Government

From Threatening A Federal Judge To Arresting A Child Over The Pledge, A Lot Of Ridiculous Crap Happened This Weekend

There's one thread that ties these stories together and it's not pretty.

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One would think that Roger Stone implying that he’d like someone to assassinate a sitting federal judge and then quickly and ineptly backtracking would be a bigger story today if only because Roger Stone is a hilarious Medieval chaos imp somehow still running amok in contemporary politics.

He’s the most ludicrous person in his own neighborhood and his neighbor is Chad Ochocinco.

Or perhaps that there’d be more to say about the decision to arrest a sixth-grader for not standing up for the pledge of allegiance — the sort of thing that you thought was settled in Barnette and a story steeped in both the dangerous school-to-prison pipeline mentality and the toxic backlash against the kinds of peaceful protests identified with Colin Kaepernick.

At least you’d suspect more talk about ATL’s 2018 Lawyer of the Year and recent podcast guest Michael Avenatti announcing that he’ll be giving up financial control of his firm amid accusations by a former partner — and, as discussed in the podcast, Avenatti disputes the attorney’s “partnership” status — that the firm has millions in assets that have been hidden from the court.

Frankly, overlooking Avenatti’s news can be forgiven because it’s just another step in the long battle with this guy that we’ve all talked about before.

However, the three-day weekend dumped so much more misery upon us that these stories failed to capture enough bandwidth to be more than a blip on the national consciousness. But with Stone and the story of the student, there is, unfortunately, a common theme that requires a closer examination. A thread that should guide our understanding of our times through the touchstone of these stories.

It’s a stunning indictment of the news cycle that putting crosshairs on Judge Amy Berman Jackson — a move not-too-dissimilar to Sarah Palin’s infamous “crosshairs” ad about then-Rep. Gabby Giffords — is being pushed to the backburner. The Giffords shooter wasn’t acting out Palin’s fantasy, but the ad was one of the many canaries in the mine that America ignored at the polite request of gun manufacturers. The militarization of political difference and the casual introduction of murderous violence into mainstream political discourse probably should have tipped someone off that there was a deeper cancer metastasizing within the conservative movement.

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Roger Stone, the aggressive pancreatic tumor at the core of that cancer, has spent decades railing against the “rule of law” in favor of the tinpot dictatorship his hero Dick Nixon always favored and as he finds himself on the wrong end of the criminal justice machine, he’s responding with his usual grace. On Monday, Stone took to Instagram to place an extreme closeup of Amy Berman Jackson next to crosshairs, which I suppose was a nice move since it implied her attacker would miss? Maybe?

In any event, he’s backtracking now:

“Please inform the Court that the photograph and comment today was improper and should not have been posted,” a statement signed by Stone read. “I had no intention of disrespecting the court and humbly apologize to the court for this transgression.”

So far, the relentless stream of partisan attacks on the federal judiciary from questioning their loyalties to calling justices a “disgrace” haven’t whipped someone into a violent frenzy. But it’s only a matter of time. Much like the Giffords target image, no one is going to take a shot at Judge Jackson over Stone’s Instagram stylings. But the fact that someone tied at a senior level to a successful presidential campaign feels comfortable using their social media to imply violence against jurists should worry people. Alas, it’ll just be another dead canary we look back at a year from now when some judge is tragically lost.

Do you recall when we hashed out the constitutional right to not stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance? In like, the 40s? Well, we’re right back to where we were at the 20th-century crossroads before America decided to fight a war against fascism. Over the weekend we learned that a sixth-grader at Lawton Chiles Middle Academy was arrested earlier this month. His crime is officially designated as “disobedience,” but in reality he was arrested for having the audacity to exercise constitutional rights in a way that unsettled white people.

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A substitute teacher began the day with the Pledge of Allegiance, a disturbingly “Young Pioneers” tribute that doesn’t worry Americans as much as it should. According to the teacher, a young black student refused to stand for the Pledge. Rather than treat this with a shrug AS SHE’S CONSTITUTIONALLY OBLIGATED TO DO, she asked the student why:

The substitute teacher said in written statement that when she asked the student, who is black, to say the pledge, he “answered that he won’t because the flag of the country is racist. He then started to explain why the national anthem was offensive to black people.” The teacher’s statement made after the incident to the school district, was obtained by CNN affiliate Spectrum Bay News 9.

That official statement, by the way, includes this gem:

In a statement to the district, the substitute teacher reported telling the 11-year-old boy “Why if it was so bad here he did not go to another place to live.” She said he then said, “they brought me here.”

And boom goes the dynamite.

The teacher continued with some nonsense about how she came from Cuba and it was worse which says exactly zilch about the concerns the kid raised. But hats off to the substitute teacher for believing so deeply that they were about to solve hundreds of years of institutional racism with a kid they met 30 seconds beforehand. That’s exactly the sort of condescending tete a tete that they make movies about and then give awards to all the white people involved.

So the school district also doesn’t require students to stand for the flag — not that it legally could — so certainly the school stepped in and told the substitute to apologize and get on with the actual teaching for the day.

Just kidding. No, even though the child has broken no rule let alone any law, the school suspended him for three days and then had him f**king arrested:

A school administrator and the officer asked the student to leave the class, but the 6th grader refused, Lakeland police said. Lakeland police said the student, who left the classroom, created another disturbance, and made threats as he was escorted to the office.

Now I can see at least one apologist out there putting their lips together to explain, “Well, actually he was arrested for his behavior after the flag incident.” Amazingly, these are the same people who throw a temper tantrum when a server miscalculates their tab but feels an 11-year-old needs to show some grace after they’ve been escorted from class by the police for having done nothing wrong. It seems as though the “but for” disruption here was the teacher, but whatever.

This is the danger of turning schools into police states — a move “required” by the rise of school shootings. In this case, maybe it’s a good thing the police were there because there are some out hoping to cut police out of the equation and arm teachers directly and in that world it’s safe to say this kid might well have been killed for having a conscience.

Guns, fascist iconography, unleashing the police state upon people of color — the tale of an affluent conservative gadfly and a young black child may seem to have nothing in common, but beneath the surface, the one strand that connects them both comes into sharp relief:

Both Stone and this kid live in Florida. Florida is America’s least common denominator, people.

UPDATE: An earlier version named Gobitis as the Pledge of Allegiance case that established the student’s right to not participate. Gobitis was about the Pledge, but it’s the case that was overruled in Barnette, which was the correct case to cite here. Thanks to an eagle-eyed reader for catching this.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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