Judge declines to drop lawsuit against Trump for using ‘Electric Avenue’

Dustin Seibert
Thu, September 30, 2021,

The former president used Eddy Grant’s song in his failed 2020 re-election campaign

A New York federal judge on Tuesday declined to dismiss a lawsuit from musician Eddy Grant against former President Donald Trump over the use of his music during Trump’s failed re-election campaign.

Trump used Grant’s song “Electric Avenue” in a video he posted to Twitter on Aug. 12, 2020. Following Grant’s copyright claim, Twitter removed the video. The social media site has also since banned Trump, theGrio previously reported.

(Credit: Getty Images)


Grant filed suit in New York last September, alleging copyright infringement. The animated video featured a train with Trump’s campaign logo followed by a small handcar operated by his then-opponent, President Joe Biden, with “Electric Avenue” playing in the background. Trump argued that the copyright was fair use.

“The purpose of the Animation is not to disseminate the Song or to supplant sales of the original Song,” stated a motion to dismiss, The Hill reported. “Here, a reasonable observer would perceive that the Animation uses the Song for a comedic, political purpose — a different and transformed purpose from that of the original Song.”

U.S. District Judge John Koetl issued the order stating that Trump failed to argue that the song, which played over most of the video, was fair use.

“A reasonable observer would perceive that the Animation uses the Song for a comedic, political purpose — a different and transformed purpose from that of the original Song,” the motion reads. “Moreover, in light of the obvious comedic or satirical nature of the Animation, a reasonable observer would regard the Animation as criticism or commentary.”

Grant isn’t the only music artist to oppose Trump’s use of their music – that list includes rock legend Neil Young, John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater fame, and The Rolling Stones, who took legal action to prevent Trump from using their 1969 hit “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Also, the failure to dismiss wasn’t the only recent courtroom loss for Trump: His former mentee Omarosa Manigault Newman triumphed in arbitration after Trump attempted to enforce a non-disclosure agreement against her following the 2018 release of her book Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House. Manigault Newman — who served as assistant to the president and director of communications for the White House Public Liaison Office in early 2017 after being a contestant on Trump’s on his reality TV show, The Apprentice — expressed her joy at the ruling.

“Clearly, I am very happy with this ruling,” she wrote. “Donald has used this type of vexatious litigation to intimidate, harass and bully for years! Finally, the bully has met his match!”

  

‘A Total Clusterf—‘: Oval Office Speech That Sparked Covid Airport Panic All Ivanka’s Idea, New Book Claims

Tessa Stuart
Fri, October 1, 2021

Donald Trump - Credit: Seth Wenig/AP Images

On March 11th, 2020, as new cases of coronavirus were popping up around the United States at an alarming rate, the president, seeking to reassure Americans that everything was under control, delivered a primetime address from the Oval Office. “To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days,” Donald Trump said.

His words instantly sparked a panic around the world. Americans in Europe rushed to airports, worried they would be shut out if they didn’t return home immediately. And that rush would later fuel the outbreak stateside: epidemiologists would later assert that the U.S. outbreak was driven, overwhelmingly, by the European strain — not the Chinese.

A new memoir from the Trump White House’s communications director offers a backstory to that disastrous presidential address. The whole thing was Ivanka Trump’s idea, Stephanie Grisham writes in I’ll Take Your Questions Now. An excerpt of the book, which goes on sale next week, was published by Politico on Friday morning.

Grisham, who describes the Trump White House as “a clown car on fire running at full speed into a warehouse full of fireworks,” served as Melania Trump’s press secretary and later her chief of staff. In between, she worked as the White House’s communications director, a position she likened to “sitting in a beautiful office while a sprinkler system pours water down on you every second and ruins everything on your desk.”

The Oval Office address, Grisham writes, was “a total clusterf— from start to finish because Ivanka and her crew wanted her father to be on TV.”

She recounts that the morning of March 11th started with a Coronavirus Task Force meeting, featuring Covid experts like Robert Redfield, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, and administration figures like Vice President Mike Pence and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin arguing over whether or not to close the border to Europe.

“After about an hour of going around in circles,” Grisham says, “The president told us all to go to the Cabinet Room and ‘figure out what to do.’”

There, Grisham writes, “Ivanka was also doing her ‘my father’ wants this and ‘my father’ thinks that routine, making it impossible for staff members to argue a contrary view. At some point I think Birx decided she’d ridden on the crazy train long enough and excused herself to get back to work. I used that opportunity to leave as well.

“I instructed one of my deputies to call the networks to reserve airtime for that evening — which no one else had even thought to do. Katie Miller, an aide to the vice president, was married to speechwriter Stephen Miller. So she went into Stephen’s office and sat there while Jared Kushner frantically dictated the address to Stephen, who wrote something out. Katie did her best to keep us looped in, sending me updates as she knew them.”

It’s worth noting that, as White House communications director during Trump’s disastrous Oval Office speech, Grisham has obvious motivations for publicly placing the blame for one of the biggest communications blunders of her tenure on someone else. (She writes, “One of my other biggest personal regrets is that I didn’t have the courage to speak out against Jared, Ivanka and Hope [Hicks] about the potential dangers of addressing the nation without any Covid response strategy in place, and what a disservice it could be to the country and the president.”)

But Grisham’s account is still entertaining, if only for the metaphors she uses to describe her time in Trump’s inner circle (like “​​living in a house that was always on fire, or in an insane asylum where you couldn’t tell the difference between the patients and the attendants, or on a roller coaster that never stopped”) and for the brief glimpses into the former president’s inner world.

She writes, for example, that once when she and Trump were sitting on Air Force One, he turned to her, and commented, seemingly unprompted: “Trudeau’s mom. She fucked all of the Rolling Stones.’ (In fact, Margaret Trudeau denied having affairs with any members of the Rolling Stones, but later said, ‘I should have slept with every single one of them.’)”

Grisham also shared that, during her time as communications director, a teenager challenged the president to go vegan for one month in exchange for a $1 million donation to veterans groups. Trump refused, she said, explaining “It messes with your body chemistry, your brain.” Before adding: “And if I lose even one brain cell, we’re fucked.”

An activist who helped organize the search for missing Tennessee woman Desheena Kyle said the attention Gabby Petito's case drew was both a blessing and a 'slap in the face'

Kenneth Niemeyer

Fri, October 1, 2021

Desheena Kyle poses for a photo. WBIR

• The body of Desheena Kyle, a Knoxville, Tennessee, woman who'd been missing for three months, was identified Thursday.

• An activist who helped lead the search for Kyle told Insider that coverage of the Gabby Petito case initially felt like a "slap in the face."

• But Petito's case also helped the search efforts because it provided an example of how a police investigation is "supposed to go," the activist said.

