man? OH NO MR.BILL! All of it always boils down to SEX when it comes to men. They assess and evaluate everyone based on their “fuckability” quotient; Facebook started that way and that is online dating in spades. A current memoir from a former Goldman Sachs Analyst discusses the misogyny and sexual harassment while under their employ, which of course has been memorialized by many men in the industry, Wolf on Wall Street anyone? But with this tome, immediately Goldman denies the allegations. What.Ever.
White Supremacy is the epitome of toxic masculinity. The fact that they were costumes, have theme songs and gestures are all akin to some type of nutfuck fraternity, right down to hazing rituals which include abuse, protest and planning to kidnap or harm those they fell impede their move, no march, to their righteous place in the front of the line.
By forcing women to have limited access to reproduction methods, and yes folks Birth Control is coming, they are sure that the breeding plan to ensure white births will occur and that the “coloreds” will stop fucking I guess as they fear that they cannot manage their own. I am not really sure if there is any logic here as again many of the Orthodox community, the Latin and Black communities are family oriented and religious so they are already conflicted with the issue of Abortion but not to the point that I believe they are willing to stop others from doing so. The reality is that the Black and Brown communities have so little access to health care, particularly pre-natal, it is highly likely that this movement to discontinue access to family planning will only contribute to further deaths of both Mothers and their infants. And that folks is the plan. How convenient or ironic? I doubt these idiots think in that fashion but it has to be known at some point by someone in those groups that death by “accident” or “incident” is not lost. The same way the War on Drugs imprisoned many Black men for decades and affected the larger economic growth of that community. I am not sure this is complex math or a secret in any sense.
The memos and letters and of course as we move into the trials of these players and their role on January 6th, more will come to light. But the reality is that they are not going away, not in the least. They may be underground right now but the reality is that they heavily funded by some dark money, they have a large amount of individuals running for office across the country and they are very very motivated. Trump may have opened the Pandora Box on this but they have been here a lot longer and in the wings waiting for their moment to rise up and announce their position in America. And that is also based heavily in religious doctrine so while Evangelical crackpots are not necessarily racist they have a strong book of myths in which they used to determine one’s place in society, a book full of misogyny and racism that comes in handy when defending one’s beliefs.
There is a book on the Proud Boys coming out and it may be a must read for those who feel worried about what is arising across the country in terms of a Civil War. I for one feel that is a bit of stretch as this country is much too large, too intertwined to have the divisions of States as they did during the Civil War. Economics do not allow for that type of conflict but there will be a continuing divide in our Congress and States with regards to Civil Rights as we have come to know them. These include access to voting, education, work and of course reproductive and health care. The take America back is one of historical relevance to a time when equality meant, that what we give you, not what you can take on your own terms. Think the bathroom access for Trans kids and that is what I believe will happen, that said there will not be a third bathroom but a no choice one forcing you to either never use said toilet or return to the gender identity you were born with at least during your time in school or in the world I guess. Gender neutral bathrooms, the single toilet concept apparently not an option. And the press to have national laws to dictate freedoms, those regarding identity, sexuality or reproduction will make the rounds and fail repeatedly, including ones to prohibit or mandate as in the case of Mx. Graham’s attempt at a 15 week national ban on abortion. But s/he looks so good standing there all sweaty with a bunch of ladies who prove that most of this issue comes from whom? Women. They are proud alright and they are the Mothers of very PROUD boys.
I truly have a problem with Women, I always have. They have been my strongest critics and often my biggest hurdle when it comes to belonging. They are threatened by my own sexuality, as I own it; They are threatened by my intellect. My still favorite criticism was that I am “analytical”; They are threatened by my independence and lack of neediness when it comes to belonging to a clique. Hey if you have seen Mean Girls that is what young girls are like, and having spent the better part of 30 years in and out of public education I see what Girls do to each other. All of it over what? Boys. As if there is no other acclaim or attention worth having. How proud their Mothers are. Again folks this type of behavior is all learned, racism, sexism, homophobia and of course my personal favorite ‘ism – elitism. Most of all of this centers on class and status. Fuck you and fuck you again. We are not a Meritocracy we are a Dynasty without Joan Collins as the Matriarch. We have much more in common with the Indian Caste system than we do with our supposed Democratic notion. Did you not watch the Queen’s funeral? Well I didn’t, but the class and status roles in England’s system is not even close to ours as we don’t make it that easy with varying labels and titles provided through birth or through marital consort. Game of Thrones makes it easier to see how a Monarchy works and we are not that bizarre and with that I am okay with. Fucking one’s Uncle is not my idea of good breeding in any sense of the word.
And that is what our Proud Boys and their Mothers want, good breeding. The Caste System in place that you always marry up, ensure that your children do as well if NOT BETTER, than you which turns all things up a notch in a competitive world. The best teams, the best schools, the best credentials. It explains a great deal when you see those in a workplace like Goldman’s turn into its own version of Game of Thrones. Seriously, when does having the right “purse” matter?
With that I have reprinted the article about the new book on the Proud Boys and I want to note the last remark as critical to understanding what I believe is their true issue, that is control and domination of women. Racism, Anti-Semitism, Homophobia, Anti Islam and the other ‘isms are a given. They threaten their power and place but without women they have none. Note in the Handmaid’s Tale the role of women seem to be subservient but the role of them is not without merit and with that the status and hierarchy that the women in Gilead designed for themselves.
The role of anxiety has taken a significant mention in the last few weeks as now it is a screened and determined medical disorder, meaning that more drugs and pharmaceuticals will be doled out without recourse or understanding and perhaps the Proud Boys and company will be first in line. Ah fuck that just get a gun that will solve it. But the reality is that we are shitty at communication and refuse to deal with each other on a rational level. The recent posturing by Governors Abbot and DeSantis show how little regard they have for human beings when it comes to demonstrating decency. When your entire approach to others is through acts of violence, which shipping people across the country without their consent or understanding is just that. This is what we are modeling to our own, to those outside how we are as a people. The greatness we seek is in no way being attained through acts of abuse. The reality is that all of this is over a bunch of Aggrieved White Males who are sure that they are missing something. They are the largest cohort who have not returned to the workplace, they are not taking the jobs that remain open and are either cobbling together work or what I suspect living off their Mothers or Wives. The Shaman was an example of such. The pandemic stripped them of their perceived dignity and with that they are lashing out to others in a way of misdirected anger and deflection. That is what Trump has managed to do, take his own resentment and anger and made it America’s. That is a massive accomplishment and we continue to enable it with every time we mention or blame him. Even today with the CDC firmly under new control I hear repeatedly that they are fucked up because of Trump. Okay he runs it now? But the same argument goes on and on like the Japanese Soldier, Shoichi Yokoi, of WWII who refused to surrender rather than be a prisoner of war. Trump derangement syndrome is by far more insidious than any bout of Covid. And with that we have allowed a fringe to become part of the mainstream. That is the real problem we face today.
