#Joe Arpaio

[hotvampireadjacent]

Source: https://amp.theguardian.com/cities/2017/aug/21/arizona-phoenix-concentration-camp-tent-city-jail-joe-arpaio-immigration

I heard about this guy listening to old knowledge war episode this guy is a monster and he got away with it bc trump pardoned him. He was a sheriff in Arizona for decades.

I’m at work and can’t do much research but a brief search NO ONE was charged with crimes for keeping people outside in tents at 145 F WEATHER IN FUCKING ARIZONA.

If all that wasn’t bad enough! He ran for mayor! He shouldn’t be running for mayor he should have his back to the wall!!!!

From 1/4/2024 he got enough signatures to run for mayor

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4389631-arizonas-sheriff-joe-arpaio-signatures-qualify-run-for-mayo-fountain-hill/

[sophieinwonderland]

No one should have the power to pardon themself, not even the President of the United States. That sounds like a dictatorship in the making.

Yeah, the very idea that this could be a power the President has is kind of ridiculous.

Honestly, the pardon itself is such a dangerous power for politicians, and opens the door for all sort of abuses. I'm not necessarily against the pardon existing given the number of times it's been used to help people who need it, but it's actually terrifying to think how this could be abused and how it already was by Trump.

So much happened in Trump's presidency, I wonder how many people even remember his pardoning of Joe Arpaio, a sheriff who was held in contempt of court and sentenced to six months due to racial discrimination.

Arpaio also ran a massive outdoor jail in the Arizona desert that was overwhelmingly filled with latino people, called Tent City, which Joe Arpaio referred to as a "concentration camp."

The fact that the pardon, in the wrong hands, can be used to set people like this loose is terrifying.

In Trump's first term, he reportedly praised Hitler's generals according to his own top generals, and used his pardon power to free a man who bragged about running a concentration camp who was jailed for racial discrimination. The message this sends is that he can pardon any crimes committed by those loyal to him, giving them a free pass for any unlawful action. Especially those taken against marginalized communities.

Stressing again how incredibly important it is to get out and vote!

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

do you ever think about the time steven seagal drove a tank into a house - as a part of an armed police operation - to bust a suspected cock-fighting ring which led to like, all the roosters dying and also the death of a puppy?

because i think about it at least once a day because what the fuck? i have so many questions and many of them can be narrowed down to: why a tank? also who approached who here? did seagal approach joe arpaio or did arpaio approach him?

oh, and yeah. joe arpaio was the one running the operation and i guess is friends with steven seagal. that parts not particularly surprising considering seagal is also friends with putin, somehow.

i really hate how often i think about steven seagal, but the man has a deeply weird life and the ego of the glass slipper cinderella didnt leave behind.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Rachel Leingang at The Guardian:

In his first campaign rally after being convicted of 34 felonies, former president Donald Trump recalled how he just went through a “rigged” trial with a “highly conflicted” judge despite there being “no crime”. The court cases Trump faces have become a mainstay of his campaigning throughout the last year, where he frequently tells his followers that the charges are a form of election interference and designed to tamp down the Maga movement. “Those appellate courts have to step up and straighten things out, or we’re not going to have a country any longer,” he said.

Trump spoke at a Turning Point Action event in sweltering Phoenix, at Dream City church, a megachurch where he and Turning Point have held rallies in the past. The extreme heat led to some waiting outside for the venue to open to need medical attention for heatstroke. Trump held a rally at the same church in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, when church leaders claimed to have an air-purification system that killed 99% of the Covid-19 virus. Turning Point Action is the campaign arm of Turning Point, the conservative youth group founded by Charlie Kirk, a figure in the Maga movement. The former president also took aim at Joe Biden’s recent executive order limiting asylum seekers, which Trump called “bullshit” and said he would rescind on his first day in office, should he win. He condemned Biden on immigration and ran down Trump administration border policies, saying his Democratic rival could solve immigration problems by reinstating all of his old policies. “Arizona is being turned into a dumping ground for the dungeons of the third world,” Trump said.