The outsized national attention Gabby Petito's disappearance drew was both insulting and a blessing for a Knoxville, Tennessee, activist who helped organize the search for Desheena Kyle, a woman who'd been missing for three months.

"When we saw that happen it was just like, 'well damn,'" Fahd Wali, who leads a community organization called Protect Our People, told Insider. "It was just like a slap in the face really."

Kyle's grandmother reported her missing on June 28, and the 26-year-old was last seen at her apartment in Knoxville ten days earlier. Community members came together for weeks to search for Kyle until police recovered her body on Tuesday. The manner of death has been ruled a homicide.

Kyle's boyfriend, Joshua Bassett, had been named a person of interest in her disappearance and the Knoxville Police Department told Insider that Bassett is now a person of interest in her death. Bassett is currently in jail facing unrelated probation violation, gun and drug charges, according to police.

Wali said Protect Our People, which is meant to stand in the gaps between the Black community in Knoxville and police, organizes children's programs, gun safety training, and employment assistance. So when Kyle went missing this summer, Protect Our People naturally stepped up to lead the search for her.

Kyle's family had tried to get the word out about her disappearance for months with little success, so Petito's case initially frustrated them and Wali.

"We reached out to the TV station and we got some news coverage on it but you know how it goes," he said. "The light is on for a second, but then they say you know, 'Here comes some more news,' and it's out of the way."

News organizations around the country reported on Petito's disappearance, sparking a national conversation around "Missing White Woman Syndrome." Petito's own father called for more media coverage of other missing persons cases and implored the public to take an interest in solving them.

But Wali said that Petito's disappearance also helped the search for Kyle, because it provided an example of how a police investigation was "supposed to go." In the months after Kyle's disappearance, the community's perception of the Knoxville Police Department's efforts to find her was not good, according to Wali.

"I just know what we see on national TV," he said. "As far as when somebody goes missing, you put a search party out and the community and the family is notified, and that hadn't happened here."

Knoxville police spokesman Scott Erland told Insider the department devoted "hundreds of hours" to the Kyle case before community interest increased. The department spent much of its time searching for Kyle, compiling evidence, and interviewing people for information about the case, he said.

"All that being said, we understand the community's frustration and recognize that the vast majority of the work that we have done on the case has gone unseen," Erland said.

Wali said when he saw how much attention Petito's case was getting, he put out a message on Facebook asking for people to help search for Kyle and got an overwhelming response.

"It just took off bigger than we expected," Wali said.

In his telling, the Knoxville Police Department intensified their search only after the community efforts led by Protect our People ramped up.

"All we wanted to do was put light on it so they could move on it," Wali said.

"We hope with this in the future - and God willing it will never happen again - but if anybody in our community goes missing, Black or white, rich or poor, that they'll get out there and do what they're supposed to do," he added.

Read the original article on Insider

#MMIW

‘If we don’t have blonde hair we don’t get on the news’: Indigenous women say the media not Gabby Petito is to blame for ‘epidemic of violence’ being ignored

Andrew Buncombe
Fri, October 1, 2021

Ashley Loring HeavyRunner was just 20 when she disappeared in 2017 (Loring family photograph)

When Nicole Wagon’s daughter went missing, she did not get a call to appear on Good Morning America.

It was not as though the disappearance of Jade Wagon, who laughed and smiled, was not newsworthy: the 23-year-old mother had vanished without trace, precisely a year after one of her sisters, Jocelyn, 30, had been murdered at home.

And so, in Nicole Wagon was embodied the spectacle of a distraught mother, still grieving the loss of one of her children, while organising the search for another.


Yet, it was a story that nobody really wanted to tell.

“When Jade disappeared, no-one from the media called me. And we mainly organised the search among ourselves, using Facebook, and just going out looking,” Wagon tells The Independent.

“It was only after Jade’s body was found two weeks later, that one of the papers got in touch.”

Lynnette Grey Bull ran for Congress to draw awareness to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) 

Last month, when Gabby Petito was reported missing, and said to have last been alive in Wyoming Grand Teton’s National Park, about 150 miles west of Wagon’s home on the Wind River Reservation, her emotions soared in different ways.

On one hand, she felt for Petito’s family, and understood, at least to some degree, how the young woman’s mother must have felt when she had to register her daughter as missing.

But she could also not help but feel pain and anger, over the wall-to-wall media coverage the case of the missing white YouTuber received, in stark contrast to the interest – or lack thereof – the press paid to the plight of her own child.

Wagon, 51, is one of a number of indigenous campaigners who have denounced what they allege is a systemic discrimination that results in both the police and the media dedicating a fraction of the resources to cases of women of colour who go missing, compared to cases of missing white women.

The stark imbalance, something that was was termed “missing white woman syndrome” by the late Black broadcaster Gwen Ifill in 2004, is all the more confounding, say activists, because women of colour suffer violence, and go missing, at a far higher rate than white woman.

Among women of colour, data suggests that Native American or indigenous women, disappear or suffer violence the most. In Wyoming alone, at least 710 Native Americans went missing between 2011 to 2020, according to a report put out by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Task Force, established in 2019.

It found that 85 per cent of those reported missing were children or young people, and that 57 per cent were female. It found that even though Native Americans account for less than three per cent of the state’s population, they made up 21 per cent of homicide victims.

It also calculated the murder rate for indigenous people was eight times higher than for white people, and six times higher for indigenous women, compared to white women.

Yet, this crisis of murdered and missing indigenous women (MMIW), is not confined to Wyoming. Across the United States, campaigners say Native Americans are killed at disproportionate rates and receive little media coverage.

Some go as far as to say this is a crisis confronted by indigenous communities around the word.

Lynnette Grey-Bull, a member of the Wyoming taskforce, describes the crisis as nothing less than “an epidemic”.

Grey-Bull, a member of the Northern Arapaho tribe who last year challenged Liz Cheney for Wyoming’s single at-large congressional seat in order to raise awareness about the violence, says data shows less than 20 per cent of cases of missing indigenous women over the past decade received any media coverage.

“I think this is an epidemic, because we make up two per cent of of the population, and yet three out of four indigenous women suffer some sort of violence during their lifetime,” says Grey Bull, who is Hunkpapa Lakota and Northern Arapaho and who heads an organisation called Not Our Native Daughters.

“Then, when you consider that 70 per of the violence is carried out by non-Natives, it means that everyone has a role to play in what is happening to our communities.”

Does she think this is case of straight up racism?

“One of the reasons I would offer up would be systemic racism,” she says. “As native people, we already know we come up against racism on a daily basis, and also a sense of not being important. We understand that if we don’t have blonde hair, or blue eyes, we don’t get to make it on the six o’clock news or front page of the morning edition. These things don’t happen for us.”

