Category Archives: Alt-right

Jordan Barkin| Guest Column

There is buzz surrounding former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-WI. The venerable conservative columnistGeorge Will, in The Washington Poston June 9, lauded Ryan's "seriousness about policies for economic dynamism and a sustainable safety net of entitlements."

The month prior, on May 27,Ryan spokeat the Reagan Presidential Library's exclusiveTime for ChoosingSpeaker Series. At the outdoor event, the51-year-oldsaid: "I think of the federal debt, which hardly comes up anymore, even though the debt is now $28 trillion." Ryan also emphasized what he sees as conservative principles:limited government, spending discipline and economic opportunity.

The Republican former speaker touched not only on policies, but also on electoral politics.

Ryan said: "Even for our good showing in the House, 2020 left Republicans powerless in Washington. Even worse, it was horrifying to see (the Trump) presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end. So once again, we conservatives find ourselves at a crossroads, and heres the reality that we have to face. If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality or of second-rate imitations, then were not going anywhere. Voters looking for Republican leaders want to see independence in metal. They will not be impressed by the sight of yes-men and flatterers flocking to Mar-a-Lago."

It is easy to see why the stalwart Mitt Romney, R-UT,chose Ryanas his running mate in the presidential election of 2012. Even though the Republican ticket was beaten by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, party loyalists respected Ryan's managementand oratorical skills. After then-Congressman Ryanreturned to the House of Representatives in 2014, he became chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. In 2015, he was elected by his colleagues to be House speaker.

In 2016, Ryan gave only tepid-support to then-candidate Trump. When a sexual harassment scandal broke regarding Trump,Ryan stated:"I am sickened by what I heard today. Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified. I hope Mr. Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests.

Then-Speaker Ryan worked with Trump for a few months, keeping his reservations about the reality TV star mostly to himself. In April 2018, Ryan decided not to run for re-election, citing a desire to spend more time with his children.

Looking back, it seems prescient thatRyan left before he could become tainted by association with Trump-era scandals. OnJanuary 6, 2021, when extremists rioted at the Capitol, hurting Capitol Police officers and damaging property, Ryan had not been in an official position for a while. Once again, the Wisconsinitekept his hands clean and his name untarnished.

Ryan's absence from the daily fracas of the COVID era also enabled him to avoid the culture wars that both the left and right have engaged in. As a result, theeconomicsmajorseems above the fray, giving public policy lectures at venues includingthe University ofNotre Dame.

Meanwhile, Trump has indicated he may run again.NBC News reportedon June 1: "Trump returns to the electoral battlefield Saturday as the marquee speaker at the North Carolina Republican Party's state convention. He plans to follow up with several more rallies in June and July to keep his unique political base engaged in the 2022 midterms and give him the option of seeking the presidency again in 2024."

The article by Jonathan Allen continued, "Only one president, Grover Cleveland, has ever lost a re-election bid and come back to reclaim the White House. In modern times, one-term presidents have worried more about rehabilitating their legacies by taking on nonpartisan causes (...) than about trying to shape national elections. But Trump retains a hold on the Republican electorate that is hard to overstate, and he has no intention of relinquishing it."

Nominating Trump in 2024 would be a huge mistake for the Republican Party. As Willstated in an NPR "Morning Edition" interview on Feb.18:"Donald Trump has no deep roots in the Republican Party and in many ways repudiates much of the Republican position of traditional conservatism, of fiscal austerity, free trade, et cetera."

USA Today reported in June that"Donald Trump is ranked near the bottom of all USpresidents by a group of historians, getting the lowest grades for leadership of any commander in chief who has served in the White House in the past 150 years. The ratings of presidents on 10 leadership qualities, the fourth in a series conducted by C-SPAN, includes assessments by 142 historians and professional observers of the presidency."

Unlike Trump, Ryan has a keen understanding of constitutionality and the rules of Congress -assets for any president. Plus, he is free of the rot that the alt-right brought to the party in Trump's term.Ryan proclaimed, in his speech at the Reagan Library,"Today, too many people on the right are enamored with identity politics in ways that are antithetical to Reagan conservatism. The whole idea in this country is that every person has worth, and that our dignity, rights, and responsibilities, they all belong to us as individuals."

Ryan offers the challenge and tone that both Republicans and Democrats need to make the 2024 presidential election substantive and productive.

JordanBarkinis a Rock Hill-based columnist publishedbyUSA Today,Gannett and other media outlets. He is a former associate editor of Hearst Magazines.

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Opinion: Paul Ryan could restore sanity to the Republican Party - Greenville News

FRONT PAGE

A picture caption with an article on Monday about Toyotas resistance to electric vehicles, using information from a photo agency, misidentified a Toyota vehicle outfitted for the Tokyo Olympics. It is a Prius, not a Mirai.

An article on Friday about Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the exiled Belarus opposition leader, misstated the action taken against the opposition politician Valery Tsepkalo before the election in Belarus last year. While he was barred from running, he was not jailed.

An article on Sunday about Big Oil in Nigeria misstated the surname of a spokesman for the Gbaramatu Kingdom. He is Godspower Gbenekama, not Benekama.

An article on Saturday about Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, referred incorrectly to the outcome of regulatory actions against Dr. Mercola. He paid millions of dollars in refunds to customers as a result of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission; he was not fined millions of dollars by the Food and Drug Administration.

An article on Monday about fatal car crashes in the New York area misspelled the surname of two brothers killed in a collision on the Hamptons this weekend. They were Michael and James Farrell, not Farell.

An article on Saturday about the completion of the human genome misstated when scientists determined the correct number of human chromosomes. It was in the 1960s, not a century ago.

An article on Monday about Phil Valentine, a conservative radio host who contracted the coronavirus, misidentified the date when Mr. Valentine announced his Covid-19 diagnosis. It was July 11, not June 11.

An article on Monday about a declining interest in investment banking as a career choice among young professionals misidentified the class of a university student. Armen Panossian is a rising senior at Rutgers University, not a rising junior.

