Friday, March 14, 2025
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The Brazen Cajun

By
Lamar White, Jr.
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Left: Jeff Landry as a high school senior in 1988. Source: St. Martinville Senior High School, 1988 Yearbook, Ancestry.com. Right: Landry with Trump in Bossier City, LA, Oct. 2019. Image credit: Lamar White, Jr. | Bayou Brief

I.

MAKE CHRISTMAS GREAT AGAIN™

(Louisiana voters) don’t want good government; they want good entertainment.”
— Earl K. Long

ONE

HELLO, HELLO, HELLO, HOW LOW?

Two weeks after Donald Trump stunned the world and captured the White House by carving out an Electoral College victory over Hillary Clinton, the attorney general of Louisiana— Jeff Landry— called a lawyer at the Lafayette office of the Big Law firm Jones Walker. He had an idea.

Landry had been an enthusiastic supporter of the new president-elect from the very earliest days of the campaign, back when most members of the political class had believed Trump would prove too inflammatory to ever be taken seriously as a candidate. He also knew Christl Mahfouz, the owner of Ace Specialties in Lafayette.

Mahfouz had flown up to New York to pitch The Donald of Trump Tower on a business proposal, and she returned to Lafayette with a contract that made her company the country’s one and only official distributor of Trump campaign gear. That meant every single official “Make America Great Again” red baseball cap had, at some point, been shipped out of her warehouse in South Louisiana.

Business was booming.

On the campaign trail, Trump often gloated about how smart he was not just for coining the phrase “Make America Great Again,” but for trademarking it as well. (Never mind that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had used the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again” in 1980).

“I said, ‘That is so good.’ I wrote it down,” Trump later recalled to the Washington Post. “I went to my lawyers. I have a lot of lawyers in-house. We have many lawyers. I have got guys that handle this stuff. I said, ‘See if you can have this registered and trademarked.’”

With the holiday season only days away, Landry’s idea was simple. Heck, it was obvious. He wanted to sell “Make Christmas Great Again” gear. Baseball caps, of course, but also t-shirts, sweaters, socks, swimwear, and children’s clothing, including onesies for infants. But for the venture to be profitable, he knew he’d need to apply for a trademark, which happened to be something Robert Waddell of Jones Walker had done before. Among other things, Waddell successfully secured a trademark for the “adult entertainment store” LoveWorks.

The United States Trademark and Patent Office received an application from Waddell, filed on behalf of J.M. Landry and Associates, Landry’s consulting company, on Nov. 21, 2016, along with a check for the $325 fee. Right away, though, Leigh Case, the lawyer assigned to review the application, found a potential snag for Landry.

As it turns out, Landry’s idea was so simple and so obvious that someone else had already thought of it. On Nov. 16, only five days before, Mark Cain, a real estate agent from Scottsdale, Arizona, had filed a trademark application for “Make Christmas Great Again,” specifically for “Make Christmas Great Again” stocking caps. “My wife and I were very early supporters of Donald Trump during his first campaign,” he told me. “We thought this would be an excellent way to frame the topic (making Christmas great again) as a means to launch a line of Christmas products… (both as a) personal investment and as a fundraising initiative for nonprofit work.”

But the application timeline made it practically impossible to for Cain to launch a product line during Trump’s first year in office. “Entering year two, the Trump administration was unstable,” he said, “and we forecast that our worst case scenario was two or three seasons of possible profit with considerable capital risk. We abandoned the idea, never thinking there was a competitive market for the ‘Make Christmas Great Again’ mark.” As Cain learned, the approval process can be a long and windy road, and it’s sometimes impossible to strike while the iron is hot.

It’s likely you’ve never heard about Landry’s attempt to launch a line of Trump-inspired, Christmas-themed clothing. As far as I can tell, I was the only person to report on his trademark application, back in April of 2017, though, at the time, I incorrectly assumed that the trademark had been granted. It hadn’t.

Eventually, on May 1, 2018, the USPTO published a notice in the Trademark Official Gazette, providing anyone who opposed Landry’s trademark application with 30 days to file a written response. It caught the attention of Guy Blabash of TeeStars, a Philadelphia-based novelty t-shirt company. He filed an objection, arguing that “Make Christmas Great Again” had already been in use prior to 2016 and that, in any event, it was now a part of the vernacular. He knew how the system worked. A year before, someone had opposed his application to trademark the phrase “Drink Up, Bitches.” Blabash won.

Ultimately, after nearly two years of delays, on Aug. 5, 2018, Landry was granted a Request for Express Abandonment with the Commissioner of Trademarks. In other words, he withdrew the application.

While Jeff Landry awaited was still awaiting approval from the USPTO, the Republican National Committee began selling Christmas-themed MAGA hats.

If he hadn’t, there would have been an inter parties opposition proceeding in front of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. Presumably, the attorney general of Louisiana decided to spare himself the potential embarrassment of losing to the legal genius behind the “Drink Up, Bitches” t-shirts.

It’s unclear whether Landry ever received Trump’s blessing for his Christmas clothing line, though it seems doubtful. Trump was known to be fiercely protective over the MAGA brand throughout his first campaign, even sending cease and desist letters to former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz for using the phrase in speeches they gave while competing against him for the Republican nomination. And when he geared up for reelection in 2020, his campaign was frequently frustrated by those who appropriated his brand to bolster other candidates and causes.

“President Trump’s campaign condemns any organization that deceptively uses the President’s name, likeness, trademarks, or branding and confuses voters,” the Trump campaign told Politico in 2019. “There is no excuse for any group, including ones run by people who claim to be part of our ‘coalition,’ to suggest they directly support President Trump’s reelection or any other candidates. We encourage the appropriate authorities to investigate all alleged scam groups for potential illegal activities.”

Five weeks before Christmas in 2017, while Landry was still awaiting a decision by the USPTO on his trademark application, Trump and the Republican National Committee partnered on a special, limited edition campaign collectable: A new red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, embroidered with Christmas lights and available for $45 plus shipping and handling during the most wonderful time of the year.

****

Today, with more than $2 million cash-on-hand in his campaign war chest and the support of Big Oil (he believes climate change is a “hoax”) and a constellation of pro-Trump SuperPACs, Jeff Landry is already considered a leading candidate in the 2023 Louisiana governor’s race, when term limits will prevent Democratic incumbent John Bel Edwards from running again.

Jeff Landry spends fair housing funds on 30,000 plastic cups, 23,000 pens, and 19,600 keychains

Such speculation may seem somewhat premature, but consider that eight years ago, in February of 2013, with Bobby Jindal not even halfway through his second term, Edwards unexpectedly announced that he intended to run for governor in 2015, after being put on the spot by talk radio host Jim Engster. In other words, this is just as good of a time as any to prepare for what is certain to be a brutal campaign season.

If you are not already familiar with Jeff Landry, the fact that he spent nearly two years quietly pursuing a way to profit from Christmas and a derivative of the Trump political brand, only to abandon his million-dollar idea after getting schooled on the law by a man who sells novelty t-shirts for a living, should give you a good idea of the kind of vapid, legally dubious, opportunistic grift that has been his hallmark.

Since our launch in 2017, the Bayou Brief has featured Landry in dozens of stories; last year, I wrote about the hypocrisy of Landry’s covid denialism in The Daily Beast. Much like the former president he admires, however, Landry’s kept himself relevant, in a way no previous attorney general ever considered, by continually seeking earned media attention on hot-button issues. Most Louisianians have probably never heard of Landry’s creepy campaign against the Netflix film “Cuties,” for example, but last September, he denounced the digital content provider for featuring a film that, in his words, “supports the actions that pedophiles engage in.” It’s unclear how exactly he arrived at this conclusion, particularly considering that survivors of childhood abuse have defended the film’s merits, pillorying the far-right for its bizarre “obsession with pedophilia” and arguing that its “misplaced outrage could be protecting actual child predators.”

But Landry’s quixotic campaign against “Cuties” is much more understandable than the ways in which he used his office to promote the dangerous and delusional lie that Donald Trump had actually won the 2020 presidential election, a lie that informed and incited a violent insurrection that Landry has refused to condemn unconditionally, Then again, his tenure as the state’s attorney general was already defined by an ever-growing list of spectacular failures and manufactured outrages.

Currently, Landry’s scandale du jour involves his decision to both conceal public records related to the unpaid suspension of one of his top aides and to preemptively sue the reporter who requested the records, Andrea Gallo of The Advocate. The message being sent to the media is crystal clear: If you’re looking for potentially embarrassing information on the attorney general, your request will not only be denied, you will be punished just for asking.

No doubt, Landry has a special antipathy for The Advocate, the Pulitzer Prize-winning paper responsible for publishing, in early 2020, a blockbuster investigative report detailing a convoluted scheme in which three staffing companies associated with Landry and his brother Benjamin allegedly exploited a federal guest-worker visa program for the construction of a billion-dollar liquified natural gas plant in Cameron Parish. The allegations were first made against the Landry brothers by one of their former business partners, Marco Pesquera, a Houston-area labor broker who subsequently pleaded guilty to a separate visa fraud conspiracy, a fact the Landry brothers would have the public believe discredits everything he says about the work he did on behalf of their businesses.

“Their product was skilled Mexican labor, federally approved,” The Advocate reported. “Their profit derived from the savings the industrial contractors stood to reap by paying far less for Mexican welders than they would have had to pay Americans. Another benefit: The Mexican workers were tied to the job under H-2B visa rules, meaning they could not quit for a better deal. Pesquera pegged the group’s expected profits from the nine-month work contract at several million dollars.”

The Extra Mile: Jeff Landry charges taxpayers for his drive to work

Prior to the report’s publication, Benjamin Landry recorded a slickly-produced, 10-minute-long video testimonial, claiming he and his brother, both of whom had evaded or otherwise refused to answer a list of substantive questions from the paper, were victims of “reporter harassment.” (Apparently, a reporter tried, to no avail, asking Benjamin Landry questions in person, and apparently, reporters who actually attempt to question people in real life are now considered guilty of harassment, even if all they do is knock on the person’s door).

Once the report was published, Jeff Landry brushed it aside as “fake news,” which is Trump-speak for “inconvenient facts,” while at the same time uploading a frenzied and disjointed 1,959-word rebuttal on his campaign website. Among other things, the response attempts to discredit the owner of The Advocate, John Georges, for being a rich guy who previously ran for public office, as if those facts were ever shrouded in secrecy. But more tellingly, the statement also asserts that “Jeff Landry never attempted to break any laws related to temporary foreign workers – or any workers” (emphasis added). The response still occupies a prominent spot on the front-page of Landry’s website.

A longtime friend of Landry, who asked to remain anonymous, believes that Landry’s pugilistic and rabidly partisan public persona is attributable to his three most important mentors, “three of the meanest people in Louisiana politics”: the late, former Sheriff of St. Martin Parish, Charles Fuselier; the former state Senator and two-time congressional candidate, Craig Romero (Landry managed both of Romero’s unsuccessful congressional campaigns); and former U.S. Sen. David Vitter, whose organization, the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (now known as the Louisiana Committee for a Conservative Majority), is currently co-chaired by Landry and U.S. Sen. John Neely Kennedy.

“(Landry’s) political mentoring drug him into the gutter. He signed onto this persona for political reasons,” his friend tells me. “He is comfortable politically with that 23% Throw-Me-Some-Red-Meat-Mister base.”

It’s regrettable, says the friend, who also notes that the careers of all three of Landry’s mentors ended in disgrace. “(Landry’s) mother and father raised a fine gentleman. His political mentors turned him into an animal.”

Before we turn our attention to Landry’s political ascendance and the ways with which he first asserted himself as a force to be reckoned, we first consider whether Landry actually benefits from his fealty toward former president Donald Trump and the real reason Landry and a small group of other hard-line Republican officials hope to eliminate Louisiana’s jungle primary system.

Next page: HERE WE ARE NOW, ENTERTAIN US.

The 14th Month Of 2020

By
Peter Athas
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Long time, no ramble. I’ve been on hiatus for the last few months but I’m back.

We begin with some housekeeping: the 13th Ward Rambler will go from a bi-weekly extravaganza to a monthly one. Stop cheering, y’all.

Here’s why: I’ve taken on additional responsibilities at my other home on the internet, First Draft. I’m now the publisher, which involves juggling stories as well as punning. I decided to scale back here in order to keep the quality high and the jokes flying. Whether I succeed is up to our readers.

Much has happened in the Gret Stet of Louisiana since we last conversed so I’m going to throw some shit against the wall and see how much of it sticks. I hope that wasn’t too gross of an analogy; spaghetti doesn’t quite have the same visceral impact even if Neil Simon used it in The Odd Couple.