The Proud Boys and the Long-Lived Anxieties of American Men
Andy Campbell details the history of an ascendant far-right group.
By Adam Hochschild The New York Times
Published Sept. 18, 2022
WE ARE PROUD BOYS: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered In a New Era of American Extremism, by Andy Campbell
Like Donald Trump’s run for office, the Proud Boys evolved out of a TV show. A British-born Canadian named Gavin McInnes had long ranted against feminism, Black activism and political correctness on his online video series, and in 2016 saw the chance to draw his fans into a movement. According to “We Are Proud Boys,” Andy Campbell’s new history of the organization, McInnes began partying and soapboxing with followers of his show after tapings, promoting “Western chauvinist” values. What started as an all-male “drinking club with a patriotism problem” would soon become one of the most visible extremist groups in the United States, with thousands of members across more than 150 chapters.
After Trump’s election, a Proud Boy helped organize the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., that left one counter-demonstrator dead and many hospitalized. Swaggering, tattooed Proud Boys began serving as bodyguards for right-wing figures and repeatedly battled Black Lives Matter advocates, often leaving injuries in their wake. When asked in his 2020 campaign to disavow the group, Trump famously asked its members to “stand back and stand by.” They jubilantly printed those words on T-shirts.
“The Proud Boys were convinced they’d been mobilized by the president,” Campbell writes. “They took to social media and announced their readiness for the coming civil war.”
Months later, the Proud Boys, some wearing bright orange watch caps and body armor, provided much of the organizational backbone for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol. More than 40 members have so far been indicted in the subsequent investigation, including Dominic Pezzola, who, in a moment that has now been viewed on video millions of times, used a stolen riot shield to smash a Capitol window and was, by Campbell’s assessment, the first person to breach the building that day.
Campbell has covered the Proud Boys and similar groups for HuffPost. His book feels somewhat hasty. Clichés tumble over one another (“drunk as a skunk,” “reared their ugly heads,” “word salads,” and you-know-what “hit the fan”), interwoven with over-the-top claims: that the Proud Boys turned Berkeley, Calif., “into an almost perpetual war zone” and altogether have organized “some of the most gruesome acts of political violence in modern American history.”
An almost forgotten but far larger group of vigilantes, the American Protective League, which swiftly acquired 250,000 members, flourished in 1917 and 1918 during the patriotic hysteria of World War I. League members made citizens’ arrests of tens of thousands of people suspected of everything from draft evasion to “seditious utterances.” And, like the Proud Boys, they relished a good brawl. “The anarchist men were tough to handle, but the women fought like wildcats, scratching, biting and kicking with feline ferocity,” happily wrote one League member after leading an attack on antiwar demonstrators in Chicago’s Grant Park.
Vigilante groups offer the thrills of war without the risks, hardships or obligations of actual military service. One of those thrills, of course, is the promise of violence. Another is rank. The Klan had its Kleagles, Klaliffs and Grand Wizards; American Protective League members wore small metal shields emblazoned with a status — “Operative,” “Lieutenant,” “Captain” or “Chief.” The Proud Boys have four “degrees” of membership. For the first degree, one merely takes an oath; for the fourth and highest degree, writes Campbell, “a Proud Boy must commit a significant act of political violence or get arrested.”
A more unexpected, and revealing, requirement faces second-degree hopefuls: They must swear not to masturbate more than once a month. This comes from McInnes’s belief that pornography-induced masturbation drains away the testosterone that would otherwise make men better fighters for the beleaguered white race.
“I have superhuman strength,” said McInnes, who publicly resigned from the Proud Boys in late 2018. “I’m smarter than ever before. I also crave my wife in a way that’s unprecedented.”
Although Campbell does not explore it, far-right paranoia about pornography goes all the way back to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” In Protocol No. 14 of that notorious forgery, now more than a century old, Jews supposedly create “filthy, abominable literature” to distract the goyim from their scheme to take over the world. In recent years, similar attacks branding pornography as a Jewish plot have come from right-wing terrorists ranging from Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, to Robert Bowers, charged with fatally shooting 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.
These anxieties reflect a greater fear: that what’s being lost is not just testosterone but masculinity itself. It’s no coincidence that groups like the Proud Boys have arisen at a time when we have a record number of women in Congress and when far more women than men are earning both college and graduate degrees. Women’s proper role, McInnes has said repeatedly, is in the home, as traditional housewives and mothers. “There is a real war on masculinity,” he told one interviewer a few years ago, adding that many Proud Boys had been raised by single mothers without a male figure in their lives. A researcher who studied 43 McInnes videos that drew more than a million views each on YouTube found that only three had to do with race, while 26 concerned women, gender or feminism. One, entitled “Single Moms: Stop Talking About How Brave and Cool You Are,” drew 2.1 million views. Don’t forget: The target of some of the worst insults and threats on Jan. 6, 2021, was one of the country’s most powerful women, Nancy Pelosi.
We hear a lot from the far right these days about the Great Replacement: the charge that sinister liberals are deliberately replacing native-born white Americans with hordes of minorities. But one wonders if what groups like the Proud Boys are really worried about is the replacement of men by women.
A similar sense of precarious white masculinity underlay the earlier vigilante groups. One of the most frequent pretexts for a Klan lynching, after all, was the rumor, usually spurious, that a white woman had been sexually assaulted by a Black man. The badge-wearing members of the American Protective League were less public about their sexual anxieties, but it, too, was essentially a boys’ club. After a few men enrolled their wives, and other women showed interest in joining, the group barred female members, with one leader declaring that to allow them would cause “untold difficulties.” The America of the World War I years, like today’s, was one where millions of men were jarred by the changing role of women: They were about to get the vote, birth control promised them power over reproduction, and, as the war swept men into uniform, women showed that they could perform traditionally male jobs ranging from firefighter to streetcar driver.
A future U.S. administration may more tightly seal the country’s borders and claim to stop the Great Replacement. But despite recent efforts by the Supreme Court, it will have a far harder time rolling back advances by American women. Which suggests that the Proud Boys — who have misogyny “baked into the rules,” Campbell writes — won’t vanish from our streets any time soon.
