Art, Truth & Feminist Politics

In the next few days the City of Boulder will celebrate its arts’ and women’s weeks simultaneously, which gives rise to several questions regarding the slogans, ‘I support the arts,’ and ‘I support women’s week’ and what is meant by those sentiments.

If we are speaking of women’s rights and accomplishments, are we also examining the entire influence of the feminist psyche on the cultural and legal landscape, or are we just looking at the superficially good, and leaving the shadowy aspects of the feminist movement for another day?

For example, in the Hindu culture they celebrate the goddess Kali, which is an abstract idea of a deity that personifies the darker forces in the feminine psyche. She’s a world destroyer, a goddess of the traumatic, she is the goddess of death, time, and doomsday, and is associated with sex and violence. She is also the visage of feminine energy, creativity, and change. She has her good side as that of protector mother, but the visage of her counterpoint is that of a sword wielding, head chopping-off, four-armed deity with a necklace and belt made of severed heads, and she is often posed standing on Shiva. The context of the symbolic metaphor is that she is about to destroy the Universe and Shiva calms her by lying at her feet.

This is how the Hindus celebrate at least some aspects of the feminine psyche. Can we do that too? Is Boulder, its café society anyway, able to keep two or more views of the female psyche in mind simultaneously, can they walk and chew gum at the same time? Can they conceive of the psyche of a Kali, or a Medusa in their presence, walking about the city and holding down a regular gig? What if I told you there was such a creature running Boulder Aquatics? What if I could prove it beyond a doubt? What would Boulder’s sloganeers think of that turn of events? What would they think if she were a Medusa, or a Chimera, or a neighbor? 

This brings us to celebrating the work of the artist; which in my view is the community’s shamanistic arbiter of a sort, tapped into the collective subconscious and guiding spirit of the culture. What is his or her role in maintaining the psychic health of the community?

This argument then brings us to my work, which sits astride those two fault lines, as it should. As an artist I wonder if the people of Boulder can take in the complexity of the female psyche in all its varied manifestations. For instance, let’s talk about the Family Law area of the current system of jurisprudence. Did you know Family Law is a ‘quasi’-legal branch of the law that starts with the presumption of guilt of the respondent? Did you know that common criminals, rapists, murderers, and even pedophiles, have more rights than do respondents in family law cases? Did you know Protection Orders fall into this category, and that the mere accusation of any kind of alleged misconduct alone can land you with a lifetime record, even if the case was never proven in a civil hearing? Can the intelligencia of the town entertain the idea that feminism as an ideology embedded in Family Law has overtaken due process, and still hold onto the sacred feminine?

My point is that as an artist I was publicly smeared by a slur campaign instigated by Ms. Cole, the director of Boulder Aquatics at the time, over stories I’d written about Boulder North. And that criminal act was finished off in a reputation-killing hearing in family law court. I was literally taken to court over what I’d written, thought crimes, which no one was forced to read, and thereby acquired a lifetime smear record based on a mere accusation; no witnesses, not even a cogent narrative. Where does that leave me as an artist forced to self-censor? Where does that leave the City of Boulder as it celebrates its artist’s, and its feminist harpies, and their impact on the cultural life of the city?

Let it be known that women fight by ruining reputations, this fact is backed up with decades of work in behavioral psychology, men conversely resort to physical violence, just for the record, so that Ms. Cole’s way of being malevolent toward me, and what I was writing about her operation, was an attempt to ruin my reputation and thereby the impact of my words; a slander, the smear of a scandal.

And now we come back to those slogans, ‘I support the Arts,’ and ‘I support Women’s Week’ and you have to ask yourselves if what I am saying is true, then what are we to make of the situation?

If Family Law is ‘quasi’-legal mumbo jumbo, and supporting the artist means hearing or seeing things that are not always pleasant to the eye or ear, as in me writing about Ms. Cole’s mobbing, and consistently pointing out for over two years that Judge Stavley ran a kangaroo court, then I contend it’s essential to the community to really mean both slogans, with some accountability in this case, in order to maintain its cultural health and legitimacy.

 Otherwise what you end up with is an art and women’s week that is self-censored and tailored for banal ideological tastes; curated for an urban professional class that lacks the imagination to free themselves of the manipulated moral reality of a feminist political correctness that has overtaken the rule of law. Without the inclusion of a critical perspective on the matters of women and art, the perspective of the other, the outlier, the artist, this current celebration will be nothing less than faux art, kitsch camp, tromp l’oeil.

Enclosed you will find the preface and epilogue of my next book, The Epic Adventures of Prince Ralphie in Northern Italy, and it is as good as any fantasy fiction Tolkien or C.S. Lewis ever wrote, and that is going to leave those who tried to smear me with more evidence against them. I didn’t ask for this fight; it all started with a Kali, a Medusa, a woman, Ms. Cole; and was carried forth by Mr. Stavley, the perfect virtue signaling, politically correct beta male, for her attempted castration of my creativity. My truth is my art.

Can the intelligencia of Boulder, I use the word generously, contemplate its own psychic shadow in weaponizing its own thought police as per my book, Coulder North, a Writer’s Guide to the Horrific Feminine, or are they going to buy into the entropy of imagination dulled-out like so much cultural mush by the Pecan Street Merchants Association, and the Daily Camera, and the Weakly, and the City Council, and the CJS as they try to bring into reality a dystopian dizzneyland for culturally challenged urban professionals.

Robert Gerard, proud father of Prince Ralphie

Authored 

• Café 66
• Coulder North, a Writer’s Guide to the Horrific Feminine
• The Epic Adventures of Prince Ralphie
• The Epic The Epic Adventures of Prince Ralphie in Renaissance Italy

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An Open Letter to the City of Boulder and Judge John F. Stavely

On January 14, 2014 I was found guilty in Judge John Stavely’s courtroom of harassing a lifeguard at the Boulder North Rec Center. The charge was not defined in the opening, nor were there any witnesses to the alleged harassment. Evidence was produced, my own writings marked as exhibits, but not referenced during the hearing; so I have to assume that it was a tactic of intimidation. In the end no facts were cited in reference to the punishment, because there was no narrative of harassment presented, in this case, the lifelong stigma of a Restraining Order (case number 2014-000021 BCCC).

I contend The City of Boulder under the auspices of the City Attorney at the time, Tom Carr, not the lifeguard, prosecuted a writer for his writings and that is the issue before not only the People of the City, but also before all of us in this era of wokeism and cancel culture. Can a judge, any judge, be free to decide what is free speech and what is criminal harassment given that the only evidence of any alleged ‘harassment’ are the writings of a writer which were on a public publication, and open to interpretation by anyone anytime, anywhere as suits their fancy? Here I cite Nobokov’s Lolita, and contend my case proved to be a titillating and tempting opening to the quasi-political Tom Carr and his office who couldn’t resist the hook of heroism. Remember there were no witnesses in court to any alleged ‘harassing’ conduct, nor a cogent narrative; it was a mobbing; a simple case of accusata, scusata.

What was also absent was a story, The Homeless Romantic,that I’d written a month before the alleged incident, wherein I was accused of something, I never found out what, by a person I identify in the story as ‘Crazy Charlie,’ after which an investigation was launched into my behavior and pursued for several weeks, in which I was found to not have a single complaint against me by anyone, not a single soul, staff or client, since I’d started coming to the Center.

I’ve spent the better part of the last eight years trying to understand the manipulations and contortions of that conviction; legal, personal, sociological, pathological and last but not least, philosophical; and I’ve come to the conclusion that this act of aggression will not stand unanswered. My case for justice before the People of Boulder relies solely on the transcript of that hearing, no other evidence is necessary.

Therein may lay a motive on Ms. Cole’s part to silence me because in the story she and her staff didn’t come off as competent, and in that effort I contend she started, what I think professionals will agree after due consideration, was an orchestrated mobbing; a crime in itself.

A mobbing is a semi-visible thing as I recounted in my book, Coulder North, but the pathological motives and tensions behind it usually take place below the surface, subconsciously, as motives of tribalism, and pubic shamming and ostracizing and scapegoating come to the surface; in a few words schadenfreude archetype behaviors overtake rational thought and fill their victim with self-righteous self-referencing scenarios of heroism. Unfortunately I think the transcript bares this out for Ms. Cole and Mr. Carr, as well as Judge Stavely and his conduct of the court; the pathology of tribalism demonstrated in that hearing is part of the public record. Where does that leave us, me the slandered and shattered soul seeking justice ala Kafka’s The Trail, and you the People of Boulder affixed with the shame of burning yet another Giordano Bruno at the stake of political correctness?

 I think Shakespeare said it best, ‘Who steals my purse steals trash  … but he that filches from me my good name, robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.’

The fact is you, the People of Boulder in the personage of the Judge, screwed over a writer, and an activist was born as the bastard child of the rape, and we all know in the end the bastard becomes the King just for spite. It’s a pathological thing mostly born out of never being acknowledged as the legitimate offspring of an illegitimate legal system; and although I’ve tried to reason with my own offspring to let it wash away, forgive and forget, he’s determined to go into the public arena over this contemptible, petty, two-tiered tyranny.

So you see, what I write about here, judicial and prosecutorial misconduct is something I would never have even thought of if I’d not been courtroom raped by John F. Stavely. I guess that’s what the ‘F’ stands for, as in he forgot his oath of fidelity to equal justice under the law and the general sweep of the Constitution, the one that states through its clauses that individual sovereignty undoes the bedeviling influences of tribalism. He accepted all that money all those years and he couldn’t even judge a simple case of vigilantism for what it was, without getting his robes bloodied-up in the mess. 

