#trump is an adjudicated sex offender

[mariacallous]

Watching Fox News these days is like being at open-mic night at a marginal comedy club.

Rightwing pundits, like a lineup of amateur comics, are trying out their new material and hoping it kills. So far, not so much.

Take Jesse Watters (please). The primetime successor to Tucker Carlson was grasping at straws – yes, literal straws – the other day as he looked for a way to put down Tim Walz. How best to mock the popular Minnesota governor who is Kamala Harris’s running mate?

“Women love masculinity and women do not like Tim Walz, so that should just tell you about how masculine Tim Walz is,” Watters said on the roundtable talk show he co-hosts, The Five.

With that setup, he tried to prove his point.

“The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice-cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”

The joke, or whatever it was, didn’t really land. Most people know that Walz is the opposite of a wimp. He’s a famously regular guy – America’s dad – who will use his newfound power to demand that all Americans own jumper cables and know how to use them.

The straw-grasping is getting a little desperate these days as Harris and Walz spread their forward-looking message, and as their rivals – the felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance – prove themselves less appealing by the day.

“Fox is really feeling the loss of Tucker Carlson right now,” theorized Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, the progressive media-watchdog non-profit, who watches a lot of rightwing cable news as part of his job.

“He was very effective at lifting something from the rightwing fever swamp and making it into a coherent message” that could spread through the conservative ecosystem.

Failing Tucker’s contributions to the commonweal, Fox and its pundits are floundering. They keep trying new approaches to replace their well-honed attacks on Biden – his family’s supposed corruption (“Biden crime family”) and his age (“senile”).

Over the past week, Fox tried to gin up controversy over Harris’s “code-switching” – the use of a different accent or speaking style when speaking to Black audiences. Fox’s White House correspondent Peter Doocy pressed the question at an official press briefing.

“Since when does the vice-president have what sounds like a southern accent?” Doocy demanded. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, dismissed him and moved on after posing a query of her own: “Do you think Americans seriously think this is an important question?”

Maria Bartiromo focused on this “southern accent” scandal on her Fox Business show, using a clip of Harris speaking to an audience in Detroit about how unions have helped win benefits for all Americans, like paid sick leave and a five-day work week, by repeating the phrase: “You’d better thank a union member.”

The pro-Trump cable network didn’t help its own cause with that one. “The funny thing about Fox News being mad at Harris for code-switching,” one observer noted on X, “is they had to play the clip of her talking about how great unions are over and over again.” You can’t buy that kind of media exposure.

The well-circulated photograph of Tim Walz’s family members wearing pro-Trump T-shirts fizzled, too, though it got a good ride on Fox for a day or two. Soon enough, it became clear that these were mostly distant cousins, a Nebraska branch of the family. Walz’s sister told the Associated Press she didn’t even recognize them. Walz does have an older brother who favors Trump, but most Americans are familiar with family disputes over politics.

Gertz told me that Fox pundits were sent reeling by Harris’s ascension and are “very shook by the ‘weird’ narrative” that Tim Walz has popularized. That’s the idea that Trump, Vance and their ilk are deeply strange people – way out of the mainstream with their nasty putdowns of “childless cat ladies” and their outlandish conspiracy theories. It applies all too well to the Fox personalities as well as the politicians they promote.

There’s time, of course, for Fox to come up with an effective message. Until something hits, we’re going to see a lot of painful tryouts.

The alternative, of course, is obvious: just don’t turn it on.

[aridara]

I’ve seen that this list of bad-stuff-that-feminists-SUPPOSEDLY-did-to-harm-men is going around again recently.

So, I’ve decided to simply copy-and-paste my rebuttal here, with slight modifications. Now with added quotes!

Okay, I’m going to number each single link Takashi0 provides. If it’s something that I’ve already talked about, I’ll be very brief about them, because there are 138 (if I didn’t miscount) links, and I can’t repeat myself every fucking time.

Feminists threaten to kill woman for saying men need abuse shelters.

1 No proof that it was feminists who threatened, in any way, Pizzey.

Feminists prevent a meeting about male suicide.

2 The meeting did happen. It wasn’t prevented from happening, nor did the protesters tried to via violent means.

Feminists stage mock murders to scare men.

3 No mainstream feminists defended them.

Feminist attacks male cartoonist and is hailed a hero of feminism.

4 Solanas wasn’t “hailed a hero of feminism”, neither back then, nor now.

Feminists shut down forum for battered husbands.

5 No proof that it was feminists; the forum continued.

Propaganda campaign against male fathers wanting custody.

6 Unsourced claim.

Feminists wish to slander accused names before convicted.

7 Feminists pointed out that protecting the names of those accused of rape while denying the same to those accused of crimes like murder or terrorism is patently unjust. This from Takashi0’s own source.

Try to shut down female prisons.

8 Becuse they don’t work - reconvictions and suicides were unusually high. Moreover, the release only involved convicts with light sentences that weren’t threats to society.

Create rape laws that exclude female rapists.

9 Suspicious source (see here); also, no word about whether those laws passed or not. Not to mention that, given the massive epidemic of rape on women in India, they really neded to sort out their priorities. (See also this thread.)

Make it impossible to charge women with rape.

10 Due to how Israel’s trials go, a man’s testimony trumps over a woman; if that law was in place and a woman can’t prove she has been raped (which is hard to prove), then the rapist could use this “non-conviction” as “proof” that she raped him and score a conviction. Also, the law only applies to a woman forcing the victim to penetrate her; if a woman penetrates a victim with a body part or object, even without this particular law she’d still be charged with rape.

Feminists against equal custody.

11 They’re against using 50/50 custody as the default; this is because it has repeatedly demonstrated that the most beneficial thing for the kid is to be able to stay with the parent that took care of them the most.

Female felons should serve home sentences.

