Another grand post on Mock Paper Scissors by Tengrain. Plus the commenters are always witty and spot on. If you don’t follow the site, I recommend you explore it, you will be happily surprised at the diversity of content and tone displayed. Hugs
Thanks to Ali for the link. This is important information that in red states run by republicans it is illegal to teach to kids. In Florida, even 18-year-old seniors in high school and higher education college kids are too sensitive and delicate to learn that not all heroes are cis straight people. After all the important people in history were a cis straight people and it is important to never mention the LGBTQ+ people at all or people might think they were normal and great. Hugs
“Baron Von Steuben” was responsible for whipping the the U.S. military into shape when things were looking bleakest
I followed the link to this article from Ten Bears post. This is a serious plan from the republican right wingers to weaponize the government against their enemies just like the Jim Jordan / Matt Gaetz / Boebert types keep screaming that the left is doing. The difference is Biden is keeping hands off of the DOJ, letting justice be the rule of law. Instead the right has the plans below to target and attack those who have different opinions while allowing themselves to break the laws at will. Hugs
The thrice-indicted former president and his allies have long been drawing plans to undo Smith’s investigations, as well as to punish everyone involved
A man with a plan [that’s deeply corrosive to the rule of law] JEFF SWENSEN/GETTY IMAGES
DONALD TRUMP IS a long, long way from winning the GOP primary, let alone retaking the White House. But he always has revenge on his mind, and his allies are preparing to use a future administration to not only undo all of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s work — but to take vengeance on Smith, and on virtually everyone else, who dared investigate Trump during his time out of power.
Rosters full of MAGAfied lawyers are being assembled. Plans are being laid for an entire new office of the Justice Department dedicated to “election integrity.” An assembly line is being prepared of revenge-focused “special counsels” and “special prosecutors.” Gameplans for making Smith’s life hell, starting in Jan. 2025, have already been discussed with Trump himself. And a fresh wave of pardons is under consideration for Trump associates, election deniers, and — the former president boasts — for Jan. 6 rioters.
The preparations have been underway since at least last year, with Trump being briefed on the designs by an array of attorneys, political and policy advisers, former administration officials, and other allies. The aim is to build a government-in-waiting with the hard-right infrastructure needed to turn the Justice Department into an instrument of Trump’s agenda, according to five sources familiar with these matters and another two people briefed on them.
Trump’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
One idea that has caught thrice-indicted former president’s attention in recent months is the creation of the so-called “Office of Election Integrity,” which would be a new unit inside the Justice Department. It would be tasked not only with relitigating Trump’s lies about his 2020 election loss, but also with aggressively pursuing baseless allegations of election “fraud” (including in Democratic strongholds) in ways that Trumpist partisans believe the department has only flirted with in the past.
This idea was recently pitched to Trump by a longtime Republican activist and an attorney who’s known the ex-president for years, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. (Republican officials have also begun voicing their own support for state-level offices of election integrity. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made the proposal a reality in his state. Officials in Tennessee, Missouri, and Wisconsin have proposed the offices, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, proposed a similarly named office.)
And when it comes to Special Counsel Smith’s office — which just handed Trump his third indictment, this one related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election — the former president and his fellow travelers already know what they want: They want the FBI and DOJ to name names.
This year, close advisers to Trump have begun the process of assembling lists of the names of federal personnel who have investigated the former president and his circle for years, and are attempting to unmask the identities of all the DOJ attorneys and others connected to Smith’s office. The obvious purpose of this, according to one source close to Trump, is to “show them the door on Day 1 [if Trump’s reelected]” — and so “we know who should receive a subpoena” in the future.
Such subpoenas would of course be instrumental in Trumpland’s vows to its voters that, should he return to power, Trump and his new attorney general will launch a raft of their own retaliatory “special counsel” and “special prosecutor” probes to investigate-the-investigator, and to go after their key enemies. As it were, Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official and a central figure in Trump’s efforts to subvert the legitimate 2020 presidential election results, has been on Trump’s informal shortlist for plum assignments, including even attorney general, in a potential second administration.
