#charlatan 2020

[k-wame]

IVAN TROJAN as Jan Mikolásek & JURAJ LOJ as Frantisek Palko Sarlatán (2020) • Period Drama • WWII • dir. Agnieszka Holland

[romancegifs]

CHARLATAN / ŠARLATÁN (2020) dir. Agnieszka Holland

Ivan Trojan as Jan Mikolášek & Juraj Loj as František

[czgif]

Ivan Trojan and Juraj Loj in Charlatan (Šarlatán) 2020, dir. Agnieszka Holland IMDB

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

For the anon who asked--

The Charlatan Duchess (TCD) was a blog back in the early Harkle/Sussex days that really focused on the contradictions and inconsistencies, if you will, that Meghan presented. Among their information, they had:

Receipts of edited articles and photographs.

Tea and gossip about the Sussexes from people in their circles.

Reports from people who were actually in/at/around where the Sussexes were doing engagements that contradicted their PR.

Meghan's old Tig articles and Instagram photos/posts that contradicted her Duchess narrative.

CopyKates and Diana 2.0 behaviors/outfits.

A running list of Meghan's fashion don'ts and royal mistakes.

TCD also had a pretty big compilation/collection of photographs and videos from Meghan's first pregnancy that pointed out things like varying bump sizes (bigger one day, smaller the next) and behaviors that were incongruent with normal pregnancy (like squatting down at 8 months pregnant with a huge belly and keeping her knees and ankles together).

They had a pretty big following here on Tumblr and there was a companion Facebook group. (It's not really clear if Tumblr was first or if FB was first.) You had to be a member of the Facebook group to see the FB comments, but the tumblr was wide open and anyone could see/send asks. I think the FB group and the tumblr blog were being run by two different people, or two different groups of people, because the FB and the tumblr didn't sound the same and didn't have the same tone in their coverage.

(I was on the FB group for a hot minute and it was so disgusting there that I noped out of it a couple days later. It was a very different place than the tumblr blog.)

At some point, the administrators of the TCD FB group began asking members for money/donations for charity, which people would send them, and they used relationships built within the TCD FB community to scam the members for more money, including selling their data (obtained from "friendships" and the membership questionnaire you had to complete to be added to the group). In April 2020ish, the TCD FB admins were doxxed. That information didn't match up to the information the FB group were told, and people started asking questions about the charity donations they had been sending to the admins.

I don't remember who the admins were pretending to be - maybe they were pretending to be British aristos?, but they ended up being an Air Force dependa and her mother, basically running a huge grift and scamming a lot of people out of money and data privacy.

Anyway, once the TCD FB fraud was uncovered, FB members turned on the admins. The admins turned on the group members and the FB drama spilled over to the TCD Tumblr group. The TCD Tumblr admin also got doxxed, began getting the same harassment as the FB admins - everyone thought they were the same person - and in early May 2020, the TCD tumblr admin deleted the blog to stop the harassment and doxxing.

So that's what happened to The Charlatan Duchess and that's why this side of tumblr (in general) gets nostalgic for her - a lot of us found each other through TCD and a lot of us had our own theories and opinions about the Sussexes validated through the receipts on TCD's blog.

You can still find some of the TCD posts floating around here on tumblr in the reblogs. Pretty much everyone who was around in 2017-2020 will have some TCD in their archives.

[zahri-melitor]

Batman v Ra's Al Ghul, by Neal Adams: A Bronze Age fever dream of a comic, written in 2019-2021.

Neal Adams caps off his over 50 year career with DC comics by...them letting him write a book for the first time in a decade.

Now, Adams is famous for his Bronze Age artwork, not his writing, and it's deservedly so: this is not the comic you would pick up if you were interested in award winning writing. But I have to say, it's actually something far more fun than 'good writing'.

I think the easiest way to describe the incredibly wild vibes of this title are 'Adams writes a multiverse Bronze Age time travel AU fic', where the cast technically consists of a modern set of characters (Dick is Nightwing and both Tim and Damian are Robin), but all of the characters are drawn, talking and acting like they just walked off a page in 1974 or so.

