Do You Know? (Ava and C.I.)

 

Do you know? 

 

Christopher Rhodes (BLAVITY) reports:

A judge ordered far-right Proud Boys militia members to pay over $1 million for their 2020 racist attack against a church in Washington, D.C. The attack was one of the bold actions of the militia linked to Donald Trump and a significant participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill.

On July 1, Superior Court Judge Neal E. Kravitz issued a default judgment against several Proud Boys members who had been sued for attacking the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church on Dec. 12, 2020. Judge Kravitz condemned them for their “hateful and overtly racist conduct” in the “highly orchestrated” attack against the Metropolitan AME Church. During this attack, members of the Proud Boys jumped a fence onto the church’s property, where they tore down and stomped upon a Black Lives Matter sign in the church’s yard. In ruling against the Proud Boys for the attack, the judge noted the group has “incited and committed acts of violence against members of Black and African American communities across the country,” as well as having “victimized women, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, and other historically marginalized people.”

Don't expect to read about it at the website of noted transphobe Jonathan Turley.  Though he presents as an expert on the law, he's too busy trying to scare readers with a foreign story -- one that attacks transpeople. And, of course, he's a closeted flaming right-winger who has been working with The Federalist Society for some time.  He's become less and less honest as a result.  He quotes a lyric to the song -- such as Carly Simon's "Anticipation," without naming the singer (Carly), the writer (Carly) or the song title -- and gets it wrong.  Today, he Tweeted about an attack on democracy (in his eyes) and 'quoted' the following "destroy the village in order to save it."

No.

The quote comes from Peter Arnett's NEW YORK TIMES report "Major Describes Move" (February 8, 1968) and it "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."  That's the quote in print.  Popularly, it became, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."  Now if you offer a quote and paraphrase it, you put it in single quotes -- 'single quotes' --but if you put something in double quotes -- "double quotes" -- as Turley did, you're saying it's a direct quote.  

It's not a direct quote and it's wrong.

And Turley misquoted it in a blog post he wrote.

People get things wrong at blogs all the time, yes.  

But maybe people should check out Turley's "Harm And Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States."  We don't recommend you check it out.  We did.  It's 132 pages.  And [warning] the essay is in PDF format.  If you do read it, be sure to note the footnotes and to marvel over how many of the 'works' being cited were authored by Turley himself.  Then note that he keeps citing his blog posts.  Then go read the blog posts and fact check them and you'll discover that he's not doing scholarship -- though he tried to pass it off as such in the paper he submitted to THE HARVARD JOURNAL OF LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY.

Long after any of Turley's shoddy blog posts have been forgotten, they will sadly live on in respected legal journals put out by universities too lazy to check the source before publishing Turley.

And if this is new to you, let's leave you with another new tidbit (from WIKIPEDIA):

in November 2020, after the election, Turley appeared on Fox & Friends and claimed that election machines In Michigan had switched “thousands of votes“ from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, suggesting problems with the results. Fox host Steve Doocy quickly corrected Turley’s claim by responding, “I looked into it. With that Dominion software, five counties in Michigan and Georgia had problems. And the Dominion software was used in two of the counties and in every instance largely it was human error, a problem, but the software did not affect the vote counts.”^[49]