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It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 15-16

CHAPTER XV

USUALLY I'm pretty mild, in fact many of my friends are kind enough to call it "Folksy," when I'm writing or speechifying. My ambition is to "live by the side of the road and be a friend to man." But I hope that none of the gentlemen who have honored me with their enmity think for one single moment that when I run into a gross enough public evil or a persistent enough detractor, I can't get up on my hind legs and make a sound like a two-tailed grizzly in April. So right at the start of this account of my ten-year fight with them, as private citizen, State Senator, and U. S. Senator, let me say that the Sangfrey River Light, Power, and Fuel Corporation are—and I invite a suit for libel—the meanest, lowest, cowardliest gang of yellow-livered, back-slapping, hypocritical gun-toters, bomb-throwers, ballot-stealers, ledger-fakers, givers of bribes, suborners of perjury, scab-hirers, and general lowdown crooks, liars, and swindlers that ever tried to do an honest servant of the People out of an election—not but what I have always succeeded in licking them, so that my indignation at these homicidal kleptomaniacs is not personal but entirely on behalf of the general public.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip

ON Wednesday, January 6, 1937, just a fortnight before his inauguration, President-Elect Windrip announced his appointments of cabinet members and of diplomats.

Secretary of State: his former secretary and press-agent, Lee Sarason, who also took the position of High Marshal, or Commander-in-Chief, of the Minute Men, which organization was to be established permanently, as an innocent marching club.

Secretary of the Treasury: one Webster R. Skittle, president of the prosperous Fur & Hide National Bank of St. Louis—Mr. Skittle had once been indicted on a charge of defrauding the government on his income tax, but he had been acquitted, more or less, and during the campaign, he was said to have taken a convincing way of showing his faith in Buzz Windrip as the Savior of the Forgotten Men.

Secretary of War: Colonel Osceola Luthorne, formerly editor of the Topeka (Kans.) Argus, and the Fancy Goods and Novelties Gazette; more recently high in real estate. His title came from his position on the honorary staff of the Governor of Tennessee. He had long been a friend and fellow campaigner of Windrip.

It was a universal regret that Bishop Paul Peter Prang should have refused the appointment as Secretary of War, with a letter in which he called Windrip "My dear Friend and Collaborator" and asserted that he had actually meant it when he had said he desired no office. Later, it was a similar regret when Father Coughlin refused the Ambassadorship to Mexico, with no letter at all but only a telegram cryptically stating, "Just six months too late."

A new cabinet position, that of Secretary of Education and Public Relations, was created. Not for months would Congress investigate the legality of such a creation, but meantime the new post was brilliantly held by Hector Macgoblin, M.D., Ph.D., Hon. Litt.D.

Senator Porkwood graced the position of Attorney General, and all the other offices were acceptably filled by men who, though they had roundly supported Windrip's almost socialistic projects for the distribution of excessive fortunes, were yet known to be thoroughly sensible men, and no fanatics.

It was said, though Doremus Jessup could never prove it, that Windrip learned from Lee Sarason the Spanish custom of getting rid of embarrassing friends and enemies by appointing them to posts abroad, preferably quite far abroad. Anyway, as Ambassador to Brazil, Windrip appointed Herbert Hoover, who not very enthusiastically accepted; as Ambassador to Germany, Senator Borah; as Governor of the Philippines, Senator Robert La Follette, who refused; and as Ambassadors to the Court of St. James's, France, and Russia, none other than Upton Sinclair, Milo Reno, and Senator Bilbo of Mississippi.

These three had a fine time. Mr. Sinclair pleased the British by taking so friendly an interest in their politics that he openly campaigned for the Independent Labor Party and issued a lively brochure called "I, Upton Sinclair, Prove That Prime-Minister Walter Elliot, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and First Lord of the Admiralty Nancy Astor Are All Liars and Have Refused to Accept My Freely Offered Advice." Mr. Sinclair also aroused considerable interest in British domestic circles by advocating an act of Parliament forbidding the wearing of evening clothes and all hunting of foxes except with shotguns; and on the occasion of his official reception at Buckingham Palace, he warmly invited King George and Queen Mary to come and live in California.

Mr. Milo Reno, insurance salesman and former president of the National Farm Holiday Association, whom all the French royalists compared to his great predecessor, Benjamin Franklin, for forthrightness, became the greatest social favorite in the international circles of Paris, the Basses-Pyrénées, and the Riviera, and was once photographed playing tennis at Antibes with the Duc de Tropez, Lord Rothermere, and Dr. Rudolph Hess.

Senator Bilbo had, possibly, the best time of all.

Stalin asked his advice, as based on his ripe experience in the Gleichshaltung of Mississippi, about the cultural organization of the somewhat backward natives of Tadjikistan, and so valuable did it prove that Excellency Bilbo was invited to review the Moscow military celebration, the following November seventh, in the same stand with the very highest class of representatives of the classless state. It was a triumph for His Excellency. Generalissimo Voroshilov fainted after 200,000 Soviet troops, 7000 tanks, and 9000 aeroplanes had passed by; Stalin had to be carried home after reviewing 317,000; but Ambassador Bilbo was there in the stand when the very last of the 626,000 soldiers had gone by, all of them saluting him under the quite erroneous impression that he was the Chinese Ambassador; and he was still tirelessly returning their salutes, fourteen to the minute, and softly singing with them the "International."

He was less of a hit later, however, when to the unsmiling Anglo-American Association of Exiles to Soviet Russia from Imperialism, he sang to the tune of the "International" what he regarded as amusing private words of his own:

"Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, From Russia make your getaway. They all are rich in Bilbo's nation. God bless the U.S.A.!"

Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, after her spirited campaign for Mr. Windrip, was publicly angry that she was offered no position higher than a post in the customs office in Nome, Alaska, though this was offered to her very urgently indeed. She had demanded that there be created, especially for her, the cabinet position of Secretaryess of Domestic Science, Child Welfare, and Anti-Vice. She threatened to turn Jeffersonian, Republican, or Communistic, but in April she was heard of in Hollywood, writing the scenario for a giant picture to be called, They Did It in Greece.

As an insult and boy-from-home joke, the President-Elect appointed Franklin D. Roosevelt minister to Liberia. Mr. Roosevelt's opponents laughed very much, and opposition newspapers did cartoons of him sitting unhappily in a grass hut with a sign on which "N.R.A." had been crossed out and "U.S.A." substituted. But Mr. Roosevelt declined with so amiable a smile that the joke seemed rather to have slipped.

The followers of President Windrip trumpeted that it was significant that he should be the first president inaugurated not on March fourth, but on January twentieth, according to the provision of the new Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution. It was a sign straight from Heaven (though, actually, Heaven had not been the author of the amendment, but Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska), and proved that Windrip was starting a new paradise on earth.

The inauguration was turbulent. President Roosevelt declined to be present—he politely suggested that he was about half ill unto death, but that same noon he was seen in a New York shop, buying books on gardening and looking abnormally cheerful.

More than a thousand reporters, photographers, and radio men covered the inauguration. Twenty-seven constituents of Senator Porkwood, of all sexes, had to sleep on the floor of the Senator's office, and a hall-bedroom in the suburb of Bladensburg rented for thirty dollars for two nights. The presidents of Brazil, the Argentine, and Chile flew to the inauguration in a Pan-American aeroplane, and Japan sent seven hundred students on a special train from Seattle.

A motor company in Detroit had presented to Windrip a limousine with armor plate, bulletproof glass, a hidden nickel-steel safe for papers, a concealed private bar, and upholstery made from the Troissant tapestries of 1670. But Buzz chose to drive from his home to the Capitol in his old Hupmobile sedan, and his driver was a youngster from his home town whose notion of a uniform for state occasions was a blue-serge suit, red tie, and derby hat. Windrip himself did wear a topper, but he saw to it that Lee Sarason saw to it that the one hundred and thirty million plain citizens learned, by radio, even while the inaugural parade was going on, that he had borrowed the topper for this one sole occasion from a New York Republican Representative who had ancestors.

But following Windrip was an un-Jacksonian escort of soldiers: the American Legion and, immensely grander than the others, the Minute Men, wearing trench helmets of polished silver and led by Colonel Dewey Haik in scarlet tunic and yellow riding-breeches and helmet with golden plumes.

Solemnly, for once looking a little awed, a little like a small-town boy on Broadway, Windrip took the oath, administered by the Chief Justice (who disliked him very much indeed) and, edging even closer to the microphone, squawked, "My fellow citizens, as the President of the United States of America, I want to inform you that the real New Deal has started right this minute, and we're all going to enjoy the manifold liberties to which our history entitles us—and have a whale of a good time doing it! I thank you!"

That was his first act as President. His second was to take up residence in the White House, where he sat down in the East Room in his stocking feet and shouted at Lee Sarason, "This is what I've been planning to do now for six years! I bet this is what Lincoln used to do! Now let 'em assassinate me!"

His third, in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was to order that the Minute Men be recognized as an unpaid but official auxiliary of the Regular Army, subject only to their own officers, to Buzz, and to High Marshal Sarason; and that rifles, bayonets, automatic pistols, and machine guns be instantly issued to them by government arsenals. That was at 4 P.M. Since 3 P.M., all over the country, bands of M.M.'s had been sitting gloating over pistols and guns, twitching with desire to seize them.

Fourth coup was a special message, next morning, to Congress (in session since January fourth, the third having been a Sunday), demanding the instant passage of a bill embodying Point Fifteen of his election platform—that he should have complete control of legislation and execution, and the Supreme Court be rendered incapable of blocking anything that it might amuse him to do.

By Joint Resolution, with less than half an hour of debate, both houses of Congress rejected that demand before 3 P.M., on January twenty-first. Before six, the President had proclaimed that a state of martial law existed during the "present crisis," and more than a hundred Congressmen had been arrested by Minute Men, on direct orders from the President. The Congressmen who were hotheaded enough to resist were cynically charged with "inciting to riot"; they who went quietly were not charged at all. It was blandly explained to the agitated press by Lee Sarason that these latter quiet lads had been so threatened by "irresponsible and seditious elements" that they were merely being safeguarded. Sarason did not use the phrase "protective arrest," which might have suggested things.

To the veteran reporters it was strange to see the titular Secretary of State, theoretically a person of such dignity and consequence that he could deal with the representatives of foreign powers, acting as press-agent and yes-man for even the President.

There were riots, instantly, all over Washington, all over America.

The recalcitrant Congressmen had been penned in the District Jail. Toward it, in the winter evening, marched a mob that was noisily mutinous toward the Windrip for whom so many of them had voted. Among the mob buzzed hundreds of Negroes, armed with knives and old pistols, for one of the kidnaped Congressmen was a Negro from Georgia, the first colored Georgian to hold high office since carpetbagger days.

Surrounding the jail, behind machine guns, the rebels found a few Regulars, many police, and a horde of Minute Men, but at these last they jeered, calling them "Minnie Mouses" and "tin soldiers" and "mama's boys." The M.M.'s looked nervously at their officers and at the Regulars who were making so professional a pretense of not being scared. The mob heaved bottles and dead fish. Half-a-dozen policemen with guns and night sticks, trying to push back the van of the mob, were buried under a human surf and came up grotesquely battered and ununiformed—those who ever did come up again. There were two shots; and one Minute Man slumped to the jail steps, another stood ludicrously holding a wrist that spurted blood.

The Minute Men—why, they said to themselves, they'd never meant to be soldiers anyway—just wanted to have some fun marching! They began to sneak into the edges of the mob, hiding their uniform caps. That instant, from a powerful loudspeaker in a lower window of the jail brayed the voice of President Berzelius Windrip:

"I am addressing my own boys, the Minute Men, everywhere in America! To you and you only I look for help to make America a proud, rich land again. You have been scorned. They thought you were the 'lower classes.' They wouldn't give you jobs. They told you to sneak off like bums and get relief. They ordered you into lousy C.C.C. camps. They said you were no good, because you were poor. I tell you that you are, ever since yesterday noon, the highest lords of the land—the aristocracy—the makers of the new America of freedom and justice. Boys! I need you! Help me—help me to help you! Stand fast! Anybody tries to block you—give the swine the point of your bayonet!"

A machine-gunner M.M., who had listened reverently, let loose. The mob began to drop, and into the backs of the wounded as they went staggering away the M.M. infantry, running, poked their bayonets. Such a juicy squash it made, and the fugitives looked so amazed, so funny, as they tumbled in grotesque heaps!

The M.M.'s hadn't, in dreary hours of bayonet drill, known this would be such sport. They'd have more of it now—and hadn't the President of the United States himself told each of them, personally, that he needed their aid?

When the remnants of Congress ventured to the Capitol, they found it seeded with M.M.'s, while a regiment of Regulars, under Major General Meinecke, paraded the grounds.

The Speaker of the House, and the Hon. Mr. Perley Beecroft, Vice- President of the United States and Presiding Officer of the Senate, had the power to declare that quorums were present. (If a lot of members chose to dally in the district jail, enjoying themselves instead of attending Congress, whose fault was that?) Both houses passed a resolution declaring Point Fifteen temporarily in effect, during the "crisis"—the legality of the passage was doubtful, but just who was to contest it, even though the members of the Supreme Court had not been placed under protective arrest... merely confined each to his own house by a squad of Minute Men!

Bishop Paul Peter Prang had (his friends said afterward) been dismayed by Windrip's stroke of state. Surely, he complained, Mr. Windrip hadn't quite remembered to include Christian Amity in the program he had taken from the League of Forgotten Men. Though Mr. Prang had contentedly given up broadcasting ever since the victory of Justice and Fraternity in the person of Berzelius Windrip, he wanted to caution the public again, but when he telephoned to his familiar station, WLFM in Chicago, the manager informed him that "just temporarily, all access to the air was forbidden," except as it was especially licensed by the offices of Lee Sarason. (Oh, that was only one of sixteen jobs that Lee and his six hundred new assistants had taken on in the past week.)

Rather timorously, Bishop Prang motored from his home in Persepolis, Indiana, to the Indianapolis airport and took a night plane for Washington, to reprove, perhaps even playfully to spank, his naughty disciple, Buzz.

He had little trouble in being admitted to see the President. In fact, he was, the press feverishly reported, at the White House for six hours, though whether he was with the President all that time they could not discover. At three in the afternoon Prang was seen to leave by a private entrance to the executive offices and take a taxi. They noted that he was pale and staggering.

In front of his hotel he was elbowed by a mob who in curiously unmenacing and mechanical tones yelped, "Lynch um—downutha enemies Windrip!" A dozen M.M.'s pierced the crowd and surrounded the Bishop. The Ensign commanding them bellowed to the crowd, so that all might hear, "You cowards leave the Bishop alone! Bishop, come with us, and we'll see you're safe!"

Millions heard on their radios that evening the official announcement that, to ward off mysterious plotters, probably Bolsheviks, Bishop Prang had been safely shielded in the district jail. And with it a personal statement from President Windrip that he was filled with joy at having been able to "rescue from the foul agitators my friend and mentor, Bishop P. P. Prang, than whom there is no man living who I so admire and respect."

There was, as yet, no absolute censorship of the press; only a confused imprisonment of journalists who offended the government or local officers of the M.M.'s; and the papers chronically opposed to Windrip carried by no means flattering hints that Bishop Prang had rebuked the President and been plain jailed, with no nonsense about a "rescue." These mutters reached Persepolis.

Not all the Persepolitans ached with love for the Bishop or considered him a modern St. Francis gathering up the little fowls of the fields in his handsome LaSalle car. There were neighbors who hinted that he was a window-peeping snooper after bootleggers and obliging grass widows. But proud of him, their best advertisement, they certainly were, and the Persepolis Chamber of Commerce had caused to be erected at the Eastern gateway to Main Street the sign: "Home of Bishop Prang, Radio's Greatest Star."

So as one man Persepolis telegraphed to Washington, demanding Prang's release, but a messenger in the Executive Offices who was a Persepolis boy (he was, it is true, a colored man, but suddenly he became a favorite son, lovingly remembered by old schoolmates) tipped off the Mayor that the telegrams were among the hundredweight of messages that were daily hauled away from the White House unanswered.

Then a quarter of the citizenry of Persepolis mounted a special train to "march" on Washington. It was one of those small incidents which the opposition press could use as a bomb under Windrip, and the train was accompanied by a score of high-ranking reporters from Chicago and, later, from Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and New York.

While the train was on its way—and it was curious what delays and sidetrackings it encountered—a company of Minute Men at Logansport, Indiana, rebelled against having to arrest a group of Catholic nuns who were accused of having taught treasonably. High Marshal Sarason felt that there must be a Lesson, early and impressive. A battalion of M.M.'s, sent from Chicago in fast trucks, arrested the mutinous company, and shot every third man.

When the Persepolitans reached Washington, they were tearfully informed, by a brigadier of M.M.'s who met them at the Union Station, that poor Bishop Prang had been so shocked by the treason of his fellow Indianans that he had gone melancholy mad and they had tragically been compelled to shut him up in St. Elizabeth's government insane asylum.

No one willing to carry news about him ever saw Bishop Prang again.

The Brigadier brought greetings to the Persepolitans from the President himself, and an invitation to stay at the Willard, at government expense. Only a dozen accepted; the rest took the first train back, not amiably; and from then on there was one town in America in which no M.M. ever dared to appear in his ducky forage cap and dark-blue tunic.

The Chief of Staff of the Regular Army had been deposed; in his place was Major General Emmanuel Coon. Doremus and his like were disappointed by General Coon's acceptance, for they had always been informed, even by the Nation, that Emmanuel Coon, though a professional army officer who did enjoy a fight, preferred that that fight be on the side of the Lord; that he was generous, literate, just, and a man of honor—and honor was the one quality that Buzz Windrip wasn't even expected to understand. Rumor said that Coon (as "Nordic" a Kentuckian as ever existed, a descendant of men who had fought beside Kit Carson and Commodore Perry) was particularly impatient with the puerility of anti-Semitism, and that nothing so pleased him as, when he heard new acquaintances being superior about the Jews, to snarl, "Did you by any chance happen to notice that my name is Emmanuel Coon and that Coon might be a corruption of some name rather familiar on the East Side of New York?"

"Oh well, I suppose even General Coon feels, 'Orders are Orders,'" sighed Doremus.

President Windrip's first extended proclamation to the country was a pretty piece of literature and of tenderness. He explained that powerful and secret enemies of American principles—one rather gathered that they were a combination of Wall Street and Soviet Russia—upon discovering, to their fury, that he, Berzelius, was going to be President, had planned their last charge. Everything would be tranquil in a few months, but meantime there was a Crisis, during which the country must "bear with him."