For assistance, that's: Dick in the yellow with the very 70s black vest; Tim in the blue t-shirt; Damian in the red t-shirt; and Bruce in the suit. You end up keeping track of them in this title by their haircuts.

Bruce and Damian here cannot remember anything about being Batman and Robin; Dick and Tim appear to have shown up with a fantastical story that cannot be proven (as I said, this has INCREDIBLE reality hopping AU vibes).

Some of the characters have been mindwiped. Some of the characters are robot duplicates. A whole list of characters Adams helped create show up largely because he created them (seriously Kirk and Francine Langstrom show up for a couple of pages mostly to give Dick and Tim an airlift into a difficult to reach entrance to the Cave). Nobody sounds particularly in character at any point, but that's not really a problem in this comic, because what it really is is a giant jolt of Bronze Age style writing nostalgia direct to the brainstem.

They don't make comics like this anymore and reading one written in the 2020s like this reinforces why.

Deadman's brother Aaron and sister Zeea show up; his brother is busy pretending to be an alternate Australian version of Batman called Marvin O'Hearn, and his sister is a psychic running around in the most 70s outfit imaginable controlling things and mindwiping Bruce on Ra's orders.

(And yes, if you too just asked 'Boston Brand has siblings???' the answer is 'kinda sorta but definitely not these two', however given Adams was writing Boston in 1968 at one point he's got as much right as anyone else to claim there are additional siblings)

There's a group who PRETEND to be the Court of Owls but secretly are a group of industrialists called The Money who want to control the world via paying for legislators, judges and industry (and yes I realise that sounds exactly like the Court's thing, but Adams was almost 80 when he wrote this, he can have an expy Court if he wants one).

Bruce pretends to be Matches for a good chunk of the back end of this comic and it actually acknowledges that Matches Malone was a real gangster before he died and Bruce stole his identity (something other writers and the fandom often forget), because Adams wants one more spin with the character he designed.

There's also a moment in the sixth issue where one of Ra's pet scientists tries to sell a panel of Gotham execs on a perpetual motion machine based on electrolysis as his replacement for the current Gotham power generators and at this point I lost it giggling at the portrayal of Ra's as a cheap charlatan.

(There is also a sneaky joke that only works if you know what British salad cream is; there's this sequence of the kids talking about Alfred making sandwiches with 'crappy salad dressing' instead of mayonnaise, only this tray has been made with mayo...and it's a hint that Alfred has been replaced by a robot. I laughed; I suspect it might be non-obvious to American audiences)

This is not a comic to read if you are interested in 'main continuity' or 'coherence' or even 'good writing'. However if you want some wild antics that feel like someone's 3am fanfic AU written in pure Bronze Age vibes and to see the last work of one of Ra's Al Ghul's creators? Give it a chance. You'll never be able to predict what's on the next page.

[ridenwithbiden]

Another CORRUPT CRIMINAL REPUBLICON CONVICTED

A judge excoriated a Colorado county clerk for her crimes and lies before sentencing her Thursday to 9 years behind bars for a data-breach scheme spawned from the rampant false claims about voting machine fraud in the 2020 presidential race.

District Judge Matthew Barrett told former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters — after earlier sparring with her for continuing to press discredited claims about rigged voting machines — that she never took her job seriously.

“I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen,” Barrett told her in handing down the sentence. “You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan.”

Jurors found Peters guilty in August for allowing a man to misuse a security card to access to the Mesa County election system and for being deceptive about that person’s identity.

The man was affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from former President Donald Trump.

At trial, prosecutors said Peters, a Republican, was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the presidential election results.

A one-time hero to election deniers, Peters has been unapologetic about what happened.