- Find & Share on GIPHY

As you can see, despite Oscar’s best efforts not much spaghetti stuck in that scene from the 1968 movie version. I hope my batting average is higher. Besides, Lamar warned y’all in his introduction to my first column that I swear like a Greek sailor. Rambling and swearing go hand-in-hand.

I swiped the column title from social media. One of my friends said it but I’m not exactly sure who. I hope they’ll come forward. If not it’s mine, all mine.

In a September column I wrote about 2020 Fatigue, I expressed the hope that 2021 *had* to be better. Other than the advent of the Biden administration, I was wrong. Thus far it’s felt like an extension of 2020. Hence the stolen title. Hey, it’s not copyrighted.

Some of what follows is old-ish news but it’s what on my mind as the 13th Ward Rambler returns. There will be no Jeff Landry content. I’ll leave that jackass to our publisher.

In the early days of the Bayou Brief, I wrote so much about Carnival that Lamar asked me if I wanted to be styled “Carnival correspondent at-large.” Not a bad title but I pitched the idea of an opinion column and the 13th Ward Rambler was conceived.

That was a fancy way of saying that we begin the meat of this column with Carnival 2021 and memories of Carnivals past.

Carnival Musings: COVID quite rightly put an end to the normal Carnival routine of grubbing for beads, carousing in the streets, and entertaining large masses of people. I didn’t march in Krewe du Vieux, we didn’t have our massive Muses party, and there was no neighborhood Thoth Sunday party.

Thoth Sunday has long been a sacred day in my 13th Ward neighborhood. For many years, it was the only parade that rolled up Magazine Street. This was only the second time since we moved to this neighborhood in 2000 that we didn’t revel with our neighbors at the corner of Magazine and Valence.  (In 2006, the parade rolled up Napoleon because of storm damage.) Over the years, some of our close friends joined us annually or just on the spur of the moment.

I met my fellow 13th Ward residents Art Neville and Deacon John Moore at that corner. More importantly, here are two of the people who made us feel welcome in our new neighborhood, Maggie and Wallace:

Neither of them still lives here but I think of them often. Maggie is still very much alive, but Wallace passed away quite some time ago. We called him the Mayor of Valence Street. He was retired military and 80 years-old when we first met. Wallace used to cut our grass before the storm. He always refused payment except in beer. I recall bringing him a case of Miller High Life and being told it was too fancy. I told him to keep it anyway and that we’d drink it together The next time I bought his preferred brand, Old Milwaukee. There’s no accounting for taste.

Then there’s another Thoth regular, Dr. A and my close friend Mother Mary. She’s known to our neighbors as the “crazy dancing lady.” On Thoth Sunday, she’s wont to dress up as a stereotypical Yat lady in curlers and a house dress. That’s why I dubbed her Thoth Sunday persona Santa Battaglia after Irene Riley’s best friend in A Confederacy of Dunces. Lest you think I’m exaggerating, here’s Mary in action on Thoth Sunday in 2013 as well as one of her in repose with her daughter Betsy:

Wait until next year.

This year’s festivities were odd but still enjoyable. House floats became a thing. The featured image is of a house on Fortin Street that backs up to the Fairgrounds where Jazz Fest is staged. Here’s a picture Dr. A took of our friend Jen’s house in the same neighborhood.

Since I took a stroll down memory lane, I might as well link to my Bayou Brief Carnival pieces; two of which were quite controversial upon publication.

2/24/2018: The State Of Carnival

2/05/2019: Confessions Of A Krewe du Vieux Member

2/22/2019: The Zulu Conundrum

2/26/2020: The Cursed Carnival?

If I don’t plug them who will?

The last piece explains why I was less upset about this year’s parade cancellations than many. Carnival 2020 was not only cursed, it was a super-spreader event unbeknownst to everyone at the time.

Please get vaccinated when your turn comes so Carnival 2022 can return to normal.

Tourist Trapped: There’s a segment of my city that puts tourists and tourism first. It’s always bugged me even when I was in a tourism adjacent business as a French Quarter shop owner. The pandemic has brought out the worst in some of these folks.

Tourism honcho Stephen Perry pitched a fit when Mayor LaToya Cantrell clamped down right before Carnival 2021:

“Cantrell and New Orleans & Company have both been criticized for encouraging visitors to take trips to New Orleans, despite the risks of traveling during a pandemic.

But Perry, whose organization represents locally owned businesses and multinational hotel chains, insists the locals are at fault.

“Our own residents created a dilemma for government,” the letter asserts.

Perry also urged city officials, who have been scrutinized for lax enforcement of rules, to re-examine the way they handle code violations and “blatant” illegal public gatherings.

“It wasn’t the small number of responsible tourists we have been hosting or the majority of our citizens and businesses,” Perry said.“

I suspect even our readers elsewhere in the Gret Stet of Louisiana understand that tourists are the vast majority of the folks who crowd Bourbon Street looking for a good time or trouble, whichever comes first. Perry’s comments are sign of how out of touch he is with the community he supposedly represents.

Perry has been in his job since 2002 and makes a reported $430K per annum. In classic Louisiana fashion, Perry got his cushy job via his political connections: he was Governor Mike Foster’s chief of staff from 1996-2002. I’m uncertain if he’s a registered Republican but he talks and acts like one while “representing” one of the bluest cities in the nation. Perhaps that’s why Perry dislikes locals so much. The feeling is mutual.

Perry’s organization is an odd beast. It’s a private non-profit company funded by hotel taxes, which *should* be treated as public money. Perry has zealously guarded his group’s groaning coffers and has refused to help service industry workers who are suffering because of necessary steps taken to safeguard public safety during the pandemic.

I’ve been critical of Mayor Cantrell but approve of her feud with Perry who last May denounced her actions during the pandemic as a “demagogue approach” and “adversarial.” At the risk of being pedantic, that should be demagogic. Besides, he’s the demagogue in this ongoing dispute.

Public-private partnerships such as New Orleans & Company are a pox because they’re fundamentally more private than public. Perry seems to think that he’s more important than whoever the sitting mayor is and he’s on his fourth. Why not? He makes twice as much money as the mayor.

Perry is the worst example but every mayor since I moved to New Orleans in 1987 has favored tourists over locals. It’s why we have potholes bigger than some small countries and a water system that’s over a century old. Something needs to be done about the tourism cabal now that their hold on the local economy has been loosened.

This turned out to be my fifth Carnival oriented piece for the Bayou Brief. It just happened as I wrote it. I love when that happens. I hope you did too.

Here’s hoping that March feels more like 2021 and not the 15th month of 2020. We’ve had quite enough of that damnable year.

I’m back, bitches.

Who Do You Play For?

By
Sue Lincoln
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I was rewatching Miracle recently. That’s the Disney-produced movie about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. The first peak in the rising action comes when the players, who had previously been playing for various rival colleges, have lost an exhibition game because they could not work together as teammates. The coach, Herb Brooks, (played by Kurt Russell) keeps them on the ice for hours after the game, doing repetitive drills ad infinitum. One by one he asks them, “Who do you play for?”, and when they reply with their college, Brooks blows the whistle and barks, “Again!”

Up and down the ice, feet dragging, knees wobbly, hardly able to hold their sticks…

“Who do you play for?”

Wrong answer.

“Again!”

“Who do you play for?”

And the panting player, exhaustedly croaks out, “U.S.A.”

It got me thinking, Who do our lawmakers actually play for?

LAKE PLACID, NY – FEBRUARY 1980

How do you feel about someone who opposes merely studying an increase in the nation’s third-lowest weekly unemployment benefits, after raking in nearly one and a quarter million dollars in pandemic “paycheck protection” benefits for his own companies?

What would you think if you found out one of the companies run by that same person defaulted on a multi-million-dollar business loan, subsequently filed bankruptcy to avoid losing that business, but is one of the select few who decides where and how your tax dollars in the state’s $30-billion budget will be spent?

And what if it turned out another of this person’s companies has done more than a million dollars worth of business with state and local governments during the time he has been a member of the state legislature?

This person is state Representative Blake Miguez, Republican, from Iberia Parish.

Miguez competing on History Channel’s “Top Shot”

But wait, you say. You liked him on that TV show about shooting competitions. You rooted for him because he was from Louisiana. Okay, so he lost. Early. In both seasons that he competed.

And he is fairly good-looking. Apparently, he’s also reasonably well-liked – or at least respected – by his party peers in the legislature. After all, they chose him as chairman of the Louisiana Republican Legislative Delegation.

Still, one has to ask: Who or what does Blake Miguez represent? And who or what has first claim on his loyalty – the party he belongs to, or the people who elected him to represent them?

Miguez first ran and won his House seat in a February 2015 special election to replace Simone Champagne. He was listed on that ballot as Blake “Top Shot” Miguez, utilizing his semi-fame as a competitor on the History Channel show, which aired from June 2010 through August 2013.

In his “real” life, away from the legislature, Miguez is the president and CEO of SeaTran Marine, a family owned business that services, supplies, and transports workers for offshore oil rigs. Miguez, who earned a law degree from Southern University in 2008, also has ownership and management duties with other family-owned LLCs operating under the SeaTran corporate umbrella, including Iberia Marine Services, Miguez Fuel, Third Generation Holdings, BG Equipment, and Advanced Oil Products and Filtration, and as many as 19 boats that SeaTran has boasted comprise some of their assets.

While Blake Miguez was conducting his first re-election campaign in the fall of 2015, one of the companies he presides over — Iberia Marine – took out a $22.5-million business loan from First NBC Bank. According to subsequent court filings, the loan was secured by eight offshore vessels and was personally guaranteed by the lawmaker’s dad, Steven Miguez.

Fast forward to 2017, and Iberia Marine stopped making payments on the loan after the New Orleans-based First NBC Bank failed. The note for Iberia Marine’s loan changed hands a couple of times, and ultimately, in fall of 2018, foreclosure on two of the company’s boats was imminent. The business and the senior Miguez each filed Chapter 11 (reorganization) bankruptcy in order to retain the vessels and keep Iberia Marine Services in business.

SeaTran Marine/Iberia Marine’s “Mr. Steven” — one of the boats at stake in the bankruptcy.

When reporters asked Rep. Miguez about the alleged loan default and the bankruptcies, considering that filings with the Louisiana Secretary of State list him as an officer of the company and an agent for the two ships in foreclosure. he was quick to bristle defensively.

“We are reorganizing to work this out. That is what bankruptcy courts are for,” he told the Daily Iberian, adding, “I am not named in any of the suits. This is all being blown out of proportion because of my position in the legislature.”

That’s right. It’s not his fault, specifically. He’s being singled out because he’s an elected official. Never mind that he’s the chief executive officer of the parent corporation that defaulted on a multimillion dollar loan. Blake Miguez was being picked on because he’s a member of the House Appropriations Committee and the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget, with direct voice and influence on how our tax dollars will be allocated and spent.

He certainly doesn’t mind profiting from another of the family companies he oversees doing a bunch of business with state and local government entities. Just take a look at Rep. Miguez’s required annual personal financial disclosures.

Miguez Fuel is a subsidiary of SeaTran, in which the lawmaker has a 16.7% ownership interest. He also claims he is directly employed by the fuel company, part time.

Just in the time Blake Miguez has been in the legislature, Miguez Fuel has done business with political subdivisions in eight parishes, including police juries, city governments, sheriff’s departments, and school districts. All together, Miguez Fuel has done more than a million dollars worth of business with local governmental bodies in Acadia, Iberia, Jefferson, Lafayette, Natchitoches, St. Landry, St. Mary and Vermilion parishes from 2015 through the present.

Blake Miguez also filed a personal financial disclosure for 2014 – the year prior to his election. That shows Miguez Fuel doing $38,371 total business with state entities, including DOTD, Wildlife and Fisheries, the Agriculture Department, and U-L Lafayette. He has declared no state business since then, but public records from the state Division of Administration indicate at least $17,329 in oil and lubricants was ordered by DOTD from Miguez Fuel between October 2015 and February 2018.

Miguez Fuel’s largest governmental client is Lafayette City-Parish Government, a relationship that began in 2014, with a contract to provide fuel products on an “as-needed” basis. From 2014 through 2019, “as-needed” has become $278,523 worth of business for Miguez Fuel, with the contract extended twice without competitive public bidding, then rewritten completely following public bids in 2017, and getting at least one no-bid extension since then.

Miguez Fuel facility in New Iberia

Miguez Fuel was also beneficiary of Paycheck Protection Program funding, as part of the first federal COVID relief package passed in late March last year. On April 13, 2020, the company was approved for over a quarter-million dollars to help protect 17 jobs.

That same day, SeaTran Marine, Miguez Fuel’s corporate parent and the company presided over by Rep. Blake Miguez, was approved for its own Paycheck Protection Program funding: $968,627 to protect 42 jobs. Three days after the pair of Miguez family-owned companies were okayed for a combined total of more than $1.2-million in potentially forgivable loans, the entire program ran out of money.

