#radley balko

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Radley Balko at The Watch:

In continuing our tour of the lesser-covered but still potentially disastrous Trump campaign promises, I want to look today at the former president’s repeated vow to confer some sort of “immunity” on law enforcement officers. During Trump’s disastrous interview at the National Association of Black Journalists forum last month, Semafor’s Kadia Goba asked him about this. In particular, she asked if he thought the Springfield, Illinois deputy who killed Sonya Massey — one of the more horrific police shootings recently caught on video — should be given “immunity.”

Trump stammered. He said the killing “didn’t look good to me,” and did not appear to object to the murder charges brought by local prosecutors against deputy Sean Grayson. He then quickly pivoted to a non-sequitur about violence in Chicago, then garbled, “There’s a big difference between being a bad person and making an innocent mistake.” Later in the interview Trump claimed, as he often does, that crime is soaring, and that post-George Floyd efforts to hold police more accountable are to blame. The truth of course is that Trump is the first president since George H.W. Bush to leave office with a higher murder rate than when he started. Crime has also dropped since Trump left the White House, and in most places is nearing the historic lows we saw prior to the pandemic. Trump’s calls to immunize police are clearly in reaction to the modest reforms we’ve seen since the murder of George Floyd. And they’re of a piece with his 2016 and 2020 campaign promises to “unleash” or “unshackle” the police to go after the bad guys without fear of recrimination.

It can be difficult to cobble together a coherent policy from Trump’s vague, stream-of-consciousness rambling. But his answer to Goba and his other public statements on police immunity suggest that, while he thinks police officers should be given the benefit of the doubt, those who engage in egregious, unambiguous abuse — like Grayson’s killing of Massey — could merit criminal charges. This, in fact, is pretty much how things already operate today. Less than 2 percent of police officers who kill someone while on duty are ever charged with a crime. We can debate whether that number is too high or too low. The point is that while criminal charges for police abuse are marginally more common today than they were before George Floyd, they’re still vanishingly rare.

The main thing Trump appears to want to change is who makes these decisions. Currently, the decision to charge police officers is made by locally-elected district attorneys or, in rare cases, by U.S. Attorneys independent of the White House. Trump wants these decisions to be made by him, or at least by those loyal to him. But Trump also clearly has no idea what he means by “immunity,” how immunity currently works, or what he could do to change it. For starters, he doesn’t seem to understand that immunity for police officers from criminal charges isn’t . . . well, it isn’t anything. It doesn’t exist. Trump first invoked this idea earlier this year while making the once ridiculous — and now, thanks to the Roberts court, all-to-real — argument that as president, he should be immune for any crimes he may have committed while in office. In the process, he compared the immunity he thinks presidents need to the immunity he thinks police officers need.

But police immunity from criminal prosecution isn’t a policy any serious person has ever suggested — not police unions, not Jeff Sessions, not the Manhattan Institute. You could make a persuasive argument that when prosecutors consistently fail to charge police officers for clear crimes, the police enjoy a sort of de facto immunity. But there is no law, policy, or regulation anywhere in the country that says police officers can’t be charged with crimes.

Trump appears to be confusing criminal liability for police with the post-George Floyd debate over qualified immunity — a form of immunity from civil liability, not criminal charges. It’s about how much protection police officers should get from lawsuits. Qualified immunity makes it extremely difficult to get lawsuits for police abuse in front of a jury. To do so, a plaintiff must show not only that an officer violated their constitutional rights, but that the officer’s actions were unconstitutional under “well-established” law. This generally means that you have to find a case in which another officer engaged in similar behavior, after which a federal court ruled that his actions were unconstitutional.

[...]