[follow-up-news]

A former Colorado county clerk who promoted 2020 election conspiracy theories was sentenced Thursday to nine years behind bars after being convicted of charges including official misconduct in connection with a security breach of Mesa County’s voting system. Tina Peters was convicted of four felony and three misdemeanor charges in August for using another person’s security badge to allow someone associated with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, a prominent election denier and ally of former President Donald Trump, access to county election equipment involving Dominion Voting Systems. The county’s machines had to be replaced afterwards when data, including passwords for the machines, was posted online. Peters claimed she didn’t know the information would become public. “Your lies are well-documented and these convictions are serious,” Judge Matthew Barrett told Peters before he handed down his sentence for the 2021 security breach, calling her a “charlatan” who used her time in office “to peddle snake oil.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

After wrangling with his inner Tory, Andrew Sullivan goes all in for Kamala Harris... but it's mostly driven by an apocalyptic vision of what Trump would mean for the world. "We do not have a serious Republican candidate. We have the most shameless charlatan in American political history — and there are plenty of competitors. He is unfit in every respect to be president of the United States. To say this is not a function of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It is not about being upset by “mean tweets” or grotesque rhetoric. It is not the same as falling for some of the worst Resistance myths — that Trump is a longtime Soviet/Russian asset. I’ve steadfastly called out the excesses of the Resistance. They have done as much harm to liberal democracy as good. I haven’t thrown out all my conservative principles as some have. But I can also see what’s directly in front of my nose.

Trump does not merely break norms. He has broken the norm, the indispensable norm for the continuation of the republic, the norm first set by George Washington when he retired from office, the norm that changed the entire world for the better: accepting the results of an election. This is the meaning of America, and Trump despises it. I do not think this is even within his personal control. He is so genuinely psychologically warped that he has never and will never agree to the most basic requirement of public office: that you quit when you lose; and that the system is more important than any individual in it.

He is not lying when he insists that he won in 2016 and 2020 by massive landslides in the popular vote. He believes it. He believes he will win by a landslide in November, and there is no empirical evidence that could convince him otherwise. If he loses the election, he will call it a massive fraud one more time, and foment violence to protest it. We know this more certainly than we know anything about Kamala Harris. He tried to leverage mob violence to disrupt our democracy once. If that was not disqualifying, nothing is. And nothing done by his opponents or enemies can justify or mitigate it."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Gertz at MMFA:

The most important story about Donald Trump’s incipient pick for his vice presidential running mate is the reason he needs to replace Mike Pence, who served as his vice president for four years. Reporting on Trump’s decision, which will be announced within the next week, should emphasize that Pence has been removed from the ticket because he refused Trump’s entreaties to overturn the 2020 election — and that his substitute will be someone who would make a different choice.

Journalists have covered Trump’s potential vice presidential pick from virtually every possible angle over the past several weeks. In addition to more traditional coverage of who the contenders are, the arguments for and against each, and which one is most likely to be the pick, the reporting has included conflicting stories about whether Trump likes Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance’s beard, discussions of whether Florida Sen. Marco Rubio would need to move to another state to accept the nomination, and illuminations of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum’s potential advantage in having “great hair.”  But what often falls out of veepstakes coverage is a simple question: Why does Trump need to pick a new running mate in the first place? Why isn’t Pence, who shared the ticket with Trump in 2016 and 2020, still on the ticket?

Everyone knows the answer: Pence eliminated any hope of serving another term with Trump on January 6, 2021. Trump spent the weeks after the 2020 presidential election lying that Democrats had rigged the vote against him through massive voter fraud — and trying to subvert the results. He drew support from propaganda outlets like Fox News and a coterie of loyal kooks and charlatans. But courts rejected his arguments in dozens of cases, and state legislatures refused to go along with his plans.  The then-president’s fallback option was a scheme to pressure then-Vice President Pence, who would oversee the count of Electoral College votes during the January 6, 2021, joint session of Congress, to illegally reject electors from key states that supported Joe Biden and thus subvert the election to keep Trump in office. But Pence refused to play along, repeatedly telling Trump that he did not have the constitutional authority to take such actions.

