The corruption is just oozing out

No one is done with Clarence Thomas. He has another channel for his bribery stream.

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

I was dismayed by the first sentence of the second paragraph. People are paying $6000/month for a boarding school? That’s nuts. I could never afford that kind of payout, nor could most people. This must be how “trickle down economics” works — the people with many millions of dollars subsidize the lifestyle of people who run over-priced private boarding schools.

Also, “raising him as a son” apparently means “shipping the kid off to a school where we won’t have to see him for nine months of the year.”

Worse, in this case, is that Thomas has a billionaire sugar daddy paying the bills, and Thomas knew this was an ethical problem, because he kept it secret.

Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.

Not clear? Crystal clear. He knew this was shady and was feebly trying to hide it.

Oh, hey, remember Herschel Walker, one of the dumbest Republican candidates ever (he lost)? He’s also in the news.

When Herschel Walker emailed a representative for billionaire industrialist and longtime family friend Dennis Washington in March 2022, he seemed to be engaging in normal behavior for a political candidate: He was asking for money.

But unbeknownst to Washington and the billionaire’s staff, Walker’s request was far more out of the ordinary. It was something campaign finance experts are calling “unprecedented,” “stunning,” and “jaw-dropping.” Walker wasn’t just asking for donations to his campaign; he was soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal company—a company that he never disclosed on his financial statements.

Wow. I wish I had a friend I could call up on the phone and ask for half a million dollars that I’d never have to pay back. Well, I do have such friends, I’m sure — maybe I’ll call you up and ask you for a hundred thousand dollars sometime — it’s just that none of my friends have that kind of money, and definitely none of the kind who would give me that much. (I do have a Patreon account, but I only ask for $1-$5, and am deeply grateful for those donations. If any of you want to send me $500K, though, we’d finally be able to do that complete update of the Freethoughtblogs code, and several other things…).

Unfortunately, I’m not a Republican, and also haven’t had my conscience drilled out of my skull, so that’s not going to happen.

I never thought I’d say I was grateful for Steven Crowder

He’s such an unfunny, horrible, selfish little man, but I am thankful that he has taught me about another plank of the conservative agenda: they want to abolish no-fault divorce. I had no idea! I assumed this was a safe and entirely reasonable right!

Steven Crowder, the right-wing podcaster, is getting a divorce. “No, this was not my choice,” Crowder told his online audience last week. “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore — and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.”

Crowder’s emphasis on “the state of Texas” makes it sound like the Lone Star State is an outlier, but all 50 states and the District of Columbia have no-fault divorce laws on the books — laws that allow either party to walk away from an unhappy marriage without having to prove abuse, infidelity, or other misconduct in court.

It was a hard-fought journey to get there. It took more than four decades to end fault-based divorce in America: California was the first state to eliminate it, in 1969; New York didn’t come around until 2010. (And there are caveats: Mississippi and South Dakota still only allow no-fault divorce if both parties agree to dissolve the marriage, for example.)

Researchers who tracked the emergence of no-fault divorce laws state by state over that period found that reform led to dramatic drops in the rates of female suicide and domestic violence, as well as decreases in spousal homicide of women. The decreases, one researcher explained, were “not just because abused women (and men) could more easily divorce their abusers, but also because potential abusers knew that they were more likely to be left.”

Today, more than two-thirds of all heterosexual divorces in the U.S. are initiated by women.

I had no idea. I was married in 1980, and I just assumed that this was an entirely voluntary association, taking for granted that she had the same rights I do. Was that a radical idea? I guess it was, once upon a time. What I take for granted is under threat from Republicans now.

Republicans across the country are now reconsidering no-fault divorce. There isn’t a huge mystery behind the campaign: Like the crusades against abortion and contraception, making it more difficult to leave an unhappy marriage is about control. Crowder’s home state could be the first to eliminate it, if the Texas GOP gets its way. Last year, the Republican Party of Texas added language to its platform calling for an end to no-fault divorce: “We urge the Legislature to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws, to support covenant marriage, and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce.”

If my wife were unhappy in our marriage and wanted to leave me, it would break my heart, but I recognize that I don’t own her and she has rights of her own and she is an autonomous agent. That Republicans want to deny women that right is eye-opening. I thought it was weird how Crowder kept harping on the idea that his wife was permitted to not want to be married to him, as if her agency was an affront to his right to compel her to live in an unhappy home, but that’s how the conservative mind works, I guess. Selfishly.

