NM SUPREME COURT AND ITS GOVERNMENT LAWYER PROTECTION RACKET

The New Mexico Supreme Court establishes the “Rules of Professional Conduct” for lawyers in New Mexico.  Its Disciplinary Board enforces the “Rules” through the Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC).  Lawyers are encouraged, perhaps expected, and certainly should be condemned to read its nearly 240 single-spaced pages (pdf).  Those convicted of and incarcerated for serious professional misconduct should be required to memorize it as a condition of release.

I had the chance years ago to read Ohio’s statement of professional conduct.  When I was 19, the senior partner of a highly regarded law firm in my hometown promised me a partnership-track position the day after I passed the state bar exam.  I passed; that is, I politely declined the offer.  Even then, I knew myself well enough to know that I did not want to read legalese, split hairs, and write sophistical arguments—all in an ego-quest to conquer competition in depositions or trials.  So I missed my chance, but not very much.

My experience with Las Cruces’s government lawyers, City Attorney Jennifer Vega-Brown and Senior Assistant Attorney Robert Cabello, prompted me to skim-read this code of legal conduct.  By the time I finished my cursory examination, I concluded that the Court operates a protection racket for lawyers, especially government lawyers.  Two biases are essential to its operation; a third bias ODC lawyers are not equipped to handle.

The first bias is the Court’s undue emphasis on the conduct of private lawyers, either alone under their shingle or with others in a law firm, almost to the exclusion of the conduct of government lawyers.  The disproportionate frequencies of the words “clients” and “citizens” parallel the disproportionate numbers of private and government lawyers.  Yet the proportion of text on private and government lawyers is the inverse of their importance.  Lawyers employed by city, county, and the state governments are far more important to the functioning of society although they often work, not for and often against citizens, but presumably, eventually, accidentally in the public interest.

Some fraction of these government lawyers forget that, as lawyers, they are “officers of the court” first, employees of governments second, as well-known examples of their forgetfulness prove.  Most government attorneys shield police by reducing or declining charges alleged against them.  Many relieve the burdens of court dockets or increase convictions rates by coercing plea bargains, especially in dubious cases, by overcharging unrepresented or poorly represented citizens, mostly minorities, many innocent, and threatening them with heavy penalties and long prison terms.  Some coach police to give false or misleading incriminating testimony (aka, “testilying”; my anagram: police = cop lie) and suppress or conceal exonerating evidence to secure convictions, some involving life, some involving death sentences.  If the Court were concerned about the integrity of the profession, its “Rules” would not be silent about these and other abusive practices by government lawyers.

The “Rules” says little or nothing specific about professional conduct by government lawyers.  However, the discussion in the last article, “Article 8: Maintaining the Integrity of the Profession,” is general enough to include them in “16-804. Misconduct”:

It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to:

A. violate or attempt to violate the Rules of Professional Conduct, knowingly assist or induce another to do so or do so through the acts of another;
B. commit a criminal act that reflects adversely on the lawyer=s [sic] honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer in other respects;
C. engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation;
D. engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice;
E. state or imply an ability to influence improperly a government agency or official or to achieve results by means that violate the Rules of Professional Conduct or other law; or
F. knowingly assist a judge or judicial officer in conduct that is a violation of applicable rules of judicial conduct or other law.
G. engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status in conduct related to the practice of law….

These acts of misconduct apparently apply to all lawyers, though E seems directed to private, not government, lawyers.  For them, E should proscribe acts, not just words, “to influence improperly a government agency or official.”  The reason is that government lawyers sometimes seek to advance personal agendas under the guise of giving advice, which, even if ill-founded, flawed, or false, is accepted on their authority and acted on.

The second bias is a procedure favoring all lawyers  The Court “has established … procedures regarding the investigation of alleged unethical conduct….  The procedures are designed to provide a thorough and objective review of the complaint of conduct and to resolve the matter in a way that is fair to those involved.”  So says the Court.  But the Board says otherwise in its statement of the complaint process.  I quote and comment on its first three steps:

First, if an attorney thinks that the complaint has merit, “The Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) sends a copy of your complaint to the attorney for his or her response.  The response is confidential; you will not [ODC’s emphasis] receive a copy.”  The process not only ensures the confidentiality of that response, but also enables the accused attorney to tailor a response to rebut the complaint.

Second, “Once the attorney has responded, the file is assigned to one of the attorneys of the ODC.”  How can the ODC attorney reliably evaluate the veracity of the response?

Third, “If the response reveals that there was no misconduct, or that the misconduct was a minor isolated instance, ODC will dismiss the complaint and you will receive a letter of the reason(s) for dismissal.  The letter will explain how you can request review if you so choose.”  The ODC attorney relies on the response to reveal misconduct or not, but the term and syntax are not reassuring that he scrupulously analyzes and evaluates the lawyer’s response with all available information.  A complainant’s reply is one important and possibly indispensable means for ODC lawyers to ascertain the truth or falsity of his response.  Without stated criteria, no one can be sure that the conduct complained of is “minor” and “isolated.”  Once the ODC reaches a decision denying the complaint, the complainant has virtually no chance of overturning it; the Board backs staff.  Its procedure can should avoid such issues by involving the complainant before, not after, ODC makes a judgment about the complaint.