[...] Pence kept his honor and stood strong against Trump’s coup attempt. Law enforcement eventually cleared the building of rioters, Pence brought both houses of Congress back into session, the legislatures resumed their work certifying the electoral vote, and, at 3:42 a.m., the vice president announced that Joe Biden had a majority and would become president. And for a brief time, there was a widespread, bipartisan consensus that the day’s events had been horrific — and that Trump bore responsibility for them. But then the right-wing’s propagandists went to work. They created a counternarrative which downplayed the mob’s violence and blamed it on federal agitators, winning over the Republican base and helping to rehabilitate the former president. Now the GOP has turned election denial into a core value — and the party is about to return Trump to its presidential ticket, even as he continues to claim he won four years ago.  Pence won’t be joining him, however. Indeed, Pence, who maintains that “Trump was wrong” and that the then-president bears responsibility for the insurrection, says he won’t be supporting Trump at all in the general election. 

The chief reason why Donald Trump is picking a new Vice President is that the previous one (Mike Pence) rightly refused to do his bidding to illegally keep Trump in office on January 6th, 2021.

[k-wame]

JURAJ LOJ as Frantisek Palko Sarlatán (2020) • Period Drama • WWII • dir. Agnieszka Holland

[insanitysscribblings]

I mean you'd with the least amount of pressure possible but, would you ever think about writing a book? Every once and a while I remember how it felt reading Back to Us and I just wish I could read a story that was fully yours.

HAAAAAAA.

Friend.

Let me tell you a story about what was my writing journey post 2020 for me.

As some of you might know, I finished a book at the very end of 2020, by the title of Charlatans. It's an adult novel about three voodoo-touched adult siblings who make Faustian bargains to find their long-missing father in exchange for their hearts' deepest desires.

I was super proud of it. My first full-fledged novel, something I had always known I was capable of doing. The hard part was over.

Or so I thought.

See, to be a GOOD novelist, you have to let your work marinate. So that's what I did: I sat on it for a few months, not touching it at all, not even remembering that it existed. After those few months, I set to the hard work of editing.

When I tell you it is SO hard to edit a book you know is missing SOMETHING, but you have no idea what...ugh. And asking for beta readers was tasking, 'cause the thing was over 90K words. I did still ask, of course, but didn't really manage to get a lot of feedback at that time of editing.

Nevertheless! I pressed on. Started researching literary agents, fully aware that with a single project, you only get ONE shot with each agent.

I had a spreadsheet. I had my query letter. I had detailed notes on who to ask for and why. I was ready.

And so I started querying.

...The agents that didn't straight up ignore me gave me automated rejections. The agents that didn't do that gave me personal rejections.

And the one or two agents that actually bothered to ask AND read the whole manuscript?

They loved it!

Just...not enough to publish it.

So. Here I am, with a fully finished manuscript and no one looking to publish it. What do I do?

I put it away and go back to the drawing board, because clearly, I'm missing something. But since no rejection is personalized enough, I don't know WHAT.

Frustration makes me put it down, and I let it sit for a few more months.

Until #DVPIT.

For the uninitiated, #DVPIT is a literary event in which diverse prospective writers and established agents come together to discover new working relationships. The diverse writer has three chances to pitch their project throughout the day to agents, and if agents like your pitch, you may send them your query package. Cool, right?

I take the day off work. I have my pitches queued on my phone, ready to go. Throughout the day, I strategically post them at peak hours, keeping my fingers crossed for even one single agent's attention.

The event runs for an extra week to give agents a chance to read the thousands of pitches flooding the Discord channel. I wait.

No likes. Not a single one.

Now, this part I'm less bitter about, because 150 characters to describe my book? That's just ridiculous. And the comp titles to prove that people would like it? Ugggggh. Not an opportunity to really sell Charlatans.

But this means that, still, my first novel is without an agent. No agent, no publication.

So I put it away again and decide to move on.

And before you ask, yes, I did look into self-publishing. Still lowkey looking, but it's tough, since everything seems like a scam nowadays. And don't even get me started on the AI books being published.

I know you didn't ask for this rant, @hydrogen-ann and for that, I apologize. But TL;DR: a published book is currently a pipe dream for me, though not for lack of trying.