Sources familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone that Trump and his close ideological allies — working at an assortment of MAGA-prone think tanks, advocacy organizations, and legal groups — are formulating plans for a wide slate of “special prosecutors.” In this vision, such prosecutors would go after the usual targets: Smith, Smith’s team, President Joe Biden, Biden’s family, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray. But they’d also go after smaller targets, from members of the Biden 2020 campaign to more obscure government offices.
“There are almost too many targets to keep track of,” says one Trump adviser familiar with the discussions. Trump and members of his inner orbit have already outlined possible legal strategies, examining specific federal statutes they could wield in a Republican-controlled Justice Department to go after Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who delivered Trump’s first indictment of this year.
The FBI’s investigation of over a thousand rioters who breached and trashed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — officially the largest criminal investigation in Justice Department history — is another area where Trump has stated he would like to reverse course. “I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control,” Trump told host Kaitlan Collins during a CNN town hall in May.
When the broader topic of possible second-term pardons has come up behind closed doors, Trump has at times said that such pardons should be signed at the start of the term, not saved for the later on, according to those who’ve heard him discuss it since last year. Aside from the rioters themselves, Trump has also privately floated issuing a wave of pardons to higher-ranking figures who were scrutinized in Special Counsel Smith’s two main investigations.
“This would be like hitting the delete-key on all of DOJ’s work on these investigations,” a person intimately familiar with the conversations toldRolling Stone in March. In the past several months, when confidants have quipped to Trump that he may have to “pardon yourself,” should he return to the Oval Office, the ex-president has sometimes simply smirked and replied that they’ll have to wait and see.
Another major focus of some of these counter-probes would be “grand jury violations,” says one person familiar with the matter. The counter-probe of those alleged “violations” is the surest sign yet that in a second Trump administration, the Justice Department would seek to investigate the special counsel’s use of grand juries in the Mar-a-Lago and January 6 cases. (Indeed, Trump has already vowed to sic a special counsel on President Biden if he beats him in 2024.)
Some of these “special prosecutors” wouldn’t even be based out of the Justice Department, as special counsels typically are. In some of these private Trumpworld legal plans, some of the “special counsels” would be based out of places like the White House. This idea is nearly identical to the controversial position that Trumpist lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell tried to convince then-President Trump to give her in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Some lawyers and operatives close to Trump have pitched themselves for these kinds of roles, telling either Trump or some of his closest advisers that they’d be more than happy to take the gig in Trump’s possible return to power in 2025.
And along with having dreams of sweeping retribution and purges, the upper ranks of Trumpworld have spent years putting together projects to vet and prepare a new generation of appointments — for “special prosecutor” posts, as well as much else — and administrative talent.
In this informal vetting for Justice Department candidates, former senior Trump aides and well-connected activists have sought lawyers with a track record of loathing DOJ, particularly what they deem its supposedly “liberal,” “left-wing,” or “Marxist” elements. Between these different Trump allies, different private spreadsheets have been created in recent years, some laying out dozens of possible contenders, while some include upwards of a hundred names, sources with direct knowledge of the situation say. Former top Trump White House policy adviser Stephen Miller and other key Trump diehards have contributed names to several of these lists.
Rolling Stone has reviewed one of these internal spreadsheets that has circulated among Trump lieutenants, and the roster is heavy on individuals connected to America First Legal, the Center for Renewing America, and other Trump-backing entities.
Prominent allies of the former president are open about plans to tie the Justice Department more tightly to the White House.
“I recall talking to a senior official in the Trump administration, who said after all of [these investigations] are over, we’ve got to think of a way to bring the Justice Department back into the government,” says Tom Fitton, president of the conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch and a close ally of the former president.
The Justice Department has typically enjoyed a degree of insulation from White House control, a norm aimed at avoiding the politicization of prosecution. But Fitton argues that the department should be more “responsive” to a president’s priorities, a belief that Trump and various influential conservatives embrace enthusiastically. “Is the Justice Department going to operate as an entity outside the White House as opposed to an entity that’s controlled by the president, as the Constitution requires?” he says.