An obituary on July 17 about William H. Regnery II, a reclusive heir to a textile fortune who bankrolled a number of people and organizations behind the rise of the alt-right, referred incorrectly to four of his children. He adopted Robert and William T. Regnery, two of his wifes children; William F. and David Regnery are his sons from a previous marriage.

An obituary on July 3 about Gen. Tran Thien Khiem, who was second in command to President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam during the last six years of the Vietnam War, misstated when and where he died. He died on June 23 in the Irvine, Calif., area not on June 24 in Santa Ana.

Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.

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Corrections: July 27, 2021 - The New York Times

Steve Barnes| Fort Smith Times Record

Next stop, Mountain Home.

Likely it was planned that way. Surely it wasnt a response to that New York Times article of a few days ago, the one that used Baxter County as the focal point of Arkansas surging coronavirus caseload. I didnt ask Gov. Hutchinsons press office; either way it doesnt matter. Hutchinson is back on the road next week, with the latest of his Community COVID Conversations taking him first to the Ozark foothills, then down to the delta and a stop at Dumas before turning north again for Heber Springs and then Siloam Springs. Hes already hit Texarkana, Cabot and Forrest City.

You might call them town hall meetings, or road shows, or rallies. If Hutchinson prefers conversations and discussions, they nonetheless are designed not so much for actual dialogue than as forum for dialectic: They are critical, the governor says, to ensure people have the facts and science about the vaccines that are free to the populace and available in abundance, but of which fewer than half of his constituents have availed themselves. The community gatherings that his administration has organized, he says, have helped to counter misinformation.

Thats a polite noun, exceedingly so in the instant case, but a convenient catchall. It encompasses political demagoguery and political timidity, class resentments, racial fears, cultural biases, social unease, innocent ignorance, and alt-right media manipulation and and just plain nuttiness. Fearsome obstacles, all of them. If conversations can outdistance conspiracy theories and discussions can neutralize the acid and alkali of todays public square, then by all means wish Hutchinson well, for the reports of viral impact in Arkansas are a dismal daily reminder of the needless sacrifice. There were those few weeks of encouraging numbers, leading many of us to hope the infection curve had truly, finally, been flattened. But then arose the new delta variant of COVID, fearsome in its communicability, sending the various indices sharply higher. Confirmed infections. Hospital admissions. Ventilator utilization. Deaths. And a new concern, concurrent with the new variant: The age of those requiring inpatient care, including intubation, has dropped noticeably.

After days of steadily increasing COVID diagnoses across the state, the message posted by Dr. Cam Patterson, chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, could scarcely have been more stark. The (UAMS) hospital ...is full. COVID-19 numbers increase every day. We are staffing inpatients in the ER and recovery room. No space for transfers. Running out of caregivers (nurses, clinical technicians), other. Support health care workers. Mask up. Get vaxxed.

Pattersons message, and Hutchinsons, may be getting through, but so far not at the velocity required to bring immunizations in Arkansas to something resembling the national percentage. Almost 60%of Americans aged 18 and older are now fully vaccinated; Arkansas lags at 45%.

New research from UAMS confirms what was assumed from the start and statistically indicated: that people of color Blacks, Latinos, Pacific Islanders would have COVID test positivity rates far in excess of whites. But yet another report, the latest coronavirus modeling from the School of Public Health, provides startling new evidence of the delta variants impact. The overall test positivity rate is now at 20%, say the scientists, who offer nothing but grim projections for the coming month: More than 1,200 new cases per day, about 170 of them expected to be youngsters 17 and younger. Children.

Public and private schools, day care centers, colleges and universities classes resume in mid-August.

The aforementioned Times piece datelined Mountain Home: It was a deeply reported, richly detailed account of how skepticism and nonchalance variants, one might call them, of misinformation about COVID-19 have stressed to the snapping point the regions largest and most sophisticated hospital, Baxter Regional Medical Center, and all but overpowered its clinical personnel. Several days prior to its publication the newspaper carried a story on an essentially identical theme, this one involving the COVID surge just across our northern borderin Springfield, Mo. Powering the outbreak there are the very same components that have Arkansascoronavirus case count (and its death count) registering alarming increases. The two stories had a special resonance for your columnist, a first cousin of whom had, short months ago, relocated from Mountain Home to Springfield, to be nearer family. He had recently retired after a long career. In the funeral industry.

Steve Barnesis the host of "Arkansas Week" on Arkansas PBS.

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COVID conversations, battling misinformation - Times Record

When people act like jerks on social media, one permanent response is to ban them from posting again. Take away the digital megaphone, the theory goes, and the hurtful or dishonest messages from those troublemakers wont post a problem there anymore.

What happens after that, though? Where do those who have been deplatformed go, and how does it affect their behavior in future?

Assistant Professor Jeremy Blackburn, Department of Computer Science, Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen.

An international team of researchers including Assistant Professor Jeremy Blackburn and PhD candidate Esraa Aldreabi from the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Department of Computer Science explores those questions in a new study called Understanding the Effect of Deplatforming on Social Networks.

The research performed by iDRAMA Lab collaborators at Binghamton University, Boston University, University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany was presented in June at the 2021 ACM Web Science conference.

Researchers developed a method to identify accounts belonging to the same person on different platforms and found that being banned on Reddit or Twitter led those users to join alternate platforms such as Gab or Parler where the content moderation is more lax.

Also among the findings is that, although users who move to those smaller platforms have a potentially reduced audience, they exhibit an increased level of activity and toxicity than they did previously.

You cant just ban these people and say, Hey, it worked. They dont disappear, Blackburn said. They go off into other places. It does have a positive effect on the original platform, but theres also some degree of amplification or worsening of this type of behavior elsewhere.