The crunch comes when a complaint concerns a lawyer’s honesty.  ODC asks the lawyer whether a complaint about lying is true or false.  How, short of revelation, does the ODC lawyer ascertain the veracity or falsity of the response?  My experience suggests that, with lying a common practice in law enforcement and legal communities, ODC lawyers likely incline to regard most of them as “minor,” whether “isolated” or not.

A third bias is the likely inability of ODC lawyers to address bias-based lawyering in complaints about “race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status.”  Even those best intentioned probably cannot identify indicators or address nuances of these biases.

Were I a member of the Disciplinary Board, I would want to revise the “Rules of Professional Conduct” in six ways:

(1) Group “Rules” by separate professional functions—financial arrangements, communications, etc.
(2) Use subgroups of “Rules” to indicate which apply to all lawyers, which to government lawyers, and which to non-government lawyers.
(3) Eliminate the bias which does not detail the professional conduct of government lawyers to the same level of detail as that for non-government lawyers.
(4) Develop rules to address prosecutorial abuses which implicate police, prosecutors, and judges, and thereby undermine the integrity of the legal profession.
(5) Move the current “Article 8: Maintaining the Integrity of the Profession” forward to be Article 1 and revise it to emphasize the current section “16-804.  Misconduct” so that it frames the rest of the “Rules” as elaborated guidance to avoid misconduct by lawyers or disservice to their employers or clients.
(6) Eliminate the bias against complainants by revising procedures to give them timely opportunity and the time to address lawyers’ responses to the complaint.

If the Court wants to maintain the integrity of the profession, it has serious work to do.

THROW OUT THE CRITICAL RACE TRASH AT SCHOOL BOARD MEETINGS

When she was sweet sixteen, my daughter suffered from a severe case of the hormone poisoning which afflicts many American female teenagers.  We had an argument; she was losing it and, knowing that she was losing it, appealed to her right to have her opinion.  I replied that her having a right to an opinion did not mean that her opinion was right.  Squelched, she later admitted that her opinion was wrong.

The same cannot be said of those attending a Las Cruces School Board meeting to protest vigorously against the Public Education Department’s proposed revision of the social studies, or history, curriculum because, so they claim, it incorporates Critical Race Theory.  The fact is that it does not, but they care, not about the fact, only about a racist agenda to impose on schools.  Unlike my daughter, they are not teenagers, but adults, she more mature than they.  She could listen and learn, and admit being wrong; they cannot.  Instead, they bellow, berate, and bully those who have different and better opinions.  Unable to offer facts or make arguments, they call names, shout slogans, and thump Bibles.  They are the metastasized legacy of hillbillies who left their shacks in the hollars to fight for states’ rights, the fig-leaf rationalization of white racial superiority.  Whatever they are, they talk trash.

These protestors have rights to have and express opinions, but those rights do not mean that their opinions are right or, if wrong or unworthy, must be respected.  As a teacher, consultant, and citizen activist, I like to discuss or debate important issues, especially of public policy.  However, I stop participating when I encounter disregard of information and indifference to truth; bigotry in the assumption of superiority on the basis of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, class, or education; or angry outbursts, insults, threats, or violence.  I feel no guilt about losing respect for my opposite because I have no misguided tolerance which often tacitly accepts the otherwise intolerable.

Still, I almost sympathize with these protestors.  Like the rest of us, they suffer from extreme tension and seek relief from a seemingly endless pandemic of a forever mutating covid-19 virus, with personal, societal, and economic effects; a complex, dynamic, and dangerous international order, with growing threats from China and Russia; accelerating post-Vietnam trends of educational decay and moral, social, and political rot; threats or effects of climate change, the nature and rate of technological, economic, and social change, all aggravated by passionate cultural and ideological divisions.  Anyone not anxious, stressed, or frazzled is not paying attention.

The protestors suffer like the rest of us but, like racists elsewhere, feel their sense of white superiority threatened.  To them, inclusiveness, multiculturalism, or the idea that “Black Lives Matters”—more change—is a sharp stick in the eye.  Fearful and angry, they vent, not about remote, large, and complicated issues, but about smaller, simpler ones close at hand, like changes in a curriculum close to personal concerns.  Anyone worried about the future is going to be concerned about the education which children receive.

