So turns out all the reporting confused me. The shooter is in fact an AFAB trans man. So perhaps specter was respecting their identity?
Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
- Start date
It's just that this isn't in fact bucking the trend of mass shooters being men is all.
Exactly.
VOA Special Report | History of mass shooters
Who commits public mass shootings? What motivates them to kill? With the help of a landmark database, VOA examines the social, psychological, emotional and environmental factors that contributed to these rare crimes.projects.voanews.com
SCIENCE.
Yes. I'm tired of seeing autistic kids get sold this snake oil, that because they don't adhere to some rigid idea of what it means to be male that they are actually female.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
- 1,594
- 1,557
- 118
- Country
- Switzerland
- Gender
- The boring one
And there I was, wondering why this discussion was in the funny anti-woke thread. 
You know what happens far, far, far, far, far more often than that?
Kids are sold another snake oil: the idea that because they happen to fit a certain morphological category, they therefore must also fit the gender category we associate with it.
Trans allies/ advocates telling kids what gender they must be is exceptionally rare. Much more often, the allies/advocates encourage kids to figure out their own identities, and the anti-Trans brigade are the ones telling the kids they must be a certain one.
So is this bucking the trend or do you consider this AFAB trans man to be a man?
Oof! Jesus Christ! I always knew something was there with Specter Von Baren, but this is just icky dude. What the fuck!?
It's been made a lot more acceptable to be fully mask off about this shit
Also, why is it always autism that's used by stupid people to spread nonsense? Vaccines cause autism, autistic kids are forced to be trans. How about you stop acting like you know what the fuck autism even is, you dipshits.
Regarding the transgender community the mask has never been on. But now that that community is starting to ask for human rights, those (in power) who have always considered them sub human are crying 'how dare they' and the expected 'think of the children'. Now the autistic children, I guess, as if conservatives have ever given a c*nt hair about that group.
These fucking elite insidious kunts working so hard to make all our lives fucking worse and there's literally nothing we can do about it, there's no accountability, no recourse absolutely fucking nothing. They got too much money, too much ownership of infrastructure, property and media, how the fuck can anyone have any hope left? We're fucked, totally completely fucking fucked and all anyone's been trained to be worried about is ppl doing genders. Fuck this, fuck everything, there's nothing left to do except to try and calm the last pointless few years/days with a heavy drug addiction. And fuck anyone who tries to judge or stop me.EXCLUSIVE
Activist group led by Ginni Thomas received nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations
Funding for group that battled ‘cultural Marxism’ was channeled through right-wing think tank, Post investigation finds
Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, on Capitol Hill in September during a break from meetings with investigators on the House committee examining the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
A little-known conservative activist group led by Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, collected nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations to wage a cultural battle against the left over three years, a Washington Post investigation found.
The previously unreported donations to the fledgling group Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty were channeled through a right-wing think tank in Washington that agreed to serve as a funding conduit from 2019 until the start of last year, according to documents and interviews. The arrangement, known as a “fiscal sponsorship,” effectively shielded from public view details about Crowdsourcers’ activities and spending, information it would have had to disclose publicly if it operated as a separate nonprofit organization, experts said.
The Post’s investigation sheds new light on the role money from donors who are not publicly identified has played in supporting Ginni Thomas’s political advocacy, long a source of controversy. The funding is the first example of anonymous donors backing her activism since she founded a conservative charity more than a decade ago. She stepped away from that charity amid concerns that it created potential conflicts for her husband on hot-button issues before the court.
Thomas’s activism has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices. She has allied with numerous people and groups that have interests before the court, and she has dedicated herself to causes involving some of the most polarizing issues in the country.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows walks to board Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House in July 2020. Later that year, Ginni Thomas privately pressed Meadows to pursue efforts to overturn the presidential election. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In 2020, she privately pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue efforts to overturn the presidential election, and she sent emails urging swing-state lawmakers to set aside Joe Biden’s popular-vote victory in awarding electoral votes. When those efforts were revealed by The Post last year, they intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the election and attempts to subvert it.
In recent months, the high court has faced increasing scrutiny over a range of ethical issues, including the lack of transparency surrounding potential conflicts of interest and a whistleblower’s claim that wealthy Christian activists sought access to justices at social gatherings to shore up their resolve on abortion and other conservative priorities.
In a brief statement to The Post, Mark Paoletta, a lawyer for Ginni Thomas, said she was “proud of the work she did with Crowdsourcers, which brought together conservative leaders to discuss amplifying conservative values with respect to the battle over culture.”