Women just lost massive control over their/hers/he/she or whatever the fuck you want to refer to women who can reproduce, rights in Indiana. An irony as earlier this week, which in Kansas of all places that led Thomas Frank to ask the proverbial question: Whatever happened to Kansas?, vote to retain their State Constitutional provision codifying abortion rights. Isn’t that great Toto?
Again the absurdity of pronouns dominate as Demi Lovato has elected to return to her gender appropriate ones. Do I the fuck care? No. There is no one there to care about their crazy bullshit. I am now forever switching their and there as frankly can you get more neutral than that? As for she/her and he/him, welcome SHIM. Over and out on this subject.
Women, real or trans do have one commonality, the likelihood of being assaulted and raped. Yes men who were once men and still are men and are now women but still men from the waist down, or not can be raped. I will let you visualize that on your own time. But the reality is that women are under assault in America over their own rights to be called women, mothers and in turn control their bodies to be Mothers or be another Gender. I get why you might want to switch now as complex as it may be I get it I really do. I still, however, would be a genetically defined Female with just man parts and then the abuse I got as a woman would switch and I now would be abused as being trans. Oh fuck it, I am good. I have already the issues of age and all that it entails being dumped on me so let’s just leave it alone. I have always been a Black Gay Man on the inside and I am fine with that remaining as such.
For shits and giggles the Jersey City Writers Group were looking for a part time gopher gig for $400 bucks a month, which is what I currently earn bi-weekly as a Sub. I could earn more but that would make me go into the schools, so no. So between that and the Writers Gig it would enable me to budget more around activities and other things that are truly luxuries so I sent a resume and cover letter telling them that I was semi retired, a prospective writer and sometimes Substitute Teacher. And with that I had just moved to Jersey City on the eve of the pandemic had not found a tribe and was interested in finally expanding that and joining them but I had the skill set and would love a part time gig to build community. I got a very patented rejection which for a writing group was hilarious and told me I won’t be joining them anytime soon or ever. They had earlier requested donations for their new digs and I for a brief moment considered it and then recalled that I was no longer do that either, helping, volunteering, donating unless I truly feel connected and compelled. Had no history nor now a future so that seems to be a philosophy that works. Their loss my gain. Ageism folks, ageism.
And now I want to write this with the issue surrounding women specifically – Gaslighting. Women do it to other women effortlessly as they have experience in both areas and largely due to the way we are perceived, emotional and with that irrational and reckless. Watch the Housewives or the recent Southern Charm, few do it as well as Southerners do. It is a passive aggressive and utterly manipulative with a touch of Sweet Tea thrown in. Whenever I watch either I get that redolent taste of said tea as I swallow down my rage and frustration with those who should be supporting one another and lifting up rather than bringing down. But then again what kind of show would that be and would we watch? For days after you will see trending on Twitter one of the casts name and endless dogpiles about that individual in ways that skirt ageism, racism and sexism. And this season on Big Brother the largely white girl club attacked the one Black Girl and with that finally the reality by the men in the house is that it was the women doing this to another woman for no real reason but apparently jealousy. The joke is that the girl is actually nice and compassionate and yet every gesture and act is perceived as manipulative thanks to the first girl who had long left the house after a week following a clear mental health break. How reliable was she as clearly she was not stable and it could have provided the other girls a chance to reset and regroup, but nope they doubled down. I have enjoyed watching their numbers dwindle as a result. This is what women do, judge and demean those they do not understand.
So when you are a woman you are on your own when it comes to facing down the medical industrial complex and the judicial one. I know, I know from my own experience and I do get some type of satisfaction as I watched one Attorney melt down and finally is now working at a Subway. Sometimes there is, yes, justice. And with that I share this story about a woman who was sexually assaulted and her own problems getting the Police to believe let alone investigate the crime. Well they made it impossible, they destroyed the evidence. Not the first nor the last. Ah yes the Police, protect and serve or ignore and fail to serve but shoot to kill however.
Police accused her of making up her rape, then destroyed the evidence
When one woman demanded answers about why items in her rape case were sent to a dump, she found she was not alone. Her case is part of a national problem.
By Justin Jouvenal The Washington Postl August 2, 2022
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, Vt. — Gretchen Van Winkle was transfixed as the hit Netflix series “Unbelievable” played across her TV screen in 2019. The dramatized version of a true story of one woman’s rape and betrayal by police was so similar it could have been hers.
Just like the protagonist, Van Winkle was sexually assaulted in her apartment by a knife-wielding intruder, who bound and gagged her. Van Winkle remembered the same kinds of searing questions lobbed at her, as detectives accused the woman on screen of making up her assault.
“Unbelievable” ends with a measure of justice: A partial DNA match helps identify the victim’s rapist and proves she was telling the truth all along. That moment had eluded Van Winkle for more than two decades.
Van Winkle had already asked Virginia authorities to take a fresh look at her 1995 assault case, and now she pressed for new DNA testing. But any hope of an “Unbelievable”-style ending was soon dashed by a stunning series of calls and texts from a Fairfax County police cold-case detective.
Van Winkle’s rape kit had been destroyed, in what police officials later concluded was aviolation of department policy. So had the knife, her bloody bedsheets and the clothes she wore when she was attacked. In fact, police said detectives scoured the property room and found that every bit of physical evidence in her case was gone.
Then the detective wrote in a text that she had discovered more missing evidence in another old case. Van Winkle responded in disbelief: “Wow. This has left me kind of speechless.”
“Me too,” the detective punched out.
The best chance for bringing Van Winkle’sattacker to justice was gone, but the detective’s words put her quest for answers on a new path.How could a department trash evidence in a sexual assault? How many other victimswere in her shoes?
What Van Winkle worked to uncover was worse than she had imagined — an accounting by Fairfax County police found that the same detective who investigated her casehad marked evidence for destruction in dozens of unsolved felony sexual assault cases. Victims remain unaware.
Why it happened, whether the evidence was improperly destroyed and what impact it had on the cases are still not fully known. Fairfax County police have begun a review of each one to see what evidence remains and what can be salvaged, but they have refused to release many details about the cases or what the reexamination has found so far.
Van Winkle’s case is part of a broader but little-known problem: Hundreds of rape kits have been destroyed at police departments across the country in recent years.
A top police commander in Fairfax now says the department believes Van Winkle’s account of her sexual assault, and police have apologized to her, but it has brought her little comfort. She decided to speak publicly because she thinks the reckoning within the department is not yet complete.
“What the police did was worse than the rape,” Van Winkle said.
A stranger in the dark
Van Winkle collapsed into bed after a night out in August 1995.