Now I’m wondering if right-wingers even have a theory of mind.

Also, further revelations about Crowder show why no one would want to associate with him for any length of time. He’s also a bullying, demeaning, awful boss, a spoiled tyrannical child.

In March 2018, Crowder and his crew were driving in a van when a former producer he liked to call “Not Gay Jared” fell asleep in the back row. “Steven was in front, and he was joking about what he was going to do,” a witness said. “He climbed over and dropped his junk on top of Jared’s shoulder.” The same ex-staffer recalled that Crowder had exposed himself to Jared in 2017 while they were filming a parody version of Ghost. And on a flight in 2018, a different employee claims they saw Crowder put his testicles on his childhood friend and assistant, John Goodman. Another employee remembered that Crowder had showed his genitals to Dave Landau, a comedian and former co-host who called Crowder a “bully” last week. (Landau claimed that Crowder installed a “‘Dave don’t talk’ button” on the show to get him to be quiet on air.) “At first, I took it as him trying to be friendly or one of the guys,” said an ex-staffer. “Now, I see it was a power play.”

Crowder allegedly sent production assistants to do his laundry and could be an “unreasonable micromanager” who would make wild requests after hours to “set people up for failure.” Ex-staffers claimed that he would “regularly” berate his team and threaten to fire people on the company’s Discord channel. He even went after his own father, Darrin Crowder, per one source, who claimed Crowder would yell at his dad in front of employees when Darrin was working as his son’s booker. (Darrin did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.)

All I can say is…I hope his ex-wife takes him to the cleaners, that his employees abandon him too, and and that not even a right-wing wealthy media site wants to syndicate him anymore. Not even the Daily Wire or Spotify will want to associate with this toxic person. More importantly I hope that every woman in the country becomes aware that a major goal of the Republican Party is to turn their marriages into prisons.

They’re killing libraries

I have never read a book by Nora Roberts, and what I’ve heard about them does not appeal at all. If you enjoy them, great — she’s an immensely popular author, so a lot of people do enjoy her books. Unfortunately, a censorious few do not, and have decided that no one should read them. She’s being banned. For this?

What’s more, the objection to Roberts’s books appears extremely flimsy. Four of those books, which make up “The Bride Quartet,” are about friends seeking love as they build their wedding-planning business.

The books have some sex scenes, but the language is often vague enough that a child would have little idea what was happening. (“He touched, he tasted, he lingered until her quivers became trembles.”) And — spoiler alert — each book ends with a marriage proposal.

Roberts allowed that the books contain “sex” but noted that it is “monogamous” and “consensual.” Speaking of the censors, Roberts told us: “I’m surprised that they wouldn’t want teenagers to read about healthy relationships that are monogamous, consensual, healthy and end up in marriage.”

It’s conventionally heteronormative! But one person, literally one person, squeaked an objection, and chickenshit school administrators in Martin county immediately pulled every Roberts book off the shelves. That’s all it takes, one prude from the fascist group “Moms for Liberty” complains, and administrators instantly surrender.

There’s a reason for that. “Moms for Liberty” is a right-wing terrorist organization.

The group’s methods, however, belie the wholesome vision it tries to project. VICE News has spoken to students, administrators, parents, superintendents, school board members, and teachers who have faced vicious attacks by Moms for Liberty. Their stories paint a picture of a group that conducts orchestrated harassment campaigns against individuals, that’s resulted in many fearing for their safety and, in some cases, their lives.

“The greatest impact that Moms for Liberty is having is imparting fear, within the teachers and the educators and in the parents,” Laura Leigh-Abby, co-founder of Defense of Democracy, a nonprofit group advocating for inclusive education, told VICE News. “The true impact they’re having is really not calculable, because I’m seeing teachers who are afraid to speak out because they don’t want to be targeted.”

It’s their tactics. They harass and threaten to get their way, and all too often people let them have it.

In Pennsylvania, the leader of a local Moms for Liberty chapter allegedly hijacked a dead woman’s Facebook page to harass her enemies, including using the N-word and saying they should hang from a noose. In Arkansas, the head of communications of the Lonoke County chapter said that librarians should be “plowed down with a freaking gun.” In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a member of a local Moms for Liberty chapter harassed an opposing group, threatened to report them for child abuse, and called them “pedophile sympathizers.” In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, police had to be called to a school board meeting after members of Moms for Liberty accused attendees of being “groomers” and wanting to show explicit pictures to children. In Charleston, South Carolina, a Moms for Liberty-affiliated member of the local school board publicly stated he would show up at his son’s teacher’s doorstep with a gun if the teacher came out as transgender.