Their attacks on proposed or approved education policies or course curriculums not only release pent-up tensions which we all feel, but also focus their pre-existing racism on CRT.  However sincerely and strongly they assert their opinions, they should not expect informed, logical, and reasonable people to agree, accept, or acquiesce in them.  Instead, reasonable people should adopt the best antidote to their trash talk: detailed rebuttals of bogus claims, clear and cogent decisions benefitting students’ education, and explicit limits of protestors’ behavior.  If protestors behave outrageously, officials should restore order without regret at having to do so.

In the matter of CRT, the primary rebuttal is the exposure of protestors’ ignorance and their indifference to it.  None of the protestors can define CRT or knows its origins or auspices.  None knows who teaches it to whom or can locate material imported from CRT and inserted into the proposed curriculum.  None can give educational, not partisan or racist, reasons for excluding from that curriculum facts about race as an influence in America long predating and continuing parallel to the specialized academic study of its influence in institutions.  None can prove it makes students “hate America.”  None cares.

None knows or cares that history is an account of selected facts interpreted to approximate the whole truth.  Protestors want a half-truth history which excludes the facts of slavery and the racism which justified it and has permeated America from its origins.  The absurdity of excluding race from American history would resemble the absurdity of excluding radioactivity, x-rays, E=MC², relativity, and quantum mechanics from physics.  Modern physics supplements, not replaces, classical physics because Albert Einstein and Max Plank explain facts which Isaac Newton could not.  Likewise, history which includes the facts of race and racism explains more about America’s past than race-biased history can.  Just as no school board would base its physics curriculum on 17^th-century science, so no school board should sustain a history curriculum based on a history derived from the 19^th century.

None cares.  The protestors do not care about history or education; they care about white racist propaganda to indoctrinate all students into beliefs of white superiority; they want to racially segregate facts about race.  They are not content to teach their children bigotry at home; they want schools to teach bigotry to all students.  They fear that racially different classmates will unteach their children what they have tried to teach and that a revised curriculum will teach them about this country’s ennobling struggles to overcome racism and realize its ideals.  “Uncomfortable,” indeed, for them but not their children.

Still, the proposed revision of the curriculum has technical flaws tantamount to educational failure or worse.  Like many curriculums developed in recent decades, it defines, not subject-matter information and skills, but “performance standards,” which are not standards at all, only tasks to be accomplished.  Though intended to inform the public about content, it does not specify the knowledge and skills teachers must possess and students should acquire.  Moreover, many standards are age-inappropriate and invasive of individual privacy—student, parent, friend, or neighbor.  Students revealing such information on their initiative is one thing; teachers assigning work requiring such revelations is another.  Schools should not evolve into a service of law enforcement.

School boards have many good reasons to reject critical race trash but few good reasons to accept the proposed revision of the history curriculum.  The question is whether their members know enough about curriculums themselves, have reasonable views what a history curriculum should teach, and have the courage to adopt it.

TIMELY REPRINT: THE SECOND AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

[NOTE TO 2022 REPRINT: Of course, 9 years later, some allusions are dated and, to many, likely unfamiliar.  I was wrong to think that a Tea-Party type candidate had no chance of election in 2016, but I had not anticipated the opposition candidate; Trump v. Clinton was unimaginable and, as we now know, disastrous.  I failed to mention the role of the law enforcement agencies and the court systems in and in the aftermath of the civil war.  I hope to do better in a 202s sequel to this analytical scenario.]

2013-02-16

The Second American Civil War

[NOTE: The paranoids are making me paranoid.  Aware of, if not alarmed by, this development, I think that the best therapy is an exercise in "creative writing."  However, rather than offer narrative, not my forte, I offer the conceptual overview and underlying themes which I hope can prompt truly creative people to develop plot and characters.  Dr. Strangelove meet Wayne LaPierre.  I shall gladly sign over any and all rights to movies or books which my seminal ideas may prompt!  I am inclined to think that a coordinated civil war is less likely than random terrorist acts.  But a scenario may be worth a moment's amused consideration.

Perhaps what is most worrisome is the Republican inability to adjust to the reality of Obama's re-election.  My theory du jour is that Republicans did not believe that McCain, unloved as he was by them, would lose to a black man and junior senator in his first term.  Under the scorched-earth leadership of Mitch McConnell, Republicans then attempted to make Obama an aberration, as if the tide of demography could be turned by one black man's defeat.  So they did not believe that Romney, unloved as he was by them, would lose to a black man whom they had tried to demonize in every way possible.  By believing their own fictions of success, they set themselves for failure.  Now they are in stunned disbelief that Obama is no aberration and that the tide has turned, but still against them.  Having lived by a Southern strategy and all the bigotry and ignorance underlying it, they are now dying by it.  Good riddance to those--McConnell, Boehner, McCain, Graham, Cantor, Inhofe, Cruz, prominent among many others--who have neither decency nor integrity, and are willing to cripple a country which they cannot control.]