“She believes Crowdsourcers identified the Left’s dominance in most cultural lanes, while conservatives were mostly funding political organizations,” Paoletta wrote. “In her work, she has complied with all reporting and disclosure requirements.”
He wrote: “There is no plausible conflict of interest issue with respect to Justice Thomas.”
A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to questions for Clarence Thomas.
In 2019, anonymous donors gave the think tank Capital Research Center, or CRC, $596,000 that was designated for Crowdsourcers, according to tax filings and audits the think tank submitted to state regulators. The majority of that money, $400,000, was routed through yet another nonprofit, Donors Trust, according to that organization’s tax filings. Donors Trust is a fund that receives money from wealthy donors whose identities are not disclosed and steers it toward conservative causes.
The documents do not say how or whether the money was spent. It is not clear how much compensation, if any, Ginni Thomas received.
CRC, which bills itself as an “investigative think tank,” is dedicated to uncovering anonymously funded influence campaigns by unions, environmental groups and other left-leaning nonprofits. Among its trustees is Edwin Meese III, the conservative elder statesman and former attorney general in the Reagan administration. Its president is Scott Walter, a former aide to President George W. Bush.
Around the time CRC agreed to channel the anonymous donations to Crowdsourcers, CRC signed a brief asking the Supreme Court to hear a case that conservative groups hoped would rein in fuel emission regulations in Oregon, records show. The court voted not to take up the case. As is routine, the votes of the individual justices were not disclosed.
Paoletta wrote that “Ginni Thomas had no knowledge of nor any connection whatsoever to an amicus brief CRC joined.”
Walter did not respond to requests for comment.
Meese said in a brief telephone interview that CRC’s trustees agreed to the arrangement because Crowdsourcers “was a group that had similar objectives and it was felt it would be helpful to them.” Such arrangements are common among other nonprofits, experts said.
Former CRC chairman Michael Franc told The Post that it was “a courtesy for this group so that it could get going without having to start up on its own, something to ease the ability of this group to raise and use their money.”
Walter proposed the Crowdsourcers arrangement to the think tank’s board members and mentioned Ginni Thomas’s involvement, Franc said.
Seeking ‘culture warriors’
On May 18, 2019, Thomas told influential right-wing donors and activists about Crowdsourcers in a private meeting, video from the event shows. The left, she said, was pushing “cultural Marxism” and “eroding the pillars of our country.”
“We have some culture warriors, but we have a lot more to do,” Thomas said at a meeting of the Council for National Policy in Northern Virginia, according to the video, which was obtained by the nonprofit watchdog Documented and has been previously reported. “Conservatives and Republicans are tired of being the oppressed minority.”
The concept for Crowdsourcers had taken shape during discussions with “35 of the best thinkers about what the left is doing,” she said.
Cleta Mitchell, chair of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, speaks at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in Camp Hill, Pa., in April 2022. (Matt Rourke/AP)
James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., on March 4. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
Thomas said partners in the effort included Cleta Mitchell, chair of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that submits amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in election law cases. Mitchell planned to establish a political action committee to “protect President [Donald] Trump,” according to a slide Thomas displayed during the closed-door meeting. James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas — known for hidden-camera stings that aim to embarrass liberals — would lead an effort to “protect our heroes,” she said. And Richard Viguerie, a pioneer in conservative direct-mail campaigns, would head up an effort to “brand the left,” she said.
Mitchell said in a brief phone interview that she did not know anything about Crowdsourcers and that nothing ever came of the political action committee.
“Ginni has asked me over the years to do a lot of different things,” she said. “I always try to respond.”
O’Keefe and Viguerie did not respond to requests for comment.
Thomas described herself as having a key role in bringing Crowdsourcers together. “I’m not the answer person. If anyone knows me, you know this. I’m merely a convener,” she said. “I find the talent and I put them in a room and I help them talk to one another.”
She said the group was “now under” the Capital Research Center, though she did not mention the funding. It is not clear exactly when in 2019 the anonymous donations were made.
Crowdsourcers had held its first meeting four months earlier at the Salamander Resort & Spa in Middleburg, Va., a 340-acre bucolic retreat with equestrian facilities. Attendees at the January 2019 meeting gathered for dinner and met in a conference room the next day, splitting into several groups — each dedicated to a theme such as politics, education or family — to brainstorm ways to counter the left, said a person who attended and spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private event.
Members communicated through a private Google group, emails obtained by The Post show. The emails contained warnings not to share information that would reveal the identities of the group’s members. “ABSOLUTELY … DO NOT FORWARD EMAILS FROM HERE WITHOUT REMOVING ALL IDENTIFYING INFORMATION FROM THIS LISTSERV,” warned one.