The transcript speaks to all of this eloquently so that mostly what I want to bring to the attention of the People of Boulder is the nature of a two-tiered legal system in which authoritarian tendencies are communally normalized, and how the discussion around the whole of the workings of the current CJS, including the non-discussion by the city council of all the recent lawsuit payouts, has led the city into the darkness of tribalism and authoritarian rule in spite of its natural freethinking cultural heritage.

A Vision

Therefore I’m going to try to elevate the discussion in order to spark a renaissance of the ideals of the nineteen sixties and seventies which is when the Oligarchs, led by that mousey demigod economist Dr. Milton Freeman, and lawyers like Justice Powell on the Supreme Court, declared war on the working man using that senile actor Ronald Reagan as their front man.

What we are witnessing in the conduct of such men as Dougherty and Garnet and Carr in the way they conduct themselves concerning the flexibility of the rule of law is what has been described by many social scholars as the cruelty of a society that is based on transactional values; the commodification of the individual as an indentured consumer debt slave who is now being stripped of his civil rights, as guaranteed by the Constitution. Anyone remember the social contract of the constitution? No, no I’m just goofing; no one does, not even the notorious law and order icon, John F. Stavely.

So you see that is how authoritarianism sneaks into the tent, under the guise of tribalism and schadenfreude and a host of other appellations until the artists, the writer in this case, is mowed down. I use that phrase purposefully, in homage to the Israeli’s use of the phrase when they knee-cap young Palestinian boys as they throw rocks in protest against war crimes; into the tent under the guise of tribalism comes the devil and his bedeviling ways, enough said about flagrant violations of the law and its nefarious hydra-head of spurious reasons.

This isn’t about me any longer, although it is, and those who have tried to slander my good name will come to a very public justice. But beyond that there is the question of how Boulder became the refuge of authoritarians like Yates, and Weaver, and Wallach, and Garnet, and Dougherty, and the city attorney’s office under Carr, and what can be done to combat their coup of the representative government we are still all a part of as per the single tier legal system outlined in the Constitution which pivots on, among other things like freedom of the speech, the tenant of equal justice under the law Mr. Stavely.

In that vein I will soon present to the People of the City of Boulder a political platform that should form the intellectual warp and weft of a vision for the future based on the Rawls’ social contract that can be ascribed to by every leader and politician without violating any other oaths of office they currently maintain. This would be the underlying foundation of a coming revolution of enlightened self-government that will turn a more compassionate institutional face to the world beyond the bubble because of the way it treats its own People.

For starters we’ll eliminate any differences between Denver’s outreach to the homeless and the city of Boulder’s so that the absurd argument of becoming a homeless ‘magnet’ will not become a rhetorical shield to hide behind for the NIMBY crowd, period. We can then buy time so that the whole of the People, as well as Wallach and his ilk, can educate themselves on the work of Drs. Guy Standing, economist from Oxford, Wendy Brown, political theorist from Berkley, and Henry Giroux of Ontario University, a social theorist dealing mainly with class warfare, for starters. To round out the description of the inherent malevolence in such a system look to Chris Hedges, divinity school graduate and Pulitzer Prize winning foreign war correspondent for the New York Times, for his speech on American Sadism. All of these teachers can be found on YouTube

I’m going to force the political discussions in the city to a higher level by presenting an undeniable political platform of current intellectual thought on these matters, complete with a social contract and enough philosophical heft to lift all boats.

With this foundation I will articulate a vision of the future that has as its center the largest round table ever seen, one that seats the common man and all of his friends and family and all the other luckless souls that inhabit the area. This issue of a two-tiered justice system ripe with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct above all others is about class warfare!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to Messrs. Yates and Wallach, and the rest of the COVID politicians that voted against the humanity of the homeless, including Ms. Brautigam, whose false report on the homeless was, but will never be cited as such, a contributory factor in the Madonna and Child’s death; a third world outcome from a governing elite in a first world showpiece that prides itself as the ‘Most Beautiful City in America.’ Thanks, Mayor Weaver, for the lessons in agenda hijacking leadership.

Merry Christmas to Jane Brautigam and all the staff that skewed that last report tribally for the NIMBY crowd against the homeless, based on inadequate staff reporting; they have an appalling lack of relevant data on the people in their charge and the national economic and social safety net deterioration context of their predicament. Therefore there has been up to this point no big picture understanding of its causes, much less a granular context of implementing such a global understanding to their reports which was further compounded by the outright lies cited by the civilian review boards at the time of Ms. Brautigam’s last report.

The death of this mother and her child was preventable, Ms. Brautigam. The death of this Madonna and Child should mark the end of the illegitimacy of scapegoating the most vulnerable in Boulder; but we’re dealing with mediocre intellects.  

These deaths, along with the two men who died during the last year of Weaver’s leadership, should be proof enough that Boulder is no longer the most beautiful city in America – but rather just another American city torn apart with the strife of class warfare where large numbers of people commute-in to cater to the more fortunate, in what most people recognize is a predatory economic system.

Merry Christmas, Tom Carr; thanks for your unlimited penchant for making ‘magic words’ every time you promulgated what you surely knew were illegal camping ban ordinances. The game plan being to delay and obfuscate the city’s responsibility for all its citizens, so that when one ordinance was stuck down he made another magic word spell to delay and obfuscate the rule of law again and again and again. The magic words reference is from Ali Rhoads in a city council meeting where she was requesting from him another ‘magic word’ spell to deal with a problem at the parks; look it up.

Finally

Until we become once again a civil society with a high regard for the public commons, like accountability, we, individualized and atomized into petty culture wars with manufactured identities, and manipulated by forces beyond the common man’s ken, will be nothing more than sheeple at the mercy of men like DA Dougherty who held the video of Demetrius Shankling’s murder from the public during the height of the George Floyd protest when it could have shaped the police reform movement within the city … for self-serving political reasons one assumes. In a way you might say he had his knee on the throat, the voice, of the People, like a more sophisticated version of Officer Derek Chauvin. Merry Christmas, Mr. Dougherty, the watchdog that didn’t bark, thanks for the lack of political courage in your leadership.

Everywhere you look, really look, there’s blood and blame all over the operatives of the ruling elite, both governmental and civilian. You know, guys like Chip at the Pearl Street Merchant’s Association who ponied up some cash to hire ‘Ambassadors,’ or was it ‘Rangers,’ to police the mall but couldn’t pony up a cent for research to get to the root of the problem instead of passing the buck to law enforcement, and maybe showing some compassion. I’m not the judge of all this mess; I’m simply a writer who lives or dies by the First Amendment.

All these people know the jig is up and the game now is to delay an inquiry, perhaps by maligning and mischaracterizing me and my work, therefore I must insist. This isn’t going away; I almost lost my life over this bullshit.

Robert Augustus Gerard

P.S. This letter constitutes the reporting of crimes committed in 2013-14. Therefore the other party involved in the case will need to be notified by the city or the city will commit yet another crime by covering up my allegations regarding prosecutorial and judicial misconduct in the case. The clock is ticking; eventually they will find out they were used for pathological reasons in the first place, and for political reasons in the second.

How Boulder Colorado became one of the Ugliest Towns in America.

September 19, 2018

On September 19^th 2018 the city and county of Boulder conspired to cover up the murder of Demetrius Shankling; and then got away with it. On September 19^th two county sheriffs under the supervision of Sheriff Pella killed Demetrius, due to his ‘passive resistance’ in being arrested, that’s a fact. In addition, two city officers, un-indicted co-conspirators, stood by and filmed the murder without raising a finger to stop it. That too is a fact.

The reason these are known facts is the body cam footage of one of the arresting officers without which we and the DA, wouldn’t have had the evidence to convict, because in the video we clearly see the two deputies pushing the door closed in spite of Demetrius’s leg being caught in it. Demetrius died on September 19^th 2018 in Sheriff Pella’s custody. On May 25^th 2020, a year and a half later George Floyd died in police custody, both deaths were by positional asphyxiation. Both were filmed. On June 8^th of 2020, two weeks after Mr. Floyd’s death, Bob Yates made a grandstand statement about the death of Mr. Floyd to the city council; never mentioning the vagaries of local police custody abuse.

Recently, the defense in the Demetrius case cited the poorly managed project of detaining select individuals, students mainly, who were sent to the drunk-tank diversion program, and blamed the sketchiness of its administration for his death, the defense lost the case. Personally, I think the attorney went after the wrong level of management of the CJS, Sheriff Pella’s culture of thuggery that is apparent in any video out of his office, and he should have been the target of a practices and patterns defense.

Fast-forward to September 2021. The murder trial results in a conviction, and days later the body cam footage is released by the DA’s office. Three years after the fact DA Dougherty released the damning film in the case, not after the crime and before Floyd, not even a year later, but three years later, when the public could not possibly intervene in the process of DA Dougherty’s cover-up of the criminality of Pelle’s shop and his own lack of indictment of the two arresting officers.

By happenstance a city council meeting was moved to September 19^th this year, the third year anniversary of Demetrius’s death, and in spite of the coincidence, not a word came from Mr. Yates, or Mr. Weaver, who has spent much of his tenure defending the Police, on the very night that three years earlier Demetrius had been killed. Is that because it wasn’t a National case garnering out of State publicity? Was that because Mr. Dyer at the Weakly decided his paper had no interest in the corruption this case points out?

