A collection of about 50 antigovernment “Patriots” gathered Thursday in the
parking lot of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office in Medford,
OR, to protest what they believe was the federal government’s
“tyrannical” treatment of miners in the region.
But the organizers of the affair were adamant they were uninterested
in a standoff with federal authorities similar to the confrontation
between BLM agents and hundreds of heavily armed “Patriots” a year ago
at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada. All they wanted, organizers claimed,
was to defend ordinary citizens from federal abuses.
Joseph Rice
“You have untrained people, uneducated people, throwing around their
weight, abusing people who are trying to earn a living, and they think
it’s OK,” Joseph Rice, coordinator for the Josephine County chapter of
Oath Keepers, told about 50 people gathered. “I took an oath to uphold
the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic, and a domestic
enemy is anyone who will abuse someone’s rights within that
Constitution.”
Rice added, “Today it is the BLM, because they did not allow the due
process to occur. They need to seriously look at their administrative
process and procedures and address that. It’s a cultural issue. We saw
it a year ago. Here we are again today. It doesn’t seem to be willing to
change or improve that.”
At issue is a dispute between the BLM and the owners of the Sugar
Pine Mine near Merlin, Ore., who were given a “letter of noncompliance”
last spring telling them they either needed to clear out of the mine
within 60 days or file an appeal of the ruling that they were not in
compliance with BLM mining regulations.
What followed was a nationwide callout to defend a couple of miners
in imminent danger of having their constitutional right to due process
destroyed by the BLM, according to the local chapter of the Oath Keepers
that made the plea. And they called it a “security operation” because
owner Rick Barclay insisted that the BLM was notorious for burning down
miners’ cabins in the backwoods, and he believes they would have
destroyed his mine if he had not called for help.
BLM spokesman Jim Whittington told Hatewatch that these were absurdly
groundless fears. “The idea that we would go in on Friday and wipe
everything off the claim is just not true,” he said. “It has no basis in
reality.”
There were few guns on display, and no threats or intimidation. A
large group of black-clad “III Percent” movement followers from Idaho
made their presence known, but the crowd and the speakers remained
relatively sedate. Even with such sedate activists, the BLM and the U.S.
Forest Service closed their joint offices as a precautionary measure.
Only five people spoke, including both of the mine owners and two local
Oath Keepers. Within an hour, everyone was gone.
Rick Barclay
The issue persists, however. The miners and the “Patriots” insist the
BLM’s issuance of a letter of non-compliance amounts to a denial of due
process, and the Oath Keepers have insisted their presence is about
“defending the Fifth Amendment rights” of the miners.
Rick Barclay, one of the mine owners, told Hatewatch that the BLM had
violated his due process in the letter. “They short-circuited the due
process by telling me I have to remove my equipment before I ever even
get a hearing,” he said.
However, the letter of noncompliance is clear that removal of the
cabin and equipment are only among the mine owners’ three options, and
says at the end: “If you do not agree and are adversely affected by this
decision you may ask for a review by the State Director … or you may
appeal to the Interior Board of Land Appeals.”
Barclay filed paperwork in his appeals process on Wednesday, but
indicated that he hoped the Oath Keepers would stay on site until he
actually has a hearing. “After I get my day in court and get a stay,
then they will go home,” he said. “Just because I turned in my paperwork
doesn’t mean the BLM won’t come up there tomorrow and set everything on
fire.”
What began as a paper dispute over the language in a claim for an old
gold mine in the hills of southwestern Oregon has lurched into what the antigovernment “Patriots” arriving on scene seemingly hope will be an armed confrontation with federal authorities.
Most of those arriving at the scene of the dispute over the Sugar
Pine Mine near tiny Merlin, Ore., and nearby towns such as Grants Pass
and Medford, believe they are engaging in a stand against a tyrannical
federal government and the Bureau of Land Management – the second
chapter in a fight that began a year ago with the Bundy Ranch standoff.
But as the mine owners now are stressing
to the militia members and antigovernment activists pouring into the
valley after heeding the call: “This is NOT a standoff with BLM. We are
NOT promoting any confrontation with BLM. This is a security operation
for the protection of Constitutional Rights.”
“If you are on a fringe element, and you’re here to protest, or
provoke a reaction with the federal government, I don’t want you here,”
said Joseph Rice, the “security coordinator” for the Josephine County
chapter of the Oath Keepers, in a YouTube video on the Oath Keepers
site. “Let me repeat that: If you’re here to protest and to provoke a
reaction with the federal government, I do not need you.”
Since the people arriving in Oregon are apparently ready for action,
and there isn’t any action on the horizon other than in a courtroom or
at an administrative hearing, they’re taking matters into their own
hands.
Today, they’re planning a “Sugar Pine Mine Support Rally” outside the combined offices of the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service in Medford. Organizer Kerby Jackson urged all supporters who couldn’t attend to hold protests outside their local BLM offices.
“We are calling on all miners, loggers, farmers/ranchers and freedom
lovers everywhere who are tired of government abuse to tell the BLM that
the people of this country that they are sick to death of the way that
they have been conducting themselves,” he wrote on Facebook.
Jackson is one of the ringleaders of a group at the center of the
dispute, which includes the mine’s co-owners, Rick Barclay and George
Backes, who both have expressed affinities for the Oath Keepers’
“constitutionalist” beliefs. They and the Josephine County chapter of
the Oath Keepers last week sent out a nationwide plea for help in protecting the mine from the BLM.
Coming the same week as the one-year anniversary of the Bundy Ranch standoff, the story was widely circulated by websites as Alex Jones’ InfoWars and the similarly conspiracy theorist website NextNewsNetwork,
whose reporter interviewed Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes about
the scene in Oregon. “Our goal is to make sure the miners have their day
in court and due process,” Rhodes said.
And Oath Keepers are coming come en masse to ensure that happens.
Among those who have come to the mine is Arizona militiaman Blaine Cooper, who made a video widely seen on YouTube urging Patriots to make their way to Oregon.
They’re calling it a “security operation” largely because owner Rick
Barclay insists that the BLM is notorious for burning down miners’
cabins in the backwoods, and he believes they’d have destroyed his mine
if he had not called for help. Cooper was last seen leading a group of anti-Obama protesters outside the White House, including several who demanded the president be hung.
So far, the mine’s owners have seemed to welcome support from the antigovernment movement.
“I’m absolutely positive the BLM has not destroyed my property
because it has been protected, as have my rights, by a group of folks,”
Barclay said in a video posted on the Josephine County Oath Keepers
site. “They came at my request. I requested their presence. I still
request their presence, until such time as I achieve my due process.”
BLM employees are somewhat flabbergasted that a dispute over unfiled
paperwork could somehow erupt into a situation in which weapons are now
being brandished.
“From our perspective, it’s been pretty much the same thing we always
do,” BLM spokesman Jim Whittington said. “This is not a process that is
new to us. We have hundreds of claims down here, and it’s not uncommon
for us to come across operations that are not in compliance or don’t
have documentation. So it’s kind of a shock to have this blow up like
this.”
What the Oath Keepers will do now is anyone’s guess, considering that
guards on the dirt road leading up to the staging area are reportedly
turning away anyone without specific permission from the Oath Keepers.
The Sugar Pine Mine is an old claim dating, its owners say, to 1865.
It is located on land administered by the BLM, though Barclay and his
peers claim, much like Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy did, that federal
jurisdiction doesn’t extend to their claim. Also like Bundy, Barclay
claims that his title to the mine preceded Oregon and federal
jurisdictions and that federal officials hadn’t sent them proof that the
BLM had obtained surface rights to the mining claim.
Whiting explained that the owners’ complaints about nonresponses to
document requests were a matter of impatience: “They filed a bunch of
FOIAs and we’re like any government agency that’s inundated with FOIAs,
it’s just the nature of the business. We answered two last week, two
this week, and another one is coming next week.”
As for the mine owners’ fears that BLM would destroy their property,
Whittington said it’s just a groundless charge. “The idea that we would
go in on Friday and wipe everything off the claim is just not true,” he
said. “It has no basis in reality.”
