NEDERLANDS 

LGBTQI+ COMMUNITY LEADS BLACK PRIDE PROTEST IN MUSEUMPLEIN

By Frances Isabelle Marcelis on Sunday, 26 July 2020 - 13:46

Amsterdam flies the rainbow flag in protest against the anti-LGBTQ Nashville declarationPhoto: Gemeente Amsterdam / Twitter

Hundreds of people stood in Amsterdam's Museumplein on Saturday evening in support of Black Pride, a demonstration organized by Black Queer & Trans Resistance NL. Those in the crowd were asked to join the fight for equality for people of color who are also LGBTQI+, and to stand up against the violence that often targets them.

Museumplein. Iedereen op 1,5m afstand én met een mondmasker. #Pride #BlackLivesMatter #TransLivesMatter #BlackQueerTransResistance pic.twitter.com/UK2d276ijM

— Sidney Smeets (@advocaatsmeets) July 25, 2020

The protest also called for full and equal access to homeless shelters and asylum reception centers that are safe for newcomers who are LGBTQI+. "It feels good to be here, as you can see that you are not alone in this fight,” one attendee told local broadcaster AT5.

“It’s 2020. This is a revolution – Trans Black lives matter,” another demonstrator said.

Speakers also delivered messages of remembrance about those in the past who faced oppression. They also spoke against discrimination, institutional racism and police brutality, the broadcaster reported.

Protesters were largely praised for recognizing social distancing advice, and keeping at least 1.5 meters apart from each other.

Pride Amsterdam officially kicked off on Saturday, though nearly all public events including the annual canal parade were cancelled this year because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Another protest in Museumplein on August 1 will focus on violence against diverse genders and sexualities.

"We want the government to do more against anti-LGBTI violence. We want a country where everyone can be openly themselves, whatever your sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or gender characteristics," organizers of next week's protest said.

Met COC-collega’s bij Black Pride NL op het Amsterdamse Museumplein. Solidair voor een wereld zonder racisme en LHBTI-haat, waar iedereen zichzelf kan zijn. #samensterk #AllBlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/W7gq56MGOZ

— Astrid Oosenbrug (@AstridOosenbrug) July 25, 2020

NOW A HOUSEHOLD NAME
Are you just learning about Larry Householder following his arrest? Those in Ohio political circles know all about him.

Today 5:00 AM

Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, seen here in a file photo. (Patrick O'Donnell, The Plain Dealer)

By Andrew J. Tobias, cleveland.com


COLUMBUS, Ohio — The arrest of Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder last Tuesday on a federal racketeering charge marked a stunning fall for one of the state’s most powerful politicians.

Despite his larger than life presence in Capitol Square, he was not exactly a household name until he made national news in his downfall. And to those who have followed his career closely, the allegations against him didn’t exactly come as a surprise.


Householder, a Republican farmer and former insurance salesman from rural Perry County, has ruled the Ohio House of Representatives since January 2019. It was the second time he’d held the job. He served a previous stint as speaker from 2001 through 2004, leaving, as it turns out, amid another FBI investigation that never produced any charges.


Starting shortly after he was re-elected to the Ohio House in November 2016, he engineered an impressive political comeback, recruiting and cobbling together a coalition of supporters that eventually included Democrats. Federal agents have said his achievement was accomplished through corruption, alleging FirstEnergy gave Householder’s political operation $60 million in a corrupt exchange for a $1 billion nuclear bailout law.

Householder is regarded as charming and a cunning political tactician, often difficult to read and for those who don’t know better, easy to underestimate.

Chris Redfern, a former Ohio Democratic Party chairman who was the top Democrat in the Ohio House during Householder’s first term as speaker, said he wasn’t among the optimists, including within his party, who believed there was a Householder 2.0.

“He’s from Appalachia. He has chip on his shoulder, and wanted to show big city legislators, both Republican and Democrat, what a powerful person he was,” Redfern said. “He did that when he first took power, and now he’s done it again. And he did that by assimilating people, raising an inordinate amount of money in exchange for access, and he was blinded by it. And now he’s in trouble.”

Sandy Theis, a Democratic political consultant who previously investigated Householder when she was the Columbus bureau chief for The Plain Dealer during his previous term as speaker, said the new charges reveal a level of audacity she hadn’t expected.

“Here you have a guy who the FBI took a very, very hard look at and he managed to skate,” she said. “And then he comes back and gets his old job back, he does some things right, and then he puts in place what appears to be an incredibly sophisticated criminal enterprise. That took a lot of thought.”

Householder’s second term has lasted 18 months. It started in a bipartisan fashion, helping Republican Gov. Mike DeWine pass a hike in the state’s gas tax to pay for road and bridge projects and pushing for a budget that raised social-services spending and cut taxes. He pledged to finally fix Ohio’s system of funding public schools, a cause his advisers described as a key motivating force in his desire to get back into politics.

Although there were signs of tension before, this feel-good picture worsened after the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic. After weeks of widespread business closures that aimed to contain the spread of the virus at the expense of the state’s economy, Householder began agitating to re-open the state before DeWine was fully ready.


Gov. Mike DeWine, left, waves alongside Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, right, during DeWine's 2019 State of the State address. (Paul Vernon, Associated Press file)

He emerged as a consistent foil to DeWine on the coronavirus, despite DeWine’s widespread public support. He passed legislation to lessen the penalties for violating public-health orders, prompting a veto from DeWine. Another House bill, blocked by the Senate, would have required state contact tracers to get written permission before conducting interviews with people possibly exposed to COVID-19.

Householder during his tenure also demonstrated a trademark socially conservative streak, combined with a willingness to use his ability to control the state budget as a cudgel. He threatened public-library funding last June over a pair of LGBT-themed teen events at a pair of Central Ohio libraries. And in June, citing his displeasure with how city police had handled protests that led to damage to the Statehouse, he threatened to either cut local government funding to Columbus or even somehow withdraw Capitol Square from the city altogether.

His toughest political victory, though, may have been getting the legislature to approve House Bill 6, which aims to direct $1 billion to two Ohio nuclear plants owned by a FirstEnergy spin-off. The cause is something Householder has long supported, but in this case, it helped raise millions of dollars for his successful campaign to become speaker and build what looked like a permanent political infrastructure.
HB6 was the basis for his arrest last week — the FBI said Householder corruptly traded $60 million in campaign money from FirstEnergy — some of which helped him become speaker — in exchange for the bailout.

An 81-page charging document describes a “pay to play” scheme orchestrated by Householder with the help of two members of his inner circle: Jeff Longstreth, his top political aide and Neil Clark, a longtime Columbus lobbyist who was a close adviser. It also alleges that Householder misappropriated $400,000 in campaign funds for his personal use, including $100,000 he’s alleged to have spent fixing up his house in Florida.

The allegations throw into sharp relief the dark side of Householder people in Columbus have long described — politically ambitious, even ruthless. But his story starts with humble beginnings.
Much of this story was re-written from a cleveland.com profile of Householder from June 2019, a different era when those in state political circles were optimistic about what his tenure might bring.

As a side note, of the people originally quoted in that story — Clark and Matt Borges, a former Ohio Republican Party chairman turned lobbyist who was involved in the HB6 campaign — also were charged last week.

Who is Larry Householder?

Householder, born in 1959, like his father and grandfather grew up on a farm near Junction City, a village of fewer than 1,000 people in rural Perry County, an hour east of Columbus. He graduated from New Lexington High School before attending Ohio University, where he received a political science degree.

He and his wife, Taundra, a public-school teacher, have five sons. A sixth child, daughter Kaley, died in 1992 at age three in a freak accident involving a power window in the Householder family’s minivan.

Householder received his state insurance agent license in 1981, state records show, and founded his own business selling policies for State Farm. He also farmed, and in 1991 bought 100 acres off Township Road 19, near Glenford in Perry County, that he still owns today.