While immigration is a top issue for voters nationwide, it is especially acute in a border state like Arizona, which Trump hit on in his speech. He wistfully recalled the days of former Maricopa county sheriff Joe Arpaio, infamous for his strict immigration policies that led to frequent lawsuits and financial settlements, and brought Arpaio on stage for impromptu remarks. Trump kissed Arpaio on the cheek, then said: “I don’t kiss men, but I kissed him. We had a real border with this guy.” Arpaio called Trump his hero.

[...] For the Trump faithful, the convictions have become a point of ire against the other side and something akin to pride. Shirts and signs at the Phoenix rally said “I’m voting for the convicted felon”. Trump repeated claims of a stolen election, saying the Democrats “used Covid to cheat” in 2020. He welcomed Kari Lake, the losing gubernatorial candidate in 2022 who is now running for Senate, and Abe Hamadeh, the losing attorney general candidate now running for Congress, claiming that they won their races but their elections were rigged.

In his first post-felony conviction rally, Convicted Felon Donald Trump went on his whinefest about the verdict that served him 34 felony convictions, attacked President Joe Biden’s MAGA-lite executive order on asylum, and continued his lies about the “stolen” election of 2020.

See Also:

Daily Kos: Convicted felon Donald Trump gives big kiss to disgraced former sheriff Joe Arpaio, who he pardoned

[ophilosoraptoro]

PROOF Obama's Birth Certificate is Fake

[angelx1992]

[etakeh]

I think the internet is doing a kind of damage to our brains that the present state of neuroscience isn't well suited towards analyzing, but we will eventually come to understand the scope and in a pretty profound way.

-Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards episode Joe Arpaio: America's Favorite Concentration Camp Operator (part two)

hahaha watch your brains, y'all. Watch your brains.

[elloon]

portraits of SHAUN ATTWOOD

London Soho 2014

“I arrived in Phoenix, Arizona a penniless business graduate from a small industrial town in England. Within a decade, I became a stock-market millionaire.

But I also led a double life. An early fan of the UK rave scene, I headed an organisation that threw raves and distributed Ecstasy in competition with the Mafia mass murderer Sammy the Bull Gravano, who put a hit out on me. On May 16th 2002, a SWAT team knocked my door down. (…) ”

Full project -> https://jackiebranc.site/shaun-attwood/

Shaun's biography -> http://shaunattwood.com/biography/

The Unbelievable Story Of An Ecstasy Kingpin | UNILAD Original Documentary -> https://youtu.be/JqL0BJ4kdt8

[mygrowingcollection]

Joe Arpaio

[diamondnokouzai]

when you google a bad person and google autofill is like "______ death"

[littleapocalypsekitten]

A blog I go to brought it up. The mainstream media is not.

Why is no one drawing the obvious connection with "deporting" migrants and the Holocaust?

Hitler promised that he was deporting the Jews to other countries and even loaded them up in trains with their belongings like they were leaving.

However, there was no place for them to go. Who was going to take millions of unwanted people at a moments notice? No one.

And so the idea of their deportation, whether originally intended to be real or not, gave way to unloading the train cars in the middle of nowhere, stripping them, having them stand next to a pit, shooting them, and burying them.

As the war moved on, it became systematized into the concentration camps we are familiar with.

TV hosts and pundits keep telling us that it's ridiculous, that they can't deport that many people that quickly. THEY KNOW THAT!

Whether intended or not at this moment, this will lead to mass exterminations and people should be stating this fact in their coverage. IT'S IRRESPONSIBLE NOT TO!

[ausetkmt]

At President Trump's rally in Tampa last week, a familiar face made it back in the national news. Maurice Symonette, also known as Michael the Black Man, was front and center in a crowd hurling invective at CNN reporter Jim Acosta, waving a "Blacks for Trump" sign.

Symonette has been a regular at Trump rallies all over Florida and as far away as Arizona. Just last month, he popped up at the U.S. border to appear in a video with disgraced sheriff-turned-pardoned-Senate-candidate Joe Arpaio.

All that national exposure raises an obvious question: Who is paying the bills for Symonette, a former member of Miami's murderous Yahweh ben Yahweh cult, to represent "Blacks for Trump" at Trump rallies? 