12 Should read “Female felons should serve home sentences if they aren’t violent, but have parental duties, since we can’t just throw children in foster care”.

Told judges to be lenient on women.

13 Because they’re more likely to have parental duties or mental illnesses. It’s still a case-by-case procedure.

Feminists cover up female domestic violence.

14 Murray-Straus cites only ONE case where a publication was blocked, and offers no proof that it was feminists, nor the details of the case. The rest of his argument is basically “Feminists don’t talk about male victims of DV, this means that they are preventing everyone from helping them”. Sure. So is the World Wildlife Found. </sarcasm>

Feminists don’t want the gov to help unemployed men.

15 Feminists pointed out that there were various female-dominated jobfields in difficulty, too. And they didn’t ask for men to not be helped - they asked for women to be helped too.

Feminists launch campaigns to help girls only while boys are doing worse in every facet of education.

16 There still is a wage gap, a pay gap, a hiring gap, and a promoting gap. That’s the reason for those pro-girls campaigns.

Males who were raped as a child still have to pay child support.

17 The most recent case is from 1996, all of those cases haven’t been picked by any newsource whatsoever, and male rapists can get child custody for the children born from those rapes in these days.

Women should have the right to put a child up for adoption before the father gets custody.

18 The father in question didn’t have custody in the first place.

Feminists against beyond reasonable doubt when it’s male rapists.

19 Penal cases are based on “innocent unless proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt”. Civil cases - what the article was about - are based around “preponderance of evidence” which, as the article’s author puts it, means “the relevant body looks at all the evidence and rules for the party it thinks has the stronger case”. So, basically, slagartehfox wants civil cases of rape - and only rape - to have the same restrictions to evidence as penal cases.

5 rights feminism ignores for men.

20 This is actually a 5-in-1 bullshit list. (Also: JudgyBitch? Really?)

Men already have the right to decide whether to keep or terminate their own pregnancies. Oh, wait, JB wants men to be able to decide for others’ pregnancies. What next, does she wants to stay at home on sick leave when a colleague has a broken leg but she’s perfectly fine?

Feminists ARE the ones taking male rape seriously. MRAs… not so much. (See point 4 of this post of mine.)

Feminists aren’t the ones shaming men for talking about their feelings or admitting that they have mental problems - misoginysts are the ones shaming other men for being “weak”, or rather, “feminine”. (See here and here.)

Again: feminists aren’t against 50/50 shared custody being the default because they assume that women are “naturally” better caregivers - they’re against it because favoring the kids’ “primary caregiver” is more beneficial for those kids.

Feminists HAVE spoken against forced circumcision, and they aren’t preventing anyone from trying and solve this issue. MRAs? Only speak about it in discussions about FGM, in order to paint feminists as penis-cutting monsters. THAT’S IT.

Feminists blame males for their abuse.

21 Tries to demonstrate that women commit the majority of DV act by referencing the study that uses the Conflict Tactics Scale, which, among other things, doesn’t differentiate single incidents from repeated behaviours, doesn’t differentiate acts in self-defense from acts of abuse, and doesn’t consider at all sexual assaults and rapes.

The primary aggressor clause where only men get charged with abuse.

22 Unsourced claim. Also: no proof to disprove that the vast majority of DV offenders are men.

Shame men into going to war.

23 The White Feather Movement was created in the first place by far-right nationalists.

Feminists dismiss female child rapists.

24 The Honey Badge Brigade did, in fact, lie. The HBB stated “95% of abused boys in juvenile facilities reported being attacked/coerced by female staff“. This “statistic” doesn’t appear anywhere in the cited source; what is written is “Among the estimated 1,390 adjudicated youth who reported victimization, 89.1% were males reporting sexual activity with female staff only, and 3.0% were males reporting sexual activity with both female and male staff” (p.23). How is “sexual victimization” defined in the survey? “Sexual victimization—any forced sexual activity with another youth (nonconsensual sexual acts and other sexual contacts) and all sexual activity with facility staff“ (p.7). “All sexual activity with facility staff”, even if consensual and legal.

Feminists say men can’t talk about domestic abuse.

25 Question: where did Costello said “Men can’t talk about domestic abuse”? Answer: Nowhere - Takashi0 made that up!

Feminists mock a man who has his dick cut off.

26 Pretty much no feminist has defended that one. And before you say “No Ture Scotsman!”: we’re at 26 links so far - 30, if you consider the JudgyBitch one as 5 different points. Up until now, Takashi0 managed to drag up only 3 istances of feminists doing something awful - and ZERO istances of those people being defended by the vast majority of feminists.

Strawmanning MRA members.

27 That’s because MRAs are misogynists. Hell, have you forgot the existance of Pick-Up Artists (”I hate women but I want to have sex, here’s some ways to coerce them into sex”) or Men Going Their Own Way (”I hate women, so I don’t want to think about them, let me talk over and over on the Net about how women are awful”)? People can’t discern sides of the manosphere because they’re pretty much all characterized by misogyny.

feminists attack church.

28 The video depicts a (probably feminist) protest in front of a church. Not an “attack”. [EDIT 19/01/2016: Apparently it was a protest against Argentina’s massively fucked-up laws on abortion, which severely limit them. They’re the reason why 80.000 women per year end up in the hospital due to complications caused by illegal, non-sanitary abortions… and are arrested for having an abortion if they survive afterwards. And only 1 in 8 abortions (out of 450-600.000 per year) in Argentina are performed legally.]

Feminists transphobia

29 Congratulations: you finally found a sizable group of feminists that are legitimately awful (Trans-Exclusionari Radical Feminists, or TERFs). Too bad you’re way too late for the “Feminists should care about trans* people too, not being transphobic!“ by about a quarter of century.