He was elected Perry County commissioner in November 1994. Two years later, he ran for the Ohio House of Representatives and won, defeating an incumbent Athens County Democrat.

Democrats soon began comparing him to another country insurance agent, Vern Riffe, the longtime Democratic House speaker for whom a state office tower is named today. That comparison has stuck.

Householder was an outsider, unfamiliar to then-Speaker Jo Ann Davidson, a moderate Republican from suburban Columbus who was close to state party leadership and remains influential today.

“They wanted him to be a back-bencher when he first got elected,” Jim Trakas, a former Cuyahoga County Republican Party chairman who was among the state representatives Householder helped get elected, said in an interview in 2019, long before this week’s scandal. “He didn’t want to be a back-bencher.”


House Speaker Larry Householder speaks with reporters in his office on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2019. (Laura Hancock, cleveland.com)

Householder bucked caucus leadership, campaigning on his own to get elected to the sixth-highest ranking position in House leadership. Householder drove to personally meet with disaffected House members to ask for their vote.

“I began to realize from their comments that that hadn’t been done - that no one had really sat down and spent much time with them,” Householder told The Plain Dealer in 2000.

“And that struck me as sort of odd, and I thought at the time that there might be an opportunity down the road that I could serve as speaker,” he said.

The problem was that Davidson, who was set to retire in 2000 due to term limits, had her own successor in mind. She wanted then-state Rep. Bill Harris, a car dealer from Ashland. Householder responded by forming a team and recruiting his own candidates for more than a dozen open seats, aggressively raising money to help them campaign.

Although Householder’s candidates overwhelmingly won their races, he eventually struck a deal with party leaders under which Harris would serve as speaker for a year in 2000, with Householder taking the job in 2001.

But circumstances created an opening for Householder — GOP state Sen. Dick Schafrath, a former Cleveland Browns player, wanted to retire from politics. Trakas said Householder found out about it, and helped find Schafrath find a job in then-Gov. Bob Taft’s administration so he could continue to receive health insurance.


Schafrath’s soft landing created an open state Senate seat, to which Harris ended up getting appointed. And Householder was unopposed to become House speaker.


“He’s always been a brilliant tactician and strategist,” Trakas said.

Householder’s tenure

As speaker, Householder, who’d run for the Statehouse on an education platform, in March 2001 introduced a school-funding formula that called for spending an extra $3.2 billion over two years, four times as much as Gov. Bob Taft had proposed. Two years before, the Ohio Supreme Court had found the state’s method of funding schools unconstitutionally relied on local property taxes. The case’s plaintiff, Nathan DeRolph, was a 15-year-old Perry County student.


The proposal was a non-starter due to its price tag, and Taft and then-Senate President Richard Finan killed it.


Later that year, a $1.5 billion budget gap emerged due to a slowing economy, and Householder announced his support for a package of tax hikes to help close it. The next day, Householder moved a package of socially conservative policies, including one bill mandating a “minute of silence” in public schools and another condemning gay marriage.


“There is no vote-bartering going on,” Householder told The Plain Dealer at the time. He said rather that he was trying to keep his caucus happy.


A 2000 Plain Dealer article details some more flexible aspects of Householder’s political ideology, shaped by his experiences growing up in coal country. The article describes Householder’s pro-union sympathies, and his belief that government has a role in helping the vulnerable. He liked to tell how his grandfather, a postal carrier, delivered food to those in need during the Great Depression. He praised the United Mine Workers for improving working conditions in his community.



In this Jan. 12, 2000, file photo, Ohio House Republicans Larry Householder, right, and Bill Harris shake hands after an announcement stating they will split the duties of Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives for 2001 and 2002, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete, File)


In 2003, another budget deficit emerged. Householder that year helped push through a hike in the state’s gas tax, 6 cents over three years, as well as a 1-cent hike to the state sales tax.


But he all the while continued to butt heads with other Republican officeholders, due in part to aggressive fundraising tactics by him and his close aides.

Explosive memo

The situation came to a head in an anonymous letter said to have been penned by a “high-ranking employee of a Republican officeholder.”


The nine-page memo was explosive. Addressed to then-Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the FBI’s Cleveland office, the Internal Revenue Service in Columbus and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, it alleged Householder and two top aides were getting kickbacks from vendors to the House GOP campaign fund.


A three-year investigation, in which bank records for the campaign funds and their vendors were subpoenaed, ensued.


The investigation closed without charges, but months of reports followed describing Householder’s aides pressuring members to donate money, and revealing contracts that paid them exorbitantly to manage party funds and supposedly independent issue campaigns. Private memos written by Householder’s political team and other records were leaked to The Plain Dealer, revealing an unimplemented plan to destroy Blackwell’s career and eventually elect Householder governor. Then-state Auditor Betty Montgomery accused one Householder aide of threatening state vendors unless they donated to a favored candidate.


Even before the scandal, Householder’s personal relationships had frayed with Taft, Finan and others. Jeff Jacobson, a former state senator who’s now a lobbyist, said in a 2019 interview that some found Householder’s assertive, independent style to be abrasive.


“He had a lot of confidence in what he was doing, and he didn’t think his job was to wait on whatever the governor happened to be wanting to do,” Jacobson said. “‘You don’t want me to do this bill? I’ll kill that bill.' ...It didn’t always go over well. It wasn’t just staff he’d get into arguments with.”


But Householder had plenty of supporters, and was seen as someone reliable who could get things done.


"Larry is a very hard-working, loyal guy. I thought he did a nice job as speaker," John Mahaney, a longtime lobbyist for the Ohio Council of Retail Merchants told the Associated Press in 2015. "His staff didn't do him any favors, but he himself certainly was four-square with me. His word was his bond, as I prided myself at having mine be over the years. Also, we're a couple of hillbillies — him from Glenford, me from Zanesville — so we got along."


Householder left office in 2004 due to term limits, abandoning plans to run for state auditor. With the FBI investigation still hanging over his head, he instead ran for Perry County auditor, narrowly winning the November election.


He then was engulfed in local political drama, with a longtime auditor’s office employee emerging to challenge him for his seat.


Householder placed her on paid leave. A former Perry County Republican Party chairman challenged Householder in the May 2006 GOP primary, but lost.


Perhaps sensing defeat in what turned out to be a Democratic wave election year, Householder later that year opted not to seek re-election, conceding the race and leaving politics.


Householder remained in private business, serving on a New Lexington bank board, managing his farm and making investments in the energy industry. His campaign website doesn’t mention his tenure as county auditor, saying he spent the intervening years tending to his business ventures and helping raise his sons.

Return to politics

After spending years out of the limelight, Householder began his political return in 2015, making moves to run for his old state representative seat.


"The issues you hear from about everybody is a return to traditional values," Householder told the Newark Advocate. "They think that government, in particular, isn't doing enough to try to bring back traditional families. Our region has been left out of a lot of success the rest of the state has seen. I felt it was time for me to step up and go back to Columbus."



In this July 18, 2016 file photo, Larry Householder speaks during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Associated Press file)AP


Some of the lingering harsh feelings about his tenure as speaker re-emerged in July 2016 after Householder was selected to commemorate Bob Bennett, the late longtime state GOP chair, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. This angered some Ohio Republicans, including now-Attorney General Dave Yost, who viewed it as a snub to Davidson.


Householder was elected back to the Statehouse in November 2016, alongside now-President Donald Trump. He and his family flew to Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., in a private plane owned by FirstEnergy, which soon helped underwrite his second campaign for speaker.

Familiar playbook

Like he did in 1999, Householder assembled a political team, recruited for open seats candidates who backed his leadership and got to work. He met twice a month with supporting Republicans, which his opponents referred to as a “shadow caucus.” (His political team referred to the meetings by a less ominous name, “Every other Thursday.”)