There were no follow-up stories of the impact of his murder on his friends who were there that night, nor his family who were from out of state and therefore not really citizens of the city. There was no follow up on the systemically thuggish patterns and practices of the Sheriff’s department, what with the spit bag lawsuit and the participation of the city officers in that debacle too.

The fourth estate in Boulder is nowhere to be heard as an advocate of accountability; and in fact Mr. Dyer, or at least his paper, is currently endorsing Mark Wallach for council, a man who said, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘I don’t feel responsible for the homeless and their predicament, and find no discomfort in my home because of their lack of integration into the mainstream culture.” This is a man who also said that ‘he has no regrets for his conduct on council the last two years!’

First off you would have to be extraordinary to not have ANY regrets after two years of service, a statement that is astonishing on its face. Secondly, what about his record on voting consistently against the homeless receiving any relief whatsoever from the community coffers ands continuously abetting the fear-mongering of the homeless by Messrs. Yates and Weaver while voting for more money for law enforcement, without people to fill the vacancies, or a hearing on the plethora of alternatives beforehand.

Mr. Dyer and Mr. Wallace aside, you still have Weaver and Yates, as two of the most cynical politicians the city has given rise to; if you don’t count Garnnet, or Stavley, or Jones, or Carr, and the rest of their ilk that constantly abuse the law to create a space wherein they, in the form of their bureaucratic decision making, are above it. For instance, why did it take three years for the public to see the body cam footage of Demetrius’ murder? Was that a manipulation of the law to protect the institutions of Boulder’s CJS? How much were the local newspapers in on that cover-up with their lack of follow up?

The whole thing, the whole of the political class and the Press are ineffectual when it comes to accountability, what with Weaver’s constant defense of the Police, and yet himself lacking the ability to look local institutional murder in the face and draw some reasonable conclusions as to its sources; i.e., the thuggish culture Pella has influenced on his watch as Sheriff of the county. Sheriff Pella is a man long overdue for a practices and patterns investigation.

In addition, you have Mr. Yates, a man that hopes soon to be elected mayor as the culmination of his carpetbagging political career in Boulder. This is a man who not only forgot to memorialize Demetrius with a few kind words on the three-year anniversary of his murder by local law enforcement, but also threatened the arts council of withholding donations, and voted against pay regularization, which is now on the ballet as a ‘non-issue’ to throw Ms. Friend a bone.

His and Mr. Weaver’s manipulation of the voting agenda, on six additional police being deployed against the homeless, and pay regularization among other issues, at one time the police department was going against the health department in the early part of the pandemic, show him to be a master manipulator; 100 percent politician as stated by Boulder Safe in leaked documents. And just for a kicker, if you missed it, he threatened to fire anyone on staff if they didn’t do as he said, stating this under the rubric of “what he would do in private business back when he was a minion of the corporate world.”

Finally we come to current council members; Ms. Joseph was all for police reform when George Floyd was murdered, what with un-tinted windows for police cruisers for one, and again the timeliness of Dougherty’s release of the body cam would have been helpful in that discussion but the DA chose to keep it hidden from the public and council. At this point you would want to ask, “Did anyone on council see the video before the public did? If so, why did they not bring it up; and if not, why not?

This is a bottom line question any good reporter would have already asked, but as I’ve stated, Boulder has no Fourth estate to speak of, or else the ACLU would not be doing the investigating on the homeless issue that both the council and the Press seem incapable of doing. Suffice it to say that the rest of the press and council has been, in metaphor, if not fact, the sideline cop that filmed the murder. They’ve watched on and made nonsensical declarations against anti-Semitism and questioned the usefulness of ‘U’ locks but haven’t brought up de-escalation training.

Ms. Friend’s neoliberalism matches Mr. Dyer’s ideas of what Clintonian liberalism looks like in the 21^st century. In the past Mr. Dyer has endorsed both Clinton and Yates, and now Wallach, all of who don’t have a compassionate bone in their bodies.

Mr. Swetlik, for all his youthful enthusiasm, he knew at one point after Mr. Floyd’s murder that he was on the precipice of great changes in city government and even said so in a meeting. He too was denied the body cam footage that might have made his questions to Chief Harold more incisive, so that by the end of his term he donned a yellow outfit as yet another metaphor. He’d brought nothing to the political gunfight Mr. Yates has been engaged in for over ten years. He was over his head almost from the beginning, and like a naive innocent he was played for a fool by the leadership; mostly Yates and Weaver, but in this case the DA.

Aaron Brocket was barely there, although he attended every meeting; he too was playing on a field of good faith which Mr. Yates and Mr. Weaver and the DA have little respect for, and I say this because in addition to the cover-up of the murder, Mayor Weaver has done everything in his power to limit public discussion, representative democracy, to two minutes per person per week. As one speaker said, “It’ll take me years to get my point across at two minutes per item.” This, combined with the cricket noises at the end of public comment coming from the rest of council has done more to undermine not only good faith but also a sense of community and accountability than probably any other council in recent memory.

Ms. Nigel likewise has little to show for her contributions; no library, much less a pocket library, and after being bamboozled along for two years of lip service, she still thinks prairie dogs should have more civil rights than the homeless. Look at her voting record on police use against the homeless versus her alternative inquiries of staff, and compare that to her defense of the prairie dogs.

Ms. Young eats a lot, with her chompy mandible flappity-flapping along, while she too took photos of the crimes against the homeless, and soon dropped her religious initiatives project of finding them a safe place. In fact, the homeless have more or less fallen off the map here at the end of the election cycle; like an old skin of an aging snake, or snakes, they are to be shed of when their terms end and they run for the exits.

In Summation

Obviously this is a snapshot but it outlines the kinds of characters that actually run the city. There is no justice to be had as Garnett skulks around the periphery of local government, pulling strings for Boulder Safe, as Boulder Safe calls the homeless ‘human trash’ and Wallach says nothing against their endorsement.

There is no accountability to be had if your DA doesn’t follow the ‘intent’ of the law by withholding evidence from the public for political gain, or wastes manpower on 115 indictments of a crazy man, while turning a blind eye to the on-looking officers in Demetrius’ death as he considers the political ramifications of both. There is no Police reform without de-escalation training at a minimum.

Mr. Yates will soon be Mayor because the newspapers in town are ineffectual and have been for decades, and because the last city council could not muster the courage to stop his egomaniacal political juggernaut, and because the liberal political class in Boulder is weak and illegitimate; as per Friend and Dyer, their politics are anachronistic.

There are two ways to lead people, either by moral reckoning or violence, and Mr. Yates, Mr. Weaver, Mr. Wallach, and Mr. Pella have consistently chosen institutional violence and fearmongering over the current social contract of equal justice under the law; criminalizing poverty while turning a blind eye to their own criminal institutional malevolence and murder. And with that being said, congratulations Boulder, Mr. Yates will soon be your King; and his puss, with its sneer and snarl, will be the face of Boulder for a long time to come.

But beware, Boulder, you’re up to your necks in oligarchic rule, sliding into authoritarianism, which is rule through money and fear. In other words, representative democracy is dying; and there seems to be no one in your town with the political courage to call out the malefactors.

Robert Augustus Gerard

 This critique is brought to you courtesy of former Judge John F. Stavley, who ran a kangaroo court on a really good writer in a criminal act of tribalism that has been buried for over two years by the Press, five currently sitting civil justices, and the current COVID city council, as well as more than a handful of criminal attorneys, all of whom I call out as cowards; disgraces to their oaths and professions.

The ruling political, economic, and legalistic class of Boulder is obviously illegitimate, and the coming election is just a dog and pony show that will result in a reinforcement of the current mismanaged and malevolent status quo because Yates and Wallach, and the oligarchs behind him, will manipulate the agenda right in front of the new kids still wet behind the ears after the election as per Young, and Joseph, and Swetlik, and Friend, and Brocket, and Nigel.

The only bright spot on the political scene is the development of the Community Court which Judge Cook had to build from scratch, outside the confines of city council political shenanigans; and good for her, it’s called moral leadership, and in my estimation she should be Mayor.

She seems the only one qualified; with scruples, I mean.

Dateline; September 9, 2021

On this day three years ago officers James O’Brian and Adam Lunn murdered a young CU student, Demetrius Shankling, 23, by handcuffing him and placing him in a transport van on his stomach, and then forcibly closing the door on him as he lay in the prone position. Sixteen minutes later he was pulled from the van, by his feet, on his face, brain dead. He lived for another twenty-six days, but the last words he would ever speak had already been uttered when he referred to the arresting officers as “dick heads,” which prophetically, they turned out to be.

During the process of his being ‘arrested’ his friends were run-off under threat of also being ‘arrested’ for real. Demetrius’ arrest was a misdemeanor arrest, which did not involve being taken to jail but rather to spend the night in a detox center.

The arresting officer in fact said to his friends,

“Demetrius is potentially a danger to himself being this intoxicated and we’re just making sure he gets home safely, tomorrow.” These friends could have been the difference between his life and death had they been allowed to witness what happened after they were run-off. They will always live with that knowledge.

Next the District Attorney, Mr. Dougherty, worked tirelessly to downplay the act of murder by Sheriff Pelle’s men, by playing the charge of reckless manslaughter as a single fourth degree felony with a two to six year sentence, and then he went on to manipulate the public by not releasing the body camera footage until three years after the crime, thus withholding from the public a means with which to judge the DA’s actions and methodology.