Since Blacks for Trump isn't a registered political organization with the Florida Division of Elections or the Federal Election Commission, there are no public records of any donations funding the group's operations.

It seems unlikely Symonette is fronting the cash for his travel himself because he filed for bankruptcy this past May. In federal court records, he reports that he's unemployed, generates no income, and has $0 in the bank. He also says four banks have staked claims on $2.9 million worth of property around Dade County. 

So how is he getting to Arizona and Tampa to stand behind Trump on national TV?  Reached on his cell phone, Symonette declined to discuss his group's financing. "You guys are horrible racists," he said. "You are lawbreakers and you're mean... God is going to punish you horribly."

Throughout the '80s, Symonette — then known as Maurice Woodside — was a devoted follower of Yahweh ben Yahweh, a charismatic preacher who wore white robes and called himself the Messiah.

Federal prosecutors later accused Yahweh, whose real name was Hulon Mitchell Jr., of ordering his followers to murder at least 14 people, including random white vagrants who were massacred as an initiation rite.

Symonette was charged in federal court along with Mitchell and 15 other followers in 1990; while the cult's leader was later convicted of 14 charges of murder conspiracy and served nearly two decades in prison, Symonette and six other cult members were acquitted.

In the decades since, Symonette has been charged with crimes including grand theft auto, carrying a weapon onto an airplane, and threatening a police officer, but has never been convicted. (He does have a pending case on a municipal ordinance charge in Hollywood after police showed up to a really loud party he threw.)

Since Trump's election, Symonette has carved out an unlikely new niche as one of President Trump's most visible African-American supporters. He has a knack for getting prime placement directly behind Trump and has handed out hundreds of his "Blacks for Trump" signs.

They advertise his website, which is full of conspiracy theories about Cherokees running the U.S. banking system. (Really.)

Symonette was even featured at a Miami Trump rally that prosecutors later alleged had been funded by Russian nationals looking to disrupt the election.

Symonette filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on May 16, listing Washington Mutual, Homecomings Financial, HSBC Bank, and Indymac Bank as his creditors; each institution laid claim to one of four houses. Three are in North Miami-Dade County, and one is near Kendall.

In court docs, his only listed assets are clothing, watches, various household items, and a pool table. He does say that his live-in girlfriend, whom he doesn't identify by name, provides him with $2,000 per month.

Could that money from his significant other cover Blacks for Trump's various trips around the country to support the president on TV? Symonette wouldn't discuss that with a New Times reporter. 

Instead, he spoke at length about his belief that the banking system is corrupt. He added that "Trump being the president is the greatest blessing we have ever had."

In his bankruptcy case, he's repeated those allegations about the banking system being crooked to Judge Laurel M. Isicoff. He's also repeatedly sought to change hearings that overlapped with Trump events. Symonette suggested the scheduling conflicts are a sinister plot to keep him away from the spotlight at Trump rallies.

"Creditors know that I have a rally in Arizona on July 25 and deliberately set the hearing on that date to cause me and my musical band to miss the performance and the rally with the bus we rented," he wrote in a motion filed the same morning as the Phoenix rally. "The creditors overheard that at the house we are disputing... and set that hearing on the same date just to harm me."

That motion was denied, as was another he filed on July 30, just before Trump's Tampa rally. "As founder of Blacks for Trump, (I) have rented vans to go to Trump's rally. We need to make the country aware how the banks (FOREIGNERS FROM THE EAST) are illegally taking WHITE AND BLACK PEOPLE'S houses away."

Maurice Symonette's story is baffling, to put it mildly. Symonette, who also goes by the name Michael the Black Man, somehow went from being part of the murderous Yahweh ben Yahweh cult to getting acquitted of murder charges himself to being a staple at Donald Trump's presidential rallies all over the country. Even among the rogue's gallery of rodeo clowns and Bond villains who make up Trump's core cadre of supporters, Symonette might legitimately be the weirdest person hovering around Trumpworld

.