More about Blackburn

The deplatforming study collected 29 million posts from Gab, which launched in 2016 and currently has around 4 million users. Gab is known for its far-right base of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, anti-Semites and QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Using a combination of machine learning and human labeling, researchers cross-referenced profile names and content with users that had been active on Twitter and Reddit but were suspended. Many who are deplatformed reuse the same profile name or user info on a different platform for continuity and recognizability with their followers.

Just because two people have the same name or username, thats not a guarantee, Blackburn said. There was a pretty big process of going through creating a ground truth data set, where we had a human say, These have to be the same people because of this reason and that reason. That allows us to scale things up by throwing it into a machine learning classifier [program] that will learn the characteristics to watch for.

The process was not unlike how scholars determine the identity of authors for unattributed or pseudonymous works, checking for style, syntax and subject matter, he added.

In the dataset analyzed for this study, about 59% of Twitter users (1,152 out of 1,961) created Gab accounts after their last active time on Twitter, presumably after their account was suspended. For Reddit, about 76% (3,958 out of 5,216) of suspended users created Gab accounts after their last post on Reddit.

Comparing content from the same users on Twitter and Reddit versus Gab, users tend to become more toxic when they are suspended from a platform and are forced to move to another platform. They also become more active, increasing the frequency of posts.

At the same time, the audience for Gab users content is curtailed by the reduced size of the platform compared to the millions of users on Twitter and Reddit. This might be seen as a good thing, but Blackburn cautioned that much of the planning for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol happened on Parler, a platform similar to Gab with a smaller user base that skews to the alt-right and far-right.

Reducing reach probably is a good thing, but reach can be easily misinterpreted. Just because someone has 100,000 followers doesnt mean theyre all followers in the real world, he said.

The hardcore group, maybe the group that were most concerned about, are the ones that probably stick with someone if they move elsewhere online. If by reducing that reach, you increase the intensity that the people who stay around are exposed to, its like a quality versus quantity type of question. Is it worse to have more people seeing this stuff? Or is it worse to have more extreme stuff being produced for fewer people?

A separate study, A Large Open Dataset from the Parler Social Network, also included Blackburn among researchers from New York University, the University of Illinois, University College London, Boston University and the Max Planck Institute.

Presented at the AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media last month, it analyzed 183 million Parler posts made by 4 million users between August 2018 and January 2021, as well as metadata from 13.25 million user profiles. The data confirm that users on Parler which briefly shut down and was taken off of Apple and Google app stores in response to the Capitol riot overwhelmingly supported President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again agenda.

Regardless of what Parler might have said, publicly or not, it was very clearly white, right-wing, Christian Trump supporters, Blackburn said. Again, unsurprisingly, it got its largest boost right at the 2020 election up to a million users joining. Then around the attack at the Capitol, there was another big bump in users. What we can see is that it was very clearly being used as an organization tool for the insurrection.

So if banning users is not the right answer, what is? Reddit admins, for example, have a shadow-banning capability that allows troublesome users to think theyre still posting on the site, except no one else can see them. During the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter added content moderation labels to tweets that deliberately spread disinformation.

Blackburn is unsure about all the moderation tools that social media platforms have available, but he thinks there need to be more socio-technical solutions to socio-technical problems rather than just outright banning.

Society is now fairly firmly saying that we cannot ignore this stuff we cant just use the easy outs anymore, he said. We need to come up with some more creative ideas to not get rid of people, but hopefully push them in a positive direction or at least make sure that everybody is aware of who that person is. Somewhere in between just unfettered access and banning everybody is probably the right solution.

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Study shows users banned from social platforms go elsewhere with increased toxicity | Binghamton News - Binghamton University

Fall River The Narrows Center for the Arts announces it has some great shows coming up in August, along with art gallery exhibitions, and its Summer Evenings in the Park series. "We have already received a warm welcome back from our patrons since reopening and we are so grateful to be able to continue to bring live music and art to Southern New England and beyond," said Executive Director Patrick Norton in a press release.

Wednesday, Aug. 4 - Summer Evenings in the Park (Griffin Park)

The City of Fall River and the Narrows have partnered together to bring the arts right into the neighborhoods of the residents of Fall River. "We are proud to be a part of making the arts accessible to all in our community and to bring what we do into the neighborhoods of Fall River," added Norton.This week the featured musical act is Marcus Monteiro Trio, a contemporary jazz group.

Thursday, Aug. 5 - Paul Thorn Band

Paul Thorn has rambled down back roads and jumped out of airplanes, worked for years in a furniture factory, battled four-time world champion boxer Roberto Duran on national television, performed on stages with Bonnie Raitt, Mark Knopfler, Sting, and John Prine among many others, and made some of the most emotionally restless yet fully accessible music of our time.

Friday, Aug. 6 - Tuba Skinny

Formed in 2009, Tuba Skinny has steadily evolved from a loose collection of street musicians into a solid ensemble dedicated to bringing the traditional New Orleans sound to audiences around the world.

Wednesday, Aug.11 - Summer Evenings in the Park (Poulos Park)

The City of Fall River and the Narrows have partnered together to bring the arts right into the neighborhoods of the residents of Fall River. This week the featured musical act is Marcus Monteiro Trio, a contemporary jazz group.

Friday, Aug.13 - Cracker

Cracker has been described as a lot of things over the years: alt-rock, Americana, insurgent-country, and have even had the terms punk and classic-rock thrown at them. But more than anything Cracker are survivors.

Wednesday, Aug.18 - Summer Evenings in the Park (Pulaski Park)

The City of Fall River and the Narrows have partnered together to bring the arts right into the neighborhoods of the residents of Fall River. This week the featured musical act is Miki Sawada, a classical pianist from Boston.

Wednesday, Aug. 18 - Marcia Ball

"Fifty years have passed in a flash," says Texas-born, Louisiana-raised pianist, songwriter, and vocalist Marcia Ball of her long and storied career. Ball, the 2018 Texas State Musician Of The Year, has won worldwide fame and countless fans for her ability to ignite a full-scale roadhouse rhythm and blues party every time she takes the stage.

