24 September 20
We Are Angry Too, Don’t Abandon RSN
We are seeing the ruthless side of American politics rear its ugly head. Shocking and demoralizing to be sure. But in fairness certainly not surprising.
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SCOTUS Front-Runner Belongs to "Cult" With Handmaidens and Abuse, According to Former Member
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "We look at the background of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the apparent front-runner to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court."
MY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we continue to look at the background of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the apparent front-runner to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. President Trump said he’ll announce a nominee on Saturday. Mitch McConnell appears to have the 51 votes he needs in the Senate to force a confirmation vote through before the election.We’re looking at Amy Barrett’s membership in a secretive Catholic group with rigid gender roles and a lifelong loyalty oath. We’re now joined by a former of People of Praise who’s now speaking out against the group. Coral Anika Theill was a People of Praise member for five years, from 1979 to 1984, after being forced to join the organization by her then-husband. She documented her experience in her memoir titled Bonsheá: Making Light of the Dark.
Coral, thanks so much for joining us from Corvallis, Oregon. Can you describe People of Praise and what happened to you while you lived in the community?
CORAL ANIKA THEILL: Thank you for having me on your show, and I’m a fan of you and your show.
I was a member of the People of Praise — many call it a community, but I describe it as a cult — in Corvallis, Oregon. I experienced abuse and torture by my husband, Marty Warner, Independence, Oregon, and the cult leaders, as well as shunning, shaming and a smear campaign against me when I escaped and left. For safety, I legally changed my name, and I’ve lived under a state address protection program from my ex-husband for the past 20 years.
Even though I left the People of Praise cult, I didn’t have any rights, due to being married to my husband, who was a cult member. I was under the authority of my husband and his authoritarian head, Ed Brown. Under their authority, I was forced to attend meetings, but because I had defied leadership and their authority, I was forced to sit on the floor outside of their meetings in the hallway at the St. Mary’s Catholic Church. There’s dozens of witnesses that have seen how I was treated. What I would ask listeners to consider, even though they say this is a healthy group, to consider how I was treated and if this would be correct for Amy Barrett to be treated.
One time I had a miscarriage in 1984, and I had to have a D&C surgery. After I returned from the hospital, I was forced to attend a People of Praise women’s meeting, or handmaidens’ meetings. I had a head that was also woman, besides my husband. They wanted to go shopping, and I couldn’t, due to returning from surgery and feeling weak. I left the meeting to go home and rest, as my doctor had ordered. I was met by my husband and forced into the car, kidnapped against my will, where I was driven to the cult leader’s home. I was interrogated until wee hours of the morning and psychologically abused. The next morning, the community was informed to shun me. I would never allow anyone to treat me this way today, and it traumatizes me to admit this was my life at that time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well —
CORAL ANIKA THEILL: The trauma experience by cult members — oh, yes?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Coral, I wanted to ask you — in terms of some of the hair-raising descriptions in your memoir of what happened to you, I wanted to ask you if you could talk about some of those. You talk about the situation where the head, that was assigned to you and your husband, wanted to see the family budget, that he told you how many hours per day you could spend on particular chores, including two to four loads of laundry a day, this meddling directly in the day-to-day — in your day-to-day life and affairs with you and your family, and that you also mention that once you decided that you wanted to leave, that they threatened to try to have you committed to a mental institution?
CORAL ANIKA THEILL: They would call me mentally ill. And there was a time they had me under special counseling, under Father Charles Harris, who was the head leader of the Corvallis People of Praise branch. He was from South Bend.
But basically, there was just cruelty and bullying, and it was not much difference than the Jim Jones cult. I shared with Heidi that my story is very much like The Handmaid’s Tale series and the Netflix series 10-part documentary The Keepers.
Other things, yeah, there was always a list on my wall, a schedule, and men from the community would come unannounced to check on me to make sure I was on schedule and had done my chores. There was basically no privacy. And all of your personal — anything personal was given to your husband’s head also. I wasn’t allowed contraceptives and was supposed to have all the children God intended for me, no matter what my health was. I had had eight children and three miscarriages and D&C, often when my health was failing.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, can you talk about your decision to leave the group? Now, you’re in Corvallis. Judge Amy Coney Barrett is in the original place of People of Praise, which is South Bend. And the reports are there are just something like 1,700 members of this group around the country. Talk, finally, about your choice to leave and the response of the group.