He recalled the military dictatorship of Lincoln and Stanton during the Civil War, when civilian suspects were arrested without warrant. He hinted how delightful everything was going to be— right away now—just a moment—just a moment's patience—when he had things in hand; and he wound up with a comparison of the Crisis to the urgency of a fireman rescuing a pretty girl from a "conflagration," and carrying her down a ladder, for her own sake, whether she liked it or not, and no matter how appealingly she might kick her pretty ankles.

The whole country laughed.

"Great card, that Buzz, but mighty competent guy," said the electorate.

"I should worry whether Bish Prang or any other nut is in the boobyhatch, long as I get my five thousand bucks a year, like Windrip promised," said Shad Ledue to Charley Betts, the furniture man.

It had all happened within the eight days following Windrip's inauguration.

CHAPTER XVI

I HAVE no desire to be President. I would much rather do my humble best as a supporter of Bishop Prang, Ted Bilbo, Gene Talmadge or any other broad-gauged but peppy Liberal. My only longing is to Serve.

Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

LIKE many bachelors given to vigorous hunting and riding, Buck Titus was a fastidious housekeeper, and his mid-Victorian farmhouse fussily neat. It was also pleasantly bare: the living room a monastic hall of heavy oak chairs, tables free of dainty covers, numerous and rather solemn books of history and exploration, with the conventional "sets," and a tremendous fireplace of rough stone. And the ash trays were solid pottery and pewter, able to cope with a whole evening of cigarette-smoking. The whisky stood honestly on the oak buffet, with siphons, and with cracked ice always ready in a thermos jug.

It would, however, have been too much to expect Buck Titus not to have red-and-black imitation English hunting-prints.

This hermitage, always grateful to Doremus, was sanctuary now, and only with Buck could he adequately damn Windrip & Co. and people like Francis Tasbrough, who in February was still saying, "Yes, things do look kind of hectic down there in Washington, but that's just because there's so many of these bullheaded politicians that still think they can buck Windrip. Besides, anyway, things like that couldn't ever happen here in New England."

And, indeed, as Doremus went on his lawful occasions past the red-brick Georgian houses, the slender spires of old white churches facing the Green, as he heard the lazy irony of familiar greetings from his acquaintances, men as enduring as their Vermont hills, it seemed to him that the madness in the capital was as alien and distant and unimportant as an earthquake in Tibet.

Constantly, in the Informer, he criticized the government but not too acidly.

The hysteria can't last; be patient, and wait and see, he counseled his readers.

It was not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. It can't happen here, said even Doremus—even now.

The one thing that most perplexed him was that there could be a dictator seemingly so different from the fervent Hitlers and gesticulating Fascists and the Cæsars with laurels round bald domes; a dictator with something of the earthy American sense of humor of a Mark Twain, a George Ade, a Will Rogers, an Artemus Ward. Windrip could be ever so funny about solemn jaw-drooping opponents, and about the best method of training what he called "a Siamese flea hound." Did that, puzzled Doremus, make him less or more dangerous?

Then he remembered the most cruel-mad of all pirates, Sir Henry Morgan, who had thought it ever so funny to sew a victim up in wet rawhide and watch it shrink in the sun.

From the perseverance with which they bickered, you could tell that Buck Titus and Lorinda were much fonder of each other than they would admit. Being a person who read little and therefore took what he did read seriously, Buck was distressed by the normally studious Lorinda's vacation liking for novels about distressed princesses, and when she airily insisted that they were better guides to conduct than Anthony Trollope or Thomas Hardy, Buck roared at her and, in the feebleness of baited strength, nervously filled pipes and knocked them out against the stone mantel. But he approved of the relationship between Doremus and Lorinda, which only he (and Shad Ledue!) had guessed, and over Doremus, ten years his senior, this shaggy-headed woodsman fussed like a thwarted spinster.

To both Doremus and Lorinda, Buck's overgrown shack became their refuge. And they needed it, late in February, five weeks or thereabouts after Windrip's election.

Despite strikes and riots all over the country, bloodily put down by the Minute Men, Windrip's power in Washington was maintained. The most liberal four members of the Supreme Court resigned and were replaced by surprisingly unknown lawyers who called President Windrip by his first name. A number of Congressmen were still being "protected" in the District of Columbia jail; others had seen the blinding light forever shed by the goddess Reason and happily returned to the Capitol. The Minute Men were increasingly loyal— they were still unpaid volunteers, but provided with "expense accounts" considerably larger than the pay of the regular troops. Never in American history had the adherents of a President been so well satisfied; they were not only appointed to whatever political jobs there were but to ever so many that really were not; and with such annoyances as Congressional Investigations hushed, the official awarders of contracts were on the merriest of terms with all contractors.... One veteran lobbyist for steel corporations complained that there was no more sport in his hunting—you were not only allowed but expected to shoot all government purchasing-agents sitting.

None of the changes was so publicized as the Presidential mandate abruptly ending the separate existence of the different states, and dividing the whole country into eight "provinces"—thus, asserted Windrip, economizing by reducing the number of governors and all other state officers and, asserted Windrip's enemies, better enabling him to concentrate his private army and hold the country.

The new "Northeastern Province" included all of New York State north of a line through Ossining, and all of New England except a strip of Connecticut shore as far east as New Haven. This was, Doremus admitted, a natural and homogeneous division, and even more natural seemed the urban and industrial "Metropolitan Province," which included Greater New York, Westchester County up to Ossining, Long Island, the strip of Connecticut dependent on New York City, New Jersey, northern Delaware, and Pennsylvania as far as Reading and Scranton.

Each province was divided into numbered districts, each district into lettered counties, each county into townships and cities, and only in these last did the old names, with their traditional appeal, remain to endanger President Windrip by memories of honorable local history. And it was gossiped that, next, the government would change even the town names—that they were already thinking fondly of calling New York "Berzelian" and San Francisco "San Sarason." Probably that gossip was false.

The Northeastern Province's six districts were: 1, Upper New York State west of and including Syracuse; 2, New York east of it; 3, Vermont and New Hampshire; 4, Maine; 5, Massachusetts; 6, Rhode Island and the unraped portion of Connecticut.

District 3, Doremus Jessup's district, was divided into the four "counties" of southern and northern Vermont, and southern and northern New Hampshire, with Hanover for capital—the District Commissioner merely chased the Dartmouth students out and took over the college buildings for his offices, to the considerable approval of Amherst, Williams, and Yale.

So Doremus was living, now, in Northeastern Province, District 3, County B, township of Beulah, and over him for his admiration and rejoicing were a provincial commissioner, a district commissioner, a county commissioner, an assistant county commissioner in charge of Beulah Township, and all their appertaining M.M. guards and emergency military judges.

Citizens who had lived in any one state for more than ten years seemed to resent more hotly the loss of that state's identity than they did the castration of the Congress and Supreme Court of the United States—indeed, they resented it almost as much as the fact that, while late January, February, and most of March went by, they still were not receiving their governmental gifts of $5000 (or perhaps it would beautifully be $10,000) apiece; had indeed received nothing more than cheery bulletins from Washington to the effect that the "Capital Levy Board," or C.L.B. was holding sessions.

Virginians whose grandfathers had fought beside Lee shouted that they'd be damned if they'd give up the hallowed state name and form just one arbitrary section of an administrative unit containing eleven Southern states; San Franciscans who had considered Los Angelinos even worse than denizens of Miami now wailed with agony when California was sundered and the northern portion lumped in with Oregon, Nevada, and others as the "Mountain and Pacific Province," while southern California was, without her permission, assigned to the Southwestern Province, along with Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Hawaii. As some hint of Buzz Windrip's vision for the future, it was interesting to read that this Southwestern Province was also to be permitted to claim "all portions of Mexico which the United States may from time to time find it necessary to take over, as a protection against the notorious treachery of Mexico and the Jewish plots there hatched."

"Lee Sarason is even more generous than Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg in protecting the future of other countries," sighed Doremus.

As Provincial Commissioner of the Northeastern Province, comprising Upper New York State and New England, was appointed Colonel Dewey Haik, that soldier-lawyer-politician-aviator who was the chilliest-blooded and most arrogant of all the satellites of Windrip yet had so captivated miners and fishermen during the campaign. He was a strong-flying eagle who liked his meat bloody. As District Commissioner of District 3—Vermont and New Hampshire—appeared, to Doremus's mingled derision and fury, none other than John Sullivan Reek, that stuffiest of stuffed-shirts, that most gaseous gas bag, that most amenable machine politician of Northern New England; a Republican ex-governor who had, in the alembic of Windrip's patriotism, rosily turned Leaguer.

No one had ever troubled to be obsequious to the Hon. J. S. Reek, even when he had been Governor. The weediest back-country Representative had called him "Johnny," in the gubernatorial mansion (twelve rooms and a leaky roof); and the youngest reporter had bawled, "Well, what bull you handing out today, Ex?"

It was this Commissioner Reek who summoned all the editors in his district to meet him at his new viceregal lodge in Dartmouth Library and receive the precious privileged information as to how much President Windrip and his subordinate commissioners admired the gentlemen of the press.

Before he left for the press conference in Hanover, Doremus received from Sissy a "poem"—at least she called it that—which Buck Titus, Lorinda Pike, Julian Falck, and she had painfully composed, late at night, in Buck's fortified manor house:

Be meek with Reek, Go fake with Haik. One rhymes with sneak, And t' other with snake. Haik, with his beak, Is on the make, But Sullivan Reek— Oh God!

"Well, anyway, Windrip's put everybody to work. And he's driven all these unsightly billboards off the highways—much better for the tourist trade," said all the old editors, even those who wondered if the President wasn't perhaps the least bit arbitrary.

As he drove to Hanover, Doremus saw hundreds of huge billboards by the road. But they bore only Windrip propaganda and underneath, "with the compliments of a loyal firm" and—very large—"Montgomery Cigarettes" or "Jonquil Foot Soap." On the short walk from a parking-space to the former Dartmouth campus, three several men muttered to him, "Give us a nickel for cuppa coffee, Boss—a Minnie Mouse has got my job and the Mouses won't take me—they say I'm too old." But that may have been propaganda from Moscow.

On the long porch of the Hanover Inn, officers of the Minute Men were reclining in deck chairs, their spurred boots (in all the M.M. organization there was no cavalry) up on the railing.

Doremus passed a science building in front of which was a pile of broken laboratory glassware, and in one stripped laboratory he could see a small squad of M.M.'s drilling.

District Commissioner John Sullivan Reek affectionately received the editors in a classroom.... Old men, used to being revered as prophets, sitting anxiously in trifling chairs, facing a fat man in the uniform of an M.M. commander, who smoked an unmilitary cigar as his pulpy hand waved greeting.

Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would have taken the most intelligent man five or six hours—that is, five minutes of speech and the rest of the five hours to recover from the nausea caused by having to utter such shameless rot.... President Windrip, Secretary of State Sarason, Provincial Commissioner Haik, and himself, John Sullivan Reek, they were all being misrepresented by the Republicans, the Jeffersonians, the Communists, England, the Nazis, and probably the jute and herring industries; and what the government wanted was for any reporter to call on any member of this Administration, and especially on Commissioner Reek, at any time—except perhaps between 3 and 7 A.M.—and "get the real low-down."

Excellency Reek announced, then: "And now, gentlemen, I am giving myself the privilege of introducing you to all four of the County Commissioners, who were just chosen yesterday. Probably each of you will know personally the commissioner from your own county, but I want you to intimately and cooperatively know all four, because, whomever they may be, they join with me in my unquenchable admiration of the press."

The four County Commissioners, as one by one they shambled into the room and were introduced, seemed to Doremus an oddish lot: A moth-eaten lawyer known more for his quotations from Shakespeare and Robert W. Service than for his shrewdness before a jury. He was luminously bald except for a prickle of faded rusty hair, but you felt that, if he had his rights, he would have the floating locks of a tragedian of 1890.

A battling clergyman famed for raiding roadhouses.

A rather shy workman, an authentic proletarian, who seemed surprised to find himself there. (He was replaced, a month later, by a popular osteopath with an interest in politics and vegetarianism.)

The fourth dignitary to come in and affectionately bow to the editors, a bulky man, formidable-looking in his uniform as a battalion leader of Minute Men, introduced as the Commissioner for northern Vermont, Doremus Jessup's county, was Mr. Oscar Ledue, formerly known as "Shad."

Mr. Reek called him "Captain" Ledue. Doremus remembered that Shad's only military service, prior to Windrip's election, had been as an A.E.F. private who had never got beyond a training-camp in America and whose fiercest experience in battle had been licking a corporal when in liquor.

"Mr. Jessup," bubbled the Hon. Mr. Reek, "I imagine you must have met Captain Ledue—comes from your charming city."

"Uh-uh-ur," said Doremus.

"Sure," said Captain Ledue. "I've met old Jessup, all right, all right! He don't know what it's all about. He don't know the first thing about the economics of our social Revolution. He's a Cho-vinis. But he isn't such a bad old coot, and I'll let him ride as long as he behaves himself!"

"Splendid!" said the Hon. Mr. Reek.

[things-to-do-san-marcos-tx]

Outdoor Activities in San Marcos, TX

The San Marcos area, set against the picturesque backdrop of Texas' rolling hills, is a haven for outdoor enthusiasts. Visitors can explore the numerous trails and state parks or indulge in water activities like tubing, paddleboarding, kayaking, snorkeling, and swimming in the clear turquoise waters of the San Marcos and Blanco Rivers. With a year-round temperature of 72 degrees, these rivers are an ideal oasis for those looking to escape the summer heat. Jacob's Well and Blue Hole Regional Park are popular natural swimming holes, perfect for cooling off during the hot summer months. The annual Texas Water Safari is a must-see for more adventurous visitors. Dubbed the "world's toughest canoe race," this four-day, 260-mile canoe race culminates on the Texas coastline. With these beautiful activities, I'm not surprised that many people live in The Parlor, an apartment in San Marcos that's designed with style.

Studio Apartments in San Marcos

The Parlor is a beautiful studio apartment in San Marcos. It's a multifamily property offering a range of apartment rental options, including studio, one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments. This property features a spacious entrance hall with large windows, designer lighting, and various seating areas. The large seating area features plush furniture and a Scrabble-style wall and is open to the conference area with long tables and private rooms. The computer lab with four MAC computers, office chairs, and a painter is next to the swimming area. The pool features covered seating, a wall-mounted TV, and lounge chairs connected to the resort-style pool. The outdoor courtyard features two community grills, a hammock garden, and a walkway with seating. The fitness center also has cardio machines, yoga mats, treadmills, and ceiling fans, providing the guests with a comfortable and enjoyable experience. For more information, call 512.200.7530.

Leucadia Certified Farmers' Market 

The Leucadia Certified Farmers' Market features over 75 vendors selling organic, locally grown produce, cut flowers, and potted plants. Local artisan food vendors offer specialty items like marinades, pasta, meats, cheeses, and baked goods. The market also features a food court, a covered eating area, a large children's playground, a balloon artist, a face painter, and weekly live entertainment. Held every Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at Paul Ecke Central School, the market offers a variety of products and services for visitors to enjoy. If you want fresh foods, visit the Leucadia Certified Farmer's Market. 

Arrest in San Marcos Because of a Deadly Fire in 2018

Based on the news, an arrest has been made for Jacobe Ferguson, a resident of the San Marcos Iconic Village apartment fire that killed five people in 2018. The U.S. Marshals Lone Star Fugitive Task Force arrested Ferguson on July 5 at 6:45 a.m. in Austin and booked him into the Hays County Jail. The San Marcos Fire Department, San Marcos Police Department, the Houston Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the Hays County District Attorney's Office, Hays County Justice of the Peace, and the Texas DPS Texas Ranger Division collaborated to lead to Ferguson's arrest. A report of investigation (ROI) was generated for each new tip or piece of information. San Marcos Fire Marshal Jonathan Henderson said at least 265 ROIs are related to the case. Read more. 

Link to maps

The Palazzo Apartments 1011 Wonder World Dr, San Marcos, TX 78666, United States Head northwest on FM3407/Ranch Rd 12/Wonder World Dr Continue to follow FM3407/Ranch Rd 12 1.0 mi Turn right onto Hunter Rd 0.5 mi Continue onto Hopkins St 210 ft Turn right onto W San Antonio St 1.1 mi Turn right to stay on W San Antonio St Destination will be on the left 0.1 mi The Parlor 140 W San Antonio St, San Marcos, TX 78666, United States

[mystlnewsonline]

Former Prison Transport Officer - Rogeric Hankins - Sentenced

Former Private Prison Transport Officer, Rogeric Hankins, Sentenced to 9 Years in Prison (STL.News) A former private prisoner transport officer, Rogeric Hankins, was sentenced in federal court in the Western District of Missouri to nine years in federal prison to be followed by three years of supervised release for violating a female pretrial detainee's civil rights by sexually assaulting her. According to the plea agreement, at the time of the offense, Rogeric Hankins, 37, worked as a private prisoner transport officer for Inmate Services Corporation.  As a private prisoner transport officer, Hankins performed the government function of picking up individuals who were arrested on out-of-state warrants and transporting those individuals back to the jurisdictions that issued the warrants.  On March 31, 2020, Hankins picked up the victim, a female pretrial detainee, from jail in Olympia, Washington, to transport her to a jail in St. Paul, Minnesota. On April 3, 2020, before arriving in Minnesota, Hankins stopped the transport van at a rest stop in Joplin, Missouri.  Hankins brought the victim into the rest stop to use the bathroom.  After the victim used the women's bathroom, Hankins led her into the men's bathroom and told her to go into the stall furthest from the door.  Once inside the stall, Hankins began to try to pull the victim's shirt up.  The victim resisted and told Hankins to stop.  In response, Hankins told the victim to be quiet and made her perform a sexual act on him.  Hankins then bent the victim over a toilet seat and raped her. "The defendant sexually abused and violently assaulted a woman in his custody, exploiting his authority and depriving this survivor of her constitutional right to bodily integrity," said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.  "This sentence sends a clear message that the Justice Department is committed to protecting victims of sexual violence carried out at the hands of any and all law enforcement officials.  The privatization of positions in law enforcement does not change the fact that these individuals can and must be held accountable when they violate our federal civil rights laws." "This former prisoner transport officer sexually assaulted a detainee who was in his custody while transporting her through Missouri," said U.S. Attorney Teresa Moore for the Western District of Missouri.  "Today, he is being held accountable for abusing his position of trust and authority.  The Department of Justice is committed to protecting the civil rights of all citizens, including those in custody." "Hankins abused his power and sexually assaulted the victim while she was extremely vulnerable," said Special Agent in Charge Alvin M. Winston Sr. of the FBI Minneapolis Field Office.  "Today's sentencing sends a clear message that those who abuse their position of power to sexually assault the very people they are sworn to protect will be held accountable.  The FBI is committed to protecting the Constitutional rights of all citizens and pursuing justice on behalf of the victims in cases like this." The FBI Minneapolis Field Office investigated this case with assistance from the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office. Trial Attorney Laura Gilson and former Special Litigation Counsel Fara Gold of the Civil Rights Division's Criminal Section prosecuted this case with assistance from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Missouri. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Justice Read the full article

[livinginhisgratefulness]

Third teen charged in North St. Paul shooting with aiding and abetining murder

The bail of a third person charged with aiding in the murder of a North St. Paul man was set to $10 million on Friday. The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office requested a high bail because Octavion Jones, 19 had nine warrants for other cases at the time he was arrested. Anthony R. Rojas was found dead in an apartment located in the 2100 Block of North McKnight Road, on Monday evening. Officers found two empty and open gun safes, as well as a 3D Printer in the apartment. According to the criminal complaint in the homicide, it appeared that Rojas used the printer to make lower receivers for handguns. Octavion Jones (Courtesy the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office). The complaints stated that a confidential informant had told law enforcement about a person called “23” or “Octavion”, who “were supposed to rob him of the ghost weapons, but shot him instead.” Ghost guns, which are made privately and have no serial numbers, cannot be traced. Octavion Rayshawn Jones (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office) A 911 call was made Monday morning, less than ten minutes after the officers arrived at the scene of the murder. The 911 caller reported that a male juvenile with a handgun in his pocket had dropped two bags containing handguns, less than a half mile from the apartment. The bags contained 15 handguns. The complaints also stated that investigators discovered Rojas had posted a picture on social media 12 hour earlier, which showed him lying in bed with thousands of dollars cash at his apartment. The money was not found by law enforcement. The complaint against Jones stated that Jones’ cell location “pinged at Rojas residence” until shortly after the murder. After the shooting, Jones closed down his social media account. La Vida Rose Martinez (also known as Lavida) and Steven Lawrence Terry are both 19 years old and have been charged with aiding in the murder. Bail was set at $200,000 for each. Source

[dezinformatsiyanow]

Just in case anyone out there hasn’t been paying attention and is considering taking Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins seriously in his latest attempt to stir up FUD among the electorate with the November 3rd election rapidly approaching, here are a few facts everyone should keep in mind when it comes to his history:

Higgins has attempted to create a public image of himself as a devout Christian, manifesting in such media soundbytes as “[h]e carries the King James Version to political events,“ “his departure from the Sheriff's Office provided him 'a prayerful time' as he considered his options,” and “he relied on another source, he insists: 1 Corinthians 2:5, in which Paul advises men to place their faith 'not in the wisdom of of man' but in 'the power of God.’“ However, Higgins is also a three-time divorcee. His current wife Becca, cited by name in the attached tweet as having had a “premonition” about their guns, knives, and other supplies being “seized” by “Federal squads,” is his 4th wife. 