Wednesday, Aug. 25 - Summer Evenings in the Park (Ruggles Park)

The City of Fall River and the Narrows have partnered together to bring the arts right into the neighborhoods of the residents of Fall River. This week the featured musical act is Southcoast Brass Band, a New Orleans-inspired brass band.

Saturday, Aug. 28 - Pousette-Dart Band

Jon Pousette-Dart is best known as an American classic and folk-rock songwriter, musician, and performing artist. Growing up in Suffern, NY with a household of artists, he separated himself by picking up a guitar at the age of 10 and mapping out a life in music before he ever attended a little league game.

"Wild Solace: Garden Paintings by Paula Martesian"is on exhibit through Aug. 31

May 31, 2021 - September 30, 2021' 'To Have Been There," photos by Rick Couto is on display through Sept. 30.

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Narrows Center for the Arts announces August concerts and gallery shows - Fall River Herald News

Mr. Regnery attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied political science and joined the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative student organization co-founded by Mr. Buckley. He left before graduating to work on Senator Barry Goldwaters 1964 presidential campaign.

In the 2017 interview with Buzzfeed, one of the few times he spoke to the news media, he claimed that his efforts on behalf of Mr. Goldwater included what he called Operation Dewdrop, in which he attempted to deter Democratic voters in Philadelphia by hiring a plane to seed the skies with dry ice, in the hopes of making it rain. He failed though, he recalled, he burned his fingers on the ultracold dry ice containers.

Mr. Regnery later returned to Chicago, where he worked for Joanna-Western Mills. He became the companys president in 1980 but was ousted a year later, after several quarters of poor financial performance. According to his own account, he spent the rest of his career in a variety of businesses, while also dabbling in Illinois politics.

In his memoir, he recounted how he first began to turn against the Republican Party after listening to a speech in 1993 in which the economist Milton Friedman declared that the end of the Cold War meant that the free-market economic doctrines of the Reagan era had won. In an early sign of that break, according to a 2017 profile in Mother Jones, Mr. Regnery ran unsuccessfully for Illinois secretary of state in 1994 on the Term Limits and Tax Limits Party ticket.

Five years later, he convened a Whos Who of white supremacists for a conference in Florida, where he delivered a speech, For Our Childrens Children, in which he said the only way to save Americas white identity was for it to break up into several smaller countries, one each for the countrys various ethnic groups.

His racism grew more explicit. He announced plans in 2004 to start a whites-only dating site. It never happened, but he continued to worry that white people were in danger of extinction: In 2006 he delivered a speech in Chicago in which he said, The white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity.

By then he had severed most of his ties with mainstream Republicans, and they with him. That same year the leadership of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which he had joined in college, removed him from its board.

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William H. Regnery II, 80, Dies; Bankrolled the Rise of the Alt-Right - The New York Times

The show of support for Mayor Byron Brown at the downtown ballpark Thursday wasn't exactly a grassroots effort. Numerous members of Brown's senior staff participated and spoke.

Wondering whether Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown is giving serious consideration to mounting a write-in campaign to keep his job in November?

The answer might have been in plain sight Thursday night at Sahlen Field, where Brown threw out the first pitch before the Toronto Blue Jays went on to drop the Baltimore Orioles, 9-0.

Outside the park, a crowd of Byron Brown supporters gathered in front of the main entrance to make a pitch of their own. They wore T-shirts bearing Browns name and carried signs reading Keep Byron Brown.

This was no extemporaneous, grassroots expression of support for the four-term incumbent, who lost the Democratic primary election Tuesday to upstart India Walton, sending shockwaves through the regions political and business establishments.

A lot of the people there, including many who spoke to the TV cameras capturing the event, are members of Browns inner circle. Others occupy important, high-paying bureaucratic jobs.

These included:

Petrucci is also an elected member of the Buffalo Board of Education. Also present was South District Council Member Chris Scanlon.

Browns spokesman, Mike DeGeorge who made $110,054 last year was spotted among the demonstrators, too, but he was at the ballpark to make sure the mayors ceremonial game-opening pitch went smoothly.

(For the record, it did: The mayors delivery was slow, but he got it right over home plate.)

Also there was Tom Smith, who earned $110,805 in 2019 as chief of staff for the Buffalo Sewer Authority. Smith was previously head of the Mayors Impact Team and has been an aide to Brown since he was a state senator. Smith is married to Jessica Maglietto Smith, a top aide to the mayor she made $96,477 in 2020 and his campaign treasurer.

The man who the demonstrators offered to TV cameras as a community spokesperson was R.J. Ball. Hes the brother of Betsey Ball and Tim Ball, the citys top attorney. R.J. Ball works for Empire State Development as director of industry development, a patronage gig that paid him $104,000 in 2019. Unlike his siblings, Ball serves at the pleasure of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, not the mayor.

As deputy mayor, Betsey Ball runs operations for the mayor inside City Hall the role once occupied by Steve Casey, who previously ran the mayors election campaigns. As such, Ball was responsible, at least in part, for the campaigns disastrous rose garden strategy: Until the week before election day, Brown acted as if there were no primary election, no opponent, no need to engage in the usual politicking at which Browns previous campaigns have been so adept.

In the final week, money poured into Browns campaign but it was too late.

The result of Browns blunder: Walton beat the four-term incumbent by 7 percent of Tuesdays low turnout. It is too late for Brown to get his name on another ballot line in November, leaving a write-in campaign his only option other than conceding his loss, which he has not done. Brown indicated on election night that hed wait until every vote had been counted and the results certified by the Board of Elections.

At the same time these riders of the patronage merry-go-round were agitating for their boss to keep the job he lost Tuesday night, developer Carl Paladino had called an emergency conclave of wealthy businessmen to discuss how to prevent Walton from taking office in January.

Paladino told those he invited his goal was to raise $1 million to fund a write-in campaign to keep Brown in office in Novembers general election. The meeting was postponed after Buffalo News political reporter Bob McCarthy wrote a piece calling attention to the planned meeting.

