One of the benefits of our whole federal system, at least in theory, is that it provides some insulation from bad government. If your state is being run into the ground by incompetent politicians, then you can just move to another state. And if a local politician is doing a terrible job, then at least he’s not wrecking the rest of the country. The damage is contained.
That’s the idea, anyway. And there are about a million reasons why that’s not true anymore. Exhibit A is the series of ongoing and deeply embarrassing disasters that are unfolding at the moment in Atlanta, Georgia and its surrounding metro area. There’s no other way to say this: Because the principles of federalism are no longer really operative, Atlanta’s dysfunction poses a direct threat to the entire country. You can’t get away from it simply by fleeing the state of Georgia. It’s all encompassing.
We’re now all very familiar with the catastrophe that is Fulton County, Georgia’s attempt to prosecute Donald Trump on RICO charges. The lead prosecutor, Fani Willis, saw the trial as an opportunity to promote her boyfriend and shower him with taxpayer money, then she apparently lied about it to the court. She also tried to play the sassy woman when she testified about this conflict of interest, which somehow managed to lower public confidence in her office even further. That’s all well-documented.
On top of that, just this week, former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler asked why Fulton County officials are reportedly attempting to destroy 2020 election ballots before they can be inspected. This comes after the Georgia Election Board voted to reprimand Fulton County — and appoint an independent poll monitor for the upcoming election — because of irregularities in the way the county counted ballots in 2020.
That decision came after testimony like this, where it emerged that hundreds of thousands of “ballot images” are apparently missing in Georgia:
Again, this might be mildly amusing if the impact of all this incompetence were confined to Georgia. But it’s not. Counting ballots affects national politics. Jailing a presidential candidate affects national politics. So the infestation of incompetent morons in the government of the state of Georgia is, unfortunately, a concern of everyone living in this country. Somehow, the most inept people imaginable are running things in Georgia. It’s important to figure out how exactly that happened, so we can stop it from getting even worse, if that’s even possible at this point.
That brings me to the very curious case of a woman who — until recently — was the highest paid judge in Douglas County: a Democrat by the name of Christina Peterson. Peterson was making somewhere north of $100,000 a year, according to some reports. She became a probate judge in Douglas County, which is right next to Fulton County, back in 2020 after winning a contested primary and running unopposed in a general election. To be clear, Peterson wasn’t handling the most high-stakes cases in Atlanta. She dealt with things like marriage licenses.
But even so — you’d hope that a relatively highly paid judge in a metro area like Atlanta would be well-qualified, professional, and competent. At the very least, you might think she’d have some capacity to control herself in public. But last week, it became clear to everyone that Peterson lacks every single one of those characteristics. She apparently got into a fight outside a nightclub and hit a police officer, and it was all recorded on the officer’s body camera. Watch:
Try to imagine arriving here in a time machine from 30 years ago and watching that video. You would assume that the woman in the video is an unemployed welfare recipient. When you found out that this is the kind of person who becomes a judge in the year 2024, you would be shocked. And then you’d get back in your time machine, go back to your own time, and do everything in your power to warn the public about the cursed future you’re heading into. But nobody would believe you. The sad reality is that voters in Douglas County picked this candidate as the best one in a competitive primary. And then, throughout her several years in office, no one decided she was unqualified in any way.
That all finally changed this week, when the Supreme Court of Georgia removed Christina Peterson from the bench. But they didn’t remove her because she hit a police officer in that body camera footage. They removed her because of more than four dozen ethics complaints that, in the words of the court, demonstrated her “flagrant disregard for the law, court rules, and judicial conduct rules.”
