Despite the dangers, early humans risked life-threatening flintknapping injuries

Peer-Reviewed Publication

KENT STATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: METIN EREN, PH.D., ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR OF ARCHEOLOGY AT KENT STATE UNIVERSITY, DEMONSTRATES FLINTKNAPPING. view more 

CREDIT: KENT STATE UNIVERSITY

Every day, hundreds of stone artifact enthusiasts around the world sit down and begin striking a stone with special tools attempting to craft the perfect arrowhead or knife. This craft is known as flintknapping, and for most, it is a skilled hobby or art form that was thought to occasionally require bandages or stitches. However, new research suggests flintknapping is far more dangerous than previously understood. And for early humans who were without the modern conveniences of hospitals, antibiotics, treated water and band-aids, a more severe cut could get infected and be life-threatening.

“Knapping injuries were a risk past peoples were willing to take,” said Metin I. Eren, Ph.D., associate professor and director of archaeology at Kent State University.

Eren and his colleague Stephen Lycett, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University at Buffalo, both also flintknappers themselves, were curious about knapping injuries and risks. More than 10 years ago, they began discussing a study they wanted to conduct that involved surveying modern flintknappers and documenting their injuries systematically.

“We’ve known for a long while that flintknapping can result in injuries, but its never been quantitatively assessed on a widespread level,” Eren said. “What is the frequency of injury? How bad can flintknapping injuries get? For that sort of thing, you need a large sample size.”

They found Nicholas Gala, at the time a Kent State undergraduate anthropology major working in Kent State’s Experimental Archaeology Lab, who was looking for a senior honors thesis project. 

Gala conducted the survey that led to his first authored article in North America’s flagship archaeology research journal, American Antiquity. They received survey responses from 173 modern flintknappers who described their wide-ranging injuries. The article, “The Injury Costs of Knapping,” was also co-authored by Eren, Lycett and Michelle Bebber, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Kent State.

“Nick’s work on this project has been fantastic,” Lycett said. “Successfully coordinating a number of different project elements always requires considerable skill and organization. The number of parts in this project, from coming up with a questionnaire to reaching out to many flintknappers and then collating and thinking about all the data, was a difficult task.”

Gala earned his Bachelor of Science in Anthropology at Kent State in 2022 and is now pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Tulsa, where he received two fellowships and is currently studying lithic technology.

Flintknapping and Injuries

Flintknapping is the method of breaking, flaking and shaping stone tools, such as points for arrow tips or sharp blades for an axe or knife. Archaeological evidence for knapping goes back more than 3 million years.

“People like to say, ‘You are going to cut yourself while learning to flint knap, even if you are an expert flintknapper,’ so we wanted to know how dangerous it actually is,” Gala said. “What are the most severe injuries that people have? How can we relate that to past people?”

The researchers learned that knapping is far more dangerous than they previously imagined. Among some of the most severe injuries reported by flintknappers included running a flake across their bone like a wood planar, cuts deep into the periosteum of the bone, and the need for a tourniquet after piercing their ankle with a flake. Thirty-five people surveyed said they have had small stone flakes fly into one of their eyes. The researchers also shared a historical account of William Henry Holmes who disabled his entire left arm from flintknapping back in the late 1890s. Several grislier examples are reported in the open-access study.

“This study emphasizes how important stone tools would have been to past peoples,” Eren said. “They literally would have risked life and limb to make stone tools during a period without band-aids, antibiotics or hospitals. But despite those injury costs, past peoples made stone tools anyway – the benefits provided must have been immense.”

“What, to us, might seem a minor inconvenience, could in the past have proven fatal if the wound became infected and prevented an individual from effectively gathering food, water and undertaking other essential activities,” Lycett said. “For those taking care of small infants, not only would their life be in jeopardy, but the life of these infants would also be in the balance. The costs of injury in the ancient world were magnified. These are exactly the kinds of costs that evolutionary models will need to take account of, and our study is a step toward that.”

Bebber collaborated with Gala on how to best visualize and report his data and developed a color-coded figure, which illustrates that injuries are not just limited to the hands. Injury frequency varies, and there are injuries that occur on the entire body, including flintknappers’ feet, legs and torso.

“The eye injuries are the most dangerous from my perspective, simply because they seem to be common and could result in loss of sight, which would significantly impact the life of the knapper,” Bebber said. “Stone tools were vital to their daily activities and overall survival. I think overall they were used to a more dangerous lifestyle and also would have had their own ways of treating injuries.”

Social Learning

The researchers were also interested in more accurately considering how injury risks might be incorporated into ongoing debates about the likelihood of ancient species (Homo erectus, Homo habilis) engaging in social learning (to teach and prevent injuries) when learning to make stone tools.

“Social learning involves directly copying the outcomes or actions of a more skilled individual rather than learning everything by yourself through trial and error,” Lycett said. “We know from studies of animals and humans that social learning, rather than learning individually, is more likely when there is an increased risk or cost to learning alone. The injury risks involved in knapping are exactly the kind of activity that would have made learning from a skilled individual more likely since it would help reduce the risks associated with individual learning.

“Stone tools are the best evidence we have to track social learning early in our evolution because they withstand the passage of time,” Lycett continued. “Other skills may have been socially learned deep in prehistory, but evidence for those behaviors is not so well preserved.”

Additional Information

For more information about Kent State’s Department of Anthropology, visit www.kent.edu/anthropology.

Kent State holds the esteemed distinction of being one of only five institutions in Ohio to be recognized as an R1 top-tier research university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. For more information about research at Kent State, visit www.kent.edu/research.

A color-coded figure illustrates that flintknapping injuries are not just limited to the hands.