His resulting clash with state Rep. Ryan Smith, favored by outgoing Speaker Cliff Rosenberger as his successor, saw millions of dollars in attack ads funded by dueling dark money groups, including over $1 million spent in Householder’s primary alone. Tensions between Smith and Householder froze House business for much of 2018. Rosenberger resigned shortly before that year’s primary amid reports that the FBI was investigating him.


Householder saw most of the candidates his team recruited for open seats elected, but didn’t have enough Republican votes to win the speaker’s race. The legislature hung in limbo as neither side was able to declare victory.


But in January 2019, Householder had a political breakthrough, getting labor unions to help broker a deal with Democrats to break the stalemate and name Householder speaker.


After vanquishing Smith, Householder addressed the House.


“Over the last 18 years, either this dais has gotten smaller or I have gotten larger,” he joked.

‘A corrupt bargain’

Federal authorities apparently were playing close attention to Householder’s comeback. The criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday describes recorded conversations between Householder and Clark dating back as far as January 2018. It’s unclear if they were investigating at this time or if someone else was recording them and later provided them to authorities.


Shortly after Householder returned to office, he picked two freshman legislators he helped elect, state Reps. Jamie Callender, of Lake County, and Shane Wilkin, of Highland County, to carry the bailout legislation.


In April 2019, House Bill 6 was introduced. The legislation would raise more than $1 billion for two financially troubled nuclear plants owned by FirstEnergy Solutions, a former FirstEnergy subsidiary. Householder and other supporters argued the money would save the jobs of the plants’ thousands of workers, and secure Ohio’s diversity of energy sources. To pay for the nuclear subsidy, it would tack new fees onto electricity bills, offsetting them by eliminating different ones that funded renewable energy programs.



Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder leaves the Federal Courthouse after he was arrested in a $60 million federal bribery probe Tuesday, July 21, 2020, in Columbus, Ohio. (Jay LaPrete, Associated Press)AP


Although he’d apparently secured the loyalty of the members he recruited, the bill was a tough sell for some. Some conservatives saw it as government intrusion into private enterprise. Some progressives viewed it as an unacceptable rollback of renewable energy standards. Critics on both sides of the political aisle saw it as propping up a failing corporation.


Throughout the legislative process, Generation Now, a political nonprofit the FBI says was controlled by Householder, provided air cover, running ads and sending political mailers pressuring members to vote yes.


But Householder got involved personally, too. One unidentified House member went to the FBI after Clark, the lobbyist closed to Householder, pressured him to vote yes. During the May 28, 2019 meeting, Householder texted the member while he was sitting with FBI agents. After the member refused to change their vote, he responded: “I just want you to remember – when I needed you – you weren’t there. twice.” An intermediary later told the unnamed representative to delete the texts.


After the bill eventually passed, and DeWine signed it, opposition began organizing a repeal effort, a process that involves gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures. Householder and his political allies mobilized an unprecedented, sophisticated and expensive campaign to thwart it. That entailed hiring up petitioning firms to make them unavailable for the opposition and hiring “blockers” whose job was to follow the repeal petitioners and make potential signers wary of approaching them. Some fights broke out.


Nick Everhart, a Republican political consultant who worked in support of Smith’s speaker bid, said Householder is a political operative at heart. He compared him to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Democratic former president and country politician who was a legendary deal-maker in Congress. He said he was surprised about the allegation that Householder misused campaign funds for personal expenses.


“I always took him as being in love with the power game, not in it to get rich, but clearly he was also driven by greed.” he said. “Householder seemed to be driven by being the under-estimated hick from Perry County who came into Capitol Square and beat the ‘experts and insiders’ at their own game.


“At the end of the day I think that operative mentality is what did him in,” he added. “Cleary he had made a promise to FirstEnergy to get it done in exchange for whatever he wanted, and was going to deliver on it at all costs. So instead of being a public servant and Speaker he basically ran point from the inside on a mammoth public affairs and ballot campaign.”


The criminal complaint summarizes the FBI’s view of Householder’s political return. It references FirstEnergy and Generation Now, the political nonprofit controlled by Householder that poured money into his races, promoted House Bill 6 while it was pending before the legislature and through a network of related entities, eventually thwarted a repeal effort financed by natural-gas and environmental interests.


“To summarize, from March 2017 to March 2020, Householder’s Enterprise received approximately $60 million from Company A [FirstEnergy] entities, paid through Generation Now and controlled by Householder and the Enterprise. In exchange for payments from Company A, Householder’s Enterprise helped pass House Bill 6, legislation described by an Enterprise member as a billion-dollar ‘bailout’ that saved from closure two failing nuclear power plants in Ohio affiliated with Company A. The Enterprise then worked to corruptly ensure that HB6 went into effect by defeating a ballot initiative.”


Smith was sidelined following his loss in the power struggle. But he emerged as a vocal critic of House Bill 6, the nuclear bailout he had refused to support. He also didn’t pull punches in his criticism of Householder’s approach to legislating.

Nope, it’s because I didn’t sell legislation. Everybody knows what’s going on here.— Ryan Smith (@RyanSmithOH) May 24, 2019

“Nope, it’s because I didn’t sell legislation. Everybody knows what’s going on here,” he wrote in May 2019.

Smith, who left the legislature last year to become president of the University of Rio Grande in Gallia County, declined to comment this week on Householder’s Tuesday arrest. But a Tuesday tweet offers a window into how he was feeling that day.

It’s a beautiful day at the University of Rio Grande and Rio Grande Community College! @URioGrande #MaskUpRio pic.twitter.com/yRNoDQqO0w— Ryan Smith (@RyanSmithOH) July 21, 2020
“It’s a beautiful day at the University of Rio Grande and Rio Grande Community College! @URioGrande #MaskUpRio” Smith wrote, his face covered by a red scarf.

Corruption scandal exposes a dirty secret: Special interests now rule in Ohio
Today 5:49 AM

Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder heads a legislative session last October in Columbus. In his column today, Thomas Suddes examines deeper lessons for Ohio from last Tuesday's arrest of Householder and four others who were charged as co-conspirators in an alleged $60 million bribery and racketeering scheme. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)AP

By Thomas Suddes, cleveland.com

Ohioans should keep in mind what the alleged $60 million Statehouse bribery scandal erupting over House Bill 6 demonstrates: that Ohio’s General Assembly increasingly stands up for special interests, not the public interest.

HB 6 requires Ohio electricity customers, starting next year, to subsidize the Perry and Davis-Besse nuclear power plants, once owned by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. Without subsidies, according to their owners, the plants can’t compete in the power market. HB 6 also emasculates Ohio’s green-energy requirements. In plain English, HB 6 protects stock market speculators who invested in the two nuclear plants. The Legislative Service Commission estimates Ohio electricity consumers will pay $170 million a year in the new charges HB 6 allows. (This does not appear to count the bill’s separate consumer subsidy for two coal-fired plants, one in Indiana.)

HB 6 backers reply that the bill may actually represent a net monthly savings for consumers because it prunes Ohio’s renewable energy and energy-efficiency requirements. But that’s penny-wise and pound-foolish. Cutting those benchmarks (and subsidizing the two coal-fired power plants) promotes air pollution. And that imposes new costs on every Ohioan’s health.
Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed HB 6 as soon as it passed in July 2019.

DeWine last week said initially there was no reason to repeal HB 6 – its “policy” is good. Maybe due to negative public reaction, DeWine now wants HB 6 repealed and replaced.

People accused of wrongdoing usually offer alibis. Government agencies do, too. It’s only a matter of time before some Ohio pols claim that (but for alleged wrongdoing by Republican House Speaker Larry Householder, former Republican State Chair Matthew J. Borges, Statehouse lobbyist Neil S. Clark, and two others charged in the scheme), Ohio’s General Assembly is basically OK.