Putting it another way: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russ Vought, a former top Trump official who heads the Center for Renewing America, toldThe New York Times in a story published last month.
“I think there’s an argument that what the Justice Department’s doing to Trump now is criminal,” Fitton tells Rolling Stone, suggesting — of course — that a future administration should launch an investigation into Special Counsel Smith’s work.
Fitton also says the department should revisit Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the FBI probe of the Trump campaign in 2016. Durham, he argues, was a “failure” and acted only as “a glorified inspector general.”
Once, Special Counsel Durham was supposed to be Trumpworld’s savior, someone who Trump, his allies on Capitol Hill, and large swaths of conservative media were counting on to expose and imprison “Deep State” foes. But when the Durham probe ended earlier this year with lackluster results for a vengeance-hungry GOP, he became much less a hero and more a cautionary tale to the right.
As one conservative lawyer who has discussed “special prosecutor” ideas with Trump in recent months tells Rolling Stone, the guiding principle of this project is simple: “No more John Durham’s — never again.”
Carusone: “It’s one of the few weeks we’ve had in a while where there’s almost uniformity. Whether it’s Fox News, or talk radio, or Alex Jones, they’re all saying the same thing.”
**if the video doesn’t show please visit the site to watch it, Thanks. Hugs **
CitationFrom the August 5, 2023, edition of MSNBC’s American Voices With Alicia Menendez
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): With me now, Angelo Carusone. He is the president of Media Matters. Angelo, if you watch right-wing media, if that is what you consume in any form, what is it that you believe happened this past week?
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT & CEO, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): You believe that the deep state, which the — not just the extremists on the right, but the mainstream Republicans now believe that, that this was sort of the next step in their plan to persecute Donald Trump. And not just Donald Trump, but then that they would then come after you next. That’s what you believe. It doesn’t matter what part of right-wing media you watch. It’s one of the few weeks we’ve had in a while where there’s almost uniformity. Whether it’s Fox News, or talk radio, or Alex Jones, they’re all saying the same thing. And that’s what you believe. You believe this was just another step in a big plot to come at you.
…
MENENDEZ: OK, so I’m so sorry to ask our viewers to watch that. But I think it is important because what you see at the end there is this mainstreaming of the idea of retribution.
CARUSONE: That’s it, revenge. And that’s sort of the fuel that’s here.
…
Because that wasn’t just Jesse Watters at Fox News, that was a very big narrative all across the right-wing echo chamber, was that this is it, this is why you have to get out there and vote. Because Donald Trump is going to be your mechanism for revenge against all of these people. And so, and that I think is a really powerful motivator. So, they’re not just spinning all these lies and conspiracies. You heard about the damage of disinformation. They’re also giving people a call to action. And the call to action isn’t immediately violence, but they are priming that pump as an ends justify the means.
…
So you put that poison into the system, and let’s not forget they have a delivery mechanism. It’s not just the right-wing media. They have all these QAnon figures and all these individuals that are spreading these ideas by word of mouth. They’re just putting the poison into the system, and one by one plucking off the individuals on the margin because there are no antibodies in the system against this type of misinformation, this type of disinformation. And the process that led up to January 6 is playing out very similarly right now in the right-wing media. I’m not trying to be alarmist about it, but this is just a reflection of what we’re seeing every single day.
The article link is from Ali, thank you Ali. The court ruling was all about racism, returning the more affluent whites back to the preferential position while denying underprivileged people of color a higher education. The end result is classes of mostly or all white people going on to lead businesses or large law firms leading to political power and people of color being regulated to lower income labor servitude jobs. The 1950s all over again. It is an attempt by racists to make a white power nation continue. Hugs
The right-wing activist behind SCOTUS’ Affirmative Action decision is now attacking a venture capital fund that supports Black women-owned small businesses.
ATLANTA, GA – APRIL 07: (L-R) Tobey R. Sanders, actress Keisha Knight Pulliam, and Arian Simone attend the “Festival of Laughs” tour at Philips Arena on April 7, 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia.