Bitterness aside, thank you so, so much. I'm so happy you'd be interested in something original of mine. If I ever push Charlatans out the door/find the time to write an entirely NEW novel, I'll be sure to let you know 💜

[robotlesbianjavert]

🤚Spinaraki🦎 14, 20, 39!!

yes. thank you. spinaraki forever.

14. How do their personalities compliment each other? How do they clash?

in regards to how their personalities complement each other, this is an aspect of my ideal leader/second-in-command dynamic: i feel like shigaraki is more of a 'big picture' kind of person. he knows what he wants (the destruction of hero society - you can debate about the underlying desires there, like his victimhood being recognized or what the fuck ever, but it all feeds back into he does genuinely want to see hero society destroyed), while the specifics of how he gets what he wants are more come as they may. (twice was the one who brought overhaul to the league and therefore the quirk-erasing bullets, ujiko and machia were already on tap waiting to be unlocked, the mla made the first move). it's not that he's lazy, but he's more about turning the situations that land in his lap to his advantage rather than proactively pursuing them. he deals with his emptiness with a future-forward focus.

on the other hand, i believe that in a situation where he could truly flourish as a second-in-command, spinner would absolutely love to deal with the details and logistics of reaching that 'big picture'. i think he's more in need of something to do NOW, hence doing something crazy like running away from home to join a terrorist group with only being a hikikomori on his resume after seeing a serial killer on tv. he needs something to fill up his day in between big inspiring moments like 'whoa so true fake heroes should be murdered' and 'whoa so true society should just be destroyed entirely'. so between the two of them, you get shigaraki providing a big picture for spinner to actually concentrate his energy on, and you got spinner gearing to do the dirty work to ensure shigaraki can actually craft that big picture.

that's also a central clash between them, which i think 220 demonstrates. shigaraki's not exactly being lazy in searching out the doctor to try and hit a new phase in his 'destroy society' goal, but he's not exactly turning over every rock to find the doctor either; they're surviving day to day. and i've expressed this before i think, but i strongly believe that spinner's outburst is partly because not being able to constructively work towards something, being stuck in a rut is too familiar to his empty hikikomori days. so you get that friction during periods where forward momentum just is not happening.

another personal headcanon for them that i think fits for this question (and is kinda at odds with my prior answer) is in regards to their gaming habits. i feel like shigaraki is a more structurally-focused gamer, wants to 100% the game and manipulate the mechanics to their fullest extent. even when he talks about the newly-formed league as a sims game in the forest training arc, i think he's conceptualizing it as using people's skills appropriately. conversely, i think spinner is more interested in the lore of a game, or the ways that games can be considered art. not that he's not up to snuff on game mechanics and everything, and he'll still play a beat 'em up to pass the time, but he gets more excited when there's some element worth getting passionate about.

in this headcanon, there's a lot of room for shigaraki and spinner to talk to each other about games and have rigorous discussions about each other's perspectives and preferences. but alternatively they can also think the other is an IDIOT and a CHARLATAN and a FAKE GAMER and mercilessly rib each other about it. <3

20. Choose one song that perfectly describes their relationship.

ohhh boy. oh boy okay. man this is always a tricky question cuz it's so easy to just relate whatever good song to your otp. i did have this lil playlist from like 2019-2020 where i still really the songs to them, but i'd have to really sit down and consider this considering how much of my spinaraki understanding has evolved since then.

until then. crazy ex-girlfriend 'i hate everything but you' will never let me down.

39. Who would rescue an injured animal and nurse it back to health? What would the other think?

see now this is a tricky one cuz i don't think either of them would go out of their way to rescue injured animals. but i'll give it to spinner because a project like that would really help him feel good about himself. and shigaraki would see spinner taking care of this lil thing that everyone else has abandoned and ignored and resolutely be like i'm NOT mushy about this you cannot trick me into being mushy about this. me wanting to jump his bones and also fantasize about domestic life with him is unrelated.

i know that a lot of people take tenko's history with mon-chan to give him pets that he can love and therapize about, but as a jaded adult i think it would be a lot harder for him to bond with an animal. but that's all lead up to my secret true headcanon where he's like one of those dads who's like "no we don't need this pet i don't want this pet" but as soon as they get that pet it is napping on his lap and he's letting it and they are napping together. in that dad way. i assume for other guys' dads. it's a stereotype.