CREDIT

Kent State University

Photo Caption:
Metin Eren, Ph.D., associate professor and director of archeology at Kent State University, demonstrates flintknapping.

Illustration Caption:
A color-coded figure illustrates that flintknapping injuries are not just limited to the hands.

Media Contacts:
Jim Maxwell, jmaxwel2@kent.edu, 330-672-8028
Metin Eren, meren@kent.edu, 330-672-4363

---

JOURNAL

American Antiquity

DOI

10.1017/aaq.2023.27 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The Injury Costs of Knapping

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-May-2023

Paramount lays off 25% of TV networks' staff, shuts down MTV News on Tuesday as Paramount+  finalizes its merger with Showtime. 

Image courtesy of Paramount Plus

May 9 (UPI) -- Paramount laid off 25% of its domestic TV networks' staff and shut down MTV News on Tuesday as the company finalizes its merger of Paramount+ with Showtime.

Chris McCarthy, president and chief executive officer of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, sent a memo to employees, saying leaders had worked "to determine the optimal organization for the current and future needs of our business."

"As a result, we have made the very hard but necessary decision to reduce our domestic team by approximately 25%. Through the elimination of some units and by streamlining others, we will be able to reduce costs and create a more effective approach to our business as we move forward," McCarthy wrote in the memo.

Paramount also announced Tuesday it would shut down MTV News, which launched in the late 1980s, following years of downsizing.

In January, Paramount revealed its plan to fully integrate Showtime into Paramount+ across streaming and linear platforms later this year with the new network becoming "Paramount+ with Showtime" in the United States. The merger integrates Showtime with MTV Entertainment Studios and creates a networks division that combines nine separate teams into one portfolio group.

Parent company Paramount Global, which had about 24,500 employees as of the end of 2022, had warned there would be staff layoffs. About 10% of Showtime's workers were let go earlier this year after the merger was announced.

Last week, Paramount Global announced worse-than-expected first-quarter earnings due to higher streaming investments and an 11% drop in TV ad revenue. The 11% drop follows a 7% drop for the fourth quarter of 2022. The company also announced a dividend cut to preserve cash.

While Paramount+ credited a bump in new subscriber growth to hits including "Yellowstone," "1883," "Tulsa King," "George & Tammy" and "Yellowjackets," McCarthy blamed the layoffs on "pressure from broader economic headwinds like many of our peers."

Of those peers, Disney is currently cutting 7,000 positions, while Warner Bros. Discovery recently completed a series of layoffs.

Paramount's memo Tuesday informed workers that those whose jobs have been cut would be alerted immediately.

"Today we will notify employees whose positions are being impacted with leaders communicating the news directly to those teams/or individuals. Those meetings will be followed by individual 1:1s with our HR partners," McCarthy said.

"I realize these decisions will be very hard for everyone, most of all, those who will be leaving. It's not something we take lightly," McCarthy added.
A
"To those impacted, we deeply appreciate the passion and creativity you have brought every day. I want to thank you for your many contributions."

Cherokee Nation Creates Historic Impact and Significant Growth in Oklahoma

Yahoo News

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. announces the tribe's more than $3 billion economic impact on the state of Oklahoma. (Photo/Cherokee Nation)

BY CHUCK HOSKIN JR 

 

APRIL 23, 2023

Guest Opinion. In the modern economy, competition for jobs and investment is fierce. Large, globalized companies come and go in search of a better deal. Especially in rural and small-town America, whole regions of our country have been left behind.

In this economic environment, having a partner deeply committed to a specific place is priceless. For northeast Oklahoma and the entire state, Cherokee Nation is that partner.

The Cherokee Nation arrived here almost 185 years ago, decades before Oklahoma was a state, and made this our forever home. From the beginning, we have invested in long-term growth. We do not outsource jobs or threaten to move our headquarters out of state. We are long-term partners with Oklahoma, a stabilizing force in unstable times.

The newly updated Cherokee Nation Economic Impact Report shows how powerful that partnership has become. This detailed study by the Economic Research and Policy Institute at Oklahoma City University shows Cherokee Nation and its businesses have a more than $3 billion annual impact on the Oklahoma economy. The report finds our businesses and government activities are supporting nearly 19,000 jobs.

As a sovereign government with a nation-to-nation relationship with the United States, we also received billions in additional COVID-19 relief funding during the pandemic emergency. Through strategic management of these funds, the Cherokee Nation was able to ensure employees never missed a paycheck, provide direct assistance to citizens, and support many community organizations. The net effect was an added $2 billion economic impact on Oklahoma, which helped communities get through one of the most difficult and disruptive economic crises in a generation.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr.

The growth and prosperity of Cherokee Nation are an example of history repeating itself. We have seen our hard-earned wealth destroyed and our government and people suppressed, but we have rebuilt time and again. History shows that when the Cherokee people are allowed to govern themselves, great things happen.

As the largest federally recognized tribe in the country, Cherokee Nation is committed to growing the economy, lifting our citizens and helping our friends and neighbors. Cherokee leaders in business and government have forged numerous partnerships to bring quality jobs, expanded services, better infrastructure and health care access to our 7,000-square-mile reservation.

We remain the market leader in entertainment and hospitality, and we have grown our federal contracting and other business ventures for a diverse, sustainable economic portfolio. We proudly reinvest our profits in services and facilities that make Oklahoma a great place to live and raise a family, for both Cherokees and non-Cherokees.

We also know we are strongest when all Cherokees have opportunities to bring their gifts and ideas forward. That’s why we recently partnered with The University of Tulsa and StitchCrew on a Native American Women Entrepreneurship Accelerator program offered at TU this coming fall. Deputy Chief Bryan Warner and I are proud to work with such great partners to help tap into the entrepreneurial spirit that we know is there. I believe this program, a first of its kind in this region, will be a model for the future. The wisdom and bravery of Cherokee women have brought us through some of the darkest periods of our history, and they will power our brightest days ahead, too.

