Haitians Call the Cops on Trump and Vance
Criminal charges sought against white men who invaded Ohio town, bringing chaos
Sept. 25: Haitians ask judge to arrest Trump, Vance … Missouri officials kill a man … Harris to push for universal childcare … Infowars up for auction …
The Haitians of Springfield, OH, appear to have completed their assimilation into American society with perhaps the most American of modern milestones: They got lawyers.
Typically in American culture, “see something, say something” is a ritual practiced by white people against Black-looking suspicious-looking people. But the Haitians of Springfield, OH, have now put their own cultural twist on that American tradition.
Because yesterday, their lawyers called the cops on former Pres. Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (OH). And they did it for that most American of reasons: Not liking what someone said.
In this case, Trump and Vance inciting 33 bomb threats causing closures and lockdowns at schools, hospitals, and municipal offices.
That led the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a national organization, to file a bench memorandum in Clark County, OH, yesterday, asking a judge to issue a warrant for the arrest of Trump and Vance on seven charges, including:
Disrupting public services
Making false alarms
Telecommunication (Twitter) harassment (tweets)
Aggravated menacing
As it happens, all four of those charges are officially part of the Republican Party platform and are routinely touted or practiced by Republican candidates at all levels.
Making False Alarms is the primary section of the GOP playbook, while Aggravated Menacing is believed to be Trump’s Secret Service codename.1
And disrupting public services has long been a tent pole of Republican Party philosophy. Trump, for instance, has said he’ll eliminate the Department of Education, admitting intent to disrupt public services.
The court filing says that Trump and Vance disrupted public services by “causing widespread bomb and other threats that resulted in massive disruptions to the public services.”
It also alleges that Trump and Vance “knowingly caus[ed] alarm in the Springfield community by continuing to repeat lies that state and local officials have said were false.”
Trump and Vance also allegedly harassed Springfield’s Haitians using just about every form of telecommunication there is, including the presidential debate, streamed campaign rallies, TV interviews, and Twitter. So. Much. Twitter.
Here’s the filing’s most heartbreaking part, testimony to how division works and dissolves communal bonds and the social contract:
“All the Haitian immigrants and community members to whom we have spoken have told us that, before Trump’s and Vance’s comments, they found people in Springfield to be welcoming, nice, and helpful. But since the comments earlier this month, Haitians are receiving hostile comments and feel like they are constantly being watched by people at work and in their neighborhoods.“
In other words, it’s not just that fear and lies victimized their targets, it turned welcoming, nice, helpful people into fully realized assholes. And that’s victimization, too! No one wants to be asshole-ified!
So where’s the evidence? Like God, it’s everywhere.
Hey, here’s Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk helpfully providing the court evidence of the impact of Trump’s and Vance’s incitement. Here’s how Kirk’s Tweet appears in the filing itself as evidence against Trump and Vance:
As far as I can tell, the allegations only go back to earlier this month, in the run-up to the debate where Trump gave birth on live television to 12 million memes by claiming Springfield Haitians eat pets.
But Vance had been pushing this stuff since July and, as the county health commissioner has told me in my exclusive reporting, even those early claims were false, too.
Yesterday’s filing alleges that Trump and Vance sprayed probable cause all over the place, enough to justify a warrant. And it says that state law requires a hearing on probable cause if the judge refuses to issue a warrant — even if the prosecutor really, really doesn’t want to prosecute the Republican Party’s presidential and vice-presidential candidates, the latter of whom is the state’s junior senator.
Which means even if the judge says no, and the prosecutor says no, thanks to the required probable-cause hearing, Trump the adjudicated felon and rapist will have to fend off criminal charges in yet another court.
Hey, does Ohio have a three-strikes law…?
Missouri Officials Kill a Guy After Federal Officials Say It’s Cool
Government officials in Missouri yesterday fatally poisoned a 55-year-old hostage named Marcellus Williams.
Missouri’s governor and attorney general defended the murder and imprisonment of Williams by saying that he started it. Williams was convicted of murdering Lisha Gayle during the 1998 burglary of her home.