They’re actually a tiny minority, a widely scattered few, whose only strength lies in their unscrupulous fanaticism. They are our brownshirts. You dare to put a book they don’t like in a library, and they show up at your door with a gun and have a parade of shrieking right-wing assholes marching by your house. The most harmless, mild exhibition of tolerance and open-mindedness will trigger a shit-flinging hateful response.

They don’t even like Judy Blume.

She’s right. Fight back. Except it’s hard — the executors of the repressive policies are usually bland, faceless, cowardly bureaucrats, middle-aged white men sitting on school boards and city councils, masters of being tepid and boring and making excuses to avoid riling up the seething masses of idiots. They will always defend action and inaction by calling upon pitiful pleas to avoid trouble, claiming to be trying to obey the will of the people…where “the people” refers to just those who have bullhorns and guns.

We have to fight back anyway.

Another judge caught with his snout in the trough

Here we go again. Justice John Roberts has been profiting from his position via his wife’s lucrative headhunting.

Jane Roberts was paid more than $10 million by a host of elite law firms, a whistleblower alleges.
At least one of those firms argued a case before Chief Justice Roberts after paying his wife hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Details of Jane Roberts’ work come as Congress struggles to reform the Court’s self-policed ethics.

Here, let’s slather a little more juicy slop into the trough. He refuses to testify about Supreme Court ethics because it might compromise “separation of powers concerns” and “judicial independence.”

Chief Justice John Roberts has notified Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin that he won’t testify at an upcoming hearing on Supreme Court ethics, instead releasing a new statement signed by all nine justices that is meant to provide “clarity” to the public about the high court’s ethics practices.

When will congress learn that you don’t ask the crooks to dictate what the law should be? You tell them.

Two losers having a perfectly normal conversation

Tucker Carlson has been fired, Elon Musk has been exposed as an incompetent twit, so let’s look back at those heady, long-ago (a bit more than a week) times when the two of them would sit down as equals and solemnly discuss the important stuff — like how birth control is destroying civilization.

CARLSON: I mean, the urge to have sex and to procreate is – after breathing and eating – the most basic urge. How has it been subverted?

MUSK: Well, it’s just, in the past we could rely upon, you know, simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate. But once you have birth control and abortions and whatnot, now you can still satisfy limbic instinct, but not procreate.

So we haven’t yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent, the last 50 years or so for birth control. I’m sort of worried that hey, civilization, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization’s going to crumble. The old question of like, will civilization end with a bang or a whimper? Well, it’s currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is depressing as hell.

CARLSON: The most depressing.

MUSK: I mean, seriously, yeah.

CARLSON: War is less depressing.

MUSK: Yeah, I’d rather go out with a bang.

CARLSON: With your shoes on, not with your diaper on.

I’m really curious to know how he thinks we would “evolve” to deal with birth control. We seem to be reproducing just fine, population numbers are generally going up, and voluntarily reducing child birth seems to be a good way to deal with the other “problem,” the radical reduction in infant mortality rates, thanks to modern medicine and hygiene. I would think environmental stressors, gross economic inequities, and the assault on successful institutions, like education and democracy, are going to be a far bigger problem for civilization than the fact that the growth curve is flattening. Maybe what he’s worrying about is more that capitalism is crumbling, not civilization. Those aren’t synonyms for each other, you know.

Also really revolting is the idea that war is less depressing than reproductive freedom. Please, Elon, if you find it so horrible, do “go out with a bang.” The sooner the better.

Hey, maybe Carlson getting fired is how “evolution” is dealing with it, and Musk’s rapid erosion of reputation and wealth is simply Darwin’s invisible hand.

I know what kind of houseplant I want to get this summer

Back in the long gone days of my youth, when I was working long hours as a nurseryman at a wholesale nursery in Kent, Washington, there were certain plants I admired greatly. This place had a small greenhouse just for bonsai that the owners tended carefully just about every day (mere laborers like me couldn’t touch those.) They sold lace maples, which were probably my favorite tree at that time — I bought one for my parents. But by far the most beautiful plants in the whole place were these big, gloriously bushy, vividly green plants raised out back, secretly, by a couple of the workers. These were the healthiest plants I’ve ever seen, lovingly tended by the crew on breaks, initially raised illicitly under the benches in a hothouse and then transplanted to a sunny spot in an empty field.