Higgins is a former police officer who has repeatedly parroted Donald Trump’s hardline stance on “law and order.” However, Higgins cast one of only five “NO” votes on HR 1155 - Reaffirming the House of Representatives' commitment to the orderly and peaceful transfer of power called for in the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes - which calls for a peaceful transition of power should Donald Trump lose the 2020 election. The bill overwhelmingly passed the House 397-5.

In 2007, Higgins was a patrol officer for the Opelousas City Police Department. In a letter to the City Council, Chief Perry Gallow said, "Clay Higgins used unnecessary force on a subject during the execution of a warrant and later gave false statements during an internal investigation.” Gallow also said Higgins “admitted to striking a suspect in handcuffs and later releasing him..." Higgins resigned before disciplinary action could be imposed. In September 2016, during his Congressional campaign, Higgins falsely claimed to have resigned for other reasons.

In October 2014, Higgins was appointed public information officer for the St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office and promoted to captain. As public information officer, Higgins made videos for the parish Crime Stoppers program appealing to suspects to surrender and sometimes threatening them by name. By 2015, he had earned the moniker "Cajun John Wayne" for his intimidation tactics.

Higgins had gone against department policy by misusing his official position for personal profit and gain by wearing a uniform in an ad for a security firm, and on his personal website to support sales of T-shirts and shot glasses for his own business. He was also cited for using the department's address in registering his LLC with the state. Salon reported Higgins "negotiated paid speaking appearances with other police departments. In one email, Higgins discussed his request for a speaker’s fee that included shopping money for his wife and part of the fuel for his friend’s private plane." Additionally, Salon stated Higgins conducted private business on "his government email account during work hours without the permission or knowledge of his supervisors. Higgins also appears to have attempted to conceal his earnings from the IRS in order to avoid wage garnishment for unpaid taxes.”

Higgins was forced out of the SLPSO by Sheriff Bobby Guidroz in February 2016. Guidroz issued a statement saying that Higgins's comments underlined "a growing undertone of insubordination and lack of discipline on Higgins’ part.”

Despite all of this, Higgins was sworn in as a Reserve Deputy Marshall for the city of Lafayette in March 2016. He retired his commission in 2019, but maintains an active commission as a reserve officer with the Louisiana Attorney General's office.

[blackkudos]

Paul Robeson

Paul Leroy Robeson ( ROHB-sən; April 9, 1898 – January 23, 1976) was an American bass baritone concert artist and stage and film actor who became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism. Educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, he was also a star athlete in his youth. He also studied Swahili and linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London in 1934. His political activities began with his involvement with unemployed workers and anti-imperialist students whom he met in Britain and continued with support for the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War and his opposition to fascism. In the United States he also became active in the Civil Rights Movement and other social justice campaigns. His sympathies for the Soviet Union and for communism, and his criticism of the United States government and its foreign policies, caused him to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

In 1915, Robeson won an academic scholarship to Rutgers College, where he was twice named a consensus All-American in football, and was the class valedictorian. Almost 80 years later, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. He received his LL.B. from Columbia Law School while playing in the National Football League (NFL). At Columbia, he sang and acted in off-campus productions. After graduating, he became a figure in the Harlem Renaissance with performances in The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings.

Between 1925 and 1961, Robeson recorded and released some 276 distinct songs, many of which were recorded several times. The first of these were the spirituals "Steal Away" backed with "Were You There" in 1925. Robeson's recorded repertoire spanned many styles, including Americana, popular standards, classical music, European folk songs, political songs, poetry and spoken excerpts from plays.

Robeson performed in Britain in a touring melodrama, Voodoo, in 1922, and in Emperor Jones in 1925, and scored a major success in the London premiere of Show Boat in 1928, settling in London for several years with his wife Eslanda. While continuing to establish himself as a concert artist, Robeson also starred in a London production of Othello, the first of three productions of the play over the course of his career. He also gained attention in the film production of Show Boat (1936) and other films such as Sanders of the River (1935) and The Proud Valley (1940). During this period, Robeson became increasingly attuned to the sufferings of people of other cultures, notably the British working class and the colonized peoples of the British Empire. He advocated for Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War and became active in the Council on African Affairs (CAA).

Returning to the United States in 1939, during World War II Robeson supported the American and Allied war efforts. However, his history of supporting civil rights causes and pro-Soviet policies brought scrutiny from the FBI. After the war ended, the CAA was placed on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations and Robeson was investigated during the age of McCarthyism. Due to his decision not to recant his public advocacy, he was denied a passport by the U.S. State Department, and his income, consequently, plummeted. He moved to Harlem and from 1950 to 1955 published a periodical called Freedom which was critical of United States policies. His right to travel was eventually restored as a result of the 1958 United States Supreme Court decision, Kent v. Dulles. In the early 1960s he retired and lived the remaining years of his life privately in Philadelphia.

Early life

1898–1915: Childhood

Paul Leroy Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898, to Reverend William Drew Robeson and Maria Louisa Bustill. His mother, Maria, was from a prominent Quaker family of mixed ancestry. His father, William, was of Igbo origin and was born into slavery, William escaped from a plantation in his teens and eventually became the minister of Princeton's Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in 1881. Robeson had three brothers: William Drew Jr. (born 1881), Reeve (born c. 1887), and Ben (born c. 1893); and one sister, Marian (born c. 1895).

In 1900, a disagreement between William and white financial supporters of Witherspoon arose with apparent racial undertones, which were prevalent in Princeton. William, who had the support of his entirely black congregation, resigned in 1901. The loss of his position forced him to work menial jobs. Three years later when Robeson was six, his mother, who was nearly blind, died in a house fire. Eventually, William became financially incapable of providing a house for himself and his children still living at home, Ben and Paul, so they moved into the attic of a store in Westfield, New Jersey.

William found a stable parsonage at the St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion in 1910, where Robeson filled in for his father during sermons when he was called away. In 1912, Robeson attended Somerville High School in Somerville, New Jersey, where he performed in Julius Caesar and Othello, sang in the chorus, and excelled in football, basketball, baseball and track. His athletic dominance elicited racial taunts which he ignored. Prior to his graduation, he won a statewide academic contest for a scholarship to Rutgers and was named class valedictorian. He took a summer job as a waiter in Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, where he befriended Fritz Pollard, later to be the first African-American coach in the National Football League.

1915–1919: Rutgers College

In late 1915, Robeson became the third African-American student ever enrolled at Rutgers, and the only one at the time. He tried out for the Rutgers Scarlet Knights football team, and his resolve to make the squad was tested as his teammates engaged in excessive play, during which his nose was broken and his shoulder dislocated. The coach, Foster Sanford, decided he had overcome the provocation and announced that he had made the team.

Robeson joined the debating team and sang off-campus for spending money, and on-campus with the Glee Club informally, as membership required attending all-white mixers. He also joined the other collegiate athletic teams. As a sophomore, amidst Rutgers' sesquicentennial celebration, he was benched when a Southern team refused to take the field because the Scarlet Knights had fielded a Negro, Robeson.

After a standout junior year of football, he was recognized in The Crisis for his athletic, academic, and singing talents. At this time his father fell grievously ill. Robeson took the sole responsibility in caring for him, shuttling between Rutgers and Somerville. His father, who was the "glory of his boyhood years" soon died, and at Rutgers, Robeson expounded on the incongruity of African Americans fighting to protect America in World War I but, contemporaneously, being without the same opportunities in the United States as whites.

He finished university with four annual oratorical triumphs and varsity letters in multiple sports. His play at end won him first-team All-American selection, in both his junior and senior years. Walter Camp considered him the greatest end ever. Academically, he was accepted into Phi Beta Kappa and Cap and Skull. His classmates recognized him by electing him class valedictorian. The Daily Targum published a poem featuring his achievements. In his valedictory speech, he exhorted his classmates to work for equality for all Americans.

1919–1923: Columbia Law School and marriage

Robeson entered New York University School of Law in fall 1919. To support himself, he became an assistant football coach at Lincoln, where he joined the Alpha Phi Alpha. However, Robeson felt uncomfortable at NYU and moved to Harlem and transferred to Columbia Law School in February 1920. Already known in the black community for his singing, he was selected to perform at the dedication of the Harlem YWCA.

Robeson began dating Eslanda "Essie" Goode and after her coaxing, he gave his theatrical debut as Simon in Ridgely Torrence's Simon of Cyrene. After a year of courtship, they were married in August 1921.

Robeson was recruited by Pollard to play for the NFL's Akron Pros while he continued his law studies. In the spring, Robeson postponed school to portray Jim in Mary Hoyt Wiborg's play Taboo. He then sang in a chorus in an Off-Broadway production of Shuffle Along before he joined Taboo in Britain. The play was adapted by Mrs. Patrick Campbell to highlight his singing. After the play ended, he befriended Lawrence Brown, a classically trained musician, before returning to Columbia while playing for the NFL's Milwaukee Badgers. He ended his football career after 1922, and months later, he graduated from law school.

Theatrical success and ideological transformation

1923–1927: Harlem Renaissance

Robeson worked briefly as a lawyer, but he renounced a career in law due to widespread racism. Essie financially supported them and they frequented the social functions at the future Schomburg Center. In December 1924 he landed the lead role of Jim in Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings, which culminated with Jim metaphorically consummating his marriage with his white wife by symbolically emasculating himself. Chillun's opening was postponed due to nationwide controversy over its plot.

Chillun's delay led to a revival of The Emperor Jones with Robeson as Brutus, a role pioneered by Charles Sidney Gilpin. The role terrified and galvanized Robeson, as it was practically a 90-minute soliloquy. Reviews declared him an unequivocal success. Though arguably clouded by its controversial subject, his Jim in Chillun was less well received. He deflected criticism of its plot by writing that fate had drawn him to the "untrodden path" of drama and the true measure of a culture is in its artistic contributions, and the only true American culture was African-American.

The success of his acting placed him in elite social circles and his ascension to fame, which was forcefully aided by Essie, had occurred at a startling pace. Essie's ambition for Robeson was a startling dichotomy to his indifference. She quit her job, became his agent, and negotiated his first movie role in a silent race film directed by Oscar Micheaux, Body and Soul (1925). To support a charity for single mothers, he headlined a concert singing spirituals. He performed his repertoire of spirituals on the radio.

Lawrence Brown, who had become renowned while touring as a pianist with gospel singer Roland Hayes, stumbled upon Robeson in Harlem. The two ad-libbed a set of spirituals, with Robeson as lead and Brown as accompanist. This so enthralled them that they booked Provincetown Playhouse for a concert. The pair's rendition of African-American folk songs and spirituals was captivating, and Victor Records signed Robeson to a contract.

The Robesons went to London for a revival of The Emperor Jones, before spending the rest of the fall on holiday on the French Riviera, socializing with Gertrude Stein and Claude McKay. Robeson and Brown performed a series of concert tours in America from January 1926 until May 1927.

During a hiatus in New York, Robeson learned that Essie was several months pregnant. Paul Robeson Jr. was born in November 1927 in New York, while Robeson and Brown toured Europe. Essie experienced complications from the birth, and by mid-December, her health had deteriorated dramatically. Ignoring Essie's objections, her mother wired Robeson and he immediately returned to her bedside. Essie completely recovered after a few months.

1928–1932: Show Boat, Othello, and marriage difficulties

In 1928, Robeson played "Joe" in the London production of the American musical Show Boat, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. His rendition of "Ol' Man River" became the benchmark for all future performers of the song. Some black critics were not pleased with the play due to its usage of the word "nigger". It was, nonetheless, immensely popular with white audiences. He was summoned for a Royal Command Performance at Buckingham Palace and Robeson was befriended by MPs from the House of Commons. Show Boat continued for 350 performances and, as of 2001, it remained the Royal's most profitable venture. The Robesons bought a home in Hampstead. He reflected on his life in his diary and wrote that it was all part of a "higher plan" and "God watches over me and guides me. He's with me and lets me fight my own battles and hopes I'll win." However, an incident at the Savoy Grill, in which he was refused seating, sparked him to issue a press release describing the insult which subsequently became a matter of public debate.

Essie had learned early in their marriage that Robeson had been involved in extramarital affairs, but she tolerated them. However, when she discovered that he was having another affair, she unfavorably altered the characterization of him in his biography, and defamed him by describing him with "negative racial stereotypes". Despite her uncovering of this tryst, there was no public evidence that their relationship had soured.

The couple appeared in the experimental Swiss film Borderline (1930). He then returned to the Savoy Theatre, in London's West End to play Othello, opposite Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona. Robeson was the first black actor to play Othello in Britain since Ira Aldridge. The production received mixed reviews which noted Robeson's "highly civilized quality [but lacking the] grand style." Robeson stated the best way to diminish the oppression African Americans faced was for his artistic work to be an example of what "men of my colour" could accomplish rather than to "be a propagandist and make speeches and write articles about what they call the Colour Question."

After Essie discovered Robeson had been having an affair with Ashcroft, she decided to seek a divorce and they split up. Robeson returned to Broadway as Joe in the 1932 revival of Show Boat, to critical and popular acclaim. Subsequently, he received, with immense pride, an honorary master's degree from Rutgers. Thereabout, his former football coach, Foster Sanford, advised him that divorcing Essie and marrying Ashcroft would do irreparable damage to his reputation. Ashcroft and Robeson's relationship ended in 1932, following which Robeson and Essie reconciled, although their relationship was scarred permanently.

1933–1937: Ideological awakening

In 1933, Robeson played the role of Jim in the London production of Chillun, virtually gratis, then returned to the United States to star as Brutus in the film The Emperor Jones, "a feat not repeated for more than two decades in the U.S." His acting in The Emperor Jones—the first film to feature an African American in a starring role—was well received. On the film set he rejected any slight to his dignity, despite the widespread Jim Crow atmosphere in the United States. Upon returning to England he publicly criticized African Americans' rejection of their own culture. Despite negative reactions from the press, such as a New York Amsterdam News retort that Robeson had made a "jolly well [ass of himself]", he also announced that he would reject any offers to perform European opera because the music had no connection to his heritage.

In early 1934 Robeson enrolled in the School of Oriental and African Studies, a constituent college of the University of London, where he studied Phonetics, Swahili and other African languages. His "sudden interest" in African history and its impact on culture coincided with his essay "I Want to be African", wherein he wrote of his desire to embrace his ancestry.

His friends in the anti-imperialism movement and association with British socialists led him to visit the Soviet Union. Robeson, Essie, and Marie Seton traveled to the Soviet Union on an invitation from Sergei Eisenstein in December 1934. A stopover in Berlin enlightened Robeson to the racism in Nazi Germany and, on his arrival in Moscow, in the Soviet Union, Robeson said, "Here I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life ... I walk in full human dignity." Waldemar ("Wally") Hille, who subsequently went on to do arrangements on the People's Songs Bulletin, got his start as an early touring pianist for Robeson.

He undertook the role of Bosambo in the movie Sanders of the River (1935), which he felt would render a realistic view of colonial African culture. Sanders of the River made Robeson an international movie star; but the stereotypical portrayal of a colonial African was seen as embarrassing to his stature as an artist and damaging to his reputation. The Commissioner of Nigeria to London protested the film as slanderous to his country, and Robeson thereafter became more politically conscious of his roles. He appeared in the play Stevedore at the Embassy Theatre in London in May 1935, which was favorably reviewed in The Crisis by Nancy Cunard, who concluded: "Stevedore is extremely valuable in the racial–social question—it is straight from the shoulder". In early 1936, he decided to send his son to school in the Soviet Union to shield him from racist attitudes. He then played the role of Toussaint Louverture in the eponymous play by C.L.R. James at the Westminster Theatre, and appeared in the films Song of Freedom, Show Boat (both 1936), My Song Goes Forth, King Solomon's Mines. and was the narrator of the documentary Big Fella (all 1937). In 1938, he was named by American Motion Picture Herald as the 10th most popular star in British cinema.