CORAL ANIKA THEILL: Well, I never wanted to join in the first place, but due to our marriage, I was forced to obey in all things through the duration of our 20-year marriage. But during the five years especially in the People of Praise cult, I was just forced to obey.
And yes, we had Sunday meetings. We had — women had Tuesday night meetings. The men had Thursday night meetings. There was community meetings to help people within the community. There’s not a lot of outside contact. In fact, our leaders would tell us how often we could see our family and our friends. And even the night my father died in 1984, he did not allow me to go see my father before he died. Those were just decisions made.
And as I will say, the bottom line was cruelty. And members are in spiritual bondage. Some are afraid to leave. I believe I was an example. Perpetrators will show people what happens to others when you say no. It’s very similar to domestic violence in how frightening of an experience it is to leave. And I was shunned in the community. And because the People of Praise community in Corvallis had a widespread respect within the community — many of their members are leaders in the local St. Mary’s Catholic Church — I was shunned even in stores. There was people who knew them. And so it was a very traumatic experience, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And what happened to your children when you left?
CORAL ANIKA THEILL: Well, when I left, eventually the community forced my husband to leave. It was kind of a long-term wait and see, but I would not go back in. And, of course, he was enraged that I would not obey, and he was looked upon as a husband that had a disobedient wife, and that was shameful to him, and then he was forced to leave. And it wasn’t long after that I also left the Catholic Church. I honor everyone’s right to believe as they want, but when there is abuse, I believe you need to leave. That is with any toxic environment. And that helps the abusers know that you are not going to allow them to abuse you. And the church was of no help. I went to the priests there, and they were friends with Charles Harris, Father Charles Harris, so there was no help. And —
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Coral Anika Theill, I want to thank you very much for being with us, a former member of the People of Praise Catholic community for five years, from 1979 to ’84, forced to join the organization by her husband at the time. She documents her experience in her memoir.
Next up, we go to the latest news that immigration authorities say they’ve stopped sending women detainees to a Georgia gynecologist accused of sterilizing the female prisoners without their consent. And we go back and look at the disturbing history of forced sterilization of Chicana women in Los Angeles. Stay with us.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Getty)
Facebook Sued Over Kenosha Killings
Theodore Hamm, The Intercept
Hamm writes: "According to the complaint, the Kenosha Guard, Boogaloo Bois, and Facebook all partook in a conspiracy that resulted in Anthony Huber's death and deprived the other plaintiffs of their ability to peacefully protest."
hen 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse killed two Black Lives Matter protesters (and wounded a third) in late August in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he instantly became a hero among white nationalist circles, in which the Second Amendment is sacrosanct.
On Wednesday, Rittenhouse and the members of the armed militias that supported him, including the Kenosha Guard and Boogaloo Bois, were named in a federal lawsuit brought under the post-Civil War Reconstruction amendments that aimed to establish Black equality.
The suit also names what it alleges was the militia groups’s most prominent enabler: Facebook. All of the parties, the complaint contends, helped deprive Kenosha Black Lives Matter protesters of their First Amendment right to assemble, thus violating the Black Lives Matter activists’ 14th Amendment right to equal protection.
Attorneys Jason Flores-Williams and Jennifer Sirrine filed the case in the Eastern District Court of Wisconsin, which covers Kenosha. Along with a handful of protesters harassed by the militia groups, the plaintiffs include Hannah Giddings, the life partner of 26-year-old Anthony Huber, who was gunned down by Rittenhouse while trying to disarm the teenager.
According to the complaint, the Kenosha Guard, Boogaloo Bois, and Facebook all partook in a conspiracy that resulted in Huber’s death (thus causing harm to Giddings) and deprived the other plaintiffs of their ability to peacefully protest.
Both the First and 13th amendment stipulations were key to Griffin v. Breckenridge, a U.S. Supreme Court case that was decided in 1971 and is cited in the complaint. That case concerned the right to travel, which is also an issue in the Kenosha protests. Some of the plaintiffs had their tires slashed and were otherwise impeded.
The 14th Amendment provided the constitutional basis for federal statutes §1985 and §1986, which prohibit interference by private groups with other’s exercise of their rights. Established under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the statutes were recently applied in the aftermath of the Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist protest in 2017.
In order to recruit foot soldiers for the August 25 protest, the Kenosha Guard created an event page on its Facebook account. Titled “Armed Citizens to Protect Our Lives and Property,” the posting summoned “patriots willing to take up arms … and defend our City from the evil thugs.”