No, it’s not OK. It hasn’t been OK for a long time. And it won’t be OK till Ohioans replace the state’s ramshackle ethics, lobbying and campaign finance laws with laws that have teeth.

The legislature also won’t be OK till voters amend the Ohio Constitution to make it easier to place issues on the statewide ballot for up-or-down votes by Ohioans. The relentless machinations of HB 6′s backers kept a repeal effort launched against the bill off Ohio’s ballot.

And the General Assembly must stop starving the already frugal budget of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel. The office of the Consumers’ Counsel represents residential customers when utilities try to raise rates. A legislator who refuses to boost the Consumers’ Counsel’s budget might as well register as a utility lobbyist.

It’s beyond astonishing that Householder and his associates allegedly accepted, in secret, and spent, in secret, $60 million, to help make Householder speaker and get HB 6 passed. That’s roughly $16.5 million more than all the money that Ohio’s 2018 gubernatorial candidates, Republican DeWine and Democrat Richard Cordray, raised for their campaigns. Yet in the 100 days between today and November’s Election Day, some General Assembly candidates may claim that the HB 6 affair is a wild-and-crazy exception to the wise, far-seeing, carefully debated laws that Ohio’s devoted and ethical legislature usually writes.

Any Ohioan who can see, or smell, knows that’s a lie. The General Assembly’s neglect of Ohioans’ needs, in favor of the needs of big business, is so routine it’s seemingly changed what’s considered good news. Consider a recent headline: “Lake Erie harmful algal bloom is expected to be smaller and less severe in 2020.” Yes, that’s good. But would there be any algal blooms worth reporting if the General Assembly stopped kowtowing to fertilizer peddlers and factory farms?

Then consider HB 6′s timetable: It took 102 days from the day HB 6 was introduced in Ohio’s House till the day it passed. But it’s been 8,524 days since Ohio’s Supreme Court, in 1997, ordered the General Assembly to make a “complete, systematic overhaul” of public school funding – and reduce schools’ over-reliance on the property tax. The legislature has yet to do that. Maybe if school districts disguised themselves as utilities (say, “Schoolkids Gas & Electric Co.”), the General Assembly would act.

HB 6′s co-sponsors were Republican Reps. Jamie Callender, of Concord Township in Lake County, and Shane Wilkin, of southwest Ohio’s Hillsboro. But the bill only became law because some Democrats voted for it. Among them: Senate Minority Leader Kenny Yuko, of Richmond Heights, and Sen. Sandra Williams, of Cleveland, and Reps. Terrence Upchurch, of Cleveland; Tavia Galonski, of Akron; John Patterson, of Jefferson; and John M. Rogers, of Mentor-on-the-Lake.

Not that the opinions of rank-and-file General Assembly members necessarily matter to The People In Charge. Consider a conversation last week’s federal complaint reported: “Representative 7” told lobbyist Clark that “Representative 7” couldn’t vote for HB 6. The legislator tried to explain why. “No one cares about your opinion,” Clark replied. Several days later, according to the federal complaint, Clark advised Speaker Householder to kill a bill “Representative 7” was sponsoring.

That’s what can happen when Ohio’s statewide legislative body, supposed to speak for all Ohioans, becomes a troupe of actors scripted by special interests.

Some readers won’t want to hear this, but term limits are a big part of that problem. From Day One, a term-limited General Assembly member’s key personal task is to find his or her next job, not to study or write legislation. And, of necessity, short-term legislators may look to Statehouse lobbyists for information, though lobbyists’ first responsibility is to their clients.

Then there’s the ever-increasing clout of Ohio’s House speaker and Senate president, who’ve become Campaigners in Chief for their party caucuses in recent decades.

Imagine you’re a legislator from Anytown. If your Ohio House or state Senate caucus leader busts his or her backside to fund a campaign to win you a General Assembly seat, you’ll likely vote the way she or he asks on a big-deal bill – or you’ll be on your own.

But on your own, that’d mean you might have to do some real work, even stick your neck out, to get re-elected. Based on the General Assembly’s record this session, that’s not what many of its members signed up for.

Thomas Suddes, a member of the editorial board, writes from Athens.

Republican abuses at the Statehouse run deep: Emilia Strong Sykes

Today 5:24 AM

In this March 5, 2019 file photo, Ohio House minority leader Emilia Sykes delivers the Democrats' response to Gov. Mike DeWine's State of the State address. In a guest column today, Sykes condemns the "dirty politics" revealed at the Statehouse after last week's arrest and charges against Republican Speaker Larry Householder. (AP Photo/Paul Vernon)AP

Guest Columnist, cleveland.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- House Democrats, like most Ohioans, were incensed and saddened last week when federal officials arrested Republican Speaker Larry Householder, of Glenford, for allegedly orchestrating a multiyear, $60 million fraud and racketeering scheme. Similar allegations of pay-to-play tactics rocked the Statehouse in 2018 when then-Republican Speaker Cliff Rosenberger came under a still-ongoing investigation for appearing to accept gifts connected to controversial payday-lending legislation. 

Rosenberger was the first Ohio Speaker of the House in modern history to resign from office in disgrace amid an FBI investigation, and now, just two years later, we’re seeing the same corruption play out with Speaker Householder.

After Rosenberger’s 2018 departure, as a cloud of public corruption shrouded the Republican-led Ohio House, a fractured Republican supermajority was unable to pick its next leader, instead settling for a short-lived leadership team that failed to garner a simple majority of votes in the House — a first in Ohio history.

In this General Assembly, following a 2018 of scandal, corruption and distractions from the issues that matter most to everyday Ohioans, Democrats were asked to make an impossible choice between two Republicans running for speaker.

Neither of them had our full trust. One of them was willing to agree to some terms, including televising all committee hearings and creating a professional human resources position, while the other silenced a Black woman legislator on the House floor and pushed through anti-woman and racist legislation that was eventually vetoed. No one in our caucus was excited about either choice.

Nonetheless, we were also able to claim a seat at the table to pass a tax cut for working and middle-class Ohioans, invest in wraparound services at our children’s schools, and make historic investments in public transit and our state’s crumbling roads and bridges.

But despite the early wins and promise of a new and better Republican leadership, our hopes have been dashed. Larry Householder proved to be a fraud, a continuation of the corruption we have come to know in Republican leadership, and an alleged criminal co-conspirator who subverted the will of the people to gain power, enrich himself and funnel a billion-dollar, taxpayer-funded bailout to corporate special interests.
With two Republican speakers embroiled in FBI corruption investigations in the past three years, we’ve learned a simple truth — that the Republican culture of corruption runs much deeper and is much broader than we imagined.

We now know that a simple change in leadership isn’t enough to overcome the deep-seated notion within today’s Ohio Republican Party that power comes without responsibility, that accountability does not apply to them, and dirty politics come without consequence.

Republicans enabled the corruption by writing an assurance of their absolute legislative power into law, locking themselves in a downtown Columbus hotel suite, known as “the bunker,” in 2011 to redraw district maps to guarantee a Republican stranglehold on power for another decade. These gerrymandered districts — some of the most rigged in the entire country — paved the way for extremist legislation and the kind of corruption we see playing out before our eyes, as the second speaker in three years is under FBI investigation.

Ohio taxpayers deserve better. Our state is in crisis from a global pandemic, an economic recession, record unemployment, systemic racism and extreme insecurity as parents ready to send their children back to school this fall feel uncertain that they can be kept safe.

Last week was a black eye for our democracy, and House Democrats renew our call for Speaker Householder to resign immediately. He cannot effectively lead the People’s House after abusing the public’s trust in such an egregious manner by engaging in the outright pay-to-play corruption that is alleged. We cannot do the people’s work with this dark cloud of suspicion and distrust hanging over the institution. Surely, everyone is afforded the presumption of innocence under the law, but the distraction of his presence lends itself to immediate removal.