Some might say it was luck. Okay, but was it fair? Or was it an example of “It’s who you know, not what you know”?

Consider: Of the more than 73,800 Louisiana businesses approved for PPP funding, 88% received less than $150,000 each. And according to the Washington Post, 78% of the total $522-billion available for the program nationally went to businesses described as “well-connected.” Indeed, SeaTran and Miguez Fuel used their connections. The bank approving both the loans was Community First Bank in New Iberia, which also handles Blake Miguez’s campaign funds.

On the bright side, Rep. Miguez’s employees were presumably kept out of the unemployment line, as the Paycheck Protection Program was targeted to do. For other state residents those IN the unemployment line due to the pandemic, the chair of the legislature’s Republican Caucus was, shall we say?, less magnanimous, empathetic, or understanding.

In June 2020, the House Labor Committee had a hearing considering, among other things, a resolution to ask Congress for continued supplements to state unemployment benefits, as well as a resolution to study the possibility of increasing and expanding state unemployment eligibility and amounts.

(Presently, the maximum weekly state benefit is $247. That’s the third lowest in the nation, behind Mississippi’s $235/wk and Arizona’s $240/week.)

Miguez opposed both, remarking he had just read about a Baton Rouge-area restaurant owner who’d had to close two of his four restaurants “because he’s having issues.” Miguez went on to say the owner couldn’t pay employees as much as they were receiving from the then-federally supplemented unemployment.

Those federal add-ons of $600/week were due to expire the next month. Still, Miguez opposed even studying ways to increase state benefits, saying pedantically, “The solution is to get people back to work as soon as possible.”

Miguez, of course, was one of the loudest voices insisting upon immediate and full reopening of everything in Louisiana. Business first: COVID-19 contagion, hospitalizations, and deaths notwithstanding.

Republican ideology first.

We, the people – our health, lives, and livelihoods – last.

Who do you play for, Blake Miguez?

A tribute to the Louisiana resident who pushed back against Rush Limbaugh’s on-air Katrina misinformation campaign

By
Michael Patrick Welch
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  • Ray Davis, better known as musician and psychedelic guru Ray Bong, celebrated his 65th birthday in January, 16 years after speaking to Rush Limbaugh on-air, and setting the lie show host straight about the suffering in New Orleans.

Ray “Ray Bong” Davis of Lafitte is my only friend crazy enough to be able to
talk himself past hell’s palace guards, and speak with the devil himself: Rush
Limbaugh, the conservative lie show host who did more to advance racism in
America than Robert E. Lee, and who finally did the right thing last week at
the age of 70, by fucking all the way off, into his grave.  

Ray Bong dialed up the Rush Limbaugh show in November 2005, just weeks after
Katrina flooded New Orleans. “The radio stations had all been on Katrina news
24/7 up to that point,” remembered Ray, “but one day I heard them
announce they would be resuming regular programming, starting with the Rush
Limbaugh show.”

Ray’s job takes him driving all over the south, and while adding thousands
of miles to his odometer he often found Limbaugh a funny distraction. “I
obviously don’t agree with anything he says,” Ray told me, “but he’s on the
radio in every single city, and it was funny, and every once in a while there
might be some truth in it.”

But on the November day when Ray tuned in to see what stupid old Rush
Limbaugh had to say about Katrina, he was horrified to hear Rush telling his
huge audience that “everything’s getting back to normal in New Orleans.” This
at a time when the city was, in reality, desperate for help, and would be for
years.

Limbaugh’s really was a special kind of lie-based evil, which he managed to
spread to every radio station in America, and FOX News, and eventually our
first Limbaugh-like president, Donald Trump.

Upset, Ray dialed the bastard’s show. When Rush’s on-air producer answered
and asked about his politics, Ray admitted his liberal leanings, but charmed
the guy, then waited on hold for a half hour. “The whole time I’m waiting, I am
writing down notes, and googling facts, things I want to say if I get through,”
Ray recalled. When Rush Limbaugh finally put Ray on-air, Ray deftly held his
own with the devil, as the following transcript attests (CLICK HERE to listen to the audio):

Rush Limbaugh: We’re back on the air at WWL AM 870 in New Orleans today. They’re getting back to normal in the city, and WWL is resuming normal operations, so we’re back. Ray, great to have you with us.

Ray Bong: Hello, Rush.

RL: Hi.

RB: You know, things are not returning to normal. I know that you love New Orleans. I wish that you would come down here and see for yourself what is happening. The President [Bush] came to New Orleans and gave a speech in front of St. Louis Cathedral when his response to Hurricane Katrina was drawing some criticism: all lies. None of the things that he promised are happening. At this moment small businesses are going down the
drain, nothing is being done to help the people who live in the 9th Ward and Gentilly and the Lakefront to come back, and today…

RL: Wait a second — why are small businesses going down the tubes?

RB: FEMA. What FEMA and the Small Business Administration are doing to the people now is worse than the flood.

RL: Really?

RB: Yes.

RL: (sarcastic) Wow. That is saying something.

RB: What is there to come back to? New Orleans is gonna be a city with about 200,000 people in it this time next year. We won’t have an NFL team anymore. They’re gonna cut and run. The NFL leaving New Orleans is very symbolic of America leaving New Orleans, like, “Y’all are doing OK now.” I wish you, Rush, would come down here and see for yourself.

RL: Well (exasperated pause), I have some friends there, and I’m not hearing this from them. I know it’s bad, but I’m under the impression that the main problem that the local officials have, is they don’t have enough Democrats coming back who fled or…

RB: You know, the people in New Orleans aren’t concerned about those kind of issues anymore, about who’s a Democrat or who’s a Republican. We’re worried about what’s gonna happen to our city.

RL: Well, I understand that. I’m just telling you that Mayor Nagin and the governor are concerned — this is where I thought the answer would be to the question, what’s wrong with small business? What I’m being told is — and you’re gonna have to tell me whether this is true or not — that wages down there are going up because they have to make pretty good offers to get people to move there and work, and there is a great opportunity for employees to go there. That’s what I thought the small business problem was, there aren’t enough people to work.

RB: There’s no place for people to live.

RL: Well…the whole city? There’s nowhere to live in the whole city? The French Quarter? They’re gonna do Mardi Gras, for crying out loud.

RB: Well, yes, Mardi Gras is a big business in New Orleans. Think of all the hotels and the restaurants — this is where people’s jobs are.

RL: Yeah, but you’re saying none of that is operating?

RB: The pace at which it is being done is so slow. As you can imagine, if you had a business, you need cash flow.

RL: Yeah.

RB: This is the problem. What I can’t understand is why America isn’t spending 24-hours a day trying to rebuild New Orleans instead worrying about Iraq.

RL: (defensive) Aww, how long did it take us [to go there?]…

RB: The question is whether America can rebuild New Orleans.

RL: Well, there’s no question America can rebuild New Orleans.

RB: 34 billion dollars to build a flood-controlled system that will protect America’s fine city from now on.

RL: What about it?

RB: That’s what we are asking for, and that’s what they’re dragging their feet on. And did you know that Texas gets 100% of their oil and gas separation revenues and Louisiana gets 10% or — it’s a very small…

RL: Ok, you’re not gonna want to hear this.

RB: Louisiana could get 40% of those revenues and we could build our own levee… (Here,
Ray claims, they turned him off before he began screaming the raw truth.)

RL: You see, the problem with that is, you did that once and they didn’t hold. And we the taxpayers of this country sent gobs of money down to the Corps of Engineers, to the local and state departments that are in charge of building those levees, and the money didn’t all get spent on the levees, and we see what happened as a result. Now we’re being asked to do it again? I think they’re just taking some time to make sure that the money goes to where it’s intended to go this time, not to the same old hands that are gonna siphon some off for themselves and their buddies in the process.

The next day Ray concocted six different techno dance remixes featuring
Limbaugh’s fat-tongued voice (LISTEN here. They are good!).

The Times-Picayune wrote about Limbaugh’s first day back on the air and mentioned, “Caller “Ray from New Orleans,” who “clearly prompted Limbaugh to question some of his sourcing on the state of
New Orleans, which the host did out loud right after a commercial break. It
almost sounded like backtracking, a first for Limbaugh.”  

Most of us liberals and progressives would have confronted and quickly
offended the devil, and been cut short before delivering any decisive blow to
our foe. Ray Davis should be commended for getting the truth across enemy lines
on behalf of New Orleans.

  • Meme by musician Josh Paxton

Krewe du Couxvid

By
Drew Hawkins
-
Lafayette Mayor-President Josh Guillory throws beads during the King’s Parade on Feb. 25, 2020. Original photograph by Travis Gauthier. Image by the Bayou Brief.

Josh Guillory’s Parade of Fools

The Mayor-President of Lafayette, Louisiana has repeatedly refused to enact or enforce commonsense restrictions intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Despite having to quarantine less than a month ago after being exposed to the coronavirus, Lafayette Mayor-President Josh Guillory attended a maskless Mardi Gras event this past weekend. In photographs circulating on social media, the 38-year-old Guillory and his wife Jamie appear indoors alongside several other costumed revelers.

Guillory has not made much of a secret over his opposition to social gathering restrictions and mask mandates. While his laissez-faire approach has been pilloried by public health experts, it’s endeared him with many in the reliably red capital of Cajun Country, which became increasingly radicalized during the Trump presidency.

According to the Louisiana Department of Health, the virus has claimed the lives of 1,081 people in the Lafayette area and infected at least 52,799 others, including more than 21,000 in Lafayette Parish alone.

In the first week of January, shortly before Guillory’s own exposure to the virus, several Acadiana Mardi Gras events were canceled, including Church Point’s traditional Courir de Mardi Gras and the Brazilian-themed Krewe of Rio parade. At the time, Guillory’s office indicated that they wouldn’t be canceling Mardi Gras events, despite state data revealing that nearly a quarter of all coronavirus cases ever identified in Louisiana occurred during December 2020, as the third wave struck the state. 

“We have no intention of canceling Mardi Gras,” said Jamie Angelle, spokesperson for Guillory. “Lafayette Consolidated Government doesn’t put on Mardi Gras, the various associations do. . . if they decide to move forward, they’ll have to do so with whatever state restrictions are in place.”

Mardi Gras parades and events have been conclusively and irrefutably linked to the spread of COVID-19. A recent study found that last year’s festivities in New Orleans led to more than 50,000 confirmed cases in Louisiana.

Despite Guillory’s refusal to cancel parades in the interest of public health, local krewes took it upon themselves to make the decision. In January, the Greater Southwest Louisiana Mardi Gras Association and the Lafayette Mardi Gras Festival Association both decided to cancel all of their events.

“It was a difficult call,” John Chappuis, a board member for Greater Southwest, told Leslie Turk of The Current, claiming that Guillory had hoped they could come up with a way to continue the festivities. “He was a champion of us trying to do this,” Chappuis said.

“It’s been some seven decades since this disruption has happened in Lafayette, when parades were called off during World War II and several years later during the Korean War,” Turk noted. New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell not only cancelled parades and second lines; last week, she also ordered bar closures from Friday, Feb. 12 through Fat Tuesday. The last time Mardi Gras was canceled in New Orleans was in 1979, as a result of a police strike.

Whereas Cantrell has been criticized for being too draconian, critics of Guillory argue that his inaction amounts to negligence.

In July 2020, Guillory rejected the idea of implementing a local mask mandate at a time when the Acadiana region led the state in new coronavirus cases, saying, “with freedom comes risk.” Guillory did not believe the basic precaution of requiring a cloth facial covering to reduce the spread of a deadly virus was justified.

“You don’t want to use an atomic bomb when an M-16 will work,” Guillory said in response to pleas from his own city council to implement the protective measure. Guillory did eventually “recognize” the governor’s statewide mask mandate. However, he has refused to allow Lafayette city officials to actually enforce it. 

Lafayette Mayor-President Josh Guillory (left) and U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA03). In 2018, Guillory, then claiming to be a moderate conservative, attempted to unseat Higgins. After finishing in a distant third place with a paltry 13% of the vote, Guillory rebranded himself as a Trumpian conservative, and in 2019, he was elected Lafayette Mayor-President in a runoff with 56% of the vote. Image credit: Josh Guillory, Facebook.

On Tuesday, the Lafayette city council again narrowly rejected implementing its own mask mandate after one of the ordinance’s co-sponsors, City Councilwoman Nanette Cook, withdrew her support, caving into pressure from right-wing extremists and fringe conspiracists, including Holly Sanders, an outspoken devotee of QAnon best known for a viral video in which she claimed that she was not allowed to vote in the 2020 Louisiana presidential primary even though she was a registered Republican. The video had been viewed more than four million times before fact-checkers discovered that Sanders was actually a registered Democrat.