And this is quite a rap sheet we’re talking about here. The most egregious incident took place in August 2021. I’m going to describe it in some detail, because it’s actually hard to believe that such a low-level judge would engage in such obvious, flagrant misconduct. And the fact that this woman did engage in this conduct — and held onto her job for several years — tells us a lot about how the “justice system” works in Atlanta, and nationwide.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
According to the Georgia Supreme Court, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Thailand filed a petition to amend her marriage-license application. She wanted to correct the name she had listed as her father’s name on the form. Basically, five years earlier, she had originally listed her uncle’s name because her father wasn’t involved in her life at the time. And now she wanted to fix that, because “she was completing emigration documents for her mother and believed she should correct the application so that it would not be inconsistent with her birth certificate.” To support this application, this petitioner “attached a copy of her birth certificate, which had been translated from Thai into English.” There was even a note on the copy that it was a translation, as opposed to an official document.
Hearing all of this, you might conclude that this is not exactly the court case of the century. But in response to this filing, Christina Peterson went to war. She wasn’t going to let this marriage-license application (from five years ago) get amended without a fight. So she summoned this woman to her court. She didn’t advise her of her right to have a lawyer or anything. She just demanded that this woman show up. And when the woman showed up, Christina Peterson told her that the copy of the birth certificate was, “fictitious,” “fraudulent,” and “forged.” She declared that the petitioner was in “blatant disregard for the laws of the State of Georgia” and sentenced her to the maximum possible punishment for contempt — 20 days in jail. This is a criminal offense. But, in the alternative, the judge allowed this petitioner the option of serving two days in jail and paying a $500 fine. That’s ultimately what the woman had to do. She couldn’t alert her children or arrange childcare services or anything. She just went straight to jail.
Anyway, the ethics panel in Georgia looked into this. They concluded that nothing Christina Peterson did made any sense. They said that the judge “predetermined” that the petitioner committed criminal contempt; “issued the notice of the hearing without informing the petitioner that the criminal contempt matter would be adjudicated; ambushed the petitioner at the hearing by alleging that she had committed a crime; summarily found the petitioner guilty and sentenced her; and then lied about her actions in her testimony before the Panel.”
There are a bunch of other violations in addition to this one. For instance, the panel found that the judge let a wedding party into the courthouse “without ensuring that the party underwent security screening by sheriff’s deputies.” And then she tried to cover it up. According to the Georgia Supreme Court, she, “falsely testified that after the division commander [of the courthouse] told her not to take the wedding party into the courthouse, the sheriff overrode that directive and granted her permission to enter the courthouse to perform the wedding ceremony.”
There was another incident in which a sheriff’s deputy who was supposed to escort the judge to the courtroom in May of 2021 didn’t get there on time. So the judge “pushed the panic button under her desk,” which is reserved for emergencies. Then the police swarmed into her office and she pretended to not understand what the panic button was for. And there are dozens of other instances like this.
They’re all comical examples of the most petty corruption imaginable — seemingly just for the sake of being petty and corrupt. It’s not even clear how this judge would personally gain from any of these abuses of power. Even the smallest amount of power can go to a person’s head, after all. I once worked for an assistant manager at a pizza restaurant whose 16 dollar an hour management position had turned him into a power mad tyrant. And now we have a lot of those kinds of people wearing judges robes, working in congress, etc.
This whole story tells us something about how easy it is for useless and corrupt halfwits to infest local governments — which matters for the rest of the country, as I outlined earlier. And incidents like this aren’t confined to Georgia.
A couple of years ago in Ohio, a judge named Tracie Hunter had to be dragged out of court after her conviction on corruption charges was upheld. Watch:
Tracie Hunter was another elected judge. In fact, she was the first woman judge *and* the first black judge ever to serve on Hamilton County’s Juvenile Court. She broke two glass ceilings at once, only to end up like this.
But don’t get too sentimental, because there’s a lot more where that came from. In fact, just this week, there was another unceremonious fall for yet another pathbreaking black civil servant. I’m talking of course about Jamaal Bowman, who famously pretended not to understand how fire alarms work so that he could delay a House vote. Bowman just lost his primary, as you might have heard. According to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wrote a teary-eyed tweet to mark the occasion, Bowman was, “Elected as the 1st Black Congressman for NY-16.”