We look forward to that future, blessed by the enduring strength of our ancestors and the talents of our rising young people. Together, we lift up Cherokee Nation, our citizens and our fellow Oklahomans. Let’s move forward as partners to even greater prosperity.

Chuck Hoskin, Jr. is the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

AMERIKAN PROTESTANT TALIBAN

Pastors for Trump Preacher Wants God to 'Take Over the Government'

Christian Trump supporters pray near the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Inset, former President Donald Trump is seen. Preacher Sean Feucht said that conservative Christians who support Trump want God to control the government during remarks at a "Pastors for Trump" event in Oklahoma this week.

WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

BY JASON LEMON 

ON 4/22/23 

A popular right-wing preacher said this week at a "Pastors for Trump" event that the people in his movement want to establish a theocracy—saying that they believe God should "take over the government."

Former President Donald Trump has long drawn substantial support from evangelicals as well as other conservative Christian groups. "Pastors for Trump" was launched in December by Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, with the newly formed organization saying at the time that it had chapters in every state and included Christian leaders representing some 200,000 congregants.

Speaking at Lahmeyer's Tulsa, Oklahoma, church during a Wednesday event for the pro-Trump organization, right-wing activist and speaker Sean Feucht explained that their movement is advocating for God to "control everything." He also embraced the label of Christian nationalism, as have a number of prominent pro-Trump conservatives.

"It's all part of the king coming back. That's what we're practicing for," Feucht told the crowd in attendance, according to a video clip first shared by Right Wing Watch on Friday. "That's why we get called 'Christian nationalists.'"

The pro-Trump preacher continued, adding that critics say: "You want The Kingdom to be the government." He then responded enthusiastically, "Yes!"

"You want God to come on over and take over the government?" he asked, again representing the arguments of his movement's critics. "Yes!" he responded with excitement.

"We want God to be in control of everything! We want believers to be the ones writing the laws! Yes! Guilty as charged," Feucht said. He added that, "We wouldn't be a disciple of Jesus if we didn't believe that."

Trump's Firm Support from Conservative Christians

Trump drew the support of about 80 percent of white evangelical Christians in the 2016 presidential election. This trend was repeated in 2020, with surveys and exit polls showing between 76 and 81 percent of the religious demographic backed the former Republican president, NPR reported. In addition to evangelicals, Pew Research Center data showed that a majority (63 percent) of white Catholics who regularly attend mass backed Trump in the last presidential election.

Meanwhile, prominent Republicans, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have proudly embraced the "Christian nationalist" label. Greene has sold shirts with the label as part of her political fundraising.

"There's nothing wrong with leading with your faith...If we do not live our lives and vote like we are nationalists—caring about our country, and putting our country first and wanting that to be the focus of our federal government—if we do not lead that way, then we will not be able to fix it," the GOP lawmaker said at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit last July.

What Is Christian Nationalism?

Paul D. Miller, professor of the practice of international affairs and co-chair for global politics and security at Georgetown University, explained in a 2021 article for Christianity Today that "Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way."

Miller continued, writing that the movement asserts "that America is and must remain a 'Christian nation'—not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future." Christian nationalists, "believe that Christianity should enjoy a privileged position in the public square."

Separation of Church and State in the Constitution

Critics of the movement view it as dangerous and antithetical to the Constitution, which outlines a separation of church and state. This concept is established in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," the amendment says.

The First Amendment is generally interpreted to mean that Americans—lawmakers, un-elected government officials and ordinary citizens alike—are entitled to hold any religious belief they choose. It also guarantees that one particular religion is not favored by the government over another.

Many prominent Trump supporters and other conservatives have been openly campaigning against this established constitutional concept. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in states across the country have been pushing forward laws that appear to challenge the separation of church and state.

Conservative Christians Impact on Politics

In Texas this week, the GOP-controlled state Senate passed a bill that would require the Ten Commandments from The Bible's Old Testament to be displayed in public schools. The law would also set aside time in the school day for prayer and religious study. Laws restricting access to abortion as well as others targeting LGBTQ+ individuals have largely been pushed forward by conservative lawmakers and Christian activists—some of whom openly embrace Christian nationalism.

"When Christians essentially say, we wouldn't be disciples of God if we didn't want political power, I am afraid they are talking about a God they have crafted in their own image, and not the God of the Gospel," Dr. Heather Thompson Day, a Christian author, speaker and associate professor of communication at Andrews University, told Newsweek on Saturday.

She said that the example of Jesus was the opposite of seeking power and control. "They tried to make him king, and he wasn't interested in earthly thrones," Thompson Day said. "There is difference between seeking 'Christian power,' and revealing the power of God through Christians."

Reverend Nathan Empsall, the executive director of Faithful America, told Newsweek on Saturday that Feucht should read the Gospel of Luke and remember that Jesus rejected earthly power when it was offered to him.

"When self-identified Christian nationalist leaders like Sean Feucht say they want a Christian nation, it doesn't just mean they want to seize power for far-right politicians like Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis by any means necessary. It also means denying religious liberty and civil rights to non-Christians, progressive Christians, the Black church tradition, LGBTQ people, women, and other targeted communities," he said.

Trump, who launched his 2024 GOP presidential bid in November, is currently the frontrunner for his party's nomination. DeSantis, the governor of Florida who has championed state legislation restricting abortion and targeting the LGBTQ+ community, has not yet announced an intention to challenge Trump, but is generally seen as his most formidable contender for the Republican nomination.