Prior to this week’s city council meeting, Sanders, now claiming to represent Lafayette’s “Free Breathers,” posted a video about her reasons for opposing the mask mandate. “We were all taught to not trust someone with a mask on, to fear someone with a mask on,” she said. “However, now overnight, as of last year, this so-called ‘pandemic’ slash ‘election infection’ has caused the absolute opposite. Suddenly, people without a mask are to be feared; those that show their identity are to be feared.”

Councilmember Glenn Lazard asked Josh Guillory if it was still his position to not use city resources to enforce the statewide mandate.

“That is correct,” Guillory said. 

In seeking a local ordinance to enforce the state’s mask mandate, Councilmember Lazard originally had the support of Lafayette’s medical community. In a Feb. 1 letter, a group of local physicians sent Lazard a letter expressing support for the ordinance. “We, the undersigned physicians of Lafayette Parish support a local mask mandate,” the letter read.

However, once word of the new proposal got out, it was lambasted by conservative groups like Citizens for a New Louisiana, and misinformation circulated online about the efficacy of masks. The ordinance became a political issue, rather than a medical one.

Two hours before the meeting was set to begin, Lazard received a different letter from the same group of physicians, according to The Current. The new letter expressed that “community masking is in the best interest of public health during this pandemic,” but it no longer contained language in support of the ordinance. “We leave public policy decisions and their enforcement in the hands of local officials,” the letter read.

Despite this, some local medical professionals urged the council to approve the mandate. “I’m telling you that a local mask ordinance will save lives and if you are strong enough to vote for it you will save lives,” said Dr. Britni Hebert, a front-line doctor in Lafayette.  

When the first mask mandate proposal was rejected last July, it was, in part, because council members believed a local ordinance was unnecessary since the state mandate was already being enforced. However, they were misled.

“We got derailed last time because we were told the [state order] was being enforced,” said Nanette Cook, before reversing her position on the mandate. “The administration said it was being enforced. Maybe that was so for a time, but it’s gotten out of hand.”

To be clear, Josh Guillory has publicly expressed that he believes that people should wear a mask to help slow the spread of the virus. However, many residents are not heeding his flaccid call. Instead, they’re following his example. Videos of packed local bars have circulated widely, and business owners have expressed outrage over the city failing to enforce the mandate.

Throughout the pandemic, Guillory has gotten in the way of every public health measure enacted to combat it, even those recommended by then-President Trump’s White House. 

This latest incident isn’t the first time Guillory has made headlines for his antics. In September of last year, his office filed a lawsuit against comedian John Merrifield for promoting a fake antifa Facebook event called “ANTIFA Takes River Ranch.” 

Hysterical: How Lafayette’s Response to a Satirical Antifa Rally Became the Bigger Joke

The event page was loaded with obviously satirical and snarky language such as, “Card-carrying ANTIFA members ONLY!” and “No children or minors. Large dogs welcome. Arms optional. Legs encouraged.” 

Despite the event being blatantly phony, Guillory used it as a political opportunity during the height of national fears over antifa attacks last summer.

“Here in Lafayette Parish, we have absolutely zero tolerance for threats made against our citizens or their property,” Guillory said in a statement on July 7. “We will act accordingly to prevent these situations from happening.”

Guillory paid five officers and one supervisor overtime to investigate the matter, diverting patrol units to the wealthy River Ranch neighborhood, leaving the rest of the city with reduced manpower. The lawsuit seeks up to $75,000 in damages against Merrifield, who Guillory described on a local radio broadcast as an “individual in New York that thinks it’s funny to make antifa jokes here.”

Interestingly, despite taking to the airwaves and issuing statements to the press regarding the fake antifa event to stir up local outrage, Guillory held a different view of the media after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6.

“In circumstances like these, heated rhetoric from any quarter is not helpful,” Guillory said in a written statement. “Neither is the hysteria of the media, flaming the fears of the country.”

Whether it’s in his official capacity as Mayor-President of Lafayette or at a clandestine Mardi Gras speakeasy, Josh Guillory has not prioritized the health of Lafayette residents over business interests or his own personal desire to laissez les bons temps rouler.

How Louisiana Republicans Trumpeted the Big Lie: Gen. Mayhem

By
Lamar White, Jr.
-
On Nov. 9, 2020, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, acting in his capacity as Chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association, announces that he and other GOP members were taking legal action aimed at invalidating mail-in votes in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Image credit: Lamar White, Jr. | Bayou Brief.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!”
—Mark Twain, autobiographical dictation, Dec. 2, 1906.
https://vimeo.com/user83583740/review/510039384/543750132e

PROLOGUE

In the late morning of Jan. 6, 2021, only a few minutes after President Donald Trump took the stage at the Ellipse, the park overlooking the South Lawn of the White House, Louisiana’s chief legal officer, Jeff Landry, opened a press conference in Baton Rouge.

The day before, hoping to build up media interest, Landry teased out a part of what he would be announcing: A Louisiana city councilman had just been arrested for voter fraud. He offered no other details, leaving people to speculate about the identity of the official. What city was he from? Was he a Democrat or a Republican? A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, thought it must’ve been a major figure for Landry to leave people hanging the way he did.

“It’s probably someone from New Orleans,” my friend said, knowing how Landry has invested a great deal of his five years as the state’s attorney general meddling in local affairs down in the Democratic-heavy Big Easy.

“Not a chance,” I said. “It’s probably a Black Democrat from a small town that most people have never heard of before. That’s who Jeff Landry targets.”

Landry is in the second year of his second term as Louisiana attorney general. In official correspondence and press releases, he refers to himself as “General Landry,” as if his office connotes a rank in the military or law enforcement. Whenever he’s in front of a camera, however, he’s not so bold.

“I’m Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry,” he says to a room of people who already know him well, kicking things off a few minutes before noon, “and it’s a great day today in the state of Louisiana.”

It’s a noticeable verbal tic of his— Landry’s— introducing himself in a way that confuses his job title with his name. Two months before, in another press conference, he began by saying, “My name is Attorney General Jeff Landry.” (Notably, in legal documents and business filings, Landry’s first name is sometimes spelled “Jeffrey,” even though his parents spelled his name “Jeffery.” But it is never spelled “Geoffrey”).

I’ve only known one other politician who did this, the former mayor of the small town of Ball, Louisiana, Roy Hebron. “Hi, my name is Mayor Roy Hebron,” he’d say, and you’d think, “No, no, it’s not. Your job is mayor, and your name is Roy Hebron.”

Mayor Roy Hebron had been in office 25 years before he was caught conspiring to commit fraud against the federal government. He and several town officials, including the chief of police, attempted to bilk FEMA for $320,000 in Hurricane Gustav reimbursements for expenses they never actually incurred. Mayor Roy Hebron was so cavalier about his plan that, at one point, he even called a meeting of all of the town’s employees to coach them on how to pad their timesheets. He spent about three years in federal prison and another three or four on probation. Once he was finally free again, Mayor Roy Hebron ran for his old job, and he won in the jungle primary by double digits. But in that same election, voters statewide approved a constitutional amendment prohibiting convicted felons from holding a public office unless there have been more than five years since they were last on probation. The voters giveth, and the voters taketh away, Mayor Roy Hebron has to wait until next year before he can be Mayor Roy Hebron again.

Back to General Jeff Landry.

In his book Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, Bryan Garner— the American lexicographer, grammarian, and arguably the nation’s leading authority on legal writing—explains why the practice of militarizing the titles of high legal offices is incorrect. “In titles such as attorney general, the word general is not a noun, but a postpositive adjective — an adjective that follows rather than precedes the noun it modifies,” he writes. “Attorney general and solicitor general are two examples. Other examples include court-martial and notary public. But no one calls a notary public simply ‘public.’ The word general in attorney general is every bit as much adjectival as it is in general counsel.”

Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist is responsible for the confusion, according to Garner. He would often refer to the solicitor general as simply “general;” current Chief Justice John Roberts picked up the habit.

But the chief justice has never called Jeff Landry “General Landry;” it’s an honorific Landry bestowed upon himself, which should give you a good idea of his sense of self-importance.

According to Attorney General Jeff Landry, His Violent Crime Task Force Spent Money On Only One Thing: Monogrammed T-Shirts

Shortly after taking office in January of 2016, Landry hired his friend Shane Guidry, a mega-wealthy campaign donor who runs a marine transportation company, to help him launch the misleadingly-titled “Louisiana Bureau of Investigation.” (Essentially, they just rebranded the division that can be called upon to assist municipal and parish law enforcement in cyber crime investigations or fugitive apprehensions).

>Landry also created a so-called “Violent Crime Task Force,” a hand-selected group of commissioned who received monogrammed shirts and began solving violent crimes by arresting Black people in the French Quarter for possession of marijuana.

You see, Landry apparently had been under the impression that he was elected to be the chief law enforcement officer of Louisiana. He didn’t realize “general” was postpositive adjective and “attorney” was the noun.

Overboard! One Louisiana Businessman. Four Politicians. And A Scandal That Is Slowly Unfolding.

Accordingly, he assumed this allowed him to create his own roving team of special street cops who weren’t constrained by trivial things like jurisdiction or due process. Eventually, he figured out that he was actually the chief legal officer. The Violent Crimes Special Task Force was disbanded, and the “Louisiana Bureau of Investigations” stopped pretending to be something it was not.

“If you would asked me back then if I would have run for a campaign,” Landry told The Daily Iberian in 2018, reflecting on his “start” in politics in St. Martin Parish, “I would have said yes, but I think it would have been for sheriff.”

This makes total sense.

Last year, when he served as chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association, all of its members were referred to as “generals;” the website appears to have been recently scrubbed clean. Now, they’re all “AGs.”

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry warms up the crowd in Lake Charles, Louisiana in advance on President Trump’s arrival for a rally in support of Republican gubernatorial candidates Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone. Oct. 11, 2019.

It turns out I was only half-right. Councilman Emanuel Zanders III is a Black man from the small town of Amite City, population 4,141. He was Landry’s culprit. While it may be true that most had never heard of Councilman Zanders before, Amite is one of the better-known small towns in Louisiana.

It also just so happens to be the hometown of the state’s two-term Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards.

Zanders is accused of convincing 22 Amite residents to allow him to change the addresses under which they were registered to vote to a pair of allegedly vacant lots located inside of his district. Additionally, he is accused of registering the address of another voter to his own residence.

Pretty sophisticated “deep state” stuff, right?

After narrowly missing an outright victory in the November jungle primary contest, Zanders won the December run-off by only 19 votes, 206 to 187. It is unclear, however, whether any of the 23 voters actually participated in the election. In fact, it’s unclear whether or not any of them even attempted to vote.

Incidentally, the candidate Zanders defeated was Claire Bel, the former “First Lady of Amite.” Her late husband, former Mayor Buddy Bel, was the governor’s second cousin.

According to Landry, the Tangipahoa Parish Registrar of Voters first flagged the suspicious registrations in October and alerted Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin’s office. Zanders is charged with eight counts of election fraud.

All for a job that pays $7,800 a year.

“Anything other than a one-for-one vote distorts our election process,” Landry said.

This is true, of course, but it also confuses the alleged crime at issue.

Neither Landry nor Ardoin claimed that any of these voters were otherwise ineligible to vote, and thus far, none have been charged with a crime, which suggests their registration forms— once flagged as potentially fraudulent— were not approved. (And if they had been allowed to vote, that would raise a whole crop of questions about why the Secretary of State’s office dropped the ball).

Landry also never suggested any of these individuals tried to vote twice or that any of the names listed on registration forms were fictitious, and since he refused to answer any questions, he was never asked whether either of the two vacant lots were previously occupied by a mobile home, for example (Answer: They both were).

In other words, the alleged crime is more accurately defined as registration fraud.

There’s a reason Landry decided to wait to make this announcement, with great fanfare, until the late morning of Jan. 6, 2021, a full month after the run-off election and three months after the issue was first brought to the attention of state authorities. Given the extremely limited facts that he ended up disclosing, there was also no compelling legal reason to tease the story out the day before, particularly considering he refused to take questions.

Landry’s real goal was obvious: He hoped to amplify yet another bogus talking point in service of the Big Lie.

Unfortunately for Landry, the armed mob of pro-Trump cultists stepped all over his registration fraud thriller, at least outside of Louisiana and the conservative fringe online. The media were far more interested in how Republican elected officials like Steve Scalise and Mike Johnson and Clay Higgins and Garret Graves and John Neely Kennedy were still trying to steal the election for Donald the Terrible by throwing away as many as 9.7 million legal votes in Arizona and/or Pennsylvania, ostensibly because state authorities disobeyed a direct order by the Commander-in-Chief to “STOP THE COUNT!”