With various elected Republican officials calling for periodic bloodshed every century or so, “Second Amendment remedies,” or a “second American Revolution,” I thought that I would fantasize or forecast something a little different: a Second American Civil War.  I understand the Republican desire to align such hostilities with the American Revolution; it purports that the party’s rebellious impulses are patriotic, not traitorous, and supports its paranoid delusions about a “tyrannical government.”  Washington, with Obama as president, is like London, with George III as king.  Thus, they talk.

But the real parallel is the treasonous rebellion of Confederate pro-slavery states against democratic states of different political positions—South versus North—on basic questions of America’s political unity, the precedence of Constitutional and federal law, and the Creator’s grant of equality to all men.  However, the Second American Civil War will be fought less along geographic than socio-economic lines: country versus city; and less between armies and navies from two different regions than loyal and disloyal units of the three main Military Services supported by paramilitary units of the National Republican Army (NRA), with civilians drawn in as war comes to their neighborhoods. 

A parallel is the Yugoslav Wars, which involved conflicts between military units of the provinces of Yugoslavia as that country disintegrated.  These territorial battles between provinces also degenerated into ethnic and religious conflicts on a smaller scale by paramilitary units and free-lance groups.  In their effort to maintain the unity of Yugoslavia and their dominance within it, Serbs from rural areas attacked, raped, tortured, and killed residents of mixed-population urban areas.  The Yugoslav Wars gave rise to a new coinage, “ethnic cleanings,” which referred to violent assaults on non-Serbs and which resemble, in toned-down form, the Republican idea and implementation of Hispanic “self-deportation.”

A novelist is better prepared than I to represent the possible, perhaps the plausible, contours which such a civil war would take in 21^st-century America.  My imagination is insufficient to specify the events prompting the alliance of military and paramilitary units, and the outbreak of hostilities.  But the Right’s increasing volatility and violence of language and its growing incivility and hostility to the Left are preparing the emotional, mental, cultural, and social conditions for physical mayhem.  Despite the mindless efforts of the media and the mendacious exertions of Fox News, the asymmetry of abuse is clear: the Right is increasingly extreme in word and deed.

The forces for a second revolution are already in place in the “red” states, in which talk about “tyrannical government” is particularly vivid, vociferous, and violent.  The volunteers who constitute the majority of officers and enlisted personnel of the Military Services are disproportionately from or stationed in the “red” states of the South and the southern Great Plains.  Most of the country’s largest forts are located in these former states of the Confederacy or states adjacent to them like Kentucky and Oklahoma.  Practices advancing evangelical Christianity at the military service academies, with distinct anti-Semitic tendencies, imply that America’s officers support neo-conservative politics and policies which fuel statements of states rights, nullification, interposition, or succession—the doctrines which rationalized the racism of rebels in the first civil war and which Republican officials articulate today without rebuke from within their party.

Other loosely associated paramilitary groups constitute a National Republican Army, which includes many former military personnel, which prevails in the “red” states, and which is doing everything it can to grow in numbers and arms.  The spread of military-style weapons to these active groups bodes ill for domestic peace and tranquility.  Their rallying cry is, of course, the Second Amendment, and the cause of its rallying is its fear and loathing of President Obama.  But it will not diminish its activities once he leaves office.  Its anti-Democratic, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-socialist, anti-communist, anti-fascist—these first six “anti’s” applied interchangeably—, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, anti-minority, anti-GLBT, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and other forms of “anti-ness” will not dissipate when Obama leaves offices or even with the (unlikely) election of a Tea-Party-friendly Republican president.  They are indelibly etched into the NRA’s culture.

Two facts suggest an affinity between military and paramilitary organizations in this country.  One, they share a love of arms.  America’s defense budget is greater than the combined defense budgets of all other countries.  And Americans own more guns per capita than the people in any other country.  Two, they share some of the same arms.  America is one of the very few countries which allow civilians to own and operate military-style arms.  Given the NRA’s fear that the Obama administration intends to confiscate guns—its evidence is the fact that the administration has indicated nothing of the sort—it is a short step from a fear of losing them to the effort to use them.

The ascendency of the Right to control of the Senate and the presidency would mark the demise of democracy in America.  It is occurring in state governments controlled by Republicans since the 2010 elections.  With thirty-seven state governments in Republican control, the Right can, if it coordinates its efforts, call for a Constitutional convention and can, if it adds only one more state, can approve a radically amended or new Constitution, perhaps as drafted by ALEC.  Fortunately, for the Right, the Left is clueless or complacent about this possibility.

Given their monopoly of power in so many state parties, the Right no longer respects election results, popular opinion, common sense, and truth at any level of government.  For example, no sooner did Michigan voters reject a proposed state constitutional amendment allowing governor-appointed city managers than the lame-duck legislature passed and the governor signed a measure restoring that power in a law which cannot be amended for 2 years.  In place of, and in defiance of, the inconvenience of voters’ wishes or established facts, Republicans respond with, and act on, fabrications and falsehoods on issues with implications not to their liking—examples: recession-fighting stimulus spending and human-influenced global warming.  They use contra-factual or fact-free propaganda to justify unpopular or repressive legislation or administrative rulings.  To oppose abortion on grounds of rape, they claim that female physiology ensures conception-free rape.  To oppose the “consent of the governed,” they claim voter fraud as spurious grounds for efforts to discourage or prevent voting not only by minorities, students and the poor, but also by seniors, who are even less likely to be involved in voting irregularities of any kind.