[louisupdates]

Andrew Cushin to support former One Direction star Louis Tomlinson on huge USA tour

The Geordie singer will join Louis Tomlinson as he tours across America this summer

CHRONICLE LIVE

By Sophie Brownson | City Centre Reporter

19:44, 24 APR 2023

Newcastle's rising star Andrew Cushin is set to perform across America this summer as he supports former One Direction singer Louis Tomlinson on his world tour.

The 23-year-old from Heaton will fly to the States in June and will spend weeks travelling across the country to support Louis at more than 20 shows. Cushin will join Louis on the June 15 to July 29 leg of the 'Faith in the Future' tour with gigs planned in New York, Chicago and Las Vegas.

Cushin told Chronicle Live he can't wait to get on the plane and bring his music to America.

“I’m delighted and overwhelmed that Louis asked me to be a part of this tour," Andrew said.

"I can’t believe that my music has now put me in a position where I can play some of the most prestigious venues across America!

“I’m immensely looking forward to getting on that plane and getting started."

The announcement is yet another major career milestone for Cushin who has just announced a headline gig at Newcastle's City Hall in November as part of his 'Waiting for the Rain' UK and Ireland tour.

The singer-songwriter burst into the limelight in 2020 with his debut single, ‘It’s Gonna Get Better’ which gained him a legion of fans across the UK and attracted the attention of music legends Noel Gallagher and Peter Doherty.

An early champion of Cushin's work, Gallagher even laid down guitars on one of his early singles, ‘Where’s My Family Gone’, while Peter Doherty signed him to his label, Strap Originals in 2021.

Last year Cushin released his debut EP with the label called 'You Don't Belong' and performed at Newcastle’s Rock N Roll Circus where he supported Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds and The Charlatans.

[don-simon]

Missives from the late John le Carré

TONY BLAIR: A mendacious little show-off ... fucking up the world in his Noddy car.

BORIS JOHNSON: As bad or worse as the above. Cowardice and bullying go hand-in-hand, and Johnson is a practitioner of both.

DONALD TRUMP: A thin-skinned, truthless, vengeful, pitiless ego-maniac.

BREXIT: An act of economic suicide mounted by charlatans.

SPIES: [le Carré worked in intelligence for MI5 and MI6 before becoming a famous author] In my day, we were told we were little apostles for truth, pledge to speak fearlessly to power. Now spies are 'craven' [cowardly], allowing the world to be led by 'a handful of jingoistic adventurers and imperialist fantasists, backed by a lot of dark money and manipulation: populism led from above'.

John le Carré (real name David Cornwell) died in June 2022. HIs books included Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), The Night Manager (1993), A Perfect Spy (1986) and The Constant Gardener (2000) many of which have been dramatised.

These missives are from his private letters, published recently in A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945–2020 edited by Tim Cornwell (Viking, 2022)

[ridenwithbiden]

HERE COMES THE JUDGE "When Judge Tanya Chutkan presides over the new criminal case against Donald Trump, it won’t be her first time tangling with the former president and his lawyers.

In fact, the U.S. district court judge already dealt the ex-president one of the most significant legal blows of his lifetime, triggering perhaps the greatest deluge of evidence about his bid to subvert the 2020 election — a scheme for which he now stands charged with serious crimes.

The Obama-appointed jurist ruled in fall 2021 that the House Jan. 6 select committee could access reams of Trump’s White House files — a ruling that was subsequently upheld by an appeals court and left undisturbed by the Supreme Court. That evidence — call logs, memos, internal strategy papers and more from the desks of Trump’s most trusted advisers — became the backbone of the committee’s evidence and shaped much of the public’s understanding of his effort to seize a second term he didn’t win.

Much of that evidence resurfaced Tuesday in special counsel Jack Smith’s four-count indictment of Trump, which referenced call logs and White House records that were already familiar to Americans who tracked the Jan. 6 committee proceedings. Chutkan was randomly selected Tuesday to preside over Trump’s latest criminal case, his third in the last four months.

“Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,” Chutkan wrote in her 2-year-old ruling, a rebuke that is sure to echo as she prepares to preside over the newest criminal case against the current GOP frontrunner for the presidential nomination in 2024.

Chutkan, 61, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and came to the U.S. for college as a teenager, attending George Washington University and then law school at the University of Pennsylvania. She spent more than a decade as a public defender in Washington, D.C. She later worked for the law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner before being confirmed as a federal trial judge in Washington in 2014.

Chutkan has avoided some of the most pointed criticisms of Trump that some of her colleagues on the federal bench in D.C. have delivered as they’ve sentenced defendants who participated in the Jan. 6 mob that attacked the Capitol as part of Trump’s bid to remain in power. Judge Reggie Walton has called Trump a “charlatan.” Judge Amit Mehta has said Jan. 6 defendants were “pawns” of Trump and his allies. Judge Amy Berman Jackson has chastised Republicans for refusing to level with Trump about the 2020 election.

“It is not patriotism, it is not standing up for America to stand up for one man — who knows full well that he lost — instead of the Constitution he was trying to subvert,” Jackson said at a sentencing last year.

But Chutkan has delivered some of the harshest sentences to Jan. 6 defendants and made her disgust and horror over the attack clear, lamenting the prospect of renewed political violence in 2024 and noting that no one accused of orchestrating the effort to subvert the election had been held accountable.

“You have made a very good point,” she told Jan. 6 rioter Robert Palmer at his December 2021 sentencing, “that the people who exhorted you and encouraged you and rallied you to go and take action and to fight have not been charged.”

“The issue of who has or has not been charged is not before me. I don’t have any influence on that,” she said. “I have my opinions, but they are not relevant.”

But Chutkan also said that reality wasn’t a reason to go easy on those who bought into the election lies and acted upon that belief.

“The people who planned this and funded it and encouraged it haven’t been charged, but that’s not a reason for you to get a lower sentence,” she said. “I have to make it clear that the actions you engaged in cannot happen again. Every day we’re hearing about reports of antidemocratic factions of people plotting violence, the potential threat of violence, in 2024.”

Chutkan has alluded more specifically to Trump in other Jan. 6 sentences, including her first — to misdemeanor defendant Carl Mazzocco, who Chutkan said “went to the Capitol in support of one man, not in support of our country.”

During those early months of the Jan. 6 investigation, Chutkan also staked out territory that some of her colleagues were reluctant to tread: She pointedly rejected the equivalence some defendants were drawing between violence adjacent to Black Lives Matter protests and the riot at the Capitol.

One Trump-appointed judge, Trevor McFadden, had raised sharp questions about whether Jan. 6 defendants were being treated more harshly than people accused of similar conduct during the summertime violence of 2020.

“I think the U.S. attorney would have more credibility if it was even-handed in its concern about riots and mobs in this city,” McFadden said at the time.

Chutkan, while sentencing a defendant in a different case, appeared to allude to her colleague’s remark, before saying she “flatly” disagreed.

“People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man. Some of those protesters became violent,” Chutkan said of the protests and rioting that followed George Floyd’s death. “But to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the January 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.”

[beardedmrbean]

https://www.foxnews com/media/ibram-kendi-assailed-left-huckster-charlatan-backlash-antiracism-center-grows-real-damage

looks like people are starting to get tired of having words be watered down to the point of meaninglessness.

even some of the progressives

I saw a bunch of layoff's were happening in his "department" and people mad because he's just blowing millions in grants without any real results, including some of the people that worked in the "department" so let's see what else we got.

The backlash against Ibram X. Kendi and Boston University doesn't appear to be fading, as two academics wrote scathing commentaries attacking the liberal figure and the university for peddling his "antiracist" ideology.

Last week, following many layoffs at the center, workers came forward with bombshell allegations that the center "exploited" staff and "blew through" millions of dollars in grant money while failing to deliver on its promises.