Republicans made this mess and Republicans need to clean it up. They must echo our call for the speaker’s resignation. Enough is enough. Ohioans deserve public servants whose priority is to restore the promise of opportunity that has remained out of reach for too long for too many of our fellow Ohioans. We have real work to do. Democrats are ready. We need to get to it.

Ohio House Minority Leader Emilia Strong Sykes of Akron is a Democrat representing Ohio’s 34th District.

WNBA Players Didn’t Kneel During The National Anthem — They Walked Out

“We’re dedicating this season to Breonna Taylor,” said New York Liberty player Layshia Clarendon.

Lam Thuy Vo BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on July 25, 2020

Phelan M. Ebenhack / AP

Members of the New York Liberty, left, and Seattle Storm observe a moment of silence in honor of Breonna Taylor before their Saturday game.

The players of two Women’s National Basketball Association teams walked off the court as the national anthem was playing during a season-opening game in Florida on Saturday in an act of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

At the game in Bradenton, the Seattle Storm and New York Liberty players were also wearing black sweaters with the words “Say her name” written prominently on them, as part of a tribute to Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman whose death at the hands of Louisville police has helped trigger national protests.


Athletes have protested during the national anthem before, but this appeared to be the first time members from two entire professional teams had walked out altogether while it played.

The players’ walk-off was part of a season-long initiative called the Justice Movement that the WNBA and the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) had announced earlier this month. Through a series of coordinated actions, the organizers of this collaborative effort hope “to be a driving force of necessary and continuing conversations about race, voting rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and gun control amongst other important societal issues,” according to a WNBA statement. The two organizations hope to raise awareness through community conversations, roundtable discussions, and podcasts among other initiatives.



ESPN@espn

As the national anthem was played, the @nyliberty and @seattlestorm walked off the floor as part of the social justice initiative.04:03 PM - 25 Jul 2020
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This is not the first time that WNBA players have protested during their games. As ESPN reports, Indiana Fever players knelt in solidarity with NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016 as part of his protests against the police killings of Black men. According to ESPN, the Los Angeles Sparks also walked off the court in 2017 to raise awareness about the Black Lives Matter movement, while in 2016 Minnesota Lynx players wore pre-game warm-up shirts that featured Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in an effort to draw attention to police brutality, according to the Guardian.


There is a long history of basketball players protesting myriad social justice movements, including NBA players who boycotted games to highlight the racial segregation of hotels or those who marched in protests after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

President Trump and other high-ranking members of his administration have castigated athletes who take part in protests during the national anthem.

ESPN@espn

"We will say her name." The @nyliberty and @seattlestorm participated in a powerful moment of recognition for Breonna Taylor ahead of Saturday's game.04:10 PM - 25 Jul 2020
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Earlier during Saturday’s game, the two teams had observed a 26-second-long moment of silence in honor of Taylor — one second for each year of her life.

“We’re dedicating this season to Breonna Taylor, an outstanding EMT who was murdered over 130 days ago in her home,” said New York Liberty player Layshia Clarendon, who is also the first vice president of the WNBPA and is one of the leaders of the initiative. “We will say her name."

Clarendon further noted that the organizations are dedicating this season to the “Say Her Name” campaign which is committed to fighting for social justice for Black women, mentioning other victims, including Sandra Bland who died in police custody 5 years ago.

As is the case for many American sports, the WNBA season was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. According to the Hill, all games for the abbreviated 22-game schedule will be held at the IMG Academy in Bradenton.

The Seattle Storm players won Saturday's game 87 to 71, according to ESPN.


Lam Thuy Vo is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

RIP 

Olivia de Havilland, Oscar-winning actress, dies at 104

IT SEEMS HER PASSING IS APROPOS IN THE CURRENT CULTURAL REVOLUTION AROUND RACISM, IMPERIALISM, COLONIALISM (THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN NORTH AMERICA) AKA ARYANISM & WHITE SUPREMACY
Updated 1:11 PM; Today 1:11 PM


FILE - In this June 18, 2016, file photo, U.S. actress Olivia de Havilland poses during an Associated Press interview, in Paris. Olivia de Havilland, Oscar-winning actress has died, aged 104 in Paris, publicist says Sunday July 26, 2020. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)AP

By Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — Olivia de Havilland, the doe-eyed actress beloved to millions as the sainted Melanie Wilkes of “Gone With the Wind,” but also a two-time Oscar winner and an off-screen fighter who challenged and unchained Hollywood’s contract system, died Sunday at her home in Paris. She was 104.

Havilland, the sister of fellow Oscar winner Joan Fontaine, died peacefully of natural causes, said New York-based publicist Lisa Goldberg

De Havilland was among the last of the top screen performers from the studio era, and the last surviving lead from “Gone With the Wind,” an irony, she once noted, since the fragile, self-sacrificing Wilkes was the only major character to die in the film. The 1939 epic, based on Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling Civil War novel and winner of 10 Academy Awards, is often ranked as Hollywood’s box office champion (adjusting for inflation), although it is now widely condemned for its glorified portrait of slavery and antebellum life.


The pinnacle of producer David O. Selznick’s career, the movie had a troubled off-screen story.


Three directors worked on the film, stars Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable were far more connected on screen than off and the fourth featured performer, Leslie Howard, was openly indifferent to the role of Ashley Wilkes, Melanie’s husband. But de Havilland remembered the movie as “one of the happiest experiences I’ve ever had in my life. It was doing something I wanted to do, playing a character I loved and liked.”


During a career that spanned six decades, de Havilland also took on roles ranging from an unwed mother to a psychiatric inmate in “The Snake Pit,” a personal favorite. The dark-haired De Havilland projected both a gentle, glowing warmth and a sense of resilience and mischief that made her uncommonly appealing, leading critic James Agee to confess he was “vulnerable to Olivia de Havilland in every part of my being except the ulnar nerve.”


She was Errol Flynn’s co-star in a series of dramas, Westerns and period pieces, most memorably as Maid Marian in “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” But De Havilland also was a prototype for an actress too beautiful for her own good, typecast in sweet and romantic roles while desiring greater challenges.


Her frustration finally led her to sue Warner Bros. in 1943 when the studio tried to keep her under contract after it had expired, claiming she owed six more months because she had been suspended for refusing roles. Her friend Bette Davis was among those who had failed to get out of her contract under similar conditions in the 1930s, but de Havilland prevailed, with the California Court of Appeals ruling that no studio could extend an agreement without the performer’s consent.


The decision is still unofficially called the “De Havilland law.”


De Havilland went on to earn her own Academy Award in 1946 for her performance in “To Each His Own,” a melodrama about out-of-wedlock birth. A second Oscar came three years later for “The Heiress,” in which she portrayed a plain young homebody (as plain as it was possible to make de Havilland) opposite Montgomery Clift and Sir Ralph Richardson in an adaptation of Henry James’ “Washington Square.” In 2008, de Havilland received a National Medal of Arts and was awarded France’s Legion of Honor two years later.


She was also famous, not always for the better, as the sister of Fontaine, with whom she had a troubled relationship. In a 2016 interview, de Havilland referred to her late sister as “Dragon Lady” and said her memories of Fontaine, who died in 2013, were “multi-faceted, varying from endearing to alienating.”


“On my part, it was always loving, but sometimes estranged and, in the later years, severed,” she said. “Dragon Lady, as I eventually decided to call her, was a brilliant, multi-talented person, but with an astigmatism in her perception of people and events which often caused her to react in an unfair and even injurious way.”


De Havilland once observed that Melanie Wilkes’ happiness was sustained by a loving, secure family, a blessing that eluded the actress even in childhood.


She was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, the daughter of a British patent attorney. Her parents separated when she was 3, and her mother brought her and her younger sister Joan, to Saratoga, California. De Havilland’s own two marriages, to Marcus Goodrich and Pierre Galante, ended in divorce.


