They will get you on something. And you will pay for your refusal to kiss the ring. Bank on it:
The West Virginia eighth-grader who was suspended and arrested in late April after he refused to remove a t-shirt supporting the National Rifle Association appeared in court this week and was formally charged with obstructing an officer.
As CBS affiliate WTRF reports, 14-year-old Jared Marcum now faces a $500 fine and a maximum of one year in prison.
The boy’s father, Allen Lardieri, is not pleased.
“Me, I’m more of a fighter and so is Jared and eventually we’re going to get through this,” Lardieri told WTRF. “I don’t think it should have ever gotten this far.”
“Every aspect of this is just totally wrong,” Lardieri added. “He has no background of anything criminal up until now and it just seems like nobody wants to admit they’re wrong.”
And they don’t have to. Bureaucracies are built to absorb and redistribute blame until you’re left muttering “you can’t fight City Hall.” This is by design. Just as you’re to live in fear of an IRS that can no longer be trusted to act with any neutrality, you are being conditioned to live in fear of running afoul of any of the other governmental tentacles, from the public schools to law enforcement to prosecutors out to pad their records and make an example of you.
This is Kafka’s world, Orwell’s world, and we are the drones who must never be allowed to believe in the value of our own independence.
In a move The Daily Caller can only characterize as courageous, Marcum returned to school after his suspension wearing exactly the same shirt. Students across the rural county showed their support for Marcum by wearing similar shirts on that day as well. (RELATED: Eighth-grader arrested over NRA shirt returns to school in same shirt)
There are no accounts of any additional arrests or suspensions when Marcum returned to school.
Lardieri has claimed that police in Logan City (pop. 1,779) threatened to charge Marcum with making terroristic threats during the incident that led to his arrest.
In legal documents obtained by the CBS station, the arresting officer, James Adkins, reportedly fails to inform the court about any terrorist threats or any violent action. Instead, Adkins asserts that the 14-year-old boy did not follow his orders to stop talking. This verbosity somehow prevented Adkins from performing his police duties.
[…]
The school district’s policy doesn’t prohibit shirts promoting Second Amendment rights.
Logan police and the prosecuting attorney, Michael White, declined to answer questions.
That would be this West Logan City Police Department: (304) 752-3244, and this Logan City City Hall: (304) 752-4044.
Maybe one kid and his dad and attorney can’t fight the bureaucratic momentum designed to turn everyone either into a criminal or a rat, but thousands might be able to do so.
Give them a jingle and let theme know what you think about the pussy petty tyrant James Adkins, hiding behind his badge and “procedure”; and the cowardly prosecutor going after a kid knowing that a kid with no record will likely strike a deal to keep in the good graces of the governmental data collecting matrix.
If we don’t start fighting and winning the little battles, what chance do we have to take on the bigger ones?
(h/t Guido)
Don’t forget that harridan posing as a teacher who started this fiasco by demanding that Marcum remove his shirt.
Oh, wait. The ABC article indicates it was a male teacher.
Nah. I’m sticking with harridan.
He’s charged with obstructing an officer because he wouldn’t stop talking?! When did the right to remain silent become an obligation?
The mayor, police chief, and school superintendent need to get their people under control before their constituents show up with torches and pitchforks.
I recall the boy was accused by the teacher of disrupting a learning environment *while standing in the cafeteria*. The kid went all morning without a problem in any of his classes only to be confronted while at lunch.
I’d really like to know who started the recent war on guns by educators and administrators (teacher’s union? Dept. of Ed?), because there’s no way this wasn’t coordinated. Too many recent incidents of overblown responses to nonsense things like gun-shaped poptarts, lego guns, gun talk on school buses, etc. to be a random.
I think it’s a case of “Respect Mah Authoritay!” run amok, Squid. The teacher certainly has it, and so does the arresting officer.
I’d really like to know who started the recent war on guns by educators and administrators (teacher’s union? Dept. of Ed?), because there’s no way this wasn’t coordinated.
They’re a herd of mindless sheep. They don’t need to be coordinated — just nudged in the right direction. Put a couple of people on TV saying “THINK OF TEH CHIDRENS!” and your average elementary-ed major will fall into line quicker than you can say “this season’s trendy shoes.”
This is what jury trials are for.
They’re a herd of mindless sheep. They don’t need to be coordinated
Except that they are.
If there’s one thing the left does well, it’s coordinate among various and diverse organizations. They didn’t do their long march through the institutions to leave sleeper agents to work alone behind enemy lines: they infiltrate to install active nodes.
The primary means of coordination is the labor union: there aren’t very many of them, really, and they’re not ever working at cross-purposes.
We avoid positing an active conspiracy because we don’t want to look foolish.
To whom, precisely?
Because those same people who use JournoList II also network heavily in those idiot conferences, and they are the same ones who make sure their enemies are laughed at and mocked during newscasts.
Tammy Bruce said that when she worked for NOW, they coordinated with the MSM all the time to get their message out: both by press release and by selection bias in the stories.