He reminded Hatewatch: “These are public lands. The road going
through their claim is a public road. Even if they did have surface
rights, BLM could still come in there and inspect the mining claim to
make sure they were following the law.”
Whittington said that so far, BLM employees in the field haven’t had
any ugly incidents. However, office workers manning their phones in the
past week have had to deal with a barrage of threats from anonymous
callers angered after reading the Internet accounts from Oath Keepers
and other “Patriots.”
“We take threats to BLM employees and other federal employees
seriously, and we will investigate those threats. As long as those
threats are under investigation, then we are not going to comment on the
particulars of those threats. There have been threats, but they have
all been by phone,” Whiting said.
In the meantime, rumors are beginning to circulate of dissension
within the ranks of the gathered Oath Keepers – a familiar scenario that
also manifested itself at the Bundy Ranch after a few weeks of forced
togetherness among the gathered “Patriots” there, who eventually broke apart amid acrimony and pointed guns.
As the Thursday event approached, even Rick Barclay was sounding eager for his would-be defenders to leave.
In an interview with the Medford Mail-Tribune,
he denounced the scene near his mine: “What you’re seeing is mostly a
spectacle caused by social media and ‘keyboard commandos’ whooping it
up.” He seemed eager to draw a curtain on the drama.
“As soon as I get my court arrangements made, the Oath Keepers are leaving,” he said. “It’s OK. It’s going to be OK.”
Chris Simcox during an earlier hearing in his child-molestation trial
Nobody in the suburban Phoenix neighborhood knew who Chris Simcox was, at least not by the
Minuteman movement persona he had cultivated on television only a few short
years before. As far as Michelle Lynch knew, he was just the dad who would hang
out and watch the kids play outside, like involved dads do
“I had met him just a few times,” she recalled in an interview,
describing the period in early 2013 when they lived in the same suburban
Phoenix apartment complex. “He was always outside the apartments that we lived
in. There were a lot of families like that, especially around 4:30, 5 o’clock,
all the families would come outside and the kids would all play. There was
always a ton of children outside, and he was always outside with his kids.
“I remember once he said to me, ‘You know, my motto is, if
there’s light outside, there’s no reason to be inside.’ … And I thought, ‘Oh,
you know, he’s an involved father,’ but that didn’t last long.
“All of a sudden they were always inside. And you know, he had kid stuff on his
back porch, and my daughter liked going over there because they could paint and
stuff.” The girls enjoyed each other’s company. There were sleepovers. There
was candy.
That all culminated – after months of manipulation of her
daughter – with the then-5-year-old girl telling her mother about how Simcox
had molested her one night in February. It happened as they were going to bed
together one night in May – three months later.
Even after she informed police and they began investigating Simcox, the
manipulation continued.
After his
arrest in July 2013, his ability to toy with her daughter changed
dramatically, but not entirely: Simcox has delayed the trial multiple times,
and eventually asserted
and obtained his right to represent himself in court, raising the specter of
the alleged perpetrator cross-examining his victim on the witness stand.
To Michelle Lynch, that was the final manipulation, and a
chance for Simcox to traumatize her daughter a second time.
And until the Arizona
Supreme Court intervened last week, that prospect very nearly became a
reality after both the trial judge and an appeals-court panel decided to let
the trial proceed with Simcox having the right to cross-examine all witnesses,
including a third young girl who is expected to testify about his similar
attempts to abuse her.
Meg Garvin
“This is just crazy,” says victim’s rights expert Meg Garvin,
executive director of the National Crime Victim Law Institute. “We shouldn’t
ask the victims that much, and we don’t need to ask them that much. Because you
can balance these easily.
“I actually don’t think this is as hard as some courts are making it,” Garvin
explained in an interview. “The individual’s right to self-representation has
well been acknowledged to be limited. You can put reasonable limits in place.
And when those limits are necessary to protect someone else’s constitutional
rights, particularly a state constitutional right, which is the one at issue
here – although at other times it can be a federal constitutional right to
privacy, depending on the type of question being asked – then the answer should
be pretty straightforward: have a standby counsel ask the questions.”
Daphne Young of Childhelp, an Arizona nonprofit that advocates for abused and
neglected children, said that permitting such a situation would be a gross
mistake.
“When a potential predator has the opportunity to
cross-examine a child victim of sexual abuse, there’s a great risk for
intimidation, manipulation and re-victimizing of that young victim,” Young
told KPHO-TV. “When you consider all the verbal and non-verbal cues that a
predator uses to groom a young victim, there’s a lot that can happen under the
nose of the judges and even experts in the field because of the intimate
relationship that abusers use to create silence.”
The trial judge in the case, Superior Court Judge Jose
Padilla, is no stranger to controversy. In
2009, he came under harsh criticism for having refused to allow a Phoenix
woman named Dawn Axsom to move herself and her son out of state to avoid
violence that she feared at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, who a short while
later shot and killed both Axsom and her mother before killing himself.
Michelle Lynch said that her greatest concern in all this is
that, if Simcox gets his way, he’ll traumatize her daughter all over again. She
described
to Hatewatch how her now-7-year-old girl broke down in hysterics when
informed recently that Simcox might be asking her questions directly.
“I am concerned that the system will make my daughter a
victim again,” she said. “There’s no reason for this to be happening. If there
is this consensus as to it not being appropriate, I don’t understand why it is
happening.”
She looks back on the situation now with a mother’s guilt,
knowing there were abundant signals that something was amiss. “I felt bad
because I trusted him,” she said. “There was this candy thing. The kids have
all mentioned candy, which was how he lured them.
“I remember one day the doorbell rang and my son answered
the door, and Chris and his daughter were standing at the door, and Chris
handed my son a two- or three-pound bag of Skittles, and told my son to give it
to my daughter for being a good girl. And at the time I couldn’t understand why
someone would give that much candy to a child. It didn’t even register.”
That happened sometime after the February molestation, but
before Lynch finally learned in May from her daughter that Simcox had molested
her. “It had been happening for a couple months,” she said.
Then came what seemed like an interminable period between
her report to police and Simcox’s arrest. “When I told police, and they were
investigating him for over a month, my daughter and I were dodging him,” she
said. “I mean, he would walk by our house and we wouldn’t go outside. The
minute we got home we would run up our stairs and close the door.
“His daughter gave mine this handmade birthday invitation.
And I told [my daughter] she couldn’t go, and she wanted to write a letter. I
actually have the letter she wrote. She responded with, ‘I’m sorry, [Girl 2], I
can’t go to your party because your dad is doing disgusting things to me.’ ”
No one in the neighborhood seemed to have any idea that the
person they were dealing with was Chris Simcox, the onetime nationally famous
leader of the “Minuteman” nativist border-watch movement. As
early as 2005, Simcox’s erratic behavior – including allegations of an
attempt to molest another ofhis
daughters – had been explored in detail by the SPLC. Even as late as 2010, he
had managed to remain in public view, running
briefly for the U.S. Senate in Arizona.
Yet in the little neighborhood where he moved after
divorcing his third wife, Simcox was just another guy. It never crossed Lynch’s
radar, at least not until she reported him to police, that he was someone quite
well-known.
“My older [teenaged] son, once he looked up who this guy
was, after the Scottsdale police department told me who he was, my son started
sleeping with a knife under his pillow,” Lynch recalled.
Once Lynch realized who he was, though, more of the pieces
fell in place. “Those personalities like Chris have the narcissistic traits,
and that’s the first thing I think of when it comes to him, you know,” she
said.
“I really feel like because of the kind of person he is, I
think he’s trying to make a comeback to being a nationally known person again.
Especially with representing himself and all that. In all honesty, he’s going
to make a mockery of himself. Because once people start to hear what he is
going to throw out there as his evidence – it’s absolutely ridiculous.” Indeed,
Simcox
has hinted that he plans to present a “grand conspiracy” defense predicated
on the idea that he is being persecuted by nefarious forces.