She had just moved to Vienna, Va., after a stint with the Peace Corps in Antigua. At 24, she had a new apartment and a new job, and she had enrolled at the Corcoran school of art in D.C. She said the fresh start was thrilling.
As Van Winkle drifted off to sleep, she heard a rustling. Suddenly, she said, a man was crawling up her bed. The intruder punched her in the face twice and started choking her. She recalls he gave her a gruff warning as he pressed a knife to her throat: “Don’t scream or I’ll kill you.”
The man bound Van Winkle’s hands with her nightgown and stuffed underwear in her mouth.
She said a harrowing sexual assault followed.
She can’t forget small details. Van Winkle can still see the man’s intense, wide-set eyes. She said the blue light that filtered through her bedroom window would be a recurring theme in her paintings for years.
When the man set the knife down, Van Winkle said, she knew she had to act. She said she wriggled her hands free, snatched the blade and cut him. He bolted from the bedroom, and Van Winkle said she followed, slashing at his back.
In the dining room, the man fell to his knees and Van Winkle thrust the blade at him one more time, she recalls. Instead of wounding him, the flimsy kitchen knife snapped on his back. Van Winkle screamed in terror and tried to run, but he tackled her onto her couch.
The man choked Van Winkle before, she said, she managed to push him off.
“I remember distinctly saying, ‘I don’t want to die,’ ” Van Winkle said. “ ‘Please don’t kill me. Just leave.’ ”
The man made her promise to tell no one about the attack, before slipping out a sliding door into the night.
Van Winkle was in shock.
She remembers walking into the bathroom and pulling on a robe. She caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror. She recalls telling herself: “This really happened.”
Neighbors called police and the investigation unfolded in a blur.
Still in her robe, Van Winkle said, she was whisked to the hospital by officers for a sexual assault exam. Hospital workers swabbed her for blood and semen. Police said DNA was recovered.
Van Winkle’s boyfriend arrived and she was introduced to Fairfax County police detective Cynthia Lundberg. She would investigate the case with her partner, June Boyle.
Lundberg explained how officers had found a banana peel in Van Winkle’s trash. Van Winkle said she was chilled and disgusted by the thought that her attacker had apparently snacked while waiting for her to come home.
Lundberg was sympathetic as Van Winkle described what happened, Van Winkle said, adding that shefelt a sense of reassurance that two women would handle the investigation. They seemed to take her case seriously.
“I trusted her,” Van Winkle said of Lundberg.
‘Attacked again’
Van Winkle said she worked with an artist to develop a sketch of her attacker the next day. A brief about the sexual assault ran in the Washington Times with the drawing. DNA testing was done at some point.Lundberg gave Van Winkle periodic updates on the investigation, but detectives had no solid leads.
Roughly six months after the sexual assault, Van Winkle said, detectives asked her to meet with them one evening. Van Winkle was excited, assuming they had made a breakthrough.
This account of what transpired during the 1996 meeting is based on interviews with Van Winkle and notes that she said she made the day after it happened. Lundberg and Boyle, who have since retired from the department, declined to comment.
Fairfax County police officials said in an interview that Lundberg and Boyle’s handling of the meeting was inappropriate, but declined to discuss specific allegations that Van Winkle made.
Van Winkle recalled that Boyle greeted her as the elevator doors opened at police headquarters.
Boyle led Van Winkle to a small, cluttered room to review a book of mug shots. Van Winkle remembers flipping through about a dozen pages, but the pictures were of Black men. Her attacker had olive skin, and she told detectives none of the photos appeared to be him.
Boyle reached over and shut the book, according to Van Winkle, and offered a rejoinder that made her freeze: You’re making this up.
Van Winkle recalled blurting out that she wasn’t.
A tense, hours-long interrogation followed that Van Winkle described as “being attacked again.”
Lundberg and Boyle told Van Winkle the evidence they had found did not support her account of a rape, according to the notes that Van Winkle made. They said a metallurgist found no blood on the knife and doubted it could have broken the way Van Winkle said it did.
They told her the blood spatter on her sofa and floor were consistent with the scene being staged, according to the notes. Van Winkle said in an interview that they accused her and her boyfriend of getting the blood and semen found in the apartment from a hospital, where he was training to be a doctor.
The detectives told her they thought she fabricated the attack, possibly to get out of her lease, according to the notes.
They said that she was not “the first woman to do this” and that she “hadn’t planned on it getting this complicated,” the notes show. Van Winkle recalls that they asked her what would happen to someone who filed a false police report.
Finally, she said, the detectives asked her to take a polygraph test. Van Winkle agreed, telling them that “she had nothing to hide.”
At the time, polygraph tests were sometimes used in the interrogation of sexual assault victims. It is no longer common.
Victims’ advocates have long criticized the practice, saying the stress of recounting a rape can produce false signs of deception. The Fairfax County Police Department has discontinued the practice.
Van Winkle recalled being hooked up to the polygraph machine. The examiner asked her name, address and other basic questions, before going over the rape detail by detail. Three tests and roughly two hours later, Van Winkle was finally done.
The detectives told her she had failed.
Lundberg asked her to tell them what really happened, Van Winkle recalled. She went over the rape yet again, but the detectives told her it could not have happened the way she claimed.
“Go home, it’s late,” the notes show a detective told her.
Van Winkle had spent hours at the police station. Shaken, she rode the elevator down by herself and trudged across an empty parking lot to her car around 1:30 a.m., she said. She never heard from Lundberg or Boyle again.
Gretchen Van Winkle describes her sexual assault on stage
The worst part
Van Winkle resolved to move on, but the experience was a raw wound. During the rape, she could fight back,she said, but there was little she could do after her statement was discounted by the police. These were the very people who were supposed to help — whom could she turn to?
“She was just starting off life and it just derailed her,” said Van Winkle’s sister, Mieke Lozano. “It changed her in her core and her soul, and everything she did after that was affected by this.”
Van Winkle said she developed post-traumatic stress disorder and woke up many nights screaming in terror. Others she spent at an all-night Kinko’s copy shop to be around other people. To this day, she checks her closets for intruders when she returns home. Large dogs are her constant companions.
Van Winkle struggled forward, completing art school. She did silk-screens about polygraphs and paintings with shadowy, hovering figures. She married her boyfriend at the time of the attack, Kevin Curtis, and had two children who are now grown. She moved to New England. She got therapy.
By 2014, Van Winkle had earned a master’s degree in social work and begun working with women who were victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. She began to revisit her own experience.