Progressive professor Tyler Austin Harper said the center's "implosion" proved how "White American elites on both sides of the political spectrum," were "always waiting in the wings to turn a shiny new Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda," in his Washington Post op-ed, Thursday.

Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates University, described Kendi as a "huckster" who was "happy to cash in on America's racial trauma" by transforming into an "antiracism guru" during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Kendi's philosophy, covered in his book, "How to be an Antiracist," did "real damage" because it diminished the evil of racism and made it common, Harper argued.

"Racism, Kendi argued, was not a grand metaphysical evil that afflicts a smattering of bucktoothed bigots. Rather, racism is everywhere, in everyone, all the time. Kendi’s second big idea was that racism is mundane," he wrote. 

"[I]n my view the real damage that Kendi’s philosophy has wrought on American culture is in the way he turned words like ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy’ into banal, everyday terms like any others," Harper added. "Once reserved for the gravest of racial trespasses, thanks to the influence of Kendi and other charlatans like Robin DiAngelo, 'racism' is now routinely employed to describe anything from workplace microaggressions to terrorist attacks. The march on Charlottesville was white supremacy, but so too is asking Black people to show up to Zoom meetings on time."

He argued the blame didn't strictly target Kendi, but on the universities and rich liberal donors who were "eager to purchase their own absolution by bulk-buying anti-racist indulgences."

While the fellow Black academic said he didn't "condone Kendi's race grift," he did understand how "easy it would be to become a grifter" when universities and corporations pay high dollar for Black academics to become spokespersons for race issues. "His rise in 2020, and his ignominious decline today, are a mirror held up to liberal America. His failure, intellectual and moral, is as much ours as it is his," Harper concluded.

Harper wasn't the only academic condemning the Antiracist Center's founder and Boston University following the staff complaints. 

BU professor of theology David Decosimo also commented on the center's downfall in an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal. He blamed university leaders for contributing to the "cultural hysteria" on racism following the death of George Floyd.

Calling the research center's downfall, "entirely predictable," he explained how the university went to great lengths in June 2020 after hiring Kendi, to "make antiracism central to every discipline and a requirement for all faculty hiring."

Even progressive faculty became "disturbed" by the changes, Decosimo said, but feared speaking up and being labeled a "racist."

He explained how he had warned university officials at the time about making any ideology, Kendi's included, "institutional orthodoxy," during a Zoom meeting and a subsequent letter, but nothing changed.

The "real culprit" in this saga, is the "countless universities" who behaved similarly to Boston University, he argued.

"And to this day at universities everywhere, activist faculty and administrators are still quietly working to institutionalize Mr. Kendi’s vision. They have made embracing 'diversity, equity and inclusion' a criterion for hiring and tenure, have rewritten disciplinary standards to privilege antiracist ideology, and are discerning ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ruling," he warned.

This "moral hysteria" of the antiracist movement has threatened intellectual freedom at the university level, he feared.

"Whether driven by moral hysteria, cynical careerism or fear of being labeled racist, this violation of scholarly ideals and liberal principles betrays the norms necessary for intellectual life and human flourishing. It courts disaster, at this moment especially, that universities can’t afford," Decosimo concluded.

Boston University and the Center for Antiracist Research did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

The college previously told FOX News Digital it was expanding a probe into the antiracist center's "management culture" following the staff complaints.

"We received complaints after the Center for Antiracist Research recently laid off a number of employees. Those complaints focused on the center’s culture and its grant management practices. We previously initiated an examination of those grant management practices and that will continue. Based on additional information provided to us, we are expanding our inquiry to include the Center’s management culture and the faculty and staff’s experience with it," a spokesperson said.

"We recognize the importance of Dr. Kendi’s work and the significant impact it has had on antiracist thinking and policy. Boston University and Dr. Kendi believe strongly in the Center’s mission, and while he takes strong exception to the allegations made in recent complaints and media reports, we look forward to working with him as we conduct our assessment," the statement concluded.

Here's the link,

I need to see that 'antiracist hiking trail' wondering how one makes one of those, bet there's lots of racism involved.

not getting much info and the video almost looks scripted