Jade Wagon went missing on the Wind River Reservation a year after her sister was murdered (Nicole Wagon)

Grey-Bull says that investigators understand the first 24 or 48 hours in missing persons case are vital. And because the Petito case received such huge coverage, it resulted in large members of the public coming in with tips, or posting them on social media such as Tik-Tok.

When Wyoming’s governor, Republican Mark Gordon, established the taskforce two years ago, he appeared to recognise in part the scale of the crisis.

“I believe it is imperative to ensure the public safety of all Wyoming citizens,” he said. “The Wind River Reservation operates under a separate criminal justice jurisdictional scheme – but Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribal members are also citizens of Wyoming.”

The governor’s office said Gordon did not have time for an interview.

However, Cara Chambers, chair of the task force and director of the Wyoming’s division of victim services, says the media had the capacity to cover cases such as those of Petito, as well as the vast number of cases of missing ingenious women.

At the same time, she is not surprised by the way the media responded to the case of Petito. The study her taskforce published earlier this year, highlighted that even when cases of indigenous women did receive media coverage, it often included language and details that almost amount to victim blaming.

“Was I surprised by the amount of coverage Gabby Petito got? No, I was not,” she says. “Because, we know this is what the media does. She’s a beautiful young woman … And the amount of media attention did help us to recover her body very quickly.”

She adds: “What I have been pleasantly surprised by is this pivot, with people saying ‘Hey, we seem to pay a lot of attention when blonde, blue-eyed young women go missing, but why not when there are brown-haired, brown eyed indigenous people who go missing’. That’s a pleasant surprise for someone who leads this task force.”

Ashley Heavyrunner Loring went missing in the summer of 2017. Her older sister, Kimberly Loring, was on holiday in Morocco when she last communicated by text with her.

She was not unduly worried when she returned to home to north-west Montana, where her sister, aged 20, was about to start college. She reported her sister as missing, but found the police had little interest.

Loring, 27, says that like many other indigenous women who turn to the police for help, was told her sister was probably “partying” and would eventually come home.

She says the authorities have been smearing victims in this way for generations, even in the cases of children who disappear.

So, like with the case of Nicole Wagon in Wyoming, Loring went about the task of trying to locate her sister, a member of the Blackfeet tribe.

“I think she ran into the wrong group of people,” she says from her current home in Portland, Oregon, saying her younger sister had always been very trusting.

Does she still believe her sister is alive?

“That is such a difficult question for me to answer. Recently, some information we’ve received suggests the best we can hope for is to bring her [remains] home…But you always keep hoping.”

She also wishes her sister’s case had received the same coverage as that of Gabby Petito.

“We need to tell everybody’s stories, not just one type of person or group or race.”

As it is, the case of her sister is featured in the current season of true crime podcast, Up and Vanished, hosted by documentary maker, Payne Lindsey, who has been investigating the case. Loring says he is “doing a lot more than the police are doing”.

Lindsey says he is struck by the web of bureaucracy confronting indigenous communities when such incidents happen – overlapping jurisdictions, different forces.

He says he believes the police forces of indigenous communities should be better funded so they are better able to serve their communities.

Nicole Wagon, who now makes protecting her three other daughters her first priority, says she cannot help but conclude that racism plays a key part in the different responses when Petito went missing, compared to that of her own child, Jade, someone who was always “laughing and giggling look at the brighter things of life”, disappeared.

She is trying to seize on the publicity created by the Petito case to draw attention to the crisis in Wyoming, and the pain endured by families such as hers.

“It’s a blessing in disguise because it has shed light on the state of Wyoming, and allowed the 710 indigenous voices be heard now,” she says.

“These are human beings, my daughters had lives. And nobody ever has the right to take anybody’s life in any way, shape or form. And my daughters are just not numbers. They’re not a statistic.”

Hack exposes law enforcement officers who signed up to join anti-government Oath Keepers


Will Carless, Grace Hauck and Erin Mansfield, USA TODAY
Sun, October 3, 2021, 

The law enforcement officers described what they could offer the Oath Keepers:

“I have a wide variety of law enforcement experience, including undercover operations, surveillance and SWAT,” one wrote on the membership application.

"Communications, Weapons, K9 Officer for local Sheriffs office 12 years to present," another wrote.

“​​I am currently working as a deputy sheriff in Texas,” a third typed.

These men, who had sworn to uphold the law, signed up to join an armed, extremist, anti-government group.

The Oath Keepers trade in conspiracy theories and wild interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. Its members have been involved in armed standoffs with the federal government. Some face charges in connection with their role in the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The statements are part of a massive trove of data hacked from the Oath Keepers website. The data, some of which the whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets made available to journalists, includes a file that purportedly provides names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of almost 40,000 members.

A search of that list revealed more than 200 people who identified themselves as active or retired law enforcement officers when signing up. USA TODAY confirmed 20 of them are still serving, from Alabama to California. Another 20 have retired since joining the Oath Keepers.

One man who filled out the form claimed he was a federal police officer and worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

These men are probably a small fraction of the law enforcement officers who joined the militia over the years, since the majority of people listed did not volunteer information about their employment. The leaked data does not indicate whether the people on the list are dues-paying members.

Founded after the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2009 by Yale Law School graduate Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers refuse to acknowledge the authority of the federal government. Members issue a conspiracy-laden declaration of orders they will refuse to enforce, including disarming the American people.

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, said weeks before the Capitol riot Jan. 6 that his group was "armed, prepared to go in if the president calls us up."

Rhodes has long claimed that the group, which experts said is the largest unauthorized militia in the country, is made up primarily of active and retired law enforcement officers and military personnel.

Just one Oath Keeper serving in a police or sheriff's department is too many, said Daryl Johnson, a security consultant and former senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Oath Keepers subscribe to anti-government conspiracy theories, so the fact that officers belong to an organization that believes in this type of stuff really calls into question their discretion and their ability to make sound judgments,” Johnson said.

Jan. 6 prosecutions: Oath Keepers had ‘corrupt’ intent when they stormed Capitol, DOJ says as defendants seek case dismissal

Guilty plea: Fourth suspected Oath Keeper pleads guilty to Capitol riot conspiracy, obstruction

More concerning is the fact that the Oath Keepers make their members swear an oath of allegiance, much like the police and military, Johnson said. That creates a dangerous conflict of interest.

“They look at the U.S. government as an enemy,” he said. “When it comes down to a crisis situation or an investigation involving other militias, where is this person’s allegiance? Most likely with the Oath Keepers and not the police department.”