Seeing justice served on Simcox is only part of her intent,
though. Her chief focus is seeing that her daughter is treated the right way by
the justice system. As she explained to Judge Padilla in a letter pleading to
keep Simcox from questioning her daughter directly on the stand:
I understand that within the justice system, all accused have specific rights
that officials do their best to uphold so to be fair and maintain the integrity
of the Constitution, but it is my hope that my daughter’s rights are also taken
into consideration and [she] is given the opportunity to progress and not
regress due to the ensuring of one individual’s rights over another.
Meg Garvin says that these kinds of conflicts in pro se cases happen on “a not-infrequent basis.” She says that
while it’s rare, there have been cases where accused perpetrators directly
cross-examined their ostensible victims. But she insists that there’s no reason
for that to happen.
“This isn’t that complicated. To ensure that the defendant’s
rights, the real test is if he is directing his representation, and he would
still be able to direct the questions,” Garvin said. “The victim would not have
to be subjected to a very intrusive, invasive and harassing moment where the
perpetrator is essentially assaulting again.”
Yet even though it seems simple, instances such as this one
happen all too often in the American legal system, Garvin says. “Courts
routinely defer to defendants’ rights without doing an appropriate calculus of
the victims’ rights,” she said.
Michelle Lynch believes there’s a real cost to that. “There’s a lot of people
out there that don’t even pursue stuff like this because they’re frustrated with
the criminal-justice system,” she said. “And I get it. I fully understand, now
that I’ve been through this process, why people would just give up and not do
anything about it. But I’m a very strong-willed person.”
Back when I was putting together a piece for Seattle magazine about the threats posed by increased shipping in orcas' territory to the endangered Southern Resident population -- particularly the lethal specter of increased oil traffic -- I noted that one of the secondary threats posed by these large ships (including, possibly, coal ships coming from Cherry Point, north of Bellingham) is the terrific amount of racket they put up:
Along the western shore of San Juan Island, across Haro Strait, the view
that most people observe when the killer whales are present is
generally a placid one: The only noises are the sounds of the currents
rushing, the “koosh” of the whales as they surface and blow plumes into
the air—although at times, the calm is broken by the engines of the
boats, sometimes 30 vessels at a time, that come crowding around the
whales to get a close look at them. If there are large ships in view,
they are mostly distant and seem almost silent as they glide past.
But
drop a hydrophone into those same waters and the picture changes
dramatically. There will be whales, all talking in their distinct
Southern Resident dialect to each other and echolocating for fish. There
will be the whale-watch boats, whose engines are mostly short-lived
whines and low-level thrums. And then there will be large cargo ships.
Because sound travels so well in water, a ship or a orca can be heard
across great distances. The underwater sound of a loud ship passing a
mile or two away produces a sound that compares to the sound a chainsaw
might make in the air.
Val Veirs, a semi-retired physics
professor, listens to all this racket, and monitors and records it with
an array of hydrophones he has set up off his waterfront home on the
west side of San Juan Island. What he and his fellow scientists have
found is that killer whales will more often than not increase the volume
of their vocalizations when there is higher background noise from boats
and ships around them. Researchers at NOAA Fisheries are still studying
whether whales fall completely silent because noisy ships are around.
But,
according to Veirs, it’s inevitable that these noise
levels—particularly the high-frequency component of ship noise—are going
to affect their abilities to communicate and hunt, both of which are
closely connected to sound. Vocalizations not only appear to play a role
in the social component of their salmon-hunting behavior, the orcas
also rely directly on echolocation.
Veirs says the ship-noise
potential for all this traffic worries him when it comes to the whales.
“Right now, about 60 percent of the time, there’s no ship within hearing
range,” he says. “But if you put a couple thousand more ships per year
in there, it seems to me you’ll end up with about 30 percent of the
time...that the whales are able to communicate without interference from
vessel noise.”
At the time I put the piece together, the conventional wisdom among whale scientists (including those at NOAA/NMFS, who I queried regarding the issue) was that whale-watching tour boats were
a bigger problem for whales, because the frequencies of noise they
created were more in the zone used by orcas and dolphins, whereas big
ships created lower-frequency noise that was less likely to interfere. Now, there is further research to corroborate Veirs' views:
Marla Holt, a research biologist with NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center, has found that loud boat noise forces endangered orcas to raise the volume of their calls.
But the question, Holt says, is "so what? What are the biological consequences of them doing this?”
To
answer that question, Holt and her NOAA colleague, Dawn Noren, a
research fishery biologist, studied captive bottlenose dolphins.
They
had the dolphin swim into a floating plastic helmet device and whistle
at a normal level for two minutes. Then they rewarded the dolphin with
fish. The device measured how much oxygen the dolphin used to accomplish
that task.
Holt and Noren found that when the dolphin was whistling harder and louder its metabolic rate rose by up to 80 percent above normal resting levels.
Just
like with humans, when marine mammals' metabolism goes up, they burn
more calories. Dawn Noren calculates that a dolphin making the louder
call for two minutes would burn the same amount of calories it would get
from eating half of a small fish.
These studies mainly looked at vocalizations, which appear to be the main way that orcas communicate. But even more important is the effect on their echolocation sense, which is fundamental to their ability to hunt prey. As Veirs explained it to me, some of this is just the sheer physics involved: When the volume of noise is that high, the amount of loss in the signal return from an echolocation click can be enough to render their ability to see underwater almost useless.
The studies also did not distinguish between noise from whale-watching boats and from large freighters. But what Veirs told me was that while the whale-boat noise could be intense, and it made a significant contribution to the problem, the biggest and most constant contributor to background noise, by far, was large shipping vessels.
My own experience corroborated what Val Veirs was saying. I own a hydrophone (thank you, Cetacean Research Technology) that I take kayaking with me, and I drop it in whenever whales are present (and sometimes even when they are not, just to see if I can catch any sound of them from a distance), and I've been using it for a number of years. That experience has made it clear to me that
large vessel noise is far, far more likely to disrupt and disturb orca
communication. After awhile you have to take the headphones off for some ships because
they throw up such a racket.
[You don't need to go out in a kayak to experience this for yourself. You can listen to the stationary hydrophones at Veirs' observatory overlooking Haro Strait at the Orcasound link here -- or to the Lime Kiln Lighthouse hydrophone at the same website. Even if it's quiet when you start it up, leave it on for awhile and a ship will come by,]
It seemed obvious to me that the sheer
volume issue alone was going to interfere with orcas' abilities to get
clear signals back from their echolocation clicks. The volume of
large-vessel noise was much more intense, and much, much more sustained.
And indeed, I have heard orcas shut up when big ships were present, and
start vocalizing again when their noise went away. An example of this occurred the same summer I was out gathering some of the material for the Seattle article, and I described it there:
In calm seas off the west side of San Juan Island, my kayak bobs gently
in a kelp bed. In the water about a quarter-mile distance from me, orcas
mill and frolic, most likely hunting their favorite chinook salmon. I
drop my hydrophone (an underwater microphone) into the water to listen
to their distinct calls.
A low clanging—whang, whang, whang—fills
my headphones. It is the steady and overpowering sound of a cargo ship,
one of the regular features of underwater life in the San Juan Islands’
Haro Strait.
At first, a quick scan of the horizon doesn’t
reveal the source of the noise. Finally, I spot it: A lone log-bearing
ship heads out to the open sea around the very southern tip of Vancouver
Island. Whang, whang, whang. It is at least nine miles away.
Finally,
the ship rounds the bend, and the sea quiets for just a moment before
the orcas’ distinct whistles, grunts and rat-a-tat-tat-tats fill the
water. These are J pod whales from the Salish Sea’s famous and
endangered Southern Resident orcas, and they are making the well-known
calls known as “S1.”
Seemingly energized, the whales head toward
my kelp bed and surround it, chatting loudly and rolling in the kelp.
It crackles and pops underwater as the orcas rip up fronds while
“kelping” themselves, something the Southern Residents are fond of
doing, apparently for the massaging effect.
I recorded the whole event, which I've embedded below. This is the whole 24-minute recording. Now, I recommend using this file non-passively: trust me, you will want to skip over the clanging ship noise, which dominates the first five minutes. But I've included it here so you can get a sense of what I'm talking about regarding the incessant and pervasive quality of the noise from big ships. Once you get a taste of that, skip forward to about the 5:00 mark and you'll hear the orcas -- which had been milling off a rocky point, well within my view but not uttering a peep the whole time -- chirp up as soon as the ship noise fades away.