The controversy about illegal immigrants is part and parcel of the Republican effort to debilitate democracy.  Eleven million Hispanic immigrants have lived and worked in this country for years, even decades, and contributed to the economy.  Only as the political implications of a changing demography have come to the fore, and only as xenophobia has driven them to offend these small-time malefactors, have Republicans made the issue of illegal immigration an important one.  In line with their anti-democratic proclivities and despite their phony outrage at the idea of “class warfare,” Republicans in the House of Representatives prefer a solution which would create a second class of residents by denying citizenship to these Hispanic immigrants while taxing them without representation.

So, too, the Republican initiatives to infringe upon the Constitutionally sanctioned right to abortion.  Totalitarian states make control of sex and reproduction central to control of citizens.  George Orwell’s novel 1984 featured the state “anti-sex league.”  But his fiction was not stranger than historical fact.  Nazi Germany anticipated his novel in its state engineering of reproduction of a “master race,” its incarceration of homosexuals, and its research and practice of eugenics generally.  Communist China has adopted and enforced a one-child-per-family policy.  In this totalitarian vein, Republican are enacting or proposing legislation to limit or deny opportunities to women to exercise their right to an abortion; to require doctors to lie or misinform their patients; and to require them to perform unnecessary, intrusive, and thus abusive medical procedures.  (Since most, though a diminishing number of, doctors are Republicans, they and their AMA do not, on basis of medical ethics and the integrity of the patient-doctor relationship, oppose such legislation—which exposes their lack of ethics and integrity.)  These Republican efforts accord with totalitarian impulses and give the lie, a really Big Lie, to Republican claims to promote freedom and personal responsibility, which, by definition, implies the freedom to choose for oneself.

What the Second American Civil War comes down to is a war, not about slavery or states rights, but about democracy and its first and fundamental belief that “all men are created equal.”  Republicans no longer accept this American belief, and their words and deeds contrary to it are moving them to discredit and ruin democratic institutions now and, if they believe it necessary, to rebel against democratic government later.  With the fraud of fabrications and falsehoods preparing for the force of arms, Republicans are turning against America and its democracy.

Are there a producer and a screenwriter out there daring enough to make a film about this Second American Civil War or do they fear boycotts, bullets, and bombs?

IS IT WISE TO CELEBRATE A FIRST--ONLY WOMEN CITY COUNCILORS--SO SOON?

[UPDATE: In fewer than 3 weeks, the Las Cruces Sun-News has slid from celebrating a first, a six-women set of councilors, to a sexist stereotype in yesterday's headline (19 Jan), "Claws come out at council discussion over lack of trap-neuter-return policy, budget."  The paper, edited by Lucas Peerman, characterizes policy disagreements among women, not as discussions or debates, but as catfights.  Do we celebrate or scorn him for reminding us that the stuff of stereotypes, the incubator of bigotry, never dies?  In a (local) culture with a strong "macho" strain, misogyny and sexism endure.]

One result of the 2021 city election was a first for City Council: all six councilors females and one male member, the mayor.  Celebration seems premature since previous experience urges circumspection.  The last time we celebrated a first for women was the election of Susana Martina, the first woman governor of the state, and the first Hispanic governor and first woman of color governor in the country.  That turned out well—not.

What now?  Most councilors’ responses have been self-and-sisterhood gratulation about women’s progress in politics.  Having a grandmother and mother smart, strong, active, and effective in community improvement and political action long before women’s lib—“fierce” without touting themselves so—, I would hardly object to this progress.  However, the difference between them, leading volunteers in their day, and these elected politicians is that their post-election statements have been silent about any commitment to more competent and honest government, and clear, comprehensive policies to serve the city and citizenry as a whole.  Much of what they have suggested is support-group stuff which will not annoy and may please Big Sister in the law office.

I have first-hand knowledge of two current councilors, Kasandra Gandara and Johana Bencomo.  They are unimpressive self-promoters.  My dour opinion reflects observations of their talk-talk in Council about police reform and my contacts with them about my complaints about the LCPD.

Gandara has acted more like an administrative assistant than a councilor and an ally of the City Attorney.  She arranged meetings with city officials but never supported my quest for an answer to the question why I was charged with five unsupported code violations, never protested the chief’s slandering me, and voted to exclude my case from the police auditor’s review.  Indicative of her pretended concern for police reform and my case, she stated her satisfaction with the police auditor’s whitewash.  Nothing in her long-running involvement in my case suggests a commitment to truth, justice, decency, and an informed citizenry.