Scott Dunn, who left the Oath Keepers board of directors in 2019 after disagreements with Rhodes, said the group's membership form asked people to list their relevant skills.

Rhodes "wanted to use that information as a searchable database, so we could punch in Oklahoma, and it would show us all the different specialties around Oklahoma, or we could search for a specific type of skill, and it would show which members had that skill," he said.

James Holsinger, a lieutenant with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Maryland, is on the list. Holsinger is running for sheriff in the county, where Hagerstown is located.

He did not respond to several requests for comment.

On the form, Holsinger purportedly wrote that he “designed and implemented tactical rescue drills” and had “experience with an assortment of weapons (lethal and nonlethal).”
Officers joined the Oath Keepers

USA TODAY contacted dozens of active-duty and retired officers to ask why they joined the Oath Keepers. Most didn't respond; nearly everyone who did said they were no longer members. One retired Marine and correctional officer said he supports the group.

In 20 cases, law enforcement agencies or the men themselves confirmed they were still employed. Among the officers identified on the membership list are:


An officer at the Louisville Metro Police Department who was involved in a shooting in 2018.


A former U.S. Army member who joined the New York Police Department and a former U.S. Army captain who joined the Chicago Police Department. Both are still police officers there.

An 80-year-old, part-time officer at the Ashley County Sheriff’s Office in Arkansas.

A corrections officer in Riverside, California.

Maj. Eben Bratcher, operations chief with the Yuma County Sheriff's Office in Arizona, is among them. Bratcher told USA TODAY he recalled receiving newsletters from the group for "some time."

"I may have signed up many years ago but do not recall any specifics," Bratcher said. "I do know that I unsubscribed some time ago due to the sheer volume of email I received."

A note attributed to Bratcher on the sign-up list reads, "We have 85 sworn officers and Border (of) Mexico on the South and California on the West. I've already introduced your web site to dozens of my Deputies."

Bratcher said he didn't recall writing that. "It is probable that I spoke to numerous people about the new organization," he said.

Constable Joe Wright of Collin County, Texas, said he joined in 2012, when he was running for office for the first time.

"To be honest, I felt pressured to join it in this county for political support," Wright said. "The Oath Keepers, if you didn’t support them, you were going to get bad reviews."

Wright said he didn't know much about the group at the time. He said he remembers receiving a box of Oath Keepers paraphernalia, including brochures and stickers, after signing up. He said he threw it in the trash and hasn't engaged with the group since being elected in the county northeast of Dallas.

"I don’t support them," Wright said. "I’m not into radical. I’m into doing my job."
Officers say they're no longer members

Several officers admitted signing up but claimed their membership expired long ago.

For example, Michael Lynch, an officer with the Anaheim Police Department in California, said he joined the Oath Keepers many years ago, but he didn’t renew his membership when he learned more about the group.

"I didn't get anything out of it," he said in an interview. "There was no local chapter or anything, so when it came time to renew, I was like, I'm not sending another $40."

Lynch was the officer who boasted of his undercover, surveillance and SWAT training.

“Obviously, we had no knowledge of this,” said Sgt. Shane Carringer, an Anaheim spokesman. “We will look into what options we have as a department while considering what rights our officer has."

Other departments have suspended or investigated officers for associating with the group.
Always an extremist group, but lately more extreme

It’s unclear from the hacked data exactly when the officers in question signed up. Experts on the Oath Keepers said the group has changed since its founding in 2009.

What started during the Obama administration as a group to fight what it saw as federal government overreach developed into a more hateful and paranoid organization, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. She has tracked the Oath Keepers since their inception.

“Rhodes and company have become much more radical,” Beirich said.

The Oath Keepers was always an extremist group, she said, founded in nonsensical and hateful conspiracy theories, and it's always had an anti-government bent.

Kelly Meggs, according to the FBI, is the leader of the Oath Keepers in Florida, and was arrested and charged with participating in the Capitol riot.

She and other experts said they were concerned about law enforcement officers who joined the Oath Keepers.

“I don’t think police officers should be involved with extremist groups,” Beirich said. "You are a part of the government, you represent the full, whole community as a police officer, and there’s obviously a problem when you’re in a group that’s questioning the government’s right to do the things that the government has the right to do.”

J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said she understands how law enforcement officers could have joined the Oath Keepers years ago without knowing much about it.

Lynch, the officer in Anaheim, said he joined in 2016 after talking to recruiters at a booth at a gun show in Las Vegas. He said he thought they were an alternative to the National Rifle Association.

"People join stuff all the time without doing any due diligence," MacNab said. "And for years, the only due diligence you could have done was on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website, and most police officers would immediately dismiss that as biased."

For most Americans, joining the Oath Keepers is an act protected by the First Amendment. But several Supreme Court cases have established that police departments can place broad limits on what their employees may say or write and what organizations they belong to.

Most officers are under the false impression that the First Amendment gives them the right to say just about anything on social media or in public, said Val Van Brocklin, a former federal prosecutor who trains police departments on using social media.

"The vast majority of cops in the country don't understand this," Van Brocklin said. "A public employer does not have to pay you for your insubordination or dishonorable conduct that sullies the badge and the uniform."

Contributing: Aleszu Bajak, Dan Keemahill, Mike Stucka

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Oath Keepers hack exposes law enforcement officers across US

Oath Keepers Panicked That the Left Would ‘Decapitate’ Them After Failed Capitol Putsch


Kelly Weill
Fri, October 1, 2021

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photos Getty

In the weeks after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the leader of far-right group the Oath Keepers encouraged members to borrow money to hoard fuel, in advance of what the group claimed would be a Biden administration attack on the power grid. All the while, the group was making almost daily withdrawals from a crowdfunding site, totaling nearly $30,000.

A leaked trove of Oath Keepers messages, uploaded by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets this week, reveals some of the group’s communications after members participated in the Capitol attack. Prominent in the leak are paranoid email blasts from the group’s founder, Stuart Rhodes, who told members that the Biden White House was about to “conduct a ‘night of the long knives’ decapitation strike” on Oath Keepers under the guise of a massive power outage. Those conspiratorial fears were frequently accompanied by appeals to spend money.

One week after the Capitol attack, while Donald Trump still held office, Rhodes sent an email pleading for the then-president to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to cling to power, leaked emails show. (Although the message is addressed to Trump, it is unclear whether Rhodes sent it to him or merely included its text in an email to Oath Keepers.) Part of Rhodes’s justification, a mere seven days after the Capitol riot, was the supposed threat from the left, which he thought would begin attacking pro-Trump families.

Plea Deals Are Tearing the Oath Keepers Apart

“The domestic enemy wolves will be at the door of all your supporters as well,” Rhodes wrote. “Liberty-loving American constitutionalists will have no choice but to honor their oaths and defend both the Constitution and their families when the communists and obedient Deep State minions come for them (as they are already planning on doing).”