1937–1939: Spanish Civil War and political activism

Robeson believed that the struggle against fascism during the Spanish Civil War was a turning point in his life and transformed him into a political activist. In 1937, he used his concert performances to advocate the Republican cause and the war's refugees. He permanently modified his renditions of "Ol' Man River" – initially, by singing the word "darkies" instead of "niggers"; later, by changing some of the stereotypical dialect in the lyrics to standard English and replacing the fatalistic last verse ("Ah gits weary/ An' sick of tryin'/ Ah'm tired of livin'/ An skeered of dyin'") with an uplifting verse of his own ("But I keep laffin'/ Instead of cryin'/ I must keep fightin'/ Until I'm dyin'") – transforming it from a tragic "song of resignation with a hint of protest implied" into a battle hymn of unwavering defiance. His business agent expressed concern about his political involvement, but Robeson overruled him and decided that contemporary events trumped commercialism. In Wales, he commemorated the Welsh people killed while fighting for the Republicans, where he recorded a message that became his epitaph: "The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."

After an invitation from J.B.S. Haldane, he traveled to Spain in 1938 because he believed in the International Brigades's cause, visited the hospital of the Benicàssim, singing to the wounded soldiers. Robeson also visited the battlefront and provided a morale boost to the Republicans at a time when their victory was unlikely. Back in England, he hosted Jawaharlal Nehru to support Indian independence, whereat Nehru expounded on imperialism's affiliation with Fascism. Robeson reevaluated the direction of his career and decided to focus on the ordeals of "common people", He appeared in the pro-labor play Plant in the Sun, in which he played an Irishman, his first "white" role. With Max Yergan, and the CAA, Robeson became an advocate in the aspirations of African nationalists for political independence.

Robeson also developed a sympathy for China's side in the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1940, the Chinese progressive activist, Liu Liangmo taught Robeson the patriotic song "Chee Lai!" ("Arise!"), known as the March of the Volunteers. Robeson memorized the words in Chinese. Robeson premiered the song at a large concert in New York City's Lewisohn Stadium and recorded it in both English and Chinese for Keynote Records in early 1941. Its 3-disc album included a booklet whose preface was written by Soong Ching-ling, widow of Sun Yat-sen, Robeson gave further performances at benefits for the China Aid Council and United China Relief at their sold-out concert at Washington's Uline Arena on April 24, 1941. The Washington Committee for Aid to China had booked Constitution Hall but been blocked by the Daughters of the American Revolution owing to Robeson's race. The indignation was great enough that President Roosevelt's wife Eleanor and Hu Shih, the Chinese ambassador, joined as sponsors. However, when the organizers offered tickets on generous terms to the National Negro Congress to help fill the larger venue, these sponsors withdrew, in objection to the NNC's Communist ties.

Partly because of the favorable international reputation Robeson gave to the song, it became China's National Anthem after 1949. The Chinese lyricist died in a Beijing prison in 1968, but Robeson continued to send royalties to his family.

World War II, the Broadway Othello, political activism, and McCarthyism

1939–1945: World War II and the Broadway Othello

Robeson's last British film was The Proud Valley (1940), set in a Welsh coal-mining town. After the outbreak of World War II, Robeson and his family returned to the United States in 1940, to Enfield, Connecticut, and he became America's "no.1 entertainer" with a radio broadcast of Ballad for Americans. Nevertheless, during a tour in 1940, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was the only major Los Angeles hotel willing to accommodate him due to his race, at an exorbitant rate and registered under an assumed name, and he therefore dedicated two hours every afternoon to sitting in the lobby, where he was widely recognised, "to ensure that the next time Black[s] come through, they'll have a place to stay." Los Angeles hotels lifted their restrictions on black guests soon afterwards.

Furthermore, the documentary Native Land (1942), which Robeson narrated, was labeled by the FBI as communist propaganda. After an appearance in Tales of Manhattan (1942), a production that he felt was "very offensive to my people", he announced that he would no longer act in films because of the demeaning roles available to blacks.

Robeson participated in benefit concerts on behalf of the war effort and at a concert at the Polo Grounds, he met two emissaries from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Feffer Subsequently, Robeson reprised his role of Othello at the Shubert Theatre in 1943, and became the first African American to play the role with a white supporting cast on Broadway. During the same period of time, he addressed a meeting with Kenesaw Mountain Landis in a failed attempt to convince him to admit black players to Major League Baseball. He toured North America with Othello until 1945, and subsequently, his political efforts with the CAA to get colonial powers to discontinue their exploitation of Africa were short-circuited by the United Nations.

1946–1949: Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations

After the mass lynching of four African Americans on July 25, 1946, Robeson met with President Truman and admonished Truman by stating that if he did not enact legislation to end lynching, "the Negroes will defend themselves". Truman immediately terminated the meeting and declared that the time was not right to propose anti-lynching legislation. Subsequently, Robeson publicly called upon all Americans to demand that Congress pass civil rights legislation. Taking a stance against lynching, Robeson founded the American Crusade Against Lynching organization in 1946. This organization was thought to be a threat to the NAACP antiviolence movement. Robeson received support from W.E.B. Du Bois regarding this matter and officially launched this organization on the anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, September 23.

About this time, Robeson's belief that trade unionism was crucial to civil rights became a mainstay of his political beliefs as he became a proponent of the union activist Revels Cayton. Robeson was later called before the Tenney Committee where he responded to questions about his affiliation with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) by testifying that he was not a member of the CPUSA. Nevertheless, two organizations with which Robeson was intimately involved, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) and the CAA, were placed on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO). Subsequently, he was summoned before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and when questioned about his affiliation with the Communist Party, he refused to answer, stating: "Some of the most brilliant and distinguished Americans are about to go to jail for the failure to answer that question, and I am going to join them, if necessary."

In 1948, Robeson was preeminent in Henry A. Wallace's bid for the President of the United States, during which Robeson traveled to the Deep South, at risk to his own life, to campaign for him. In the ensuing year, Robeson was forced to go overseas to work because his concert performances were canceled at the FBI's behest. While on tour, he spoke at the World Peace Council, at which his speech was publicly reported as equating America with a Fascist state—a depiction that he flatly denied. Nevertheless, the speech publicly attributed to him was a catalyst for his becoming an enemy of mainstream America. Robeson refused to bow to public criticism when he advocated in favor of twelve defendants, including his long-time friend, Benjamin J. Davis Jr., charged during the Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders.

Robeson traveled to Moscow in June, and tried to find Itzik Feffer. He let Soviet authorities know that he wanted to see him. Reluctant to lose Robeson as a propagandist for the Soviet Union, the Soviets brought Feffer from prison to him. Feffer told him that Mikhoels had been murdered, and he would be summarily executed. To protect the Soviet Union's reputation, and to keep the right wing of the United States from gaining the moral high ground, Robeson denied that any persecution existed in the Soviet Union, and kept the meeting secret for the rest of his life, except from his son. On June 20, 1949, Robeson spoke at the Paris Peace Congress saying that "We in America do not forget that it was on the backs of the white workers from Europe and on the backs of millions of Blacks that the wealth of America was built. And we are resolved to share it equally. We reject any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong. We shall not make war on anyone. We shall not make war on the Soviet Union. We oppose those who wish to build up imperialist Germany and to establish fascism in Greece. We wish peace with Franco's Spain despite her fascism. We shall support peace and friendship among all nations, with Soviet Russia and the people's Republics." He was blacklisted for saying this in the mainstream press within the United States, including in many periodicals of the Negro press such as The Crisis.

In order to isolate Robeson politically, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed Jackie Robinson to comment on Robeson's Paris speech. Robinson testified that Robeson's statements, "'if accurately reported', were silly'". Days later, the announcement of a concert headlined by Robeson in New York City provoked the local press to decry the use of their community to support "subversives" and the Peekskill Riots ensued.

Later that year, Edward R. Murrow had CBS News colleague Don Hollenbeck contribute to the innovative media-review program CBS Views the Press over the radio network's flagship station WCBS. Hollenbeck discussed Edward U. Condon, Alger Hiss, and Paul Robeson. Regarding Robeson and the Peekskill riots of 27 August 1949, Hollenbeck said that, while most newspapers had covered the riots well, the New York World-Telegram had drawn from sources that disliked Robeson, including The Compass (successor to PM, Hollenbeck's former employer).

1950–1955: Blacklisted

A book reviewed in early 1950 as "the most complete record on college football" failed to list Robeson as ever having played on the Rutgers team and as ever having been an All-American. Months later, NBC canceled Robeson's appearance on Eleanor Roosevelt's television program. Subsequently, the State Department denied Robeson a passport and issued a "stop notice" at all ports because it believed that an isolated existence inside United States borders not only afforded him less freedom of expression but also avenge his "extreme advocacy on behalf of the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa." However, when Robeson met with State Department officials and asked why he was denied a passport, he was told that "his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries".

In 1951, an article titled "Paul Robeson – the Lost Shepherd" was published in The Crisis although Paul Jr. suspected it was written by Amsterdam News columnist Earl Brown. J. Edgar Hoover and the United States State Department arranged for the article to be printed and distributed in Africa in order to defame Robeson's reputation and reduce his and Communists' popularity in colonial countries. Another article by Roy Wilkins (now thought to have been the real author of "Paul Robeson – the Lost Shepherd") denounced Robeson as well as the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in terms consistent with the anti-Communist FBI propaganda.

On December 17, 1951, Robeson presented to the United Nations an anti-lynching petition titled "We Charge Genocide". The document asserted that the United States federal government, by its failure to act against lynching in the United States, was "guilty of genocide" under Article II of the UN Genocide Convention.

In 1952, Robeson was awarded the International Stalin Prize by the Soviet Union. Unable to travel to Moscow, he accepted the award in New York. In April 1953, shortly after Stalin's death, Robeson penned To You My Beloved Comrade, praising Stalin as dedicated to peace and a guide to the world: "Through his deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves us a rich and monumental heritage." Robeson's opinions about the Soviet Union kept his passport out of reach and stopped his return to the entertainment industry and the civil rights movement. In his opinion, the Soviet Union was the guarantor of political balance in the world.

In a symbolic act of defiance against the travel ban, in May 1952, labor unions in the United States and Canada organized a concert at the International Peace Arch on the border between Washington state and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Robeson returned to perform a second concert at the Peace Arch in 1953, and over the next two years, two further concerts took place. In this period, with the encouragement of his friend the Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan, Robeson recorded a number of radio concerts for supporters in Wales.

1956–1957: End of McCarthyism

In 1956, Robeson was called before HUAC after he refused to sign an affidavit affirming that he was not a Communist. In his testimony, he invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to reveal his political affiliations. When asked why he had not remained in the Soviet Union because of his affinity with its political ideology, he replied, "because my father was a slave and my people died to build [the United States and], I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you and no fascist-minded people will drive me from it!" At that hearing, Robeson stated "Whether I am or not a Communist is irrelevant. The question is whether American citizens, regardless of their political beliefs or sympathies, may enjoy their constitutional rights." In 1957, still unable to accept invitations to perform abroad, Paul Robeson sang for audiences in London, where 1,000 concert tickets for his telephone concert at St Pancras Town Hall sold out within an hour, and Wales via the transatlantic telephone cable TAT-1: "We have to learn the hard way that there is another way to sing". An appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States to reinstate his confiscated passport had been rejected, but over the telephone Robeson was able to sing to the 5,000 gathered there as he had earlier in the year to London.

Due to the reaction to the promulgation of Robeson's political views, his recordings and films were removed from public distribution, and he was universally condemned in the U.S press. During the height of the Cold War, it became increasingly difficult in the United States to hear Robeson sing on commercial radio, buy his music or see his films.

In 1956, in the United Kingdom, Topic Records, at that time part of the Workers Music Association, released a single of Robeson singing "Joe Hill", written by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson, backed with "John Brown's Body". Joe Hill (1879–1915) was a labor activist in the early 20th century, and "Joe Hill" sung by Robeson is the third favorite choice of British Labour Party politicians on the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs.

Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism at the 1956 Party Congress silenced Robeson on Stalin, although Robeson continued to praise the Soviet Union. In 1956, after public pressure brought a one-time exemption to the travel ban, Robeson performed two concerts in Canada in February, one in Toronto and the other at a union convention in Sudbury, Ontario. That year Robeson, along with close friend W.E.B. Du Bois, compared the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary to the "same sort of people who overthrew the Spanish Republican Government" and supported the Soviet invasion and suppression of the revolt.

Later years

1958–1960: Comeback tours

1958 saw the publication of Robeson's "manifesto-autobiography" Here I Stand. His passport was restored in June 1958 via Kent v. Dulles, and he embarked on a world tour using London as his base. In Moscow in August 1959, he received a tumultuous reception at the Luzhniki Stadium where he sang classic Russian songs along with American standards. Robeson and Essie then flew to Yalta to rest and spend time with Nikita Khrushchev.

On October 11, 1959, Robeson took part in a service at St. Paul's Cathedral, the first black performer to sing there. On a trip to Moscow, Robeson experienced bouts of dizziness and heart problems and was hospitalized for two months while Essie was diagnosed with operable cancer. He recovered and returned to the UK to visit the National Eisteddfod.

Meanwhile, the State Department had circulated negative literature about him throughout the media in India.

While leading The Royal Shakespeare Company starring as Othello in Tony Richardson's 1959 production at Stratford-upon-Avon, he befriended actor Andrew Faulds, whose family hosted him in the nearby village of Shottery. In 1960, in what was his final concert performance in Great Britain, Robeson sang to raise money for the Movement for Colonial Freedom at the Royal Festival Hall.

In October 1960, Robeson embarked on a two-month concert tour of Australia and New Zealand with Essie, primarily to generate money, at the behest of Australian politician Bill Morrow. While in Sydney, he became the first major artist to perform at the construction site of the future Sydney Opera House. After appearing at the Brisbane Festival Hall, they went to Auckland where Robeson reaffirmed his support of Marxism, denounced the inequality faced by the Māori and efforts to denigrate their culture. Thereabouts, Robeson publicly stated "..the people of the lands of Socialism want peace dearly".

During the tour he was introduced to Faith Bandler who interested the Robesons in the plight of the Australian Aborigines. Robeson, consequently, became enraged and demanded the Australian government provide the Aborigines citizenship and equal rights. He attacked the view of the Aborigines as being unsophisticated and uncultured, and declared, "there's no such thing as a backward human being, there is only a society which says they are backward."

1961–1963: Health breakdown

Back in London, he decided to return to the United States, where he hoped to resume participation in the civil rights movement, stopping off in Africa and Cuba along the way. Essie argued to stay in London, fearing that he'd be "killed" if he returned and would be "unable to make any money" due to harassment by the United States government. Robeson disagreed and made his own travel arrangements, arriving in Moscow in March 1961.

During an uncharacteristically wild party in his Moscow hotel room, Robeson locked himself in his bedroom and attempted suicide by cutting his wrists. Three days later, under Soviet medical care, he told his son that he felt extreme paranoia, thought that the walls of the room were moving and, overcome by a powerful sense of emptiness and depression, tried to take his own life.

Paul Jr. believed that his father's health problems stemmed from attempts by the CIA and MI5 to "neutralize" his father. He remembered that his father had had such fears prior to his prostate operation. He said that three doctors treating Robeson in London and New York had been CIA contractors, and that his father's symptoms resulted from being "subjected to mind depatterning under MK-ULTRA", a secret CIA programme. Martin Duberman wrote that Robeson's health breakdown was probably brought on by a combination of factors including extreme emotional and physical stress, bipolar depression, exhaustion and the beginning of circulatory and heart problems. "[E]ven without an organic predisposition and accumulated pressures of government harassment he might have been susceptible to a breakdown."

Robeson stayed at the Barvikha Sanatorium until September 1961, when he left for London. There his depression reemerged, and after another period of recuperation in Moscow, he returned to London. Three days after arriving back, he became suicidal and suffered a panic attack while passing the Soviet Embassy. He was admitted to the Priory Hospital, where he underwent electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and was given heavy doses of drugs for nearly two years, with no accompanying psychotherapy. During his treatment at the Priory, Robeson was being monitored by the British MI5. Both intelligence services were well aware of Robeson's suicidal state of mind. An FBI memo described Robeson's debilitated condition, remarking that his "death would be much publicized" and would be used for Communist propaganda, necessitating continued surveillance. Numerous memos advised that Robeson should be denied a passport renewal, an obstacle that was likely to further jeopardize his recovery process.

In August 1963, disturbed about his treatment, friends and family had Robeson transferred to the Buch Clinic in East Berlin. Given psychotherapy and less medication, his physicians found him still "completely without initiative" and they expressed "doubt and anger" about the "high level of barbiturates and ECT" that had been administered in London. He rapidly improved, though his doctor stressed that "what little is left of Paul's health must be quietly conserved."

1963–1976: Retirement

In 1963, Robeson returned to the United States and for the remainder of his life lived in seclusion. He momentarily assumed a role in the civil rights movement, making a few major public appearances before falling seriously ill during a tour. Double pneumonia and a kidney blockage in 1965 nearly killed him.

Robeson was contacted by both Bayard Rustin and James Farmer about the possibility of becoming involved with the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement. Because of Rustin's past anti-Communist stances, Robeson declined to meet with him. Robeson eventually met with Farmer, but because he was asked to denounce Communism and the Soviet Union in order to assume a place in the mainstream, Robeson adamantly declined.

After Essie, who had been his spokesperson to the media, died in December 1965, Robeson moved in with his son's family in New York City. He was rarely seen strolling near his Harlem apartment on Jumel Place [sic], and his son responded to press inquiries that his "father's health does not permit him to perform or answer questions."

In 1968, he settled at his sister's home in Philadelphia. Numerous celebrations were held in honor of Robeson over the next several years, including at public arenas that had previously shunned him, but he saw few visitors aside from close friends and gave few statements apart from messages to support current civil rights and international movements, feeling that his record "spoke for itself". In 1974, he posed for a portrait by artist Kenneth Hari at his sisters home. The portrait was unveiled in 1978 at the Paul Robeson Center at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, where it remains on display. At a Carnegie Hall tribute to mark his 75th birthday in 1973, he was unable to attend, but a taped message from him was played that said: "Though I have not been able to be active for several years, I want you to know that I am the same Paul, dedicated as ever to the worldwide cause of humanity for freedom, peace and brotherhood."

1976: Death, funeral, and public response

On January 23, 1976, following complications of a stroke, Robeson died in Philadelphia at the age of 77. He lay in state in Harlem and his funeral was held at his brother Ben's former parsonage, Mother Zion AME Zion Church, where Bishop J. Clinton Hoggard performed the eulogy. His twelve pall bearers included Harry Belafonte and Fritz Pollard. He was interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. According to biographer Martin Duberman, contemporary post-mortem reflections on Robeson's life in "[the] white [American] press..ignored the continuing inability of white America to tolerate a black maverick who refused to bend, ..downplayed the racist component central to his persecution [during his life]", as they "paid him gingerly respect and tipped their hat to him as a 'great American,'" while the black American press, "which had never, overall, been as hostile to Robeson [as the white American press had], opined that his life '...would always be a challenge to white and Black America.'"