Bencomo has been more the faint-hearted follower than the “fierce” leader, as she recently described herself.  When George Floyd’s murder triggered local protests, she spoke strongly in favor of police reform, including a citizens’ review board.  But when, in a televised council meeting, she advocated such a board and was scolded by the mayor, she flinched, did not stand up to his bullying, and renounced that reform.  Despite attending a meeting in which the City Manager acknowledged that I merited an apology for unfounded LCPD allegations, she pointedly supported and voted for the exclusion of my case from the police auditor’s review.  So much for her commitment to police reform, truth, justice, and an informed citizenry.

Two continuing councilors Tessa Abeyta-Stuve and Yvonne Flores, like Gandara and Bencomo, had abundant information about my case from my many blogs, said and did nothing about it, and also voted to preclude my case from review.  We can thank these four “sisters” for suppressing information about the quality of LCPD responses to citizen complaints, getting the police auditor’s whitewash, and discounting police reforms to improve public safety.  I cannot speak to the quality of the two new councilors, Becky Corran and Becki Graham, but I have no reason to think them likely to be more truth-seeking, principled, or persevering in public service.

I expect the male mayor to dominate and direct the six female councilors.  I expect that inoffensive mediocrity and mendacity by six female councilors to merely replace the past inoffensive mediocrity and mendacity by six male councilors.  I expect that such equivalence—call it equality, if you will—to make no difference to ordinary folk, much less be a cause for citizens to celebrate.  Still, I hope for better than I expect.

If you must, you go ahead and celebrate.  I shall wait to see in what place this first finishes.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING IN LAS CRUCES: A JOKE

For most of my first decade in town, I subscribed to the Las Cruces Sun-News.  For six or so of those years, I wrote a fortnightly column for it.  After I resigned from that task, the paper reduced itself to the size of a double-issue comic book, and I dropped my subscription.  Today, I read it occasionally on the internet, and, after I have used up my freebies, I get an offer to subscribe.  It is still comic; its inducement begins, “Investigative reporting that makes our community a better place to work, live and play.”

Some friends who subscribe cannot recall any instance of “investigative reporting” which makes an improvement to city life.  None has seen one word in the Sun-News about the Brown Farm fiasco or police and law office misconduct and dishonesty.  Why, despite my blogs which I send him, does Editor Lucas Peerman ignore these muck-ups?  Why does investigative reporter Algernon D’Ammassa not investigate them?  Why did reporter Michael McDevitt, with whom I discussed my case, not contact me when the OIR police auditor report appeared?  (It was the whitewash which my blog expected it to be.)

Answer: the Sun-News knows that the phrase “investigative reporting” looks good in an advert and that the name of an investigative reporter on the masthead looks good, but has no desire to expose dishonesty, incompetence, and likely corruption in local governments.  Accordingly, its advert lies to prospective subscribers—a free sample of its wares to induce a sale.  If you want puffery about organizations and schedules for television, you can get The Bulletin for free and without hype about investigations.

Since public safety is the first requirement of government, I use my continuing case of police and law office misconduct, dishonesty, and likely antisemitism as a touchstone of public service responses.  Not only the papers, but also prominent media columnist Peter Goodman, a lawyer, avoid city issues about the LCPD and the Law Office.  They have no excuse; he does: no one would have appointed him a substitute magistrate judge if he opined in a Sun-News or KRWG editorial or kept his promises to have me opine on a KTAL program, on police and legal issues close to home.

Many—Governor, Attorney General, all state legislators including my senator, Jeff Steinborn, and my representative, Angelica Rubio—think that these legal agencies can be dishonest in little things without being dishonest about bigger things as time marches on or occasions arise.  They prefer to shrug off small, incremental threats to democracy from bad police and bad prosecutors.  Aside from well-known cases of police brutality and prosecutorial abuse, relationships between police officers, including “constitutional” sheriffs, and extremist groups, especially in rural areas in this and other counties and states, are a growing threat.  I quote two recent articles on this concern.

“The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order.  Hard right organizations have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.”  (Stephen Marche, “The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it,” The Guardian, 4 Jan 2022)

“According to Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and author of a new book, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.  Who previously served on the political instability taskforce, an advisory panel to the CIA: ‘I could also imagine situations where militias, in conjunction with law enforcement in those areas, carve out little white ethnostates in areas where that’s possible because of the way power is divided here in the United States.  It would certainly not look anything like the civil war that happened in the 1860s’.”  (David Smith, “Is the US really heading for a second civil war,” The Guardian, 9 Jan 2022)

Not everyone reads The Guardian, but other national papers have carried similar articles.  Local editors, investigative reporters, and media mavens should use them to give direction to their work.  The issues suggested in the quotations above might call their attention to the approaching election for county sheriff and suggest the need for some research in advance.  Current Sheriff Kim Stewart faces challenger Omar Chavez, who has received out-of-county and out-of-state endorsements which raise red flags.