Paladino has a long history of clashing with Black elected officials, and until recently that included Brown. In 2009, he helped bankroll the mayoral campaign of South District Common Council Member Mickey Kearns, who lost in a landslide to Brown in the Democratic primary.

Paladino ran for governor in 2010, but his campaign was derailed by the publication of racist and pornographic emails hed shared with an email list of friends and business associates.

He later was elected to a seat on the Buffalo Board of Education, but was removed from office in 2017 after he made racist remarks about Barack and Michelle Obama to a weekly newspaper. He was an early supporter of Donald Trump and remains a hero of the regions conservative and alt-right movements.

Walton, meanwhile, has been receiving national attention for her victory. Shes been congratulated by prominent progressive figures including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

That raises a fascinating prospect: Will Byron Brown, Buffalos first Black mayor, accept the backing of a guy like Paladino in an effort to defeat Walton, who is also Black and poised to become the citys first woman mayor?

If he does, what national figures and organizations will rush with money and volunteers to aid Waltons cause?

It could be a long, hot summer. And fall.

Paladino affirmed Friday to WGRZ-TV and other reporters that he had spoken to Brown and pledged his financial support, should Brown agree to a write-in campaign.

The mayor has not said whether he will do that, or whether hed accept Paladinos support if he does. But he told WGRZ-TV in a statement he was weighing the outpouring of support as he considers his next steps.

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Rallying to save their patronage jobs - Investigative Post

Its a long way from performing socially distant, one-man private acoustic shows in driveways to being back on stage with a full six-piece band. But thats the road David Lowery, front man for the classic alternative rock group Cracker, has traveled in just one month of pandemic time.

Cracker, led by lead singer Lowery and virtuoso lead guitarist Johnny Hickman, embarked on a 15-city summer tour that brings the group to Harmar on Wednesday for a concert at Pittsburgh Shrine Center Pavilion. The band will play fan-favorite songs like Low, Euro-Trash Girl and Get Off This from Crackers chart topping album Kerosene Hat and deep cuts from its 29-year recording career.

I did the acoustic shows in the Bay Area back in May and that was pretty interesting, said Lowery. When we booked them in advance, we didnt know how those shows would be.

Other than that, Lowery and his band havent performed live in 15 months. He admits there is plenty of rust to shake off. So much so that Cracker, which normally doesnt do extensive rehearsals, has actually been rehearsing for this tour.

Weve been trying to get back up to speed. I dont remember the last time I had that long of a period of time without playing shows. Were really looking forward to getting back on the road and playing shows and seeing people, Lowery said.

Lowery teaches music business at the University of Georgia. Along with doing some solo recordings, he managed to stay pretty busy during the pandemic.

I did them kind of virtually with most of the guys in Cracker, at least the ones that live in Georgia and we could send files back and forth and do a little bit of studio stuff together, Lowery said. So, I made like an album-and-a-half during that time and just hung out with my sons and my wife.

Lowery said the covid lay off gave him a chance to do things he hasnt been able to do, like adopting a shelter dog a pit bull named Gypsy that is making the trip with Cracker to Pittsburgh.

Shes in the car with us right now, Lowery said during a phone interview with the Tribune-Review. Shes actually a tour dog. Weve been training her, getting her ready to be a band dog so that shes comfortable being in a vehicle and being on the road. Shell actually be in Pittsburgh.

Cracker made numerous Pittsburgh appearances over the years with its most recent stop happening in November 2019 at Moondogs in Blawnox as part of the groups Turkey Hangover Tour.

Lowery had one memory that stood out from a Cracker show at the old Metropol Dance & Night Club in Pittsburgh.

They had live shows with bands early and then it would flip to a dance club, said Lowery. I remember being backstage at the Metropol and pushing through a door thinking it was going out back and then finding myself in the middle of this dance club and the door locked behind me. I was in a totally different reality.

We went to Pittsburgh every tour. It was a good, solid town for us.

On this tour, Cracker also plans to play songs from its most recent double-album Berkeley to Bakersfield, which is part punk and part country. Though it was released seven years ago and not nearly as well known as Kerosene Hat, its a record their fans should be excited to hear.

Berkeley to Bakersfield showcases the alternative rock sound of Californias better known coastal areas on one album as well as the Americana indigenous to the inland area Lowery grew up in. He admits to the song California Country Boy being somewhat autobiographical.

That is kind of my life. I grew up in the orchards in the Inland Empire of Southern California, said Lowery. I put myself through college by driving a truck or being the production manager for this farm just south of Santa Cruz in the Salinas Valley. When you talk about being from the Inland Empire its with some pride and if people think that were a little rougher, were not going to disabuse you of the notion.

All of that of course came before Lowery became a rock star, first with the alternative band Camper Van Beethoven and then in a major way with Cracker, a band that received a lot of air play on rock radio and MTV back in its early to mid 90s heyday. Lowery said a lot has changed in the music industry since then.

I wouldnt want to be a young band today because, the way the revenue streams work, its really drastically different and it tends to overpay the top artists and underpay the younger artists, said Lowery.

The algorithms rule now, he said. You used to be able to walk into a radio station and there was a music director and she might go I like this song. Were going to play it. I dont know how you negotiate with an algorithm. The thing about human curation, which we lack, is the things you dont know that youre going to like.

Lowery said he still likes playing live shows but limits his touring to breaks in his teaching schedule, mainly holidays and during the summer.

Its a clich but we play for free, you pay us to travel.

Paul Guggenheimer is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Paul at 724-226-7706 or pguggenheimer@triblive.com.

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Alt-rock band Cracker happy to be back on the road, heads to Harmar this week - TribLIVE

Jordyn Brown and Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick, Eugene Register-Guard, and Elizabeth Gabriel, KLCC| Eugene Register-Guard and KLCC

Protests against police violence and racism occurred on a near-daily basis last summeracross Lane County, prompted by the murder of George Floyd.