High probability, low impact

A Trump DOJ will almost certainly stop providing oversight for constitutional violations by police. Traditionally, when local prosecutors have refused to prosecute police for clear constitutional violations, federal law enforcement has stepped in — the FBI will launch an investigation, which might result in federal criminal charges. It’s a near-certainty that Trump will appoint DOJ leadership and U.S. attorneys who refuse to intervene in such cases. It’s also a near certainty that a Trump DOJ would stop seeking new consent decrees with police agencies with a pattern and practice of abusive policing. It’s also likely that the DOJ will stop enforcing existing decrees — or just laxly enforce them. Project 2025 calls on the next administration to “promptly and properly eliminate all existing consent decrees.”

A second Trump administration would also likely tie favored police and prosecution policies to federal funding. Currently, presidents don’t have much influence over local policing (though Trump will seek to change that, too). But they can use funding and other incentives to reward policies the president favors, and discourage those he doesn’t. Project 2025, for example, explicitly calls for denying federal funding to cities that don’t use stop-and-frisk. (Given the overwhelming data on these policies, it seems safe to say that the more discriminatory and racist the policy, the more Republicans seem to support it.) More generally, Trump and the Project 2025 people want less discipline in policing. They want officers using more force, more often (unless it involves people with close ties to Trump). They want more militarization, less deescalation, and less negotiation. This is the main reason why they also want to end federal training for state and local law enforcement, which they consider to too woke, too weak, and too conciliatory.

High probability, moderate impact

Moving up in seriousness, a Trump DOJ may also interfere when local prosecutors do try to hold bad cops accountable. His administration could threaten to withhold federal funding to jurisdictions in which local prosecutors and police agencies discipline bad cops, as he tried to do with sanctuary cities. A Trump DOJ may also try to bully cities away from voluntarily implementing police reforms, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions tried to do in Chicago. Trump is also likely to pervert the intent of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division by opening investigations of local prosecutors and police agencies who do hold officers to account by launching “civil rights” investigations of those agencies based on alleged “reverse discrimination,” as previous Republican administrations have done in other contexts. Trump has already vowed to open “civil rights investigations” of “radical leftist prosecutors” who “refuse to charge criminals.” Project 2025 calls for this as well — criminally charging progressive DAs for not enforcing certain laws. (Back in reality, no DA has the resources to enforce every law. All DAs prioritize based on the resources they have). The 2025 blueprint also calls on the Civil Rights Division to divert resources from investigating police abuse to investigating public agencies, private businesses, and universities for DEI programs and affirmative action that engage in “reverse discrimination.”

[...]

Back in July, several media outlets reported that MAGA activist Ivan Raiklin has been assembling a Trump enemies list. The list apparently includes “high-ranking Democrats and Republicans, U.S. Capitol Police officers, officials at the FBI and other intelligence agencies, witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trials, and journalists at The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and other news outlets.” Once Trump takes office, Raiklin plans to recruit far-right sheriffs to arrest the people on that list. Raiklin also thinks he can also recruit tens of thousands of ex-military personnel, people he says were discharged for refusing COVID protocols. This is an unserious, unconstitutional, pie-in-the sky, batshit-insane scheme. But so was sending a bunch of idiots to the Capitol to stop Mike Pence from certifying electors in a bid to overturn the election. They tried it anyway. (Raiklin, by the way, is generally credited as the first person to float that Pence/electors scheme.)

So far, media outlets have been unable to find any sheriff who will commit to the plan. I’m not sure how much comfort we should take in that. Democrats currently run the DOJ. I doubt any sheriff is going to publicly volunteer himself as a participant in a criminal conspiracy to violate the Constitutional rights of, among others, the people who currently oversee the Justice Department. If Trump were able to make the DOJ into his personal law firm, fixer, and enforcer, I suspect things could change. The scheme doesn’t seem likely to get far in blue states. A Democratic attorney general, a state police force in a solidly Democratic state, or a Democratic governor with the National Guard would snuff it out pretty quickly. I’m less confident about red states, particularly those with feverishly MAGA attorneys general and governors. It could get at least far enough to intimidate and chill dissent, which is the whole point. And it’s more likely to get that far if the law enforcement officers who carry it out know they won’t be prosecuted for doing so.