We now know how he was treated by the arresting officer that had assured his friends he was safe, by that officer’s very own body camera, the one in which it can clearly be seen that both deputies had their hands on the door as they shoved it closed. The officer filming this horrific scene did not intervene, nor attempt to deescalate the violence of the Sheriff’s deputies, nor did he inquire about Demetrius’s well-being after he witnessed what later turned out to be the final act of Demetrius’s murder. He was no more concerned with Demetrius’ well being than the Man in the Moon, and only said what he said as a ‘Performa’ statement to allow him to do as he pleased.  

In his statement after the trial, DA Dougherty stated that Sheriff Pella acted immediately to fire the deputies involved; only it was six months later. The DA also decided to keep the city officers from being charged in any way; from either negligence in their duties, to accessories to the murder that was actually taking place in front of them.

The whole tone of the arrest was one of playground bullies playing to each other; Pella’s bullies displaying still more of a well-documented culture of hooliganism behind the Sheriff’s badge, as they administered ‘street justice’ on the young man for his ‘passive resistance,’ his back-talk. When officer Lunn had decided he’d had enough of Demetrius’s talk, although no violence was ever displayed by Demetrius, he picked Demetrius up by his feet (he was already falling into the compartment sideways) and violently shoved him into the van and slammed the inner door on him. Then they said, “hasta la vista,” and “another satisfied customer,” and slammed the outer doors of the van.

DA Dougherty, Sheriff Pella, as well as Mayor Weaver and Councilman Bob Yates, knew all of this and had seen the videos within a week of the crime; if they didn’t, then they were negligent, especially given Mayor Weaver’s ongoing campaign to make heroes out of each and every officer on the payroll, and Bob Yates’ never-ending votes to increase the funding of the Police, while neither hinted at the tragedy they both knew had occurred under Pella and at the hands of their own city officers; some of Boulder’s finest, according to Weaver.

Last night, on the third anniversary of his murder and after the verdict of murder was in, and after the video of his arrest had finally been given a public airing, the city council never mentioned Demetrius’ name; not one of them. This is a far contrast to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police in Minneapolis when Bob Yates made a speech and the rest of the council gave eight minutes of silent prayer to the heavens.

There wasn’t even any public feedback on his murder during the two-minute public comment time which speaks to the effectiveness of allowing only two-minute comments in which the council never adds anything of substance except their own indignation at being called out for not following the will of the People, with harsh words.

The local papers didn’t say anything either, after multiple lawsuits against the Sheriff and his crew, the most recent costing the county 400k; and that’s before the civil suit that will surely follow this conviction. The local papers, the Weakly, the Camera, and even Ms. Castle’s Beat all decided not to explore the on-going problems in the CJS; whether city or county.

This is how it has been for years with the fourth estate in that town and their simple denial of the humanity of this young man and the horrific things, continuous cover-ups, being done in the name of the status quo in their ‘business as usual’ sensibility as to what is fit to print, what makes it into the public forum, the public zeitgeist, makes them just as culpable to the crime as the officer that said, “it’s for his own safety that we’re taking him to detox” as he witnessed his murder.

 They have all seen the videos, they all know of office Lolotai, officer Smyly, of the 400k settlement, another crime that was denied by the Sheriff’s Panel before they forked over 400k, of this murder and these videos and of all the other crimes committed by Pella, and the city under Tom Carr; they all know the score.

The question is …. who gives a fuck when the papers can’t even face the truth about their own collusion in these ongoing bureaucratic, institutional crimes … when the People are given just two minutes to raise their concerns and no one on council says a word … when Weaver calls for a vote on six more cops, when the alternatives haven’t been explored … when the downtown merchants association funds Rangers and Ambassadors to keep the unwanted and despised and dispossessed (by this council) are ignored and arrested … who gives a fuck that the city under Yates and Weaver and Young and Joseph and the rest of the COVID Council denies all of our common humanity and catches a lawsuit from the ACLU  for being ‘inhumane’ !

Who gives a fuck that they, the powers that be, including the fourth estate and the judiciary, I’m speaking to you Mr. Daly and former Judge Stavley as just two of the malefactors operating within the system, have turned America’s most beautiful city into one of its ugliest. I’m speaking to all of you that are supposed to be the ‘keepers of the flame’ because with your silence you perpetuate the status quo.  

The CJS is the grain of sand Boulder can be viewed through and its inbreeding institutionalized political corruption, tribalism, and malevolence revealed. Three years ago a young student died at the hands of those sworn to uphold the law and protect its citizens and not a word is said by those on high … Mr. Brocket or Ms. Friend, or Mr. Swetlik … would you like to add something?

For all the talk of Police reform and changing the Homeless situation, Weaver, Yates, Wallace, Young, Joseph, and Nigel and Brocket at times, have made it impossible. Ms. Friend and Mr. Swetlik brought a knife to a gunfight and are now leaving the field of radical reform to others. Not one of you could rally your arguments and the People to oppose what the ACLU has called ‘inhumane’ practices against the most vulnerable which has brought shame on the whole city.

Ms. Friend may mature in the future, but given her concerns over U locks versus training for practices and patterns of de-escalation, I don’t hold much hope for her powers of insight. If she is all the city has between legitimate authority and tribal rule we are lost.

Debo died three years ago at the hands of the city

Mr. Yates put on his bee antenna and acted silly.

No one on council said a word about Debo … they wanted to be silly.           

Robert Mayles

Where are ‘The City Lights’ of Boulder, Colorado?

The City of San Francisco has its City Lights, a bookstore founded by the late poet Lawrence Farlinghetti. It started as a paperback bookstore that democratized literature by offering high quality literature in the form of paperbacks, then turned into a self-publishing house as well. He envisioned his store as a ‘literary meeting place’ where writers and readers could congregate to share ideas about literature, politics, and the angst of the arts.

The question is, where are Boulder’s own City Lights because once in every generation the services of a farsighted, independent, visionary bookstore or cafe owner is needed to democratize the political environment, to find its cultural common ground, a conflict-free commons where free thought is encouraged. I ask this because it appears from this writer’s perspective that Boulder is well overdue to democratize its culture, its criminalized politics, and its violations of freedom of speech.

Boulder is currently suffering an identity crisis, politically, culturally, and therefore existentially; and in that vein this writer offers a simple solution … reignite the Bohemian Revolution that once guided the local political scene and gave us the legacy of a Bohemian Republic, however hollowed out it may currently be by the CJS, of a community that is environmentally, politically, and spiritually aware of its own fingerprints on the cultural life of the nation.

Today the city is blighted with class warfare. This was brought to us by the likes of City Attorney Tom Carr, currently having served for ten years, current Mayor Sam Weaver over six years, Councilman Bob Yates over six years, former City Manager Jane Brautigam ten years, and the rest of the conservative wing of the COVID Council as far back as DA Garnett and former Mayor Jones. This list also includes Sheriff Pella, a natural born sadist in charge of the county jail, and former Chief Testa. Currently, Chief Harold has encouraged other sheriffs in the state to work against SB 62 while continuing, and then intensifying, the illegal homeless camp sweeps; thus criminalizing and victimizing those least able to defend themselves in court from the operatives and oligarchs of the political and commercial classes statewide; a contagion of stupidity and cruelty.

In light of these developments, the actuality of a two-tiered legal system, and the commodification of the whole of the community commons and labor for ruthless exploitation, Robert Augustus Gerard offers a critically-timed review of the current politically correct culture of the City Council, and the tribal legal system of criminal conspiracy as defined and codified by the city’s criminal justice system in his book Coulder North, a Writer’s Guide to Boulder, Colorado; which speaks to a case of slander out of the Boulder North Rec center (case number 2014C 000021).

In addition to his critique of the city’s cancel culture, he has also self-published, in the Farlinghetti tradition, a road book, Café 66, his homage to Steinbeck and Kerouac; as well as a genre-defying book about an imaginary dragon, The Epic Adventures of Prince Ralphie; which he claims is a ‘two party’ book and must be read aloud between friends, lovers, brothers and sisters, or children and parents, to gain its fullest understanding.

This appeal to the café and bookstore society of the metaphorical City on the Hill is to their sense of freedom of speech; to backing the artist’s right to speak freely. The protagonist of the story, which is based on actual events with known political personalities, was taken to civil court over the stories he wrote about the Boulder North Rec Center, and was exiled from the city as a consequence of the crime of corrupting the youth; ala Socrates, Petrarch, and Nabokov.

The censoring of his voice, based on scurrilous rumormongering by the Rec Center staff under Ms. Cole’s leadership, which led to a classic vigilante mobbing, is a tried and true method of ruining a reputation; but the ‘facts’ of the case don’t exist without them. The judge took the opportunity to abuse his so-called ‘discretion’ in a case in which the city attorney’s office conspired with him to create an unseen party to the case, which had a predetermined verdict; in other words, they ran a kangaroo court together.

The result was a permanent restraining order against the writer, an immediate listing on the police ‘watch list,’ and a ban for life on ever going to any Rec Center in town; and of course, the writing of this book, which refutes it all as a mobbing, a shameless vindictive slandering, and the disgracing of a local civil court judge by the name of John F. Stavley.

This is where the resilient character of book lovers and freethinkers comes in, this is where the cafés in Paris and Vienna became hot spots for the intelligentsia and agent provocateurs, and great debates filled the local newsprint. This is where the backing of a local writer comes up against the political status quo, and this is where the community makes its choices about its culture and future on the same battlefield where all the other great writers have fought and died or lived to carry forth their ideals of justice for all, in the cafés and bookstores; whether that be in Paris or Vienna before World War One, or the cafés and bookstores of Boulder before the Great War on Ignorance that Prince Ralphie is bringing to the city.