Like others on the far right, Rhodes appeared to believe conspiracy theories about Trump secretly holding onto damaging secrets that would destroy the left. Rhodes encouraged Trump to leak those supposed secrets on fringe sites like 8chan.

“At the very least, do the mass declassification and data dump,” Rhodes wrote. “You still have absolute authority as President and Commander-in-Chief to declassify any files held by the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. Use trusted elite units you know are still loyal to the Constitution to get it done (to seize the servers and dump the data on 4Chan, 8Chan, etc).”

Rhodes included the text of that letter in an email blast to Oath Keepers titled “OATH KEEPERS WARNING ORDER PART I.” In it, Rhodes warned followers of the “very high possibility” that the Biden administration would supposedly take out the power grid and begin carrying out targeted strikes on conservatives.

“Within the short term, we face a very high possibilty [sic] of an intentional ‘comms down’ scenario where black hats take down/shut down all communications in the US - No cell service, no internet, no land lines. A comms blackout. This could also include a take down of electrical power. An intentional power blackout. Worst case scenario would be an EMP [electromagnetic pulse] strike,” Rhodes told Oath Keepers on Jan. 13. “The purpose of such a comms down/blackout will be to minimize our ability to communicate and to pin people in their homes as the black hats and their terrorist allies conduct a ‘night of the long knives’ decapitation strike to arrest or otherwise take out patriot leaders, potential leaders, and highly skilled personnel.” (The reference to the “night of the long knives” was the second time Rhodes compared the Biden administration to Nazis in that email.)

Rhodes encouraged followers to plan for militia-led evacuations of homes during the fantasy power grid attack, and to hoard fuel, even going into debt if necessary. “Get all the fuel you can - gas, diesel, NOW,” he wrote. “Get the fuel out of the underground storage tanks and into portable containers. Get all you can. You will need it. Borrow money or charge it if you have to.”

Rhodes did not return requests for comment on whether he believed such attacks were still imminent.

Those leaked email comments show a continued ratcheting-up of Oath Keepers rhetoric, even after the Capitol riot.

Rhodes claims to have been uninvolved and unaware of Oath Keepers’ efforts to breach the Capitol. In speeches at D.C. rallies before Jan. 6, however, he preached a similar brand of anti-left apocalypticism, which extremism monitors described as a warning sign before the Capitol attack. During one such speech, in December, he called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and warned that “if he does not do it now while he is Commander in Chief, we’re going to have to do it ourselves later, in a much more desperate, much more bloody war.”

Rhodes also appeared to support court-based efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. In a Jan. 28 email, Oath Keepers lawyer Kellye Sorelle sent an email blast to the group stating that “Stewart agreed to allow me to send out an email to all the chapters requesting assistance.”

Sorelle asked members of the group for help finding documentation “for all 50 states regarding their orders/policy changes modifying their absentee ballot process, the use of drop boxes, voter registration changes and certification information for the machines used for elections. I also need evidence from the counties/states documenting that the data/ballots are not maintained for 22 months as required by law.”

Sorelle did not return requests for comment about the nature of her request, and whether Oath Keepers mobilized to help her. At the time of her request, Sorelle was involved in a baffling court case that cited a law from the fictional Lord of the Rings universe in an attempt to nullify Biden’s win. (The case was dismissed in September.)

Some of Rhodes’s emails during this period included requests for donations to the Oath Keepers. Although a public Oath Keepers fundraiser on the site GiveSendGo was a flop in spring 2021, the group was actively withdrawing tens of thousands from an account on the crowdfunding site RallyPay, leaked withdrawals show.

From Jan. 18 to Feb. 16, New Jersey Oath Keeper Edward Durfee made withdrawals from the account almost daily, totaling more than $28,000. Durfee, who is running for office in New Jersey, did not return requests for comment on Thursday (nor did he respond previously, when asked about allegations that Oath Keepers swindled application fees).

The purpose of the Oath Keepers’ RallyPay account is unclear. Leaked chat logs reveal the group “promoted” one such account in support of alleged Capitol rioter Jessica Watkins. The Oath Keepers have also run their own RallyPay fundraisers since at least October 2020.

Questions about money are laced through the leaked emails. In February, Rhodes emailed Oath Keepers asking for their help responding to a tornado in Alabama. Although the email called for volunteers, it also asked for donations. Two days later, Rhodes emailed again, informing followers that local first responders had declined the group’s services.

‘Prepared for Violence’: Prosecutors Are Closing in on Oath Keepers Leader

“The local PD has let us know they have enough man-power to cover their needs and the security need is not as bad as first anticipated. Therefore, we are standing down on this operation,” Rhodes wrote. Nevertheless, he noted, the Oath Keepers would like to keep the donations it had received for the Alabama mission.

“To those who donated to support this mission: we greatly appreciate your support,” he wrote. “Donors like you make what we do possible and we couldn’t do it without you. We hope you will simply let us use your donation to fund our future operations (no doubt we will be in the field again very soon) and our ongoing expenses. However, if you donated to this effort and do want a refund, email us and we’ll get it done.”

Refunds were a problem for the Oath Keepers in early 2021, as The Daily Beast previously reported. Multiple would-be Oath Keepers emailed the group, complaining that they had sent application fees but never heard back about membership.

One application came from a former leader of the Proud Boys, a different far-right paramilitary group. Leaked chat logs reveal that Jason Lee Van Dyke, who briefly served as the head of the Proud Boys, attempted to join the Oath Keepers in March. Van Dyke has previously been accused of using a Proud Boy chapter to surveil an enemy—a charge Van Dyke denies.

Van Dyke told The Daily Beast that Oath Keepers did not ask him about his Proud Boys affiliation. He said he joined the group’s chat briefly, but few people talked to him, even to onboard him as a member. Chat logs show him offering to pay a $50 membership fee, but being told that the group’s payment processors were currently down.

“I seem to recall a time when I might have been in their chat but I was in there for a little bit and as far as I know, that group is completely defunct,” Van Dyke told The Daily Beast. “I don't remember my password to get in there. They don’t have memberships to get in there anymore. If I remember correctly, that chat was dead as a doornail.”

PATRIARCY IS MISOGYNY

'Anti-feminist' vandals in Israel deface images of women

LAURIE KELLMAN
Fri, October 1, 2021

JERUSALEM (AP) — The joyful glint in Peggy Parnass' eyes is so sharp it can be seen from the walls of Jerusalem's bustling Old City. Posted across the street at the gateway to City Hall, twin images of the Holocaust survivor and activist gaze out at the ancient warren of holy monuments of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

But just outside this center of spirituality, someone saw her image as a problem. Five times since the photos of Parnass were posted as part of an exhibition that began in April, vandals — widely believed to be ultra-Orthodox extremists — spray-painted over her eyes and mouth.