(Gov. Mike Parson (R-MO) is capable of mercy, it turns out. Remember the couple who pointed guns at peaceful, non-violent, law-abiding protesters in 2020? Parson pardoned them even though they didn’t meet the standard pardon requirement of expressing remorse, stating publicly, “I’d do it again.”)
The office that prosecuted Williams now says he didn’t do it. The DNA evidence against him was compromised. Witness testimony against him was compromised.
And the jury-selection process was compromised. There were 11 white jurors and one (1) Black juror. One potential — and Black — juror was dismissed for looking too much like Williams.
Specifically, a prosecutor at the time said that they look like brothers. He denied that he meant they look like Brothers.
But yesterday, the Supreme Court denied a last-minute appeal not to kill Williams even though the local prosecutors and even the victim’s family said Williams should not be killed by the government.
The court’s three Democratic appointees dissented, although it’s not clear a Democratic majority would have done anything differently. For the first time in more than a decade, this year’s Democratic Party platform dropped opposition to the death penalty. And while he was in office through the start of 2017, Gov. Jay Nixon (D-MO) didn’t free Williams. (h/t)
So, last night, the six right-wing judges let the execution proceed, ruling that the government may not have the power to regulate polluters, but by God it can still execute an innocent Black man!
MORE DEATH Williams wasn’t even the only person killed by government officials yesterday.
Travis Mullis was fatally poisoned for stomping his infant son to death. Because killing someone by stomping is wrong, Texas yesterday killed Mullis the right way: By taking 20 minutes to find a good vein to pump his body full of officially approved death juice.
Harris to Push for Universal Childcare
In an allegedly major speech on the economy today, Vice Pres. Kamala Harris reportedly plans to endorse universal childcare…in some form.
The simplest and most obvious form would be for the government to pay for childcare so parents don’t have to fill out bullshit forms or apply for shit or produce documentary shit to prove they deserve shit. So that probably won’t be what Harris proposes.
She’s also expected to come out for paid family leave…in some form. Both measures would represent minor steps toward America rejoining the First World of developed nations where parents don’t have to deal with this shit.
Fully joining the developed world, however, would mean abandoning Harris’s slogan of an “opportunity economy,” something no voters have ever asked for because who the fuck thinks that way except rich people who want the opportunity to extract so much of the economy that people can’t provide themselves with things normal societies do.
And in a chilling passage, the Washington Post reports this morning that the speech will define Harris as someone who “views herself as a capitalist who believes there are limitations of what government can do.”
Historically minded Newsfuckers may recall that Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the most popular president of the 20th century by metaphorically beating the shit out of capitalists who tried to limit what government can do.
Harris today will outline an approach to manufacturing that leans heavily on government investment in the form of tax breaks for specific industries. Paradoxically, however, those tax breaks can sometimes destroy jobs by handing companies cash to invest in automation and other job-destroying tactics, as I’ve pointed out often enough that The Fucking News should qualify as an industry eligible for tax breaks.
So the key will be how these tax breaks are actually written2. Does the new legislation hand money to companies in the old, naive belief that companies want to hire people? Or is it narrowly crafted to ensure that companies only get tax breaks for actual, living/breathing, exploited employees?
Harris is not expected to talk about her newly announced support, in whatever form it may take, for the crypto-currency “industry.”
Harris Woos Crypto-Fascist Crypto Fascists
In case anyone missed the point, Vice Pres. Kamala Harris signaled her crypto-friendly position at a fundraiser Sunday. On Wall Street.
She reportedly said, “We will encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets, while protecting investors and consumers."
Protecting consumers, however, is discouraging to crypto. It’s literally the opposite of the crypto business model, which relies on a plentiful supply of unprotected consumers.
And financial innovation is already encouraged…by the remaining tatter of regulations against financial innovation. These “innovations” are almost always just attempts to get around the laws, regulations, or common sense, rather than to improve the lot of humanity. So, the more rules, the more innovation!
But past financial innovations have proved innovatively terrible for the masses. They include limited liability corporations, which worsened economic inequality by literally limiting how liable corporations were…for what they did to people.
