Mark Mccormick, Kansas Relector

Fake rumors fueled by MAGA Republicans blamed for man's death: 'Why are they lying on me?'

There is a scene in the 2008 film “Doubt,” set in a 1964 Catholic grade school, where the priest told a story about a woman gossiping about a man she hardly knew — a situation Denton Loudermill Jr. understood when he was falsely accused in the 2024 shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs celebratory parade.

In the movie, the woman dreamed that night of a great hand appearing that pointed down at her. Seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt, she went to confession the next day with the parish priest, Father O’Rourke.

“Is gossiping a sin?” she asked. “Was that the hand of God almighty pointing a finger at me? Should I be asking your absolution, Father? Tell me, have I done something wrong?”

“Yes,” the priest said. “You’ve borne false witness against your neighbor. You played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed.”

Gossip haunted Loudermill in his last days with technologically supercharged rumor traveling at light speed, leading to death threats and slander from which he, and his family, could not escape.

People may not remember his name, but his family will never forget how people falsely accused him in a shooting that claimed one life and injured 22, including children.

He’d stood dazed in the chaos.

People screamed. Fight or flight hormones activated. Panicked parents scooped up little ones as best they could and sought safety, not knowing if they were running at or away from danger.

Unlike those who ran, Loudermill froze, said LaRonna Lassiter Saunders, part of the legal team representing Loudermill’s family.

“He saw a woman shot and bleeding out,” she said. “The shooting began near him. He was in shock. Everyone started running, but he asked himself, ‘Where should I run?’ He was waiting for his ride to pick him up.”

Public torment for this intensely private man began here.

Police cuffed him and sat him on a curb where people began photographing him, perhaps assuming police had collared one of the shooters. Police stopped Loudermill, Lassiter Saunders said, because he moved slowly.

Hard to blame the police in this context. This doesn’t seem malicious. Still, Loudermill sat helpless as photos of him traversed the internet like a lit fuse about to detonate and destroy his carefully guarded world. It did.

Someone at an undisclosed website posted the picture and labeled him a “terrorist,” and an illegal immigrant. Those images and that narrative spread like a virus. Two Missouri officials used the photo in posts urging the president to “close the border.”

U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Willie J. Epps Jr. on Oct. 7 allowed Loudermill’s defamation case against Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and state Sen. Rick Brattin to proceed.

Emails sent to the offices of Hoskins and Brattin were not answered.

Given the appetite in wide swaths of society to allow masked law enforcement to tackle and shackle foreign-looking people, imagine the impact on Loudermill and his family.

Death threats rose like a flood.

“I’m just a light-skinned Black dude,” Lassiter Saunders recalled Loudermill saying. “Why are they lying on me? I was born and raised in Olathe. I’ve been here all my life.”

This digital mob predictably but painfully took its toll.

His counselor diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. In conversations with Lassiter Saunders, he wondered if he’d survive. His weight crashed, leaving him unrecognizable.

“This happened often, usually at the beginning of our conversations,” she said. “The first part of my representation, I was like a counselor.”

Loudermill, she said, would see references to the parade shooting on television. He rarely ventured into social media, but his children would see threats and accusations about him.

Once, at work, he told her he saw someone staring at him. He said they punched keys on their phone. It seemed as though they were pulling up his photo and when it appeared, it registered on their faces.

Once the digital mob poured the illegal alien and terrorist narrative into a mold, it quickly hardened into a truth-resistant bulwark of gossip and stupidity.

“This cost him his life,” Lassiter Saunders said. “The process has outlived him.”

His family found him dead on April 11.

There seems no remedy sufficient for what happened to him. To date, she said, the officials who wrongfully posted his photo have not apologized.

In “Doubt,” the gossiping woman did say she was sorry and asked for forgiveness.

“Not so fast,” Father O’Rourke said.

He ordered her to go home, take a pillow from her bed, climb to her roof, and cut it open.

The woman did as the priest asked and returned.

“What was the result?” he asked.

“Feathers,” she said. “Feathers everywhere, father.”

“Now, I want you to go back and gather up every last feather that flew out on the wind,” he said.

“It can’t be done,” she said. “I don’t know where they went. The wind took them all over.”

“And that,” O’Rourke said sharply, “is gossip.”

And for many, the image of this innocent man as some immigrant terrorist still floats on the digital four winds, impervious to truth.

Mark McCormick is the former executive director of the Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Push to trash Department of Education points to a darker aim

The U.S. Supreme Court last week ruled the Trump administration could continue dismantling the Department of Education. Waves of firings halted by a lower court could now resume, it seems, until all 1,400 employees are gone.

The department oversees billions for schools, for civil rights actions, for a federal student loan program, for education access. In other words, the common good.

It’s the latest public institution under assault by people obsessed with destroying any semblance of a common good. This tension between America’s soaring ideals and its cruel realities has existed as long as the country has.

Congress established the department back in 1979, and closing it not only would require an act of Congress, but likely supermajority votes. If this fight sounds familiar, it’s because it has historical roots.

A June NPR podcast, The First Department of Education, whisked listeners to the 1830s as a “common school movement” developed in the Northeast. Nativist fears about Irish Catholic immigrants propelled the effort.

Proponents believed education could reverse increasing societal fragmentation. This might help unify the country under a common system — free public school in every state — not just for education, but also for citizenship.

Future President James Garfield in 1866 called education one of government’s most economical expenditures.

“A tenth of our national debt expended in public education 50 years ago would have saved us the blood and treasure of the late war,” Garfield said, according to the podcast. “A far less sum may save our children from still greater calamity.”

Congress created the system, but it lasted only about a year, dragged down by claims education represented a waste of money, that it undermined local control and that the word “education” didn’t appear in the Constitution.