Companies,school districtsand local governments publicly expressed support for racial justice as the crowds of voices calling for change grew. Some Lane County police departments announced they would make immediate changes, public health agencies began to tackle the pandemic through a lens of racial justice and Gov. Kate Brown called for a special session to pass police accountability legislation.

But a year later, some activists are left wondering if any substantial changes have been made.

While some remain optimistic about where last summers wave of energy will take communities, for some that have witnessed moments like this before, theres a feeling of deja vu.

The only difference is I see is more young white people and even some older white people involved, said Eugene resident Henry Luvert. Back in the day, it was Black folks, so they would shoot you (for protesting), whereas now sometimes they'll come out with rubber bullets.

Luvertwas a president of the local NAACP for about 20 years and was involved with civil rights movements in the area since the 1980s; he's pulled back his involvementin recent years for his health. He had a computer store,a construction company and served as a firefighter in the '80s where he says he faced racism from his peers as one of the first and only Black firefighters.

It's more of the same, Luvert said. What happens is you take one or two steps forward, you get pushback.

The core issue driving protests last summer was police use of force, fueling calls for defunding and abolishing police departments across the U.S.

Around Lane County, therewas animmediate response of possible solutions and suggestions.

Schools reevaluated having armed, uniformed police on campus. The Eugene School Board voted 6-1to remove police from schools, being the only one of the three major metro school districts in Lane County to do so.

And some policy changes were made at the Eugene and Springfield police departments after several use-of-force incidents in the past few year.

Eugene Police Department responded to the first week of protests and the initial May 29 riot with pepper balls, tear gas, arrests and curfews, which prompted two lawsuits.

Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner took some immediate steps, scaling back police involvement at protests, banning the use of chokeholds a few weeks ahead of state reforms. EPD also has a section of its website devoted to "8 Cant Wait," a police reform campaign thatprovidesalist of policy changes that can be quickly enacted,with the department committing to six of the eight reforms.

Skinner announced that as ofJune 14, EPD will report to the public displays of force such as pointing a taser, firearm and using K9s to gain compliance in incidents as well as uses of force.

Across the river in Springfield, however, changes in policing this year were not prompted by department initiative, but various use-of-force lawsuits and whistleblower complaints.

One wrongful death lawsuit was settled in 2020 on behalf of Stacy Kenny, who was killed by police during a traffic stop in 2019. The lawsuit, which noted a toxic warrior culture within the department, was settled by the city of Springfield for a record $4.55 million. An independent review released this year also found police "immediately resorted to force." As part of the settlement, the city agreed to a plan laid out by the Kenny family to correct this culture, which includedthe independent review and requiring SPD to annually report its use-of-force incidents and make several changes to policies, such as prioritizing de-escalation.

In response to the "8 Cant Wait" campaign, then-Springfield Police Chief Richard Lewis told city councilors in November he views the eight changes as unreasonable because they don'tmake an exception for officers arriving at immediately threatening scenes.He said SPD officers would still be allowed to use otherwise prohibited use-of-force tactics if their lives or others were in danger.

Lewis was placed on paid administrative leave at the end of March,during a still-ongoinginvestigationinto a complaint from a former recruit that he falsified information about her. He announced his retirement on May 19.

Springfield hired a new interim police chief, Andrew Shearer, who had 28 years with the Portland Police Bureau, which has had its own lawsuits and federal orders related to repeated incidents of use-of-force against protesters this last year.

Shearer said when taking the job he saw the various headlines about SPDs issues and wasnt deterred, seeing it as a chance for change and improvement.

I'm always up for a challenge, he told The Register-Guard.

Activismmoved from the Eugene and Springfield streetsto its board rooms last year. Protesters and activists gave public comment at city council and county board meetingsand protested atcity leaders homes at night. They were met with resolutions and words pledging change.

Unlike its neighboring communities, Springfields city council has notissuedany formal resolution. Springfield Mayor Sean VanGordon, who was appointed to the position in January and has been on the council since 2011, did denounce white supremacy in his State of the City address.

We didn't pass a resolution against racism, but we did talk about the fact that political violence isn't welcome here, VanGordonsaid. Maybe it's a different venue than taking a formal action, but as mayor, thats actually the biggest megaphone I have.

The only tangible change that came from council action wasintroducing body-worn cameras for allSpringfield officers.

A year ago, facing budget concerns because of COVID-19, the council and budget committee planned to eliminate the funding set aside for police body cameras. When people gathered outside city hall to protest the decision, cameras were put back into the budget.

... To drive transparency, (we decided) that as a city this size, we've got to have body cameras, and we have got to figure out how to make it work, VanGordon said.

VanGordon said the best way he found to gather information about how people are feeling over the last year was to have one-on-one talks.

Over that summer, I had a lot of coffee, he said, adding he talked with about six people, not necessarily people of color. Those one-on-one moments and phone calls are really how you gather the feeling about where the community is.

We're a community of 60,000 people that goes all the way from the farthest point on the leftto the farthest point on the right, he said, about his takeaways from those conversations. Overall, it's always meaningful to have those types of conversations.

VanGordon announced last week that he will be holding quarterly conversations with community members via Zoom, calledVisit With Mayor VanGordon, with the first one happening Tuesday, June 22.

Meanwhile,Eugenecity leaders continued to face the question of what "public safety really is.

The City Council unanimously passed resolutions in 2019 and again in 2021that denounce white nationalism, alt-right and extremist groups. Eugene has had a police auditors office and body cameras for officers for years, but the protests called for more accountability.

Nationally, advocates made clear the call wasnt reform police,but defund police.

In Eugene, community members called on city officials toconsider changing the way revenues from the community safetypayroll tax, passed by voters inJune 2019, are spent. The taxis intended to generate $23.6 million annually to provide long-term funding for community safety services.

As originally proposed, more than half of those Community Safety Initiative funds would go to the citys police departmentincluding more than 50 new officers and other police staff, a street crimes unit and 10 additional jail beds, while a combined 10% would go to crime prevention and services to address homelessness.