Her acting ambitions dated back to stage performing at Mills College in Oakland, California. While preparing for a school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she went to Hollywood to see Max Reinhardt’s rehearsals of the same comedy. She was asked by to read for Hermia’s understudy, stayed with the production through her summer vacation and was given the role in the fall.


Warner Bros. wanted stage actors for their lavish 1935 production and chose de Havilland to co-star with Mickey Rooney, who played Puck.


“II wanted to be a stage actress,” she recalled. “Life sort of made the decision for me.”


She signed a five-year contract with the studio and went on to make “Captain Blood,” “Dodge City” and other films with Flynn, a hopeless womanizer even by Hollywood standards.


“Oh, Errol had such magnetism! There was nobody who did what he did better than he did,” said de Havilland, whose bond with the dashing actor remained, she would insist, improbably platonic. As she once explained, “We were lovers together so often on the screen that people could not accept that nothing had happened between us.”


She did date Howard Hughes and James Stewart and had an intense affair in the early ’40s with John Huston. Their relationship led to conflict with Davis, her co-star for the Huston-directed “In This Our Life”; Davis would complain that de Havilland, a supporting actress in the film, was getting greater and more flattering time on camera.


De Havilland allegedly never got along with Fontaine, a feud magnified by the 1941 Oscar race that placed her against her sister for best actress honors. Fontaine was nominated for the Hitchcock thriller “Suspicion” while de Havilland was cited for “Hold Back the Dawn, a drama co-written by Billy Wilder and starring de Havilland as a school teacher wooed by the unscrupulous Charles Boyer.


Asked by a gossip columnist if they ever fought, de Havilland responded, “Of course, we fight. What two sisters don’t battle?” Like a good Warner Bros soap opera, their relationship was a juicy narrative of supposed slights and snubs, from de Havilland reportedly refusing to congratulate Fontaine for winning the Oscar to Fontaine making a cutting crack about de Havilland’s poor choice of agents and husbands.


Though she once filmed as many as three pictures a year, her career slowed in middle age. She made several movies for television, including “Roots” and “Charles and Diana,” in which she portrayed the Queen Mother. She also co-starred with Davis in the macabre camp classic “Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte” and was menaced by a young James Caan in the 1964 chiller “Lady in a Cage,” condemning her tormenter as “one of the many bits of offal produced by the welfare state.”


In 2009, she narrated a documentary about Alzheimer’s, “I Remember Better When I Paint.” Catherine Zeta-Jones played de Havilland in the 2017 FX miniseries about Davis and Joan Crawford, but de Havilland objected to being portrayed as a gossip and sued FX. The case was dismissed.


Despite her chronic stage fright, she did summer stock in Westport, Connecticut, and Easthampton, New York. Moviemaking, she said, produced a different kind of anxiety: “The first day of making a film I feel, `Why did I ever get mixed up in this profession? I have no talent; this time they’ll find out.‘”


___


Italie reported from New York. Former Associated Press Writer Dolores Barclay contributed to this report.

Akron Black Lives Matter leader arrested by police during protest at grocery store
Updated 10:41 AM; Today 10:41 AM

Akron police arrested the leader of a Black Lives Matter protest of a grocery store.

By Adam Ferrise, cleveland.com


AKRON, Ohio — Akron police on Saturday arrested an organizer of a Black Lives Matter protest of a grocery store.

Dirshawn Mansfield, 29, was released from the Summit County Jail about an hour after his arrest. He is charged with three misdemeanors— criminal trespass, obstructing official business and disorderly conduct.

He is scheduled for arraignment on Monday in Akron Municipal Court.

Mansfield said in a video he posted on Facebook prior to his arrest that he organized the protest at Marc’s grocery store on East Waterloo Road near Glenmount Avenue after store managers refused to allow an employee to wear a face mask that said “Black Lives Matter” on it.

Neither Mansfield nor Marc’s immediately responded to messages seeking comment.

A group of about 20 protesters gathered in front of the grocery store about noon, according to Akron police spokesman Lt. Michael Miller.

Miller said officers told the protestors that they could not protest on private property and directed the group to several places they could protest. Miller said officers waited for some time for the protestors to move to a different area but they didn’t.

The officers went to arrest Mansfield, who ran several blocks before officers caught up to him, Miller said. After the arrest, the protestors left. No one else was arrested, Miller said.

Protestors then went to the Summit County Jail and protested until Mansfield was released, according to the Akron Beacon Journal.

CONSERVATIVE MEDIA SEIZES ON PORTLAND-IS-BURNING NARRATIVE

And, of course, Trump is watching! But The Oregonian notes that the tensest protests are happening within about a dozen blocks, as city residents witness “dogs playing and people picnicking.”


BY CALEB ECARMA JULY 20, 2020

Black Lives Matter protesters gather in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center in Portland on July 17, 2020.BY ANKUR DHOLAKIA/AF

According to conservative-media networks, Portland is a city engulfed in “riots” and “unrest,” where it’s “unclear how long this violence will last.” Their most important viewer, Donald Trump, describes Portland as “totally out of control” and progressively crumbling after “50 days of anarchy,” claims the president cited while justifying his decision to dispatch federal agents into the city who have detained protesters and packed them into unmarked civilian vans.
But this right-wing media—and thus, Trump co-opted—narrative of a disorderly Portland on fire ever since daily protests in the city broke out in response to Minneapolis police killing George Floyd is receiving significant pushback from local media outlets and area residents who are witnessing firsthand the city’s goings-on. The Oregonian noted in a weekend report that while tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters have taken to the streets throughout the past 54 days, the largest of those anti-racist demonstrations have remained peaceful. “National media reports, particularly those published by right-wing outlets,” noted the paper, “suggest a vastly different version of how safe it is for children and families to stroll through downtown Portland.”

The smaller part of the protests that networks like Fox News and One America News have latched onto involves a 12-block area around the Multnomah County Justice Center and a federal courthouse, The Oregonian notes, where a reported couple hundred mostly young protesters gather to stage a nightly showing against police. Much of the “violence” cited by Homeland Security in a press release last week explaining the department’s presence in Portland occurred during these standoffs, with graffiti being the main offense during the early days of the protests. To keep protesters away from the Justice Center, a chain-link fence was erected to divide a park where groups form at night and the building’s property. At times, in response to protesters casting small items over the barricade like plastic water bottles, open cans of alcoholic seltzer, and even donuts, police on the other side have unleashed tear gas and “less lethal” projectiles into the crowd.


At their most dangerous, on at least one occasion, the protests around the Justice Center have seen police reportedly firing off nearly every kind of crowd control munition at their disposal while protesters countered with fireworks. In an interview with the New York Times, Robert Evans, a journalist based in Portland who has been covering the protests, recounted such a situation that happened on July 4. “It started as drunken party, more or less. At random, cops began shooting into the crowd. Protesters coalesced around the idea of firing commercial-grade fireworks into the Justice Center and Federal Courthouse,” he told the Times. “You had law enforcement firing rubber bullets, foam bullets, pepper balls and tear gas as crowds circled in around the courthouse firing rockets into the side of the building. That went on for a shocking length of time—there was this running three-hour street battle.”



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Overall, however, these skirmishes have remained relatively small and isolated when compared to the nationwide unrest that broke out in the days that immediately followed Floyd’s death. But footage of those few blocks in downtown Portland has become a go-to segment at Fox News, which, in mid June, resorted to replaying the same May footage of the Minneapolis police precinct burning when its hosts apparently ran out of new material to portray American cities as perpetually on fire.