This is that moment that all café owners and bookstore proprietors dread and love to fill their memories with; what will Boulder’s Bookish Bohemians do? Don’t do anything until you’ve read the book(s); then decide whether or not this writer has within his grasp some of the answers to the seemingly insurmountable issues of the day; existential meaning, the role of the artist in trying times, the healing power of depth psychology and mythic adventure just to name a few. The Realm of the Imagination is the bibliophile’s playground; let’s see if book-loving Boulderites can play with big ideas!

Robert Augustus Gerard

Prince of the Realm of the Imagination

Postscript

I plan to return for the book fair and will be making the rounds of the cafés and bookstores; taking the rooms’ temperatures. I hope this fall is a good season for writers and café owners and book merchants, and book smugglers and bibliophiles and flaneurs of all stripes. Until then, my best wishes for all our adventures, whatever adventure we’re all on!

How did America’s Most Beautiful City Become One of Its Ugliest?

Class Warfare

The fault lines of America’s current cultural despair run into cities and burgs across the country, and are most evident in the conduct of the local Criminal Justice Systems, the ones operated by the local District and City Attorney’s offices.

This single institution has a symbiotic relationship with the culture of the community it serves, and in the case of Boulder, Colorado the relationship has become toxic for the citizens; and therefore the city itself has a simulacrum of culture, imposed from the outside by the influence of the rentier class, and their illegitimate political operatives.

The Boulder CJS is entrenched and armed with state-sanctioned violence, and therefore deadly for those who oppose its privileges and cultural meddling with virtue signaling platitudes meant to quell the restless by criminalizing the tribally outlawed.

The treatment of the homeless is just one example of the CJS involved in cultural community issues wherein social constructs of individual worthiness, rather than real criminal considerations, are in play; although the power of the CJS is mostly exercised under a law and order rubric, it is used in the city of Boulder as a sorting and vetting machine of its less fortunate citizens as to social acceptance by the ‘norms’ of the tribe.

Another area of consideration is the Judicial Branch itself; take for instance the case of Judge John F. Stavley. Judge Stavley ruled against a writer in a case involving a mobbing, the writer’s only crime, thoughtcrimes. The writer had the temerity to write about what he saw at the Boulder North Rec Center and was taken to civil court over it. You can read the transcript in the following case and decide for yourself: case number 2014C 000021.

In that case you’ll find John Stavley did not follow the law but rather his tribal instincts by abusing judicial discretion, an assumed privilege of judges everywhere that does not actually exist under the Rule of Law. This effort by the city was intended to limit what the writer said then, and is now saying under threat of state-sanctioned violence.

The net effect of the judge’s actions for this writer has been to uncover a network of city employees in high positions, Bob Yates, Mayor Weaver, Sheriff Pella, and Tom Carr, who have aided and abetted the cover-up of the judge’s and other city employees’ criminal activities, including but not limited to, conspiring with Tom Carr and employees’ of the Boulder North Rec Center to deprive the aforementioned defendant of his civil rights. That makes Judge Stavley’s and Tom Carr’s actions in this case a Federal Crime; but more to the point it means the Boulder CJS is operating a two-tiered legal justice institution for pre-selected winners and losers.

Individual sovereignty is the only known antidote to tribalism; that’s why it’s foundational to the Bill of Rights. Without that tenet of the law in play in the courts, the city is adrift, at the mercy of demagogues and bureaucratic tyrants; and because we are currently without moral leadership at the highest echelons of the city government, it means powerful amoral political interests run the institutions of the city, not the People. The People, the defendant included, deserve the Rule of Law at a minimum from these public servants, yet they are continually conspiring to cover up each other’s crimes.

So here we are, with the whole of Boulder’s political class underachieving and delegitimizing itself for years, and not a voice from the fourth estate strong enough to rally the People to demand truly representative governance, to rally them to their own enlightened self-interests.

The political class schemes and schmoozes while the rentier class profits from the use of the public commons, including its spectacular natural setting, imports its labor needs from nearby towns, does its best to disenfranchise most of its inhabitants, and preens itself as America’s most beautiful city. But under the commodifiable slickness of the Pearl Street Merchants Association’s sloganeering is its recent decision to fund more Police, which hides a mountain of crimes against the community commons.

Everything the old Republic of Boulder stood for, its famed liberalism of free thought for which it was once world-renowned, has been turned on its head in a creepy, silent, oligarchic coup, and men like Stavley, Carr, Yates, and Weaver are now the operatives of this tribal political agenda of class warfare. They decide who is heard, staff for endless hours, or the public in two-minute intervals.

This is precisely the gerrymandering of civil participation, and the class warfare crisis we see coast-to-coast that is rending the country into polarized camps that are unable, and in the case of the Covid Council, unwilling to find the middle ground. This is what class warfare looks like up close, locally; and this division over the vision of the future of the town, whether it be for commercial exploitation or for the edification, relaxation, and expansion of its citizens’ interests in the culture at large, is what is at stake.

The Role of the Artist

In the political processes of a town’s culture, in its milieu, the artist is the agent provocateur on a cosmological stage; one without the power of state-sanctioned violence at his fingertips, but rather a stage presence empowered by its moral consistency. The artist is left with the imagination of his audience, and on that blank slate, through his sonnets and prose, he creates a morally nuanced vision of reality, one that is informed by tyrants but never ruled by them, less he becomes an inauthentic voice of the uncultured political class.

In that vein I have rendered the stage of Boulder as the City on the Hill, the ideal, metaphorical city familiar to all great writers and artists since time immemorial. In that city I have identified the crime, the crimes of the CJS, as having created a two-tiered legal system, and within this frame I have identified the case of the mobbing of a carpenter philosopher who came to town not to convert or subvert, but to create, and in that effort was pilloried; the Socratic philosopher marked for life as a corrupter of the youth.

Boulder is at a cultural impasse and the ground under its assumptions about itself is shifting; its political class has lost its legitimacy by turning the police force into Pearl Street mall cops bought and paid for by the Pearl Street Merchants, and its county Sheriff’s jail into a torture dungeon run by a sadist, Sheriff Pella. What they eventually decide to do in regards to this actor, on that cosmological stage of truth, justice, and free speech, will reflect on them as a governing class, not on the People.

In my writings I put to the public a story with local actors and settings which is a microcosm of the cultural chasms that are splitting the nation apart; we will either be united by the latitude we give art to heal these wounds, or we will be divided by cancel culture. The horrific feminine exists, as does the toxic male, and the conversation we have regarding these stereotypes, versus archetypes, and the conundrum of a writer’s ‘thoughtcrimes’ will define Boulder’s cultural path into the future.

Sociopathic Voting

The recent vote on six new positions within the Police department, allegedly for a ‘highly’ trained team to enforce the illegal camping ban, assuming the other officers are not ‘highly’ trained and just winging it, and the Pearl Street Merchants Associations donation to further that effort, along with ‘ambassadors’ and ‘rangers,’ is the very definition of sociopathic if not despotic behavior, given that twenty plus vacancies still exist on the force, and changing personnel to sleeping ordinance enforcement will not change that fact until the twenty are hired.

The resistance to change, ala Yates when he passed the hardball to Harold wherein she spilled a gobbledygook of bureaucratese, ‘because this is how all the other police forces do it,’ that was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the Covid Five shows the mediocrity of intellectual integrity within the sociopathic discussion on what to do with the homeless.

Chief Harold keeps saying ‘every life is sacred’ but keeps acting as if some lives are more valuable, more sacred, than others. Is she up to the task of fighting the sociopaths on the council? So far they’re winning, and she’s obliging. But then she’s been a weak sister from the beginning by enforcing the status quo of class warfare, the sweeps, from her first day. We have a failure of confidence in police leadership nationwide. Is Boulder so different as to be above what other departments in the area are currently doing criminally? Is Boulder an exception to bad leadership? She’s had a year, has anything changed, or has it gotten worse; and is that her fault? Or is compassionate leadership, ethical leadership, lacking at council?

Robert Augustus Gerard

Prince Ralphie’s Rawlsian Revolutionary Platform: A Vision for the Future of Boulder

Based on the foundation of using the Rawlsian Social Contract, Prince Ralphie proposes the following planks of his political platform going forward. This by no means points to all his ideas, just those that come to mind off the cuff; therefore this platform is amenable to change, but not in its underlying social contract.

1. Education Reform; we support a return to the trivium and the quadrivum with a minimum of three hours a day devoted to play and art.
2. Health Care Reform; we support Medicare for all as a basic human right, in this way we can avoid turning away pandemic patients who owe money to hospitals.
3. Foreign Policy; in light of the ‘anti-Semitic’ policy recently adopted by the City Council we too have a foreign stance on Jewish affairs; we support the Boycott, Divest and Sanction Movement concerning the state of Israel and its occupation of Palestine.
4. On the Homeless issue we support Senate Bill 62 and The Right to Rest Act and advocate a more creative and benevolent local approach to the homeless issue; we do not support the continued criminalization of poverty by the current City Council.
5. We support a $25 an hour minimum wage for all workers in the city limits, and a $15 an hour wage for all restaurant staff and other work that is tip dependant, as well as gig workers’ rights to organize and unionize within the city.
6. We oppose the overreliance on the current regressive sales tax and we support bedrooms for all. In other words, we want the property owners of the city to quit being parasites on the People and start paying for what they are stealing, both in labor wages and time commuting, as if they were colonials in India in the time of the Viceroy.
7. We oppose the city commons and the community at large being used for the economic purposes of financial interests and the merchant class as long as the business community refuses to carry out its share of the social contract in finding workable solutions for the precariat class.
8. We support the right of Free Speech for all citizens. We believe Assange and Snowden are political prisoners of the security state, the one Eisenhower warned about, and we oppose the same intimidation tactics locally by way of watch lists, kangaroo courts, and judicial overreach.  
9. We believe that all the political victims of the current system of the CJS, going back past Garnett, should be financially compensated, in a peace and reconciliation process, including but not limited to those who’ve given their lives in the frozen outdoors under the leadership of current and former city officials; including Pella, Carr, Stavley, Garnett, former Mayor Jones, and current Mayor Weaver in their continued silence on the illegal activities of Tom Carr and the CJS.
10. Last but not least, we support the Sovereignty of the Individual under the Rule of Law. We adamantly oppose the current two-tier system of Justice as endorsed and acted upon by former justice John Stavley, City Attorney Tom Carr, and Mayor Weaver, as well as the rest of the conservative arm of the Covid Council; including but not limited to Yates and Wallach.