She did a raw dramatic reading about her experience titled “The Worst Part.” “To not be believed,” Van Winkle concluded as the lights on the stage dimmed, “that is the worst of all.”
In the years that followed, she was buoyed by the #MeToo movement and began researching rapes that had occurred in the area near her Virginia apartment for leads on her attacker. In the summer of 2019, she was finally ready to call police about reopening the investigation.
A reckoning
A pair of Fairfax County police detectives and a victim advocate visited Van Winkle in New England in September 2019 to begin a fresh look at her case and hear her account of what transpired during the investigation.
Van Winkle and Curtis, who have since divorced, met the detectives at a hotel. Curtis said Van Winkle answered questions for an hour and a half, before the detectives cracked open a binder of photos from the crime scene for both of them to see for the first time.
Curtis, who had only briefly been in the apartment after the attack, said he was struck by how much evidence there had been: Detectives flipped through images of the disheveled bedroom where the assault occurred, the knife, scattered blood and the broken frame of the apartment’s sliding door, where the attacker appeared to have entered.
“It was exactly consistent with the story she related,” Curtis said.
In the days that followed, Van Winkle watched “Unbelievable” and asked police to retest the DNA recovered in her case. Shortly after the attack, police had used an early, rudimentary version of a DNA test on the genetic material recovered from the scene, but it failed to provide a match, they said. The newly assigned detectives searched the property room and discovered that genetic material had been destroyed, police said.
Angry, Van Winkle fired off a series of public-records requests.
Van Winkle wanted to know whether Lundberg had ordered evidence destroyed in other cases, so she asked police for the disposition of all the detective’s investigations between 1994 and 1997, when Lundberg worked as a sex-crimes detective.
Van Winkle was floored when she got a spreadsheet that showed evidence was destroyed or missing in 47 unsolved cases — roughly half the investigations Lundberg undertook during the period.
Van Winkle then requested an internal affairs investigation of how her rape was handled. The investigation, which concluded earlier this year, found that the destruction of biological evidence in her case was “improper and in violation of department regulations,” according to a letter to Van Winkle that summarized the findings.
Fairfax County police said that they attempted to contact Lundberg and Boyle during the internal investigation of Van Winkle’s case, but that neither gave a statement.
Maj. Ed O’Carroll of the Fairfax force saidthat officials still don’t know why the detectives accused Van Winkle of fabricating the assault, but that aggressive questioning was a tactic sometimes used at the time to try to ascertain if a victim was making up a story. He said nothing in the case file indicates why Lundberg and Boyle disbelieved Van Winkle.
In an interview, O’Carroll apologized for the way Lundberg and Boyle treated Van Winkle and said that “this case breaks my heart.” Some top officials in the department met with Van Winkle. Others, working under a previous chief, sent her a letter saying, “We shared in your frustrations and anger with the handling of the investigation.” Last year, the department put out a press release seeking new leads in Van Winkle’s case.
O’Carroll said that the department has no reason to believe Van Winkle fabricated the assault and that there was substantial evidence corroborating her account. O’Carroll said Van Winkle “was truthful then and she’s truthful today.”
“The department let her down then and let her down a second time when her evidence was destroyed,” O’Carroll said.
The evidence in Van Winkle’s case was destroyed in 2005, shortly after a message went out to staff reminding them to dispose of evidence that was no longer needed, O’Carroll said. The department was running out of space in its property room.
Department policy was then — and is now — to retain evidence in cases that might still be prosecuted, O’Carroll said. In Virginia, there is no statute of limitations on felony sex crimes.
At the time, detectives had unilateral authority to dispose of evidence, O’Carroll said. In response to Van Winkle’s case, he said, the department has instituted a secondary review of any request to destroy evidence to prevent similar errors.
A whole different story
Fairfax County police have not made public the evidence destruction in Lundberg’s cases, and O’Carroll said victims had not been notified. He said the department would decide whether to do so on a case-by-case basis, based on the ongoing review. O’Carroll said the department would do the “right thing.”
Department officials declined to release to The Post what the review has uncovered so far, other than to say a handful of cases need to be examined more closely. They said all of the evidence in some cases had been destroyed, while items remained in others. Police said the destruction of evidence in some cases may not have violated department policies.
Police said the majority of those in which evidence was destroyed are felony sex crimes. They denied a public-records request for additional information.
Van Winkle said that lack of transparency is unacceptable.
She wants to see the victims notified in cases in which evidence was destroyed. And she wants a comprehensive review of sex-crimes cases to see if evidence destruction extends beyond Lundberg.
The Post filed a public-records request seeking to find out if 10 other sex-crimes detectives active in the 1990s had destroyed evidence in cases that could still be prosecuted, but the department said it would cost thousands of dollars to fulfill the request because the records are not digitized and each case would have to be examined by hand. The department did agree to look at 33 randomly selected cases from 1995 and said evidence had been improperly destroyed in one unsolved rape case not handled by Lundberg.
Improper evidence destruction in sex crimes is a wider issue.
Maryland’s attorney general found in 2020 that state police agencies had destroyed nearly 270 rape kits in the previous two years, despite a new law requiring they be retained for 20 years. That year, a Minnesota TV station found that hundreds of rape kits had been destroyed in unsolved cases in the state.
A CNN survey in 2018 found that police at dozens of agencies nationwide had trashed 400 rape kits in cases that could have been prosecuted.
In 2015, Harold Medlock, then the police chief in Fayetteville, N.C., held a news conference to announce that his department had discovered it improperly destroyed 333 rape kits over a 13-year period to make space in its evidence room. The department notified each victim and apologized.
Experts say there has not been a comprehensive assessment on the pervasiveness of evidence destruction in sexual assault cases on a national level. The issue has gotten far less attention than the backlog of untested rape kits that has been publicized in recent years.
Medlock said it’s likely that evidence destruction in sexual assaults remains hidden in some departments.
“I took a pretty good beating from a lot of my peers,” Medlock said. “They chastised me a bit for admitting it publicly when it had not been public. … There were other departments that had done the same thing and didn’t feel the need to acknowledge it.”
O’Carroll credited Van Winkle with bringing the issue to light in Fairfax County and potentially preventing it from happening again. Van Winkle was gratified that police were re-examining her case, but said the department needs to do more.
“I would like this police force to somehow be held accountable for messing up this case and other cases, too,” Van Winkle said. “If I had the evidence, it would be a whole different story.”
That was a proposal by Radical Feminists to remove the male root from the word and make Women that. And with that you thought Binary was a tough one to learn. And with that I reject both as I am a WOMAN and proudly one.