“Unrest across America all weekend: riots in Portland, violent protests in Seattle,” said Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Monday morning. “Portland’s mayor demanding federal troops leave, despite the violence. This as calls to defund the police continue while crime rises in major cities across the country.” Later in the day on the network, Katie Pavlich, a Fox News contributor, pointed to the federal courthouse in Portland while insisting that the roving squads of federal agents are necessary for its protection against “the anarchists [surrounding] the building.” During the same segment, Fox News’s Carley Shimkus lauded the unidentifiable Homeland Security officers for “trying to keep the community safe” and said that Portland mayor Ted Wheeler’s opposition to their presence “makes the situation totally dangerous and entirely out of control.” The same hyperbolic imagery has been cited on the network’s non-opinion side, as a Fox News headline on Friday read, “Portland protesters flood police precinct, chant about burning it down,” and corespondent Christina Coleman said on Sunday that “it is unclear how long all of this violence will last.”

Alternatively, a reporter from The Oregonian called on people living in Portland to describe what they’re actually seeing on a day-to-day basis. One person replied by saying there “ain’t nothing ‘under siege,’” as they are witnessing “dogs playing and people picnicking” and that they attended “a farmer’s market in the park.” Other locals shared images including a neighborhood gardening project and elephants at the Oregon Zoo enjoying a bath on a summer day.

“PEOPLE ARE FED UP WITH THIS LEVEL OF VIRTUE SIGNALING”: CORPORATE AMERICA IS IN A P.R. MELTDOWN OVER THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT

“Companies are panicking because they don’t know what to do,” says one source. “And a lot of times when people don’t know what to do, they don’t do anything.”


BY JESSICA CAMILLE AGUIRRE JULY 22, 2020

BY BILL TOMPKINS/GETTY IMAGES.
In early June, the artist Shantell Martin received an email from the McCann ad agency asking her to paint a mural in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The mural was supposed to go on the boards covering the storefront of McCann’s client Microsoft, and the agency wanted the work done within days, “while the protests are still relevant.” Instead, Martin found out that other Black artists had also been approached by the agency, and together they published a statement excoriating the shortsightedness of a branding strategy that considered the protests—and, by extension, their concerns—to have an expiration date. (Both Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, and Harris Diamond, head of McCann, apologized to Martin on Twitter.) For a storied agency the message was a rare fumble, but it was symptomatic of the kind of P.R. failures that have stressed out executives and dogged much of the communications industry in the weeks since George Floyd’s killing.

As protests against police brutality and systemic racism swell across the country, corporate America has scrambled to address what has become a national reckoning. In public, major brands have issued statements proclaiming solidarity with Black Lives Matter, to questionable effect. In private, executives have fretted about how to position their companies publicly and address their employees internally. In some cases, that worry has been so extreme that it has led to inaction as corporate leaders balk at making a misstep or putting themselves in an awkward position.

With leadership often out of practice with having conversations about race, not to mention taking real steps to address problems, turmoil has beset the boardrooms. “There’s a sense of panic because of the temperature of our country right now,” said Alexis Davis Smith, president and CEO of Atlanta–based PRecise Communications. “Companies are panicking because...they don’t know what to do. And a lot of times when people don’t know what to do, they don’t do anything.”


Across the P.R. industry, messaging that leverages the national conversation around social issues has become de rigueur, to mixed effect. Go to any corporate social media account, and the replies to bland statements in support of Black Lives Matter are eviscerating. That has put executives on edge about stewarding their companies through. “Clients come to us with examples, like, how do we be like these people and not like these?” said LaTricia Woods, founder and president of Mahogany Xan Communications. “Brands are watching other brands and companies are watching other companies to see who’s doing it right, who’s making missteps and how they can avoid it, because everybody wants to be right and nobody wants to step into a minefield.”

There’s also “the brand legacy element,” explained a strategist at a boutique employee-communications agency. “Because when you have a larger brand that’s been around, say, over 100 years, so much of the fear is rooted in being one of the people at the table who made a decision that toppled the legacy and history of the company.” Some of the companies that the strategist’s agency works with have tried to start a conversation internally, holding focus groups or listening circles to understand how their own workplace cultures affect employees of color—only to stall with results, unsure of how to begin making systemic changes that could topple power structures established over decades.

Given the Black Lives Matter movement’s focus on flushing out the rot of systematic oppression, though, the biggest minefields have arisen from the dissonance between statements and internal practices. When Adidas put out messages of support for the movement, the company had to take a step back after some employees spoke out about the lack of diversity in an organization that actively courts Black and brown consumers. Eventually, Adidas renewed its statement with concrete promises to address internal inequalities and invest in Black communities.

“People are really fed up with this level of virtue signaling that we’re seeing in corporate America right now. Your CEO can put out a beautifully written statement on why Black lives matter, but if the organization isn’t actually backing that up with the way that it behaves on a daily basis, then it’s kind of bullshit,” the strategist said. For many brands, the internal reckoning starts with leadership. Roger Miller, who helps run a peer-mentoring organization for industry executives called Vistage, said white leaders he works with see starting conversations about racial justice as fraught with risk. “These CEOs, all of them are white, most of them are men,” Miller said. “Most of them don’t have close connections with the Black community and they’re uncomfortable having these conversations. And they’re at risk of saying the wrong thing, even though their intent is 100% good.”

The problem isn’t confined to brands, either, but extends to the very P.R. and communications agencies that are supposed to be crafting their messages—as in the case of McCann, which the artists’ statement blamed for exactly the kind of “telling and dangerous opportunism” that other brands have exhibited to disastrous effect. “What you have is two sides of the coin—agencies and in-house communications people, and most people are white,” said Linda Dunbar, chief executive of communications firm Diversity Decoder. “So they’re doubly shocked. George Floyd is such a terrible thing, but I’ve been watching this for 20, 30 years. I watched my parents watch this. It’s terrible and horrible, but it’s not new. I think that’s what people are struggling with; they thought this was new, and now they’re finding out this isn’t really new at all. And they’ve been wondering, where have they been all this time?”

“TRUMP COULD NOT BE MORE ON THE WRONG SIDE”: NEW POLL SHOWS TRUMP’S BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTEST RESPONSE COULD COST HIM 2020

Exclusive polling suggests the protests changed Americans’ minds so quickly, and so profoundly, that Trump planted himself even further on the wrong side of public opinion than previously understood.


BY PETER HAMBY JULY 24, 2020

BY BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES.

If Donald Trump loses in the fall, the first week of June might have marked the beginning of the end. On June 1, with the country consumed by historic protests against racism and police brutality, some of them violent, Trump decided to position himself as the “law-and-order” president, made clear by his tweets and his now infamous march that evening across Lafayette Square, outside the White House. His path cleared by the National Guard and D.C. police who used chemical agents on lawfully assembled protesters and roughed up journalists, Trump walked across the street to stand in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church for an inscrutable and buffoonish photo op, in which he held up a Bible and said nothing much at all about the cities on fire and the country’s dismal legacy of racism. “We have a great country,” Trump said. “That’s my thoughts.” The moment was an emblem of Trump’s presidency: attention-seeking, bereft of empathy, gut over strategy. It was so embarrassing and borderline anti-American that one of his generals, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley, apologized for participating in the walk and reportedly considered resigning. Like so many of Trump’s decisions, it was a sugar-high tactic designed to please his base and get TV ratings, with almost no thought about the larger sweep of American history, let alone his reelection campaign.

Politically, it was a disaster. In the days that followed, Trump’s approval ratings tumbled to their lowest point in over a year, and their lowest point of the coronavirus pandemic, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker. The first two weeks of June also saw Trump fall even further behind his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Before June, Biden steadily held a four-to-six-point lead over Trump in national polls, fueled in part by massive support among the independent voters whom Trump won in 2016. Shortly after Lafayette Square, though, Biden began to open up an even bigger lead, a nine-point average lead over the president, with a Washington Post–ABC News poll this week showing Biden winning by as many as 15 points.