After Michael the Black Man turned up at a Tampa-area Trump rally last week and led anti-press chants, it's worth taking note of all the bizarre places he's materialized since becoming a prominent Trump supporter:

1. At the original October 2016 Trump rally where he first popped up on TV:

Conservative Twitter is abuzz this afternoon with a trending hashtag: #BlacksForTrump. The spark is clear: Thousands have retweeted photos from Trump's rally in Lakeland, Florida, this afternoon showing a small group standing directly behind the Donald while enthusiastically waving "Blacks for Trump" signs. "Blacks are for Trump and the left can't stand it," writes @LawlessPirate, with another pic of the sign-waving man wearing a shirt reading "Trump & Republicans Are Not Racist." So who is this new face of Trump's elusive black support? He's none other than Michael the Black Man, also known as Maurice Woodside or Michael Symonette, who has made waves in Miami in recent years with protests against the Democratic Party and rallies for the GOP. He's also a former member of the murderous Yahweh ben Yahweh cult, which was led by the charismatic preacher Hulon Mitchell Jr., who was charged by the feds in 1990 with conspiracy in killings that included a gruesome beheading in the Everglades. Michael, along with 15 other Yahweh followers, was charged for allegedly conspiring in two murders; his brother, who was also in the cult, told jurors that Michael had helped beat one man who was later killed and stuck a sharpened stick into another man's eyeball. But jurors found Michael (and six other Yahweh followers) innocent. They sent Mitchell away for 20 years in the federal pen. In the years that followed, Michael changed his last name to Symonette, made a career as a musician, started a radio station in Miami, and then reinvented himself as Michael the Black Man, an anti-gay, anti-liberal preacher with a golden instinct for getting on TV at GOP events. He's planned events with Rick Santorum and gotten cable news play for bashing Obama. Since 1997, he's been charged with grand theft auto, carrying a weapon onto an airplane and threatening a police officer, but never convicted in any of those cases. 

2. At a Trump rally in Bayfront Park in Miami just before the election: 3. At a rally allegedly organized with the help of Russian agents:

A federal grand jury filed charges against 13 Russian nationals [in February 2018] for allegedly stealing identities, wiring money overseas, and staging a small series of flash mobs to help tip the 2016 election in Donald Trump's favor. It's unclear whether the social media campaign had any actual impact on voting, but the FBI alleges Russian money indeed affected one small group of Miamians who unknowingly used Russian cash to pay for supplies for an unnamed rally the September before the presidential election. There still seem to be online traces of that Moscow-funded rally. Only one publicized, pro-Trump rally appears to have taken place in the Miami area — #LatinosConTrump in Doral at 1 p.m. September 11, 2016. The event was pitched as an "anti-media" protest outside the town's Univision offices. The national group Latinos With Trump created flyers for the rally and noted that virtually all of Miami's most prominent pro-Trump groups — Cubans 4 Trump, Hispanas for Trump, Latinas for Trump, and the official Miami Trump Volunteers — would attend.

4. At a 2017 Trump rally in Phoenix, per the Washington Post:

And so it was Tuesday night before a crowd of Trump supporters in Phoenix who had come to watch another show. There was the president, whipping up the wildly cheering crowd, and then there was Michael the Black Man, chanting just beyond Trump’s right shoulder in that trademark T-shirt. The presence of Michael — variously known as Michael Symonette, Maurice Woodside and Mikael Israel — has inspired not only trending Twitter hashtags but a great deal of curiosity and Google searches. Internet sleuths find the man’s bizarre URL, an easily accessible gateway to his strange and checkered past. The radical fringe activist from Miami once belonged to a violent black supremacist religious cult, and he runs a handful of amateur, unintelligible conspiracy websites. He has called Barack Obama “The Beast” and Hillary Clinton a Ku Klux Klan member. Oprah Winfrey, he says, is the devil. Most curiously, in the 1990s, he was charged, then acquitted, with conspiracy to commit two murders.