The graffiti was cleaned each time, leaving Parnass smiling again. For many Israelis, however, the short-term fix highlighted a familiar pattern that's all the more painful because the destruction is coming not from enemies across Israel's borders but from within.

“It's not anti-Semitic,” said Jim Hollander, the curator of The Lonka Project art installation at Safra Square. “This is anti-feminist.”

For all of its modernity, military firepower and high-tech know-how, Israel has for decades been unable to keep images of women from being defaced in some public spaces. Billboards showing women -- including soccer players, musicians and young girls -- have been repeatedly defaced and torn down by religious extremists in Jerusalem and other cities with large ultra-Orthodox populations over the past 20 years.

Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel was erased from a 2015 photograph of world leaders in Paris published by an ultra-Orthodox newspaper.

The pattern is especially uncomfortable now.

“This is not Kabul, this is Jerusalem,” said Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a Jerusalem deputy mayor. “This is a concerted campaign by radicals to erase women from the public space, which belongs to all of us."

The double photo of 94-year-old Parnass, who lives in Germany, is posted on an outside wall of Jerusalem's City Hall complex.

Hollander said he specifically chose it among dozens of others posted around the complex to hang in the marquee spot because it projects vitality, perseverance and survival across one of Israel's most famous expanses. Its central location makes it visible to thousands every day.

The vandalism is widely blamed on a small number of fringe members of the insular ultra-Orthodox community, which emphasizes modesty among women and has traditionally carried outsized influence in Israeli politics. The photo is posted next to a street that borders an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood and is a popular walkway to the Old City's Western Wall, the holiest Jewish prayer site.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews make up about 12.6% of Israel's population of 9.3 million. That community's population is growing faster than those of other Israeli Jews and Arabs, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan Jerusalem think tank. A majority of Jerusalem's Jewish community is ultra-Orthodox, the institute said.

There is a difference, one expert cautioned, between the more pragmatic mainstream ultra-Orthodox Judaism and the vandals defacing photos of women.

“In the mainstream, they know that the world outside is functioning in a different way,” said Gilad Malach, who leads the ultra-Orthodox program at the Israel Democracy Institute. "And they know that in some situations, they need to cooperate with that."

In the mainstream Orthodox community, some women have begun to push back on social media.

“The men aren’t in charge there,” said Kerry Bar-Cohn, 48, an Orthodox chiropractor and performer who a few years ago started posting YouTube videos of herself singing children's songs. Recently, she tried to publish an ad in a local circular with her photo on it, and was refused.

“It’s straight-out discrimination,” said Bar-Cohn, wife of a rabbi and a mother of four. “I was thinking I want to sue them, but No. 1, who has the time? And No. 2, you don’t want to be that person.”

Advocates say erasing women carries dire societal risks.

“You don’t see women, you don’t hear their needs and their needs are not met,” said Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll, 46.

Keats Jaskoll recently launched the subscription-only Jewish Life Photo Bank, a collection of what she calls “positive” images of Orthodox women for the Chochmat Nashim organization. The idea is to sell images of women that are acceptable to an Orthodox audience and better understood by people in general.

None of these initiatives has halted the constant wave of vandalism.

The Israel Religious Action Center, which is connected to the liberal Reform movement of Judaism, has tracked the vandalism and other attacks on women's images for five years and filed a court petition to compel the city of Jerusalem to crack down.

Over time, the municipality has responded by saying it is engaged in “massive, effective and focused enforcement” of city bylaws against vandalism, but it acknowledged difficulty in collecting testimony and prosecuting suspects.

“The Jerusalem municipality has and will continue to condemn any damage to public images and deals with the problem if appears on the spot,” the city said in a statement.

Police say they investigate all complaints of vandalism and property damage and try to find those responsible, but had no information about the Parnass case.

By refusing or being unable to crack down, "the state sponsors this practice,” said Ori Narov, an attorney for IRAC. “We keep getting this impression that they keep making excuses," ranging from a shortage of labor to even more limits due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The municipality said the Parnass photos have been restored and it has increased patrols around City Hall.

Parnass' niece, Keren-Or Peled, who lives in Israel, says Parnass has been told what happened. After her photos were cleaned for a third time, Peled traveled to Jerusalem to take a photo to send to her aunt.

By the time Peled got there, however, the set of photos had been defaced again. She helped clean it herself.

“They paint over your picture time and time again because you are a woman," Peled wrote to her aunt in an article published in Haaretz. ”A beautiful, strong, confident 94-year-old woman.”

—-

Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion contributed.

Israel Womens Images Erased

This Sept. 22, 2021, file photo, shows a detail of a billboard with a defaced image of an ultra-Orthodox woman, on a street in Jerusalem. Israel is having a difficult time keeping images of women in public from being defaced. Billboards showing women -- whether they are soccer players, musicians or young girls -- have been repeatedly defaced and torn down by religious extremists in Jerusalem and other cities. 

(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)

Billionaires Get Help From China Move to Contain Evergrande



Blake Schmidt
Thu, September 30, 2021
(Bloomberg) -- China’s purchase of a stake in a struggling regional bank from China Evergrande Group aimed at preventing contagion is also benefiting Shengjing Bank Co.’s investors, including some poker pals of Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan.

Evergrande agreed to sell a 20% stake in the bank to the local Shenyang government for 10 billion yuan ($1.55 billion), with the bank demanding that all proceeds go to settle debts with the lender. The deal marks the first step toward solving Evergrande’s liquidity crisis, S&P Global Ratings said. Shengjing Bank rose 1.4% on Wednesday in Hong Kong on the agreement, then dropped the same amount Thursday.

Recent investors in Shengjing Bank include the following people who have backed Hui and Evergrande financially:

Cheung Chung Kiu

The Chongqing, China-born chairman and founder of Hong Kong-listed company C C Land Holdings Ltd. is a regular player of the Big Two poker game with Hui. Cheung started off buying electronics and other goods in Hong Kong to resell in the mainland, and later moved into property. Today, his C C Land has billions of dollars of property in the U.K., including the “Cheesegrater” skyscraper in London’s financial district. Cheung held direct and indirect minority interests in Shengjing as of June 30, according to the bank’s latest shareholder disclosure.