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Trump’s reaction to the protests was not the only reason for his summer collapse. Most pollsters say that Trump’s continuing inability to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, and the economic havoc that’s come with it, has been the dominant factor. And last week, for the first time, polls began to show Biden beating Trump on the question of who would best handle the economy, the only decent card left in Trump’s deck. But if Trump loses in November, the nationwide protests against racism and police brutality that erupted in early June have to be seen as a significant breaking point. Not just because they threw an exhausted nation into even more chaos, and not just because they forced Trump into the most astoundingly dumb photo op in presidential history, surpassing George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished!” blunder. In fact, new polling and research provided to Vanity Fair suggests that the protests themselves changed America’s opinions about race so quickly, and so profoundly, that Trump unknowingly planted himself even further on the wrong side of public opinion than previously understood.


Shortly after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, the Democratic research firm Avalanche went into nine battleground states—Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, and Pennsylvania—to measure how segments of Americans were reacting to the protests. Unlike most pollsters at the time, Avalanche surveyed two large back-to-back samples of 6,986 registered and unregistered total voters—one on June 1 and a second on June 10 and 11—allowing it to track how sentiments changed during what might have been the most consequential chapter of the protests. Like most polls, Avalanche found widespread support for the protests by June 11, with 68% of respondents saying the protesters were “completely right” or “somewhat right.” But rather than measuring responses by self-identified partisanship—Democrat, Republican, independent—Avalanche measured by vote choice. It organized respondents into five segments: Vote Trump, Lean Trump, Mixed Feelings, Lean Biden, and Vote Biden.

Avalanche found resounding support for the protests not just among Biden supporters, but among persuadable voters and even soft Trump supporters. The hardcore Vote Trump respondents were against the protests, with 56% opposing them. But among the softer Lean Trump set, an eye-opening 59% said the protesters were “completely right” or “somewhat right”—probably not what the president had in mind when he commandeered Lafayette Square. And 72% of Americans with Mixed Feelings about the presidential race—precious undecided voters—said the protesters were right too. “There’s not a lot of issues where you get even a strong majority of Americans on the same page,” said Michiah Prull, the CEO of Avalanche. “It speaks to that historic moment, and it speaks to a degree of national alignment on something that's honestly pretty rare these days.”


But just as remarkable were the shifts among those persuadables in the 10 days between June 1 and June 11, a window that opened with burning cities and Trump’s march to St. John’s Church, but concluded with mostly peaceful demonstrations nationwide. During that period Avalanche found that support for the protests grew 10 points among Mixed Feelings voters, 14 points among Lean Biden voters, and a head-spinning 25 points among Lean Trump voters. “I had never in my research career seen public opinion shift on the scale in this time frame,” Prull said. “When we look at this from electoral context, when you see a 25-point swing in Lean Trump supporters from disapproving of the protests to at least somewhat agreeing with them, that’s just a scale of public opinion shift you don’t see in this line of work very often.”

The reasons persuadables moved from opposing to supporting the protests, Prull said, can mostly be attributed to the demonstrations growing and becoming largely peaceful by their second week, with human stories of everyday police brutality saturating the media environment. Trump’s strongman performance on June 1 did almost nothing to turn public opinion against the demonstrations. Instead it likely backfired. “Between those two dates, the big driver that I see is the protests becoming larger and even more peaceful each day,” Prull told me. “The story was being told by people who are being hurt by police every day, and the empathy with that, and frankly the reasonableness of that, was breaking through. And then the president tear-gassing protestors outside the White House lawn, I think, was a nontrivial part of this. You had the draconian response of the government, and then the protests just seemed even more reasonable when it was a bunch of regular people being tear-gassed in the middle of Washington D.C. for the sake of a photo op.”

Avalanche’s data bear this out. The firm marries polling with what it calls “deep listening surveys,” using a language-processing system that analyzes written responses to open-ended “listening” questions, as a way to extract more depth and texture about public opinion. They operate like focus groups at scale, performed online. The purpose, Prull told me last year, is to get beyond hard numbers and better understand the emotional undercurrents of politics. “We, as Democrats, have a really bad habit of bringing facts to an emotional battle and getting our asses kicked,” Prull said. In the case of the protests, Avalanche’s survey asked if protesters were doing the “right thing or the wrong thing,” with the responses analyzed using the firm’s listening tools. The idea that the protesters were “completely right” was most pronounced among Vote Biden respondents, Black respondents, and young Americans between 18-35. Those supporters described the protests using terms related to ending police brutality, achieving justice, and the urgent need to address racism.


The persuadables—the Lean Trump and Mixed Feelings segments—were more inclined to say the protests were “somewhat right,” describing them using hazier terms like “equality” and “change.” But at the same time, they expressed unease with rioting, looting, and property destruction. So when the demonstrations became almost completely nonviolent and penetrated even the smallest American towns, public opinion came their way—even among soft Trump supporters. “Even among voters who say they will probably vote for Trump, there are still more than 40% of people who talk about this as being a moment about racial equality,” said Tovah Paglaro, Avalanche’s cofounder and COO. “So when you're talking about what's going on with those persuadable voters, and figuring out spaces where they're more aligned with Biden, for them this moment is about racial equality. And 20% of them also cite that it's time to create change. That's a surprisingly large percentage of soft Trump supporters saying something's got to happen here. They’re saying, ‘I don't like rioting and looting and I'm not crazy about the tactics, but I do acknowledge that there's a problem with racial equality.’ It connects to police brutality and a need for change.”

Beyond the presidential race, the Avalanche survey picked up a treasure trove of detail about the anti-racism moment. As seen in other national polls, the intensity of feeling was stronger among Black Americans, who were more likely to talk about the protests in the context of racial justice and reforming police departments, compared to white Americans and undecided voters, who responded with more abstract terms like “equality” or “opportunity.” “When Black respondents talk about what’s happening right now, their response is twice as likely to be about racism or racial justice as it is about equality generally and good treatment,” Paglaro said. “Fear,” “anger,” and “bad” were the terms most used to describe police among Black respondents, who talked about personal experiences with bias and excessive force. White respondents, meanwhile, were more likely to use terms like “good,” “safe,” and “proud” when referring to their local police. Despite those differences, 75% of Americans in the survey favored some kind of policing reform, with respondents expressing a desire for better officer training, increased diversity, and more police accountability. Among both Black and white respondents, there was almost no support for fully defunding police departments, an idea that turned off the persuadable voter segments. There was even less support for hiring more police and raising officer pay.

But according to Prull, the biggest story of early June was the widespread support that rapidly emerged in favor of the protesters, people of all races and ages, who took to the streets to make a statement about racism in America. The protesters, he said, were winning a values argument with Americans of all races, backgrounds, and political persuasions at the very moment President Trump was trying to paint them as an angry and radical minority. “Trump could not be more on the wrong side of this issue for anyone except for a very isolated group of his base, and that’s what he’s stuck with,” Prull said. “He’s taking a line of messaging that works for 34% of his base in our survey. It’s not even that big of a part of his base. He’s really alienating folks. There’s a compelling argument here that Trump’s negatives can be driven up even further among some of these Lean Trump folks, based on his behavior and relationship with the protests,” Prull said, suggesting that NeverTrump groups like the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump could take up that work.

Yet Trump seems to be doing the work on his own in recent days, by dispatching federal troops to cities like Portland, Chicago, and even Albuquerque to tangle with protesters who, for the most part, have been behaving peacefully for more than a month. As with Lafayette Square, Trump is perversely creating mayhem in the name of law and order, clinging to the apple-pie idea that the “silent majority” of 1968 is still hiding out somewhere. The country will “go to hell” if Biden wins, Trump said this week, as if people don’t understand that he’s the one presiding over the chaos. But if Avalanche’s research is correct, the silent majority of 2020 is firmly on the side of Biden when it comes to issues of race and justice, and its members walked out of Trump’s community theater Richard Nixon impression many weeks ago.

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