Over 450 Facebook users alerted the platform’s moderators that the Guard’s violent rhetoric violated the company’s policies. According to BuzzFeed News, four Facebook moderators deemed the Guard’s posts “non-threatening.”
In Flores-Williams’s view, Facebook’s actions subsequent to the event — shutting down the Guard’s account and admitting to what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called an “operational mistake” in not heeding the 450 warnings — amounted to a recognition it behaved with negligence.
“Facebook’s negligence enabled the conspiracy here,” said Flores-Williams. He maintains that “this is not a First Amendment issue. It’s a matter of responsibility on the part of Facebook.”
“I would love to see Facebook change their moderation policies and for them to take accountability. One way to do that would be for them to make the moderators work directly for the company instead of outsourcing them,” added Sirrine.
Citing the likelihood of voter intimidation by armed militias on Election Day, and the possibility that those same groups may try to keep Donald Trump in the White House should he lose in November, Flores-Williams hopes that the action in federal court will send the company a message.
“If Facebook won’t change their M.O.,” he said, “then a judge needs to tell them to enforce their own standards and stop allowing violent groups to use their site as a recruiting station.”
A Facebook spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Donald Trump's rally in Tulsa. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
Trump Just Signed an Executive Order Claiming That Anti-Racism Is the Real Racism
Paul Blest, VICE
Blest writes: "The new order takes aim at anti-racism training, or as the White House calls it, 'offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating.'"
n executive order signed Tuesday by President Donald Trump essentially bans the military and federal contractors from conducting diversity training. The executive order, which Trump said was meant to “to combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating,” bars contractors from conducting training that “teaches, advocates, or promotes divisive concepts” such as unconscious bias and systemic racism.
Companies who do conduct these trainings risk losing grants and contracts from the federal government. Trump issued a similar memo to federal agencies earlier this month.
“Americans should be taught to take PRIDE in our Great Country, and if you don’t, there’s nothing in it for you!” Trump tweeted Tuesday, announcing the executive order.
The order tells a revisionist history of the United States. For example, the order states that “Our Founding documents rejected these racialized views of America, which were soundly defeated on the blood-stained battlefields of the Civil War.” The Constitution included the Three-Fifths Compromise, which marked the legal worth of enslaved Black people as three-fifths of a white person. This definition stood for decades until it was officially killed off by the Reconstruction Amendments, which outlawed slavery and established, at least in theory, legal rights and protections for formerly enslaved people.
The executive order claims that anti-racism and anti-sexism efforts are, in fact, the real examples of racism and sexism.
"Instructors and materials teaching that men and members of certain races, as well as our most venerable institutions, are inherently sexist and racist are appearing in workplace diversity trainings across the country, even in components of the Federal Government and among Federal contractors," Trump’s order says.
Ironically, by Trump’s own admission, part of the purpose of the executive order is to prevent the feelings of white people, particularly men, from getting hurt. Trump specifically cites trainings that cause anyone to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex” as not allowed.
Workplace diversity advocates criticized Trump’s decision earlier this month, when he barred federal agencies from conducting similar trainings.
“We have to see each other as human beings, and we have to do whatever it takes, including taking whatever classes make that possible,” attorney M. E. Hart, who conducts racial sensitivity training for companies, told the Washington Post.
But the order tracks with Trump’s relentless attack on educating people about the history of racism in the United States. Last week, the president announced the “1776 Commission,” another election-year stunt seemingly meant to mine grievance from Trump’s base, to “restore patriotic education to our schools.”
During that announcement, Trump attacked the New York Times’ 1619 Project launched last year, saying it “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”
A still from the bodycam footage release by the Salt Lake City Police Department. (photo: YouTube)
Body Camera Video Shows Salt Lake City Police Firing Nearly a Dozen Shots, Injuring 13-Year-Old Boy With Autism
CBS News
Excerpt: "Recently released body camera footage shows the moment Salt Lake City police officers fired nearly a dozen shots at a 13-year-old boy with autism, leaving him severely injured."
Three investigations are now underway into the shooting of Linden Cameron, and his family is demanding answers after his mother's 911 call for help resulted in her teen son's shooting.
"I don't feel good," Linden could be heard saying on video as officers violently shout at him to "Get on the ground."
At one point the 13-year-old says, "Tell my mom I love her."
The officer's bullets tore through Linden's shoulder, both ankles, intestines and bladder.
His mother, Golda Barton, told CBS News that "he was running away" from the police out of fear.
"He's a small child. Why didn't you just tackle him? You are big police officers with a massive amount of resources, come on, give me a break," she said.