Cheng family

Henry Cheng, chairman of New World Development, is the wealthiest of Hui’s poker pals, with a fortune worth $23.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is the eldest son of the late Cheng Yu-tung, who fled rural Guangdong to Macau in 1940 ahead of the Japanese occupation, married a goldsmith’s daughter and built a fortune in the property business. The Chengs have invested in Evergrande projects and company shares, including this year’s public offering of Evergrande’s online real estate and automobile marketplaces known as FCB. The family held a minority interest in Shengjing indirectly, according to the report.

Paul Suen

Suen was once known as Hong Kong’s “shell king” for having stakes in dozens of small companies as he played the city’s penny stocks. His holdings include a minority stake in Shengjing held directly and indirectly. He has also invested in English football club Birmingham City and London’s Les Ambassadeurs Club, a casino that appears in the James Bond film “Dr. No.” A 2019 disclosure of Suen’s purchase of a stake in Shengjing Bank also showed that he held an interest in Evergrande’s electric-car company at the time, as well as Evergrande bonds.

Karen Lo

Lo is a wealthy scion of Hong Kong’s biggest soy-milk dynasty whose real estate holdings range from mansions in Holmby Hills and Malibu, California, to pop star Sting’s former apartment overlooking New York’s Central Park. The University of Pennsylvania graduate, who has held shares of dozens of companies, went from being an investor in Hong Kong-listed fashion company Esprit Holdings Ltd. to its biggest shareholder. Lo has made investments alongside Suen, including a stake in Shengjing from 2019, when they also disclosed interests in Evergrande’s electric-car company. Lo and her partner -- Eugene Chuang, an investor and horse-racing enthusiast -- endowed a professorship in their name at University of Hong Kong. A Sept. 27 Shengjing filing with the Hong Kong exchange shows that Lo no longer has an interest requiring disclosure.

Lau family

Joseph Lau’s Chinese Estates sold its holdings in Shengjing in 2017 to a company owned by his wife, Chan Hoi-wan. Chan later sold those and hasn’t had a notifiable interest in the company since January 2020, according to a filing. The billionaire family of Lau, another of Hui’s poker pals, has also been selling Evergrande shares.

(Updates with S&P report in second paragraph.)

RIGHT TO WORK ANTI UNION STATE
Production begins at new Alabama auto plant; hiring ongoing


This photo combination shows the logo for, from left, Mazda and Toyota. The first vehicles are rolling off the line of a new auto plant in Huntsville, Ala., Thursday, Sept. 30, 2021, and the joint venture between Mazda and Toyota is still hiring workers. (AP Photo/File)

Thu, September 30, 2021

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama (AP) — Production has begun at a new auto plant in north Alabama and the companies running the facility continue to hire workers at a brisk pace.

Work on the first 2022 Corolla Cross vehicles began with the press of a button at the Mazda Toyota Manufacturing, a joint venture between Mazda Motor Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp.

In 2018, the Japanese automakers selected Huntsville, Alabama, for the mammoth facility that will eventually have the capability to produce up to 300,000 vehicles per year, split evenly between Mazda and Toyota.

The joint venture on Thursday said it was in the middle of hiring another 1,700 workers and anticipates reaching up to 4,000 employees once production is in full operation next year.

“This is the moment MTM and our North Alabama community have waited for since we broke ground in November 2018,” said Mark Brazeal, a vice president at the facility. “We are excited to see Corolla Cross in dealerships across the U.S.”

More than $2.3 billion has been invested in the plant and the companies last year committed another $830 million to ensure cutting-edge technologies could be worked into its manufacturing processes.

The Psychedelics Industry Could Offer a Whole New Approach to Work


Shelby Hartman and Madison Margolin
Sat, October 2, 2021,

psychedelic-column-industry - Credit: Illustration by Carolina Rodríguez Fuenmayor for Rolling Stone
This column is a collaboration with DoubleBlind, a print magazine and media company at the forefront of the psychedelic movement.

As the world of psychedelics matures to include both a grassroots movement and a burgeoning legal industry — echoing the process that cannabis went through a few years ago — many are wondering what kinds of new jobs will become available in the psychedelic space. Will psychedelics come to resemble most other mainstream, corporate North American industries — or can we expect something that more reflects the spirit and ethos of the medicines that have been used for generations?

For the question of what of jobs will be available, the short answer is, all different kinds. “As psychedelics go from the fringe to the mainstream, the same types of jobs for every other industry that went from fringe to mainstream apply to this one,” says Lewis Goldberg, a managing partner at KCSA, a communications consultancy that works with a handful of companies in the psychedelic space. “I would tell anyone who wants to get into the space to do it, but you better move fast. I’ll steal a line from Aldous Huxley: ‘The doors of perception are wide open, but the doors of opportunity are still closing.’”


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In the last couple of years, there’s been an exponential growth in the number of drug development companies seeking to take psychedelic compounds through the FDA approval process. MDMA, sometimes referred to as “ecstasy,” and psilocybin, one of the primary psychoactive components in psychedelic mushrooms, are both projected to be legal for prescription in the next five years. Meanwhile, more than a dozen drug development companies have now brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to research compounds from 5-MeO-DMT for depression to novel psychedelics they’re hoping will remove the possibility for a “bad trip.”

Indeed, it’s not just those developing the drugs who will be in on this industry — careers will span from lawyers who specialize in helping entrepreneurs navigate the legal landscape, to therapists who help patients integrate their experiences after a psychedelic trip, to receptionists who greet visitors at psychedelic clinics across the country.

“If you think that in the last three years, something like $3 billion of venture money has been pumped into the industry, that’s a tremendous amount, but not a lot of money — it’s building the foundation for a multi-trillion-dollar industry,” says Goldberg. “Five of the top 25 selling drugs in the world are designed to treat central nervous system disorders. This collective group of [psychedelic] companies is going to disrupt that. Some are going to be the equivalents of Google or Amazon and some are going to be Pets.com.” Although Goldberg is a self-proclaimed “regular mainstream capitalist,” he says that “the companies looking to be open-source are more likely to be successful and have a societal impact than those that are looking to solely work on their own.” In the field of psychedelics, being open source means allowing everyone in the field access to your data and research, in the spirit of progressing the movement as a whole — as opposed to prioritizing your company’s profitability.

Of course, open source alone is not enough to ensure that key players in the space are working toward a compassionate and equitable psychedelic industry. “This will require a lot of personal and internal decolonization work by the emerging ‘leaders’ of this space,” says Charlotte James, co-founder of The Ancestor Project, an educational platform designed for people of color that offers workshops and resources for members on the plant medicine journey. “We believe that by doing this work first, it then becomes natural to understand your role in the collective liberation movement that this medicine wants us to usher in. An equitable ‘industry’ won’t be an ‘industry’ as we currently understand it to be, and instead a mycelial-like network of co-creation across diverse communities and environments.”