One is Sierra County, NM, Sheriff Glenn Hamilton’s, whose conduct has been challenged: “The mixture of Hamilton soliciting deputies among armed militia from Albuquerque, pro-gun church goers and anti-Democrat Cowboys for Trump supporters, most of it captured on video, spread alarm on social media that went nationwide.” (Kathleen Sloan, “Supporters for Sheriff Glenn Hamilton claim he’s upholding the Constitution and detractors don’t know the law.” (Sierra County Sun, 16 Jun 2020).

The other is Hudspeth County, TX, Sheriff Arvin West’s, whose links to apparently rogue Navy and Pentagon personnel operating secretly in his jurisdiction east of El Paso remain unclear.  But the report does not suggest that the connections are savory and suitable.  (Craig Whitlock, “How a high-profile Texas sheriff is tied to a rogue Navy unit facing a criminal probe.” (The Washington Post, 30 Sep 2016)

Because of these endorsements and his appearance in military garb and weaponry on his campaign website, Chavez merits investigation to ascertain whether he has ever shown police practices consistent with his campaign promises.  Rumor says that he practiced (still practices?) operational tactics in exercises with military-style groups in West Texas.  If the man has these proclivities, can he be trusted to tell the truth, respect federal and state constitutions, and protect all constitutional and civil rights of all citizens, not just his supporters who seem to embrace no more than freedom of religion and the right to bear arms?  Will Peerman dispatch an investigative reporter to answer this and related questions?  Will columnist Goodman opine about the implications of such a sheriff on public safety and civil rights in a democracy?

Probably not.  Public safety supported by honest, competent police officers and city attorneys is not anyone’s priority, expands no audiences, and sells no papers.  Same-same is good enough for now—until then.

THE SMALL-TOWN MYTH AND THE INSURRECTION AGAINST DEMOCRACY

Two 2020 articles in the Sierra County Sun report the racist and authoritarian impulses in Truth or Consequences (school board, city commission), impulses existing in many other small towns.  The issues arousing controversy led by some elected officials are of modest importance.  But, when the issues are race or differences of opinion, some elected officials on both panels revealed their fear of a black presence or white dissent.

School Board members Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup complained about a Public Education Department proposal revising the social studies curriculum with greater accuracy about race and racism in American history.  In this context, demographic data indicate the strength of local bigotry.  Whites constitute more than 85% of TorC’s population, just under 6,000, and of Sierra County’s population, just under 12,000.  Blacks number about 36, or 0.6%, of the city population, and about 48, or 0.4%, of the county population.  Although the numbers of blacks are small, racism is strong.

City Commission member Frances Luna smeared the many voters petitioning for a referendum on an energy-metering mandate with $50 monthly penalties for refusal.  She also encouraged harassing these peaceful petitioners, who acted unlike citizens disguised as Indians throwing tea into the sea to protest a tax from a faraway country.

The small-town myth suggests that everyone is folksy with everyone else in a small-town, with holiday ceremonies and parades, church and school bake sales, etc.  But in a politically polarized country, with politics no longer local, but national, small towns have become incubators of bigotry, vitriol, and violence.  Most TorC residents, like those in other small towns, are conservatives, properly “regressives”—my term—, who are waging an asymmetric war against liberals who, with few exceptions, do not use their tactics: name-calling, motive-mongering, and threats of, incitement to, or acts of violence.

Regressives desire to return to authoritarian rule which preceded the founding of the United States yet would, ahistorically, privilege “true Americans”—whites and Christians only.  Regressives, far from desiring to conserve America’s basic democratic values, want to repudiate them, including three prominent ones in its foundational documents.  The first “self-evident” truth of the Declaration of Independence asserts that “all men are created equal”; the First Amendment of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights asserts “freedom of speech” and “the right of the people…to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”  Together, these three values imply respect for and civil treatment of others.

These truisms are necessary reminders of an important part of the definition of what it means to be American, and set appropriate standards to judge the behavior of citizens and the conduct of officials in this country.  On the basis of their views, TorC regressives LaFont, Stroup, and Luna are un-American, radical in their opposition to equality, free speech, and the right to petition.  Their views, accepted by colleagues and TorC voters, encourage racism, disrespect, and incivility; revert to the values of tribal barbarism—ignorance and violence—; and expose the myth of benign small towns as a myth.

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The PED proposal is bad on educational grounds, but LaFont’s and Stroup’s views are worse because they reflect the racism of many TorC voters.  Their statements do not cite Critical Race Theory, but they assume that it influences the PED proposal.  According to regressives’ inflammatory misrepresentations, CRT divides Americans by race and teaches hatred of whites.  These regressive talking points incite resistance to education about race and racism in America—a perverse position for school board members.