Jeff Landry, by the way, had previously signed onto an amicus brief in a case that sought to throw out 2.7 million votes in Pennsylvania, and when that failed, he then filed to intervene in a different case asking the Supreme Court to throw out 20.4 million votes (Johnson, Scalise, and Higgins supported that effort as well).

****

A brief digression, because Landry’s immediate reaction to the insurrection was especially egregious:

Landry refused to unconditionally condemn the violence at the Capitol and was one of only four attorneys general in the nation who declined to sign onto an open letter by the National Association of Attorneys General affirming as much. He claimed to be outraged that the letter had failed to figure out a way to also condemn Black Lives Matter protesters for the violence last summer.

Here’s what he did not realize, however: Nearly all of the acts of violence in those protests were committed by people unaffiliated with the movement or by alt-right instigators and white anti-government militia groups.

“The Black Lives Matter uprisings were remarkably nonviolent,” writes Erica Chenoweth, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and Jeremy Pressman, a political science professor at the University of Connecticut. The two have been collecting and analyzing data on crowds at political events in the United States since 2017. Quoting:

Police were reported injured in 1% of the protests. A law enforcement officer killed in California was allegedly shot by supporters of the far-right “boogaloo” movement, not anti-racism protesters.

The killings in the line of duty of other law enforcement officers during this period were not related to the protests.

Only 3.7% of the protests involved property damage or vandalism. Some portion of these involved neither police nor protesters, but people engaging in vandalism or looting alongside the protests.

In short, our data suggest that 96.3% of events involved no property damage or police injuries, and in 97.7% of events, no injuries were reported among participants, bystanders or police.
Author

****

“It’s even more disheartening,” Landry said of the Amite councilman charged with eight counts of election fraud related to 23 allegedly fraudulent voter registration forms that were flagged before the election, “when the perpetrator is an elected official.”

He’s got a point.

PREFACE

Despite leaving office in disgrace and with an abysmal 29% approval and the lowest average approval rating of any American president in more than 74 years of polling, Donald John Trump, Sr.— the pathologically-lying, Muslim-banning, sexual-assaulting, Jeffrey Epstein-friending, tax-avoiding, casino-bankrupting, college-defrauding, Ukraine-bribing, Putin-fearing, Kim Jong Un-loving, Birther-conspiring, border wall-fantasizing, Harriett Tubman-scrubbing, insurrection-inciting twice-impeached former president with a real estate brand built by his father’s fortune and a political brand built by his appeals to white grievances—was somehow enduringly popular in Louisiana.

At least that had been the conventional wisdom.

During the four years Trump spent in public housing, I deliberately limited his appearances on the Bayou Brief to stories that involved people from Louisiana, Texas, or Mississippi. Hence, my decision to publish multiple stories about Stormy Daniels. (The one exception to this rule was “Trump Trumps Trump,” Peter Athas’ review of Mary Trump’s book Too Much and Never Enough). Frankly, I thought Hillary Clinton had correctly diagnosed the danger he posed to the nation way back in 2016; if anything, he was even more dangerous than she imagined. Is there any question today over whether he has attracted a sizable number of “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” supporters? Or that “he has lifted them up”?

When I set out to write this piece, I’d initially intended for it to be about both Landry and the man who now occupies his old seat in the United States Congress, Clay Higgins. The working title had been “The General and the Captain,” because Higgins, a disgraced former law enforcement officer who parlayed his sudden celebrity as the star of a series of viral videos into a successful run for Louisiana’s Third Congressional District, also likes to conflate his title with a high-ranking military officer. (In fairness, Higgins had briefly been a captain in the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Department shortly before he was essentially forced to resign. Now, he is an honorary marshal for Landry’s office).

I’ve covered both Landry and Higgins extensively, here on the Bayou Brief and on my former website, CenLamar. In fact, just recently, I set up www.CaptainClayHiggins.com, a compendium of reports, documents, and videos here on the Bayou Brief.

Captain Clay Higgins

But it didn’t take long for me to realize it’d be a mistake to paint them with the same brush or to give readers the impression that they played similar roles in promoting the Big Lie that incited an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Landry is significantly closer to Trump and the former president’s inner circle. In 2018, Donald Trump, Jr. and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle traveled to Broussard in suburban Lafayette for a $5,000-a-person alligator hunt in support of Landry’s reelection campaign. Higgins, on the other hand, has shared only a single photo of him and the former president speaking personally to one another: A screen capture of Fox News’ broadcast from Sept. 2, 2017 of their brief exchange on an airport tarmac.

According to a source familiar with his 2018 campaign, Higgins received Trump’s endorsement only after putting him on the spot in front of a room full of his colleagues during an event at the White House, and Trump allegedly told him to take his request to Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law and his campaign’s “online producer” during the midterms.

Whereas Higgins’ post-election hijinks primarily comprised of posting absurd and occasionally drunken rants on the internet, Landry had seemingly allowed his public office to become an apparatus of the Trump campaign while a dark money group on which he served as co-chair helped recruit the mob at the Capitol.

Last July, I wrote an extensive profile on Higgins, and following his second impeachment trial, in Part Three of this series, we will consider Donald Trump’s ‘s legacy in Louisiana more thoroughly. For now, however, hold on tight because we’re about take a sharp turn.

Clay Higgins may have been Louisiana’s first “Trumpian” politician, but Landry was its first Tea Party radical.

If you search our archives and the archives of CenLamar, you’ll find more than 50 stories about the Louisiana attorney general, dating all the way back to his first campaign for Congress in 2010. Today, Jeff Landry is arguably the most divisive and controversial statewide elected official in Louisiana, a distinction that he will doubtlessly attempt to use to his advantage as he prepares a bid for governor in 2023.

At this point, I think he deserves a proper introduction.

During the past two weeks, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time re-reading our archives as well as hundreds of other news reports and stories about Jeff Landry, and since his family owns his hometown newspaper, it isn’t an exaggeration to say that people have been writing about him since the day he was born.

I’ve also reviewed troves of public records, financial disclosures, and campaign finance reports. I even spent some time researching his genealogy. This is not, however, an “oppo dump,” to borrow from campaign parlance. My purpose, instead, is to place him and his politics, which I find irredeemably repulsive and dangerously incendiary, in the proper context.

Stay tuned.

NEXT: General Mayhem: A Primer on Louisiana’s Jeff Landry

“Stay home!” says Krewe of House Floats founder.

By
Michael Patrick Welch
-

Carnival is when we find our friends on the streets and we grope them and slobber on them like we haven’t seen them in a year. Imagine how lovesick and foolish we’ll act with friends we haven’t seen in a year!

Don’t be these poor excuses for foreshadowing at Fat Tuesday last year.

“Stay home, stay home, stay home!” bemoans Krewe of House Floats founder Megan Boudreaux, who intended New Orleans’s house floats to be enjoyed by locals, while driving around in their safety-sealed cars. Hence the krewe’s slogan, “Parade at home.”

With the help of national media however, the house floats have been usurped as a marketing tool to invite the world to Mardi Gras during a pandemic. Mardi Gras hasn’t garnered this much press in decades, perhaps not even in 2006 after Katrina. This past week, local social media feeds have flooded with ads promising what sounds like an irrepressibly fun Mardi Gras celebration. While clearly, everyone in New Orleans’s tourist industry needs to eat, my stomach sinks when a tour group run by locals promises a big party where the “music will flow into the streets.”

“Our krewe members are calling me saying, ‘There are tour groups in my neighborhood now,’ and the hotels are saying, ‘Come down and see the house floats,’” says Boudreaux. “It’s mind boggling to me that people from out of town or out of state join our Krewe of House Floats, and start talking about how they are coming in from out of town. Don’t come! Or they ask me, ‘What’s the best tour group in town?’ and I won’t endorse that. Stay home.”

Boudreaux was especially disappointed in a way-too-inviting Good Morning America segment/tourism campaign focused on Krewe of House floats. “They’re not passing my real message on,” Boudreaux insists. “When I’ve got the media’s attention, I talk about the whole economy around Carnival, and all the businesses that depend it. I stress that there are many ways to support New Orleans without coming here. And they just don’t say that part, and they make everyone think they should come here.”

Boudreaux says that her new, citywide Krewe has remained focused on cutting down on crowds: “It’s been a concern from the beginning. When people register for the krewe, and even for our map, they have to agree to our covid guidelines. We’ve always had a covid crowd control plan—even if the city has not.”

She adds that, even as city government fumbles covid restrictions as Mardi Gras approaches, the Krewe of House Floats will stick with Phase 1 rules.

“I’m growing very concerned that we’ve created hundreds of small super-spreader events,” Boudreaux worries. “Even given how much the house floats have helped artists and businesses survive this year, I still don’t know what to think: Was the house float thing a happy accident that worked out well? Or will it, in the end, make the pandemic worse?”

*

Looking at Krewe du Vieux’s failed attempt at a safe party last weekend as Beta test, I propose one rule for Mardi Gras this year: Do not walk around. Stay in your car, or stay home. There is no way to celebrate Mardi Gras safely on foot. Try and you will fail. Hear me out:

First, if you are walking, then you are drinking, and if you are drinking, then you are not wearing a mask. That is what’s called a non-starter.

Second: Mardi Gras is about huggin and kissin. When I describe Fat Tuesday to friends elsewhere in America, I tell them the whole point is to walk around in costume with people you love, for the express purpose of finding other people you love, and lovin on em.

Carnival is when we embrace strangers as if they are longtime friends. And on Fat Tuesday, when we find our real friends on the streets, we grope them and slobber on them like we haven’t seen them in a year.

Imagine how we’ll act around friends we actually haven’t seen in a year! Imagine how lovesick and foolish!

It’s been exactly one year for many New Orleans locals. We haven’t seen the majority of our friends since exactly last Fat Tuesday, just before the first major coronavirus lockdown. God did we feel guilty afterwards, for what we’d just done. All that kissin and huggin and drooling and humping suddenly seemed dangerous as hell. Round about Ash Wednesday, we couldn’t believe we just Mardi Gras’d in the petri dish together.

The only way to absolve those sins was to seal ourselves in our homes like the doctors suggested. We took lockdown very seriously, and New Orleans was rewarded with relatively low corona numbers. We’ve done OK since, compared to the rest of our embarrassingly red state. But with Mardi Gras 2021, we are poised to create a much worse scenario.   

Imagine how you will act! If you get out of your car and venture out onto the streets, you will pick up where you left off last year. You’ll tell yourself you just want to see some costumes. But imagine how you will dance when you come upon your first brass band! Don’t do it; Brass bands are dangerously spitty! Some horn sections literally leave puddles on the ground wherever they perform.

Or even worse, imagine walking around sipping your fifth cocktail and nibbling your mushroom chocolates (both of which require you to remove your mask) and you stumble upon your FAVORITE PEOPLE EVER! You will hug deeply, and you will cry tears into each other’s mouths, Oh my god it’s been so long!

Imagine that happening five dozen times over the course of a day. Or imagine seeing your friends and not hugging them. Why torture yourself? Resist temptation. Our only truly safe option also happens to be the most depressing option: Avoid our friends. Board up our homes as if for a hurricane, and don’t come out until Ash Wednesday.

Or stay inside until New Orleans has passed through the death spike that those who cannot resist Mardi Gras are about to create.

What It Means to Cancel 2021’s Mardi Gras Parades

By
Michael Patrick Welch
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Mardi Gras float painters and sculptors put out of work by coronavirus are instead being hired to create house floats, like this “Night Tripper” house float at the home of Angee Estevez.

My ability to stay at home with my kids and help them suffer through this long year of online schooling during the pandemic, has been funded by Mardi Gras. Their mother has paid all of our bills this year by painting floats, for a parade season that we all knew wasn’t gonna roll.

Thousands of artists like her work year-round, decorating over 50 parades for 50-plus Mardi Gras krewes. Each parade rolls for just one night, before it returns to the float den to be painted white, and redecorated for next year–ad infinitum, or until a pandemic hits. Krewe-members pay anywhere from $500 to $15,000 per person to ride on the floats, with much of that that money going toward art. Mardi Gras funds a vast artist economy that doesn’t exist in other cities. Cancelling these parades not only punches an almost half-billion dollar hole in the tourist economy, it jeopardizes hundreds of local businesses and jobs.

Throughout the pandemic, the Mardi Gras industry has mostly pretended that parades will roll as usual, just so that artists can keep their jobs. “Yes we were hopeful,” admits Richard Valadie, owner of Royal Artists, a New Orleans company that decorates hundreds of floats for a dozen of the city’s krewes, including “King of Carnival,” Rex. “The virus would come and go in waves and sometimes it seemed possible but, in the end… Cancelling wasn’t a popular decision, but there’s no way you could have parades in the present situation. People were lucky to have jobs this long.” 

