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BUSTED: Missouri teachers under fire after spelling out a racial slur with oversized Scrabble letters
March 04, 2021
The Christian School District in St. Charles County, Missouri is facing criticism from parents after five white teachers were photographed spelling out the word "coons" with oversized Scrabble letters.
Local news station KSDK reports that the teachers spelled out the racial slur while playing a game of human Scrabble, although they insist they didn't mean to communicate any kind of racism when they spelled out the word.
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But Pastor Raymond Horry, who has two children in the school district, tells KSDK that he's not buying that explanation.
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"They were running around trying to spell raccoon, but they didn't have the R and the A," he said. "I don't believe it that five Caucasian teachers, not one of them knew that. Maybe one didn't know it, maybe two didn't know it, but all 5 didn't know it?"
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One mother in the district tells KSDK that her son immediately understood the significance of the word when he saw it posted online.
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"He absolutely told me, 'Mom, I'm tired of it, do what you need to do because this is not fair and I'm tired of feeling like this,'" she said.
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The school district has apologized for the photo.
</p><p>
"We recognize that this ill-informed action caused hurt and offense to many students and families in our school and in the wider community," the district said. "We offer no excuse as to why this word was used. In a statement to families last night, we apologized for the incident and sought their forgiveness. We also ask that of anyone who has been impacted by this picture."<br/>
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<em>Watch KSDK's report below</em>.<br/>
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There's one big reason why March 4 doesn't pose as great a threat to democracy as Jan 6 did : Extremism expert
March 04, 2021
Some of Donald Trump's most fervent supporters believe the former president will be inaugurated Thursday, and law enforcement is on guard for another possible assault on democratic institutions less than two months after the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection.
NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny covers online extremism and conspiracy theories, and she said the chatter around March 4 isn't quite as loud as the noise ahead of the U.S. Capitol assault that left five dead -- but Congress has canceled its session and the National Guard has mobilized just in case.
<p>"It's very different," Zadrozny said. "You know, the conversation before the 6th was clear because we saw it all online. People were planning, they had flyers, they specifically said what they're going to do, how they were going to do it. It [was] just very, very clear."</p><p>"It's a little bit weird," she added. "It's based in this conspiracy theory from <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-56260345" target="_blank">Qanon</a> that this is very silly and stupid, but, you know, humor me, that Donald Trump today will be inaugurated as the 19th president. It borrows a lot from the sovereign citizen movement, these people believe no laws have been real since Ulysses S. Grant. That is where there is danger, actually. It's hard to say these people are militia groups, the 'Boogaloo' groups and Qanon groups. There has a sort of melding of these groups."</p><p>Although the chatter isn't quite as loud, Zadrozny said law enforcement is still preparing for possible violence.</p><p> "The Capitol police and the FBI warnings weren't clear what those [threats] were," she said. "There could be militia groups planning today to do something. There could be other radical extremists, white power people, planning something to do. But what makes us breathe a little easier, these groups like to hide what they are doing under larger political movements like the Boogaloo Bois at Black Lives Matter over the summer or we saw at the Capitol with militia groups weaving their way into more generic MAGA crowds."</p><p>There is one major reason why Thursday isn't expected to be quite as volatile as Jan. 6, Zadrozny said.</p><p> "We're not going to have those large crowds today because we don't have a president of the United States anymore telling every supporter he has to come to the Capitol and support this big lie," Zadrozny said.</p><p><br/></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
<span class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="72c6059aac4b4c31f8de9305b0a7019a" style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="auto" type="lazy-iframe" scrolling="no" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nEl5c7SXm-o?rel=0" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" width="100%"></iframe></span>
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Two top Pentagon officials who were chosen by former president Donald Trump were blamed in a Senate hearing Wednesday for the slow security reaction to the January 6 Capitol assault.
Witnesses told the hearing that a nearly three-and-a-half hour delay in deploying the national guard against the attack by Trump supporters was because deployment authority was held only by then-acting secretary of defense Christopher Miller and then-secretary of the army Ryan McCarthy, both political allies of the White House.
<p>Washington's metropolitan national guard commander Major General William Walker said McCarthy had even reserved personal control over activating a "quick reaction force" that was on standby for violence.</p><p>He said that the delays meant they were unavailable at the height of the violence, which led to five deaths and scores of injuries.</p><p>On January 6 hundreds of extremist Trump supporters forced their way into the Capitol, halting Congress's certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the November presidential election.</p><p>The assault was being shown live on television and it had been clear the Capitol Police were overrun by the attackers, many wearing para-military gear and citing encouragement by Trump.</p><p>Approval "would eventually come from the acting secretary of defense and be relayed to me by army senior leaders at 5:08 pm," Walker told the joint hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Rules committees.</p><p>"It should not take three hours," he said.</p><p>Walker said neither Miller nor McCarthy were available for a call at 2:30 pm on the situation.</p><p>But he said that the top McCarthy aides who joined the call said they were opposed to deploying the national guard at the Capitol because they "did not think that it looked good."</p><p>They also claimed that sending out the uniformed guard would inflame the rioters, Walker said.</p><p>"I kept hearing it was the optics of it," he told the committee.</p><p>Robert Salesses, a senior Defense Department official, confirmed that the decision to activate the national guard had been reserved by Miller, a former White House counterterrorism official who Trump installed as head of the Pentagon on November 9, a week after losing the election to Biden.</p><p>"Secretary Miller wanted to make the decisions of how the national guard was going to be employed on that day," he told the hearing.</p><p>In the same hearing two senior security intelligence officials admitted they did not supply adequate warning to officials about a specific threat of extremists to the Capitol that day.</p><p>They said they had issued general bulletins about far-right extremists.</p><p>But they downplayed a warning from the FBI's Norfolk, Virginia branch of a possible planned attack on the Capitol on January 6, the day most of the Congress and vice president Michael Pence would be there for Biden's certification.</p><p>That warning had not been shared with top officials involved with Capitol security that day.</p><p>"It is astounding to me that, even if it's raw intelligence, given what the stakes were on January 6th, that that kind of sharing wasn't routine, and that it didn't happen," said Senator Maggie Hassan.</p>
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