One of the fun things about this encounter was that I was indeed in a kelp bed, so when the orcas came by, I was well out of their way (you can hear me making some ungodly noise in a few spots on the recording as I repositioned myself into the middle of the kelp). What I also didn't realize is the amount of tearing and breaking of the kelp fronds that occurs when orcas "kelp" themselves, as they were doing here. That's all the crackling and popping you hear amid the vocalizations.
Here's a somewhat more pleasant version, with the extraneous ship noise and some of the silent spaces and paddling/repositioning noises edited out. This is the one you want to just hit "play" on:
The larger and more significant takeaway from this is that scientists should probably take a longer look at the effects of large ship noise, and begin thinking about ways to mediate that. Considering the amount of money that we're seeing go up and down Haro Strait, we have to know that making any changes there is going to be an uphill battle. But it may prove to be an important component of recovering this endangered population.
Ever since that night in May 2013 when her daughter told her that her
friend’s daddy – the seemingly ordinary guy who hung out with the kids
in the neighborhood, but who turned out to be former “Minutemen” leader Chris Simcox
– had molested her the previous February, Michelle Lynch’s world has
been an endless limbo of uncertainty while wrestling with her daughter’s
pain.
It’s a feeling, she says, that has only been worsened by her
experiences with the court system as she awaits the day when Simcox will
stand trial more than two years after the event.
Lynch says her daughter, now seven, was a happy and well-adjusted little girl before that night in 2013.
“Before this event, [she] fell asleep with no problems and slept
through the night,” explained Lynch in a letter to the trial judge,
Superior Court Judge Jose Padilla. “She was very trusting; any
complaints of feeling sick were far and few between and were due to true
illnesses, and she was only emotional/angry when the time was ‘right,’
which was determined by your typical 7-year-old child.
“She now has nightmares and does not fall asleep without complaining
of her stomach hurting. She also complains of being ‘sick’ when I have
to leave her. She does not sleep through the night and most nights she
finds her way into my room, even though she has her own room and bed.
She worries about the doors being locked and asks over and over if they
have been secured.”
In her letter, Lynch went on to describe a litany of changed
emotional behavior, including “extreme sensitivity” and frequent crying,
as well as extreme anger and occasional hitting. She described what
should have been a fun trip to Disneyland transformed into a series of
panic attacks.
“I realize that nightmares and separation anxiety may be typical of a
young child’s behavior and that many children will exhibit periods of
emotional sensitivity and anger; these behaviors were never existent in
[my daughter] prior to this happening to her,” she explained.
Lynch wrote her letter because she faces the horrifying prospect of
having her daughter be cross-examined by Simcox himself, a prospect that
very nearly became a reality when Padilla approved Simcox’s request to represent himself at his trial. Late last week, the Arizona Supreme Court intervened.
Lynch wrote the letter in March, hoping to persuade Padilla to agree
to a prosecution request that Simcox be required to only cross-examine
the girls through a court-appointed associate attorney.
“Her father and I continually do our best to help [the girl] through
all of this by providing her with comfort, consistency, and other
avenues that encourage her to work through this in a positive manner to
where her daily life isn’t effected,” Lynch wrote. “Allowing Mr. Simcox
the ability to address my daughter, I fear, will only set [her] back in
her healing and quite possibly exacerbate her symptoms and anxiety/panic
attacks.”
However, Padilla ruled in Simcox’s favor,
telling Lynch and the other mother in the case that their letters did
not constitute evidence that the girls would be traumatized: “With all
due respect,” he said, “[the mothers] are simply not qualified to make
that assessment.”
That ruling, and the subsequent decision by the state appeals court
to allow the trial to proceed even as it considered the legal propriety
of allowing a pro se defendant to cross-examine his alleged
victim, was in many ways a culmination of Lynch’s nightmarish experience
with the court system since Simcox’s arrest.
In interviews with Hatewatch, Lynch has described feeling “left hung
out to dry” by both the judge and the prosecutors in the case. She’s
especially harsh in her assessment of the performance of the county’s
victims’ rights advocates unit, which she says “has just not done their
job.”
At one point, Lynch became furious with prosecutors
when Simcox was offered a plea bargain that would let him out of prison
after 10 years, in exchange for not forcing the girls to testify.
However, Simcox himself dismissed the offer, and it was eventually taken
off the table.
Lynch was also outraged at the way evidence was handled in the case,
particularly the fact that Phoenix detectives failed to seized Simcox’s
computer – the one on which he allegedly showed Lynch’s daughter
pornography. Prosecutors reportedly explained it away by saying that he
was only watching adult porn, a legal activity, on the computer, and so
no search warrant for it was ever issued.
Lynch described feeling abandoned by the system. “Over the whole
two-year process, victims’ rights in general have just not been
followed,” she said. “I’ve gotten more information from reporters and
television than I’ve even had with my own victim’s advocate. And I do
all the reaching out to them, they never reach out to me.
“My daughter has only met her two times, for a maximum of two hours.
So Padilla wants the victim’s advocate to be up on the stand with my
daughter, but that’s a stranger too. So you want a stranger to sit with
my daughter so that a man who has hurt her can question her. It doesn’t
make any sense,” she said.
“You know, she’s not going to want to reach for somebody she doesn’t
know, while somebody she does know who hurt her gets to talk to her.”
Lynch did, however, credit Phoenix New Times reporter
Stephen Lemons with keeping her informed on the case, saying Lemons
texted her with vital updates on the various court rulings and had
apprised her of other developments in the trial as they occurred. At
other times, she said, she was informed through the social media
grapevine.
“I found out about Chris representing himself two weeks after it was
filed and approved, through a television news picture that my boyfriend
sent me,” she said. “I had a panic attack at work, because nobody had
told me about it.
“I went on the county website and found that it was all there, but no
one had given me a heads up,” she added. “I should have gotten a phone
call the day that he filed to represent himself. I shouldn’t have to do
all of that work. I shouldn’t have to become my own legal aide.”
The most difficult part, she says, has been helping her daughter – who gets counseling weekly – heal from her trauma.
“It’s definitely no fun,” she said. She described the recent upheaval
in the case as especially trying, since her daughter had not yet been
told that Simcox would be asking them questions.
Her daughter was shocked. “She was hysterical. She started crying.
She didn’t want to talk to him, and she cried herself to sleep in the
car. And then it was an hour later that the advocate texted me and said
there was nothing going to happen on Thursday and the judge was going to
wait until Monday. So after all that I had to go in and tell her it
wasn’t going to happen.”
She is elated that Phoenix attorney Jack Wilenchik (who had been
referred to her by Lemons) was able to stop the train wreck from
happening, at least for now, by persuading Arizona Supreme Court Justice
John Pelander that, in the words of his petition, “if the court allows
the child victim to be subject to cross-examination by her abuser, then
the victim’s constitutional right [under the Arizona Constitution] to be
free from harassment and intimidation will be permanently violated.”
“It’s been really, really difficult,” Lynch said. “I honestly am
pleased about the delay, because it’s about making sure that my daughter
doesn’t suffer more trauma than what she has been going through."
J2, aka 'Granny, estimated to be over 100 years old, plays in the kelp
A lot of my non-dorca friends have been remarking about how frequently they have been seeing the SeaWorld counteroffensive to the #Blackfish Effect on their teevee sets these days, especially on sports and news programs.
What they mostly remark on, in fact, is just how utterly insincere the people they are putting onscreen are coming off. "There are people who believe the crap that Sea World says," says my friend Michael Rogers. "The people in the ad are not two of them."
That's just the tell, though. If you dig into the factual content of these ads, what you'll discover is that they are deeply misleading, bordering on the outrageous.
See for yourself. Here's the most frequently seen ad, featuring a SeaWorld veterinarian and the company's animal-rescues chief, Pedro Ramos-Navarrete (which is kind of weird, considering that SeaWorld has never rescued an orca nor does it support people such as New Zealand orca scientist Ingrid Visser, who actually is engaged in orca-rescue work).