Recent polling carried out in March by Monmouth University showed that Trump remains the favorite of evangelicals, however. The former president was backed by 44 percent of evangelicals and DeSantis was supported by just 25 percent.

GOD AND COUNTRY

MAGA Pastor Says Christians Must ‘Be the Ones Writing the Laws’

"We want God to be in control of everything!" Sean Feucht declared at the Pastors for Trump leader's church

BY TIM DICKINSON
ROLLING STONE
APRIL 21, 2023

Sean Feucht preaches during a rally at the National Mall in Washington on Oct. 25, 2020. AP PHOTO/JOSE LUIS MAGANA

The MAGA preacher Sean Feucht made an unsettling guest appearance in the Tulsa, Oklahoma church of Jackson Lahmeyer, founder of Pastors for Trump, the leading group of evangelicals supporting the former president’s reelection bid.

Standing on stage at Sheridan.Church on Wednesday, Feucht made a direct call for Christian nationalism — declaring that America should be governed according to biblical law for the benefit of believers, as a way to prepare for the second coming of Christ.

“It’s all part of The King coming back,” Feucht told the audience. “That’s what we’re practicing for,” he insisted, before adding, “That’s why we get called ‘Christian nationalists.'”

Feucht then presented an imaginary dialog, in which he mockingly imitated the voice of secular critics: “You want The Kingdom to be the government,” he said, before thundering a reply in his own voice: “Yes!”

“You want God to come on over and take over the government,” he said, responding, again: “Yes!

Fuecht continued, now using his voice alone: “We want God to be in control of everything! We want believers to be the ones writing the laws! Yes! Guilty as charged.”

Presenting an extreme theology, one that is a far-outlier in Christian circles, Feucht added that Christian nationalism is required of the faithful: “We wouldn’t be a disciple of Jesus if we didn’t believe that.”

Fuecht’s remarks, first highlighted by Right Wing Watch, represent a leap for the preacher. A former candidate for Congress, who once prayed over Trump in the Oval Office, Feucht has long associated himself with far-right lawmakers like Reps. Lauren Boehbert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have both embraced Christian nationalism.

But Feucht has, in the past, been somewhat more circumspect. He has opted for heavenly calls of intervention and guidance in government — praying for the casting out of demons from Washington — rather than advocating for an overt takeover of politics by Christian zealots.

Feucht’s appearance at the church of Donald Trump’s top evangelical cheerleader raises questions about the ex-president’s 2024 campaign, and the role of Christian nationalists in shaping policy for a prospective second term. (Privately, as Rolling Stone has reported, Trump has been calling on religious zealots in his camp to keep a lid on the issue of abortion.)

After this story was first published, Lahmeyer sent an email to supporters titled, “The Rolling Stone Is After Me, Sheridan.Church & Sean Feucht… AGAIN!” In the body of the email, Lahmeyer characterized this article as part of “the constant attack” waged against “authentic Christianity” in America. He called on the faithful “to engage to preserve our Christian Nation” by acting to “make sure that President Trump is elected for a third time in 2024” — a reference to the baseless conspiracy theory that Trump won the 2020 election. Lahmeyer insisted that ex-“President Trump has proven to be a friend of the Church in America.”

Feucht is currently on a fifty-state worship tour to bring his now-open brand of Christian nationalism to every state capitol in the land. That tour has the backing of Turning Point USA, the far-right political shop headed by Charlie Kirk. Its initiative TPUSAFaith has partnered with Fuecht’s Let Us Worship project to stage the Kingdom to the Capitol tour. 

TPUSAFaith’s website tells visitors: “TOGETHER WE CAN RESTORE AMERICA’S BIBLICAL VALUES.”

The tour kicked off in Washington, D.C., last month, with a prayer service in the Capitol rotunda, surreptitiously organized by Boehbert.

WE'RE A REPUBLIC NOT A DEMOCRACY

The Federalist Society Isn’t Quite Sure About Democracy Anymore

After recent Supreme Court wins, the society’s youth arm debates the next stage for the conservative legal movement.


Despite accusations from liberals that the Federalist Society is merely the eggheaded puppet of the Republican Party, many of the society’s members genuinely view themselves as independent-minded intellectuals. | POLITICO illustration/Photos by iStock

LONG READ

By IAN WARD
03/17/2023
Ian Ward is a contributing writer for POLITICO Magazine.

AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas sun was just beginning to rise over central Austin as groups of neatly-dressed law students arrived at the AT&T Hotel and Conference Center, a beige monolith plopped on the southwestern corner of the University of Texas’s sprawling campus. Once inside the lobby, the students ascended two flights of stairs, crossed a courtyard, descended two more flights of stairs and rode two escalators down to a subterranean ballroom, where members of one of the most maligned organizations in American politics were gathering for breakfast.

It was the start of the second day of the Federalist Society’s National Student Symposium — an annual gathering of conservative and libertarian law students hosted by the conservative legal behemoth  — and as I sidled up to one group of attendees, I got the sense that they were caught off guard to find a reporter in their midst.

“People think we’re some sort of shadowy cabal, but all we really do is invite speakers to campus and then go to Chipotle for tacos,” one of the attendees, a first-year law student from Georgetown University, assured me as we drank coffee and picked at mini croissants. “Or least, that’s all I’ve seen of FedSoc so far.”

And to be fair, the symposium — which is part academic conference, part high-powered networking event, and part extended cocktail party — was hardly shrouded in mystery. At a reception the night before, gaggles of fresh-faced law students had sipped frozen margaritas and piled their plates with barbecue from a nearby buffet. Many of the students accessorized their suits and cocktail dresses with cowboy boots and Stetsons. Peals of laughter rippled around the room. It was the type of event where you’d expect everyone to slink back to the hotel afterward to get drunk and hook up, except that most of the students I talked to were either married or engaged. A few of the young attendees had brought their infant children along with them.