On Wednesday, the nonprofit American Alliance for Equal Rights filed a lawsuit against an Atlanta-based venture capital fund that supports Black women and other minority-owned small businesses. The nonprofit was founded by none other than right-wing crusader Edward Blum, who has made it his mission to destroy affirmative action.
The lawsuit filed against the Fearless Fund alleges that the fund is “operating a racially-discriminatory program” in violation of the Civil Rights Act. The Fearless Fund was founded by three Black women — executive Ayana Parsons, actress Keshia Knight Pulliam, and entrepreneur Arian Simone.
As their website notes, less than 2.2.% of all Venture Capital funding goes towards women-founded businesses, and less than 1% of total funding goes towards businesses founded by women of color. And yet, for some reason, folks like Blum are convinced this number should be even lower.
It’s worth noting that Blum and his team are clearly riding high from Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. In fact, they cite it at the top of their lawsuit.
Even before this lawsuit, conservatives were looking for ways to weaponize the Supreme Court’s decision in the workplace. In July, 13 Republican attorneys general wrote a letter demanding that Fortune 100 companies stop their affirmative action programs.
Amalea Smirniotopoulos, NAACP Legal Defense Fund Senior Policy Counsel, says that these Republican attorneys general are trying to make the Supreme Court’s affirmative decision about something it’s not.
“This was another attempt to chill completely lawful efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion by corporations,” says Smirniotopoulos. “By really trying to stretch the meaning of the decision in the Harvard and UNC cases and frankly by also restating things that have always been true about discrimination law and employment.”
“This letter is a scare tactic,” says University of New Mexico Constitutional and Employment Law Professor Vinay Harpalani. “And unfortunately, it’s a pretty good one.”
Although the Supreme Court decision didn’t touch on hiring practices, Harpalani says that conservatives will certainly try to use it as a basis for challenging race in employment. “The law, as it is now, allows affirmative action in employment,” says Harpalani. “But if the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, I’m not at all confident that they would continue to allow it.”
The immediate threat is that companies begin to back-away from DEI programs, said Justin Hansford, Executive Director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University.
“Some of these companies weren’t really doing that much anyway… and what they were doing was done only under pressure,” says Hansford. “This could be an excuse for some companies that already didn’t want to push the envelope on diversity to start walking things back.”
As for the lawsuit against Fearless Fund, an obvious concern is that it could scare off investors who might otherwise want to similarly invest in women of color. However, it’s still too soon to say (especially in this climate) whether the case has legs.
Well said / written. It lays bare the hypocrisy of those desperately trying to create some kind of equality and outrage between the very real attempt to overturn a valid election along with other crimes done by trump with a rarely ever charged crime of failure to fully pay taxes which was paid after and a firearms form that is never prosecuted. All to protect Mr. trump while trying to smear President Biden using his son. Hugs
Tonight, a judge ruled in favor of the 15 women who sued Texas after the state’s abortion ban put their health and lives at risk. Travis County District Judge Jessica Mangrum issued a temporary injunction that will stop the law from being enforced against doctors who provide abortions using “good faith judgement” that a pregnancy is unsafe for the pregnant person, or that a fetus is unlikely to survive.
Texas will definitely appeal; but for now, people in the state with dangerous or doomed pregnancies should be able to get care.
I am so grateful for the women who laid their pain bear in public for the chance to change this law just a little—but so distressed that they had to fight so hard to be given this bare minimum of humanity. It makes me feel a bit ill, to be honest, that these are the kinds of ‘wins’ we have to hope for.
The lawsuit, brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights, required women to relive the horrors they were forced to endure because of the state’s abortion ban. One woman, Samantha Casiano—who was forced to give birth despite the fact that her baby had anencephaly and was missing parts of her brain and skull—ended up vomiting while recounting her experience. She said that talking about what happened “just makes my body remember and it just reacts.”
Lawyers defending the state, meanwhile, were extraordinarily cruel. One attorney said, “Plaintiffs simply do not like Texas’ restrictions on abortion.” Another not only frequently interrupted as the women spoke about their experiences, she also asked each one individually if Attorney General Ken Paxton had personally denied them an abortion. Plaintiff Amanda Zurawski, who nearly died after being denied an abortion, said, “I survived sepsis and I don’t think today was much less traumatic than that.”