Locally, the calls for "defund police" areeven more specific: reallocate and fund CAHOOTS,a 32-year-old emergency response program that continues to receive nationwide attention as a potential alternative to policing. In 12-hour shifts, teams made up of unarmed medics and crisis workers respond to medical or psychological emergencies in Eugene and Springfield. In 2019, CAHOOTShandled about 24,000 calls for service.

CAHOOTS wasn't included in theCommunity Safety Initiative fundingdespite the city touting CAHOOTS as a community service on thewebsite advertising the initiative.

InJuly 2020 the council voted to create an Ad Hoc Committee on policing and reevaluate the Community Safety Initiative by gathering more public input on the funding uses, especially from BIPOC residents.

After 46 hours of focus groups, listening sessions andonline surveys, the Ad Hoc Committee on May 17 offered the council 50 recommendations for changes.

Part of the feedback given tocity officials supportsthe use of alternatives to law enforcement, such as CAHOOTS.

According to the committee's report, CAHOOTS was a dominant example and one that was highly praised. Italso notes that CAHOOTS funding is "absent in the (Community Safety Initiative)" and says many focus group participants asked for the city to make funding explicit while others suggested separating CAHOOTS funding from EPD funding.

Some survey respondents and participants in the listening sessions directly asked for an increase in CAHOOTS services.

Following the report's findings, CAHOOTS requested $1.8 million from the cityso it could offer competitive wagesand wrote a letter to the City Council asking for direct funding from the Community Safety Initiative.

For now, the budget committee recommended the City Council add $125,000 of one-time funding for CAHOOTS in the next fiscal years budget from reserve funds to maintain an additional five hours per day of service, according to city spokesperson Laura Hammond.The committeeis also consideringincludingCAHOOTS in Community Safety Initiative allocations inthe fall.

One of the things that we learned from the Community Safety Initiative engagement, was a different framing… people were saying, We don't want you to talk about community safety, we want you to talk about community well-being, Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis said. That's a profound shift.

When asked whether these steps taken this year were enough, Vinis said she believes the council has done excellent work.

I think these two initiatives the ad hoc committee and the going back with another round of engagement on the Community Safety Initiative were excellent ideas. And from those reports, I would say we have learned a lot, she said.

I won't say that, in every respect, it was perfect, Vinis said. There was no model to follow and we responded in a climate of urgency that we needed to act … Sometimes when you move very quickly, you don't anticipate all of the ways in which there might be unintended consequences from your actions. But I think that both of those reports really set the groundwork for us.

County leaders were called on for larger change last summer, including taking action to rename the county.

The county is named after Joseph Lane, the first governor of Oregon Territory and a slaveowner. A petition circulated calling for a change to the countys name, which the Board of Commissioners discussed last August, but in the end the board kept the name, KLCC reported.

The board instead issued resolutions. The first was in June 2020 in support of Black Lives Matter. The second came in February 2021, when the county acknowledged its role in evicting and demolishing the citys first black neighborhood Ferry Street Village in 1949. The third was to acknowledge racism as a public health crisis this April.

Resolutions are interesting things in and of themselves, they don't do squat…unless they engender action and change they don't mean much you might as well put them on a shelf and forget them, said Board Chair Joe Berney. "But what that does is it gives staff a green light.

These declarations told county staff to prioritize equity in their work, Berney said, with actions such as opening up a sixth Community Health Center, prioritizing financial support for minority and women-owned small businesses, and bettering hiring practices.

We targeted recruitment for the jobs we were creating to populations that have been historically excluded from full workforce participation in those jobs, which in the building tradeswas women, people of color and veterans, Berney said. We were not attached toLane County government should look like Lane County. We were attached to, Lane County government should look far more diverse than Lane County what Lane Countys hopefully going to become.

Lane County Public Health set aside COVID-19 vaccine doses during distribution to ensure access for people who may have strained relationships with the medical system, including people who are experiencing homelessness as well as some people of color.

We're fighting racism as a public health crisis, and back in 2020 we weren't … we were fighting against police brutality, but police brutality is also a piece of racism it's also a piece of this public health environment that we have, said Martin Allums, protester-turned-BIPOC Community Liasion for LCPH.

Allums also pointed to the statewide passage of Measure 110, which decriminalizes small quantities drugs in Oregon and will potentially decrease yearly convictions for possession by 90%.

When the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission analyzed the racial and ethnic impacts of the measure, it found that Black Oregonians were overrepresented in the number of people convicted of drug possession, and that the passage of Measure 110 would eliminate the disparity.

With COVID, even though it's set us back so far in terms of the hustle and bustle of society, it gave us an opportunity to really stop and look around and really see how we treat each other and how we treat our communities, Allums said. You didn't have an option to turn away and ignore it, because you were forced to quarantine, you were forced to stop and see how you treated yourself and how you treated your community.

Even with these changes, theres still more to do to make a significant cultural shift to addressing racism, Berney said.

Its never enough, he said. Anyone that says its enough shouldn't be where they're at. It's never enough.

Seven police reform bills passed the Legislature during two special sessions called last summer, and at least eight more passed at the latest session, along with several other non-policing bills aimed at racial justice.The Oregon Legislature banned police use of chokeholds during the 2020 Special Legislative Session for pandemic and police accountability. The state alsoestablished the duty for other officers to intervene in a use-of-force situation.

Have we moved the needle? I think considerably. Is there more to do? There is much more to do because we're talking about years of systemic racism, Sen. James Manning Jr., D-Eugene said. We're talking about a system that was designed systemically to oppress and hold Black people people that look like me.

Manning, a former police officer and Army veteran, represents Oregon Senate District 7, which includes north Eugene, west Eugene, Santa Clara and Junction City. Hehas been involved with the creation and passage of many recent bills meant to reform policing in Oregon.

Manningsaid that even as protests have died down, the political will to make change has not.