But the event, which took place the first weekend in March, wasn’t merely a multi-day schmooze-and-booze fest, either. Built around a series of panel discussions with prominent legal scholars, lawyers, and federal judges, the annual gathering offers up-and-coming conservative lawyers a prized opportunity to rub elbows with the leading lights of the conservative legal movement — and, as an added benefit, to meet face-to-face with potential future employers. This year’s symposium wasn’t lacking in political star power, either, with Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott slated to give a keynote address to cap off the programming on Saturday evening.

“The people I met at student conferences a decade ago are now sitting federal judges,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at the Southern Texas College of Law and a fixture of the Federalist Society speaking circuit. “The people you meet here and the networks you build up over years — they’re very, very important.”  

“The people I met at student conferences a decade ago are now sitting federal judges.”

Josh Blackman, professor, Southern Texas College of Law

This year’s gathering was even more important than most. As the first student symposium since the Supreme Court handed conservatives a historic package of victories on gun rights, religious freedom, environmental deregulation, and, of course, abortion, the weekend offered a window into the shifting priorities and preoccupations of the youngest and most elite members of the conservative legal movement, at a time when the future of the movement as a whole is quietly unsettled. 

The first major clue about those preoccupations came from the symposium’s theme, which the organizers had designated as “Law and Democracy.” As the programming unfolded over the next day and a half, it became alarmingly clear that, even among the buttoned-up young members of the Federalist Society — an organization not known for its political transgressiveness — the relationship between those two principles is far from settled. From radical new theories about election law to outlandish-seeming calls for a “national divorce” the symposium-goers were grappling with ideas that raised fundamental questions about American democracy — what it means, what it entails, and what, if anything, the conservative legal movement has to say about its apparent decline.

‘That Ship Has Sailed’

As the symposium kicked off in Austin, another group of conservatives was gathering halfway across the country in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. where the annual Conservative Political Action Conference was getting underway. The reports coming out of CPAC were worrisome for establishment conservatives: Before a visibly thinned-out audience, the MAGA faithful dutifully leaned heavily into culture war tropes and parroting Donald Trump’s baseless claims about fraud in the 2020 election. 

In Austin, meanwhile, there were no red, white and blue sequined blazers — or at least none that I saw — and Donald Trump’s name went almost entirely unspoken, except for the occasional mention in hushed tones. 

“I don’t know where I’d be if Trump hadn’t won,” I overheard one Federalist Society staffer confide to a colleague as we milled around the foyer outside the main ballroom, apparently referring to the 2016 election. “Probably working some corporate job that I’d hate.” 

The symposium, however, mirrored CPAC’s ambivalent assessment of the future of American democracy — even if that ambivalence was expressed in slightly more elevated terms. 

To those who have followed the Federalist Society closely since its triumphs at the Supreme Court last year, the symposium’s focus on law and democracy may hardly seem incidental. Since its founding in 1982, the Federalist Society has championed “judicial restraint,” the notion that judges should limit their roles to interpreting the law as written, leaving the actual business of lawmaking to democratically elected legislatures. 


During the first weekend of March, 2023, the Federalist Society’s National Student Symposium gathered at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law for the first time since the Supreme Court handed conservatives a historic package of victories. | Ian Ward/POLITICO

That approach made sense for conservatives when they still saw the federal judiciary as a liberal force dragging the country to the left. But now that conservatives have secured a solid majority on the Supreme Court — and voters in several red states have soundly rejected hard-line positions on abortion — a spirited debate is underway within the Federalist Society about the wisdom of deferring to democratic majorities as a matter of principle.

“From our very beginning, there has been an aspect of judicial restraint, and there has been an aspect that it’s judges’ jobs to interpret the Constitution, that whatever it says, that’s what they should do — and those two can sometimes be in tension,” said Eugene Meyer, the president and CEO of the Federalist Society, as we spoke in a back hallway of the conference center. 

I had only convinced Meyer to talk with me after assuring him and his handler that I wasn’t trying to back him into answering specific questions about cases currently before the Court. At Meyer’s urging, the society goes to great lengths to emphasize that it does not take policy positions or weigh in on the merit of individual cases, preferring to present itself as a neutral “debate society” for right-leaning intellectuals. But Meyer — who tapped his foot nervously as we spoke — was willing to admit that the intellectual winds within the organization are shifting.

“I think it would be fair to say there’s been some movement over time more in the direction of interpreting the Constitution and less in the direction of pure judicial restraint.”

Eugene Meyer, president and CEO, Federalist Society

“I think it would be fair to say there’s been some movement over time more in the direction of interpreting the Constitution and less in the direction of pure judicial restraint,” he told me.

When I spoke with Blackman, the Southern Texas law professor, he noted that that tension was neatly captured in two of the headline-making decisions that went conservatives’ way in the last Supreme Court term. In the Dobbs ruling, the conservative majority returned the abortion question to state legislatures, limiting federal judges’ role in determining the extent of reproductive rights. Meanwhile, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen —  which struck down a New York law that set the requirements for individuals to receive a concealed carry permit for handguns — the Court trumped the decision of a state legislature in favor of conservatives’ preferred reading of the Second Amendment. 

But Blackman’s assessment of the direction of the intellectual current within the Federalist Society was even more candid than Meyer’s.

“The norm that judges be restrained and moderate — that ship has sailed,” he said. 

Inside the cavernous ballroom, panelists took turns delivering their remarks from a raised platform, flanked on one side by the American flag and by Texas’s Lone Star Flag on the other. The symposium is hosted by a different law school every year, but there was a tidy irony to the fact that this year’s gathering landed in Texas, which has in recent years seen an influx of conservative transplants seeking refuge from what they see as the insanity and insipient authoritarianism of Blue America.