There is a reason Texas tried to stop these women from telling their stories: there is no arguing with their experiences, no turning away from the horror these laws have caused. As happy as I am for the people in Texas who might be able to get the care they need as a result of this decision, I keep thinking about Terry—the young woman I spoke to in June—and how this ruling came too late to help her:
An American Nightmare: Young, pregnant & living in Texas
Critics condemn superintendent Mike Miles’s ‘new education system’ that removes students’ access to books
The state is to take over the district next year due to poor academic performance. Photograph: Francois Picard/AFP/Getty Images
The largest school district in Texas announced its libraries will be eliminated and replaced with discipline centers in the new school year.
Houston independent school district announced earlier this summer that librarian and media-specialist positions in 28 schools will be eliminated as part of superintendent Mike Miles’s “new education system” initiative.
Teachers at these schools will soon have the option to send misbehaving students to these discipline centers, or “team centers’” – designated areas where they will continue to learn remotely.
News of the library removals comes after the state announced it would be taking over the district, effective in the 2023-24 school year, due to poor academic performance. Miles was appointed by the the Texas Education Agency in June.
In a press release announcing the schools participating in the “new education system” program, Miles said: “I am overwhelmingly proud that this many HISD school leaders are ready to take bold action to improve outcomes for all students and eradicate the persistent achievement and opportunity gaps in our district.”
Lisa Robinson, a librarian retired from the school district, told local news outlet KPRC2 that her “heart is just broken for these children that are in the [NES] schools that are losing their librarians”.
Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, condemned the district’s move and said the solution to the problem of behavioral conduct was not to revoke access to books, especially in these underserved communities.
He said: “Are there students who need additional support? Yes, and I am 100% supportive of that. But it’s not an eithe/or. You don’t close the libraries, remove the librarians, and simply have the books on the shelf. What about all the other students? What are you saying to them?”
He added: “With all due respect to the superintendent, I grew up in this city. I still live in the same neighborhood that exists. I am the mayor of this city, and I am the mayor of every person who lives in the city of Houston.”
He urged schools to open up libraries to avoid creating a two-tier system within the district, as well as providing additional support to students who need it.
The Houston independent school district did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Houston, Texas’ school district is now eliminating librarians and replacing school libraries with “discipline centers” after Texas Republicans forcibly took over the district using state power.
This is the school to prison pipeline. They’re teaching the undesirable kids, ie black and brown inner city teens, that the only future in front of them is a prison sentence.
These motherfuckers aren’t even trying to hide their education-hating bastardy anymore.
I used to practically LIVE in my school’s libraries. They were my sanctuary and my escape.
And now they want to turn them into little day prisons inside their bigger day prisons for children being prepped only for lives of manual labor and poverty.
Same. My neighbourhood library just a few blocks away was my sanctuary. I knew all the librarians and they knew me. I grew up there. I knew all of their names and they knew to leave me alone to find what I was searching for. Art, history, and even sex books as I got older. They were better for me than catholic school or even my parents. Best of all was that none of the other neighbourhood kids or my family, other than my mom, ever went there. She was the person who taught me to love reading and research.
I used to love to walk to the public library when I was in grade school. I loved books about space and about science fiction. I would check out and read as many books as I could on a regular basis. The school library didn’t have as many books. But I liked the libraries in high school and college, and in graduate school as well. One summer when I was in graduate school for an MSW, I drove to the Institute for Sex Research to do a week of independent study of transvestism, and what was then called transsexualism. While there I met Alan Bell, and we discussed some of the latest theories on the origins of homosexuality.
This is terrible for all kids but especially those from low income families. It’s not just about access to books, but also to the internet, computers and other media and technology that many couldn’t afford otherwise. Books are great but only one part of what modern libraries do. And lack of access makes it impossible for them to get themselves to the kind of opportunities their talents might take them.