I have no problem with rights being bestowed among all of us equally, be that of gender or of sexuality or of normative choices regarding ones gender and with that religion or culture. I chose to not capitalize any of them as they are smaller in reference as when you put the capital on that it becomes a proper noun as related to IDENTITY. And we have learned that we can CHANGE all of them. Yes if you have read Black Like Me or understand that when Rachel Dolezaal decided to choose her race as Black she was demonized. Really? We elected to actually abuse a woman who felt more connected to another race due to oppression or emotion or simply cultural norms that should have been perhaps snickered at but fuck it if she wants to be Black have at girl, go with it and get with that program of being further marginalized and ignored as any Black girl can tell you. And with that I want to say that if you are Biracial do you do a genetic test to see which is the predominant genetics to CHOOSE which Race you select on the form you check? Maybe in this new state you will have to.
Even with race there is a complex nature of genetics and culture. African American, Caribbean, Afro-Caribbean, and with that shades of Black that is very important among many Black people as you think there are 50 shades of Grey? Try Black. I was corrected on this recently when admiring the style and presence of Shaye and her Mother, Lady Ruby in the recent Congressional Hearings. They were striking in their looks and clearly were very engaged in that world as Lady Ruby discussed that as her business and work aside from being a poll worker. I loved that she had on a clearly dark purple wig and gorgeous white outfit during her Deposition and was the Lady in Red at the Hearings, sitting behind her daughter. And when I shared that I thought this woman in our building who is a Nanny how she is always decked out in the most outrageous of outfits and even when her hair is in curlers I think it must be intentional as they seem more an accessory than a hair product. And when she looked up the women, she informed me she is nothing like them as they are Chocolate. I knew instantly that my remark was thought a put down and she was clearly offended. I informed her that shades of skin is her world not mine and I was only commenting on shades of fashion not giving shade to anything. And I left it at that. So with that is Michelle Obama a chocolate black and Iman a vanilla black? Does that matter to me and should it? I found this from 1977:
The Journal of Negro Education Vol. 46, No. 1 (Winter, 1977), pp. 76-88 (13 pages) Published By: Journal of Negro Education
And as I have said that among any culture there are also equal distinctions and sense of identity that can cause division and disagreement. See how Asians view themselves in regards to the world and their place within. Folks it is more than what us white folks do over our political identity and by far more insidious as it contributes to the concepts of racism and identity. And with that comes again the argument over the word Women and women who support women and see those who identify as Trans as just that, women who were once men who transitioned to becoming a woman. And with that they are going to have to accept all that comes with being a woman but also add another stigma that being trans adds to one’s life; however, it doesn’t let you cut in line. And with that I ask if I get to change gender to male, can I finally get al the privileges and positions denied to me as a woman, as now I am the pinnacle of the top of the charts, a WHITE MAN!! In a word no. I never will ever be a member of that club as no matter how to slice it my DNA is XX. How I feel and look and move throughout the world will always enable some access but again I will never be a real boy Pinocchio. But if I am happy that I can do that, be that I believe I should have been it is better than not and that is all that matters. But again I can’t cut in line and say I have it tougher, as I could have stayed a woman and bitched about that as another problem in and of itself; I could have been a Lesbian and added that to the roster but I again CHOICE and BELIEF matter more, so great, but don’t think that you get a pass.
And I read today the singer Macy Gray agrees that a woman is one born with boobs and a vagina. Again I agree with her and it does not mean we are anti-Trans we just understand the physiology that makes a woman. Identifying, believing and surgically becoming one is not the same as having lived as a woman when one is BORN one. And with that I support the same concept that Rachael Dozeeal did when she believed and identified as a Black Woman. Her body, her choice.
And when a Senator is asking a prospective Justice to appoint to the Supreme Court, “define Woman” I think that is what she wanted to know, how do you define a Woman that is word being eradicated on the left and demonized on the right?
I reprint the below opinion piece as again the pendulum is swinging to extremes on both ends and they are both equally Misogynistic in the approach. It is why I said I am out when it comes to the current climate regarding the right to choose as apparently since I CHOSE to not give birth, never had an abortion and managed to live to age 63 without children of any kind, I am NOTHING and NO ONE. Well then I can’t write you any checks can I?
The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count
July 3, 2022
Pamela Paul Opinion Columnist The New York Times
Perhaps it makes sense that women — those supposedly compliant and agreeable, self-sacrificing and everything-nice creatures — were the ones to finally bring our polarized country together.
Because the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count.
The right’s position here is the better known, the movement having aggressively dedicated itself to stripping women of fundamental rights for decades. Thanks in part to two Supreme Court justices who have been credibly accused of abusive behavior toward women, Roe v. Wade, nearly 50 years a target, has been ruthlessly overturned.
Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda. There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. Women’s rights were human rights and something to fight for. Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, legal scholars and advocacy groups spent years working to otherwise establish women as a protected class.
But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.
As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”
Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.”
It left out those threatened most of all: women. Talk about a bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.
The noble intent behind omitting the word “women” is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth or breastfeed. But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side.
Women, of course, have been accommodating. They’ve welcomed transgender women into their organizations. They’ve learned that to propose any space just for biological women in situations where the presence of males can be threatening or unfair — rape crisis centers, domestic abuse shelters, competitive sports — is currently viewed by some as exclusionary. If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it’s assumed women will be the ones to serve other people’s agendas rather than promote their own.
But, but, but. Can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous? For wincing at the presumption of acquiescence? For worrying about the broader implications? For wondering what kind of message we are sending to young girls about feeling good in their bodies, pride in their sex and the prospects of womanhood? For essentially ceding to another backlash?
Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.
It wasn’t so long ago — and in some places the belief persists — that women were considered a mere rib to Adam’s whole. Seeing women as their own complete entities, not just a collection of derivative parts, was an important part of the struggle for sexual equality.
But here we go again, parsing women into organs. Last year the British medical journal The Lancet patted itself on the back for a cover article on menstruation. Yet instead of mentioning the human beings who get to enjoy this monthly biological activity, the cover referred to “bodies with vaginas.” It’s almost as if the other bits and bobs — uteruses, ovaries or even something relatively gender-neutral like brains — were inconsequential. That such things tend to be wrapped together in a human package with two X sex chromosomes is apparently unmentionable.
“What are we, chopped liver?” a woman might be tempted to joke, but in this organ-centric and largely humorless atmosphere, perhaps she would be wiser not to.
Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions or opposing views are often brutally denounced for asserting themselves. (Google the word “transgender” combined with the name Martina Navratilova, J.K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock to get a withering sense.) They risk their jobs and their personal safety. They are maligned as somehow transphobic or labeled TERFs, a pejorative that may be unfamiliar to those who don’t step onto this particular Twitter battlefield. Ostensibly shorthand for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” which originally referred to a subgroup of the British feminist movement, “TERF” has come to denote any woman, feminist or not, who persists in believing that while transgender women should be free to live their lives with dignity and respect, they are not identical to those who were born female and who have lived their entire lives as such, with all the biological trappings, societal and cultural expectations, economic realities and safety issues that involves.
But in a world of chosen gender identities, women as a biological category don’t exist. Some might even call this kind of thing erasure.
When not defining women by body parts, misogynists on both ideological poles seem determined to reduce women to rigid gender stereotypes. The formula on the right we know well: Women are maternal and domestic — the feelers and the givers and the “Don’t mind mes.” The unanticipated newcomers to such retrograde typecasting are the supposed progressives on the fringe left. In accordance with a newly embraced gender theory, they now propose that girls — gay or straight — who do not self-identify as feminine are somehow not fully girls. Gender identity workbooks created by transgender advocacy groups for use in schools offer children helpful diagrams suggesting that certain styles or behaviors are “masculine” and others “feminine.”
Didn’t we ditch those straitened categories in the ’70s?
The women’s movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women — and for men, too.
Those on the right who are threatened by women’s equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place. What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming and other scare tactics when women try to reassert that right. The effect is to curtail discussion of women’s issues in the public sphere.
But women are not the enemy here. Consider that in the real world, most violence against trans men and women is committed by men but, in the online world and in the academy, most of the ire at those who balk at this new gender ideology seems to be directed at women.
It’s heartbreaking. And it’s counterproductive.
Tolerance for one group need not mean intolerance for another. We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own — with their own specific needs and prerogatives.
If only women’s voices were routinely welcomed and respected on these issues. But whether Trumpist or traditionalist, fringe left activist or academic ideologue, misogynists from both extremes of the political spectrum relish equally the power to shut women up.
I have been writing a great deal about Religion for two reasons: One, due to my experience in Nashville and particularly with regards to my encounters with Ethan who is now Ministering in his family Church and spreading hate speech in each Bible interpretation. From Homosexuality, to the role of women in the church, Ethan spares no rods and beats the hate down, much like I suspect his Father did to him, in the same was his Grandfather did to his Father. Yes folks all of that kind of family loathing and introspection is often part of the Section Baptist Church Sunday AM and PM services. Ramshackle does not describe it. You can find that on YouTube or Facebook as that is how these ministries bypass filters and checks. And while their Church is not a large scale ministry, Ethan is soon interning at one where they franchise the hate like McDonald’s does burgers. Coming to a town near you, a Pastor with self-loathing misdirecting and projecting anger onto the believers and more importantly the sinners whom they wish to convert to that old time religion.
The second reason is due to the Evangelical embrace of Trump and their role in the January 6th insurrection. They are not backing down and like Trump are embracing another Big Lie. That first one is about Jesus, the son, the myth, the legend.
I had heard of this book and had no reason to read it as I lived around it for three years. It is why I call the women “cum dumpsters” as the men in their lives see them as nothing more than receptacles of their seed and to breed as much as possible in which to keep the white man supreme. The Southern Baptist Convention held in Nashville, aside from being a super spreader Covid event, barely came to terms with their hating of Blacks, Women and the LGBQT community, sex abuse in their ranks, as well as public health and safety. Vaccines are Satan’s tool and all that. Covid makes a nice keepsake to bring home to the family. And with the election and divisiveness of their committees I don’t see the Baptists being anything progressive when it comes to America and it not being first without Trump at the helm. They truly believe he is the MAN.
And this also explains some of the cultural rub off in Hispanic/Latin and Black communities where a part of their history and belief system is in fact very Misogynistic and compares to their White Evangelicals when it comes to religion, that old time one. Again Christianity is like Judaism and Islam with regards to factions of their faith (well none in Islam) that embraces modernity and contemporary roles in society when it comes to accepting those who are not conservative if not rigid in their beliefs.. aka “their truths.” Love that I can take a Millennial expression and turn it into exactly what Conservatives love, that truth has alternative facts. Thanks Kellyanne, a staunch Catholic, along with William Barr, which is why Trump embraced them as well. (I remember when America feared JFK as a Catholic President.) That conservative view of family and cultural mores that somehow have us all put into our cages, gilded for some, for others not so much, has always been the bell weather of Conservative Politics. Long before Fox, Rush Limbaugh and friends, Father Coughlin beat the airways like a drum to warn of the Liberal scourge. When I listen to Ethan and his father preach it is that same long winded incoherent messaging that reminds me why I abandoned religion years ago. And they are more common then not as that is the idea, bury a message of hate in amidst of bullshit. Quote some scripture, make up a meaning and viola! Now pass the plate. New age rhetoric is equally obtuse and full of bullshit and they too are embracing the lies and conspiracy theories at a fast pace as who wants to be left out of the revolution!
Here is an article about the Book that compares Trump to John Wayne, also a made up character and actor. Charleston Heston is another figure to whom the right love as he played Moses, another fictional character. The idea that Q’Anon is somehow so out there and full of bullshit seems nonsensical when it comes to anyone advocating and following it, has clearly never been to a Yoga commune or a mega Church. Same diff as they focus and follow the gibberish and made up stuff with some real tangible shit and then they press the button that is the trigger warning that you are coming close to a connection of pain and trauma. With that they have you hooked, like drugs it is a free first taste that will have you coming for more. Drugs can kill you and toxic masculinity can as well. The opioid crisis anyone? Child abuse? Domestic Violence? Street violence? Mass shootings? Nothing makes boys Prouder than being a member of a group that calls themselves a militia with their guns the extension of their dicks. They are standing up and standing by alright.
How a book about evangelicals, Trump and militant masculinity became a surprise bestseller
When historian Kristin Du Mez’s latest book, “Jesus and John Wayne,” came out in the summer of 2020, it received little attention from mainstream gatekeepers and reviewers.
But the book, which explores evangelical fondness for former president Donald Trump and strong masculine figures, has since sold more than 100,000 copies through word of mouth, podcasts and book clubs. When it came out in paperback last month, the book shot up to No. 4 among nonfiction paperbacks on the New York Times bestseller list.