“Democracy is what philosophers call an ‘essentially contested concept,’” said Daniel Lowenstein, a professor of law emeritus at UCLA and an expert in election law, during a panel on Friday evening. “Differences that seem on their surface to concern the meaning of the word ‘democracy’,” he added, are actually struggles to advance particular and controversial political ideas.”

What democracy does not mean, Lowenstein argued, was “plebiscitary democracy,” or simple rule by democratic majorities. Citing the Federalist Papers — the namesake of the Federalist Society — Lowenstein suggested that governance based on simple mathematical majorities would enable “tyrannical domination of the minority by the majority.” 

“The assumption that only plebiscitary forms [of government] are truly democratic is fallacious, and should be openly and directly contested by those supporting non-plebiscitary positions,” he added. 

Behind me, somebody whispered, “We’re a republic, not a democracy” — a tongue-in-cheek slogan that some conservatives have adopted as a way to slyly signal their approval of minority rule.

Later on in the same panel, Joel Alicea, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, diagnosed the apparent threats facing American democracy today — political violence, abuses of governmental power, and attempted election subversion, to name a few — as symptoms of a deeper malaise. 

“At this point in our society, we can’t even agree whether somebody is a man or a woman, which suggests such a deep level of moral disagreement — and even disagreement about basic notions of reality — that to say that society can form an overlapping consensus is hopelessly naive,” he said. Faced with such fundamental disagreements, Alicea said that citizens have to choose between two approaches: coercion, suppressing disagreements by means of force and intimidation, or conversion, the slow and steady work of persuading people who disagree with you to come around to your point of view. 

Alicea advised the attendees to embrace conversion rather than coercion, but in the question-and-answer session after the panel, an audience member proposed a third option: a full-scale national divorce, of the sort recently proposed by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.


This year’s gathering landed in Texas, which has in recent years seen an influx of conservative transplants seeking refuge from what they see as the insanity and insipient authoritarianism of Blue America. | Ian Ward/POLITICO

On the dais, the panelists squirmed at the invocation of such pedestrian political ideas, and Alicea offered some high-level philosophical objections to the idea that America should fracture into independent ideological entities. But the question seemed to linger in the room: If the disagreements over democratic first principles are as serious as Alicea had suggested, then was the idea of a wholesale political rupture really so radical? 

The possibility of dramatic changes to America’s democratic order also hung over a panel on election law, where Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, briefed the audience on Moore v. Harper, a case that is currently awaiting judgment from the Supreme Court. The case, which arose from a challenge to North Carolina’s redistricting plan, is widely viewed by legal scholars as a referendum on the controversial independent state legislature theory, which posits that state legislatures should be allowed to exert broad control over the execution of federal elections. 

From the stage, Pildes — who testified about the dangers of the theory before the House last year —  seemed confident that the justices were not poised to endorse the theory in its most radical form. But even as the several panelists acknowledged the disruptive nature of the theory, none of them seemed eager to acknowledge that the four members of the Court who have flirted with the idea — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — all maintain close ties to the Federalist Society. 

That omission hinted at a deeper dilemma facing the Federalist Society. Despite accusations from liberals that the society is merely the eggheaded puppet of the Republican Party, many of the society’s members genuinely view themselves as independent-minded intellectuals, committed to the principles of individual freedom, judicial restraint and the rule of law. For the past two decades, the society’s members have pointed to those principles to justify the conservative movement’s efforts to weaken democratic norms and institutions, without having to go so far as to explicitly argue that a minority of Americans should be allowed to impose their will on the whole country. 

But now, as the American right lurches toward a more explicitly anti-democratic position,  the society’s members are face to face with a troubling possibility: that most conservatives couldn’t care less about their high-minded principles, and, even worse, that many of their allies view their attachment to those principles as a quaint — and slightly embarrassing — relic of the bygone era when conservatives still had to be coy about what they actually believed. And whether or not those criticisms are true, there was a definite sense of cognitive dissonance at the conference, where many of the panelists appeared willing to endorse the logic of anti-democratic arguments but shied away from those arguments’ more radical conclusions.

The next morning at breakfast, I met a law student from the University of Tulsa named James Carroll — who was, like me, one of the few male attendees not wearing a suit and tie. He told me he had grown up in Arizona before moving to Tulsa for law school, where he had fallen in love with Oklahoma, married his long-time girlfriend, and set down roots. He had recently accepted a job at the Tulsa County District Attorney’s office, where he had worked as an intern in law school. 

As we got talking, he described a vision of democracy that I hadn’t heard much of from the panelists the day before — democracy as something immediate, something pragmatic, something that people interact with in their daily lives and not just in philosophy textbooks.

“On the national level, democracy’s just a construct, but on the local level, it’s not a construct at all,” he said. 

I asked him what a functioning local democracy meant to him.

“Keeping your community safe, keeping murderers off the street, making sure people who need mental health support can get connected with those services,” he answered. He said his favorite part of his internship in the D.A.’s office during law school had been helping people who were struggling with mental health problems, and that his work on that issue had been part of what led him to join the office after graduation.

“Democracy,” he said, “works best on a small scale, in your community.”  

‘Maybe We Need More Shitposters’

The Federalist Society was founded by law students, and advancing the careers of ambitious, right-leaning lawyers has remained a major element of its work. That work begins on law school campuses, where local chapters host speakers and events, and it extends all the way to Washington, where the Federalist Society has become the GOP’s go-to clearinghouse for major judicial appointments. Although much of the national media attention has focused on the organization’s role in supporting Republican Supreme Court nominations, its presence on law school campuses has also been a source of controversy, especially since the Dobbs decision. Just last week, a Federalist Society event at Stanford Law School made national headlines after protesters heckled U.S. Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee to the Fifth Circuit, causing him to cut his remarks short.