The Catholic calendar says Carnival officially began on January 6, yet Valadie currently oversees a small, unhurried staff at his warehouse stuffed with colorful parade floats. His den should’ve descended into madness by now, with 20 artists scrambling to finish up parades that should be rolling between now and Fat Tuesday on February 16. By now, even I would have called Richard asking if he had extra work for me, and he would’ve said Hell yes I do. Last year, last second, he hired me to restring all the lights on 20 floats. This year I didn’t bother to ask.

My partner and I still end each day wondering aloud when she’ll finally be cut from her job painting floats. Lucky for her, krewes in Jefferson Parish, St. Bernard Parish, Houma and Hammond still hope to roll as if 400,000 Americans have not died of coronavirus. Only the Mardi Gras industry’s sad hopes for normalcy have kept her painting, and kept our kids eating.

*

My family started to really worry though, back in October when our Algiers neighborhood’s official krewe, NOMTOC (New Orleans’s Most Talked of Club) became the second krewe to self-cancel, following Krewe of Oshun. An African American krewe born in 1951 as a reaction to racist Jim Crow laws, NOMTOC remains one of the Westbank’s only parades that didn’t jump ship to the east bank after 2013’s Super Bowl.

“In that community of Algiers, people are so attached to what we do,” my neighbor and NOMTOC leader Jim Henderson told me over the phone, since we can’t meet in person around the corner at their clubhouse on Newton St. “Anything we do is going to attract a crowd. Any time we go out the clubhouse, the neighborhood will be there. And we didn’t want to be a part of that. We even thought to do something small to commemorate Mardi Gras with just the 60 board members, but we couldn’t figure out how to guarantee safety for the people we’re attracting. So, we had to back off, decorate the clubhouse as best we can, and promise we’ll have a better show and better conditions in 2022.”

NOMTOC’s total shutdown made sense, given the outsized toll coronavirus has taken on African American communities due to poverty and poor healthcare options. But Henderson worries about the permanent damage this single cancellation will cause to his krewe. “We had built our ridership up to 600, and I am worried about bringing that all back,” he told me “We’ve had to cancel before for rain events, or big freeze events, and it took years to build our membership back up each time. If you don’t have those membership dues, you can’t pay for the parade. We currently have roots in ATL, and Houston, and Alabama, and I wonder how long it will take us to get all that back….”

Henderson also wonders if he’ll need to get into the business of custom float design and preparation, if his usual float building company, PFJ Parade Floats, doesn’t survive. “Reality has set in now that the pandemic is hurting these businesses’ sustainability.”

The Krewe of NOMTOC’s clubhouse on Newton St. in Algiers.

Finally, in December, three months after Brazil cancelled its carnival for the first time in a century, New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell gave her haters fits by officially cancelling all parades in Orleans Parish for the first time since the 1979 Police strike, and before that World War II. This completely warranted cancellation set in motion a crash within the Mardi Gras industry that will potentially reverberate for years.

“I’ve kept my core artists, but a lot of people I couldn’t keep on,” said Valadie of Royal Artists, who usually employs 20 workers, but foresees needing no more than eight for the next year or two. “I lost half my business this year, and will also lose half of my business for next year: Like, my Mobile, Alabama parades aren’t rolling this year, but we are still decorating them now for next year’s parades. We won’t be painting those again next year. The satire parades have to be new every year, so we stopped and had to trash what we were working on, and we’ll redo those. Then Rex has their 150th anniversary next year, so they will want us to redecorate, but using [pieces] we made for them this year.”

Trimming down to only his most experienced painters also means Valadie’s ceased teaching the craft to anyone new. “We had to cut all the new people who were learning,” Richard said, “so, whenever I do have the workload again, I worry I won’t have enough skilled people to do it. It’s gonna take a couple years for us to catch up.”

*

Biking through Algiers Point on my way to interview Megan Boudreaux who started the new, citywide Krewe of House Floats, I pass a dozen people outside their homes hammering away on elaborate tableu. A dog-sized, paper mache murder wasp, and a man-eating plant made from Great Stuff, comprise a “Little Shop of 2020 Horrors” scene that takes up the whole front of a two-story house. Pedaling past Crown-n-Anchor bar, I even hear the beer drinkers at the outdoor tables say to each other, “This house float thing is great!”

“Little Shop of 2020 Horrors” house float in Algiers Point. [Artists John and Cori Tutrone @TutroneInk]

Megan Boudreaux’s idea of people turning their homes into stationary parade floats has grown into not only a phenomenon and likely a new Mardi Gras tradition; House floats have provided a silver lining for many freshly-unemployed Mardi Gras artists.

“People keep emailing me this week asking, ‘Is it too late to get my house decorated?’” said Boudreaux. “And I keep having to explain that we don’t do that. You do that.” But once the idea began gaining momentum, Boudreaux’s thoughts turned to helping out. “We compiled a public resource list on Facebook of artists, and local businesses that sell supplies, so you could avoid ordering everything on Amazon, and maybe pay someone to create and build a house float for you.”

Inez Pierre credits the house float phenomenon with saving the Mardi Gras decorating business she owns with her husband Rene, Crescent City Artists. “We would be closing our business down otherwise,” she told me. Rene and Inez usually represent CCA’s only two fulltime employees, alongside several part-time helpers. “Now that we’re doing the porch floats,” said Pierre, “we employ a full-time staff of eight artists and master carpenters, all making above minimum wage. Our smallest has been a $500 float, and our largest was $4,000. We have done at least 54 in a month—we got our first order the day after Xmas–and we’ve donated one to the McDonald House, and one to the Homeless Center for Children.” Instead of a fatal season, Inez said, “The house floats have allowed us to have a better than normal Mardi Gras season despite the pandemic.”

Pierre said she’s already booked for house float jobs next year: “It’s growing! We have a couple coming from Houston today to pick up theirs. And I’ve gotten calls from D.C., North Carolina, New York. This is definitely something we’ll incorporate permanently into our business.”

Devin DeWulf then took the concept a step further and focused specifically on job creation with his website HireAMardiGrasArtist.com. “Caroline Thomas knew that I had organized Feed the Frontline NOLA, which brought 90,000 restaurant meals and 10,000 coffees to local health workers as a moral boost. We hired unemployed local musicians as delivery people,” said DeWulf, who is also the organizer and founder of the Krewe of Red Beans, and the charity project Feed the Second Line.  

“Red Beans has a lot of members who care about the community and are very grass roots, so when Caroline Thomas had the idea to crowdfund Mardi Gras worker jobs back, she turned to us,” said DeWulf. HireAMardiGrasArtist.com collects donations of all sizes. “And every time we raise $15,000, we raffle off a house float to someone who donated. We also take commissions from people and businesses who want to hire artists to create $15,000 projects. We’ve raised a quarter of a million dollars in just a month, and are currently employing 45 full-time artists at a minimum of $30-per-hour. We’ve completed 22 float houses since December 5th when we announced the idea.”

MOJO Coffee co-owner Angee Estevez self-financed the first of these large scale projects, and had her façade converted into an homage to New Orleans musician Dr. John’s “Night Tripper.” Years before the pandemic, Estevez began an extended PR campaign to gain notoriety for the Mardi Gras float artists. “No one knows their names!” says Estevez, every chance she gets. Last year, Estevez began changing her Magazine St. boutique, Miette, into a gallery where Mardi Gras artists could sell their wares and get their names out. “I started seeing a lot of great Mardi Gras artists leaving to take movie jobs, and quitting carnival all together because the money wasn’t good enough,” Estevez told me. “There are a lot of talented people who have a passion for Mardi Gras and I hated to see them leaving, and I was sure the pandemic would make that worse. I always wanted to help grow the Mardi Gras artists a supplemental income, and this house float thing has been that dream come true. It’s been the Mardi Gras artist PR campaign I could never afford for them.”

DeWulf agrees that the house floats come with an education in Mardi Gras culture. “Everyone doing their house floats DIY is learning how hard it is to do,” he said. “They will come to appreciate the professionals, and learn about the real costs associated with float-building. And I think now, the demand will always be there to hire people to build house floats.”

*

The Joan of Arc parade, which traditionally welcomes the arrival of Carnival season each January 6th, this year set up tableaus at a NORD park in Algiers, and charged admission to drive through the exhibit.

Mardi Gras historian, media commentator, and all around New Orleans Carnival guru, Arthur Hardy, almost didn’t publish this year’s 45th edition of his famous Arthur Hardy’s Mardi Gras Guide. “We made the difficult decision to publish even though we had not very much advertising revenue this year. I thought it was important to publish anyway,” Hardy told me when I called. “My fear was: Out of sight, out of mind. If I take a year off, I may never come back.”

Hardy maintains great faith in Carnival’s healing power. “But it’s gonna take a while for the Mardi Gras economy to return, as it will for the whole city’s economy to bounce back,” Hardy predicted. “It will be a longtime recovery, and there is concern that a lot of krewes won’t get back on the street. A lot of people have lost their disposable income to covid, and Mardi Gras is a luxury, and if you don’t have money, you can’t put on a parade, and if you don’t have members, you don’t have money. It’s a ripple effect. The krewes that are big and expensive to ride in can maybe lose half their members and still remain viable. The size of the super-krewes will shrink. But I think we’re gonna lose a few of the more intimate parades, sadly.”

As Hardy projected to me the grandeur and pathos of next year’s Mardi Gras on March 1, 2022, it suddenly seemed strange to be talking about a better coronavirus situation, when things only seem to be getting worse. Hardy doesn’t want to think about the possibility of cancelling Mardi Gras next year too, admitting only, “I don’t know if I could survive two years.”

In the meantime, the Mardi Gras guru prescribes contribution: “Participate on some level, whether it’s buying a king cake, or a Mardi Gras Guide, or decorating your house. Just don’t let this get you down, and figure out some safe outlet to celebrate Mardi Gras. Treat this as a on-off, and we’ll be back next year. That has to be the attitude. Even if that might not be our reality.”

How Louisiana Republicans Trumpeted the Big Lie: Rousing a Reckoning

By
Lamar White, Jr.
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We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,
would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith, we trust.
For while we have our eyes on the future,
history has its eyes on us.

Excerpted from “The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman

In the late morning of Jan. 6, 2021, right around the time her brother-in-law, Jeff Landry—the attorney general of Louisiana— kicked off a press conference in Baton Rouge, more than 1,100 miles away, Sheila LeBlanc Musso surveyed the expanse of people gathered at the Ellipse, a park near the South Lawn of the White House, and saw a reason for hope. She snapped a picture of Eric Trump, the president’s second-born son, as the crowd serenaded him on the occasion of his 37th birthday.

“Happy birthday Eric!” she wrote on Facebook.

Musso didn’t anticipate what she was about to witness—the pandemonium that soon unfolded. And once all hell broke loose, it was disorienting.

Sheila and Landry’s wife Sharon are twin sisters, two of Tommy and Mary Carol LeBlanc’s five children, beneficiaries to the fortune made by their father and his company, Service Tool, which bills itself as “the leading importer, distributor, and merchandiser of hand tools in the United States.”

In a rambling and often contradictory series of public posts on Facebook, Musso documented her participation in both the “Save America Rally” at the Ellipse and the so-called “March to Save America” at the U.S. Capitol, though, to be clear, it was essentially all the same thing. Prior to Jan. 6, I’d never heard of Musso, but when one of her posts that day swiftly picked up over 900 shares, a few people reached out with a tip: Sheila LeBlanc Musso, the on-the-scene correspondent who was unwittingly chronicling her own cognitive dissonance meltdown, had a famous brother-in-law.

In a series of public posts on Facebook, Sheila LeBlanc Musso of River Ranch, Louisiana documented her participation in the March to Save America, the pro-Trump protest that morphed into an armed insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Musso was not among those who entered the Capitol. Source: Facebook, Sheila LeBlanc Musso. Retrieved on Jan. 7, 2021. Click to zoom.

It should go without saying that like her famous brother-in-law, Musso is an unabashed and outspoken supporter of the former president. It’s why she traveled from her home in River Ranch— a tony enclave of Lafayette, Louisiana— to the nation’s capital that day.

At the time of publication, a request for comment sent to Musso’s email address remained unanswered.

In addition to wishing Eric Trump a happy birthday, Musso encouraged people to “unfriend and unfollow Mike Pence,” echoing the frustrations of those who wrongly believed Trump’s claim that the fate of the election hinged on whether his once-dutiful Vice President ruled against ratifying the already-certified count of Biden electors, despite the fact that Pence lacked the authority to do so.

To be clear, there is no evidence whatsoever that Musso was among those who stormed into the Capitol and engaged in an insurrection, but she was certainly close enough to witness and cheer on the melee.