Legacy and honors

Early in his life, Robeson was one of the most influential participants in the Harlem Renaissance. His achievements in sport and culture were all the more incredible given the barriers of racism he had to surmount. Robeson brought Negro spirituals into the American mainstream. His theatrical performances have been recognized as the first to display dignity for black actors and pride in African heritage, and he was among the first artists to refuse to play live to segregated audiences.

After McCarthyism, [Robeson's stand] on anti-colonialism in the 1940s would never again have a voice in American politics, but the [African independence movements] of the late 1950s and 1960s would vindicate his anti-colonial [agenda].

Subsequently, in 1945 he received the Spingarn medal from the NAACP. Several public and private establishments he was associated with have been landmarked, or named after him. His efforts to end Apartheid in South Africa were posthumously rewarded in 1978 by the United Nations General Assembly. Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist won an Academy Award for best short documentary in 1980. In 1995, he was named to the College Football Hall of Fame. In the centenary of his birth, which was commemorated around the world, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award, as well as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Robeson is also a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame.

As of 2011, the run of Othello starring Robeson was the longest-running production of a Shakespeare play ever staged on Broadway. He received a Donaldson Award for his performance. His Othello was characterised by Michael A. Morrison in 2011 as a high point in Shakespearean theatre in the 20th century.

Robeson left Australia as a respected, albeit controversial, figure and his support for Aboriginal rights had a profound effect in Australia over the next decade.

Robeson archives exist at the Academy of Arts; Howard University, and the Schomburg Center. In 2010, Susan Robeson launched a project by Swansea University and the Welsh Assembly to create an online learning resource in her grandfather's memory.

Robeson connected his own life and history not only to his fellow Americans and to his people in the South, but to all the people of Africa and its diaspora whose lives had been fundamentally shaped by the same processes that had brought his ancestors to America. While a consensus definition of his legacy remains controversial, to deny his courage in the face of public and governmental pressure would be to defame his courage.

In 1976, the apartment building on Edgecombe Avenue in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan where Robeson lived during the early 1940s was officially renamed the Paul Robeson Residence, and declared a National Historic Landmark. In 1993, the building was designated a New York City landmark as well. Edgecombe Avenue itself was later co-named Paul Robeson Boulevard.

In 1978, TASS announced that the Latvian Shipping Company had named one of its new 40,000-ton tankers Paul Robeson in honor of the singer. TASS said the ship's crew established a Robeson museum aboard the tanker.

In 1998, the second SOAS University London halls of residence was named in his honour.

In 2002, a blue plaque was unveiled by English Heritage on the house in Hampstead where Robeson lived in 1929–30.

In 2004, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 37-cent stamp honoring Robeson.

In 2006, a plaque was unveiled in his honour at the SOAS University London

In 2007, the Criterion Collection, a company that specializes in releasing special-edition versions of classic and contemporary films, released a DVD boxed set of Robeson films.

In 2009, Robeson was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

The main campus library at Rutgers University-Camden is named after Robeson, as is the campus center at Rutgers University-Newark. The Paul Robeson Cultural Center is on the campus of Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

In 1972, Penn State established a formal cultural center on the University Park campus. Students and staff chose to name the center for Robeson.

A street in Princeton, New Jersey is named after him. In addition, the block of Davenport Street in Somerville, New Jersey, where St. Thomas AME Zion Church still stands is called Paul Robeson Boulevard.

In West Philadelphia, the Paul Robeson High School, which won 2019 U.S. News & World Report for Best High Schools in Pennsylvania, is also named after him.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Robeson's graduation, Rutgers University named an open-air plaza after him on Friday, April 12, 2019. The plaza, next to the Voorhees Mall on the College Avenue campus at Rutgers–New Brunswick, features eight black granite panels with details of Robeson's life. Also in 2019, Commercial Avenue in New Brunswick was renamed Paul Robeson Boulevard.

On March 6, 2019, the city council of New Brunswick, New Jersey approved the renaming of Commercial Avenue to Paul Robeson Boulevard.

In popular culture

In 1954, the Kurdish poet Abdulla Goran wrote the poem "Bangêk bo Pol Ropsin" ("A Call for Paul Robeson"). In the same year, another Kurdish poet, Cegerxwîn, also wrote a poem about him, "Heval Pol Robson" ("Comrade Paul Robeson"), which was put to music by singer Şivan Perwer in 1976.

Black 47's 1989 album Home of the Brave includes the song "Paul Robeson (Born to Be Free)", which features spoken quotes of Robeson as part of the song. These quotes are drawn from Robeson's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in June 1956. In 2001, Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers released a song titled "Let Robeson Sing" as a tribute to Robeson, which reached number 19 on the UK singles chart.

In January 1978, James Earl Jones performed the one-man show Paul Robeson, written by Phillip Hayes Dean, on Broadway. This stage drama was made into a TV movie in 1979, starring Jones and directed by Lloyd Richards. At the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, British-Nigerian actor Tayo Aluko, himself a baritone soloist, premiered his one-man show, Call Mr. Robeson: A Life with Songs, which has since toured various countries.

Tom Rob Smith's novel Agent 6 (2012) includes the character Jesse Austin, "a black singer, political activist and communist sympathizer modeled after real-life actor/activist Paul Robeson." Robeson also appears in short fiction published in the online literary magazines the Maple Tree Literary Supplement and Every Day Fiction.

In November 2014, it was reported that film director Steve McQueen's next film would be a biographical film about Paul Robeson. As of 2018, the film has not been made.

On September 7, 2019, Crossroads Theater Company performed Phillip Hayes Dean's play Paul Robeson in the inaugural performance of the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.

[creepingsharia]

Minnesota Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar filed joint tax returns before she married husband

The first Somali Muslim refugee woman in Congress is blazing a whole new trail...of fraud.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Minnesota campaign finance officials said last week that Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar misused campaign funds in violation of state rules. They also revealed that she had filed joint tax returns with her husband years before they were legally married and at a time when she was married to another man.

The revelation put the freshman representative under more scrutiny from critics who have taken issue with her marital past. One tax expert said that if there is no criminal intent and the issue has been corrected, she’s unlikely to face any criminal consequences.

Some questions and answers about the tax issue:

Q: What did Omar do wrong?

A: The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board said Thursday that Omar and her husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, filed joint tax returns for 2014 and 2015 — before they were actually married and while Omar was legally wed to another man. While some states allow for joint filing for “common law” marriages, Minnesota does not, and filing joint tax returns with someone who is not your legal spouse is against both federal and state law.

Q: How did this become public?

A: Last year, a Republican state representative accused Omar of misusing campaign funds, alleging among other things that she used $2,250 in campaign money to pay a lawyer for her divorce proceedings. The campaign finance board investigated and found she didn’t use the funds to pay for a divorce lawyer as alleged, but other irregularities were found. The board’s final report said “there was an issue with her tax returns that needed to be corrected” and that some campaign funds went to an accounting firm.

State officials ruled last week that Omar must repay her campaign committee nearly $3,500, including $1,500 for payments made to the accounting firm for services related to joint tax returns for 2014 and 2015. Omar must also pay a $500 penalty to the state.

Q: What has Omar said about this?

A: Very little. In response to questions from The Associated Press, her campaign sent an emailed statement saying, “All of Rep. Omar’s tax filings are fully compliant with all applicable tax law.” The campaign did not make Omar available for an interview or answer specific questions from the AP. In response to the overall campaign finance investigation, she said in a statement last week that she will comply with the state board findings calling for her to repay money and pay a penalty.

Q: Hasn’t Omar faced criticism on other issues?

A: During her brief time in Congress, Omar has been outspoken on issues such as U.S. policy toward Israel and the Middle East. As one of the first two Muslim women in Congress, she has faced heightened scrutiny. She has been accused of making anti-Semitic remarks. In response to some of her comments, the House passed a resolution condemning hate speech against all groups. Omar denied any anti-Semitic intent but apologized in February for the remarks.

She has also been dogged by conservatives who have raised questions about her past. She came to the United States as a refugee from war-torn Somalia. In 2016, as Omar was running for a seat in the Minnesota House, conservative bloggers alleged she was married to two men at the same time. Marriage records show that’s not the case. Conservatives also alleged that one of those men, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was her brother — allegations that Omar called “disgusting lies.”

According to marriage records, Omar applied for a license in 2002 to marry her current husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, who Omar says went by Ahmed Abdisalan Aden at the time. A marriage certificate wasn’t issued and Omar has said they didn’t pursue a civil marriage but instead married in their Muslim faith tradition. Omar and Hirsi had two children, but ended their relationship in 2008.

Omar then married Elmi, whom she said is a British citizen, in 2009, according to a marriage certificate. Omar said that relationship ended in 2011 and the two divorced in their faith tradition, but Omar didn’t take legal action to divorce him until 2017. Divorce records say Omar and Hirsi reunited and had a third child together in June 2012. Omar legally married Hirsi in early 2018, a month after her divorce from Elmi was finalized.

Q: Did Omar gain something by filing jointly?

A: It’s hard to say. In most situations, filing jointly may reduce taxes for married couples. But Eric Johnson, an attorney who practices tax law in St. Paul, Minnesota, said that’s not always the case and filing jointly might actually increase a tax bill for some.

Omar has so far kept her tax returns private. While she has called for President Donald Trump to release his tax returns, her campaign did not acknowledge the AP’s request to release hers. Her campaign also did not answer a question about whether there might be issues with other tax returns prior to Omar’s marriage to Hirsi in 2018.

Q: Is Omar now in trouble with the IRS?

A: That’s not clear. The IRS says federal privacy law prohibits it from commenting.

Jeff Sigurdson, executive director of the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, said that while the board has authority to refer matters to a county attorney if it discovers an issue, there were no referrals made in this case. Sigurdson said the board did not look into the legality of the joint tax returns, but only “whether it was appropriate to use committee funds to get a copy of them.” Sigurdson said the board never saw the returns in question.

Johnson, the tax attorney, said if taxpayers incorrectly file tax returns as “married filing jointly” where there is no legal marriage, it is typically not a criminal matter unless taxpayers have a strong intent to cheat on their taxes, or unless they directly provide false factual information.

“If the IRS discovers the error, they send the resulting tax bill to the taxpayers,” Johnson said. “If the taxpayers discover the error ... amend their returns and pay the tax, there is typically no further consequence.”

Q: Will the public ever know what happened?

A: Probably not, unless Omar decides to talk about it. Taxpayer information is protected under federal law. Johnson said the IRS can’t disclose the status of anyone’s tax issues or directly release information about Omar’s tax situation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Star Tribune explains that Omar claimed she was following “her faith” - which is Islam, that is governed by sharia law, not U.S. laws.

Ilhan Omar's credibility takes another hit:

In an October 2018 editorial, we called on Omar to more fully explain her travel and other expenses. We noted that the allegations “suggest a pattern of carelessness and/or self-dealing with legally restricted funds. Neither conclusion inspires the confidence voters deserve to have in someone they send to the U.S. House to represent them.”

It is even more disturbing, therefore, to learn that among the board’s latest findings was a troubling discovery that is far beyond its jurisdiction, but worthy of greater scrutiny nevertheless. Omar, for two years running, filed joint tax returns with a man she was living with but not legally married to. Complicating matters further, she was legally married to another man at the time.

It’s against the law in Minnesota to file jointly unless one filer is legally married to the other. Last year Omar told the Star Tribune that she had married her partner “in her faith,” and had earlier divorced her first husband “in her faith.” That’s fine for religious purposes. But for tax purposes, only civil marriages qualify. It’s not known whether she benefited materially by filing jointly. That is something that voters, who are obliged to follow tax laws no matter how painful, are entitled to know.

It’s not too much to expect that a lawmaker would check with a tax attorney on a rather complicated marital status before filing. And when questions arise, it’s a violation to use campaign funds to clear up those personal issues, as Omar apparently did. The Campaign Finance Board has ordered that she reimburse her campaign $3,469 for violations related to her tax returns and non-campaign travel costs. She must also pay a $500 civil penalty.

Omar is no stranger to controversy. As a new state House member, she collected $2,500 in speaking fees — $2,000 from Normandale Community College and $500 from Inver Hills Community College — for appearances made shortly after she took office. Rep. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, who publicly noted that state law prohibits legislators from collecting such fees from groups that have business before the Legislature, made that public, and Omar returned the money. Drazkowski also filed the latest complaint. “It’s very clear there are huge ethical problems with Rep. Omar,” he told an editorial writer, adding that the House should consider an ethics investigation.

If this pattern continues, further investigation may be necessary.

----------------------------------------------

May be? How many other areas of her life and in her role as an elected official is Ilham Omar willing to choose “her faith” and sharia over the U.S. Constitution?

[bountyofbeads]

https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article232799597.html?__twitter_impression=true

FYI Epstein just engaged a new law firm .

Steptoe & Johnson specializes in representing clients who face specific government investigations. Why does Jeffrey Epstein need a law firm that specializes in criminal defense of ; Anti-Money laundering , Cartels & Conspiracies, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act , Fraud ? https://t.co/7K99pFlt25

NEW from Miami Herald: Leaked documents show Jeffrey Epstein kept funds offshore. Can the money even be tracked?

Leaked documents show Jeffrey Epstein kept funds offshore. Can the money even be tracked?

BY KEVIN G. HALL AND NICHOLAS NEHAMAS | Published JULY 18, 2019 07:00 AM | Miami Herald | Posted July 18, 2019 |

Washington

Jeffrey Epstein’s attorneys, hoping to persuade a judge to release the accused sexual predator on bail while awaiting trial, submitted a bare bones accounting of his financing this week.

Prosecutors — and the judge — seemed unsatisfied with the level of disclosure.

Now, documents obtained by McClatchy and Miami Herald provide a more detailed — but still very limited — look at Epstein’s wealth. They also underscore the challenge his accusers and the U.S. legal system might face in seeking restitution if he is convicted of the federal sex trafficking charges filed last week.

The records show that Epstein in February 1997 became a client of Appleby, a Bermuda-based law firm specializing in the creation of offshore companies and investment vehicles for the ultra-wealthy. A client profile cryptically describes Epstein’s job as “Manager of Fortune.”

These documents also show that from at least 2000 to 2007 Epstein was chairman of a company called Liquid Funding Ltd., which was initially 40 percent owned by the Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns, where Epstein worked after his short stint as a schoolteacher. Bear Stearns’ spectacular collapse and sale to JP Morgan Chase in March 2008 set in motion what months later devolved into the worst U.S. financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Epstein’s wealth has become a flash point in whether he is released from jail pending trial, a decision that should come Thursday. Federal prosecutors in New York cite his enormous wealth as a flight risk, and when asked to document his wealth lawyers for Epstein this week told a judge that the answer is complex.

He’s right about that. It’s unclear how long Epstein ran Liquid Funding, which tied back to a similarly named company in Delaware, and how much it contributed to the known narrative of Epstein losing big sums during the financial crisis.

But coupled with the fact that many of his businesses were operated in or with help from Caribbean offshore tax havens, the documents raise the likelihood that Epstein’s wealth is spread secretly across the globe. Wealthy people commonly employ opaque offshore companies to mask their true fortunes from tax authorities and creditors, although the companies also have legitimate business and tax-planning uses.

The client profile gives a glimpse into Epstein’s wealth, referencing two separate accounts with money kept in a bank. One listed more than $880,507 in the account in 2006/2007, while another bank account under Epstein’s name held almost $3.46 million at a high point over that period. This pales in comparison to the claimed value of his holdings — reported by his attorneys in court as $559 million — but suggests he had the ability to keep money in far-flung places. A check of the bank coding in the profile shows that Epstein banked at the time with HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA in Geneva.

The Epstein documents were among 13.4 million leaked to German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ assembled a team of international journalists to investigate what became known as the Paradise Papers when published in October 2017.

Within the Paradise Papers documents, there isn’t much underlying information. For example, it’s unclear why the Epstein client profile spreadsheet that appears in the database references sums of money for the 2006/2007 time-frame.

That’s shortly before Epstein was accused in 2008 of sexually abusing girls as young as 14. He took a lenient state plea agreement, which became the focus of a Miami Herald investigation in November 2018 that resulted in this month’s resignation of U.S. Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who in 2008 was the Miami-based U.S. Attorney working the plea arrangement.

That same Appleby client sheet on Epstein lists billionaire Leslie Herbert Wexner under “legal entities in relation with profile.”

Wexner is the wealthy founder of clothing company The Limited and co-invested with Epstein in the redevelopment of an area in Ohio where The Limited was headquartered. Both men appear tied in the document to Family Interest LP, which was owned by Financial Trust Company Inc., Epstein’s investment firm in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, where he owns an entire island, Little St. James. and where he had registered yachts and planes.

And on a curious note, given courtroom revelations about Epstein having an Austrian passport listing a Saudi address from the 1980s and a fake name, the Appleby client profile provides Epstein’s U.S. passport number but a date of birth of Jan. 20, 1963. He was born on that day in 1953, not ‘63. It’s unclear if he provided a false date, had a false passport or if Appleby officials simply fat-fingered an incorrect date.

Appleby officials did not respond to emails seeking comment about the offshore business provider’s relationship to Epstein. Neither did one of Epstein’s attorneys.

On another client spreadsheet, Epstein appears with his St. Thomas address. But the client profile lists a Palm Beach mansion address and 457 Madison Ave. in New York. That is a historic property called the Villard House, and the building is currently owned by the Sultan of Brunei.

In a notation on the client profile, correspondence to that New York address is directed to Harry Beller, whose LinkedIn profile shows that at time he worked for New York Strategy Group, a financial advisory firm to clients worth $1 billion and up.

Beller is a partner today in Louis J Septimus & Co, a New York firm offering tax, accounting and financial planning to corporations, partnerships, trust and estates. A person at the office confirmed that Beller had worked as an accountant for Epstein’s business, but said Beller was vacationing out of the country and unreachable.

The most voluminous document about Epstein in the Paradise Papers is a 541-page document detailing Liquid Funding Ltd., a company that was innovative for its time in trying ways to broaden the kind of debt that accepted on repurchase, or repo market. These involve a lender giving a borrower cash in exchange for securities that the borrower will buy back at an agreed upon date for a fixed price.

Rather than having stocks and bonds as the underlying security, Liquid Funding had commercial mortgages and investment-grade residential mortgages bundled into complex securities. The three main credit rating agencies — Standard & Poor’s, Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service — all helped Bear Stearns create the securities in a way that would allow the creative product to get a gold-plated AAA rating.

The early directors of this company included some big-name investors. One was Paul A. Novelly, CEO of St. Louis-based FutureFuel Corp., a fuel, biofuel and chemicals company. He is also CEO of Apex Oil Company Inc., a privately held oil company in St. Louis. He did not respond to requests for comment to his investor relations department.