In recent years, however, the Federalist Society has come under fire not only from its traditional opponents on the left, but also from some erstwhile allies on the right. According to these conservative critics, the Federalist Society has excelled at training monkish young lawyers to fill the ranks of the federal judiciary, but it has been less successful at inspiring those same professionals to eschew prestigious clerkships and partner-track jobs in favor of manning the front lines of an all-out war on the American political establishment. 

Or as Theo Wold, a former Trump administration official who now works for Idaho’s attorney general, recently put it during an interview on the American Moment podcast, which is popular with young conservatives, “Maybe [conservatives] don’t need any more well-credential lawyers. Maybe we need more shitposters from Twitter.” 



In recent years, the Federalist Society has come under fire not only from its traditional opponents on the left, but also from some erstwhile allies on the right. | Ian Ward/POLITICO

At the student symposium, none of the panels focused explicitly on shitposting — one breakout session provided an introduction to the Federalist Society’s lawyers division, and another offered advice on “becoming an academic” — but there was a palpable sense that many young attendees were hungering for some juicer political red meat.

“I think the students wanted it to be fierier than it was,” Carroll said, reflecting on the first panel. 

That hunger is partly a function of the iconoclastic energies that Trump introduced into the American right, and partly a function of generational divides within the conservative legal movement itself.

“I think the older generations had been beaten so many times that they felt sort of defeated,” Blackman, who is in his thirties, told me. “They lost Roe, they lost Casey and they weren’t so eager to overrule those decisions, so it was largely the younger generation — who didn’t have those sort of battle scars — who were pushing hard for the court to overrule Dobbs.” 

The students at the conference did get a taste of face-to-face conflict on Saturday evening, when a group of about 30 law students from a liberal student group at UT showed up outside the conference center to protest Greg Abbott’s speech. As the protesters waved hand-drawn signs and chanted “Get that sexist out of Texas!”, a small group of conference attendees gathered inside the hotel lobby to take jeering selfies with the protesters through the glass double doors. 

“I mean, I do support the First Amendment,” I overheard one conference-goer say, clearly relishing the opportunity to own the libs. 

Back in the ballroom, Abbott leaned into the conservative culture war rhetoric, telling the audience that he was on “a recruiting mission” to enlist young conservative lawyers in the fight against “the social justice warriors and the anti-constitutionalists” who are seeking to subvert the rule of law and undermine America’s constitutional order. 

“Those who believe in the rule of law are outnumbered…but I believe we are still winning, because we are on the side of the righteousness,” Abbott thundered. It wasn’t entirely clear what he meant by “winning,” but the audience didn’t seem to mind. They offered up another round of thunderous applause. 

Abbott’s speech went on in more or less the same fashion for the next half-hour, bouncing between punchy anecdotes from his legal career and perfunctory exhortations to defend the country from tyrannical social justice warriors. The audience applauded and laughed through mouths of salad and dinner rolls, and the whole room leapt to its feet as Abbott’s remarks drew to a close.

As the ovation died down, I left the hall for the foyer, where a team of hotel staff was clearing cocktail tables and emptying garbage cans. On one side of the room, a group of women in evening gowns took pictures in front of a FedSoc-branded backdrop. At the other, a group of men gathered around a table for a drink.

As I made my way to the bar, the men raised their glasses for a toast. 

“To America,” said one of them. 

“To America,” said the others.

US tribes get bison as they seek to restore bond with animal

By MATTHEW BROWN and THOMAS PEIPERT

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One of the 35 Denver Mountain Park bison stands in a corral as it waits to be transferred to representatives of four Native American tribes and one memorial council so they can reintroduce the animals to tribal lands Wednesday, March 15, 2023, near Golden, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

VIDEO US tribes get bison as they seek to restore bond with animal | AP News

GOLDEN, Colo. (AP) — Dozens of bison from a mountain park outside Denver were transferred Wednesday to several tribes from across the Great Plains, in the latest example of Native Americans reclaiming stewardship over animals their ancestors lived alongside for millennia.

Following ceremonial drumming and singing and an acknowledgement of the tribes that once occupied the surrounding landscape, the bison were loaded onto trucks for relocation to tribal lands.

About a half-dozen of the animals from Colorado will form the nucleus of a new herd for the Yuchi people south of Tulsa, Oklahoma, said Richard Grounds with the Yuchi Language Project.

The herd will be expanded over time, to reestablish a spiritual and physical bond broken two centuries ago when bison were nearly wiped out and the Yuchi were forced from their homeland, Grounds said.

He compared the burly animals’ return to reviving the Yuchi’s language — and said both language and bison were inseparable from the land. Bison were “the original caretakers” of that land, he said.

“We’ve lost that connection to the buffalo, that physical connection, as part of the colonial assault,” Grounds said. “So we’re saying, we Yuchi people are still here and the buffalo are still here and it’s important to reconnect and restore those relationships with the land, with the animals and the plants.”

The transfers also included 17 bison to the Northern Arapaho Tribe and 12 to the Eastern Shoshone Tribe — both of Wyoming — and one animal to the Tall Bull Memorial Council, which has members from various tribes, city officials said.

Wednesday’s transfer came two weeks after U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland issued a bison conservation order meant to further expand the number of large herds on Native American lands. Haaland also announced $25 million to build new herds, transfer more bison from federal to tribal lands and forge new bison management agreements with tribes, officials said.

American bison, also known as buffalo, have bounced back from near-extinction in the 1880s but remain absent from most of the grasslands they once occupied.