In February 2019, Thomas’s assistant emailed the Google group announcing the addition of new members, including Charlie Kirk, president of the pro-Trump student group Turning Point USA; Larry Solov, chief executive of Breitbart News; and Allen B. West, a former Republican congressman from Florida. Thomas replied, “WELCOME new leaders!!!”
Both Thomas and her assistant used email addresses belonging to her for-profit consulting business, Liberty Consulting.
In that same message, Thomas wrote that she had been trying to raise money for Crowdsourcers. “We had many great meetings with interested donors, but we don’t yet have specific funding yet, so prayers still needed,” she wrote.
She added that Crowdsourcers’ next biweekly conference call would include a presentation from Steve Hantler, an adviser to Bernie Marcus, a Home Depot co-founder and major conservative donor. Hantler is listed as the “principal officer” in a nonprofit group called the Job Creators Network Foundation, its tax filings show. The group has in recent years asked the Supreme Court to strike down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program.
Hantler declined to comment. Spokespeople for Kirk and West did not provide comment for this story. A spokeswoman for Solov said that “sometimes Breitbart people get put on informational lists ... to know what people are thinking and doing.”
By late 2019, Crowdsourcers had engaged Tim Clark, who spearheaded Trump’s 2016 campaign in California, to serve as its national director.
In an email obtained by The Post, Clark issued an invitation to a March 2020 public launch of the group. He made clear that Crowdsourcers did not have the money to pay for members’ travel and lodging for the event, which was to be held in Washington.
The launch was scheduled for March 6, 2020. “Culture Summit 2020 will focus on the Left’s escalating war across American culture and how we go on offense to better preserve America’s liberties for another generation,” read the invitation obtained by The Post.
It’s not clear whether the meeting — which would have taken place just as the nation was beginning to grapple with the spread of the coronavirus — was held as planned.
Clark did not respond to a request for comment.
A ‘temporary accommodation’
CRC’s funding relationship with Crowdsourcers continued through the end of 2021, records show. The relationship was described in CRC tax filings as a “fiscal sponsorship arrangement.” Under such agreements, an existing charity houses a start-up group with a similar mission until the smaller group gets off the ground.
In its tax filings, the think tank wrote that it provided “fiduciary oversight, financial management and other administrative services to help build the capacity” of Crowdsourcers. The filings describe Crowdsourcers as an “informal, unincorporated nonprofit association which serves as an incubator for ideas across a network of conservative leaders, cultural entrepreneurs, and cultural influences.”
Franc, the former CRC chairman, said the idea “didn’t seem like it was particularly controversial” when it was presented to the board for approval. “It was maybe putting some money in one of our accounts to make it easier to access it,” he said. “It was presented to us as a courtesy, something that was more of a temporary accommodation.”
Franc said the think tank had no role in raising the $596,000 that it channeled to Crowdsourcers.
Crowdsourcers was never established as an independent nonprofit group, according to a search of an IRS database.
Philip Hackney, a former IRS attorney who is now an associate law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said such arrangements are not uncommon or improper. He said they do allow the start-up group to avoid having to disclose information that independent nonprofits must reveal in annual tax filings, such as its officers or details about its spending.
“You would be able to keep names and salaries off of any documents,” he said.
Indeed, Thomas’s title in Crowdsourcers is not a matter of public record and could not be determined.
CRC’s annual audits show that the $596,000 dedicated to Crowdsourcers was “released” from donor restrictions over three years, meaning donors’ conditions on how it could be spent had been satisfied or lifted, experts said.
About $207,000 for Crowdsourcers was released in 2019, $85,000 in 2020 and the remaining $303,000 in 2021, the audits show. CRC’s most recent tax filing in 2021, obtained by Documented, said it had ended its agreement with Crowdsourcers at the close of that year.
An intersection with the court
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation in Washington in October 2021. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
In 2019, the year the funding arrangement began, a trade group that represents industrial companies, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, had unsuccessfully sued Oregon over a program that regulates how fuels are produced and transported.
On Feb. 8 of that year, CRC joined free-market groups including the Cato Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation in an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to reconsider lower court decisions upholding the program.
It was the only time CRC, founded in 1984, has filed a brief with the court in recent decades, according to Supreme Court records dating to 2001.
For the court to hear a case, at least four justices must agree.
On May 13, 2019, the court declined to hear the case.
The fact that CRC filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court around the same time it was supporting the work of Crowdsourcers does not on its own present a conflict of interest that would have required Clarence Thomas to recuse himself, according to Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University. If Ginni Thomas was paid for her work with Crowdsourcers — either directly or through her consulting firm — then there could be a recusal issue depending on the size and timing of the payment, Gillers said.
All federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are required to recuse themselves in certain circumstances, including when they or their spouses have a financial interest in a party before the court or when a reasonable person might question their impartiality. But because the Supreme Court sits atop the judiciary, there is no higher court to review each justice’s recusal decisions.
Gillers said ordinary Americans might find it puzzling that “one half of a married couple is at the ramparts on political issues that then get translated into legal issues that her husband has to decide.” But there is no rule prohibiting that, he said, and it’s not clear how one could be crafted.
Ginni Thomas has long maintained that she and her husband keep their careers separate. “I can guarantee that my husband has never spoken to me about pending cases in the court. It’s an ironclad rule in our house,” she told congressional investigators last year who were examining the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “Additionally, he’s uninterested in politics, and I generally don’t discuss with him my day-to-day work in politics.”
Controversy over Ginni Thomas’s political activism dates back to at least 2010, after she founded the nonprofit Liberty Central to harness the energy of the then-burgeoning tea party movement. Though she described Liberty Central as “nonpartisan” and focused on the principles of the Founding Fathers, she spoke even then about “activating a community of grass-roots patriots” to wage a cultural war.
“It’s time to wake up and refocus. Just like in a farm setting we need to till the ground, plant the seeds, tend the crops and pray for rain before we can harvest the crops,” she said that year in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference. “The left has been tending their crops, you guys. It has occurred in high schools, in K-12 textbooks, in colleges and Hollywood and mainstream media in our churches and in government. We’ve been asleep.”
Ginni Thomas launched Liberty Central with an anonymous donation of $500,000 and another of $50,000, sparking questions about potential conflicts of interest for her husband. (Months after the launch, Politico reported that the $500,000 investment had come from Harlan Crow, a Texas real estate magnate and major donor to conservative candidates and causes who had also given Clarence Thomas a Bible worth $19,000 that had once belonged to Frederick Douglass, according to the justice’s financial disclosures.)
Amid those questions, Ginni Thomas stepped away from Liberty Central in November 2010. She went on to establish Liberty Consulting. Because Liberty Consulting is a for-profit firm, it is subject to fewer public reporting requirements. Little is known about the firm’s clients, besides those that have listed payments to Liberty in required disclosures.
A nonprofit called the Center for Security Policy, which filed an amicus brief with the court in 2017 in support of the Trump administration’s Muslim ban, reported in its tax filings that it paid Liberty Consulting a total of $236,000 in 2017 and 2018, the New Yorker first reported last year. A political action committee run by Viguerie, the Crowdsourcers member and direct-mail pioneer, also reported paying Liberty $5,000 in 2018 for “video production.”
As a Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas must list sources of his wife’s income on annual financial disclosure forms, but not the amount. Since 2018, he has reported that Liberty Consulting was the sole source of income for his wife, and that the firm paid her a salary and benefits.
Clarence Thomas is not required to report the firm’s clients.
I am on the autistic spectrum and I'm cishet. Nobody has tried to force anything on me. You make shit up, dude. You really do.
Because we're an easy target.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
- 1,594
- 1,557
- 118
- Country
- Switzerland
- Gender
- The boring one
What ?
I'm not sure what you're talking about but it's not the impression I have. Reactionarism is a reaction, feet dragging on the ground to try and slow a train, but in the grand scheme of things, conservative beliefs are pretty much screwed. In the US, they are over-represented institutionally, and in some eastern countries they are supported by totalitarian regimes, but culturally they're a lost cause. And knowing it. And all the more noisy for it.
Last edited:
Brenda Ann Spencer, The Girl Who Shot Up A School Because She Didn't Like Mondays
She killed two people and injured nine in the 1979 attack.
allthatsinteresting.com
People who are autistic do unfortunately get things forced onto them, like needing to fit into what (straight western) society deems right at the expense of their mental health. Sound familiar, don't it? Conservatives won't talk about that though, huh? No, we just get brought up by them to attack an even more vilified community, and that I'm reading this shit here is fucking sickening.