You'll notice that Ramos-Navarrete says the following:
"And government research shows they live just as long as whales in the wild!"
This, over a text that reads:
"Survival in the wild is comparable to survival in captivity." -- Wall Street Journal
Note the little sleight of hand there? The first statement actually describes longevity -- how long the whales live. The second statement in fact is about survival rates -- that is, the likelihood of a whale surviving any given year. These are completely different things.
Then there's the longer SeaWorld propaganda ad addressing the same topic, appended to the above video. It features Chris Dold, SeaWorld's head veterinarian, holding forth to a confused member of the Twitter public, deriding their critics' claims that SeaWorld whales don't live as long in captivity as "false":
You don't need to take our word for it. Some of the best marine mammal researchers in the world work for the federal government at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. You know what they found? That killer whales that live at SeaWorld live just as long as killer whales in the wild. One of the authors of that report told the Wall Street Journal, "Survival in the wild is comparable to survival in captivity."
You'll note that it indulges the same sleight of hand -- assuming that people will believe that survival rates determine how long a whale lives. But they are completely separate measures.
SeaWorld's claim, you see, rests entirely on the work of Alaska scientist Doug DeMaster, who has been compiling statistics on annual survival rates. These are handy numbers and probably give us an accurate picture of the likelihood of any given orca surviving the year, both in the wild and in captivity.
Back in 1995, DeMaster and his partner found that there was a significant difference in those rates between orcas in captivity and those in the wild, favoring wild orcas by a large percentage (as differences in these rates go). But by 2013, he explained to Politifact, he had found their annual survivorship rates to be comparable. That's the study cited in the WSHJ piece as well.
But what SeaWorld isn't telling you is that there's a caveat to DeMaster's observation, and it's a big one:
"[A]s long as you use data from 2005 to 2013."
That's an eight-year data sample to assess how likely an orca is to survive in an institution that has been in operation for over fifty. In statistics, that's what we call a "skewed sample", or more precisely, an "inadequate sample.
That's SeaWorld saying, "Hey, we may have been insanely awful in how we handled orcas before, but we've been doing much, much better the last eight years!"
More to the point, annual survivor rates won't tell you how long the animals will live -- which is, of course, exactly what both Dold and Ramos-Navarette were claiming. All that number gives you is a kind of snapshot of the current health of the population, how likely their animals are to live through the year. If you want to know how long the animals will live, you need to look up longevity statistics.
Now, let's be specific: We don't really have a complete longevity picture for the orcas in SeaWorld's care, in part because they have only been in business for a little over fifty years now, and orcas in the wild (particularly females) are known to live often into their eighties, and even beyond. Atop the post, you'll see my 2013 shot of Granny, the matriarch of the Southern Residents' J clan orcas who is believed to be over 100 years old (though her age is in fact an estimate).
A whale whose age we know a little better is this one: L-25, believed to be about 85. She is also believed to be the mother of Lolita, the L-pod female who has been held captive at the Miami Seaquarium for the past 45 years and counting.
The oldest SeaWorld orca, by contrast, is the female Northern
Resident orca Corky, who was captured as a 2-year-old calf from the A5
pod, whose whereabouts remain well known (though in fact her mother has
since passed away). She is 47 years old.
The next
oldest are the Icelandic orca females captured on the same day in 1978,
Katina and Kasatka, who are estimated to be 39 and 38 years old,
respectively. The oldest male in the collection, Ulises (another
Icelandic capture) is 37.
Those are, however, the outliers when it comes to longevity at SeaWorld to date. The bottom line is much more grim.
As Naomi Rose has explained in detail, SeaWorld is even distorting the annual-survival-rate (ASR) data, which still does not favor SeaWorld:
However, the most recently presented ASR – not peer-reviewed, but presented at a scientific conference (Innes et al. in prep – this is for the period 2005-2013) – calculated from captive killer whale data in the Marine Mammal Inventory Report is lower, at 0.983, than the Alaskan ASR for both sexes aged 1.5-2.5 (0.997), females aged 15-19 (0.996), both sexes aged 10.5-14.5 (0.992), both sexes aged 3.5-5.5 (0.991), females aged 25-29 (0.990), both sexes aged 6.5-9.5 (0.989), females aged 20-24 (0.987), and even males aged 15-19 (0.986). It is higher than all other age classes (mixed and single sex) in Alaska. The Matkin et al. paper did not calculate an overall ASR, so none of these comparisons (a mixed age/mixed sex group vs. a specific age/sex class) is actually valid. Regardless, they are not similar. (Note: the MMIR ASR for the decade 1995-2004 was 0.968, lower than most of the Alaskan values.)
Meanwhile, as she notes, the average life expectancy for wild orcas is “around 50-90 years for females and 30-70 years for males."
So what does it look like for SeaWorld orcas?
I've compiled a database of SeaWorld orcas, living and dead, wild- and captive-born. I've specifically left out other marine parks' orcas from the database, given that the record there is downright horrific, particularly during the 1960s and '70s, and granting SeaWorld's argument that its superior care should not be tainted by what occurs in other parks. Nor does it include the many calves who died stillborn.
Here's the final tally:
-- Over the years (since 1965, beginning with the first Shamu), SeaWorld has possessed a total of 66 live killer whales. Of those, 29 are still alive. Shamu died after six years in captivity, a victim of SeaWorld's dubious breeding program.
-- Wild-born captives have both fared the worst and lived the longest. Of the 32 wild-born orcas in their collection, only six remain alive. Those six, as noted above, are also SeaWorld's longest-lived orcas. The average age of death for wild whales at the park is 14.5 years.
-- The average length of captivity of all of SeaWorld's wild whales, including those still alive, is 15.375 years. And the average longevity for all 66 of SeaWorld's whales tallies out at 14.03 years. For males, the average longevity of all orcas living and dead is 14.78 years; for females, it is even lower, at 13.92 years (the reverse of what occurs in the wild, where females enjoy much longer average lifespans).
-- Captive-born orcas have been a mixed bag. Of the 37 who have survived infancy, 11 have died. Those deceased orcas have averaged 9.8 years alive. Of the 26 remaining in SeaWorld's collection, the oldest -- Orkid and Kayla -- are 27 years old. The average age of all their current captive-born orcas is 14.1 years (the number drops to 12.76 if deceased captive-born orcas are factored in).
In other words, it should be obvious that captive wild killer whales have not fared well historically at SeaWorld, especially when compared to the wild. There, the Southern Resident killer whale population that founded SeaWorld has, while officially endangered as one of the effects of that capture period, at least maintained relatively stable numbers. In contrast, 81 percent of SeaWorld's wild population has died, all at ages well below what is considered a normal lifespan in the wild.
And while SeaWorld loves to tout its now-increased standards of veterinary care and husbandry as the reason for arguing "Hey, we've done lots better in the last eight years!", there really is no guarantee that these short-term gains of the recent past will translate into actual longevity for the orcas, including those born in captivity.
They still are subject to the extreme stresses caused by their sterile and extremely limited environment and the obliteration of orca-society norms that they have been wired for over millions of years. They still lead the lives of slaves. There's no doubt the company has light years to go before it can even come close to replicating the complexity of environment and surroundings, as well as the multiple layers of orca social organization, that they can experience in wild waters, even if (in the case of the captive-born whales and damaged goods like Tilikum) that only means life in a seapen similar to Keiko's.
Study after study has demonstrated that whales in captivity are more than two and a half times more likely to die than whales in the wild. All the care in the world cannot compensate for the stress brought on by placing a large, highly mobile, highly intelligent, and highly social animal with a complex life into a small concrete tank.
Of the 136 orcas taken in captivity from the wild over the years, only 13 still survive. The average lifespan in captivity so far is about eight and a half years. In the wild, the average rises to thirty-one years for males and forty-six for females. Then there is the upper end of the spectrum. In the wild, males will live up to sixty years, and in the Puget Sound, there is a matriarchal female named Granny who is believed to be a hundred years old.