Earlier in September, Barton had called 911 earlier saying her son was having a mental breakdown and she needed help getting him to the hospital. She asked for a crisis intervention officer to come to the scene.
"My son has severe, severe, uh — he does not like cops at all, and so that's why we need a mental health worker," her 911 audio says.
Four police officers arrived on the scene. Barton warned them her son feared police because sheriff's deputies shot and killed her father in January.
"He sees the badge and he automatically thinks like, you're gonna kill him or he has to defend himself in some way," she can be heard saying on the body camera video.
Barton also warned officers Linden may have access to a BB gun or prop gun, but did not believe he had it on him.
"I don't believe it's a real gun," she told officers repeatedly.
The officer answered, "So unfortunately, we have to kind of treat them all as if they are."
Two police officers expressed concern about approaching Linden.
"We can call sergeant and tell him the situation, because I'm not about to get in a shooting because he's upset," one said.
Linden's father, Michael Cameron, told CBS News' Jamie Yuccas the body camera footage was "the worst thing I've ever watched in my life."
"He has a heart of gold," Cameron said. "Even when he was a baby, he tried to do all the stuff I did. And, you know, he's definitely grown up to be an awesome young man."
He said his "little buddy" Linden still has a long road to recovery.
"It's going to take a lot of work, I'm afraid. And, you know, it's going to be tough for him," Cameron said.
Police released the body camera footage Monday. Chief Mike Brown called for more resources to deal with mental health crises.
"As a police department, we want to be partners with those who provide mental health services. As a community, we need to find a way forward," Brown said.
The officer who fired the shots has been placed on administrative leave, per standard protocol. Salt Lake City police officers are required to go through a 40-hour course of instruction that covers mental health issues in relation to police work.
Brown did not explain why the officers felt the need to fire at Linden.
Florida gov. Ron DeSantis. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
Running Over Protesters Could Become Legal in Florida
Kelly Weill and Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is dusting off a right-wing playbook to give violence a legal seal of approval."
fter a summer that saw dozens of horrific car attacks on Black Lives Matter demonstrators across America, activists and attorneys are warning that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is trying to legalize them, and turn Florida into a model of vigilante anti-protester violence for other states to follow.DeSantis’ effort follows in the tracks of an earlier one. In 2017, several states proposed—but did not pass—indemnities for drivers who ran down protesters. They did so shortly before the most infamous such episode: the August 2017 murder of antiracist protester Heather Heyer at Charlottesville’s Unite The Right Rally.
Now, should other Republican governors or state legislatures follow DeSantis’ lead, much of the groundwork will already be in place.
DeSantis’ proposals, announced in a Monday tweet, amount to a grab bag of anti-protest measures that read like they were devised by a police union. The measures would ratchet up charges for people involved in disorderly assemblies or damaging statues, make it a crime to participate in a disorderly assembly at a public accommodation or restaurant, and attach racketeering (RICO) liability to people who organize disorderly assemblies.
But perhaps most ominously, they would provide immunity for drivers who strike and even kill protesters “if fleeing for safety from a mob.”
Caroline Mala Corbin, a law professor focusing on constitutional and First Amendment law at the University of Miami, said that while it was difficult to analyze legislation that hasn’t been introduced, it looked like a naked attempt to discourage protest in the state.
“Even if the laws turn out to be constitutional, they are clearly aimed at chilling the exercise of First Amendment rights,” Corbin told The Daily Beast.
Much of the proposed legislation, which combines a number of recent anti-protest tropes like charging protesters under racketeering laws or barring them from posting bail, seems more like a gift to Trump supporters than a response to actual Florida protests. CJ Staples, a lead organizer with the Democratic Socialists of America’s Broward County chapter, said the proposed legislation punched at the left, even though protests in the state had been subdued.
“In Florida, there hasn’t been that much violence or property damage, so to come out with something so aggressive when we have not seen half of the incidents we’ve seen across the country was very concerning and made us wonder where [the legislation] was coming from,” Staples told The Daily Beast. “I’m definitely suspicious as to who authored or provided that bill, because I could definitely see it coming up in other states as well.”
DeSantis’ representatives did not immediately reply to a request for comment. But such a disproportionate response to protests has a recent—and seemingly coordinated—legislative pedigree.
Following widespread demonstrations for Black Lives Matter, against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and by women against Trump, a wave of lawmakers starting in early 2017 introduced bills in at least 18 states raising penalties on protesters. The onslaught prompted a warning from two United Nations human rights experts that American freedom of assembly was under threat.