Raiklin, by the way, isn’t just some fringe activist out of nowhere. He’s a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, and was an aide to QAnon conspiracist and unregistered foreign lobbyist Michael Flynn — the man Trump appointed National Security Advisor, the single most sensitive position in U.S. government. Raiklin and Flynn remain close, and Trump has said he’d appoint Flynn to another high-ranking position. I suppose that on some level, once we reach the point where sheriffs are making out-of-jurisdiction arrests of journalists and politicians with complicity from the DOJ, whether or not those sheriffs can later be charged or sued is probably the least of our problems. Like the mass deportation plan, when the details were reported, the MAGA faithful on sites like X-Twitter didn’t react with denial or skepticism. They reacted with glee.

Radley Balko exposes how Donald Trump’s two-tiered plans for law enforcement could impact policing in a 2nd Trump term: favorable immunity for cops who follow his tune, and retribution for those that don’t follow it.

[akatsukirites]

just got done reading 'rise of the warrior cop: the militarization of america's police forces' by radley balko and OF COURSE THE ONLY THING I CAN THINK OF IS KISAME AU. book basically talks about the history and use of SWAT teams; in particular the egregious offensives against the fourth amendment. and also documents police chiefs, law enforcement academia, heads of agencies now long gone, and literal SWAT cops quoted saying "omg we shouldnt be doing this" (pg. 241 of 1st edition) SO YES KIASME AU IS COMPLETELY LEGITIMATE.

also there is a theme that keeps returning of 'if we think the people we are supposed to protect/serve are the enemies, what does that make us?' LIKE... HELLO. THIS IS KISAME'S MONOLOGUE.

apparently i read a book about police brutality and immediately think of kisame. great. JUST GREAT. FUCKIN BRAINROT ALL THE WAY TO HELL I GUESS.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Radley Balko gives us a libertarian take on the SCOTUS immunity decision here:

"The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States is its worst decision of my lifetime. John Roberts’s sloppy, arrogant, contradictory majority opinion provides license for any future president to lie, cheat, steal, suppress dissent, and — if they have the stomach for it — assassinate. It obliterates a guardrail for executive power that’s fundamental to a functioning democracy. So fundamental, in fact, that until the country elected an aspiring autocrat brazen enough to engage in open-air corruption, it was a guardrail few thought necessary to actually define.

Of course the president can be prosecuted for actual crimes. When Trump initially made his claim of “absolute immunity” for presidents from criminal charges, it was widely derided among constitutional scholars as a hopeless Hail Mary. Then John Roberts answered Trump’s prayers. This opinion isn’t a stain on Roberts’s legacy. It is his legacy. He will be remembered as the “institutionalist” who destroyed the legitimacy of the institution entrusted to his care. And if that’s the worst of the damage, we’ll all be lucky."

[zenosanalytic]

#original#lmfao is there ANY 'pattern matching' forensics that isn't bullshit (via @unpretty)

NOPE XD

I’d really encourage everyone to read this article, Balko’s been working this beat for nearly 20 years now and he not only really knows his stuff but is also a concise and punchy writer, but there’s one sentence I think EVERYONE should see, whether they read it or not. To Wit:

One review found FBI analysts had made statements unsupported by science in 95 percent of the cases in which they testified.

95% OF PAST FBI FORENSIC TESTIMONY WAS BASELESS! How many innocent people imprisoned, how many lives wrecked, how many family destroyed, by that gigantic steaming pile of false testimony? If US pols cared about justice they’d be calling for, at least!, every case which FBI testimony played a role in being reviewed to make sure it wasn’t unverifiable or simply made up.

[azspot]

If you look at J.D. Vance, he considered Trump a clown and a threat to the country back in 2015 and 2016, and the same with Nikki Haley and Elise Stefanik. All these people are now being somewhat challenged on what they said about Trump back in 2015, and their responses are to get angry at the media for quoting them directly. But it's a cult. I don't know how else to describe the behavior that we're seeing from some of these politicians.