And let's remember one last stark number: Of the 55 whales the SeaWorld and other marine parks removed from the Southern and Northern Resident populations from 1964-1976, exactly two remain alive. One is at SeaWorld: Corky. And the only surviving Southern Resident is Lolita. She's not even in SeaWorld's collection.
Anyone know what 'Social Communism' is? From Ric O'Barry's Dolphin Project.
They held a nice protest out in front of SeaWorld Florida in Orlando on Saturday, and some uninvited guests showed up. Actually, they apparently were invited -- by someone associated with SeaWorld.
"Support Social Communism" the signs read. They featured both a Russian hammer and sickle and a Chinese star. Or something like that.
The invitations came with paychecks to go stand among the protesters
with signs that would at once make the protesters look bad and
simultaneously express the company's opinion of the dirty hippies
marching out front.
Soooo .... does anyone know exactly what "Social Communism" is? Ever hear of it? Me neither.
When Dolphin Project spoke with one of them, the unnamed Communist admitted to “just doing this as a job to make
so extra money.” When we asked him to actually name a communist, he
“couldn’t.”
We also noted that the pre-made sign he was holding was manufactured
in Texas. When we suggested that this might, ” not look good to some,”
should he try to get a job or decide to run for office in 10 years, he
began to hide.
Hey, if I had worn black socks with shorts in public, I would try to hide too.
Via Facebook.
Mind you, the sign carriers never openly admitted to being paid by SeaWorld to stand there with those signs. But who else would do that -- with prefabricated signs made in Texas, no less? Certainly the other protesters had their opinion about whose work the "Social Communists" were engaging.
So, let's check the scoreboard on SeaWorld's continuing attempts to push back against the "Blackfish Effect," the rising tide of anger over the clearing understanding that orca and dolphin captivity constitutes animal cruelty.
-- The response website, "The Truth About Blackfish": Epic fail.
-- The proposal to make their sterile pools bigger: Epic fail.
Now SeaWorld and its defenders are making clear that the fight over orca and dolphin captivity is becoming your classic Culture War battleground. They're casting their critics into the same basket as LGBT and civil-rights defenders and themselves upon the same pedestal as the geniuses who run Indiana.
Yeah, that should do wonders for their stock price.
The Arizona Supreme Court intervened in the child-molestation trial of onetime Minuteman leader Chris Simcox
on Thursday afternoon, calling a halt to the proceedings until it can
consider whether Simcox – who is insisting on his right to represent
himself at trial – should be permitted to cross-examine the young girls
he is accused of molesting.
KPHO-TV in Phoenix
reported that Justice John Pelander of the state’s high court granted a
stay in the trial at the request of Phoenix attorney Jack Wilenchik,
who is representing the parents of one of the girls pro bono. Wilenchik
had filed an emergency motion on behalf of the victim with the Arizona
Supreme Court on Wednesday night, after the state appeals court declined to stop the trial while it considered whether or not it was appropriate to allow Simcox to cross-examine the girls.
Maricopa County prosecutors had asked Superior Court Judge Jose
Padilla, who is overseeing the trial, to require Simcox to cross-examine
the girls through court-appointed associate counsel, but Padilla had
refused. And when the appeals court declined to prevent the trial from
proceeding while it waited to consider the prosecutors’ arguments,
Wilenchik stepped up with what he admits was “a Hail Mary pass,” in an
interview with Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times.
“If the court allows the child victim to be subject to
cross-examination by her abuser,” Wilenchik argued in his motion, “then
the victim’s constitutional right [under the Arizona Constitution] to be
free from harassment and intimidation will be permanently violated.”
Justice Pelander agreed, ruling that “the stay shall take effect
either immediately or upon completion of the ongoing jury selection
process in superior court.” Jury selection in Padilla’s courtroom ended
Thursday with only five jurors having been examined, four of those
rejected. The trial is now expected to resume sometime after the end of
this month.
“Simcox caused this all himself,” Wilenchik told Lemons. “It was him
who decided after two years of pending charges to make the decision to
represent himself a month and a-half before trial. I think the
prosecution moved pretty quickly to ask for this accommodation that
[Simcox] not cross-examine his own molestation victims.”
Victims’ rights advocates had earlier voiced their outrage to KPHO
reporters about the possibility that Simcox might cross-examine his
alleged victims. Daphne Young of Childhelp, an Arizona nonprofit that
advocates for abused and neglected children, told the reporters that
permitting such a situation would be a gross mistake.
“When a potential predator has the opportunity to cross-examine a
child victim of sexual abuse, there’s a great risk for intimidation,
manipulation and re-victimizing of that young victim,” Young said. “When
you consider all the verbal and non-verbal cues that a predator uses to
groom a young victim, there’s a lot that can happen under the nose of
the judges and even experts in the field because of the intimate
relationship that abusers use to create silence.”
In this case, the girls were ages 6 and 5 when the alleged incidents occurred, in 2013. They are 8 and 7 now. Simcox was originally charged
with also molesting a third little girl, whom Simcox allegedly bribed
with candy to expose her genitals, but those charges were dropped after
the grand jury chose not to indict him in that case. However, that girl
is expected to be a prosecution witness as well.
According to the papers filed by prosecutors, Simcox “is alleged to
have digitally penetrated his biological daughter’s [vagina] on two
occasions, penetrated her vagina with an object on [one] occasion and to
have fondled the genitals of his daughter’s friend on two occasions.”
Simcox had initially been offered a plea bargain that would have
required him to serve 10 years in prison, but he refused and insisted on
taking the case to trial. Eventually, after months of disputes with his
court-appointed attorneys, Simcox decided to assert his constitutional
right to defend himself in court. Padilla granted him that.
Simcox rose to national notoriety in the early part of the previous
decade by leading vigilante border watches that attracted a steady
stream of media attention, culminating in the 2005 Minuteman Project
event at the border that he and cofounder Jim Gilchrist promoted as a
national anti-immigration event.
All along, however, there were allegations of sexual misbehavior. A 2005 report by the SPLC
noted that Simcox had been previously accused by an older daughter of
attempting to molest her, and his third ex-wife – mother of his current
accuser – obtained a restraining order during their 2010 divorce.
The oft-delayed Arizona trial of erstwhile Minuteman leader Chris Simcox on
child-molestation charges has blown up once again, thanks primarily to
Simcox’s insistence on having the right to personally cross-examine his
alleged victims — two young girls aged 7 and 8.
Now, according to a report by Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times,
Judge Padilla has conceded to Simcox’s counter-argument — namely, that
he should be permitted to directly cross-examine the two girls because
doing so is “a crucial cornerstone of his desire to present his best
defense.” Padilla ruled in a hearing Thursday afternoon that Simcox
would be allowed to question the girls, who were 5 and 6 years old when
the crimes allegedly occurred.
But Padilla refused to remove himself from the trial, which Simcox had also requested.
According to The Associated Press,
prosecutors plan to immediately file an appeal of Padilla’s ruling,
meaning the trial — which had already been delayed nine times since
Simcox’s arrest in July 2013 — is likely to last into the summer. Lemons
reported that deputy county attorney Kelli Luther argued strenuously
against allowing Simcox to “control his own victims in the courtroom,”
pointing to U.S. Supreme Court and federal appellate court rulings
allowing for special accommodations to be made in similar instances.
However, Padilla said he would need evidence that the children are
traumatized at the prospect of being interrogated by their alleged
molester, and brushed aside letters from the girls’ mothers attesting to
that effect: “With all due respect,” he said, “[the mothers] are simply
not qualified to make that assessment.”
In the filing made this week, Simcox argues that the children “were
never subjected to … harm in the first place,” so the county attorney is
“asking the court to find the defendant guilty … before the trial has
even begun.”
Simcox was originally charged with
also molesting a third little girl, whom Simcox allegedly bribed with
candy to expose her genitals, but those charges were dropped after the
grand jury chose not to indict him in that case. However, that girl is
expected to be a prosecution witness as well.
Simcox’s trial was most recently scheduled to begin March 24.