All of my colleagues understand," he said, "that it's time for reform.

Editors' note: This project is a collaboration between The Eugene Register-Guard and KLCC public radio.

Editor's note: The original version of this story incorrectly stated how many calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019. It has been corrected to reflect the correct amount.

Contact reporter Jordyn Brown at jbrown@registerguard.comand on Twitter @thejordynbrown; reporter Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick atTatiana@registerguard.com and on Twitter@TatianaSophiaPT; andreporter Elizabeth Gabriel ategabriel@klcc.org andon Twitter@_elizabethgabs.

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What has Lane County changed a year after protests for racial justice? - The Register-Guard

Republican voters choice for Virginia governor, a deep-pocketed first-time candidate who plans to run as a business-friendly political outsider, will offer a major test in the post-Trump era of the partys ability to win back suburban voters who have fled over the past four years.

Glenn Youngkin, who won the Republican nomination on Monday night, had walked a line between his partys Trump-centric base and appeals to business interests in a crowded field, defeating two rivals who more aggressively courted supporters of former President Donald J. Trump.

After years of Democratic advances in the state thanks to suburban voters who adamantly rejected anyone linked to the Trump G.O.P., Mr. Youngkin, 54, a former private equity executive, has warned that we can kiss our business environment away if Democrats retain power in Richmond.

During the nominating fight, he criticized the current governor, Ralph Northam, and his predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, for creating business conditions that cause college-educated residents (read: suburbanites) to move away.

But even as Mr. Youngkin tries to focus on kitchen-table issues, Democrats signaled on Tuesday they would aggressively seek to fuse the nominee to Mr. Trump, by reminding voters of hard-line positions he took in fending off six Republican rivals including on voting rights, Medicaid expansion and culture-war topics like critical race theory.

Mr. McAuliffe, the polling leader for the Democratic nomination, said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Youngkin spent his campaign fawning all over Donald Trump, adding that he would make it harder to vote and be a rubber stamp for the N.R.A.s dangerous agenda.

Mr. Trump stayed out of the G.O.P. race while the field jockeyed for position, with Mr. Youngkin ultimately emerging as the winner after roughly 30,000 voters cast ranked-choice ballots at 39 locations around the state on Saturday. But the former president jumped in on Tuesday with an endorsement of Mr. Youngkin, although it was primarily an attack on Mr. McAuliffe, a former fund-raiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, who as a private citizen was in business with Chinese investors.

Virginia doesnt need the Clintons or the Communist Chinese running the state, Mr. Trump said, so say no to Terry McAuliffe, and yes to Patriot Glenn Youngkin!

But Mr. Youngkin might consider such effusions unwelcome in a state Mr. Trump lost by 10 percentage points in November.

Mr. Youngkin, 54, was raised in Virginia Beach and has lived in Northern Virginia for 25 years. He defeated two rivals who appealed more directly to the Trump-centric base: Pete Snyder, a technology entrepreneur, and State Senator Amanda Chase, a hard-right supporter of the former president who was censured in a bipartisan vote of the states General Assembly for referring to the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 as patriots.

Mr. Youngkins appeal to Republicans was at least twofold: He is a political blank slate, with no record in elected office for Democrats to attack. And his private wealth reportedly more than $200 million after he retired as co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group will allow him to compete financially against Mr. McAuliffe, a prolific fund-raiser.

Mr. McAuliffe raised $36 million for his 2013 election campaign and more than $9.9 million during the past two years, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Mr. Youngkin has already spent $5.5 million of his own money since entering the race in late January.

Republicans have not won a statewide election since 2009, and Democratic dominance of the once-purple state accelerated under Mr. Trump, with Democrats taking control of both houses of the General Assembly in 2020 for the first time in a generation.

They used their dominance of state government to pass sweeping progressive priorities like more restrictive gun laws and a ban on capital punishment.

But the trend is not irreversible, as some election analysts see it. In the pre-Trump era, Mr. McAuliffe won his first governors race in 2013 by just 2.5 percentage points against a hard-right conservative, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II. Rural regions of southern and southwest Virginia have grown redder even as the populous northern and central suburbs are bluer. There is a theoretical path to statewide Republican victory for a candidate who rouses rural Trump voters, appeals to suburban independents and benefits from lower overall Democratic turnout without Mr. Trump as a motivator.

And Mr. Youngkin has signaled that he would run against the very legislation Democrats have passed, accusing his opponents of pushing Virginia far to the left of most voters preferences.

Mr. McAuliffe may be the clear polling leader for the Democrats, but he is conspicuous as the lone white candidate in a field with three Black contenders, in a party whose base is heavily African-American.

In four years in office, Mr. McAuliffe governed as a pro-business Democrat, and he began his campaign for a second term in December on a pro-education note, pledging to raise teacher pay and offer universal pre-K. (Virginia governors cannot serve two consecutive terms.)

Though Mr. Youngkin is not as unrelenting a supporter of Mr. Trump as some of his Republican opponents, he declined the chance at a recent candidates forum to distance himself from Mr. Trumps lies about a rigged 2020 election. Asked about voter integrity, he launched into a five-point plan to restore our trust in our election process.

During the nominating race, he also pledged to restore a state voter identification law and to replace the entire state board of education. He also said he would create the 1776 Project, an apparent reference to a curriculum of patriotic education proposed by a commission established under Mr. Trump that has been derided by mainstream historians.

Last month, Mr. Youngkin said it was a sad thing that Virginia had expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, though he acknowledged the clock couldnt be turned back.

As Mr. Youngkin likely spends generously on TV ads to forge a more soft-focus identity as a pro-business outsider, Democrats are sure to try to keep his earlier positions in front of voters.

Make no state mistake about it, we are going to point out every step of the way the right-wing extremism of Glenn Youngkin, Susan Swecker, chair of the Virginia Democrats, said on Tuesday.

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In Virginia, a Fight Over the Suburbs in the Governors Race - The New York Times