Radley Balko

[bishopmyrielfundraiser]

Auction Rules for the Bishop Myriel Fundraiser 2023

Public defenders, lawyers who provide legal defense for those who cannot afford it, are often all that stands between modern Jean Valjeans and 19 years in prison. This post by Radley Balko, a journalist advocating for criminal justice reform, points out that even though the right to a lawyer is guaranteed in the USA if you're facing serious charges, public defenders are underfunded, overworked, and demoralized. All of which gets in the way of putting up a good fight in court for their clients. That's where you come in. We're going to raise money for public defender organizations via the Bishop Myriel Fundraiser 2023. You can start submitting your offers now, in accordance with the rules, and bidding will commence as the offers are coming in.

Rules

1. Offering

SUBMIT your offering post to this blog! Include a link to this rules post in your own post, and also a minimum starting offer for your item, which can be a fic, art, or a physical item--be creative! Your offer does NOT have to be connected to the Les Misérables fandom, although such items are always welcome! Any terms and conditions of your offer should also be included in the post, eg what fandoms you are wiling to write for, any hard no’s on content, etc. Offer posts can keep coming in through the SUBMIT button until the auction closes.

2. Bidding

Bid in REPLIES NOT REBLOGS (this is important because replies enable me to figure out who bid when and avoid conflicts) until end of day Eastern Time December 15th, 2023. The highest bidder at that time will be the winner. Bidding can start as each item is posted.

3. Claiming or delivering your item

If you have won an item, I will contact you directly via DM and ask you to provide a receipt or other verification for a donation to an indigent defense/public defender orgnaization in the amount bid. Send such verification to bishopmyrielfundraiser@gmail.com or in a screenshot on Tumblr. AFTER I have verified that, I will contact the offerer to let them know they can deliver the item. If you do not respond at all to my attempts to contact you within one week, I will move on to the next highest bidder. So check your DMs. All items should be delivered by March 31st, 2024 at the absolute latest, unless you have made other arrangements, eg the custom item/fic takes longer than that to create or write and you communicate about this. Earlier is even better, but remember that the most important thing is to keep the winner informed and make sure everyone has a good time. Let's keep this a fun event in the spirit of Bishop Myriel, so this fundraiser can keep going for years to come. 4. Donating Please do not donate your bid until I have contacted you to inform you that you won the item! Then follow the procedure above. While you can choose any organization to donate to as long as it covers the overall cause of indigent defense/public defenders, here are a few New York-centric recommendations, shamelessly ganked from the linked article: Bronx Defenders Brooklyn Defender Services Neighborhood Defender Service However, the Bishop Myriel Fundraiser intentionally allows a broad range of donations as your state or country may have specific organizations you know of doing good in this field. Remember: BID IN REPLIES, NOT REBLOGS. Let's go!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Radley Balko at The Watch Substack:

Donald Trump wants to deport 15 million people. He has now made that promise on multiple occasions. He made similar promises during his first term, when he said he’d deport 8 million people. Back then, he was thwarted by institutional resistance, other priorities, incompetence, and his general tendency to get distracted. But this time there’s a plan. It is not a smart plan, nor is it an achievable one. But it is an unapologetically autocratic plan. “You don’t even try something like this unless you aspire to have an authoritarian government behind you,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition told me. “You’re talking about soldiers marching through neighborhoods across the country, pulling families out of their homes.”

The Atlantic, New York Times and Washington Post have all looked at what Trump and the MAGA coalition have planned for immigration policy should he be elected again. Those stories all got some attention at the time, but not nearly enough to reflect the insanity of what he’s proposing. Perhaps it’s the sort of bluster Trump often spurts out in the moment, but never bothers to implement. We ought to take it more seriously. Trump has made 15 million deportations a central part of his 2024 campaign. And he’s stepped up the dehumanizing of immigrants he’ll need to get a significant portion of the country on board.