This is just the beginning of the Prince’s work in the City on the Hill. He will work tirelessly to include any other planks that ennoble and embolden the People of the Bohemian Republic of Boulder; long live the Republic of Boulder!

His Serene Personage, Prince Ralphie Augustus I

The Murder of Demetrius Shankling in the Most Beautiful City in America

The Demetrius Shankling murder trial is the most important public review of the CJS since the Ramsey case revealed its gross incompetence.

What do we know?

1. We now know that the two deputies attending the transport, post arrest, put Demetrius in the van in the ‘prone’ position, with his hands cuffed behind his back, a position that stretches the muscles of the chest and causes the lungs to labor harder to breathe; the exact same position as George Floyd was put in when he died of oxygen deprivation.
2. We now know that his head was turned against the partition wall of the van and that he was squeezed into that position by being lifted by the deputies and shoved into the van on his stomach so that his neck was pinned sideways as if a knee were on it; that’s called ‘enhanced positional asphyxiation’ in both cases.
3. We now know that he was unable to move because his leg was pinned by the door as if he was being held down; this complication is past the ‘enhanced positional restraints’ of his having been crammed into the smaller compartment with his neck twisted and his hands cuffed, this is negligent homicide, murder two.

This is accessory to murder if you consider the responsibility of the other two city policemen involved in the arrest, which Dougherty failed to file on. This is also the color of systematic, institutionalized protection of the criminal actions of the CJS, even when involved in an obvious negligent homicide. This is murder two and accessory to murder; yet we got murder four out of DA Dougherty and a pass for the city police, a two to six year felony charge for Pella’s men with the possible suspension of the sentence. Dougherty, like his counterpart DA in Aurora in the police murder of Elijah McClain, fears the wrath of the local Policemen’s Association more than the voters.

Mr. Pella at the time said, “It was a tragedy for all.” Implying, I guess, that he and the four officers themselves underwent a trauma after they’d gotten caught committing murder. Next, those on the defense team will try to obscure the facts of the murder by claiming it was the drugs and alcohol in Demetrius’ system that contributed to his death and thereby they’ll go after his character too. It was his birthday; he was celebrating. Needless to say they will try the victim as they do in all these police murder cases. How does Yates’ grandstand virtue signaling speech about George Floyd a year ago, look now to the rest of the Council? Insincere, calculated, tone-deaf? He knew then what we all know now.

Mr. Swetlik remarked recently that platitudes alone don’t cover mass killings, but what if the killings took place over years? Say maybe a frozen corpse here and a frozen corpse there, which by my estimate has added up over Mr. Yates’ and Mr. Weaver’s tenure to maybe … ten. Is that mass murder or a killing spree? Is that a tragedy for everyone too, the whole community or just a private tragedy for those families that fell victim to Boulder City Council policing policy, which uses the Police Department to enforce illegal social control statutes.

What if Chief Harold used the same words to praise Lolotai as she did to praise Officer Eric Tally? Look it up for yourself. Is this hypocrisy or just more mere platitudes, and more to the point, can these politicians or the Chief and Sheriff tell the difference? What if these leaders can’t find the right words to heal the community after the years-long tenure of their misanthropic rule because they can’t discern murder in the first and second degree? The first looks like a psychotic break, the second looks like bureaucratic fiat.

Remember the librarian who called in to say her son had played with the young man whose body was the second frozen fatality of this past winter? Do you remember that he was a local boy? Do you remember that Yates as well as Carr are carpetbaggers who’ve advanced their pathological political careers by way of class warfare onto a compliant council with the backing of the institutions that are supposed to serve the public interests, specifically the CJS, which has turned into deadly public policing policy by constantly trying to enforce the camping ordinances, in spite of their continued court defeats and continued lack of services for the most destitute among us?

Unfortunately, Mr. Swetlik, the change you seek will take a complete philosophical and economic shift away from the ugly, divisive class politics of Weaver, Yates, Young, Wallach, and Nigel, and sometimes Brocket and Joseph. An (r)evolution of thought concerning the way the ‘community commons’ is understood is desperately needed, and these malefactors can’t provide it; they are intellectually and philosophically challenged to say the least. For a start you might study the work of Guy Standing, an economics professor out of the University of London, then move on to Christopher Lasch and his book The Revolt of the Elites.

Are these ‘leaders’ to be held accountable? No, Mr. Swetlik, not during your term or Ms. Friend’s as the council presses on with business as usual as they decide what to do with the parcel of land at 55^th and Arapahoe. The way Weaver carried on about that property and its potential commercial value I thought he was going to spontaneously combust, so that he does have vision, unfortunately it’s just a business vision. He has no vision of a beneficent community, or how to curb the economic disintegration of the community he and his ilk are destroying; but he sure can see the financial benefits of that corner. Mr. Weaver was on a city council retreat at the time of the young man’s frozen death, talking about snorkeling in Tahiti.

These are our ‘leaders’ – and for all the talk of police reform and the addition of services for the homeless, nothing has happened. It’s all still in study groups while some of you are on your way out. This is how the sausage is made, with platitudes where real human emotion and constructive thought should prevail; it’s called virtue signaling, as in defining the lack thereof.

Finally, to mention Jane Brautigam in the same sentence with ‘hope’ is the kind of virtue signaling propaganda that Weaver and Yates and Wallach specialize in, as exemplified by her last staff report on the homeless in which she labeled most of the homeless as ‘sex addicts and drug users’ – all of which was disputed by your own citizen review board that called her out as an outright liar; which begs the question, how many did she kill with those false reports over those ten years?

Mr. Swetlik and Ms. Friend have accomplished nothing for all the colloquies, and pleasantries, and thank yous to staff, and the endless self-congratulations; and that is a true tragedy for everyone. I suggest you try to make a ‘radical’ moral stand on the homeless issue before it’s too late.

Weaver is a businessman, not a moral leader; two very different skill sets. Yates is a political divider, a morally craven political operative, and maybe even sociopathic; his hard-line policies against the homeless have ‘kettled’ them into the parks where they are sure to invoke calls for law and order, much to his delight. Every time I turn around he’s paying fealty to the police, instead of the People, either praising them or assuring more funding, virtue signaling the law and order constituency.

Wallach is a mush-mouth lawyer unable to orient himself to the service of the most forgotten, and thereby betrayed, of his constituency. Young is of no help with her inability to move off the prescribed agenda in the face of new facts; like an early, deadly winter, or the uptick in confrontations on Pearl Street with the homeless, which indicate the desperate poor are now getting more desperate in light of the current policies that are meant to intimidate and criminalize their poverty. One might say they are fighting back against a global economic circumstance they don’t fully understand, the globalization of labor.

Joseph is conservative in her voting pattern and therefore keeps shooting down her own best ideas for police reform by going along with the other conservatives. Remember her enthusiasm for reform, then her continued vote on camping bans, in spite of having no new services added to help those in need with their problems? Nigel confuses groundhog sanctity with human sanctity and therefore continually votes for sweeps, while protecting her very cute and precious groundhogs, which is probably a false equivalency. Mr. Brockett started off good with the homeless welfare agenda, and may still yet prove to be worth something to those who don’t vote.

Then there’s Ms. Friend and Mr. Swetlik; what’s your next move?

I’ll tell you this, what you’re looking at in your own lack of accountability concerning the CJS is institutionalized malevolence, evil made manifest, but no need to skirt the issue at this point; murder is murder just the same in the most beautiful city in America, whether by the tens or twos, or alone in the back of a van. So let’s have an elevated conversation instead of a pretentious student council meeting where we say things like colloquy and jerk each other around with platitudes. Or at least let’s pretend we’re intellectually sophisticated people and have a more realistic conversation, starting with the crimes against the community committed by Carr and Stavley, who in my case conspired in the open and on the public record to subvert the Rule of Law. Easy enough to prove, it just takes political will.

These men and their ilk have created a cancer on the body politic, aiding and abetting a cynical political pathology of institutional tribalism which has led to senseless deaths among the homeless, maiming in the county jail, and possible suicides, something we may never be able to calculate, so that just maybe a close study of my case might work to break through the platitudes. Either way it’s well past the time to own up to your own complicity, Ms. Friend and Mr. Swetlik; it’s time to wake up to the potential of the responsibilities you have.

Finally, after the murder Sheriff Pella brought us the spit bag lawsuit; another in a series of crimes jointly authored by city police and county deputies, which were cleared by the Review Panel. To me the video clearly showed a gang of thugs had been set upon the woman; later Pella and his panel cleared them! Pella appears to be a sadist; it seems he didn’t learn a thing from the murder.