Documents show Novelly was replaced as a director by James R. Burritt, at the time a hedge fund executive at Thomas H. Lee Capital but today managing director of alternative investments for California insurer Pacific Life. Burritt did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

A third director was Austrian national Marcus Klug, now a member of the governing board of Bundespensionskasse AG, a large Austrian pension fund. Reached by phone he confirmed he was a director when he worked for an Austrian insurance company that had invested in Liquid Fund, leaving the post in 2005.

Directorships of this company were not the same as a directorship of a brick-and-mortar company and instead were part of the structure of the investment vehicle.

“There was neither a physical board meeting or a call between board members,” Klug explained, adding of Epstein, “I never met him.”

[new-york-ny-usa-daily-blog]

New York NY Daily

Education

The New York State Education Department is one of the most complete and interconnected systems of educational services in the United States and is part of the University of the State of New York (USNY). There are 13 public K-12 schools in New York, 10 charter schools, 109 private schools, and 38 private special schools. Some of the world's best universities can be found in this city. These include the New York University (NYU) which ranks 43rd as the world's best school, the Columbia University which ranks 16th in the world, and the Cornell University which ranks 14th in the world, making it the best university in New York City.

Law Office of David S. Leigh

If you are looking for a construction accident attorney in New York City, choose the Law Office of David S. Leigh, P.C. They make sure that their clients fully understand the case, know the possible outcomes, and how to gain financial recovery after a construction accident. They assist with the collection documentation and evidence, correspond with the police and law enforcement, obtain medical records and reports, communicate with the court and the opposing party, track important dates for the case, and take a firm stance against insurance companies. They also make sure that their clients are provided with all necessary information during their claim.

Manafort’s Lawyer Said to Brief Trump Attorneys on What He Told Mueller

WASHINGTON — A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president’s onetime campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations. The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence. Read more here

According to the US prosecutors, Paul Manafort has breached a plea bargain agreement by lying repeatedly to the FBI. The former campaign chief of Donald Trump has already been convicted on eight counts of fraud, bank fraud, and failing to disclose bank accounts. Experts say Manafort could face a longer prison sentence and more criminal charges. Kevin Downing, a lawyer for Mr. Manafort, is said to have been in contact with President Trump’s lawyers. Everyone is now questioning whether Mr. Trump would pardon Mr. Manafort for his crimes. Manafort was first indicted a year ago and the question has been lingering as a possibility.

Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY

The Metropolitan Museum, also known as the Met, is located on the border of Central Park on Museum Mile. It is composed of The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters. It is the largest art museum in the USA as well as one of the largest and most comprehensive art museums in the world. The Met has over two million square feet of works of art from all cultures and time periods spanning 5,000 years. It was founded on April 13, 1870, and opened its doors to the public in 1880. The museum also features dining and shopping.

Link to map

Driving Direction

32 min (8.7 miles)

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Get on FDR Dr. from E 79th St

9 min (1.2 mi)

Follow FDR Dr. to S Street Viaduct/West St

11 min (7.0 mi)

Take Rector St to Broadway

4 min (0.5 mi)

Law Office of David S. Leigh

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[centralpointinvestigations]

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[fuckblizzardbearlover]

in case i cant load this file at the library. (trying to print a document so i can quickly show  Alleged well meaning ignorant trump voters why, he isnt just evil, he’s anti republican/christian and they shouldnt vote for him). Good god this was only the last 2 months. what an asshole

Trump is anti republican values

 Letting a private media network run the country

August 21, 2020 – Department of Homeland Security officials were told by Trump to watch Lou Dobbs “every night.” The Fox Business host and ardent supporter of the president was the department’s “shadow chief of staff,” said former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor. “The president would call us and… he would say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you watch Lou Dobbs last night? You need to listen to Lou. What Lou says is what I want to do.’”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/miles-taylor-trump-lou-dobbs-fox-marching-orders-homeland-security_n_5f4066aec5b697824f98b023?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubWNzd2VlbmV5cy5uZXQv&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAGFv3J9DnCA3yhN9irljBGeIbETe34K6hRT9yzxk6fd6EH5rwaIC9XZg45NhSNMmcvi9VOlg6_bhNLjM5dJN0RyAgwY-OU7N6WLocW6uEbm0aIboW8YpMa9gJWFC2ROIFYRfX1D3NcVHgWKxWLeie8yY03vhUz2vWZR5jrJSGEy

 Every word of this is blatant government corruption. Trying to rig an election, putting someone in charge who gave you money  to make sure it happens? WHy does he hate america democracy so much?

August 17, 2020 – Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was accused of deliberately slowing mail delivery to give the president a boost in the November election. Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Ted Lieu of the House Judiciary Committee called for the FBI to open a criminal probe into DeJoy, who was appointed by Trump in May. The businessman earned millions of dollars from a company that does business with the Postal Service. He donated $1.2 million to Trump’s election campaign.

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/512284-two-democrats-call-for-criminal-inquiry-of-postmaster-general

 More corruption! Using the Presidential seat to promote a donar’s brand? Is America just a money making scheme to him and his rich elite?

August 16, 2020 – Trump said that the Food and Drug Administration “should be approving” an extract from the oleander plant as a coronavirus cure, even though there is no evidence that it is beneficial. Oleandrin had been touted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a major Trump donor who has invested in the company that makes the extract. Lindell is not a doctor.

https://www.axios.com/trump-covid-oleandrin-9896f570-6cd8-4919-af3a-65ebad113d41.html

 Hates america and democracy. If America is so great why cant he respect the democratic process

August 19, 2020 – Trump would “see what happens” in the November election before accepting its result, said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. “The president has always said he’ll see what happens, and make a determination in the aftermath.” Two days earlier, Trump had said, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-election-results-white-house/

 More lies

August 14, 2020 – The Senate Intelligence Committee asked federal prosecutors to investigate former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon for possibly lying during its inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Senators also said that Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks offered conflicting testimony.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-08-14/senate-committee-sought-investigation-of-bannon-raised-concerns-about-trump-family-testimony

 Stole from his own voters!

August 20, 2020 – Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, was charged with cheating hundreds of thousands of donors who were told that their money would go toward building a wall along the Mexican border. A federal indictment said that Bannon, arrested with two other men, used almost $1 million for personal expenses; in all, the men raised more than $25 million. Bannon, who portrayed himself as a man of the people, was arrested on a $35 million yacht owned by fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20/nyregion/steve-bannon-arrested-indicted.html

 Still no tax returns? If he was successful and legal he wouldnt be hiding!

August 20, 2020 – A federal judge ruled that Trump must give his tax returns to the Manhattan district attorney, who is investigating Trump’s financial records. Judge Victor Marrero rejected the president’s most recent attempt to block the release of his returns. “This is a continuation of the witch hunt, the greatest witch hunt in history,” Trump told reporters. “There’s never been anything like it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20/nyregion/donald-trump-taxes-cyrus-vance.html

 More voter manipulation

August 6, 2020 – White House health officials said that the U.S. might have a coronavirus vaccine in early 2021. Trump, however, claimed that one could be available “sooner than the end of the year, could be much sooner.” Asked if a vaccine could arrive before the November 3 election, he said, “I think in some cases, yes possible before, but right around that time.” No reputable scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, believe a vaccine is possible before 2021.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-trump-vaccine/trump-says-coronavirus-vaccine-possible-before-nov-3-idUSKCN25221Q

  Vote intimidation is against 1st ammendment and your right to vote

August 20, 2020 – In order to prevent voter fraud, Trump said, he will order law enforcement to the polls on November 3. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement. And we’re going to have hopefully U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals,” he said. Law enforcement is barred at polling places in several states because of concerns over voter intimidation.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/513048-trump-says-he-will-send-law-enforcement-us-attorneys-to-polls-in

 More election tampering

August 4, 2020 – Trump’s campaign sued Nevada, arguing that a bill allowing voters to mail in election ballots would lead to fraud. In a tweet, Trump called the legislation “an illegal late-night coup,” adding, “See you in Court!”

https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/trump-campaign-sues-nevada-over-bill-expanding-mail-in-voting-for-general-election

 Undermining America, insulting the American system, undermining democracy and making attacks on the American people. No one hates american democracy like Trump

August 21, 2020 – Trump said he had a “theory” that if November’s election results were not known by the end of 2020, “Crazy Nancy Pelosi would become president, you know that. No. No. I don’t know if it’s a theory or a fact, but I said, ’That’s not good. That’s not good.’” In his remarks to a conservative group in Arlington, Va., Trump also said, “The more success that we’ve achieved, the more unhinged the radical left has become. Anarchists and violent mobs have rioted in our Democrat-run cities, attacking police and tearing down statues. I’m the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness, and chaos, and that’s what it is.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/us/elections/trump-says-he-is-the-only-thing-standing-between-the-american-dream-and-total-anarchy.html

 No one is above the law. Refusing to comply with investigators

August 24, 2020 – New York State’s attorney general asked a State Supreme Court judge to compel Eric Trump, the president’s son, to testify in an investigation. The inquiry was looking into whether Trump and his business overstated assets “to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits.” Eric Trump canceled an interview with the attorney general in July, and the Trump Organization said it would not comply with seven subpoenas that it was sent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/nyregion/letitia-james-trump-projects-investigation.html

 Big govt stealing from taxpayers

August 27, 2020 – In visiting his own properties 271 times as president, Trump and Secret Service agents netted the Trump Organization more than $900,000. According to the Washington Post, Trump’s business also brought in at least $3.8 million in fees associated with 37 political events held at Trump’s properties.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-company-secret-service-spending/2020/08/27/9331bd86-de36-11ea-8051-d5f887d73381_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_trumpsecretservice-1150am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

More attacks on American WOrking class. He acts like the postal service is a boogie man. Its hundreds of thousands of hard working americans trying to do a job to keep this country running

August 13, 2020 – Trump said he opposed $25 billion in emergency aid for the U.S. Postal Service. He made the unfounded claim that the coronavirus relief funding would help the service process “fraudulent” mail ballots for the November election.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

 Praising Terrorist

August 31, 2020 – Trump suggested that a 17-year-old charged with murdering two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, acted in self-defense. “That was an interesting situation,” Trump said at a news conference. “He was trying to get away from them, I guess it looks like, and he fell and then they very violently attacked him… I guess he was in very big trouble. He probably would’ve been killed.” The shootings occurred during an anti-racist protest after Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by police. Trump planned to travel to Kenosha, but Blake’s family said they would talk to the president only if the family’s lawyers were present. Trump said he would not speak with them.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/31/trump-defends-kenosha-gunman-406377

Promoting conspiracy theorists

August 12, 2020 – Trump congratulated Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congressional candidate from Georgia who voiced her support of the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon. “Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!” Trump wrote on Twitter. The FBI identified QAnon as a potential domestic terror threat in 2019.

https://www.axios.com/trump-qanon-georgia-runoff-marjorie-taylor-greene-50ccdb7a-89ca-4331-9b16-77710ea27b5c.html

But his whole campaign is based on baseless conspiracies

August 11, 2020 – In a radio interview, Trump said, “China will own the United States if this election is lost by Donald Trump.” He added, “If I don’t win the election…you’re going to have to learn to speak Chinese, you want to know the truth.”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/11/politics/trump-china-biden-learn-chinese/index.html

 Anti free speech

– August 28, 2020 – At a campaign rally in New Hampshire, Trump ridiculed social justice protesters around the country. “You know what I say?” he told a small crowd. “Protesters, your ass. I don’t talk about my ass. They’re not protesters. Those aren’t protesters. Those are anarchists, they’re agitators, they’re rioters, they’re looters.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump/trump-knocks-protesters-against-racial-injustice-during-new-hampshire-rally-idUSKBN25O1AE

  More anti free speech

– August 7, 2020 – The Trump administration issued two rarely used executive orders to ban TikTok and WeChat. The popular social media networks are owned by companies in China — a frequent target of the president’s pre-election rhetoric. “The spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” Trump wrote. He did not, however, outline any specific threat from the companies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/technology/trump-wechat-tiktok-china.html

 Only cares about his brand and money

August 8, 2020 – An aide to Trump asked the South Dakota governor’s office what it took to have a president added to Mount Rushmore. In 2018, Trump had told future Governor Kristi Noem, “Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/us/politics/kristi-noem-pence-trump.html

 What is wrong with him. A dr is just doing her job and he attacks her cus dead americans make him look bad? Suck it up!

August 3, 2020 – Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said that the pandemic was “extraordinarily widespread.” Trump replied that she was “pathetic.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/03/trump-blasts-birx-after-coronavirus-claims-390881

 Speaking ill of the dead, Not giving a shit about Russia putting bounties on american troops heads, not caring that americans are dying

August 4, 2020 – Jonathan Swan of Axios asked Trump how the coronavirus was “under control” when 1,000 Americans were dying of it every day. “They are dying. That’s true. It is what it is,” Trump replied. In the same interview, Trump maintained that he did not know about Russia’s offer of bounties for American troops killed in Afghanistan. The bounties, though, were reportedly brought to his attention in intelligence reports. “I read a lot,” he said. “I comprehend extraordinarily well. Probably better than anybody you’ve interviewed in a long time.” When asked how history will remember the late civil rights leader John Lewis, Trump replied, “I really don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration.”

https://www.axios.com/trump-coronavirus-under-control-5f114a16-9952-428c-bc07-3cfa360b0977.html

    Trump is anti christian

Intentionally spreading the virus

August 27, 2020 – The Trump administration broke norms and flouted the Hatch Act by using government property — the White House — for a political convention. Trump delivered his closing-night speech from the South Portico, flanked by Jumbotrons on the South Lawn that screened campaign billboards. Roughly 1,500 people attended the speech, sitting closely together, most refusing to wear masks. A senior White House official dismissed any concerns about the coronavirus, telling CNN, “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually.”

 Lying about dead americans to look good in the polls

August 5, 2020 – The United States recorded 1,380 COVID-19 deaths in a day, but Trump said, “This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/trump-says-surging-virus-will-go-away-like-things-go-away

 Do not take the lord’s name in vain. He’s trying to speak for God.

August 6, 2020 – Trump said that Biden, a Catholic who has long attended Mass, was “following the radical left agenda… no religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God. He’s against God."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

 Thou shalt not covet . He’s so full of hate when obama comes up

August 19, 2020 – As Obama criticized Trump in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, Trump assailed his predecessor in tweets. He wrote, “HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN, AND GOT CAUGHT!” and “WHY DID HE REFUSE TO ENDORSE SLOW JOE UNTIL IT WAS ALL OVER, AND EVEN THEN WAS VERY LATE? WHY DID HE TRY TO GET HIM NOT TO RUN?” Earlier in the day, having heard some of Obama’s prepared remarks, Trump said, “When I listen to that and then I see the horror that he’s left us, the stupidity of the transactions that he’s made — look what we’re doing, we have our great border wall, we have security.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-hammers-obama-ahead-dnc-speech-so-ineffective-so-terrible-n1237359

 Lies, coveting , and being a petty man baby

August 9, 2020 – Trump cut short a news conference when a reporter asked him why he repeatedly took credit — more than 150 times — for a veterans’ health care bill that was signed into law by President Obama. “Why do you keep saying that you passed Veterans Choice?” asked CBS correspondent Paula Reid. “It was passed in 2014… it was a false statement, sir.” Trump answered, “OK. Thank you very much, everybody.” Then he abruptly walked away.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/08/politics/trump-veterans-choice-paula-reid/index.html

 Threatening American citizens, the poor the homeless, displaced. Threaten to take away money from the state so they could help those whos homes were destroyed

August 20, 2020 – As wildfires displaced more than 100,000 Californians, Trump again blamed the state for the blazes, threatening to withhold federal emergency funds. Speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania, he said, “I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.” He added, “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.”

https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/trump-blames-california-for-wildfires-tells-state-you-gotta-clean-your-floors-1311059

 Note: We now know he knew how deadly it was when we only had 11 cases. He held this rally on govt property knowing his own voters might catch it and die

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/wh-brushes-off-covid-concerns-amid-trumps-maskless-crowd-in-game-of-make-believe

 Willfilly killing Americans by taking away their medicine if their hospitals don’t obey him. Thats fascism. Thats murder

August 25, 2020 – The Trump administration announced that if hospitals did not report coronavirus data to the Department of Health and Human Services — until now a voluntary program — they would have their Medicare and Medicaid funding revoked. The loss of the money could force hospitals to close.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-data.html

 "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" 9th commandment

– August 23, 2020 – Without providing any proof, Trump alleged that the Food and Drug Administration was intentionally delaying coronavirus vaccine trials. “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics,” he tweeted. “Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/22/politics/trump-fda-coronavirus-vaccine/index.html

 More easily identifiable lies. Does trump not know how to use google?

August 13, 2020 – Trump, who had spread the lie that Obama was born in Kenya, gave credence to the conspiracy theory that Kamala Harris could not be vice president because her parents were immigrants. “I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump said of Harris, who was born in California and is thus eligible for the vice presidency and presidency. “I have no idea if that’s right. I would have thought, I would have assumed, that the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/politics/trump-kamala-harris.html

  Destroying God’s land

August 17, 2020 – The Trump administration announced that it would begin selling leases for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a vast area of undisturbed wilderness in Alaska. The Center for American Progress said that the drilling — sought by Republican lawmakers for decades — would lead to the release of more than 4.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

 More enviroment destruction

August 13, 2020 – The Trump administration eliminated an Obama-era rule that required oil and gas companies to repair methane leaks. The EPA said the companies will no longer pay roughly $100 million a year for repairs — resulting in the release of 850,000 tons of planet-warming methane by the end of the decade.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/climate/trump-methane.html

  Thou shalt not commit adultery

– August 22, 2020 – Trump was ordered by a California judge to pay an adult-film actress $44,100. The money was for her legal fees related to a lawsuit that she had brought against the president. Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, had sued Trump to be released from a $130,000 nondisclosure agreement to keep her quiet about their alleged sexual relationship.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-22/trump-ordered-to-pay-44-100-in-stormy-daniels-legal-fees

 Trump is an incompetent idiot

-August 31, 2020 – In defending police officers, Trump said they can make mistakes in using deadly force in the same way golfers sometimes miss putts. “They choke,” he said. “Just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot—.” Fox News host Laura Ingraham interrupted the president to keep him from continuing. “You’re not comparing it to golf,” she said, suggesting that “the media” would use that against him.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/514539-trump-compares-police-who-use-force-to-golfers-who-choke-and-miss-a

  – August 22, 2020 – “You can’t trust him,” Maryanne Trump Barry said about her brother, Donald, in a conversation secretly recorded by their niece, Mary Trump. A retired federal judge, Barry said, “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God. I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/maryanne-trump-barry-secret-recordings/2020/08/22/30d457f4-e334-11ea-ade1-28daf1a5e919_story.html

 Blatant lies

August 10, 2020 – Trump said he would not have called for Obama’s resignation if 160,000 Americans had died on his watch. Trump, though, had said in 2014 that Obama should resign for his response to the Ebola outbreak, during which two people died in the United States. “I think it’s been amazing what we’ve been able to do,” Trump said about his administration’s response to the pandemic. “We understand the disease. Nobody understood it because nobody’s ever seen anything like this. The closest thing is in 1917, they say, right? The great pandemic. Certainly was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War, all the soldiers were sick.” The pandemic that Trump spoke of actually began in 1918 and lasted until 1919. World War II ended 26 years later, in 1945.

https://www.axios.com/trump-obama-resign-787b042d-0361-48f1-bba5-c97b05837331.html

  https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-so-far-atrocities-1-889#2020

[sinrau]

(CNN) Ever since the coronavirus began its deadly march through the US, Donald Trump has been accused of lacking the empathy presidents typically draw on to lead and soothe a nation in crisis.