I mean, we are, but then we're also seen as utterly harmless in the eyes of the rest of the world. Which is why we're always getting used by assholes to target the gays, the trans, and in the future the way things are going probably black people again.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
- 1,594
- 1,557
- 118
- Country
- Switzerland
- Gender
- The boring one
Nashville school shooter’s identity may make them an exceptionally rare perpetrator
According to all recorded data, the US epidemic of mass shootings are committed overwhelmingly by cis males
www.theguardian.com
'Lo and behold, we've found the one mass shooting conservatives are going to give a shit about for the next 5 years. The mass shooting equivalent of Daniel Shaver, complete with zero solutions to actually prevent further mass shootings
Also agreed, it's certainly a multi-faceted thing. There are certainly many factors, and many, many things that could potentially be those factors. I've been pondering this off and on all day (in wildly speculative fashion), and one thing that these Columbine-style school shootings often have is a socially isolated perpetrator. Not in the sense of solitude, but someone who may be surrounded by people but is still ignored. Cause this type of thing has sort of exploded in the internet era, where the effect of speaking to many people without ever being listened to is amplified to an extreme degree. In this case, we have someone who was known to some of the people at the school, and they seemingly had no idea the shooter was identifying as a male. This is someone living in Nashville that went to a Christian school and was identifying as transgender, so there's probably not a support system for that, and then identifying as he/him online, which is also not a combination that garners a lot of extra attention from people. All of that could have been incredibly isolating. Add in to that probably a desire to prove one's masculinity in a culture that frequently equates manliness with guns and/or violence. None of this is to say an individual isn't uniquely demented to even conceive of doing something like a school shooting, just rationalizing patterns.
This is what I mean when I say that conservatives have no solutions: this was a fixable problem
/https%3A%2F%2Ftf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ffiler_public%2F4f%2Feb%2F4feb0eac-5ac3-41a9-b128-b7c793841385%2Fgettyimages-1332143731.jpg)
www.smithsonianmag.com
Drying Great Salt Lake Could Expose Millions to Toxic Arsenic-Laced Dust
The largest saline lake in North America is on track to collapse within five years, a new report finds
www.smithsonianmag.com
Well, that's the Republican modus operandi- they claim that government is the problem, then get elected and prove it.This is what I mean when I say that conservatives have no solutions: this was a fixable problem
View attachment 8381
Drying Great Salt Lake Could Expose Millions to Toxic Arsenic-Laced Dust
The largest saline lake in North America is on track to collapse within five years, a new report finds
They will try (and succeed) in making everyone's lives worse, but they don't have everything their own way. They can be resisted, and how much worse they make things can be lessened. There have always been people like that throughout history, to various degrees of power and mendacity, and we are still here.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
- 1,594
- 1,557
- 118
- Country
- Switzerland
- Gender
- The boring one
Not only "we're still here" but : women vote, black people have officially the same civil rights as white people, homosexual marriage is spreading, minority representations in medias and fiction is taken seriously (sometimes too zealously, which is not only a much lesser issue but also a sign of common sense shift), for the majority of them racists have to preface their racism with "I am not racist but" instead of proudly owning it, likewise ecology is such a known issue that its disregard must hide under greenwashing instead of being proudly assumed, knowledge about the complexity of gender and sexuality is becoming so common that it triggers reactionary outrage whereas it used to be scientifically niche, the legal fight against sexual abuse and harrassment has become such that it defines workplaces and interpersonal relations (and here again, if some people are concerned about side effects and collateral damages it's also a testimony of how far we've progressed), the right is waging a defensive "culture war" against the wind and losing ground, imposing laws and sometimes presidents against the will of the majority.
I'm sorry, I'm old (actually a few months away from ancient), so I have the perspective of what societal awareness and common sense were when I was a kid. The very notion of ecology was being laughed. Standard tv humor was benny-hill-like, featuring stripping playmates. Standup comedians were getting popular by mimicking and caricaturing the accent of migrants. Action heroes were fighting baddies over the ownership of women. Homosexuality was a punchline in itself, and the most hilarious part of any comedy was about a male degrading himself into looking like a woman. Cigarettes were awesome, and your status was proportional to the size of your car's farts.
There are many components in society, and not all of these components evolve at the same speed, the same way, everywhere. Plus they also evolve in oscillations, like the small fluxes and refluxes in a wider tide, more than in straight lines. But today's society is much, much more progressive than my childhood's. And these are not things that will go back. There's a lot to fight for gender equality, but a lot of things that even conservatives won't touch, and will claim they were always in favor of. Even Switzerland's extraordinarily powerful extreme-right has stopped arguing against women's right to vote. We forgot that such arguments were even a thing. Every side "owns" it now. This is how it goes, our victories are so strong that they become invisible, fading in common sense, leaving us with our current frontlines which will have the same fate.
In ten years, who will remember that people argued against gay marriage ?
In 50 years, who will remember the arguments against sexual self-determination ?
Focusing on the present is fine, focusing on the future is important. But the world gets discouraging if you lose sight of the past.