Across the U.S., 82 tribes now have more than 20,000 bison, and the number of herds on tribal lands have grown in recent years. The animals have been transferred to reservations from other tribes, from federal, state and local governments and from private ranches.

Tens of millions of bison once roamed North America until they were killed off almost entirely by white settlers, commercial hunters and U.S. troops. Their demise devastated Native American tribes across the continent that relied on bison and their parts for food, clothing and shelter.

The animals transferred to the tribes Wednesday descend from the last remnants of the great herds. They were under care of the Denver Zoo and kept in a city park before being moved to foothills west of Denver in 1914.

Surplus animals from the city’s herd were for many years auctioned off, but in recent years city officials began transferring them to tribes instead, said Scott Gilmore, deputy executive director of Denver Parks and Recreation.

Gilmore said the land acknowledgement statement read out loud during Wednesday’s ceremony underscored the historical importance of the area to the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute and dozens of other tribes that once lived in the area. But he added those were just “words on a piece of paper.”

“What we’re doing is putting action to those words for Indigenous people. Buffalo are part of the land, they are part of their family,” Gilmore said. “They are taking their family members back to their ancestral home.”

To date, 85 bison from Denver have been transferred to tribes and tribal organizations. City officials said the shipments will continue through 2030.

___

Brown reported from Billings, Montana.

‘Shut your mouth’: GOP senator clashes with union leader during hearing

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien

Karl Evers-Hillstrom
Wed, March 8, 2023

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien got into a heated argument with Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) during a Wednesday Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on union busting tactics.

O’Brien told Mullin he was “out of line” after the GOP senator said that the union leader was “sucking the paycheck” out of workers to earn his salary, which was roughly $193,000 in 2019.

“Don’t tell me I’m out of line,” Mullin responded. “You need to shut your mouth.”

Mullin, who owned non-union plumbing companies before selling his majority stakes in 2021, accused union leaders of engaging in intimidation tactics in an effort to unionize his company so they could pay themselves “exorbitant” salaries.

“We hold greedy CEOs like yourself accountable,” O’Brien responded. “You want to attack my salary, I’ll attack yours. What did you make when you owned your company?”

Mullin — who had a net worth ranging between $31.6 million and $75.6 million in 2020, according to personal financial disclosures analyzed by Oklahoma newspaper Tulsa World — said that he kept his salary to around $50,000 to invest more money into his company.

“You mean you hid money,” O’Brien said, prompting visible outrage from Mullin.

Mullin finished his remarks by stating that he’s “not anti-union” but believes that workers shouldn’t have to pay union dues if they don’t want to. 

DUES ARE THE BEST TAX BREAK WORKERS GET

In 2013, the Office of Congressional Ethics alleged that then-Rep. Mullin received more than $600,000 in outside income from his companies, which is well above the congressional limit. The House Ethics Committee closed its investigation into Mullin in 2018 and ordered him to repay $40,000 to one of his businesses.

Wednesday’s hearing, hosted by committee Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), focused on anti-union tactics by large companies such as Starbucks, whose CEO Howard Schultz recently agreed to testify before the committee later this month after a subpoena threat from Sanders.

 The Hill.

Senator Markwayne Mullin ran a multimillion-dollar plumbing business and claimed he only took a $50,000 salary. His financial statements show otherwise.

Jack Newsham
Thu, March 9, 2023

Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., speaks during a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 15, 2021.Al Drago/Pool via AP

Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin had a heated argument with the head of a union on Wednesday.

Mullin claimed he only paid himself a $50,000 salary and "invested every penny" into his business.

But he'd reported his private-sector salary at $92,000, with another $200,000 in income.

A Republican senator drastically understated how much money he made in the private sector as he argued with the head of the Teamsters union at a hearing in Washington on Wednesday.

While lambasting Teamsters president Sean O'Brien for his nearly $200,000 salary, Oklahoma's Senator Markwayne Mullin claimed that he paid himself a salary of just $50,000 when he ran a plumbing business. But his financial disclosures show his salary was nearly $92,000 in 2012, the year he was first elected to Congress. His total income was even greater.

"What did you make when you owned your company?" O'Brien asked.

"When I made my company? I kept my salary down at about $50,000 a year because I invested every penny into it," Mullin replied.

Like many business owners, Mullin's biggest source of income wasn't his salary. He reported between $200,000 and $2 million in income in 2012 from two family companies, Mullin Plumbing Inc. and Mullin Plumbing West, and another $15,000 to $50,000 from shares he held in a bank.

In 2011, Mullin also made well over $50,000. His salary was over $77,000 and his other income from the same two businesses was also over $200,000. He also reported over $50,000 in rent that year from Mullin Properties.

Mullin's office didn't respond to a request for comment.

Wednesday's hearing of the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which is chaired by the democratic socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, was focused on "Defending the Right of Workers to Organize." Before questioning O'Brien, Mullin described himself as a job creator and said in 2009, a union tried to intimidate his workers into unionizing.

"I started with nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, I started below nothing. And I started growing this little plumbing company with six employees, to now, we have over 300 employees," he said.

O'Brien seemed to enjoy sparring with Mullin on Wednesday. He could be seen grinning at one point, and after the hearing tweeted information from more recent financial disclosures about Mullin's being worth tens of millions of dollars.

The Tulsa World reported in October that Mullin's wealth ballooned to at least $31 million after the apparent sale of his plumbing business to HomeTown Services, a residential heating, air conditioning, plumbing and electrical company.

Mullin has served on Capitol Hill since 2012 and was elected to the Senate in a special election last year. He is a member of the Cherokee nation and the only Native American member of the Senate.

He is known for having clashed with State Department officials in 2021 as he sought to get into Afghanistan on a self-appointed rescue mission.