5. With noted racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio at the U.S.-Mexico border just last week:

Via our sister paper Phoenix New Times:

Former sheriff Joe Arpaio filmed a video at the U.S.-Mexico border with a former Florida cult member who goes by the name Michael the Black Man. In the video posted on Thursday, Michael has his arm around Arpaio as the ousted former sheriff promotes his improbable race for Arizona's open Senate seat during a visit to the border fence in Naco, Arizona. Michael was a follower of the Yahweh ben Yahweh cult, a black-supremacist religious sect in Florida. In 1990, the feds charged Michael and over a dozen fellow cult members with conspiracy related to brutal murders in Florida. Alongside Arpaio and Michael in the video is an independent Senate candidate in Massachusetts, Shiva Ayyadurai, who shared the live video on Twitter. Born in India, Ayyadurai is a scientist and MIT graduate who claims that he invented email. He began his Senate campaign as a Republican before switching to run as an independent. Ayyadurai’s campaign uses the slogan, “Defeat #FakeIndian Elizabeth Warren,” as a derogatory jab at his Democratic opponent. “First of all, I’m from Massachusetts, so of course I’m supporting this great guy,” Arpaio says of Ayyadurai in the video. “He’s gonna win.” Michael says, “We’re at the border right here, between Arizona and Mexico.” He turns to Arpaio to ask if he has anything to say to the camera. The aging former sheriff brings up his law enforcement background. “It’s great to see the border again; I haven’t seen it in a while,” Arpaio says. 

If you've got any info on who's paying Symonette's travel bills to Trump rallies, email [email protected] or [email protected]

For a second, Donald Trump seemed to be backing off his vitriolic attacks on the free press. After five journalists were massacred at the Annapolis Capital Gazette, Trump briefly toned down his slurs. He even invited New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzburger to the White House to clear the air. But it didn't last.

Trump quickly returned to his Stalinist, enemies-of-the-people label for journalists and then lied about his meeting with Sulzburger to insist that truthful reporting is "fake news." Those insults have a real effect, and that fact was never frighteningly clearer than at Trump's rally last night in Tampa, where an unhinged-looking mob screamed insults and waved middle fingers at journalists, particularly CNN's chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta.

The scene left many political watchers deeply shaken, including Acosta:

Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 1, 2018

But most national press watchers didn't notice who was right at the center of that mob hurling invective at Acosta and his colleagues: Yep, it was Michael the Black Man, AKA Maurice Symonette, a former member of Miami's murderous Yahweh ben Yawheh cult who once faced charges of conspiring in the group's murders.

That's him with his instantly recognizable "Blacks for Trump" sign:

.@Acosta is trying to do a stand-up at #trumptampa and the crowd is booing and chanting “CNN sucks” behind him. pic.twitter.com/XiULajB1Li— Emily L. Mahoney (@mahoneysthename) July 31, 2018

Symonette has been a mainstay at Florida Trump rallies and over the past year has popped up at other Trump-linked events around the nation. Just last week, he flew to Arizona to film a video at the border with disgraced former sheriff Joe Arpaio. Trump's staff regularly gives Symonette front-and-center seats where he waves his black-and-white sign on national television.

Here's some background on Symonette from New Times' earlier reporting on him:

He's also a former member of the murderous Yahweh ben Yahweh cult, which was led by the charismatic preacher Hulon Mitchell Jr., who was charged by the feds in 1990 with conspiracy in killings that included a gruesome beheading in the Everglades. Michael, along with 15 other Yahweh followers, was charged for allegedly conspiring in two murders; his brother, who was also in the cult, told jurors that Michael had helped beat one man who was later killed and stuck a sharpened stick into another man's eyeball. But jurors found Michael (and six other Yahweh followers) innocent. They sent Mitchell away for 20 years in the federal pen. In the years that followed, he changed his last name to Symonette, made a career as a musician, started a radio station in Miami and then re-invented himself as Michael the Black Man, an anti-gay, anti-liberal preacher with a golden instinct for getting on TV at GOP events. He's planned events with Rick Santorum and gotten cable news play for bashing Obama. Since 1997, he's been charged with grand theft auto, carrying a weapon onto an airplane and threatening a police officer, but never convicted in any of those cases. 