Lawmakers didn’t succeed. But in North Dakota, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, and DeSantis’ own Florida, legislators attempted in 2017 and 2018 to indemnify from civil and in some cases criminal liability drivers who “unintentionally” injure protesters. The bills typically made obstructing a roadway—a common protest tactic—a misdemeanor. Once a protester committed such a violation, then any injury resulting from a driver who took “due care” would have been the fault of the protester.
In Florida, the proposal even explicitly put the burden of proof on a protester to show that they were lawfully protesting.
And it wasn’t only injuries from vehicular assault at protests that the bills would have permitted. In Florida, Kentucky, and North Dakota, the bills expressly indemnified motorists who cause “death to a person who obstructs or interferes with the regular flow of vehicular traffic,” as the Florida bill read. Kentucky’s bill, unlike the others, was introduced after Heyer’s death in Charlottesville.
Andy Stepanian—the vice president of the communications firm Balestra Media and an activist who was in Charlottesville helping counterprotesters with communications during the 2017 Unite The Right march—said the governor’s threat took him back to that moment.
“When I saw that Governor DeSantis announced new legislation eliminating liability for drivers who hit protestors with their cars, my mind immediately went to the intersection of 2nd and Water Street in Charlottesville, where I watched Heather Heyer pass away in front of me and dozens of others were grievously injured,” Stepanian told The Daily Beast.
The 2017-era bills were remarkably similar to each other. Practically identical language appeared in the versions sponsored in states from North Carolina to Rhode Island to Texas to Tennessee. With cosmetic differences, their relevant sections all read: “A person driving an automobile who is exercising due care and injures another person who is participating in a protest or demonstration and is blocking traffic in a public right-of-way is immune from civil liability for such injury, but shall not be immune from civil liability if the actions of the driver leading to the injury were willful or wanton.”
It’s unclear if the similarities were coordinated. Such legislative templates are a feature of the conservative corporate coalition known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which brings together corporate lobbyists and state lawmakers to draft, vote on, and circulate favorable legislation. That legislation infamously included the justifiable-homicide “Stand Your Ground” laws that drew national condemnation after the slaying of Black 17-year old Floridian Trayvon Martin.
But David Armiak, the research director of the left-leaning Center for Media and Democracy that aggressively tracks ALEC and its “bill milling,” said the 2017-era legislation didn’t match ALEC’s patterns. For one, ALEC hasn’t put together a so-called “model policy” on protests to shop to lawmakers, as it typically does with priority legislation. Only four of 18 sponsors of the 2017 legislative push are known to be tied to ALEC, and those lawmakers worked in only three of the seven states.
“Although ALEC shows a lot of love for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, we have seen nothing to suggest that this disturbing bill is based upon an ALEC model bill,” said Armiak. “However, given the strong ties between ALEC and Florida and other ALEC model bills attacking protest rights, it would not surprise me if some version of this bill appears at ALEC’s State and Nation Policy Summit in December."
ALEC spokesman Dan Reynolds said the group “is definitely and specifically not involved.”
Vehicular attacks have been a shocking feature of violence against demonstrators in the summer of 2020. (They’re also literally a tactic urged earlier in the decade by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.) USA Today documented at least 66 of them targeting Black Lives Matter protests between May 27 and July 9 alone.
“DeSantis pulling this failed legislation back off the shelf during such a tumultuous moment does not signal leadership—it is the behavior of a societal arsonist,” Stepanian told The Daily Beast.
Staples, the Broward County DSA organizer, said indemnity for car attacks and the potential of racketeering charges were the most worrying to him as an activist.
“We saw it in Charlottesville. That guy’s serving life right now. This year, they’re trying to change the narrative to make it seem like they’re protecting themselves,” he said.
He also expressed concern that the racketeering provision would allow the state to charge protesters for the actions of others, making everyone part of a criminal conspiracy case if a protest was deemed disorderly. He pointed to the revelation that the man linked to one of the first fires of the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis was accused of being a white supremacist posing as an anti-fascist. In such a case under the proposed Florida law, infiltrators could theoretically sabotage a protest, flee, and leave activists on the hook for racketeering charges.
Staples said he’d seen anti-protest bills proposed in other states, but feared that Florida was a grim bellwether.
“I do believe that Florida is the lab rat for how things might turn out, if this does go unnoticed,” he said. “We definitely want to make sure that everybody is paying attention because it won’t stop here. That’s my fear.”
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