Feminists slander the MRM

30 Repeated link - see 27.

Again,

31 Nope, the article is accurate. There is no systemic oppression of white cishet men (Systemic oppression isn’t just “I am discriminated against”, you also need a social system that upholds said discrimination to a systemic level - and there is no vast majority of women/POCs/lgbt+ people oppressing white cishet men); MRAs really did try to slander the Don’t Be That Guy campaign with their “False rape accusations are an epidemic, stop encouraging them!” bullshit (which has been repeatedly proven to be false); pretty much none of the issues MRAs worry about are caused by - or prevented from being solved by - feminists; and, in fact, the MRM has done nothing at all to solve those issues, preferring instead to attack feminists.

And again,

32 Elliott Rodger was literally dripping with his own misogyny. He regularly frequented first PUA sites, and then the PUAHate subreddit. His violent misogyny was pretty much the final consequence of the general manosphere’s misogynistic rethoric. Also, feminists didn’t claim that Rodger was a MRA, the Daily Kos did. And no, despite what the Honey Badgers can say, Futrelle wasn’t involved.

Call them terrorists.

33 While peole do think that calling the MRM “terrorist” is quite excessive, there’s no denial of the massive amount of hate present in it. Here and here manospherians justify Lepine; here’s proof that the Tom Ball manifesto stayed on AVfM’s front page for way too much time; and here, here and here are the manospherians’ opinions on Rodger. They aren’t terrorists - they’re cheerleaders for terrorists.

Feminists say Men can’t be raped.

34 Broken and probably repeated link - see 9.

Feminists defend female raping minor.

35 ………Barbara Ellen is a prominent feminist? Oh, right, I forgot - she’s a woman, and she’s saying something you don’t like, therefore of course she’s a feminist. (Meanwhile: MRAs believe that a minor boy “having sex with” an adult woman is something enviable: 1, 2, 3.)

Feminist defends why fucking an 8 year old boy isn’t rape.

36 Zero proof that kermitismywaifu is a feminist. In fact, it seems he’s NOT.

Feminists primary aggressor clause discriminates against males.

37 WAVA is already gender-neutral. Plus: if the MRM wants male shelters, then why didn’t they do like feminists did and fund them?! Hell, with WAVA you’d easily get financial aid from the government!

Feminists cover up female domestic abuse stats.

38 Broken link, but probably a repeat of 14.

Woman smashing bottle in mans face in public. Nobody gives a fuck.

39 Oh, right, I remember when they’ve tried this before. How many times have they done the play? And how many times they’ve shown the one istance where nobody helped?

Jezebel mocks men who are abused.

40 Jezebel critiqued the faulty CTS study. Bad taste? Sure. Plenty of feminists admit that. We’re still waiting for MRAs to stop bringing up that massively flawed study.

Feminists make sure the gov doesn’t spend money on male shelters or male research.

41 Same argument as 37. Why don’t MRAs fund male shelters? Oh, right, because they don’t give a shit about male victims.

Female on male abuse in public is at best ignored, and at worst celebrated.

42 Where’s the unedited footage? Where are the bystanders’ reactions? (See point 39)

Public stops a man from abusing a woman in public, same crowd laughs when the roles are reversed.

43 Oh hey, it’s the #ViolenceIsViolence fraudolent video! See here for details!

No funding for male shelter.

44 Again: WAVA IS GENDER-NEUTRAL. There’s this guy who’s asking for help to build this shelter, but have any of you ever heard MRAs raising their asses and doing something to help building those shelters? Nooooooo! (Also: good job spreading that “there are no resources for men” narrative. Apparently MRA’s prefer to tell male victims that they cannot receive any help, than to direct them towards actually existing resources like this or this or this…)

Founder of Canadas only male shelter for abuse forced to close due to lack of funding before committing suicide.

45 Did feminists cut off his fundings? No. Did they prevent anyone from supporting him? No. Did MRAs raised money to help this guy? No.

Feminists threaten to kill woman for saying men need abuse shelters.

Feminists prevent a meeting about male suicide.

Feminists stage mock murders to scare men.

Feminist attacks male cartoonist and is hailed a hero of feminism.

Feminists skewed the Definition of Domestic Abuse, resulting in only male abusers being arrested and female abusers not.

46-50 Repeated points - see 1, 2, 3, 4 and 22.

Feminists’s DV training hurts Police training

51 Misleading title. What happend was: a husband attacks a man. He claims that it was self-defense because, he says, said man attempted to attack and rape his wife. The wife had previously given a taped statement to the police, stating that the man wasn’t armed. She then refused to testify in person by invoking marital privilege. Not “feminists’s DV training”.

Feminist Mary Koss denies malerape victims.

52 Koss doesn’t “deny male rape victims”. She simply states that for the purpose of researching the subject “forced to penetrate” should be a separate category.

53 Broken link to a page named “Sommers”. Possibly, it portrayed these debunked statements of her.

54 Link that shows that Koss, in her survey, attained herself to the local (Ohio) legal definition of rape because otherwise her critics would’ve dismissed her survey “because she broadened the definition of rape beyond the reasonable”. They still tried to discredit her that way, though.

Feminists violently protesting against Warren Farrell at U of Toronto

55 Repeated point - see 2. Also: no acts of violence were made.

A mob of feminists at a recent protest attacking and sexually molesting a group of Rosary-praying Catholic men who were peacefully protecting the cathedral in the city of San Juan from threats of vandalism.

56 Repeated point - see 28. And there was no “attack” or “sexual molesties”.

Feminists disrupt a forum for battered men

57 Repeated point - see 5.

Feminists fought a law for equal custody to be the default if both parents want custody and neither parent is unfit.

58 Broken link to Glenn Sacks. Also: probably repeated point (11).

Multiple times.