As journalists and academics tried to explain how evangelicals could bring themselves to vote for Trump, Du Mez argued that evangelical support was not a shocking aberration from their views but a culmination of evangelicals’ long-standing embrace of militant masculinity, presenting the man as protector and warrior.
“In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of their own values,” Du Mez wrote. “In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them.”
The book also described a pattern of abuse and its coverup by several mainstream evangelical leaders, many of whom are still in leadership. Du Mez contended that evangelical leaders’ emphasis on militant masculinity created a culture where abuse was able to flourish and often kept secret, an argument that has both caught fire and created controversy.
Du Mez, who teaches at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich., wrote that mainstream evangelical leaders such as John Piper, James Dobson and John Eldredge, preached a “mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity — of patriarchy and submission, sex and power.”
“The militant Christian masculinity they practiced and preached did indelibly shape both family and nation,” Du Mez wrote.
Piper, Dobson and Eldredge did not return requests for comment.
Russell Moore, who was the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy arm until earlier this year, said in an email that everywhere he goes someone asks him about the book.
Moore, now a public theologian for Christianity Today magazine, said that many evangelicals are trying to understand recent developments like Trump’s rise and revelations of sexual abuse in evangelical spaces. Moore said that Du Mez has shown that “much of what has passed for evangelicalism over the past decades was more John Wayne than Jesus” and that some of the characters in her book who have been portrayed by some as fringe turned out not to be fringe at all.
“ ‘Jesus and John Wayne’ is not the whole picture, but it’s on target in enough places that we should take seriously the mirror put to our faces to reform ourselves by the gospel we believe,” Moore wrote in an email. “I don’t agree with this book on everything, by any means, but there are key aspects that are necessary for us to see, and that can help us make sense of some things.”
The book showed how masculine pop-culture figures like John Wayne could influence the evangelical imagination and shape the way people act and think, said Karen Swallow Prior, who teaches English at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
“Among my own group of friends and peers, this is the book that they have been talking about more than any other in recent years,” she said. “I can’t think of the last one that people talked about this much.”
In his review for the journal Christian History earlier this year, Yale University historian Jon Butler called the book one of the most important on modern evangelicalism in the past four decades. A review for the Christian website Mere Orthodoxy said the book should be required reading for evangelicals. Du Mez’s book also inspired a three-part episode for the popular Holy Post podcast and was named book of the year last year by Englewood Review of Books.
“Having announced her thesis about militant Christian-nationalist, male-patriarchal supremacy, she mines American history for classic biblical,” Daniel Harrell wrote for Christianity Today. “On the other hand are plenty of white evangelical men canceled out for political acts never committed but only assumed and whose patriotism gets distorted as nationalism simply because they’re white, Christian, and male. As a political force they barely register compared to Amazon, Facebook, and Hollywood.”
One of the more frequent criticisms she receives is from the subtitle of her book: “How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.” Du Mez said that she wanted to challenge White evangelicals to examine their core beliefs about Jesus’s teachings to “turn the other cheek,” love your neighbor and love your enemy.
“I wanted to make clear that I wasn’t going to woo evangelicals or cater to evangelicals,” she said. The Bible lists virtues like love, peace, kindness and gentleness that Du Mez argues would contradict the model of militant Christianity that leaders have held up.
Raised in a Dutch immigrant community in Sioux Center, Iowa, Du Mez’s mother was a Dutch immigrant and her father was a longtime Reformed theologian at Dordt University, where in 2016 Trump famously told a crowd he could shoot someone in the middle of New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters.
Du Mez said she began working on the topic around 2005 when she started teaching at Calvin, a Christian university rooted in the Reformed tradition of Protestantism. Du Mez was teaching a class on U.S. history and lecturing on President Theodore Roosevelt to show how American ideas about masculinity have changed over time through economics, foreign policy and race.
Two male students came up to her after class one day and suggested she read the book “Wild at Heart,” by Colorado-based author John Eldredge, which has sold more than 4 million copies. She bought a copy and found “a particularly militant conception of masculine Christianity that Roosevelt had been promoting.”
In the early years of America’s war with Iraq, Du Mez considered how Eldredge’s vision of masculinity promoted militaristic ideas about America as an empire. Du Mez said she also reviewed data that showed White evangelicals were more likely to condone the war in Iraq and the military’s use of torture.
“I was trying to tease out: Is this mainstream or is this fringe?” she said in an interview. “As a Christian scholar, I thought, is this what I should be doing? If this is fringe, should I hold this up as though it’s mainstream?”
Du Mez set the topic aside for a few years but picked it up again in 2016 in the days after the “Access Hollywood” tapes came out — in which Trump is heard making vulgar comments about women — and many evangelical leaders came to Trump’s defense. That’s when she decided what she had been working on wasn’t fringe.
Du Mez is a longtime member of a Christian Reformed Church, part of a denomination under the umbrella group called the National Association of Evangelicals. She was influenced by cultural evangelicalism through popular Christian music and the “purity culture” movement that encouraged sexual abstinence before marriage. However, she wasn’t exposed to popular evangelical leaders like John Piper, Wayne Grudem or Jerry Falwell Sr. until adulthood.
Her book, published by a nonreligious publisher called Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Co., found its way into the evangelical world through powerful word-of-mouth networks. Du Mez’s editor Daniel Gerstle said “Jesus and John Wayne” was the publisher’s “surprise hit” of 2020, selling over 300 hardcover copies every week in its first months of publication. The first jump came in late December when the book began selling more than 900 copies a week. Popular Bible teacher Beth Moore, Gerstle noted, has tweeted about the book, describing it as the one she hopes evangelicals read in 2021.
While the book is almost entirely focused on White evangelicals, Du Mez said she has received feedback from a number of Black Christian leaders about it as well. John Onwuchekwa, a Black pastor in Atlanta who left the Southern Baptist Convention last summer, said he felt “vindicated” when he read the book because it seemed to affirm his experiences and connected dots for him.
“The book was refreshing because it wasn’t someone who [seemed] angry or vindictive,” Onwuchekwa said. “There was a courage, a boldness, a matter-of-factness.”
Du Mez said that many “troubled” evangelicals who have read her book are going through a “religious reckoning” where they’re grappling with what they have been taught both culturally and theologically. However, she said she hasn’t seen much change by many evangelical institutions.
Evangelical leaders and institutions continue to promote their versions of masculinity. This weekend in Dallas, thousands of evangelical men are expected to gather for a conference called Promise Keepers that will include speakers who once sat on Trump’s evangelical advisory council. Attendees are promised “biblical and spiritual tools that will empower you to be the man Christ intended you to be.”
Off the Rack Publishing 