The South, according to the podcast, considered education dangerous. The Black population represented a majority or near majority in a handful of Southern states, and withholding education offered an effective means of social control.

The podcast also pointed out that Southerners seemed more vulnerable to demagoguery because of lack of education.

Withholding education as social control fits a historical pattern. Any common good seemingly must weather accusations of wastefulness. This push for individualism benefits the wealthy minority at the expense of a hardscrabble majority.

The strategy crystallizes though today’s performative cruelty. Crushing empathy is necessary to stamping out a sense of common good, whether education, voting rights, or universal health care (opposed by rich politicians on public health care).

Increasing waves of politicians exalt qualities that should disqualify them as public officials: a mistrust of government, demonizing opponents, and supporting private schools with public money. These qualities should stand as barriers to candidacy, not bona fides.

Countless candidates promote themselves as “CEOs,” but governments aren’t corporations. Governments exist for the common good.

Wichita State University associate professor of sociology Chase Billingham said this rugged individualism, marked by minimal social obligations, remains a bedrock principle for those leaning right.

He said the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once argued there was “no such thing as a society.”

“Our government, our social safety net and some of our most treasured institutions, like public libraries, public schools and public media … are all antithetical to that radical individualism,” he said.

Such institutions represent a kind society, but they face extinction or significant weakening, he said. The result will be a society characterized by self-interest and self-centeredness — a mean society.

“Increasingly, treasured resources will be available exclusively to those who can pay for them,” he said. And as we lurch toward Thatcher’s ideal, “even the most ardent conservatives will find that they don’t enjoy the actual experience of living in that world.”

Until Gov. Laura Kelly ascended to Cedar Crest, Kansas routinely underfunded public education, and right now, extremists in the Legislature want to send public money into private schools via school vouchers.

That will neither promote the general welfare nor secure any blessings of liberty.

If you hate government and you’re indifferent to human suffering, you shouldn’t run for office. Attacking public education constitutes an attack on our societal fabric.

We need people who believe in government, not hateful bureaucrats eager to scrap crucial institutions people depend on for upward mobility if not basic survival.

It’s called “public service” for a reason.

Mark McCormick is the former executive director of the Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas.

Troubling questions abound for Kansas police in wake of Jan. 6 Commission hearings

A chief of police candidate in Wichita a few years back said during the public interview process that an officer’s racism wasn’t necessarily a dealbreaker for employment. That response alarmed the Black community at the time — particularly because biased traffic stops around the country had recently escalated into shooting deaths — but nothing much came of it.

The question of what is or should be a disqualifying factor for police employment has taken on new urgency as the Jan. 6 commission uncovers more levels of criminality leading up to and taking place on that day. What are we to make of police officers who were among the white supremacists and seditionists storming the Capitol?

Should they be held to account just for their actions — which has been proved beyond doubt to be criminal — without regard for racist speech? Were they merely swept up in the moment, mimicking the language and actions of the president who summoned them there? (Recall, while still a private citizen living in his New York tower, Donald Trump claimed to have evidence proving that Barack Obama was ineligible to run for president because he wasn’t born in the United States. Birtherism, as it became known, was just the first of Trump’s numerous racist fictions unleashed for political gain.)

Or should they also be held to account for their words? Law enforcement officer salaries are paid through taxpayer funding. Does such speech demonstrate clear bias, a violation of their oath to serve and protect all members of the public equally?

Brandon Johnson, chairman of the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training, says actions of those storming the Capitol create a cut-and-dried case for firing. The words they used, he argues, also create such a case.

“Officers who traveled to the Capitol and took part in a direct attack on our democracy have broken their oath and because of the criminality of the insurrection should not be working in law enforcement,” he said.

“Officers who have stronger feelings of support for the disgusting rhetoric that the former president spewed regularly may have some biases that would potentially lead to biased negative treatment of members of those groups,” he added. “In my opinion, both racism and sexism should be dealbreakers in law enforcement due to the nature of their job of serving all of the public.”

Police clash with supporters of President Donald Trump during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. (Alex Kent/Tennessee Lookout)

Johnson’s commission has authority to investigate officers accused of wrongdoing — as long as an individual submits a request focused on a specific officer. A Kansas Open Records Act request for vacation days taken on or around Jan. 6, 2021, might mark a great starting point for such an investigation.

But we shouldn’t stop there. All complaints against officers and any disciplinary action reports should be made public.

The Jan. 6 hearings have implicated Trump more deeply in the horrid events of that day that left one woman dead, numerous officers injured and offices looted.

Trump reportedly asked rioters to show up armed and then wanted metal detectors removed. This may have led to the death and injury of officers who fought valiantly defending the Capitol, while Trump watched from the White House for hours as staffers and his daughter begged him to intervene.

The former president earned wide support from militant, white nationalist groups for his racially incendiary rhetoric. It was here that Johnson expressed concern about officers perhaps compromising their ability to mete out justice fairly in non-white communities.

Trump famously said there were good people on both sides of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Virginia where a Neo-Nazi sympathizer killed Heather Heyer when he drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters.

Trump’s rallies have continued to draw throngs of Confederate battle flag wavers, fatigue-wearing militiamen and survivalists and others seemingly obsessed with the rapidly changing racial demographics of our nation.

The fact that many white officers identify with a man with these kinds of views is chilling to people from communities who already disproportionately bear the brunt of stops, searches and police use of force. There’s not a ton of difference between racist language and racist actions where officers are concerned.

Johnson said if any officer was found to have committed one of the specific statutory offenses, they could be disciplined by the commission with a suspended or revoked law enforcement certification, depending on the infraction and the severity of it.

Johnson is right. This needs scrutiny.

Ideally, police protect communities. But if we’re sealing police files and remain unwilling to weed out officers with histories of discrimination and violence, it’s Black and brown communities that will need protection from police.

Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.