“Patriots have taken over!” she gushed upon her arrival outside of the Capitol, attaching a photo of a sea of people, awash in the blues and reds of Trump campaign merchandise.

As the march morphed into a mob, Musso dutifully dispatched an update. “Patriots just pushed through four lines of officers and breached the Capitol chambers which halted the electoral vote counting!” she reported.

But upon hearing news reports of the mayhem unfolding inside the building, the people she had only just described as “patriots” were abruptly scrubbed from her story.

“I am here in D.C., and I will tell you NOTHING aligns with what the media is saying,” she wrote. “I will also tell you that close to 1.5 million to 2 million people PEACEABLY protested the entire two days.”

While law enforcement is unlikely to release any official estimate and although a lack of aerial photos makes a precise number challenging, it’s not difficult to determine that Musso wildly exaggerated the crowd size. Earlier in the day, Eric Trump pegged the number at 150,000. In a call with reporters the next morning, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy spoke about how intelligence estimates on potential crowd size were “all over the board.”

“The problem was the range,” said McCarthy, disclosing that initial estimates had ranged anywhere from a low of 2,000 people to a high of 80,000 people.

Stephen Doig, a data analyst and journalism professor at Arizona State University, explained the difficulty of estimating the crowd size, but noted that it’s undoubtedly lower than many believe. “I’m perfectly prepared to believe there were several thousand people there, even 10,000 maybe,” Doig told The Conversation. “But when you start pushing that up to 100,000 and so on, that’s not going to be true.” Musso’s estimate was only off by between 1.4 million to 1.9 million people.

But her exaggerations about crowd size weren’t even close to her most outlandish assertion. “Antifa showed up on (Jan.) 5th and 6th dressed in Capitol Police uniforms and Trump apparel and started attacking Trump supporters,” she claimed without evidence.

Source: Facebook, Sheila LeBlanc Musso. Retrieved on Jan. 7, 2021.

Click to zoom.

“Six people broke into the Capitol in protest, and all six were identified as antifa members and promptly arrested,” Musso falsely asserted. “Patriots assembled on the steps and sang the National Anthem.”

The celerity with which Musso warped and then re-warped reality to fit her own political agenda is staggering. Perhaps more revealing, though, is the ease with which she moved from one lie to another, seemingly unaware that her claims not only contradicted what viewers were seeing across the world on live television but also what she had said only hours before. What happened to the patriots who “pushed through four lines of officers and breached the Capitol chambers”? Presumably, they were simply deleted from her story and replaced with the boogeymen that haunt the dreams of those on the far-right: antifa.

The notion she could convince anyone to believe that six antifa “members” dressed up as Trump supporters, broke into the Capitol, and did exactly what Trump hoped would happen—halting the counting of electoral votes confirming Biden’s win—requires both chutzpah and an astonishing lack of respect for her online audience.

But perhaps what is most troubling was her claim that some of the men and women of the Capitol Police who literally risked their lives to protect the Capitol from the very breach Musso had celebrated earlier were, in fact, antifa “members” in disguise. To be clear, it’s not troubling because it may be true; there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone identified as antifa were among those who participated in the Capitol attack. It’s troubling because it was easily, instinctively manufactured.

“The Associated Press reviewed public records for more than 120 people identified at the insurrection and found that they included GOP donors, members of far-right militia, and supporters of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory,” reports Politifact, an arm of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Poynter Institute. “ProPublica archived more than 500 videos taken Jan. 6 that show people in and around the Capitol wearing Trump apparel, carrying Confederate flags and sporting the symbols of QAnon. Specific individuals held up as antifa activists have turned out to be Trump supporters or QAnon enthusiasts. Now, court documents show that the FBI is investigating connections between the Capitol rioters and far-right groups — not antifa.”

Musso’s posts, while contemptible, also illustrate the reality distortion field that far too many people were manipulated into joining by a president who once referred to the press as “enemies of the people” and who, in just four years, made a total of 30,573 false or misleading claims, nearly half of which were made during his final year in office, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post.

When confronted by a set of facts that disrupted her fervent faith in Trump and the MAGA movement—that is, the reality of Trump supporters violently attacking law enforcement officers— and recognizing the very real prospect that this reality would unravel other things she’d been led into believing about him, Musso concocted a fantastical conspiracy theory that, however untenable it may seem, allowed her to continue preaching the gospel of the Donald.

Once she was safe and sound back in Louisiana, Musso shared a local news story about an announcement her brother-in-law had made on the day she witnessed a band of patriots sing the National Anthem outside of the Capitol.

“Thank you Jeff!” she wrote. But we will get to that in Part Two.

Musso wasn’t the only member of a prominent Louisiana family who traveled to Washington, D.C. for Trump’s last hurrah.

On Jan. 9, 2021, protestors in the New Orleans neighborhood of Gentilly call for the boycott of Rouse’s after the co-owner of the grocery chainstore attended the Jan. 6, 2021 pro-Trump rally that later turned into a violent insurrection attack at the U.S. Capitol. Photo credit: William A. Morgan, Shutterstock.

On the night of the insurrection at the Capitol, after the mob of marauders were finally expelled and the building was finally secured, I tweeted a photo I’d seen on Facebook of Donald Rouse, Sr., the co-owner of the grocery chainstore Rouses Markets, standing alongside Steve Galtier, the company’s former Director of Human Resources, at the rally at the Ellipse. The tweet immediately went viral. Within 24 hours, it had racked up more than 3.1 million impressions on Twitter alone.

The backlash against Rouses Markets was also immediate, with thousands of people, including the actor Wendell Pierce (The Wire and Treme) and Josh Hart of the New Orleans Pelicans, vowing to never again shop at one of his stores.

I should be clear that my intention in calling attention to the photo was simply to inform the public about an already-public photo of a public figure at a public event. Others clamored for a boycott, which, at least in my opinion, would be most effective as an instrument of economic activism if it results in building value and increasing opportunities for Rouses’ largely underpaid, majority-Black workforce.

It took more than 15 hours before Rouse issued a response, and when he did, it hardly made a difference. Obviously, Rouse denounced the violence, which he said began after he left, a claim that tracks with the comments Galtier made on his since-deleted Facebook account. But he also failed, glaringly, to apologize for his implicit support of the “Stop the Steal” campaign. As a consequence, his comments primarily served as confirmation of his attendance.

Demonstrators organized outside of at least two of his family’s stores in the New Orleans area, some with signs to attract the attention of passing motorists and others with leaflets to distribute to customers outside the stores’ entrances. The Krewe of Red Beans returned a $20,000 sponsorship from Rouses, and Collis Temple, Jr., a member of the LSU Board of Supervisors, called on the state’s flagship university to consider severing all ties with the grocery retailer. (In 2019, Rouses signed a multiyear contract naming the chain as the “Official and Exclusive Grocery Partner of LSU Athletics”).

As a work of crisis communication, Rouse’s statement was a complete failure—that is, unless your media diet consisted of a breakfast with right-wing talk radio demagogues and lunch and dinner with the white supremacists and extremists who populate the comment sections of local news sites.

Louisiana talk radio host Moon Griffon, a virulent right-wing flamethrower who has spent the bulk of the past six years amplifying Donald Trump’s war against reality, gleefully endorsed Rouses, riling up his audience in support of the retailer against those calling for a boycott. It was the kind of cause tailor-made for Griffon— defending a wealthy white family whose patriarch traveled to D.C. in support of a scheme to disenfranchise millions of “Black voters in key cities (who) helped deliver the election for Joe Biden” against criticism he characterized as racially-motivated.

Griffon recently claimed his efforts were proving to be successful, boasting that listeners from Alexandria, Shreveport, Ruston, and Monroe—four markets in which the Louisiana-based Rouses has no presence— had been sending him photographs of their families taking road trips just so they could shop at the embattled grocery store.

Clearly, though, Griffon’s boosterism wasn’t nearly as effective as he imagined.

On Jan. 22, Rouse booked an appearance on WBOK’s “The Good Morning Show with Oliver ‘OT’ Thomas,” a decidedly different venue than the one Griffon operates. A year ago, WBOK, “the state’s oldest African American radio station,” relaunched after a group of local investors, including Wendell Pierce, former New Orleans mayoral candidate Troy Henry, and entrepreneurs Cleveland Spears III and Jeff Thomas, purchased the station from the Bakewell Group of Los Angeles.

In many respects, Rouse had selected the most appropriate forum to address his critics. Oliver Thomas, the show’s host, knows a thing or two about forgiveness and redemption. A former New Orleans city councilman at-large who served as Council President during Hurricane Katrina, he had once been seen as one of the city’s brightest political stars until he was caught soliciting $15,000 in bribes from Stan “Pampy” Barre, a parking lot operator. Thomas tearfully pleaded guilty to the charges, and after spending two-and-a-half years in prison, returned to a city that had largely been willing to forgive him. Fans of HBO’s Treme may be familiar with Thomas; he played himself in a recurring role in the show’s second season.

This is not to suggest anyone would “go easy” on Rouse, who was accompanied by his friend Jerome Boykin, the President of the Terrebonne Parish NAACP. You can hear the entire interview below:

“The first thing,” Rouse said, “I would like to apologize to Rouse’s customers, to the community as a whole, my son and Rouses’ president Steve Black, my family, and most important to me, Rouses’ team members who, in New Orleans, are majority African Americans. All of these people are innocent. But they are paying the price for my poor judgment and that hurts me terribly and for that I am very sorry.”

Among other things, Rouse claimed, somewhat dubiously, that he did not attend the rally to signal his support for a president he acknowledged he’d supported in last year’s election; instead, he said, he traveled to D.C., over the objection of his son, Rouses CEO Donny Rouse, merely to experience a moment of American history. He also claimed to have never believed in Trump’s assertions of a “stolen election,” after Wendell Pierce asked him whether he understood the concept of complicity.

I’ll leave it to others to judge Rouse’s contrition, though I’d note that there was at least one moment in which—at least in my opinion—Rouse revealed himself to be capable of genuine self-reflection. Part of the problem, he said, was that he primarily consumed right-wing media. It distorted his perspective. It was, in his words, not “balanced.” This, I think we can safely assume, could be said about practically everyone else in attendance that day.

The damage that Trump left behind when he boarded Air Force One for the final time is incalculable: A nation suffering from his catastrophic negligence in the face of a deadly pandemic, a four-year assault on the notion of basic decency and the institutions and alliances that made American democracy durable, an era that began with a fictitious story of American carnage and ended with the reality of one. But perhaps most insidiously, he left behind a legacy of lies—again, some 30,573 of them— beginning with an absurd and trivial exaggeration about how many people attended his inauguration and ending with the Big Lie that incited an insurrection.

A day after the attack at the Capitol, Moon Griffon spent two hours spewing baseless and nonsensical conspiracy theories about antifa being the real culprit and repeating the thoroughly discredited claim that Trump had won the election. It’s one of the main reasons he was so enthusiastic about supporting Rouses: He wished he could have been there, he said.

But after hearing that Donald Rouse, Sr. had apologized on WBOK, Griffon couldn’t conceal his contempt and disgust. On Jan. 25, he ridiculed Rouse for several minutes, questioning his manhood and calling him “gutless.” “I owe the people of the state an apology, especially the people who traveled to Rouses Meat Market,” Griffon said, presumably referring to the meat counter at Rouses Market.

“By the way, he threw us under the bus for saying ‘I was there and I had a mask on and people were making fun of me ’cause I was wearing a mask,'” Griffon said. “Well, you probably looked stupid, and you sure showed how stupid you are for coming out saying you apologize for something you didn’t do wrong.”

Years ago, when the Chairman of the Louisiana Republican Party, Roger Villere, issued a statement calling for Republican congressman Vance McAllister to resign after a leaked video showed him kissing a staffer who was clearly not his wife, I published a satirical press release, worded almost identically to Villere’s statement on McAllister, that claimed Villere was also now asking for Republican Sen. David Vitter’s resignation as well. Griffon must’ve read only the headline of the piece, because the next morning, he began his show with an unhinged rant calling for Villere’s resignation.

I mention this only to suggest that a man who is so easily triggered by an obviously satirical press release probably shouldn’t be lecturing anyone on how stupid they look.

Coming soon: Part Two: The General and the Captain.

An Insurrection Born on the Bayou

By
Lamar White, Jr.
-

Ochlocracy

NOUN: government by the mob; mob rule. ORIGIN: Fr ochlocratie < Gr ochlokratia < ochlos, a mob, populace + -kratia, -cracy.