In other words, he's exactly the kind of guy you might not want to drive into a blind rage at journalists who are just trying to do their jobs. Yet there he was in Tampa, right in the middle of the crowd screaming at Acosta — who, incidentally, took time to talk to the crowds who were so angry with him:

After each live shot, @Acosta would walk down and politely talk to the people who just heckled him. He talked to one group for at least 15 minutes. pic.twitter.com/J26nlxfD6k— Christopher Heath (@CHeathWFTV) August 1, 2018

There are two safe bets on this topic going forward: Trump won't stop throwing insults at the media, and wherever the president is whipping up that anger, Michael the Black Man will probably be there with his signs, happily taking the bait.

[mariacallous]

Trump is campaigning in Arizona. Phoenix is over 110F. At least eleven MAGAs had to be taken to the hospital for heat exhaustion. Trump admitted he kissed Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Happy Pride.

https://x.com/Acyn/status/1798830259552629065

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Radley Balko at The UnPopulist:

Donald Trump and his allies constantly complain that they are regularly targeted, singled out for abuse, and deliberately humiliated by the criminal justice system. They claim that there are “two tiers of justice”—a strict, unrelenting one for MAGA, and a loose, deferential one for the migrants, rapists, and killers that George Soros-funded prosecutors refuse to punish. But even before the conservative justices in a party-line ruling handed Trump virtual immunity from fomenting an insurrection, he had been getting the criminal justice system’s “platinum door” treatment. His cases are unusual in that he’s a former president. But his status and political position have helped him far more than they have hurt him. I want to compare and contrast some of Trump and his supporters’ complaints with how the criminal legal system operates in the real world.

Treating Trump With Kid Gloves

Trump has complained that his criminal trials have been a huge inconvenience for him—keeping him from using that time to campaign for president, potentially keeping him from attending his son Barron’s high school graduation. Typically, people facing criminal charges have to show up when court begins and then sit for hours until their case is called. They’re required to take off work, or find someone to watch their kids. And those are merely the people lucky enough to be released before trial. In many courts, they aren’t allowed to have cell phones. Over the last few years, I’ve watched dozens of people wait in a courtroom, staring at the wall for half a day or more, only to learn that their case has been continued, so they'll have to do it all again in a month. I don’t know if any of them had to cancel a political rally, but many have certainly been fired, missed doctor’s appointments, or lost other opportunities. I suppose it’s possible that a judge at some point let a defendant charged with 34 felonies delay a trial to attend a graduation ceremony, but I imagine if you asked a public defender if that’s a regular occurrence, you’d need to set aside some time for the laughter to die down. Incidentally, Trump was permitted to attend his son’s graduation.

Trump and his supporters have also complained about the tactics the FBI agents used when serving the search warrant on Mar-a-Lago. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene described the raid as “the rogue behavior of communist countries,” and Steve Bannon insisted that the GOP will move to incarcerate officials who approved it. Trump himself accused FBI agents of not taking off their shoes while walking through his bedroom. As someone who has written about aggressive police raids for over 20 years, it’s hard to image a more pathetic complaint than that. The FBI gave Trump’s Secret Service detail a heads-up that they were coming. They deliberately conducted the search when Trump would be out of town, to save him embarrassment. When National Security Agency intelligence officer, William Binney, a whistleblower, tried to point out problems at the agency by going through internal channels, FBI agents raided his home unannounced, entered without authorization, and pointed their guns at him after finding him in the shower.

Far-right media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have also suggested that Robert Mueller’s office may have tipped off the media to maximize publicity around the raid. But of course tipping off the press about a pending arrest is a time-honored tradition among publicity-seeking prosecutors. The amusing thing about this complaint is that a carefully staged perp walk as a publicity stunt is a technique first popularized by … Trump’s personal attorney and bag man Rudy Giuliani, who used it to humiliate the International Monetary Fund’s chief. We now know that Mueller’s office did not tip off CNN. The network’s reporters had staked out Stone’s house after noticing unusual activity in court fillings from Mueller’s office. It was just good reporting.