I’m betting that if Houston actually gets to do this the discipline centers will be 99% Latino, black, gay, poor and ESL students. Right after this Texas will try to legalize slavery, again. Florida will be riding Texas’s coat tails and then the rest of the shit-hole states.
They are going to learn remotely? I recall the MAGA cult hyperventilating over remote learning when it was the emergency option to use in a life threatening pandemic. They said it was an infringement on their freedoms. But now it’s okay to do remote learning when the students being harmed are kids they don’t like.
Yes because anything to defend white people holding black people as property and what the white people did to them. Don’t mention the bad thing, the rapes, humiliations, the being told what, when, where you were allowed to do anything including pee (sounds like how Amazon treats workers only without them being able to say no or go home) how and when they could eat, basically a white person had complete control over those black people and their bodies. Let’s obscure and fudge that anyway possible, even making up that white Irish people were also chattel slaves. That is a complete lie. But the people that wanted to push it built a whole mythology around the idea. Just like the anti-trans people have done with every mythical idea they can to try to discredit the idea of a person identifying as the gender not assigned at birth by a visual inspection of the genitals. What is it with these type people that they cannot simply accept the truth, the history, the science? Why is it so damn important for the to deny all of the science and history to protect their feelings or their views of the world? Hugs
Ron Peri, a member of the Board of Supervisors for the Reedy Creek Improvement District, listens during a monthly meeting on June 21, 2023 in Reedy Creek, Florida.
An appointee by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to an oversight board of Disney’s special tax district taught a seminar in 2021 falsely claiming “Whites were also slaves in America,” using discredited research to say there was an “Irish slave trade.”
The comments were made by Ron Peri, one of five people DeSantis appointed earlier this year to oversee the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District to replace the old board after the company spoke out against what critics dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida.
Peri, an Orlando-based pastor and CEO of a Christian ministry group called The Gathering, made the comments in an hourlong class for his group posted on YouTube about critical race theory called “Cunningly Devised Fables.”
In other comments Peri spread false claims that Irish slaves were forcibly bred with enslaved Africans. He also said a “significant” number of free Blacks in the antebellum era owned slaves, claims disputed by reputable historians who say the number was minimal. CNN archived Peri’s comments from 2021, which he deleted from YouTube following his appointment to the Disney oversight board.
The oversight board, previously called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, governed Disney’s sprawling 25,000 acre footprint around Orlando. Created in 1967, its duties include providing services like sewage, fire rescue and road maintenance and issuing debt for infrastructure projects supporting Disney’s theme park empire.
“Slavery is a moral wrong wherever it exists or existed and is one of America’s great historical wrongs,” Peri told CNN in a statement Tuesday. “Similarly, racism is likewise wrong. I countenance neither to any degree, so the criticism of the belief that thousands of people being held in slavery was significant and a terrible wrong is severely misplaced. Even one person in slavery is egregious and morally reprehensible, regardless of race.”
The DeSantis administration but did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Peri’s 2021 comments came in the context of him pushing back on claims of “systemic racism” in the United States from past White ownership of slaves.
“Look at old newspapers, as old as you can find, and you’ll find that Whites were also slaves in America,” said Peri. “The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the new world. His proclamation of 1625, which you can go back and see, required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.”
“By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat,” Peri added. “From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English, and another 300,000 were sold as slaves.”
“The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion,” Peri added.
Peri’s claims are based on fabricated material that has circled the Internet over the last two decades and has been the subject of repeated debunkings from news organizations like the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, Snopes, and frustrated historians – many of whom signed an open letter in 2016 disputing the claims.
Even the article Peri cited as evidence was updated before he used it in the seminar to note it contained a number of factual errors.
Historians who spoke to CNN said that the research Peri cited is ahistorical and based on invented research: Whites were never considered slaves in America, legally or socially; 300,000 Irish were not sent as slaves to the Americas; English King James II – who Peri cited as issuing the proclamation in 1625 – was not born until 1633 and did not take the throne until 1685. Even then, no proclamations by King James II on Irish slaves exist. The Irish did not “breed” with African slaves, as Peri claimed.