This week the question of presidential compassion was a consistent storyline.

You could pick your lyrics: Was the President like the Tin Man from the “Wizard of Oz,” plaintively singing, “If I only had a heart.” Or was he suffering from, as the 80s hit song put it, “a total eclipse of the heart”?

We saw a President who slammed the Supreme Court for blocking his effort to subject 650,000 Dreamers to deportation. He also bemoaned the court’s historic ruling Monday that LGBTQ people can’t be fired because of their sexuality. His former national security adviser John Bolton claimed in a book excerpt that Trump had encouraged China’s leader to set up concentration camps for the Uyghur minority. He plowed ahead with a non-socially distanced rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, even as coronavirus cases mounted.

Yes, some rallygoers could get sick, Trump told the Wall Street Journal, but “it’s a very small percentage.”

In a private meeting with the families of Black victims, though, Trump was “very compassionate,” according to the mother of Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot to death while jogging in Georgia. But in his public remarks, the President made law-and-order his primary message.

“Trump went on the attack against his political rivals and doubled down on his hard-line, ‘law and order’ stance, a political calculation solidified by his use of the words ‘safety and security’ and his statement that Americans ‘demand law and order,'” wrote Issac Bailey. “His effort to address growing national suffering and protest over police brutality was, at best, a thinly veiled excuse to defend law enforcement and signal to white voters where he stands.”

A chilling view of the private Trump emerged from the Bolton book. It painted a credible “portrait of the most amoral, autocratic and unprepared man to ever serve as president of the United States,” wrote John Avlon. “This is not a partisan attack by activists from the opposition party. This is the first-person view of the President’s former national security adviser, bolstered by contemporaneous notes, a standard which is admissible in court. It is a damning portrait of a president untethered to anything resembling morals, who cannot separate his self-interest from the national interest and doesn’t even care to try.”

Jen Psaki viewed the book through the lens of the upcoming election: “All of the observations, accusations and specific anecdotes are about one person — Donald Trump — and whether he is fit to lead the country and the lasting damage he would inflict if given four more years.”

In fact, the revelations show Bolton as complicit, in Elie Honig‘s view: “John Bolton has offered the nation a staggering profile in cowardice…Bolton directly witnessed not one but multiple acts that could have been cited in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. But Bolton did nothing about it while he held a powerful post in the Trump administration. And he stayed quiet and took cover when Congress and the nation pleaded with him to speak out during the impeachment process.”

Writing about China policy, Bolton gave this devastating description: “The Trump presidency is not grounded in philosophy, grand strategy or policy. It is grounded in Trump.” As if to prove that such a verdict applies more broadly, on Friday night Attorney General William Barr ousted Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of NY which has been investigating and prosecuting Trump’s associates. “The news of Berman’s ouster is one more piece of evidence that Trump is the anti-law-and-order President, despite his claims to the contrary. Trump touts law and order when it suits him, but attacks the courts and erodes our judicial system when it comes to his agenda and actions,” wrote Julian Zelizer.

One critic described Bolton’s book as a slog. “It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged,” wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. “Still, it’s maybe a fitting combination for a lavishly bewhiskered figure whose wonkishness and warmongering can make him seem like an unlikely hybrid of Ned Flanders and Yosemite Sam.”

Another book Trump may be dreading is due out in July from the President’s niece, Mary L. Trump, who is a psychologist. Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio wrote that the book promises to shed light on the President’s fraught relationships with his father and elder brother, Fred Trump Jr., who was Mary Trump’s father. “Three and a half years into the Trump era, endless words have been spent illustrating the chaotic and cruel personality that can, to cite just one example, schedule a huge ego-gratifying rally in the middle of a deadly pandemic caused by a viciously contagious virus,” noted D’Antonio.

A rally fizzles

Given that cases of Covid-19 have been rising sharply in Tulsa County, wrote infectious disease expert and Oklahoma native Dr. Kent Sepkowitz in advance of Trump’s Saturday rally there, “from a strict public health perspective, the selection of Tulsa is a terrible decision.”

Trump’s first rally since the pandemic began was “supposed to trumpet his return to greatness — and the country’s return to normalcy,” wrote Frida Ghitis. But it “instead brought embarrassing scenes of empty bleachers, a dismantled stage and a familiar speech unsuccessfully trying to reignite public fears…The speech was typically self-centered, with a bizarre more than ten-minute long riff on his ultra-slow descent from the West Point ramp, and absolutely no words of compassion for the nearly 120,000 people in this country who have died during the pandemic.”

Days of freedom

Friday was Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the US. Another historic day of freedom came on October 1, 1962, when James Meredith became the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. He had to sue for his right to an education there, and it took the courts, hundreds of federal marshals and thousands of troops to overcome rioting and protect Meredith.

“The gates of higher education in the United States were opened for all Americans,” Meredith wrote. “This victory for me and for the US Constitution shattered the system of state-sponsored white supremacy in Mississippi…”

“When I see people across America — and around the world — peacefully marching for racial justice and honoring the memory of George Floyd and other martyrs like Medgar Evers…I am filled with both joy and hope. White supremacy may be the most evil beast that’s ever stalked the halls of history, and today it may finally be mortally wounded.”

Some companies and some states marked Juneteenth as a holiday, but it should be observed nationally, wrote Peniel Joseph. It “would spur not only conversation about the origins of our current racial and political conflicts, but would also prompt vitally necessary education about white supremacy and its manifestations in policies and political actions that are anti-Black, anti-democratic and anti-human,” wrote Joseph.

Rayshard Brooks’ own words

Months before he was shot to death by Atlanta police, Rayshard Brooks took part in an interview for a research project. A video of that February interview aired on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 show Wednesday, and in it, Brooks described the lasting burden of being on probation: “I just feel like some of the system could, you know, look at us as individuals. We do have lives, you know, just a mistake we made, and you know, not just do us as if we are animals.”

Van Jones noted that for people on probation “any contact with a police officer — for any reason — means an almost certain return to the horrors of a jail cell. It is safe to assume that Brooks did not want to go back to jail over sleeping in his car or failing a sobriety test, lose everything he had and be forced to start his life over again.”

“In other words, we do not know why the Atlanta police officer chose to shoot a man who was running away from him. But we can guess why that man chose to run, in the first place. Brooks didn’t want to lose his liberty. Instead, he wound up losing his life.”

Melvin Carter, the first African American mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, is the son of a police officer who served his city for 28 years. But even with that background, he doesn’t think the answer to public safety is solely a matter of spending billions on police and prisons. “Our country’s enforcement-heavy approach to safety isn’t designed to address the root causes of crime, but the symptoms,” he wrote. “Instead of equipping us all with tools to guard our own future security, it further alienates those on the outer edges of society and impedes funding for critical social infrastructure like schools and housing.”

A former mayor, Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, wrote that the US Justice Department was investigating his city’s police department when he took office. A consent decree which is still ongoing has resulted in a dramatic improvement in how residents view the police, but there’s more work to be done, Landrieu wrote. “We must go further. We can no longer ask police to handle the failures of our social and educational systems.”

Anne Milgram, the former New Jersey Attorney General, worked on the reinvention of policing in what was once America’s most dangerous city, Camden. “We had a police department that had no idea of what it was doing or whether it could do better. It lurched wildly from 911 call to 911 call, sometimes taking hours to respond to calls of serious violence. It failed to solve serious crimes…that plagued the city, and yet hundreds of arrests were being made for low-level crimes, driven most often by drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, poverty and homelessness.” New leadership, new systems and ultimately a new police department made a difference — the city is “the safest that it has been in more than 50 years” and the police department is a model for others, Milgram wrote.

Supreme surprises

When Donald Trump ran for President, he promised to appoint conservative justices to the federal courts — and he’s been true to his word, naming Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and scores of others for lower courts.

But it was Gorsuch who wrote the majority opinion this week upholding civil rights for LGBTQ Americans, rejecting the Trump administration’s position in declaring that the anti-discrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protect gay and transgender people. “It’s surprising that it’s taken this long,” wrote John D. Sutter. “Until this week in the United States of America, many LGBTQ workers lacked these simple legal protections.

“In over half the states in America, you could be fired for being gay. Until now.”

Then on Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by George W. Bush, sided with the court’s four liberals in blocking the Trump administration’s effort to kill the Obama-era DACA program, which shields young people who had been brought to the United States as children from deportation. DACA “was life-changing for hundreds of thousands of people — Americans in all but the paperwork — who were now free to work, go to school, seek promotions and continue their academic careers without fear of being detained and sent back to countries they barely knew,” wrote Raul A. Reyes. The decision was “a win for Dreamers, for the American ideal of welcoming immigrants — and for the independence of the high court.”

Happy Father’s Day

Mother’s Day this year came as most Americans were still locked down, and a lot of the holiday get-togethers were virtual. Today is Father’s Day and the advice from Kent Sepkowitz is consistent with what he recommended for the earlier holiday: get together with your father on Zoom, Facetime or whatever platform you prefer. America’s “approach to reopening — which has been unscientific and uncoordinated — has failed miserably. Rather than cautiously peeling back the various Covid-19 containment safeguards, most states have supported an ‘everybody-back-in-the-pool’ return, as if we were all teens partying during Spring Break.”

“Besides, let’s be honest — Father’s Day is no Mother’s Day, “wrote Sepkowitz, noting that total US spending on Mother’s Day gifts is more than 50% higher. “As a dad myself, this junior varsity status is fine by me. This year in particular, I want nothing to do with celebrating a holiday in the middle of a poorly managed pandemic.”

For more on Father’s Day:

Marcus Mabry: A Father’s Day message to all dads

Arick Wierson: George Floyd was my wake-up call

After Aunt Jemima

The debate over systemic racism touched off by the killing of George Floyd rippled into many parts of America. Consumer-facing companies reacted, with Quaker Oats announcing that it would end the 131-year-old Aunt Jemima brand, noted Elliot Williams.

As a Black child, it was upsetting for him to discover that the light-pink Crayola crayon was labeled “flesh” colored. “I put it back in the bin, pulled out ‘burnt sienna’ or ‘raw umber’ and continued whatever (probably “Star Wars” themed) self-portrait I was working on… By implying that the only color called ‘flesh’ looked like white skin, Crayola decided who was ‘normal.’ Everyone else had to work around that.” (The “flesh” color was phased out in 1962, replaced by “peach.”)

“In the midst of a national debate on life-and-death matters around racism and public safety, fussing about the logo on instant rice may seem trivial,” Williams wrote. “It’s not. The images our society chooses to elevate are reflective of who we are, and more importantly, whose voices — and yes, even lives — matter.”

Now that Aunt Jemima has been retired, wrote Crystal Echo Hawk, what should be next? She argued that the many uses of Native American images and symbolism in sports must end. “Professional sports have the power to influence and inspire people of all ages. In this unprecedented moment of solidarity, t hey have the opportunity to take a strong stand and show — not just say — that racism will not be tolerated.”

Covid-19 is still here

America’s top two elected officials did their best this week to argue that Covid-19 is going away, despite clear signs to the contrary. “Other countries whose governments addressed the crisis forthrightly have managed to wrestle down the curve, and now they are carefully, safely reopening,” wrote Frida Ghitis. “In the US, the curve is trending up, not down, even if Vice President Mike Pence deceptively declared in an op-ed this week, ‘We are winning the fight against the invisible enemy,’ unctuously declaring that the good news is ‘a testament to the leadership of President Trump.'”

As Ghitis noted, “On Monday, during a roundtable discussion on senior citizens, Trump said ‘If you don’t test, you don’t have any cases,’ a belief reminiscent of a baby thinking you disappear if he covers his eyes. To state the obvious, if we stopped testing, people would continue to become infected and die.”

Don’t miss:

Kamala Harris: The fight continues to protect Americans’ health care from Trump.

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr.: Trump’s tweet exploits and defames toddlers

Vicky Ward: Telling the truth makes a huge difference

David Gergen and Caroline Cohen: The next Greatest Generation

Merrill Brown: Federal government abdicates duty to inform public on coronavirus

Claire McMullen, Yael Schacher and Ariana Sawyer: Trump’s cold-blooded move to shut out desperate asylum seekers

Jeff Yang: It turns out your favorite movie is racist. What now?

Nayyera Haq: Why Stacey Abrams deserves applause

AND…

At last, summer

A summer like no other begins this weekend. In the first of a new series of weekly columns for CNN Opinion, biologist Erin Bromage wrote, “Our choices over the coming months will determine the trajectory of this pandemic. If we continue to pursue activities that pose a high risk for infection, such as large indoor gatherings, then we will hear the roar of that second wave sooner than later.”

“If we take a more measured approach, by improving hand hygiene, limiting daily interactions with other people, maintaining physical distance and increasing face mask use when we can’t maintain the distance, then businesses can operate safely, people can return to work and the activities our children are missing can resume.”

But even in the midst of the pandemic, Bromage wrote that he’s looking forward to some traditional summer activities: “my first meal at a restaurant (dining outdoors), visiting with more than one or two households at a time, and spending time at the beach. These interactions will be a little different than last summer.

“We will have to keep personal risks and risk mitigation measures in mind, but these adjustments are well worth the payoff of getting to enjoy some of my family’s usual summertime activities.”

Donald Trump’s heartless week #web #website #copied #to read# #highlight #link #news #read #blog #wordpress post# #posts #breaking news# #Sinrau #Nothiah #Sinrau29

[corneliusreignallen]

The conspiracy theories about the Clintons and Jeffrey Epstein’s death, explained

A New York state sex offender registry photo of Jeffrey Epstein. | New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services

The idea that Bill and Hillary Clinton secretly kill their political enemies has circulated in right-wing fever swamps for decades.

On Wednesday, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) sent out 23 consecutive tweets whose first letters spelled out a startling claim: EPSTEIN DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF.

Gosar has coyly resisted confirming that he was alleging that hedge fund manager and convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein was murdered. But his tweets were hardly anomalous. Epstein’s death has sparked a ton of conspiracy theorizing, and “Epstein didn’t kill himself” has become a bona fide meme, showing up in signs at college football games and posts by influential pundits like Joe Rogan.

To be clear, the New York City medical examiner has ruled that Epstein died by suicide. A former NYC medical examiner hired by Epstein’s brother has disputed this finding, but that examiner was fired after a long string of errors on his watch, making his word a little untrustworthy.

But that hasn’t stopped prominent individuals, up to and including Donald Trump, from joining in the speculation. The day of Epstein’s death, President Trump retweeted a conservative personality who captioned a video in which he pontificates at length about his theories with “we know who did this” and the hashtags #ClintonBodyCount and #ClintonCrime family. Trump was clearer than Gosar in suggesting who he thought had Epstein killed: Bill and/or Hillary Clinton.

To understand what’s going on here, you don’t just need to know about Epstein’s former friendship with Clinton (or with Trump). You just need to understand the role that allegations of murder by the Clintons have played in right-wing fever swamps since the 1990s, beginning with the suicide of Vince Foster and continuing through to the completely random 2016 murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.

What is the “Clinton Body Count”?

According to a history and debunking first published by Snopes in 1998, the body count meme originated in 1993 with Indianapolis lawyer and militia movement activist Linda Thompson, who compiled a list of 34 people connected to the Clintons who had died and titled it, “The Clinton Body Count: Coincidence or the Kiss of Death?” William Dannemeyer, a notoriously homophobic former Congress member from Orange County, California, picked up the list, trimmed it to 24, and sent it congressional leadership in 1994 as he ran for the US Senate.

Thompson provided — by her own admission — “no direct evidence” that the Clintons were responsible for any of the deaths, and Snopes provides a comprehensive account of all of them, most of which were easily explained heart attacks, plane crashes, or suicides.

The most notable name on the list is Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel who died by suicide on July 20, 1993. Foster was a colleague of Hillary Clinton’s at the Rose Law firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and came to Washington, DC, as part of the crew of Arkansas loyalists who joined the Clinton administration. In the job, Foster helped conduct vetting of administration officials and said he felt like he had failed the president when Clinton’s first two picks for attorney general were forced to withdraw because of revelations that they had hired undocumented immigrants.

Foster also became wrapped up in a scandal surrounding the firing of staff in the White House travel office and in legal disputes about access to records about Hillary Clinton’s health care task force, earning him a bevy of harsh Wall Street Journal editorials.

Overwhelmed by these circumstances, and clearly struggling from depression, Foster fatally shot himself. But almost immediately, conservatives jumped on the idea that Foster was murdered. Those fanning the flames included the Journal editorial board, National Review’s Richard Brookhiser, and then-Rep. Dan Burton, who tried to do some amateur ballistics research on the case by shooting a large fruit in his backyard. Reports differ as to whether Burton shot a watermelon, a pumpkin, or a cantaloupe.

Numerous investigations, as my colleague Matt Yglesias explains here, have found that Foster died by suicide. But the eagerness of conservatives, both on the more conspiratorial right and in respectable places like the Journal editorial board (Brookhiser favorably reviewed a book casting doubt on the suicide investigation in the New York Times), to doubt those findings fed the idea of a “Clinton Body Count.” So in the future, when people connected to the Clintons died because of easily understandable causes (like former business partner Jim McDougal’s heart attack death in prison), their deaths became grounds for speculation.

The death of Seth Rich in 2016 was the next major event fueling Clinton Body Count conspiracies. Rich was a 27-year-old Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot in what police believed to be an attempted robbery in DC. But almost as soon as he died, Clinton haters seized on his death and tried to argue that Hillary and/or Bill was responsible. After these rumors began, Julian Assange of Wikileaks gave the conspiracy theorists a motive by hinting that Rich, not Russian hackers, provided WikiLeaks with the DNC’s emails. WikiLeaks then offered a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s death. The implication was that Rich’s killing was punishment for leaking damaging internal emails.