Even if Trump gets distracted, it’s likely he’ll put Stephen Miller in charge of the plan. Miller is the only non-relative senior staffer who served the entirety of the first Trump term. And Miller won’t be distracted. Ridding the country of non-white immigrants has been a core part of his identity for his entire life. Miller himself has long made clear that the distinction that matters most to him is not between “legal” and “illegal,” but between white and non-white immigrants. Both prior to and after joining the Trump campaign in 2016 and White House in 2017, Miller sent hundreds of emails to far-right outlets like Breitbart touting racist literature like Camp of the Saints, and links to unabashed white nationalist sites where writers argue that nonwhite immigrants are of lower intelligence, and are disease-ridden, parasitic, and predisposed to criminality.

(It shouldn’t need saying, but immigrants and their children contribute far more to the economy than they take from it, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens, interracial IQ comparisons are based on a false premise and have few real-world implications, and provided there’s some basic screening at the border, there’s zero evidence that immigrants threaten public health.) In November, Miller offered the details of his plan in an interview with Charlie Kirk. Miller plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police, other federal police agencies like the DEA and ATF, and if necessary, the military. Miller’s deportation force would then infiltrate cities and neighborhoods, going door to door and business to business in search of undocumented immigrants. He plans to house the millions of immigrants he wants to expel in tent camps along the border, then use military planes to transport them back to their countries of origin.

[...]

Miller also wants to end birthright citizenship (more on that in a moment), and during the first Trump administration pushed a “denaturalization” program to strip naturalized immigrants of their citizenship. Last year, a coalition of MAGA factions put together “Project 2025,” their blueprint for a second Trump term. It’s basically a roadmap to autocracy. And they make no secret of the fact that they want to do away with legal immigration — and nonwhite legal immigration in particular.

The Project 2025 plan would end the only legal way for seasonal and agricultural workers to come to the U.S. to work. It would also effectively end the H1-B visas that allow immigrants to work in fields like tech, engineering, and medicine — most of whom come from India or China. They want to end humanitarian programs that grant sanctuary for refugees fleeing war or natural disasters, and suspend all visas to any country that the administration deems uncooperative in accepting deportations. They want to screen visa applicants for ideology, barring entry and terminating the visas of people Miller considers politically impure. Miller told the New York Times that the administration would also invoke a 1798 law that allows federal officials to deport immigrants without due process during wartime, taking the broad view that drug cartels are waging a war against the United States.

The Project 2025 plan also calls for cutting all federal aid to colleges and universities that provide financial aid to undocumented students, including DACA recipients — the undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. It would cruelly tie all sorts of unrelated federal aid — including emergency aid after natural disasters — to state and municipal cooperation on immigration enforcement. The plan would require at least 70 percent of the staff of any federal contractor to be U.S. citizens — not legal residents, but U.S. citizens. As the Niskanen Center puts it, “the Mandate aims to demolish the American immigration system, coerce states and localities into cooperating with administrative schemes, and intimidate immigrants present in the United States.”

[...] Deporting even a fraction of 15 million people would also wreck the economy.��Inflation would soar (especially when combined with Trump’s plan to slap a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imports), and the U.S. would likely spiral into a recession, possibly a depression. Naturally, House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed his enthusiastic support. Trump and Miller aren’t going to deport 15 million people in four years. It just isn’t possible. But the important thing — the thing that ought to be immediately disqualifying — is that they plan to try.

[...]

Trump’s plan would require deportation officials to go into cities, workplaces, colleges, and neighborhoods, find undocumented immigrants, and forcibly extract them. He did some of this during his first term, but it was sporadic and mostly for show. This would be on a much, much larger scale.