Other financial innovations include derivatives, the complexification of finances that also exacerbates economic inequality by dividing the world into uncomprehending schmucks and schmucks rich enough to hire lawyers and traders who understand derivatives well enough to exploit us with them.
The financial innovation of derivatives was re-innovated in the late 1990s…by Democrats — who ignored the warnings of a tiny handful of other Democrats (Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). That innovation involved deregulating derivatives and demolishing fussy, old-fashioned Roosevelt-era rules that had protected us from financial meltdowns since the Great Depression.
It took less than ten years for that Democratic innovation to trigger the innovative global economic catastrophe of 2007/2008.
The reality is we already know how to economy. We do it through aggressive resistance and limits on would-be oligarchs and aggressive measures to help people exist.
But our history is full of Democrats who modernized or reformed or innovated us into disaster. The path to prosperity for all is paved with boring, hard-assed bureaucrats keeping Wall Street would-be tyrants in their place.
Infowars Loses Info War
A federal judge said yesterday that InfoWars and its assets will go on the auction block in November.
The Alex Jones media empire lost the info wars when it was found to be extremely bad at the info part and illegally engaged in the war part. Specifically, Jones used his Infowars platform to claim — and convince deeply stupid people — that the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting was fake in ways I can’t even convince my long-term memory to retain.
Okay, fine, I looked it up. Jones claimed that the killing of six school personnel and 20 first-graders was fake, carried out by “crisis actors,” which in the real world exist only in the form of some TV anchors.
The savagely inhumane act of turning this claim into a public crusade came not from any actual fucking evidence, of which zero existed, but — in a weirdly comprehensible way — from the absolutely understandable inability to come to grips with the actual horrific reality of what happened that day.
Still, as we all learned in kindergarten, lying is wrong, even when it arises from our own incapacity to comprehend enormity, and especially when lying involves telling monstrous lies about people already in the throes of unimaginable anguish.
Jones’s stupider-than-sheep sheep not only believed the dead kids never existed, they were so sure that they were supposed to do something about this, that some of them actually, in person, confronted the parents face to face and asserted their dead child’s never-existence.
Jones has told many lucrative lies over the years. And now he’s in bankruptcy, forced to sell off about $16 million in personal and corporate assets in order to pay off the one billion dollars he’s been ordered to pay to some of his victims. How’s that for info?
Harris Filibuster Attack Costs Her One Vote in West Virginia
Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) said yesterday that he won’t vote for Vice Pres. Kamala Harris in the November presidential election.
Manchin’s entirely unsurprising non-endorsement came after Harris said she’ll support efforts to sidestep the Senate filibuster in order to codify abortion rights into federal law, a position she and Pres. Joe Biden have supported before.
Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said yesterday that Senate Democrats will discuss when the next Senate reconvenes in 2025, when it may be too late.
“Shame on her,” Manchin said. “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy.”
Manchin’s analogy was an apt one, since it doesn’t exist. But Manchin didn’t explain exactly how the power of 40 U.S. senators to block legislation is analogous to a mythical cup that held the blood of a hippie magician who was human-sacrificed by his own Father.
There is, though, one clear similarity that Manchin cited: Their imaginary-ness. The filibuster, Manchin said, is “the only thing that keeps us talking and working together [sic].” It is not. Because they are not.
The filibuster, as writer Michael Harriott inventories, has been a reliable tool for Senate racists, segregationists, and lynching aficionados for years decades centuries. And as Harriott astutely notes, there’s nothing magical about the number 40 that somehow mystically protects democracy with the blood of white Jesus.
What the number 40 has done is line up pretty neatly with the minimal number of senators hailing from and/or loyal to the failed Confederacy. And if history teaches us nothing — which it often does — we should at least by now understand that capitulating to the whining, treasonous, unpopular, minority faction of fading white Christian hegemony has been a far greater cause of national misery and division than actually doing Reconstruction right would have been. Harumph.
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids!
Believed by me, anyway, if only to justify this line.
…by lobbyists.
You amaze your readers (well, this one) with the awesome power of the strike through character to make your point.
"Complexification"; another great Larsenism:)