So far, James doesn’t know a single BIPOC-led organization that has significant financial support in the psychedelic space, which, she says, leads to a widening gap between the grassroots movement and the corporate. “More folks are recognizing that in order to move away from capitalism, we have to break the work patterns that are ingrained in us, [since] those patterns that contribute to the glorified ‘hustle and grind’ culture are actually just extensions of systemic oppression,” says James. “Reclaiming our relationship to creativity and productivity will support us in being able to imagine a different and more equitable future in which our value is not defined by our bodies or our productivity.”

The psychedelic approach to work culture may lie in the way we regard our professional life versus our personal life. There’s a paradigm shift in being able to “bring your full self to work,” says Gareth Hermann, co-founder and CEO at Magic, a marketing agency in the psychedelic space. “At Magic, we don’t like the term ‘balance’ because it brings up the image of being on a seesaw, so we’re creating a culture that’s more celebratory of work-life ‘presence’ to create a space for the whole human to show up at work,” says Jennifer Ellis, chief people officer at Magic. The agency even goes so far as to offer programs that support repatterning, helping teammates recognize states of response and triggers so that they can develop better emotional literacy. Ultimately, Hermann explains, those shifts in beliefs and values create more possibility for us to make foundational impacts in the world at large.

What psychedelics offer is an invitation to look at professional and economic systems more, well, psychedelically. But it takes time leaning into the paradigm shift: Mike Margolies, founder of the educational conversation series Psychedelic Seminars, used to work a corporate job before an ayahuasca trip set him off on a journey that led to quitting, traveling, and creating a career in psychedelics. “The irony was that after all that, I had created myself a desk job, and I was like wait, what am I doing here?” he says. “I was thinking a lot about how you spend your time is how you spend your life.”

Among tactics like designated days dedicated for “work or task mode” versus “flow mode,” he now makes space to “allow for ‘productivity’ to happen in a different way.” “We have this idea of what a job is, what being productive is, but even though we’re all psychedelic, we’ve put ourselves in the same old boxes,” he says. “Because we have to have a work ethic, a mission, and so much urgency, we end up embodying the systems that we’re purportedly working to reinvent.” Indeed, a question not uncommon among psychedelic folk is whether a company can really heal the ill effects of capitalism in individuals and the collective, while also working within a capitalist system. Capitalism has us thinking that “work” has to be a certain way—a 40-hour a week grind. “It’s crazy that that’s become the standard,” Margolies says. “The goal isn’t to get everyone working” — in the standard capitalistic sense — “but how do we get everyone self-actualized? Achieving collective self-actualization is intrinsically the pathway to creating the most value for each other.”

Britain is short 100,000 truckers. The drivers it spurned don't want to come back.

Alexander Smith

Fri, October 1, 2021, 8:28 AM·

LONDON — Faced with dry gas stations and bare grocery shelves, the British government is offering 5,000 temporary visas for foreign truck drivers to prevent a looming crisis ahead of Christmas.

But despite this potentially lucrative offer, many truckers who left the country after it exited the European Union say they have no plans to help solve a problem stoked in part by the consequences of Brexit.

Artur Jarzebski says he will not work in the United Kingdom because he no longer feels welcome in post-Brexit Britain.

"English society decided that the Polish people are not worth enough to stay in the U.K.," said Jarzebski, 42, a Polish trucker who spent a decade toiling long hours on British highways. "After Brexit, Polish drivers feel unwanted by the U.K. market."

The U.K. is facing the same supply chain problems as the U.S. and Europe. Older truckers are retiring and youngsters, perhaps reassessing their lives amid the Covid-19 pandemic, don't want to work the long hours or return to life on the road, which is lonely and not conducive to social relationships.

Image: A student at a heavy goods vehicle training center in Croydon, England (Leon Neal / Getty Images)

The virus made things worse, delaying tests for new drivers and making it more difficult to haul goods from one country to the next. But the U.K. is being squeezed by another factor: Brexit.

After the vote, an estimated 20,000 truckers went back to Europe and never returned.

The U.K. is currently around 100,000 truck drivers short, according to industry officials. In recent days, that's translated into winding lines outside gas stations because there aren't enough licensed drivers to deliver fuel from refineries. The issue has been compounded by panic-buying.

Some supermarket shelves are also empty, with a shortage of workers in the food processing sector, also partly down to Covid and the Brexit exodus, beginning to bite.

Image: Artur Jarzebski (Courtesy / Artur Jarzebski)

In a sign of how bad things are, the British government will deploy the military to drive gas tankers "in the next couple of days," Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told reporters Wednesday.

The government is also trying to fast-track driver training. And it is offering the 5,000 temporary visas for the three months until Dec. 24, as well as 5,500 visas for poultry workers.

For the critics of Brexit, there is a certain irony to all this. The vote to leave the E.U. was motivated in part by a desire to curb immigration and stop as many foreign workers as possible from competing for British jobs. Now the U.K. is in trouble, and it wants foreign workers to save it.

The demand has seen trucker wages spike. But many European drivers say the upheaval of moving to another country outside the E.U. for three months is not worth it. Others are unhappy that only now is their crucial role in the supply chain being acknowledged after being taken for granted for decades.

Image: Freight trucks line up on the M20 motorway near Dover port in December 2020 (Andrew Aitchison / Getty Images file)

As well as the sense that Brexit exposed Britain's unwelcoming side, some drivers are also scarred by the memory of what happened last Christmas: More than 6,000 trucks stuck outside the English port of Dover after France closed its border to try to contain Covid's Kent variant.

Thousands of drivers were forced to sleep in their cabs Christmas Day.

"I have friends from Lithuania and Czech Republic, and what they told me is there is no point in coming just to work on a three-month visa," said Mateusz Ozimek, 31, a trucker who was born in Kraków, Poland, and now lives in London. "The money is quite decent but the way they treated us last Christmas will not be forgotten."

"You have to remember that drivers spend most of their time on their own. They always remember when someone did something wrong to them," he added.

Image: Mateusz Ozimek (Courtesy / Mateusz Ozimek)

Though many industry figures and experts say Brexit has exacerbated the crisis, most agree it is only one cause among several.

In the U.S., the number of people working in the trucking industry also nosedived when the pandemic hit, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This has since recovered, but the workforce is still around 26,000 workers short of its pre-pandemic levels.

The same is true in Europe. Britain may struggle to fill its 5,000 temporary visas with European drivers because the reality is that there are shortages across the continent too, according to Benoit Lefere, a spokesperson for UPTR, a Belgian logistics union.

"Brexit has meant that the U.K. has been confronted with this problem now — but Europe will face the same problem, just a few years down the line," he said. "Perhaps by then, the U.K. will have found a solution."