Feminists started a campaign against Father’s rights groups

Feminists fought against laws granting men anonymity until charged with the crime of rape—not convicted, just charged.

Feminists fought against a law to end to the justice system favoring women simply because they are women, and giving men harsher sentences simply because they are men.

Feminist fought against men want equal treatment when victims of domestic violence, and to not be arrested for the crime of “being male” under primary aggressor policies.

Feminists in India and Israel fought against femalerapists being arrested, charged and convicted of rape.

Feminists fought against a economic stimulus for male-dominated job such as construction, etc.

59-66 All repeated points - see 11, 6, 7, 8, 21, 9, 10 and 15.

Feminist fought a law against Paternity Fraud.

67 The link only states what the “Revocation of Paternity Act” is. Not that feminists fought it. In fact, a search for “feminism revocation of paternity act” pretty much only brings up anti-feminists sites linking to the same webpage.

Feminist Harriet Harman has publicly requested employers to hire women in preference to White men if both job candidates are equally

68 It was basically affirmative action, it was for women and ethnic minorities (and yes, there IS discrimination against them), and most importantly it was NOT a law proposal and thus there was no obligation for those firms to follow.

Equality Minister,feminist Patricia Hewitt, was found guilty of breaching the Sex Discrimination Act by “overlooking a strong male candidate for a job in favour of a weaker female applicant”.

69 Congratulations: you found a woman doing a Bad Thing. And? Are you claiming that feminism as a whole is bad because of one woman, but that one of the biggest MRM websites putting up a libelous “criminal registry” is the action of an extremist fringe? Or that widespread hiring biases against women don’t exist because of this one woman being biased?

Elected in 2009, the lesbian feminist prime minister Johanna Sigurdardottir has vowed to “end of the Age of Testosterone

70 Do you know what the “Age of Testosterone” refers to? The 2008-11 Iceland financial crisis, caused by aggressive economic policies opposed by, among other groups, feminist groups.

Feminists want to peeing while standing illegal

71 False description - that left party is pushing to exchange stand-only toilets in male restrooms with sitting ones. Newsflash: you can pee on a sitting toilet while standing up.

Erin Pizzey had to flee the UK because she and her family received death threats and her dog murdered all because feminists didn’t like that she discovered women were equally as violent as men.

72 Repeated point - see 1.

Also Suzanne Steinmetz and her children received death threats and bomb threats she discovered that the rate at which men were victimized by domestic violence was similar to the rate for women.

73 No proof that it was feminists.

Richard Gelles and Murray Straus have all received death threats from feminists, simply for publishing their findings (that female-to-male family violence was equal to the rate of male-to-female violence).

74 No proof that it was feminists.

75 Yep, it’s the CTS study. Debunked.

Feminists say Men can’t be raped.

Feminists defend female raping minor.

Feminist defends why fucking an 8 year old boy isn’t rape.

76-78 Repeated points - see 9, 35 and 36.

Most feminists backed studies are bullshit.

79 This doesn’t prove that “most feminist backed studies are bulshit”. All this proves is that people have forgot to actually check the BOJ statistics.

Beyond reasonable doubt doesn’t apply to rape.For men only

80 A college hearing is considered akin to a civil lawsuit, and thus it isn’t bound by the same restrictions as a penal trial. Plus, even in the rare cases where the school does take disciplinary action against a student accused of sexual assault, 75-90% of the time it’s a token punishment - if the school decides to give any punishment in the first place.

Feminist changes mind on rape culture when her son is falsely accused.

81 False rape accusations are awful. The fact that they exist doesn’t change the fact that rape culture exists, or that way more often is the accuser that gets disbelieved (including by the police), or that false rape accusations are no more common than false anything accusations.

Feminists primary aggressor clause discriminates against males.

Feminists cover up female domestic abuse stats.

Jezebel mocks men who are abused.

Feminists make sure the gov doesn’t spend money on male shelters or male research.

82-85 Repeated points - see 37, 38, 40 and 37 (again).

Feminists prevent a meeting about male suicide.

Feminists stage mock murders to scare men.

Feminist attacks male cartoonist and is hailed a hero of feminism.

Feminists shut down forum for battered husbands.

Propaganda campaign against male fathers wanting custody.

Feminists wish to slander accused names before convicted.

Try to shut down female prisons.

Create rape laws that exclude female rapists.

Make it impossible to charge women with rape.

Feminists against equal custody.

Female felons should serve home sentences.

Told judges to be lenient on women.

Feminists cover up female domestic violence.

Feminists don’t want the gov to help unemployed men.

Feminists launch campaigns to help girls only while boys are doing worse in every facet of education.

Males who were raped as a child still have to pay child support.

Women should have the right to put a child up for adoption before the father gets custody. Feminists against beyond reasonable doubt when it’s male rapists.

5 rights feminism ignores for men.

Feminists blame males for their abuse.

The primary aggressor clause where only men get charged with abuse.

Shame men into going to war.

Feminists dismiss female child rapists.

Feminists say men can’t talk about domestic abuse.

Feminists mock a man who has his dick cut off.

86-110 All these points are a repeat of links 2 through 26.

feminists attack church.

111 Repeated point - see 28.

Feminists shut down a festival about gender equality for including men.

112 That’s not what happened. What happened was that the sponsors realized that CAFE had nothing to do with equality and everything to do with MRAs and misogyny, and ran away from them.

Feminists hope MRA’s die.

113 Correction: ONE person who defines themselves as “feminist” and who doesn’t have any relevant spot in feminism whatsoever hopes that MRAs die.

Feminists against fathers day.

114 #EndFathersDay is a troll tag created by 4channers.

Feminist makes up fake assault stories.

115 Again: only 2% at best of rape accusations are false. There is no epidemic of “false rape accusations” or “made-up stories of assault”.