You can guess what kind of plant they were. Unfortunately, just as they were reaching peak growth, the owner discovered them and took a machete to them.

There will be no machetes in Minnesota this summer!

Minnesota’s foray into legal marijuana reached the first major decision point as the state House considered a bill Monday that establishes a seed-to-sale program and streamlines a process for clearing prior criminal offenses off records.

The vote – along with one set for Friday in the Senate – won’t end the debate. Differences in the two versions would have to be reconciled before anything reaches Gov. Tim Walz, who supports permitting adults over 21 to buy, possess and use cannabis.

But if a bill passes before May 22, Minnesota’s marijuana landscape would change starting this summer.

“Cannabis will be no longer illegal this summer,” said the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Zack Stephenson, DFL-Coon Rapids. “The regulation, rulemaking and licensing process will take many more months. Beyond that you will of course also be able to home grow starting this summer so it will be a while before Minnesotans can expect to see a dispensary open up.”

I should mention my least favorite plant: kinnikinik. They had acres of that potted stuff that I had to shuffle around and weed and load on trucks — it’s a popular, low growing ground cover that may have been the bread and butter of the nursery, but I just found it boring.

Tucker Carlson is OUT

Well, I’m surprised. As an aftershock of the Dominion lawsuit and the embarrassment of Fox News, Tucker Carlson is out on his ass.

In a shocking announcement, Fox News announced Monday that its controversial yet top-rated prime-time host Tucker Carlson is leaving the network.

“Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” the network said in a statement. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”

The apparently hasty parting — Carlson gave no indication he was leaving in his last nightly appearance Friday, and the network was still running promos for his show Monday morning — came less than a week after Fox settled a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, which had sued the network for false claims about the 2020 election. Carlson was among several on-air personalities expected to testify.

You might be wondering…was it because of his racism? Because of his lies? Because of his lack of qualifications? No, of course not. Those things are prerequisites for working at Fox News.

It was because he told the truth and chewed out Fox management for promoting lies about the election.

But it was Carlson’s comments about Fox management, as revealed in the Dominion case, that played a role in his departure from Fox, a person familiar with the company’s thinking told The Post.

“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson wrote to a colleague in a message a day after Fox, like other media outlets, called the election for Joe Biden. It was a sentiment echoed by others at Fox in the fall of 2020, as even network officials who disbelieved Trump’s election-fraud conspiracy theories fretted that countering them strongly would alienate their conservative viewers.

In another message, Carlson referred to management with an expletive: “Those f—–s are destroying our credibility.” He later wrote: “A combination of incompetent liberals and top leadership with too much pride to back down is what’s happening.”

This termination is sending a message to all the other “journalists” at Fox News: you can lie all you want, be as biased as you want, as long as you are supporting the particular lies and bigotry of Rupert Murdoch and other executives.

It must be scary being a highly paid apparatchik at a propaganda organ, but he’ll get no sympathy for me. Maybe he can land a new job with a North Korean news agency?

What are we going to do about Missouri?

For one thing, we have to deal with the rise of Missouri Man, rival to the ubiquitous Florida Man.

On April 18, Republic Police Department officers were called to a Price Cutter to respond to a call about a robbery in which a man held an employee at gunpoint so that he would be served meat.

Larry Gene Gay, 70, of Springfield, is charged with one felony count of unlawful use of a weapon and a felony count of armed criminal action.

Court documents show that officers responded to the scene and ordered Gay to get out of his truck so they could arrest him. After he was taken into custody, an officer removed a loaded semi-automatic pistol with a bullet in the chamber from Gay’s hip holster.

In an interview, Gay said he went to Price Cutter to buy steaks. He told the “good man” who was helping him that they needed to weigh the steaks. However, the meat department was closed. Gay said at that point, he showed his gun “Just to say I’m not stealing. I need you here to help me to get a couple of these steaks. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The officer asked Gay why he thought the people in the store called police and told them he was threatening them with his gun.

“I don’t know,” Gay said in the interview. “I have no idea.”

Hand stupid people a gun, and at some point they’re going to use it to deal with some minor inconvenience. Missouri has a lot of guns, and a lot of stupid people, it’s an inevitable problem. But we could wave that away, it’s a problem with a few individuals, I’ve met a lot of good people in Missouri, and we can’t blame the whole state.