However, when attorneys gathered in Padilla’s courtroom that day, they
were informed that Simcox was in the hospital, for reasons that could
not be disclosed under medical-privacy laws, and would be there for a
week. At a pretrial conference on Thursday, Judge Padilla scheduled jury
selection to begin on April 6.
But if the prosecutors proceed to take the ruling on the girls’
testimony to an appeals court, that schedule seems unlikely at best.
During his heyday as a Minuteman leader, Simcox liked to pose for reporters with a gun down the front of his jeans.
These developments are the latest in a long and twisted road to trial for Simcox, who previously had suggested he would present a “grand conspiracy” defense
that he had been targeted for prosecution, and the evidence against him
invented, because of his prominent role as a leader and co-founder of
the nativist extremism group called the Minutemen. The judge later
informed him that such a defense would not be allowed.
At the height of the border vigilante movement, Simcox was president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,
a nationwide, anti-immigration organization that led armed “citizen
border patrols” in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, along with
a smattering of states on the Canadian border where Minutemen had
deployed to protect America from northern invaders. Never modest, the
cigar-chomping Simcox was a hyper and relentless self-aggrandizer who
came across with the smug egotism that quickly earned him the nickname
“The Little Prince.”
He was known for over-the-top claims, like his repeated assertion
that he had seen Chinese Red Army men at the Mexican border, preparing
to attack the U.S. Nevertheless, he was featured repeatedly on Lou
Dobbs’ CNN show and a plethora of shows on Fox News, where he was
treated as a serious critic of immigration policy.
But even then, there were allegations of sexual abuse. As the SPLC reported in 2005,
Simcox was accused by his first wife of molesting another daughter when
she was a teenager, although no complaint was ever made to police. His
second wife also sought custody of their teenage son because, she said,
Simcox had become violent and unpredictable. His third wife — the mother
of his current accuser — took out a restraining order against Simcox in 2010 when she divorced him.
Beneath ominous music, the voice of the narrator strikes a strident
chord, feverishly warning viewers: “Attention! President Obama is
exercising another executive power grab! And this time, he is going
directly after your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms!”
Sounding for all the world like an Alex Jones or Oath Keepers
production, the video ad then launches into a paranoid description of
Obama’s supposed plot to destroy the Second Amendment.
“The Obama administration was unable to impose gun restrictions and
confiscation through the legislative process, so now it’s trying to ban
commonly used ammunition through regulation. Obama must be stopped now!
If we allow Obama to ban ammunition through executive fiat now, it will
lead to the loss of our Second Amendment rights by the time Obama leaves
office!”
Of course, as with most similar efforts at fearmongering over the
Obama administration’s handling of gun rights and gun control, the
reality regarding the supposed plot to destroy Americans’ gun rights is a
far cry from what’s depicted in the ads: There was never an executive
order being considered about the ammunition, as the ad suggests; and the
brief consideration by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives (ATF) of altering regulations of a narrow bandwidth of
armor-piercing bullets had already been abruptly abandoned several weeks
ago.
Indeed, with only 19 months remaining in office, the long-feared
Obama “gun grab” that gun-rights and antigovernment “Patriot” groups
(not to mention Jones and Co.) have feverishly warned the public against
since at least 2008 appears far from ever materializing. The
organization behind the ads, however, is not a run-of-the-mill far-right
“Patriot” group, but presents itself as a mainstream gun-rights group,
the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF).
The regulation in question – actually an ATF proposal to alter its regulation framework
for certain types of ammo used in AR-15 semi-automatic weapons,
especially those such as armor-piercing types that seemed unlikely to be
used “primarily for sporting purposes” – was met with fierce opposition
in early March by the Second Amendment Foundation, who launched the ad campaign with the incendiary video in early March.
However, the ATF recoiled quickly
from the negative response generated by the video ad, and on March 10
withdrew the proposal and closed off comments by noting that “the vast
majority of comments received to date are critical of the framework.”
Nonetheless, the SAF’s ads have continued to run, appearing on
national media outlets such as CNN and Fox News, as well as at
conservative outlets such as The Blaze. They direct viewers to an 800
phone number that, if dialed, collects the callers’ names and adds them
to an SAF petition opposing any regulatory change for the ammunition, as
well as the outfit’s potential donor database.
SAF spokesman David Workman told me that the non-profit organization
had invested “several hundred thousand dollars” in the campaign, and the
ads would cease appearing once the ad buy had expired, probably in
early April. And besides, he added, his organization didn’t believe that
the administration had fully retreated yet.
“When ATF pulled back on it, they didn’t say the idea was dead,”
Workman said. “They’re going to go back and re-examine it, see how to
present it to the public so it doesn’t generate 310,000 comments. We
don’t believe this is a dead idea.”
ATF spokeswoman Danette Seward told the Washington Post that
the proposed "green tip" ammo ban came from the ATF's decision to
review all ammo exemptions to a 1986 law that had sought to crack down
on “cop killer” bullets. Seward said the agency had seen a recent
increase in the number of "sporting purposes" exemptions requested by
ammunition manufacturers for the AR-15 ammo. Moreover, she said, the
agency wanted to strip the “green tip” armor-piercing ammo because AR-15
handguns capable of firing the rounds have recently become available.
The White House had issued a statement
calling the regulation change “common sense,” but at no time did it
ever indicate that the president would make the regulation through
executive action. Press Secretary Josh Earnest, likewise, had told reporters
that this was an action by the ATF under its standard procedures,
noting: “I’d put this in the category of common-sense steps that the
government can take to protect the Second Amendment rights of
law-abiding Americans while also making sure that our law enforcement
officers who are walking the beat every day can do their jobs just a
little bit more safely.”
Workman explained that the seemingly hysterical conclusion of the
ad’s narrator that the failed change in rules for the AR-15 ammunition
could doom every citizen’s guns rights could be seen as rational, if one
saw any gun regulation at all as a kind of slippery slope.
“If people can be convinced that it’s OK to ban one type of
ammunition, it will be easier to sell the idea that it’s OK to ban
another type of ammunition,” Workman said. “And then we’ll get right
back to where we were before, he’ll want to ban a whole class of
firearms. They’ve tried to do that before.”
He thought that raising fears about an Obama plot against citizens’
gun rights was legitimate, regardless of Obama’s prior lack of action on
gun control. “You can go ahead and think what you want, but there are a
lot of people out there who are very concerned about this
administration’s designs on gun control,” he said. “Whether it starts
with an ammunition ban or some other sort of regulation, it is still
viewed by millions of people as an attempt to erode their basic right to
keep and bear arms.”
Thanks in no small part to a barrage of misleading ad campaigns.
Midway through the
Q&A, a woman no one knew stood up and waved some papers and asked
Hargrove if he had been arrested for domestic violence and assault
against his sister. Hargrove made clear to everyone that this was a
baldfaced falsehood. There were some boos, and the woman shrank away into the woodwork.
Mind you, I am friends with some authors who attract controversy -- especially Rick Perlstein and Max Blumenthal -- and so of course there are always some kooks at their public speaking appearances, at least in Seattle. But they're usually of the black-helicopter variety, if you know what I mean. I'd never seen anyone try to smear an author in public with an unprovable and ugly accusation that had nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Well, let me correct that: I have seen this kind of intimidation by smear campaign previously. It's the kind of thing that
everyone who has ever dealt with Scientology has had to confront,
particularly when it comes to former members exposing their secrets.
And make no mistake: Hargrove has been scoring consistently against SeaWorld, particularly as he discusses the difficulties orca trainers face, embodied by the 2010 death of his colleague Dawn Brancheau at the hands of the largest orca in captivity, Tilikum, at SeaWorld Orlando. His appearance with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show was also a smash hit:
All the week I had been making jokes on Facebook comparing SeaWorld to Scientology -- a timely comparison, given the appearance of the documentary Going Clear on HBO. The film is in many ways just a distillation of Lawrence Wright's magisterial work of investigative journalism of the same title. "I'm becoming convinced that SeaWorld is the theme-park equivalent of
Scientology: a cult that relies on abusive practices and intentional
self-delusion/prevarication to sustain itself," I wrote. OK, I wasn't really joking.