Female reporter bullied by feminists at the National Young Feminist Leadership Conference

116 Yes, because telling someone “Your conservative magazine isn’t welcome here” is totally bullying on par with what feminists face. </sarcasm>

The Wage Gap is a myth.

117-121 Besides the fact that the wage gap has been always correctly labeled by feminists as “How much female workers collectively make/how much male workers collectively make“, there’s some small factoids such as: women are penalized if they get pregnant more than if they take a pause from their jobs from any other reason; women are penalized if they try to negotiate their salary; there’s hiring and promoting biases; and even if we consider a man and a woman doing the exact same job/efficiency/hours worked, there’s still a 7% difference.

Women Now a Majority in American Workplaces

Labor force participation rate for men has never been lower.

122-124 How is this a problem? Feminists aren’t “stealing jobs” or “preventing men from taking jobs”.

Women in some cases make more than men.

And their husbands dont have a problem with it either.

125-134 Still doesn’t negate the existance of the gender wage gap.

Women CHOOSE to stay away from STEM field

135-138 Still doesn’t negate the existance of biases against women in STEM. (Here’s two examples.)

Did I mention that at least 50 of these links are repeats? Good fucking job, Takashi. Good fucking job.

[rapeculturerealities]

The site where former Stanford student Brock Turner sexually assaulted a young woman known as Emily Doe in 2015 is a mulch-covered slope next to a basketball court, dotted by a few trees. It is still there, largely unchanged, though the area it abuts, where there used to be dumpsters enclosed by a wooden fence, has since been turned into a small commemorative park.

I was there on a beautiful spring day in March; a water feature now trickles next to two benches surrounded by landscaped vegetation and a low stone wall. A plaque bearing Doe’s words was to be installed there, too, an attempt at a sort of commemoration that did not materialize after the university and the victim could not agree on what it would say. If you didn’t know about Turner’s crimes, you might sit here and listen to the quiet fountain in the sunshine, looking out across the basketball court at Lake Lagunita, the mostly dry drainage basin around which members of the campus bike and jog, without knowing why this little park exists.

“I think when people hear ‘campus rape,’ some people, they have a mental picture that’s probably wrong, but it’s really wrong in this case,” Michele Dauber, a Stanford law professor and sociologist, said to me, as we walked over from the spot on the slope to a path on the other side of the basketball court, along the lake. From there, we looked back toward the crime scene from the approximate vantage point of the two Swedish graduate students who were biking in the area when, according to one of them, Carl-Fredrik Arndt, they saw the then-19-year-old Turner “thrusting,” over what appeared to be a motionless body. It was a disturbing enough sight that they ran over to Turner, who they say bolted, leaving his victim, still unconscious, lying in dirt and pine needles, naked from the waist down, save for her boots. “Whatever comes into your mind when you hear campus rape, this is not it,” Dauber continued. “This is the stranger-danger-in-the-bushes scenario that your mother warned you about.”

The assault occurred at around 1:00 a.m. on a January night in 2015, near a Kappa Alpha fraternity party that Turner and the victim had both attended; there were few lights in the area. (More have been added since.) According to the incident report, it was there on the ground that the then-22-year-old Doe’s dress was lifted up, her underwear removed, and her bra exposed. Police suspected that Turner had photographed her breast (evidenced, the prosecution said in its sentencing document, by a message he received in an app called GroupMe saying, “Whos [sic] tit is that”), and she was digitally penetrated, according to a police interview with Turner. Doe woke up in the hospital around 4:00 a.m. She had no memory of the assault, nor of the several hours preceding it, as recorded in the police report. Though Turner, at one point, while questioned by police, said that he couldn’t remember how he and Doe ended up on the ground, a year later he testified that Doe had uttered yes or sure three times, affirmatively consenting to various aspects of their encounter.

After two days of jury deliberations, in March of 2016, Turner was convicted of three felonies, including assault with intent to commit rape. He faced a maximum of 14 years in state prison; the prosecution asked for six.

If those convictions indicated a cut-and-dry version of the night’s events, the sentencing two months later blurred it: On June 2, 2016, Judge Aaron Persky sent Turner to county jail for only six months—of which he served just three—and gave him three years probation, citing the “severe impact” prison would have on the once heavily recruited athlete (who, the probation report also said, had already “surrendered a hard-earned swimming scholarship”). Turner was also required to register as a sex offender. Persky, himself a Stanford alum (and a former captain of the club lacrosse team), said that Turner had expressed remorse, and that “up to this point, he complied with social and legal norms sort of above and beyond what normal law-abiding people do.” That leniency inspired Doe to publicly release the victim’s impact statement she had read in court, a document detailing more than a year of her struggles with physical, psychological, and emotional trauma incurred by the assault and trial. It, and the outrage that it provoked, subsequently went viral.

It also inspired Dauber—a tenured law professor at Stanford, a family friend of Doe’s, and an outspoken critic of Stanford’s sexual assault disciplinary process—and a group of like-minded supporters to come together over one shared goal: to recall Judge Persky.

On June 5, Santa Clara County voters will have the chance to do just that, and to choose between two other candidates who are running to replace him: Cindy Hendrickson, currently an assistant district attorney, and Angela Storey, a civil attorney. This is an enormously rare occurrence: A recall is allowed under the California Constitution for elected officials (superior court judges serve six-year terms), but the movement against Persky marks the first judicial recall, in any state, to make it on a ballot in 36 years. (The last successful judicial recall in California was in 1932.)