Here’s wider problem, though. Missouri is run by a gang of regressive Republicans who have been passing all kinds of ugly laws. They hate transgender kids, you know, and want to deny them good healthcare. The state Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, set up a ‘snitch line’ where random concerned citizens could submit their complaints about those danged transes and their wicked doctors who poison them all with estrogen and testosterone. It’s not clear what Bailey was going to do with those complaints…arrest everyone who was androgynous? Send out genital inspectors to check the accused? It was the usual preliminaries, I suspect, where the fascist builds a list in anticipation of the day he can send out the brownshirts.

It didn’t go as well as he’d hoped.

Bailey said his office set up the tip line for parents to submit concerns about the gender-affirming care their children received from transgender youth centers. He also issued an emergency rule severely restricting access to gender-affirming care.

PROMO, a Missouri LGBTQ advocacy organization, said Bailey “fanned the flames of hate” in issuing the emergency rule.

“The Attorney General’s claims are maliciously cherry-picked and come from unverified sources that allow him to promulgate disgusting, obstructive, and misleading information into an emergency rule,” PROMO said in a statement. “It should be clear to anyone paying attention that the real threat to Missourians is the attorney general himself.”

Social media users on TikTok, Twitter and Tumblr ensured that Bailey’s office would have plenty of evidence to sift through for the investigation, flooding the site with fake complaints and other ephemera.

When the online form first launched, it lacked a CAPTCHA, which savvy Twitter users quickly used to their advantage by using bots to spam the site. Users also employed a generator to churn out fake names and fake Missouri addresses. Others just dumped text into the complaint form, ranging from the entire script of the “Bee Movie,” to Billy May’s OxiClean sales pitch, to Walter White’s introductory monologue in “Breaking Bad.” TikTok users said they submitted the “most raunchiest fanfic from AO3” and “a saucy love story of Mario and Luigi.”

Love wins in the end, right?

But here’s my dilemma. I’m a regular tourist visiting Missouri — I go for Skepticon every summer. The question I wrestle with is…should I refuse to go again, and not contribute my travel dollars to a fascist, theocratic state? Or should I go, and contribute my travel dollars to the good kinds of Missourians who support a liberal skeptical conference? I’ve got time to resolve this internal debate since the organizers haven’t even announced a date for the event.

They could fix my problem for me by moving the whole Skepticon show north, to a progressive state (not Iowa), but that leaves the good Missourians in the lurch. I dislike these kinds of decisions. My problem would go away if Missouri would just throw the rascals out, but that isn’t going to happen this year, or maybe even in years to come.

Republicans ignore the principles of a good education — clearly, they never had one

Every time they try to hide an ugly fact of history, they look worse — they’re just compounding the problem. We’re seeing this mistake in Florida and Texas and Tennessee, where Republican legislatures cobble up laws to silence teachers and prevent them from mentioning the ghastly evils that previous legislatures have executed. It’s not going to work. It just means that the next generation is going to be confronted with the fact of American slavery, for example, and the fact that America tried to hush it up in the 2020s. Tennessee has been eager to join in the shameful displays of cowardice.

Last year, Tennessee passed one of those cookie-cutter rightwing bills banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” in higher education — the very same sort of hogwash that’s currently under a court injunction in Florida. The law, SB 623 prohibited teaching a whole bunch of very bad ideas, like the concept that “One race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex” or the always fun “An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex” — so you can’t read about Ruby Bridges, you. The bill also prohibited “penalizing” students for not endorsing the concepts, because we all know how professors like to demand that students recite from the Maoist catechism.

(Do follow that link to the Ruby Bridges story. There is a woman in Florida named Emily Conklin who is going to be on the poster about the wicked perpetrators of bigotry, her picture right next to the Ku Klux Klan, the Southern Democrats of the 1960s, and Steve King of Iowa.)

You can tell these congressvermin know nothing about how education works — they’re of the God’s Not Dead school of projection, where they think their authoritarian vision of how to teach by law enforcement is the way we must work. For example, my genetics students have been given a bunch of papers on racist and sexist misconceptions in genetics that they’ll be summarizing in class this week…and I’ve explicitly told them that they can disagree with the papers without penalty. I can’t imagine standing up in a class and dictating how they must interpret the science. That’s not how any of this works, this is an exercise in learning how to think for themselves about the evidence.

Does that make me one of those red professors? There’s no way you can compel me to wear a bowtie.