This conspiracy theory was always absurd; there is copious evidence of Russian hacking, Rich had no access to all of the DNC’s internal emails, and he certainly didn’t have access to all the other information Russia recovered, like Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s emails. The Rich family would eventually sue Fox News unsuccessfully for its efforts to spread the conspiracy theory.

But for Clinton Body Count conspiracy theorists, the incoherence of the theory in the Rich case was never an impediment. The Rich theory soon became part of the broader QAnon conspiracy theory, which is too byzantine to explain in detail here but which my colleague Jane Coaston summarizes as arguing that “special counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump are working together to expose thousands of cannibalistic pedophiles hidden in plain sight (including Hillary Clinton and actor Tom Hanks).” Obviously, the victims of Clinton’s cannibalistic pedophilia would be additions to the body count.

How this fits in with Epstein

The Foster, Rich, and QAnon allegations are clearly absurd. And, we should be very clear, there is no firm evidence at this juncture to suggest that Epstein was murdered, let alone murdered by people with ties to the Clinton.

Epstein did have very real ties to Bill Clinton. That does not mean that Clinton had anything to do with his death, any more than allegations that Donald Trump raped a 13-year-old girl while hanging out with Epstein mean that Trump had something to do with Epstein’s death.

My colleague Andrew Prokop summarized Clinton’s interactions with Epstein thusly:

According to the Daily Beast’s Emily Shugerman, Epstein visited the White House for a donor event during Bill Clinton’s presidency and met with a White House aide several times there. Shugerman also unearthed a 1995 letter from businesswoman Lynn Forester in which she said she enjoyed briefly meeting Clinton at a recent event and used her “fifteen seconds of access to discuss Jeffrey Epstein and currency stabilization.”

Soon after Bill Clinton concluded his presidency in 2001, the ties deepened. Clinton entered a new stage of his career, in which he’d travel the world, launch philanthropic initiatives, hang out with rich people and celebrities, and make money.

“What attracted Clinton to Epstein was quite simple: He had a plane,” Landon Thomas Jr. wrote in that 2002 New York magazine profile. Clinton’s aide Doug Band made the introduction, and that September, Epstein and Clinton were off on a tour of five African countries, alongside actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker. Per Clinton’s team, the trip was about “democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.” (It was that trip that first elevated Epstein to some media notoriety, as journalists began to dig into Clinton’s new friend.)

That wasn’t the only trip. According to Clinton spokesperson Angel Ureña, in a statement last week, there was one more to Africa, one to Europe, and one to Asia — but, he says, Clinton and Epstein haven’t spoken in “well over a decade.”

Virginia Giuffre has said in an affidavit that Clinton was also present on Little St. James Island, Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands. But so far, there has been no corroboration for this claim, and Ureña says Clinton has never been there.

Neither Giuffre nor any other Epstein accuser has alleged that Clinton had sex with them. Clinton was, however, credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick in the 1970s.

What makes the conspiracy theories so frustrating, in part, is that they’re premised on real elements: credible accusations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton, Clinton’s real ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and Epstein’s own well-documented sex crimes. It doesn’t take incredibly inventive conspiracy theorizing to move from that to allegations that Clinton was part of Epstein’s sex abuse and from there to wild accusations that Clinton had Epstein killed.

But we should be very clear that as of this writing, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest someone ordered Epstein’s death, and certainly no evidence whatsoever that Bill Clinton was that person.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2KxRcP2

[shanedakotamuir]

The conspiracy theories about the Clintons and Jeffrey Epstein’s death, explained

A New York state sex offender registry photo of Jeffrey Epstein. | New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services

The idea that Bill and Hillary Clinton secretly kill their political enemies has circulated in right-wing fever swamps for decades.

On Wednesday, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) sent out 23 consecutive tweets whose first letters spelled out a startling claim: EPSTEIN DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF.

Gosar has coyly resisted confirming that he was alleging that hedge fund manager and convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein was murdered. But his tweets were hardly anomalous. Epstein’s death has sparked a ton of conspiracy theorizing, and “Epstein didn’t kill himself” has become a bona fide meme, showing up in signs at college football games and posts by influential pundits like Joe Rogan.

To be clear, the New York City medical examiner has ruled that Epstein died by suicide. A former NYC medical examiner hired by Epstein’s brother has disputed this finding, but that examiner was fired after a long string of errors on his watch, making his word a little untrustworthy.

But that hasn’t stopped prominent individuals, up to and including Donald Trump, from joining in the speculation. The day of Epstein’s death, President Trump retweeted a conservative personality who captioned a video in which he pontificates at length about his theories with “we know who did this” and the hashtags #ClintonBodyCount and #ClintonCrime family. Trump was clearer than Gosar in suggesting who he thought had Epstein killed: Bill and/or Hillary Clinton.

To understand what’s going on here, you don’t just need to know about Epstein’s former friendship with Clinton (or with Trump). You just need to understand the role that allegations of murder by the Clintons have played in right-wing fever swamps since the 1990s, beginning with the suicide of Vince Foster and continuing through to the completely random 2016 murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.

What is the “Clinton Body Count”?

According to a history and debunking first published by Snopes in 1998, the body count meme originated in 1993 with Indianapolis lawyer and militia movement activist Linda Thompson, who compiled a list of 34 people connected to the Clintons who had died and titled it, “The Clinton Body Count: Coincidence or the Kiss of Death?” William Dannemeyer, a notoriously homophobic former Congress member from Orange County, California, picked up the list, trimmed it to 24, and sent it congressional leadership in 1994 as he ran for the US Senate.

Thompson provided — by her own admission — “no direct evidence” that the Clintons were responsible for any of the deaths, and Snopes provides a comprehensive account of all of them, most of which were easily explained heart attacks, plane crashes, or suicides.

The most notable name on the list is Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel who died by suicide on July 20, 1993. Foster was a colleague of Hillary Clinton’s at the Rose Law firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and came to Washington, DC, as part of the crew of Arkansas loyalists who joined the Clinton administration. In the job, Foster helped conduct vetting of administration officials and said he felt like he had failed the president when Clinton’s first two picks for attorney general were forced to withdraw because of revelations that they had hired undocumented immigrants.

Foster also became wrapped up in a scandal surrounding the firing of staff in the White House travel office and in legal disputes about access to records about Hillary Clinton’s health care task force, earning him a bevy of harsh Wall Street Journal editorials.

Overwhelmed by these circumstances, and clearly struggling from depression, Foster fatally shot himself. But almost immediately, conservatives jumped on the idea that Foster was murdered. Those fanning the flames included the Journal editorial board, National Review’s Richard Brookhiser, and then-Rep. Dan Burton, who tried to do some amateur ballistics research on the case by shooting a large fruit in his backyard. Reports differ as to whether Burton shot a watermelon, a pumpkin, or a cantaloupe.

Numerous investigations, as my colleague Matt Yglesias explains here, have found that Foster died by suicide. But the eagerness of conservatives, both on the more conspiratorial right and in respectable places like the Journal editorial board (Brookhiser favorably reviewed a book casting doubt on the suicide investigation in the New York Times), to doubt those findings fed the idea of a “Clinton Body Count.” So in the future, when people connected to the Clintons died because of easily understandable causes (like former business partner Jim McDougal’s heart attack death in prison), their deaths became grounds for speculation.

The death of Seth Rich in 2016 was the next major event fueling Clinton Body Count conspiracies. Rich was a 27-year-old Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot in what police believed to be an attempted robbery in DC. But almost as soon as he died, Clinton haters seized on his death and tried to argue that Hillary and/or Bill was responsible. After these rumors began, Julian Assange of Wikileaks gave the conspiracy theorists a motive by hinting that Rich, not Russian hackers, provided WikiLeaks with the DNC’s emails. WikiLeaks then offered a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s death. The implication was that Rich’s killing was punishment for leaking damaging internal emails.

This conspiracy theory was always absurd; there is copious evidence of Russian hacking, Rich had no access to all of the DNC’s internal emails, and he certainly didn’t have access to all the other information Russia recovered, like Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s emails. The Rich family would eventually sue Fox News unsuccessfully for its efforts to spread the conspiracy theory.

But for Clinton Body Count conspiracy theorists, the incoherence of the theory in the Rich case was never an impediment. The Rich theory soon became part of the broader QAnon conspiracy theory, which is too byzantine to explain in detail here but which my colleague Jane Coaston summarizes as arguing that “special counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump are working together to expose thousands of cannibalistic pedophiles hidden in plain sight (including Hillary Clinton and actor Tom Hanks).” Obviously, the victims of Clinton’s cannibalistic pedophilia would be additions to the body count.

How this fits in with Epstein

The Foster, Rich, and QAnon allegations are clearly absurd. And, we should be very clear, there is no firm evidence at this juncture to suggest that Epstein was murdered, let alone murdered by people with ties to the Clinton.

Epstein did have very real ties to Bill Clinton. That does not mean that Clinton had anything to do with his death, any more than allegations that Donald Trump raped a 13-year-old girl while hanging out with Epstein mean that Trump had something to do with Epstein’s death.

My colleague Andrew Prokop summarized Clinton’s interactions with Epstein thusly:

According to the Daily Beast’s Emily Shugerman, Epstein visited the White House for a donor event during Bill Clinton’s presidency and met with a White House aide several times there. Shugerman also unearthed a 1995 letter from businesswoman Lynn Forester in which she said she enjoyed briefly meeting Clinton at a recent event and used her “fifteen seconds of access to discuss Jeffrey Epstein and currency stabilization.”

Soon after Bill Clinton concluded his presidency in 2001, the ties deepened. Clinton entered a new stage of his career, in which he’d travel the world, launch philanthropic initiatives, hang out with rich people and celebrities, and make money.

“What attracted Clinton to Epstein was quite simple: He had a plane,” Landon Thomas Jr. wrote in that 2002 New York magazine profile. Clinton’s aide Doug Band made the introduction, and that September, Epstein and Clinton were off on a tour of five African countries, alongside actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker. Per Clinton’s team, the trip was about “democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.” (It was that trip that first elevated Epstein to some media notoriety, as journalists began to dig into Clinton’s new friend.)

That wasn’t the only trip. According to Clinton spokesperson Angel Ureña, in a statement last week, there was one more to Africa, one to Europe, and one to Asia — but, he says, Clinton and Epstein haven’t spoken in “well over a decade.”

Virginia Giuffre has said in an affidavit that Clinton was also present on Little St. James Island, Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands. But so far, there has been no corroboration for this claim, and Ureña says Clinton has never been there.

Neither Giuffre nor any other Epstein accuser has alleged that Clinton had sex with them. Clinton was, however, credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick in the 1970s.

What makes the conspiracy theories so frustrating, in part, is that they’re premised on real elements: credible accusations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton, Clinton’s real ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and Epstein’s own well-documented sex crimes. It doesn’t take incredibly inventive conspiracy theorizing to move from that to allegations that Clinton was part of Epstein’s sex abuse and from there to wild accusations that Clinton had Epstein killed.

But we should be very clear that as of this writing, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest someone ordered Epstein’s death, and certainly no evidence whatsoever that Bill Clinton was that person.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2KxRcP2

[gracieyvonnehunter]

The conspiracy theories about the Clintons and Jeffrey Epstein’s death, explained

A New York state sex offender registry photo of Jeffrey Epstein. | New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services

The idea that Bill and Hillary Clinton secretly kill their political enemies has circulated in right-wing fever swamps for decades.

On Wednesday, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) sent out 23 consecutive tweets whose first letters spelled out a startling claim: EPSTEIN DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF.

Gosar has coyly resisted confirming that he was alleging that hedge fund manager and convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein was murdered. But his tweets were hardly anomalous. Epstein’s death has sparked a ton of conspiracy theorizing, and “Epstein didn’t kill himself” has become a bona fide meme, showing up in signs at college football games and posts by influential pundits like Joe Rogan.

To be clear, the New York City medical examiner has ruled that Epstein died by suicide. A former NYC medical examiner hired by Epstein’s brother has disputed this finding, but that examiner was fired after a long string of errors on his watch, making his word a little untrustworthy.

But that hasn’t stopped prominent individuals, up to and including Donald Trump, from joining in the speculation. The day of Epstein’s death, President Trump retweeted a conservative personality who captioned a video in which he pontificates at length about his theories with “we know who did this” and the hashtags #ClintonBodyCount and #ClintonCrime family. Trump was clearer than Gosar in suggesting who he thought had Epstein killed: Bill and/or Hillary Clinton.

To understand what’s going on here, you don’t just need to know about Epstein’s former friendship with Clinton (or with Trump). You just need to understand the role that allegations of murder by the Clintons have played in right-wing fever swamps since the 1990s, beginning with the suicide of Vince Foster and continuing through to the completely random 2016 murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.

What is the “Clinton Body Count”?

According to a history and debunking first published by Snopes in 1998, the body count meme originated in 1993 with Indianapolis lawyer and militia movement activist Linda Thompson, who compiled a list of 34 people connected to the Clintons who had died and titled it, “The Clinton Body Count: Coincidence or the Kiss of Death?” William Dannemeyer, a notoriously homophobic former Congress member from Orange County, California, picked up the list, trimmed it to 24, and sent it congressional leadership in 1994 as he ran for the US Senate.

Thompson provided — by her own admission — “no direct evidence” that the Clintons were responsible for any of the deaths, and Snopes provides a comprehensive account of all of them, most of which were easily explained heart attacks, plane crashes, or suicides.

The most notable name on the list is Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel who died by suicide on July 20, 1993. Foster was a colleague of Hillary Clinton’s at the Rose Law firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and came to Washington, DC, as part of the crew of Arkansas loyalists who joined the Clinton administration. In the job, Foster helped conduct vetting of administration officials and said he felt like he had failed the president when Clinton’s first two picks for attorney general were forced to withdraw because of revelations that they had hired undocumented immigrants.

Foster also became wrapped up in a scandal surrounding the firing of staff in the White House travel office and in legal disputes about access to records about Hillary Clinton’s health care task force, earning him a bevy of harsh Wall Street Journal editorials.

Overwhelmed by these circumstances, and clearly struggling from depression, Foster fatally shot himself. But almost immediately, conservatives jumped on the idea that Foster was murdered. Those fanning the flames included the Journal editorial board, National Review’s Richard Brookhiser, and then-Rep. Dan Burton, who tried to do some amateur ballistics research on the case by shooting a large fruit in his backyard. Reports differ as to whether Burton shot a watermelon, a pumpkin, or a cantaloupe.

Numerous investigations, as my colleague Matt Yglesias explains here, have found that Foster died by suicide. But the eagerness of conservatives, both on the more conspiratorial right and in respectable places like the Journal editorial board (Brookhiser favorably reviewed a book casting doubt on the suicide investigation in the New York Times), to doubt those findings fed the idea of a “Clinton Body Count.” So in the future, when people connected to the Clintons died because of easily understandable causes (like former business partner Jim McDougal’s heart attack death in prison), their deaths became grounds for speculation.

The death of Seth Rich in 2016 was the next major event fueling Clinton Body Count conspiracies. Rich was a 27-year-old Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot in what police believed to be an attempted robbery in DC. But almost as soon as he died, Clinton haters seized on his death and tried to argue that Hillary and/or Bill was responsible. After these rumors began, Julian Assange of Wikileaks gave the conspiracy theorists a motive by hinting that Rich, not Russian hackers, provided WikiLeaks with the DNC’s emails. WikiLeaks then offered a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s death. The implication was that Rich’s killing was punishment for leaking damaging internal emails.

This conspiracy theory was always absurd; there is copious evidence of Russian hacking, Rich had no access to all of the DNC’s internal emails, and he certainly didn’t have access to all the other information Russia recovered, like Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s emails. The Rich family would eventually sue Fox News unsuccessfully for its efforts to spread the conspiracy theory.

But for Clinton Body Count conspiracy theorists, the incoherence of the theory in the Rich case was never an impediment. The Rich theory soon became part of the broader QAnon conspiracy theory, which is too byzantine to explain in detail here but which my colleague Jane Coaston summarizes as arguing that “special counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump are working together to expose thousands of cannibalistic pedophiles hidden in plain sight (including Hillary Clinton and actor Tom Hanks).” Obviously, the victims of Clinton’s cannibalistic pedophilia would be additions to the body count.

How this fits in with Epstein

The Foster, Rich, and QAnon allegations are clearly absurd. And, we should be very clear, there is no firm evidence at this juncture to suggest that Epstein was murdered, let alone murdered by people with ties to the Clinton.

Epstein did have very real ties to Bill Clinton. That does not mean that Clinton had anything to do with his death, any more than allegations that Donald Trump raped a 13-year-old girl while hanging out with Epstein mean that Trump had something to do with Epstein’s death.

My colleague Andrew Prokop summarized Clinton’s interactions with Epstein thusly:

According to the Daily Beast’s Emily Shugerman, Epstein visited the White House for a donor event during Bill Clinton’s presidency and met with a White House aide several times there. Shugerman also unearthed a 1995 letter from businesswoman Lynn Forester in which she said she enjoyed briefly meeting Clinton at a recent event and used her “fifteen seconds of access to discuss Jeffrey Epstein and currency stabilization.”

Soon after Bill Clinton concluded his presidency in 2001, the ties deepened. Clinton entered a new stage of his career, in which he’d travel the world, launch philanthropic initiatives, hang out with rich people and celebrities, and make money.

“What attracted Clinton to Epstein was quite simple: He had a plane,” Landon Thomas Jr. wrote in that 2002 New York magazine profile. Clinton’s aide Doug Band made the introduction, and that September, Epstein and Clinton were off on a tour of five African countries, alongside actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker. Per Clinton’s team, the trip was about “democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.” (It was that trip that first elevated Epstein to some media notoriety, as journalists began to dig into Clinton’s new friend.)

That wasn’t the only trip. According to Clinton spokesperson Angel Ureña, in a statement last week, there was one more to Africa, one to Europe, and one to Asia — but, he says, Clinton and Epstein haven’t spoken in “well over a decade.”

Virginia Giuffre has said in an affidavit that Clinton was also present on Little St. James Island, Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands. But so far, there has been no corroboration for this claim, and Ureña says Clinton has never been there.

Neither Giuffre nor any other Epstein accuser has alleged that Clinton had sex with them. Clinton was, however, credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick in the 1970s.

What makes the conspiracy theories so frustrating, in part, is that they’re premised on real elements: credible accusations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton, Clinton’s real ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and Epstein’s own well-documented sex crimes. It doesn’t take incredibly inventive conspiracy theorizing to move from that to allegations that Clinton was part of Epstein’s sex abuse and from there to wild accusations that Clinton had Epstein killed.

But we should be very clear that as of this writing, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest someone ordered Epstein’s death, and certainly no evidence whatsoever that Bill Clinton was that person.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2KxRcP2