In the immediate hours after Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested inside of the Texas Theater in Dallas, the FBI began knocking on doors in Louisiana. Dealey Plaza is 508 miles away from Jackson Square, but agents knew that the man suspected of killing the president had been born and partly raised in New Orleans.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s mugshot. Colorized by Lamar White, Jr. | Bayou Brief

After spending a few years away, Oswald returned to the city in the late spring of 1963, living there for five months before winding up back in Dallas. He’d even managed to get himself arrested in August for disturbing the peace following a physical altercation with Carlos Bringuie, an anti-Castro activist, in front of the Ward Discount House at the intersection of Canal and St. Charles. A week later, he had appeared on a pair of local radio shows, first in a segment on WDSU’s “Latin Listening Post,” and four days later, for a live debate on the station’s “Conversation Carte Blanche.”

So when the rest of the world learned the name of the suspected assassin for the first time, there were plenty of people in New Orleans already familiar with the 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a conspiracy theory about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that doesn’t at least make a pit stop in the Crescent City.

****

Four days after the November election, when The Advocate reported on a “Stop the Steal” protest of around 200 people earlier that day at the steps of the state Capitol in Baton Rouge, the paper, I thought, had missed the real story. The night before, I’d read a tweet from Ali Alexander, who I knew as the Baton Rouge-based political operative Ali Akbar, announcing that someone else would be serving as his proxy at the Baton Rouge protest. Ali sent his regrets; he’d be at a similar protest in Austin, alongside Alex Jones of Infowars infamy. These weren’t the first post-election protests organized by Ali. He had also claimed credit for putting together an armed protest outside of a vote-counting center in Maricopa County, Arizona on Nov. 5.

The nation now knows Ali as the chief organizer of the “March to Save America,” the pro-Trump protest on Jan. 6 that devolved into a violent insurrection that resulted in five deaths, including the horrific murder of a Capitol Police officer, caused extensive property damage, and left more than 60 officers injured. These weren’t protestors hoping to persuade lawmakers to vote against seating electors for the president’s opponent, even if they lacked the authority to do so; these were domestic terrorists who came prepared for battle, hoping to kidnap and kill those who stood in the way of a second term for the defeated demagogue, including the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, a man who had spent the past four years carefully avoiding even accidentally breaking the fragile ego of a volatile and vindictive Commander-in-Chief.

Trump is directly responsible for inciting a violent mob to do his bidding. His ambivalence about calling in the National Guard wasn’t because he didn’t understand the situation; it was because he thought, for much longer than a passing second, that the mob of his supporters may actually win. By the time he was finally pressured into ordering his battalion to retreat, he hardly sounded like someone outraged by the attack on the Citadel of American democracy. “We love you,” he told the marauders. “You’re very special.”

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Like Trump, Ali vehemently denies inciting violence, but as someone who followed his online antics for several years and who both publicly and privately expressed concern about his descent into extremism, the events of Jan. 6 seemed tragically inevitable. Ali routinely broadcasted his associations with well-known white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, QAnon zealots, and militia leaders. As Media Matters has extensively documented, he frequently used “violent rhetoric to rile up his followers to action” in advance of Jan 6, “(telling) right-wing media audiences that they should be afraid because their enemies want to enslave them, put them in ‘gulags,’ or ‘kill’ them (and offering) purported solutions, telling followers that they have ‘to punch the left in the nose,’ ‘do brave acts,’ ‘fight’ and ‘have vengeance if we have traitors.’” This is nothing new, though. What’s infuriating is how nearly all of this was right out in the open.

Source: Twitter @onesecondname

While Ali told me back in November that the protests in Baton Rouge and Austin and as many as a dozen other state capitals that day had come together in only 23 hours, there was plenty of evidence that he had been planning the events for at least two months, well before the election. He said he intended, eventually, to stage protests in the capitals of all 50 states, something the FBI is now warning state officials to prepare for on Jan. 20.

“(It is) impossible not to be alarmed and deeply concerned by the very real chance that Ali endangers himself and others with his reckless hyperbole,” I warned at the time, noting that he had recently started wearing a bulletproof vest when he appeared in public.

Theater of the Absurd: How A Louisiana Extremist Helped the Trump Campaign Manufacture Outrage

Not long after my profile of Ali appeared online, he texted me. “I didn’t know the piece was about me,” he wrote. “That hit piece was so thorough and spicy. I hope your readers enjoy! I’m not really doing much media while organizing. Exclusive!”

Despite his claims to the contrary, Ali had been spending practically all of his time on building up his media presence; he just preferred broadcasting his message on his own online platforms. But it wasn’t as if he was difficult to find. He was particularly prolific on Twitter, where he had a following of over 170,000 people, often sending out hundreds of tweets in a single day. It was sometimes difficult to discern when, if ever, he caught up on sleep.

On Nov. 14, a week after the first round of “Stop the Steal” protests, standing alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene, the newly-elected Georgia congresswoman and QAnon enthusiast, and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, on the stage of a rally in support of President Donald Trump in Washington D.C., Ali had an ominous warning for those watching. “We’re going to terrify this town,” he roared.

Ali’s inflammatory rhetoric online had earned him an army of intense and delusional followers. He worked closely with other right-wing provocateurs, most notably James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, who visited him in Louisiana on at least two occasions, and he boasted about his access to Steve Bannon, who he first met in 2014, and Roger Stone, who created the first “Stop the Steal” campaign in advance of the 2016 election.

Former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Ali Alexander in 2014. During his years as a political operative in Louisiana, Alexander worked closely with the Republican establishment.

On Facebook, he shared dozens of photos of him standing beside powerful politicians, including Sen. Ted Cruz, who was linked to Ali through his personal account, and Donald Trump himself. Ali claimed that he’d spent 45 minutes alone with Trump in December of 2014 after the future president grilled Rob Maness, a Louisiana Senate candidate seeking Trump’s endorsement during the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. Trump, he said, remarked on Ali’s uncanny resemblance to Sammy Davis, Jr., and years later, when they saw one another again at a social media summit Trump hosted at the White House, the president greeted him warmly. “Sammy Davis, Jr.!” Trump exclaimed.

“Sammy Davis Hitler,” Stephen Colbert recently joked.

A person familiar with Trump’s visit to New Orleans in 2014 disputes Ali’s characterization of the encounter. “He was never with Trump alone,“ the person told me. “I was with him and a handful of staff (and others) the whole time. When Rob Maness sought Trump’s support and Trump yelled at him, there was probably 15 other people in the room.”

Today, Ali is reportedly in hiding, and it is important to note that he has not yet been charged with any specific crime (he watched the insurrection from the rooftop of a building across the street). Ali also claims that he planned the “March to Save America” with three Republican members of Congress, Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama and Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona. Brooks and Biggs deny they had any role in organizing the event, but Gosar, a dentist originally from Wyoming who recently breezed into a sixth term after winning nearly 70% of the vote against Democrat Delina DiSanto, left his fingerprints everywhere, tagging Ali in dozens of tweets during the past three months.

From left to right: U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, Elbert Guillory, and Ali Alexander in 2014. Cassidy’s campaign against Mary Landrieu benefitted from the attack ads launched against Landrieu by Black Conservatives Fund, a PAC founded and led by Alexander and funded by billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer. On Jan. 6, Cassidy was the only Republican member of Louisiana’s federal delegation who opposed Trump’s efforts to unseat electors for Joe Biden and was the first Republican official in Louisiana to publicly recognize Biden’s victory.

In the aftermath of the insurrection on Jan. 6, Ali has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and he’s now prevented from raising money through Venmo and PayPal. The man whose presidency he had been trying to save is also in the midst of a remarkably swift and long overdue reckoning: Impeached for the second time, banished from Twitter, Facebook, and a number of other social media platforms, cut off by Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank, and denied the second biggest prize of his career. The 2022 PGA Open Championship will no longer be held at the Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The fallout has only just begun, and we are certain to learn much more about Ali and those who collaborated with him in organizing the march that turned into a violent mob.

When I wrote about Ali in November, I largely focused on his connections to Louisiana. Although he is a native of Fort Worth and is currently in the Dallas metroplex, Ali had been living in Louisiana for at least five of the past six years, renting a small home in Baton Rouge’s Garden District. During the past week, as the national media has dug into Ali’s background and his associations, I’ve also been able to piece together some of what I’d missed before.

Ali first arrived in Louisiana in late 2014, presenting himself as a “senior advisor” for a new PAC, Black Conservatives Fund. The truth, however, is that Ali effectively ran the whole operation. Indeed, when Twitter permanently suspended Ali’s account, it also banned the PAC’s account, which was controlled by Ali, as well. After receiving $155,000 from Robert Mercer, the billionaire hedge fund manager who was the principal investor in the now-defunct data mining company Cambridge Analytica and whose daughter Rebekah co-founded Parler, the conservative social media network, Black Conservatives Fund announced it was launching its first-ever “state chapter” in Louisiana.

From left to right: Ali Alexander, T.W.Shannon, Sarah Palin, and Ted Cruz in April of 2014.

I had previously reported that the PAC, at least here in Louisiana, appeared to be nothing more than a proxy for state Sen. Elbert Guillory, a Black Republican from Opelousas who would later run unsuccessful campaigns for Lieutenant Governor and the U.S. Senate, but after taking a more thorough look at its FEC filings, I realize Guillory merely fostered that perception after the PAC launched an attack ad against Sen. Mary Landrieu that used a deceptively-edited and secretly-recorded video clip of Guillory’s arch-nemesis, Opelousas Mayor Don Cravins, Sr.

On the night before the 2014 jungle primary, Cravins, whose son was then serving as Landrieu’s chief of staff, mocked Landrieu’s Republican opponent Bill Cassidy for attempting to scare voters by claiming Landrieu voted with President Obama “97% of the time.” While Black Conservatives Fund did contribute around $3,500 to Guillory’s own PAC, Free at Last, it was involved in other elections, including, most notably, Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Ali’s name does not appear anywhere in the PAC’s filings. Instead, the PAC only lists its treasurer, Patrick Krason, who also just so happens to be the treasurer of Stop the Steal, in its statement of organization, which was filed on March 31, 2014. Its largest beneficiary was Active Engagement, a political fundraising agency led by Richard Norman. But there was at least one sizable expenditure made out to Vice & Victory, the consulting company under which Ali conducted business.

An itemized list of payments from Jay Dardenne’s 2015 gubernatorial campaign to Vice & Victory, Ali Alexander’s consultancy.

All told, Ali earned more than $60,000 from the PAC, in payments that were typically itemized simply as “Direct Voter Contact.” Incidentally, Vice & Victory was also the company Ali used when he worked as the Digital Director for then-Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne’s 2015 gubernatorial campaign.

There’s one aspect of Ali’s political career in Louisiana that I neglected to mention in my previous reporting. After Dardenne, a decidedly moderate Republican whose politics are markedly different than the man he hired to run his campaign’s online operation, finished in fourth place in the 2015 Louisiana governor’s race, Ali began searching for his next act. He figured that it was a forgone conclusion that John Bel Edwards, the Democrat, would win a runoff election against Republican David Vitter. That meant the next battle would be over the speakership in the state House. Traditionally, the House deferred to the governor’s selected candidate for Speaker, but Ali saw an opportunity to create some disruption.

With the help of a $25,000 contribution from controversial Lafayette real estate developer Glenn Stewart, Ali launched Louisiana Victory Fund.

He quickly managed to gain access to an email database of more than 60,000 Louisiana Republicans, and in the run-up to the election for Speaker, which had been seen as favoring Edwards’ preferred candidate, Democrat Walt Leger of New Orleans, Ali sent a series of urgent warnings, purposely designed to instill anxiety and worry, asking people to contact their representatives and pressure them to vote against Leger. The gambit worked, though it’s worth noting that Leger’s loss to Republican Taylor Barras of New Iberia is also partially attributable to Democrat Neil Abramson’s quixotic decision to enter the contest. Ali would later collect more than $7,500 from the PAC, which effectively dissolved after the Speaker’s race, according to reports filed with the Louisiana Ethics Administration.

****

If there is any silver lining to Ali’s Louisiana connections, it is this: In September of 2015, while still working for Jay Dardenne’s gubernatorial campaign, Ali managed to acquire the Twitter handle @louisiana. I mentioned this in my previous story. It was my understanding that he had been gifted the lucrative online real estate through his connections with Twitter executives.

Keep in mind this actual headline of an actual story from only two years ago:

Years ago, when I first launched the Bayou Brief, I tried my damndest to convince him to hand over the keys, but I got the impression that he either wanted more money than I could or would be willing to pay or that he liked the idea of holding onto the account, just in case he ever had the opportunity to put it to use. (It’s been dormant since 2017).

I’ve already called attention to Ali’s control over @louisiana to Jack Dorsey and company, but as of this writing, the account is still online. To be clear, I don’t have much use for the account today. In my opinion, its highest and best use would be as property of the State of Louisiana, which would also be fitting. There’s a good chance the government will be looking to collect a few more things from him as well.

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