These will be people who for the most part are indistinguishable from legal residents and citizens, and whose only offense is to be in the country without documentation (which is a civil offense, not a criminal one). That means it’s a near certainty that a significant number of people who are here legally would be mistakenly detained. Some would be deported. And once they’re gone, they’d have to battle a backlogged and bureaucratic morass of an immigration system to get back in. Usually, refugee crises are brought on by large groups of people either voluntarily migrating from regions struck by war or natural disaster, or armies forcibly moving people en masse. Trump’s deportation plan would mean identifying the undocumented people in virtually every decent sized city, town, and county in the United States, detaining those people in some regional facility, transporting them to a bus station or airport, then flying, walking, or driving them across the border.

Imagine what it would take to evacuate the entirety of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Imagine the number of buses and you’d need, the number of holding facilities, and everything you’d need to staff and equip those facilities. You’d need security. You’d need medical staff and food services. You’d need bathroom and shower facilities. You’d need janitorial staff, bus drivers, and pilots. Now imagine moving a population equal in size to the populations of those cities, but spread out all over the United States. In addition to Miller’s tent encampments along the border, you’d also need detainment facilities in every major city to hold immigrants as they await transport. Sanctuary cities would resist letting the administration use space in their jails. But even in cooperating jurisdictions, there wouldn’t be nearly enough available space. In his Atlantic piece, Brownstein consulted with experts who made the dystopian suggestion of housing immigrants in warehouses and abandoned shopping malls.

Currently, removals are handled by the Enforcement and Removals Operations (ERO) division of ICE. At the moment, that office has 7,600 employees. Last year, ERO removed about 142,000 people with a budget of $4.7 billion. If we apply these numbers to Trump’s 15 million plan, and spread it out over a 4-year term, Trump would need the ERO or an equivalent agency to increase its capacity by a factor of about 26. So the office would need to increase to more than 200,000 employees, and a budget of $122 billion. But that’s just the “muscle,” or the people who carry out the removals. ICE also has investigators, administrative staff, and attorneys who argue immigration cases in court. Overall, ICE has about 20,000 employees, with a budget of $8.5 billion. If we assume the current staffing and budget would need to expand at scale with the number of removals, Trump’s deportation plan would need 530,000 employees. That’s about 70,000 more staff than current active-duty troops in the U.S. Army.

The overall ICE budget would need to increase to $225 billion — 80 percent more than the current budget for the entire Department of Homeland Security, and 20 percent more than the Army’s 2025 budget. You’d also need to multiply the number of immigration courts and judges. Currently there are 69 immigration courts with 650 immigration judges. To keep the current ratio of courts and judges to deportations, you’d need more than 1,800 courts and over 17,000 judges. The current budget for these courts is $981 million. That would need to jump to $26 billion.

Radley Balko wrote an insightful column on the costs of Donald Trump’s fascistic mass deportation plan, as it would be very costly to the economy and would require tons and tons of people to carry out.

[thatstormygeek]

The problem is that Substack hasn’t been letting everyone in. They’ve been drawing lines all along. They do moderate some content — sex worker newsletters, for example — which makes it harder to swallow the argument that the decision to keep hosting newsletters by Nazis (yes — actual Nazis) is grounded in some purist devotion to free speech. As Mike Masnick writes, like it or not, once your bar starts allowing Nazis, you’re going to be known as the Nazi bar. Similarly, once you ban consensual porn, nudity, or sex work while still allowing Nazism, it isn’t unfair to conclude that you find porn, nudity, and sex work more offensive than Nazism. And it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that those are some pretty fucked up priorities.

"The moment a platform begins to recommend content is the moment it can no longer claim to be simple software....Until Substack, I was not aware of any major US consumer internet platform that stated it would not remove or even demonetize Nazi accounts. Even in a polarized world, there remains broad agreement that the slaughter of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust was an atrocity. The Nazis did not commit the only atrocity in history, but a platform that declines to remove their supporters is telling you something important about itself."