One of the deputies was taken to the Colorado Supreme Court for breaking an inmate’s leg and was cleared, and then he went on to murder Demetrius. In my estimation this is an indictment of the systemic court bias in favor of the current structure of the CJS. The murder trial and the Review Panel clearance is an indictment of Sheriff Pella. He now wants to fight the ACLU about the use of the restraint chair. That’s why the entire CJS is on trial, and not the deputies’ conduct, because on every level of the CJS city employees are encouraged to be thugs; it’s a matter of record. These men, Yates, Weaver, Wallach, Pella, Carr, and Stavley, and women, can’t see or at worst, choose not to see, the institutional malevolence because they’re all involved.

Robert Augustus Gerard

The City of Boulder’s Circular Firing Squad

Was Ms. Nagel Mobbed for Alleged Anti-Semitic Comments?

Dr. Zimbardo’s insight into bullying inside groups, any group, is that certain seemingly normal group dynamics can, if not understood properly, lead to the adoption of herd morality and group malevolence. He states that individual pathological behavior is the outcome of social vectors of malevolence wherein herd morality is encouraged and reinforced by those in authority. He postulates that group mobbing is pathological malevolence, and when understood as such can be addressed as a public health issue. (The Lucifer Effect by Dr. Philip Zimbardo)

It’s also a crime under Colorado state statute.

The Socialized Public Health Problem of Evil;

Seven Known Vectors of Malevolence

• Someone mindlessly took Nagel’s words out of context without consulting her first as to what she meant, and repeated them, most probably with malevolent intent.
• The postcard fed into this shame and blame narrative which became an anonymous slur campaign, which is a textbook dispersion of individual responsibility for malevolence.
• Those on council who organized a rebuttal did it with impunity, as did everyone else that signed-on, because after all it was a broad statement against a known evil, and not intended to hurt her politically or personally; or so it was alleged.
• The council denounced anti-Semitic remarks and false equivalencies, group norms that make denunciation nothing more than picking low hanging, over-ripe fruit for everybody to throw at the target of the rumors and innuendo.
• Friend calls in the ADL, the Rose Institute, and the rest of the cavalry of the PC Left; at this point Ms. Friend, is seemingly out-of-control with self-inflicted indignation, otherwise known as PC madness.
• Everyone on Council signs on to the false comparison agenda, only the false comparison is between what Nagel actually said and meant, and what the mob decided she said and meant, without talking to her.
• Nobody apologizes to Mirabai after her eloquent explanation as Wallach piles on, Sam remains morally rudderless, and Bob remains silent in defending her right to speak freely.

The Banal Face of Malevolence in a Self-righteous Mobbing

Are any of those involved in the smear campaign, in spreading the gossip and innuendo to the point of having to make a public declaration of their PC bone fides, evil people individually, or are they ordinary people who can’t think straight about their own responsibility in a mobbing because they have no underlying ethical, rather than political, framework for civil discourse?

Or is it that they lack political perspective with a personal philosophy of human dignity at its center, a viewpoint of humanity that can allow them to see and measure the form of some of the most odious facets of human beings, like gossip and innuendo, through a group dynamic psychological lens, so that they don’t once again go off down a rabbit hole, this time of anti anti-Semitic declarations, on a mindless tangent over something that wasn’t even true to begin with?

Understanding the crime of a mobbing is about understanding how herd morality develops inside tribal group dynamics, and as Professor Zimbardo states in the book, these vectors of malevolence are a public heath issue, as I’ve been trying to point out for over a year now. It happened to me, it’s in the book you didn’t read, and here you’ve gone and done it to yourselves.

Am I happy because this incident proves my point about the nature of group malevolence? No, I’m sad, sad for both Ms. Nagel and Ms. Friend. The first one will more than likely never forget this moment of public humiliation, and the other will have to come to terms with her own undeniable adoption of an illiberal liberal herd morality; PC culture in its worst form.

The Parties Fomenting the Mobbing

Ms. Friend has now become the Bob Yates on the other end of the political spectrum which is to say that both are more political propagandists for divisive agendas, than leaders with healing visions of personal integrity and community.

In calling in other organizations, specifically the ADL, to formulate a Council proclamation against the alleged ‘false equivalencies’ spoken by a Jewish woman without apparently consulting her first is one of the most craven actions I’ve ever seen one politician do to another. Ms. Friend may have done more damage than she knows; because what she did served to add a dark ‘legitimacy’ to the gossip and innuendo with her declaration of ‘city council purity’ when she should have listened to Mirabai and defended her right to say and feel as she wished.

This kind of virtue signaling by illiberal liberals makes them as guilty of the same sort of reputation destroying political gamesmanship as are Bob and Sam and Mark. In my estimation, Ms. Friend would show unusual political courage if she apologized to Mirabai for damage she doesn’t know she’s done, yet.

 

Mark Wallach appears to be a co-conspirator in bringing the condemnation of the ‘alleged’ defamation through the rubric of false comparisons to fruition, as the annoying neighbor. One of the great benefits of a public pillorying is that those who do the flogging feel morally superior to the rest of us, and Mark’s false equivalencies are brought to light as evidenced by his statement claiming that what happened in the holocaust was the ‘worst genocide in human history’; which presumes we don’t know our history, and, well, it all but proves he doesn’t know his history.

Mark has a homunculus worldview with all the nerve endings in him and his Jewish heritage, which makes him more or less indifferent to others’ sufferings, as is witnessed in the last council meeting where he made the remark that his personal ‘comfort’ should not be impinged upon when it comes to what happens to the homeless in the town, where he ran for office to represent all the People; and that’s called chutzpah!

 

Aaron Brocket didn’t add anything of value to the conversation when he implied that Mirabai’s blaming of the media for spinning what they thought she’d said into an out-of-control frenzy, and that it was partially to blame for the situation, the mobbing. He saw this as an attempt to scapegoat the media, which he seemingly felt needed his protection, over Mirabai’s reputation or free speech rights.

Frankly, I don’t think she intended to take down NBC at 30 Rock for being lame, but rather I think she was talking about local media; the gossipy, un-vetted parts of The Weakly’s and The Daily Camera’s so-called journalism. Just for the record, the Weakly and the Camera aren’t what I’d call great bastions of the Fourth Estate either, or the city of Boulder wouldn’t be in such a rudderless political state as it continues to be divided on political fault lines over PC culture and a general lack of accountability for the Councilmen Weaver, and Yates, and Wallach and the rest.

 

Sam Weaver and Bob Yates just watched from the sidelines as the illiberal liberal shot herself in the foot over and over. Basically neither one of them could bring any sensible leadership and moderation to the discussion; because again they have no philosophy of moral leadership guiding the civil discourse at Council meetings.

The problem with both of these politicians is they are unprincipled in their politics; they rule by division. Therefore, because they don’t exercise and exemplify principled decision making by putting human dignity as designated by individual sovereignty first and foremost in their deliberations, the conversations always deteriorate into something politically pathological, with tragic outcomes for all, including fellow council members, but most especially the citizens.

Good leadership would never have let this type of mobbing happen, along with it’s concomitant divisiveness because they would’ve read my book and thereby would know a thing or two about how the tribalism of a mobbing works to destroy individual sovereignty in both the public and legal arena.

Coulder North is after all an entire book on the local politics of a very specific criminal mobbing in their town, and that case with its unofficial denial of the crime, combined with city council’s lack of their own avenues of civil discourse or recourse, has gotten us to this pitiful state of affairs; they’ve self-mobbed themselves!

Boulder’s political class, with its reactionaries on one side focused on division and chaos, and its illiberal liberals on the other side virtue signaling over false equivalencies, and a city attorney’s office that regularly disregards both individual sovereignty and the Rule of Law, all under Sam and Bob’s years-long morally vacuous leadership has allowed this lowly state of affairs to develop and continue with tragic outcomes for all, again, especially the town’s citizen.

But then, just like the illiberal liberals, the conservatives already know everything there is to know about the institutional criminality of the CJS, the insular tribalism of staff, and the malevolent banality of their town’s institutions of governance because they’re getting elected over and over; I say they see the community as a political chess game and themselves as political ‘players’ instead of representatives of all the People. Therefore, when a mobbing occurs, they don’t know how to use it as a teaching moment but rather just watch from the sidelines because they lack political courage, insight into the public heath problem of mobbing and, or the practical knowledge to act to unify, and are therefore unfit to lead on yet another level of having a vision of how to heal the community.

 

Junie Joseph has already experienced Ms. Friend’s friendship, so she wisely kept quiet, as did Mr. Swetlik, smartly, and Mary Young to her credit as she too watched the illiberal liberal virtue signaling her People as they all tacitly signed on to the low-hanging fruit of the declaration; because as I said before, everybody hates Nazis, and in my case predators, and it doesn’t matter whether that libel is fact-based or transmitted by innuendo and gossip, because both are equally valid as evidenced in Boulder courtroom as my encounter with John Stavley can attest.

 

Ms. Nagel was superior to every dirty, ugly, unfounded accusation hurled at her; good for her. She held her head high, stood up for herself, and acquitted herself with grace in her words. This may seem like her political nadir but in time it will be one of her fondest memories; the day she stood up for free speech, speechless groundhogs, and, yes, even the human animals of the world that are being desensitized to the suffering of all animals, including human animals, and in doing so displayed a depth of feeling and compassion toward the world few humans enjoy. I’d defend her stand on the animal kingdom over feigned political indignation any day.