MAGA world has also been critical of how search and arrest warrants were served on other Trump-adjacent personalities. FBI agents were accused of “manhandling” Paul Manafort and his wife during an early morning raid, which legal commentator Jonathan Turley called “excessive.” In response to the FBI’s raid on Roger Stone, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said: “I’ve been busting down doors for 50 years and I’ve never sent that many units to the baddest murderer.” (Arpaio once sent a small army of cops to raid a guy accused of cockfighting. That raid ended with actor Steven Seagal, cosplaying as a cop, driving an armored vehicle into the poor guy’s living room.) But of course the FBI and other federal agencies routinely conduct volatile, aggressive raids on people suspected of nonviolent or low-level crimes.

[...]

Jan. 6 Rioters More Equal than BLM Protesters

Then there’s January 6th! Increasingly over the past couple of years, Trump and his allies have complained that the Jan. 6 rioters have been singled out for abuse, especially when compared to those accused of rioting and looting during the George Floyd protests. The Jan. 6 rioters are frequently referred to as “political prisoners”—Trump himself calls them “hostages.” Let’s look at the facts.

About 70% of people arrested and charged with Jan. 6-related crimes were released on bond or under their own recognizance, including everyone charged with crimes that would qualify as “peaceful protest,” such as trespassing. Just 25% of federal criminal defendants are released pre-trial overall. If we factor in both state and federal courts, the number of people routinely detained while awaiting trial in this country is so large that there are actually more people behind bars who have yet to be convicted than people who have. But seven in 10 Jan. 6ers were released. It is true that the conditions in Washington, D.C. jails are terrible. They’re under-supervised, unsanitary, and hellish, and have astronomical rates of suicide. When Trump was booked at the jail in Fulton County, Georgia, he complained that the facility was “poor and disgraceful,” adding, “It’s worse than you could even imagine. It’s violent. The building is falling apart.” But Trump was quickly booked and released. He didn’t spend any time in an actual jail cell.

All of the Jan. 6 defendants who were not released prior to trial were charged with serious felonies. Federal public defenders have made clear that the federal courts have been far more likely to release Capitol rioters pre-trial than other defendants. And, in fact, the D.C. federal public defender’s office went all out to make sure that Jan. 6ers received a robust defense. They ramped up staffing and enlisted attorneys from other federal offices to help. We can contrast the extraordinary efforts to make sure the Jan. 6ers were well defended to the ongoing crisis in public defense I’ve been regularly documenting. There are parts of the country where people sit in jails for weeks or even months before ever seeing a lawyer. Some meet their attorney for the first time just minutes before they’re due in court. Many public defenders have no access to investigators. Most are severely overworked.

[...]

The System Has Gone Way Easy on Trump

Trump has been treated far better and received more preferential treatment than just about anyone ever ensnared in the criminal justice system. He’s the only person in U.S. history to have his criminal case appear before a judge he appointed—and one he could promote to a higher court should he retake the White House. He’s also the only person in U.S. history to have his criminal case appear before the U.S. Supreme Court after having appointed a third of that court’s justices. Consider how his classified documents case compares to similar cases against non-former presidents. The Justice Department became aware that Reality Winner had leaked a single classified document to a media outlet—a document she believed served an important public interest—in May 2017. She was arrested the following month. By August 2018, 16 months later, she had been sentenced to five years in prison. Trump was indicted for hoarding around 200 classified documents, lying about them, refusing to turn them over, and then obstructing the government’s attempts to recover them. Whatever his motivation was for all of this, it definitely wasn’t whistleblowing.

Trump illegally took the documents in January 2021. The first indication that the government became aware of them was in May of that year. The National Archives then gave Trump repeated warnings. Instead, he showed off and boasted about top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago visitors. The FBI didn’t open an investigation until March 2022. The search of Mar-a-Lago didn’t take place until the following August. Trump wasn’t indicted until June 2023. It has now been 37 months since the government became aware of Trump’s 200 documents, and it’s unlikely that his trial will happen any time soon.

[...]

Trump Monetizes Criminality When Others Lose Their Shirt

People with criminal convictions also typically struggle to pay court fines and fees, probation or parole fees, child support, and private debts accumulated while they were incarcerated. It can be difficult to find housing, and they’re far more likely to experience homelessness. Trump himself faces significant fines and fees. He owes $450 million to the state of New York for crimes committed by his company, and $90 million to E. Jean Carrol after a jury found him liable for defaming her after he sexually assaulted her. Trump also has a habit of not paying his creditors, though in his case it’s usually more a matter of not wanting to pay than the inability to do so. Still, unlike others with felony convictions, Trump will not end up homeless or destitute. It’s unlikely he’ll even need to alter his lavish lifestyle.