[atthecenterofeverything]

in this book I’m reading (Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko) the author uses the example of Columbine to demonstrate a situation where, despite being in theory the exact reason SWAT teams were founded in the 60s, none of the units present on the scene were able to stop Klebold and Harris in any way. this is supposed to come as a contradiction since the author is clearly a liberal, which it will not to anyone reading this.

the official explanation behind the creation of SWAT teams under Nixon was that regular law enforcement would not have the weaponry to intervene in active shooter situations (specifically the Texas Tower Massacre in 1966) - though of course the urban riots happening at the time and the fear of Black nationalist militant groups (like the Watts riot or the Black Panther Party shootout in 1969) had more to do with it.

except that several SWAT team units were stationed outside and none of them went in because the situation was deemed “too dangerous”. at the height of the shooting, there were eight hundred cops and eight separate SWAT teams. a teacher bled to death for four hours because despite having received the message that someone was dying, none of the forces came in.this is something that is repeated in many similar shooting situations, especially in the past 20 years - SWAT didnt go in until after the shooters were confirmed dead. how your takeaway from this can be anything but "this shows the point of SWAT teams is not to intervene in shootings but to break down the door of ppl with half a gram of weed in their house and terrorize communities" I do not know

[mitchipedia]

GOP senator demands DOJ investigate reporter who wrote about potential Trump dictatorship.. Radley Balko: “Congratulations to J.D. Vance, for responding to accusations that his party is authoritarian in the most authoritarian way a senator possibly could.”

[schraubd]

Art Maven Roundup

All of the sudden, I've been on an art kick. The below image is a silkscreen I recently purchased from DC-based artist Halim Flowers. Flowers was convicted of felony murder as a juvenile and sentenced to two life terms. He was released after serving 22 years following statutory reforms aimed a juvenile offenders who had received life sentences, and now is showing in galleries around the world. Pictured: "Audacity to Love (IP) (Blue)" by Halim Flowers. The colors are meant to be reminiscent of the Israeli and Palestinian flags (blue and white, and red, white, and green). * * * Trump continues to show his contempt for American Jews, saying any Jew who doesn't support him "hates their religion" (and Israel). An in-depth story about a White supremacist who was elected to city council in Enid, Oklahoma, and the recall campaign to try and remove him. Given the well-covered softness in Biden's support in the Muslim community, it seems suicidal to me for Democrats to give into the repulsive Islamophobic attacks holding up the confirmation of Third Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Adeel Mangi (the story indicates that Biden has remained rock-solid in backing his confirmation, but there may be some misgivings in the Senate Democratic caucus). Writing on the sudden "heterodox" support for revisionist accounts justifying George Floyd's murder, Radley Balko flags what has been obvious for a long time: as much as this cadre likes to bleat about respecting truth, free-thinking, and rationality, it is as if not more beholden to ideologically-convenient narratives at the expense of reality. Pretty much everyone on the internet has been sharing this with their own story of the alt-center blowing past truth in order to push conservative grievance politics; mine was watching them stand in unblinking support of a hit piece on California's Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum even after it was revealed the author completely fabricated the inclusion of a seemingly-damning antisemitic quote. Interesting retrospective on the Israeli Black Panthers in JTA. The Supreme Court's frosty reception to the contention that government officials privately lobbying social media companies to take down misinformation is a First Amendment violation is the latest suggestion that the Court is finally losing patience with the regular drumbeat of insane legal theories emanating out of hyper-conservative Fifth Circuit. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/n6GxwX9

[fnord888]

I had originally planned to paywall some stuff, or at least give subscribers a preview for a few days. But shortly after I launched, I had a call with the folks at Substack, and they recommended just keeping everything available for free, at least for now.

Substack asked Radley Balko to *not* paywall any posts?! Obviously he's in a very unusual position in having the support base he does, but definitely a surprising anecdote. I has assumed that no paywalls was a principled decision on his part (and possibly a concession he got from Substack based on that unusual position), not that it was Substack's idea.