For Dauber and the other volunteers who have spearheaded the effort, a vote for or against recall is a vote for or against the way that American society has normalized sexual violence against women, which is to say it’s a vote against rape culture itself. Critics of Persky’s sentencing say that he clearly identified with Turner as a white man (in a state where, as of 2014, the ratio of black to white prison inmates was 8.8 to 1), and as a former Stanford athlete, in determining whether or not to send Turner to prison and for how long. Persky gave Turner less than a tenth of the time desired by the prosecution, but it’s worth noting that Persky also sentenced Turner within the bounds of the probation report, which suggested “a moderate county jail sentence”; recall supporters believe that report was also biased toward Turner, and that the judge should have made a better final call. Both Persky and the probation officer cited Turner’s remorse as a reason to sentence him less harshly, despite a sentencing memo submitted by the prosecution that claimed Turner had misrepresented his own innocence and lied about being exposed to drugs and alcohol for the first time at Stanford. This was central to the remorse he expressed: In a letter to Persky, Turner said that he regretted the “party culture and risk taking behavior that I briefly experienced in my four months at school.”

“[Persky] saw a young man with a bright future,” said Dauber. “He didn’t see what was before him. He saw, instead, an image that was untrue and refracted through the lens of bias and privilege.” This sentiment, that Persky’s empathy lay more with Turner than with Doe, was also expressed by critics after a statement Turner’s father made in court w​as made public: he characterized the assault as “20 minutes of action,” and any time in prison as “a steep price to pay” for it.

The recall campaign has unearthed additional cases in which Persky, they say, also adjudicated leniently for defendants of similar social status—cases where the accused are all male, largely white, and/or connected to a university or to Silicon Valley, though a report by the California Commission on Judicial Performance, which the recall campaign dismisses as “one-sided,” concluded that there was insufficient proof of Persky’s judicial misconduct, including accusations of bias. And it has sparked a contentious battle not only between recall proponents and defenders of Persky, but also with members of the legal community, who worry that a recall threatens judicial independence, no matter whether the sentencing was fair or not; and with public defenders, who say that black and brown defendants will suffer the most from a rash of harsher sentencing, if judges start to fear they will be recalled for the opposite.

Yet the recall has vaulted over every hurdle it has faced so far, including gathering more than 90,000 signatures (far more than what was required to get the measure on the ballot) and seeing Persky’s attempt to block the election by citing a procedural error rejected by an appellate court. Its organizers are a cadre of mostly women volunteers, some of whom are sexual assault survivors themselves, who were outraged on behalf of Emily Doe in 2016, watched Donald Trump win the presidential election a few months later, and have since seen the #MeToo movement blaze through the halls of power elsewhere in America. They are now seeking a reckoning on their home turf, taking on two behemoth institutions: Stanford University and the law.

read more

[maxwellyjordan]

Justices release February argument calendar

The Supreme Court released the calendar for its February sitting today. The justices will hear eight hours of oral argument over five days, including in two of the highest-profile cases of the term so far, involving factfinding in the dispute over the decision to add a question about citizenship to the census and a challenge to the constitutionality of a cross on public land.

The February sitting begins on February 19 with Department of Commerce v. U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the census case. The case has its roots in the announcement, earlier this year, that the 2020 census would include a question about whether the individuals responding to the census are citizens of the United States. The Trump administration said that the question was intended to help the Department of Justice better enforce federal voting-rights laws, but the challengers (including a group of states, led by New York) argue that including the question would skew the results of the census because it would discourage households with undocumented immigrants from responding.

February’s oral argument will not focus on the legality of the citizenship question, but instead on a dispute over what evidence can be gathered for use in a trial on the citizenship question. The challengers wanted to take the depositions of Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce, and John Gore, the acting head of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, and obtain evidence outside the official government record considered by Ross in making his decision; in late October, the justices blocked Ross’ deposition but allowed the Gore deposition and factfinding, and eventually the trial itself, to go forward.

On February 27, the justices will finish the February sitting with one hour of oral argument in two consolidated cases: American Legion v. American Humanist Association and Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association, challenges to a World War I memorial in the shape of a Celtic-styled Latin cross that stands in a traffic median in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. The challengers argue that the cross is an unconstitutional government endorsement of Christianity, while the state of Maryland and the American Legion counter that it is simply a secular war memorial. In addition to deciding the fate of the cross, the case could give the justices an opportunity to clarify when religious symbols are (or are not) permitted on public land.

Other cases scheduled for oral argument in February include:

Return Mail v. U.S. Postal Service (Feb. 20): Whether the government is a “person” who may petition to institute review proceedings under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act

Mission Product Holdings v. Tempnology (Feb. 20): Whether a debtor-licensor’s “rejection” of a license agreement — which “constitutes a breach of such contract” under Section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code — terminates rights of the licensee that would survive the licensor’s breach under applicable non-bankruptcy law

Gray v. Wilkie (Feb. 25): Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has authority to review an interpretive rule reflecting the Department of Veterans Affairs’ definitive interpretation of its own regulation, even if the VA chooses to issue that rule through its adjudication manual

Manhattan Community Access v. Halleck (Feb. 25): Whether the private operator of a public-access television channel is a “state actor” – that is, someone who is acting on behalf of the government — who can therefore be sued for violations of the First Amendment

United States v. Haymond (Feb. 26): Whether a federal law that requires additional prison time for sex offenders who violate the terms of their supervised release is constitutional

Mont v. United States (Feb. 26): Whether a period of supervised release for one offense is paused under federal law while an inmate is held in custody awaiting trial, when that pretrial time in custody is later credited toward the inmate’s sentence for another offense

This post was originally published at Howe on the Court.

[Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in Mission Product Holdings, but the author of this post is not affiliated with the firm.]

The post Justices release February argument calendar appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

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[tomorrowusa]

Republicans demand border reform but whenever it actually becomes a possibility they find ways to sabotage it.