Perverse also because opposition to CRT is entirely unreasonable.  CRT studies the historical influences of race on institutional arrangements which have created racial disparities in the public domain.  There is nothing new or secret about it.  The media have long reported the facts of these disparities in employment, education, health care, housing, transportation, banking, etc.; scholars have long studied them; only now are racists overreacting to academic research which has been ongoing for half a century.

White racists have reason to react unreasonably to CRT, however.  Individual racism is mostly a private matter beyond the reach of government action—leaving racists feeling secure.  Institutional racism is mostly a public matter within the reach of government action by legal enactments or judicial decisions which can lead to social change toward equality—leaving racists feeling insecure.  Attacks on CRT are racist attacks on historical truth which can lead to change achieving, or ever more closely approximating, equality.  LaFont and Stroup want public education, under the guise of teaching American history, to teach only the racist fable of white superiority reflecting achievement, not advantages significantly based on racist suppression or discrimination.

LaFont’s and Stroup’s views reflect this fear of truth-in-teaching.  At best, Ms. LaFont is conflicted.  On the one hand, she likes “‘more emphasis on cultures and … causes and effects for all groups’”; on the other hand, she thinks that “‘It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans.  It’s not good to differentiate’.”  Presumably, she favors homogenizing 330 million Americans by erasing factors differentiating not only blacks and whites, but also men and women; Christians, Jews, and Muslims; and people of different ethnicities and national ancestries.  Although she cannot hide her gender or race, logic would compel her to forsake her Christian identity.  Or, possibly, she would accept ethnic cleansing and other drastic steps to “make American great again” as a country of—oops—white Christians only by eradicating people with differentiating factors.  Of course, the truth about race and racism in American would support a significantly different view: it’s not good to discriminate.

Ms. Stroup says, “Our country is not a racist country.  We have to teach to respect each other.  We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination.  We need to teach civics, love and respect.  We need to teach how to be color blind.”  She wants to deny racism altogether and thereby eliminate the need for change.  Her view: no racism; ergo, no problem.  Her statements are contradictory or contentious.  "We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination”—is both nonsensical and delusional.  If racial discrimination did not exist, laws against it would be unnecessary; and laws are not self-enforcing.  Of course, it is also nonsense to speak of respecting others by deprecating or denying traits of individuality important to them.

La Font’s and Stroup’s efforts to sanitize or eliminate in public education historical information about race and racism in America are camouflaged racist efforts to perpetuate bigotry, not only in their children, but in everyone else’s.

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The myth about small-town folksiness is challenged by the authoritarian impulses of Luna, owner of a newspaper and a woman’s gun shop.  Angered by a large number of petitioners objecting to a city commission penalty, she smears them by name-calling and motive-mongering, and urges harassment.  I quote the city commission article:

Luna…called upon the community to ‘stand up to these malicious individuals’—a ‘small, vocal minority’ who ‘have trust issues with the commission.’  Luna—looked up to by many as a pillar of the community—sought to deny local-government critics their First Amendment rights to comment at city commission meetings by asking her readers to aggressively help her silence all such naysayers.

[Luna’s 19 November column] descended into an unhinged and anti-democratic rant against her constituents who dare to question city government.  Even more disturbingly, Luna called for her readers to take it upon themselves to publicly castigate and shame the civic activists for their ‘constant bickering and negativity’ whenever and wherever the good citizens of T or C encountered these malcontents….

[Luna urged] ‘that it’s time those of us who know that the right thing is being done to stand up to these malicious individuals.  Stand up to them on Facebook, at the grocery store, and even as they are walking down the street.  Let them know their behavior is unacceptable—undesirable and unwelcome.  I’m not threatening them with bodily violence, but I will no longer tolerate their falsities, their hypocrisy and their belittling of the people who work for our government entities, who have lived here and given of their lives to make our community a better place to live.  Seriously, what have they done but try to destroy us and waste our valuable tax dollars?’

Perish the thought that Luna wants her violent verbal attacks on citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to lead to violent physical attacks on them, much less to increased sales at her gun store.  She would deny the truth of such consequences.  But her lunatic advocacy of up-front-and-personal incivility not only tarnishes the myth of small-town friendliness, respect, and decency, but also encourages government repression of Constitutional rights and regressives’ thuggery against citizens exercising them.

Recent polls show that Americans are losing faith in democracy.  Some TorC leaders on its school board and city commission are a good example why, one replicated in thousands of small towns across the country.  Regressives are more racist than most Americans, more likely to resist the truth about racism, and more likely to resort to violent verbal or physical attacks on those with different views.  They are betraying democracy because America’s demographics are transitioning from a majority white to a majority rainbow populace.  Prompted by the racist fear that “they” are coming, they want no democracy when “they” arrive.  Regressives are disregarding or fighting truth and its consequences to get and keep political power and dominance, not as American patriots, but as guerrilla parasites infecting and  destroying the body politic.