[...] Over the years, I’ve interviewed more people treated unfairly by the criminal justice system than I can count. They often say that the experience changed them. It made them more empathetic, less trustful of police and prosecutors, and more willing to entertain the notion that the system sometimes gets it wrong. Most understand that any system capable of the injustice inflicted on them has certainly done the same or worse to others. Powerful people who encounter the justice system can be particularly effective agents of change. But that isn’t going to happen here. That’s partly because Trump has experienced only the most glancing of consequences from his criminal convictions. But it’s also because MAGA revels in victimhood. Conceding that the system is fundamentally unfair would merely make Trump one victim among many. The false narrative that courts and prosecutors are hellbent on targeting him and his supporters—while showing outrageous leniency toward scary drug dealers, rapists, and killers—only amplifies the outrage and victimhood.

MAGA’s beef with the system isn’t that justice has been weaponized, it’s that it has been weaponized against them. Their answer isn’t to insulate the system from politics, it’s to ratchet up the politicization, then aim it at their enemies.

Radley Balko wrote in The UnPopulist expertly debunking the MAGA lie that the so-called "weaponization" of the criminal justice system is being used to rightly prosecute Donald Trump and his allies for their crimes.

In fact, the criminal justice system has gone soft on Donald Trump and his allies.

Balko said it best here: "MAGA’s beef with the system isn’t that justice has been weaponized, it’s that it has been weaponized against them. Their answer isn’t to insulate the system from politics, it’s to ratchet up the politicization, then aim it at their enemies."

[azspot]

Rachel Mitchell, the apogee of Republican cronyism, won re-election as county attorney. Jerry Sheridan, Sheriff Joe Arpaio's former chief deputy, who is on the Brady list of dishonest cops, triumphed over his Democratic rival by more than seven points. Democratic county recorder candidate Tim Stringham took a thrashing from Republican election denier Justin Heap.

How Arizona will be affected by Donald Trump’s second term

[thoughtportal]

Ham Radio & More was a radio show about amateur radio that was broadcast from 1991 through 1997. More than 300 episodes of the program are now available online as part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (DLARC).

Ham Radio & More was the first radio show devoted to ham radio on the commercial radio band. It began as a one-hour show on KFNN 1510 AM in Phoenix, Arizona, then expanded to a two-hour format and national syndication. The program’s host, Len Winkler, invited guests to discuss the issues of the day and educate listeners about various aspects of the radio hobby. Today the episodes, some more than 30 years old, provide an invaluable time capsule of the ham radio hobby.just some of the HR&M cassette tapes

Len Winkler said, “I’m so happy that the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications took all my old shows and made them eternally available for everyone to hear and enjoy. I had the absolute pleasure, along with a few super knowledgeable co-hosts, to interview many of the people that made ham radio great in the past and now everyone can go back and listen to what they had to say. From the early beginnings of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) to Senator Barry Goldwater to the daughter of Marconi. So much thanks to the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications for doing this amazing service.”

Other interviewees included magazine publisher Wayne Green, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Bob Heil, Bill Pasternak, Fred Maia, and other names well known to the amateur radio community. Discussion topics spanned the technical, such as signal propagation, to community issues, including the debate over the Morse code knowledge requirement for ham radio operators—a requirement eventually dropped, to the benefit of the community.

The radio programs were recorded on cassette tapes when they originally aired. Winkler digitized 149 episodes of the show himself in 2015 and 2016. The digitizing project paused for years. In January 2024 he sent the remaining cassettes to DLARC. Using two audio digitizing workstations, we digitized another 165 episodes in about three weeks. The combined collection is now available online: a total of 464 hours of programming, most of which have not been heard since their original air date. The collection represents nearly every episode of the show: only a few tapes went missing over the years or were unrepairable. 

The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at kay@archive.org or on Mastodon at dlarc@mastodon.radio.