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said it is “irresponsible” to reject a bipartisan border bill “without even reading it” in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Saturday. “The crisis at our Southern Border should not be about party politics. The entire nation is finally feeling the burden that border communities have felt for years,” Cuellar’s post read. “It is irresponsible to reject a bipartisan border security bill without even reading it. We have a crisis at our border that demands solutions now.” “Democrats and Republicans must come together to get the job done,” Cuellar continued. Cuellar also included a clip of a recent interview he did on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in which he questioned how someone could push back against a bipartisan border bill that they haven’t read. “Nobody has seen the text,” Cuellar said. House Republicans appear to be close to striking down a chance at border legislation, despite a history of wanting changes to border and migration policy tied with more Ukraine.

Adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump needs something to distract voters from his legal problems and Nazi rantings. So he's instructed Speaker "MAGA Mike" Johnson to kill the border bill being worked on in the Senate.

The whole point of MAGA Republicans is not to offer policy solutions but to use their positions to engage in a perpetual culture war.

[tomorrowusa]

« [B]efore I was elected vice president, before I was elected a United States senator, I was elected attorney general of the state of California. And I was a courtroom prosecutor before then.

And in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type. »

— Vice President Kamala Harris speaking at a rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday. Text via the White House Press Office.

The VP was occasionally interrupted by the crowd chanting "lock him up!" when she made references to Trump.

Harris is a former prosecutor and Trump is a convicted felon and an adjudicated sex offender. So Trump is trying to find a more MAGA-friendly venue for the planned September debate on ABC.

Trump, trying to get out of a scheduled debate with Kamala Harris, now says ABC "is not worthy"

It's probably a ploy to scuttle the debate entirely.

While Harris is a rather middling debater, her courtroom skills as a prosecutor are likely to kick in when faced with a career criminal like Trump.

Trump ignoring the questions by debate moderators and instead spewing incoherent rants on unrelated topics would not go unchallenged by Harris.

[tomorrowusa]

« What Trump should realize is that women don’t want to be told he will relieve them of the burden of thinking. What they would like is for him and other Republicans to start doing some. »

— Karen Tumulty at the Washington Post.

Trump is hoping that his awkward attempts to reassure female voters will make them forget that he is an adjudicated sex offender and an overall creep.

Women don't need Trump's protection. If anything, they need to be protected from Trump.

[tomorrowusa]

A day after Trump insulted Milwaukee, Democrats began buying billboard space to remind locals of what he thinks of them.

Billboards may seem very old school, but they are one way to get through to low information voters.

A group called Republican Voters Against Trump has its own campaign.

Back in Wisconsin, a Wauwatosa company called Penzeys Spices paid for this sign near the airport in Milwaukee.

Trump can be beaten and democracy saved, but it's going to take a lot of creative effort and grass roots work by everybody.

[tomorrowusa]

Indeed, Trump is a convicted felon and an adjudicated sex offender. And the convention starts just a few days after Trump is sentenced by Judge Juan Merchan in New York.

The GOP is no longer the party of law and order. So residents should be wary of so many apologists for criminality invading their city.

[tomorrowusa]

^^^ Created in the same spirit as various holiday greetings by Trump which he's posted on social media.

In Ancient Rome, the birthday of somebody like Trump would be declared a "day of ill omen".

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has the best description of where Trump is at these days. The governor was the keynote speaker at the recent Wisconsin Democratic State Convention.

"[L]et's all remember Donald Trump is just a flatulent old man with an orange spray-tan who fell asleep at his own trial."

source...

[tomorrowusa]

CNN's Anderson Cooper shows how Republicans are willing to destroy the rule of law in the United States in order to placate their wannabe dictator Donald Trump.

Their logic is that wrecking the entire justice system will then make Trump not guilty. Republicans want to make America great for lawbreakers.

The Republicans stopped being the party of law and order when they willingly morphed from the GOP into the CoT (Cult of Trump).

[tomorrowusa]

Thanks to the frothing at the mouth incident, cartoonists now have the option of foaming up their Trump cartoons.

All that carbonation from 12 cans of Diet Coke® each day has got to go someplace. 🫧

If you saw somebody on your street ranting incoherently and at length about revenge and retribution, you might be tempted to call police or mental health paramedics to intervene.

Convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump continues to threaten revenge even when MAGA-friendly interviewers attempt to get him to sound normal.

Interviewers keep giving Trump an off-ramp to his revenge tour. He isn’t taking it

‘That 10 percent is important’: Trump forgoes moderates to juice the base after his conviction

[tomorrowusa]

The question remains: What exactly was Donald Trump going to do with all those classified documents, including nuclear secrets, strewn all over his garish mansion?

Trump Judge Aileen Cannon doesn't want anybody to find out – at least before the November election.

Judge Aileen Cannon Will Entertain Any Excuse to Delay Trump’s Trial

Federal judges like Aileen Cannon are appointed for life. Imagine another four years (or more) of Trump sycophants being appointed to the federal bench. 😱

Convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump had truckloads of classified materials intentionally transported to Mar-a-Lago. It's not that Trump enjoys reading that much. Agents who gave him intelligence briefings during his presidency had to create diagrams and other graphics so he could understand their reports.

Not all of the missing classified papers which went missing during the Trump administration have been recovered.

The mystery of the missing binder: How a collection of raw Russian intelligence disappeared under Trump

Trump is a danger to US national security and should be treated as such.

[tomorrowusa]

Some polls show that Trump's 34 felony convictions have somewhat been a net negative for him. This one from POLITICO-ipsos continues the trend.

This poll was conducted from June 7-9 and had a sample of 1,027 adults, age 18 or older, who were interviewed online; it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points for all respondents. This is the fourth poll on the Trump prosecutions that POLITICO Magazine has conducted in partnership with Ipsos since last summer.

Twenty-two percent of respondents said that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them less likely to support Trump. Only 6 percent of respondents took the other side of that question — reporting that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them more likely to support Trump.