Irish immigrants in North America and the Caribbean were never considered slaves but were indentured servants, said Matthew Reilly, a professor of anthropology at City College of New York.
Indentured servitude consisted of a fixed period of time, usually five to seven years, and was not inheritable. Whereas the race-based chattel form of slavery kept enslaved people as property for life and children would inherit their mother’s status.
“The conditions may have been like that of slavery, but socio-legally, it was a very different form of unfreedom,” said Reilly.
In another comment, Peri used data attributed to the 1830 census to say the numbers showed a “significant” and “large number” of free Blacks owned slaves. However, the 1830 census data cited by scholars show that out of 2,009,043 slaves in the United States, 3,776 free Blacks owned 12,907 slaves – 0.006%.
“The justification that they have for it is they claim that systemic racism emanates from White ownership of slaves,” Peri said. “Therefore, all White wealth is based on the hard work and abuse of Black slaves and women. That’s their justification. Well, the reality is all races owned slaves.”
“A significant number of these free Blacks were the owners of slaves,” Peri added.
Historians, like esteemed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have noted that a large number of those Black slave owners “owned” their own family members to protect them – oftentimes by purchasing a family member. And that pointing to other races owning slaves is a way to minimize the brutal realities of slavery.
“The vast majority, the overwhelming majority – to the tune of millions of people who were brought from West and West Central Africa to the Americas – they were enslaved. Not people who were perpetrating slavery themselves,” Jenny Shaw, a professor of history at the University of Alabama, told CNN. “There’s a small number who did because they rose up in society and did what society was doing, which was enslaving people.” And that some people of African descent enslaved people because they were family members bringing them into their households with the intent of freeing them.
Peri’s appointment to the Disney oversight board followed a clash between the company and DeSantis over a state law that would restrict certain classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity. While Disney first declined to weigh in publicly on the legislative fight over what critics called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, then CEO Bob Chapek, under immense pressure from the company’s employees, later changed directions, and shared his concerns with the legislation. Later, after it became law, the company in a statement said it would work to get it repealed.
However, Peri has also accused Disney in the past of adopting teachings of critical race theory in its company training. The comments touched on another top concern of DeSantis, who sought to ban employers from training workers about privilege and systemic racism when he signed the Stop Woke Act, parts of which were blocked by a federal judge from going into effect.
“We’re seeing companies embracing CRT,” Peri said in his Zoom. “I’m gonna just share two – Walt Disney you’re quite familiar with. You know, down here in Orlando.”
DeSantis has faced backlash in recent days over Florida’s board of education approving controversial new standards for teaching Black history in the state, which includes teaching “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” DeSantis has defended the state’s curriculum.
Peri previously faced scrutiny after CNN’s KFile uncovered that the Orlando pastor had suggested tap water turned people gay. Peri disputed that he made the remark during a May 1 Central Florida Tourism Oversight District board meeting, saying from the dais, “I never said that. I don’t believe it, certainly.”
The latest revelations about Peri’s beliefs come as DeSantis’ conflict with Disney is embroiled in dueling legal challenges. Peri is named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by Disney, which alleges that the Florida governor has punished the company for exercising its First Amendment rights while describing his hand-picked board as a pawn in his “retribution campaign” against the entertainment giant.
In its complaint, filed in the United States Circuit Court for the Northern District of Florida, Disney alleged DeSantis picked board members who would “censor Disney’s speech and discipline the Company” and that DeSantis’ action against the company “threatens Disney’s business operations, jeopardizes its economic future in the region, and violates its constitutional rights.”
Peri, meanwhile, voted with the rest of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District board to sue Disney in state court. In the past week, a Central Florida judge rejected Disney’s request to dismiss the state lawsuit. In the federal case, lawyers for DeSantis have asked the court to delay a trial until after the presidential election while Disney attorneys suggested a timeline that would put the case before jurors next July.
The board installed by DeSantis has said much of its power was stripped by Disney in an agreement reached before the governor’s appointees took over in February.
Since then, DeSantis and the board have focused on clawing back authority while threatening to develop the land around Disney – including by building a prison or a competing theme park next to Disney World.
Scottie's Playtime 