And then on Monday night, there was that strange woman trying to smear him with an accusation that, even if true, has not a single freaking thing to do with the issue that Hargrove has been confronting -- namely, the abusive and coercive and ultimately inhumane practices in its treatment both of its captive killer whales as well as the people who have the jobs of handling and caring for them.
Analogy confirmed. In spades.
And the craziest part is that the smear artists were just getting started.
The very next day, one of the more pestilent corners of the wingnutosphere posted a video showing a drunken John Hargrove harassing a friend on the phone with the repeated and thoughtless use of the N-word, delivered with a Texas twang. Within the day, even as one San Diego area bookstore canceled Hargrove's appearance, the video was then being promoted to various media outlets avidly by none other than Fred Jacobs, SeaWorld's chief communications officer.
SeaWorld spokesman Fred
Jacobs said in [an] email that “we believe it is important that you see
this video we received just this weekend from an internal
whistleblower.”
“Anyone interviewing the
“Blackfish” star should certainly be aware of it,” Jacobs said in the
email. “We are offended by John’s behavior and language. The video is
particularly reprehensible since John Hargrove is wearing a SeaWorld
shirt. SeaWorld would have terminated Hargrove’s employment immediately
had we known he engaged in this kind of behavior.”
Hargrove was appropriately embarrassed, as well he should have been. It's a video that shows him at his worst -- thoughtless, arrogant, ignorant, and mean. And his initial response -- "I remember parts of that night and drinking,
and you can clearly tell we definitely had a lot to drink. But that
video is taken completely out of context. There’s not a proper beginning
or end" -- was inadequate.
But he's since been more forthcoming, more like the John Hargrove most of us who have met him know now. He told KPBS: “I don’t think that it will for the people who truly know me ... It’s certainly offensive language and it should’ve never been used. I
was so heavily intoxicated — I barely recall any of those events.
Clearly, it’s not funny.”
First I will make clear I take full responsibility for my actions and I
cringed when I watched the video from 5 years ago- a night I barely
remember when it happened and even less of 5 years after the fact. There
is no place EVER for the N word. This is a word tied with a horrific
history that as a white person I cannot even fully understand the depth
of pain this caused black people. I certainly regret my actions that
night. I would not expect anyone to defend that conversation where I
used the N word. I am extremely disappointed that my words could cause
more pain to a minority group. Regardless if you are in a private home
and drunk and think you are harmlessly being funny- this word should
never be used.
... Tonight at my book signing in LA, I had an exchange with an black
man that will stay with me for the rest of my life. He was intelligent,
articulate, and completely genuine. He began by saying that he and his
friends have followed and supported me from the beginning I began to
speak out and admired my courage by doing so. They believe in what we
are all fighting for and have held me in high regard and respected me
but when he saw the video he looked me straight in the eyes and said
that it truly hurt him and wanted to hear directly from me what I
had to say regarding that video and if I was willing to personally
apologize to him.
I was both impressed and humbed and felt even worse
actually seeing a face of this young black man who respected me but had
now been hurt by me. This was an amazing human being and without
hesitation or making any excuses I sincerely apologized to him to his
face and explained as I said earlier that even though I know it is NEVER
acceptable to use this word that as a white man I don't pretend to ever
be able to fully understand the pain this word has caused him
personally or any other black person.
He had already bought my
book and stayed to go through the line to have me sign his book. We
shook hands and had a real and genuine understanding and forgiveness in
the end. I was humbled and had so much respect for him in how he chose
to conduct himself. I will never forget that exchange. He deserved my
answers and my apology and he accepted them and chose to forgive me. And
for that I am very grateful. That exchange was truly powerful and
witnessed by a packed room in the book store.
As someone whose regular business entails confronting racism, there's nothing amusing about the video or Hargrove's participation in it. But as someone whose work also entails assessing evidence regarding whether someone is a serious racist, I have only one question: What, are you freaking kidding me?
This video was recorded five years ago. Hargrove is clearly intoxicated. He clearly thinks he is being amusing. The only other person who seems to think he's amusing is the person recording the thing, who we can all similarly presume to be the person who leaked the video of their onetime friend. Clearly the woman on the other end is not much amused, especially as Hargrove makes fun of her for dropping the N-bomb as well. This is ugly stuff, but I can also assure you that it is common, everyday stuff that a million thoughtless white Americans privately indulge every single day. It's also an extraordinarily transparent smear attempt with "gotcha" video, the kind that actually sheds little light on the issue of racism and its institutionalization, and in the end is a shallow distraction that does more to dilute a serious discussion of the underlying issues. It's certainly not the kind of talk that would attract the attention of organizations such as the SPLC or the ADL, which are dedicated to combating hate speech and racial extremism in its many manifestations, and are logically and necessarily focused on dealing with hatemongers who spew hate over the public airwaves to large audiences every day. This is small-time, petty racism that is meaningless unless it can somehow demonstrate that Hargrove is a practicing racist today (not likely) or that it reveals a character flaw that he has never outgrown.
Part of the story that Hargrove has to tell, in fact, is all about his personal growth and the immense changes in attitudes that he has undergone. At one time, Hargrove was the consummate Company Guy, happily shilling the SeaWorld official line about the killer whales in their care and dedicating his body and his physical well-being to a company that saw him and the whales as commodities, for years at low salaries made endurable by their idealism and the ego satisfaction that came with the job. He made fun of the dippy hippies who used to protest outside SeaWorld venues for the freedom of the animals in his care, including one of the oldest wild whales in captivity, the Northern Resident (A5 pod) Corky. And then, like someone awakening from an abusive cult because the personal toll -- including the death toll of friends and colleagues -- began to mount, Hargrove grew up and out of the corporate cocoon he had placed himself in. To say that the Hargrove you see onstage today is nothing like the punk in the video is an understatement. In fact, it's also clear that this Hargrove -- the cocky, thoughtless racist -- is the Hargrove who also defended orca captivity to the hilt.
In the end, it reflects far more directly in a negative way on SeaWorld's culture, because the Hargrove in the video is the Ultimate SeaWorld Guy. And that same culture seems to think that smearing him with the video -- given that it has zero bearing on his knowledge of the company's orca-captivity programs -- will convince people that Hargrove has a credibilty problem. No, it's the company that would trot out that kind of petty, crude, ham-handed smear that has a credibility problem (and note that they don't even have enough class or smarts to do it on the sly, letting their defenders in the wingnutosphere do the dirty work for them; no, their comms chief is the guy out there on the front line, openly circulating the smear). Especially because it reminds us all so closely of how Scientology, the ultimate fear-driven cult, has operated for years.
What Wright's book details exhaustively is how the church assiduously gathers information, especially lots of private information, on all of its members and recruits, especially through the ritual "audits" conducted by the church that are essentially tell-all confession sessions, and then exploits that information and their insecurities to drive them deeper into the cult, making it so that the threat of cutting them off from the cult is like cutting off their air. Tellingly, Hargrove's book describes a culture among SeaWorld employees that worked in similar ways.
And woe betide anyone who should fall from favor in the cult of Scientology. They would be subjected to all kinds of ritual humiliations, demotions and even abusive degradation. Again, not entirely dissimilar from SeaWorld.
Eventually, some would try to break away, but if they ever tried to reveal to the public the facts they had learned they would be confronted with the most ferocious personal attacks, in which literally nothing was out of bounds. Of course, they would first mine all the personal information revealed during the church's "audits," which then were used in attempts to blackmail their critics into silence. If that failed, the church often resorted to even more frightening personal attacks. In the end, the phrase "going clear" is now a stand-in for anyone overwhelmed by Scientology's fraudulent spiritual nonsense, someone who believes in the church's overtly insane theology without question as an act of pure gullibility. The church itself is shrinking, but it's intensifying its hold on the believers it has remaining.
SeaWorld isn't as deeply deformed as Scientology, perhaps because its pseudo-religious components are limited, as is its reach. But it's become abundantly self-evident that SeaWorld's self-contained and rapidly collapsing bubble of badly constructed reality is approaching its final throes as well. And lashing out as it does so.
It's an ugly sight, really. Much uglier than a stupid video.
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