More than twice as many independents say they are now less likely to vote for Trump as opposed to those who are now more inclined to vote for Trump.

In states decided by small margins, a few thousand votes by independents can make a huge difference.

In conversation, don't just say Donald Trump – say convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump. A bit of a mouthful, but successful advertising campaigns are ones that use a lot of repetition. Liberals need to get over their obsessive and counterproductive reluctance to repeat things. If you want to win then repeat a lot.

The Biden-Harris campaign produced this ad to show the difference between what convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Trump has been doing and what Biden is doing.

[tomorrowusa]

In 2016 we had But Her Emails. In 2024 we have Biden Is Too Old. The sources of these two lines haven't changed: the flailing GOP with an assist by bothsiderist news media.

Yes, it's the same old distraction technique to draw attention away from the leader of the Republican Party who is an adjudicated sex offender who just lost a gigantic lawsuit based on his past use of fraud.

It's time to push back and aggressively. And successful messaging is repetitious messaging – get used to repeating things if you wish to cut through the noise.

But the main thing is not to freak out and to play offense instead of being defensive. For example: Why are so few people on our side bringing up Trump's unhealthy lifestyle? Drinking 12 Diet Cokes® a day and copious chomping of double cheeseburgers wouldn't be recommended for somebody half his age. And what kind of drugs is he being prescribed?

[A]ll of the #BidenTooOld coverage is about as new and revelatory as #ButHerEmails. If nothing else, it proves that a scandal holding that the president forgets things is always going to go down smoother than a scandal in which a special counsel flagrantly violated a long-standing Justice Department practice and protocol not to “criticize uncharged conduct.” As Sullivan was quick to point out, CNN and the New York Times and every U.S. corporate media entity and its cousin jumped onto the bandwagon. [ ... ] Perhaps one way to navigate yourself through this seemingly insoluble morass would be to ask yourself why Biden, who is stipulated #Old, has managed to helm the most successful presidency in modern history. Booming economy, eye-popping jobs reports, first gun violence reduction bill in decades, $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan plus COVID relief, Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure prioritized, judges seated. Pick your metric—there have been a lot of wins. And the reason this old man who sometimes forgets things like dates has gotten all this done? He has, for the most part, surrounded himself with experts, genuine scientists, respected economists, and effective governmental actors and advisers. Governance is not an action film. There is no minute-to-minute psychodrama involving someone in a tight black T-shirt mincing along the outdoor ledge of a skyscraper, ninja-kicking his lonely way down to the stairwell, where he karate-chops the well-armed baddies and then commando crawls his way into an empty vault with the glass chest where the nuclear reactor sits. No. Despite our fascination with the Great Man theory of American lawmaking, the presidency is an office that largely turns on superb staffing, visionary planning, deft political negotiation, and artful execution. Joe Biden doesn’t actually have to remember every single detail himself—he has to use his judgment to employ and empower a large contingent of skilled experts to execute upon their agreed-upon vision. If you are unconvinced, the best evidence that we keep falling for Great Man fantasy propaganda is the unmitigated failure of the first Donald Trump presidency. Here we had a self-described loner literally trumpeting his I-alone-can-fix-it worldview, all embodied in Great Man megalomania. He managed to accomplish virtually nothing: Almost none of his promises for single-handed economic revitalization, world domination, or intrepid urban crime-solving panned out. His great dreams were either strangled in infancy by staffers or halted by courts. And whether you believe that this happened because Donald Trump surrounded himself with incompetent yes men or steely adults in the room, both versions serve to offer proof of concept: Donald Trump accomplished close to nothing because the people around him were either too inept to put his vision into practice or too skillful at blocking him to allow him to put his vision into practice. Put another way, if you or anyone you know finds themselves reacting to the Biden Is Old revelations with the thought that, sure, Donald Trump is a 91-indictments-richer, adjudicated sexual abuser, defamer, liar, violator of national security, self-enriching, fascist-boosting insurrectionist, but it’s OK because he will surround himself with people who might check those impulses—well, doesn’t it rather intuitively make more sense to instead vote for the highly effective, internationally respected, but yes, sometimes forgetty guy who is surrounded by people with day planners?

A president is a lot closer to being a CEO than a superhero. And when it does come to being businesslike, Trump has declared bankruptcy six times – approximately six more times than Biden. Trump's business "skills" lean heavily towards fraud, deceit, and bullying.

The real reason we all keep falling for Great Man horse race stories is because they are good for fueling fantasies of all-powerful big daddy presidents who control every tiny aspect of governance in their tiny wee hands. If that is your jam, well, it would make sense to vote for the only candidate who believes in the same dream. If it’s not, the question is reducible to rather simple stakes: Do you want the Big Daddy who surrounds himself with sycophants and nutters and people with shared last names, or the one who surrounds himself with competence and expertise? This doesn’t seem, on balance, like a really tricky call. Do we prefer presidents who can backflip and ninja-kick their way to total world dominion? Perhaps. To my knowledge, nobody ever made a Tom Cruise movie about listening and learning and compromising. But if you still believe governance to be a sober and serious enterprise, vote like the alternative is chilling, because it is.

Trump flatters himself as a "stable genius". But it is Biden who brought stable governance back to the US. Being a constantly ranting gasbag is not an indicator of competence.

Very little attention is being paid to psychological age. Trump is just 42 months chronologically younger than Biden, but Trump acts like a toddler who is not yet 42 months old.

Parents with kids who were constantly having temper tantrums and being frequently disruptive would consider taking those kids to a child psychologist. Being a disruptive narcissist in his late 70s does not make Trump seem youthful but instead more like a case study for arrested development as a toddler.

[tomorrowusa]

There are reports that convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump is getting cold feet over his upcoming debate with Joe Biden.

Trump could always call in sick – citing his bone spur acting up for the first time since the 1960s.