 

Some Random thoughts on Self-Censorship

 

So once again the Council got off-track and went down the anti-Semitic rabbit hole, a spurious tangent based on a false rumor, and spent their time condemning what Mirabai may or may not have said or meant, which she didn’t have time to fully explain when it happened, because as she stated, she was cut short; and after all, she was just trying to engage another councilmember as the retreat coach had asked her to do. So that half of what she said, and none of what she meant, got tweeted out into the gossip-sphere, the rumor mill of social media, and she became an instant public enemy.

That’s what you call a mobbing, a modern, social media fueled, vigilante mobbing.

She went on to say she was sorry for any hurt feelings, but that she was being misunderstood, and that she is from a Jewish background, and she, like everyone, hates what happened to her people. She also quoted a holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, ‘the way we treat animals can be directly linked to the way we treat humans,’ and in this sentiment one need look no further than the indifference displayed by Yates and Weaver and Wallach to the homeless man’s recent death, behind a church of all places, to see that there is some merit in what she’s quoting; even though she too supported the camping ban. After all of that, Ms. Friend somehow managed to accept her apology while at the same time virtue signaling her hatred of hate speech, which we all hate, and that makes it just more low-hanging fruit.

The truth of the matter in these PC times that we live in is that if anyone says anything remotely anti-Semitic (the Palestinians are a Semitic people too, so figure that one out for yourselves) they become instant targets of the morally self-righteous and everyone climbs aboard, liberals and conservatives become lovers of self-righteousness, over what in this case, as in most PC incidents, turns out to be just another case of gossip and innuendo run wild as Mirabai’s reputation is smashed and her right to speak her mind freely, is censored once again by a politicizing leadership that gives way to PC cultural intolerance as it turns its back on yet another homeless man’s death. This ultimately leads to self-censorship and stifles disparate voices at the table as those that would like to speak for the voiceless don’t want into the kind of fratricide, the circular firing squad Mr. Weaver and Mr. Yates have made of the council because they lack both practical leadership skills and a unifying vision of community.

 

Postscript

 

Where was all the outrage when the homeless man died behind the church? Or when Demetrius died at the hands of the sheriff’s deputies, in the back of a van, utterly alone in his death throes? Or when the spit bag tasering happened at the jail, and the review board signed off on it, and the $800K settlement was not questioned? Or when Lolotai was doing his worst? Or when Chief Harold wrote a glowing letter of recommendation for him? Where is your outrage when a Lieutenant and Deputy Chief perjured themselves in their official reports?

Where was your outrage then, Mr. Wallach, Ms. Friend? Where is the outrage now that Pella has decided to defy the NAACP about the use of restraint chairs even after you too have reviewed the video? You did look at the Video, didn’t you? Not doing your jobs, obviously, because you were too busy consulting the ADL and the Rose institute about a gossipy rumor.

If Wallach and Friend really cared about the People they serve they wouldn’t have used this obvious misunderstanding to publicly shame a fellow council member for something they’d clearly misunderstood, but would instead be heading a probe into Tom Carr’s and Sam Weaver’s multiple cover-ups in the CJS lawsuit cases that just keep coming.

As I’ve said, I’ll take no prisoners; from Weaver to Wallach to Friend and Brocket and Yates, mobbing is tribalism. It’s a crime, one for which Ms. Cole and Judge Stavley have yet to be held accountable. The courtroom is an arena of conflicting narrative; the transcript in my case shows no over-arching narrative of a crime or misdemeanor, it literally has no narrative. Read it for yourself, because all it contains is the inaudible gossip and innuendo of self-righteous PC people, as in this case, and of course the pesky problem of free speech, as in a few lines of my stories were taken out of context and used against me as ‘evidence’ of possible potential future crimes; thought crimes.

The only antidote to tribalism is individual sovereignty and the Rule of Law, both of which are routinely ignored by Tom Carr, which has turned the whole town tribal with vying camps of virtue signaling demagogues, (Yates on Floyd George’s back) on both sides of the aisle that don’t have any clue that the line of good and evil runs right down the middle of all of us, them too.

That’s why I call all of this feigned distress about what was basically rumor and innuendo conveniently applied to PC cultural bullshit; criminal bullshit. This is the exact crime Ms. Cole and Judge John Stavley and Tom Carr did to me; it’s a crime under the Rule of Law. Where is your outrage over the very real and provable criminal acts these individuals committed?

I’ll state it clearly for all of you; Ms. Cole instigated a mobbing, a crime under Colorado statute, based solely on rumor and innuendo. I’ll also state here flatly, that Judge Stavley was in contact with the city attorney’s office because there is no over-arching narrative in the transcript and therefore one can only conclude sentencing was handed down because an alternate narrative was presented in another forum, in an ex parte meeting. In addition, there was no opening charge cited, nor a finding of facts, before sentencing was applied with devastating results.

And finally, where is the outrage for the young woman and her family who were manipulated by Tom Carr, Ms. Cole, and Judge Stavley for their own political, virtue signaling ends?

 

Was Mirabai mobbed? You tell me, you have the evidence to convict.

 

 

 

Robert Augustus Gerard

 

Author of Coulder North, a book about Boulder’s Political Class

 

 

 

Some Random Thoughts on Anti-Semitism

 

Not many people on council know their history very well or they would’ve challenged Mark when he went overboard in his condemnation of Mirabai’s right to free speech.

Mr. Wallach was pleased with the generalized statement the Council made against the false equivalency of the holocaust and the gassing of the groundhogs, but then he went on his own tangent to say that the Jewish holocaust was the ‘worst genocide in human history,’ conveniently forgetting Stalin’s 30 million and Mao’s 100 million. Not to mention our brother and sister Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who are currently victims of collective punishment, itself a war crime, or Israel’s defiance of UN resolutions concerning confiscated territories which indicates to me that Zionists, a subculture to be sure, feel that they are above the law, international law anyway; due, I imagine, to the same claim of the aforementioned ‘worst genocide in human history.’

Mister Wallach is ignorant of history among other things. What he did at the end of the meeting is called grandstanding; he learned it from Yates when Bob stood on George Floyd’s back without acknowledging Demetrius Shankling. Frankly, I’m not sure that Jewish suffering is any more sacred than Russian or Chinese suffering, or what the Palestinians are suffering now at the hands of the Jewish state in real time.

Is that a false equivalence? Am I anti-Semitic for saying that; again reminding you that Palestinians too are a Semitic people? Who’s running the PC show this week? Ms. Friend, Bob, Mark?

I read in the paper the ICC has taken up the Palestinian agenda, to which the Prime Minister of Israel responded by calling the ICC anti-Semitic, just after walking out of his third corruption trial. But then again the pro-Israel political apologists around the world allowed the slaughter of the Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon that were allegedly under the protection of Ariel Sharon pass by without speaking any outrage, so who’s to say what a false equivalency or justice looks like from a Jewish or Palestinian perspective? Not me and certainly not a City Council in Colorado that flaunts the Rule of Law and individual sovereignty as freely as it does under Tom Carr and Mayor Weaver while the homeless freeze and the Police perjure themselves, multiple times, without being held accountable.

Institutional Denial Bolder Boulder Style

Brought to you by Bob, Sam, Mark, and the rest of the COVID Council

City Council Meeting 1-5-2021

 Denial, denial, denial … are these the men; Officer Rappold, Commander Trujillo, and Deputy Chief Weinheimer that Sam has been chatting-up in the last few meetings, or just another example of a few more ‘bad apples’? Are any of these city employees going to be held accountable, like Pella was for the four hundred thousand dollar lawsuit, and the death of Demetrius? Or is this just business as usual; precedents set by Yates and Weaver, and Pella and Jones last season?

This latest incident of police brutality with a hefty financial penalty was a perfect opportunity to challenge some of the Mayor Weaver’s Pollyanna positions about law enforcement. Yet not one person on Council made use of the opening the tragedy presented for an exploration of law enforcement abuses, including filing false reports.

What kind of signal was that to the culture of the police force; to the People?

How many of these tragedies will it take before Council Members do their jobs?

When will the individual people on Council take personal responsibility for their office, as if their personal freedom from injury and death where at stake?

This incident goes back to the hypocrisy of Mr. Yates standing on George Floyd’s back without acknowledging Demetrius Shankling. This goes to Sam’s hypocrisy of acknowledging Officer Good Guy’s jeep saving story, while at the same time shorting the consent agenda review that was an undeniable acknowledgment of law enforcement officers abusing their offices.

The cover-ups are a pattern, the undeniable conspiracy of constant cover-ups is systemic; and yet the Council sees no evil. No amount of letters, good reference books, or strong intellectual arguments can do much if it’s a ‘see no evil’ public conversation.

None of the dissembling will be unwound, no responsibility will be enforced; even after both officers involved, Luna and Rappold, had received specific training in the areas that they ignored, and none of the higher-ups, including on the jailhouse review panel, will be fired or demoted or even acknowledged in their deceptions. Which is why good people continue to get maimed and killed by the hypocritical decisions the Council keeps making. Is this how representative politics is supposed to work? Is this what you signed up for; covering up class warfare and institutionalized crimes; like falsifying reports?

When I came to Boulder I expected reality tinged with good faith and good will, and this is what I found, an on-going tragedy of cruelty and sadism within the city government that has infected the body politic. It’s beyond disgusting. I have no words for what I saw Sam do by parliamentary process tonight, except denial – the denial of justice. If this is the best staff and Council can do, and if you can’t stand up to the bureaucratic bullying by Yates and Weaver, then I recommend you resign while you still have a reputation, much less a conscience.

“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.”                                 

Thomas Paine