They’re a hive with a hive mind. They’re the Borg: interconnected even when standing alone. They HAVE actual marching orders, talking points, strategies, tactics, campaigns.
They’re effing “community organized” six ways ’til Sunday.
Mindless sheep MUST be shepherded, else they mill around, uselessly. Notice how effective they’ve been in the last 40 years?
That doesn’t happen by accident, nor is it a matter of spontaneous combustion. The decline of the Republic is intended and planned and executed.
It’s who they are; it’s what they do.
I think it’s entirely plausable that The Word went out after Sandy Hook.
Because the way to make sure we don’t have anymore maladjusted losers with a guns-n-slaugher fetish is to capriciously yet ruthlessly punish boys for being boys who engage in stereotypically male behavior.
the woman who answered the phone in West Logan was nice enough, offered to take my name and phone number and have the Chief give me a call back. I think a few thousand more calls might make them think letting this kid off with a commendation would be a good idea.
Exactly, Dicentra!
It’s like how the MSM, politicians, and activists miraculously use the exact same phrases on a given issue, such as “gun safety” in place of gun control. I love it when Rush collects a bunch of audio soundbites where the same phrase is repeated.
I still maintain that there’s no need for the unions or the community organizers to send out word that gun-shaped toaster pastries need to be rounded up. These teachers and lunch ladies are perfectly capable of hysterical overreaction based on nothing more than what they see on the evening news.
All of the “dog whistle” stuff they’re always accusing us of using? Projection, just as with all things.
I’d love to see a group of folks wearing NRA shirts walking onto school grounds holding hands and singing, “We Shall Overcome”.
It would send their proggtarged irony circuits into overload. At least until the cops with billy clubs and fire hoses showed up.
This has the stink of a teacher’s union anti-gun policy. F
I still maintain that there’s no need for the unions or the community organizers to send out word that gun-shaped toaster pastries need to be rounded up.
It doesn’t matter whether there’s a need. They do it anyway.
Where do you think all those moronic zero-tolerance policies came from? They didn’t spring from the ground spontaneously like 17-year cicadas.
They’ve been told that anything and everything gun-related must be punished and punished hard. They didn’t have to make a list that specifies PopTarts™ and Hello Kitty™ — they just stressed that This Is Our Mission To Tolerate No Gun Stuff, no matter how innocuous it may seem.
Everyone knows it’s absurd to punish a kid for biting a PopTart into a gun shape, ergo, teachers and administrators are sticking their necks out because they know they have Higher Orders to follow, and that the powers that be have their backs.
Otherwise, why bother? Anyone who works in an elementary school already has their hands plenty full to be going around picking at nits.
We had a little bit of an issue here where school “policies” that weren’t written down anywhere were being enforced at random against kids who’s parents were listed on a “PITA list” that was “leaked” anonymously. PITA stands for “good parents”, evidently because these were the high achieving kids from great families and children of professionals and not the kids who spent all day smoking behind the dumpsters. The year my oldest entered Junior High he was busted for everything from “threatening” to “unwanted advances” (the penis game. You try and say “penis” as loud as possible in an inappropriate setting, like the library and not get caught. He got caught.). This stopped when several of the parents on the PITA list ran for school board, three out of five won. Suddenly, there was a rash of administrative retirements resulting in complete administrative turnover from the superintendent on down, twice in six years.
What’s interesting is that despite all of the bellyaching in the local rag about all of the policy changes and why Mrs. Soggydrawers was getting RIFFed after 89 years of teaching macaroni art, our shitass rural school system has gone from a 66% graduation rate to an 89% graduation rate. Even after dealing with the loss of income due to the voucher program.
My take? Be a pain in the ass parent. Make sure all of your kids teachers know you by sight. Make sure your kid’s friends parents know you too. Pay attention to the schoolhouse gossip. Have a torrid affair with one or more of the gym teachers. Beat your child mercilessly if he or she doesn’t practice the violin for four hours a day. Be a well-known figure at your kid’s school. Maneuver to put term limits on teachers and school administrators. Make the school write down it’s code of conduct and enforce the written code, not the “spirit”. No one wants to babysit Hillbilly Mike for an hour after school and then have to deal with his irate trailer trash momma when they could have Little Johnny and Petit Marie sit in silence with their hands folded and tears of shame running down their little faces instead. Force the bastards to work for a living.
Wow, wall of text.
But it’s been weeks since I’ve been able to log in, so I feel entitled.
That doesn’t happen nearly as often as it should.
The year I taught high school in my little neck of the woods, t-shirts with Che Gueverra were popular. Murdering despots about whom these kids and most of their teachers, apparently, know nothing are A-Okay.
That was a good rant, LMC, that has the virtue of being good advice for parents.
Is there a legal defense fund to contribute to and if so, what is the contact information?
[…] to the point that kids are tormented for biting a poptart into the shape of a gun? Or expelled for wearing a NRA tshirt? or permanently branded as a person of interest for possession of a toy Lego gun? Will future […]
[…] the following succinct remarks, Jeff Goldstein explains a key strategy found in the Leftist Playbook [Chapter 666, I […]