[angryisokay]

Police militarization? That ball got really rolling with Nixon iirc, with the whole War on Drugs nonsense. Every president since has added to the problem. I guess you could hold Biden double accountable, since he was a key figure pushing the ‘tough on crime’ attitude as a Congressman. Republicans and Democrats have been trying to outdo each other in the ‘who can suck cop dick harder’ contest since the late 70s at least.

Which American president can be fully, or get the most blame, for the over-militarization of the US police?

Because I want to be bet money that it’s a Democrat.

[eggcatsreads]

February Wrap-Up

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Favorite Read of the Month:

Solita by Vivien Rainn (GR review)

It’s only through facing the past and her buried fears can Sadie find salvation as she upturns the Hacienda’s twisted roots, roots born from the faith and fire of the conquistas, the Spaniards who came from distant shores, bringing with them not only their God, but also their demons.

THE gothic romance. This book changed my perspective on romance books. I've thought about this book regularly since I read it.

"In my time," he continues, voice low, "sanctity was measured by suffering. Those saints that abstained from the pleasures of life, fasted to starvation, mortified their flesh, drank the blood of the wounded - it was only they who saw the eyes of God, it was only through their agony that they were touched by true divinity, enraptured by their own faith."

"I...I'm not a saint, Silas." Her eyes meet his in a gaze that's wrapped up in the promise for everything she's always denied herself. The promise of temptation for the taste of that forbidden fruit, a single bite all it takes for irreversible expulsion, for an eternal fall from grace.

"I never said you were."

The warmth of his breath is so close to her own, heat mingling, pulses flush close. "Then what are you saying?"

"That I am," he answers. "I found God. And I'm looking into her eyes."

HELLO???? THIS QUOTE HAS IRREVOCABLY CHANGED HOW I READ ROMANCE BOOKS. THIS IS THE STANDARD.

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

Rest of Books Read Under the Cut:

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover (sequel)

The second book in the Murder & Magic series of historical fantasy novels featuring Hetty Rhodes and her husband, Benjy, magic practitioners and detectives living in post–Civil War Philadelphia.

Godkiller by Hannah Kaner

Kissen’s family were killed by zealots of a fire god - now, she makes a living killing gods. That is until she finds a god she cannot kill: Skedi, a god of white lies, who bound himself to a young noble, and are on the run from assassins.

The Book of Living Secrets by Madeline Roux (GR review)

Best friends Adelle and Connie love of a little-known gothic romance novel called Moira. When they find a way to enter the book, suddenly everything isn't how they remember.

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton (GR review)

It's 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world's greatest detective, is being transported to be executed for a crime he may, or may not, have committed. Out at sea things begin happening. A twice-dead leper stalks the decks. Strange symbols appear on the sails. Livestock is slaughtered. And then three passengers are marked for death, including Samuel.

The Song of the Sandman by J.F. Dubeau (GR review) (sequel)

After a terrible mass shooting at Cicero’s Circus, the evil presence responsible for the carnage is taken in by a doomsday cult lying in wait for such an opportunity.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist by Radley Balko

For nearly two decades, medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. Michael West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart.

Hell's Half-Acre by Susan Jonusas

In 1873 the people of Labette County, Kansas discovered the remains of countless bodies, and below the cabin was a cellar stained with blood. The cabin's family, the Benders, were nowhere to be found, sparking a frenzy that continued for decades.

Seductive Poison by Deborah Layton

In this haunting and riveting firsthand account, a survivor of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple opens up the shadowy world of cults and shows how anyone can fall under their spell.

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Born to be Hanged by Keith Thomson

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than three hundred daring, hardened pirates gather on a remote Caribbean island. The plan: to wreak havoc on the Pacific coastline, raiding cities, mines, and merchant ships.

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Books read so far this year: 21

How I rate books.