Now, that’s not true, as it turns out. New York’s 16th Congressional District has had several other black representatives in its history. But more to the point, this was how Bowman and AOC tried to turn out the vote at a rally just before Bowman’s election defeat. This was a rally that wasn’t even in his district, by the way. Watch:
Watching that, you can understand why the school that Bowman “led” for a decade is doing about as well as LeBron James’ school. They have reading and math proficiency scores hovering below 30%. In any event, AOC and Bowman are prancing around like they see themselves as superstars. And fortunately for them, those videos are shot at a pretty close angle. But if you take a few steps back, this is what the rally actually looked like:
Hard to believe this rally crowd didn’t propel Jamaal Bowman to victory
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) June 26, 2024
No one’s even there. It’s a completely dead rally. And indeed, the reason no one was there is that Jamaal Bowman is very unpopular. But somehow, instead of making any effort to win over voters, both Bowman and AOC decided that the best course of action was just to run around on stage and scream.
At the local level, all over the country, we are ruled by people like this. These are people who make a mockery out of politics and the judicial system. They have no regard for any of it. They don’t even realize how absurd they look to everyone else because they’re not capable of shame. And yet somehow, at one point or another, all of these people I’ve mentioned managed to win competitive elections. And they’ve parlayed those wins, in some cases, into national influence. That’s why fleeing their jurisdictions isn’t enough anymore. Instead we must mock them at every opportunity and point out their corruption whenever possible. That worked, to an extent, with Jamaal Bowman. Now there’s a lot more imbeciles who need to meet the same fate.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
One of the benefits of our whole federal system, at least in theory, is that it provides some insulation from bad government. If your state is being run into the ground by incompetent politicians, then you can just move to another state. And if a local politician is doing a terrible job, then at least he’s not wrecking the rest of the country. The damage is contained.
That’s the idea, anyway. And there are about a million reasons why that’s not true anymore. Exhibit A is the series of ongoing and deeply embarrassing disasters that are unfolding at the moment in Atlanta, Georgia and its surrounding metro area. There’s no other way to say this: Because the principles of federalism are no longer really operative, Atlanta’s dysfunction poses a direct threat to the entire country. You can’t get away from it simply by fleeing the state of Georgia. It’s all encompassing.
We’re now all very familiar with the catastrophe that is Fulton County, Georgia’s attempt to prosecute Donald Trump on RICO charges. The lead prosecutor, Fani Willis, saw the trial as an opportunity to promote her boyfriend and shower him with taxpayer money, then she apparently lied about it to the court. She also tried to play the sassy woman when she testified about this conflict of interest, which somehow managed to lower public confidence in her office even further. That’s all well-documented.
On top of that, just this week, former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler asked why Fulton County officials are reportedly attempting to destroy 2020 election ballots before they can be inspected. This comes after the Georgia Election Board voted to reprimand Fulton County — and appoint an independent poll monitor for the upcoming election — because of irregularities in the way the county counted ballots in 2020.
That decision came after testimony like this, where it emerged that hundreds of thousands of “ballot images” are apparently missing in Georgia:
Again, this might be mildly amusing if the impact of all this incompetence were confined to Georgia. But it’s not. Counting ballots affects national politics. Jailing a presidential candidate affects national politics. So the infestation of incompetent morons in the government of the state of Georgia is, unfortunately, a concern of everyone living in this country. Somehow, the most inept people imaginable are running things in Georgia. It’s important to figure out how exactly that happened, so we can stop it from getting even worse, if that’s even possible at this point.
That brings me to the very curious case of a woman who — until recently — was the highest paid judge in Douglas County: a Democrat by the name of Christina Peterson. Peterson was making somewhere north of $100,000 a year, according to some reports. She became a probate judge in Douglas County, which is right next to Fulton County, back in 2020 after winning a contested primary and running unopposed in a general election. To be clear, Peterson wasn’t handling the most high-stakes cases in Atlanta. She dealt with things like marriage licenses.
But even so — you’d hope that a relatively highly paid judge in a metro area like Atlanta would be well-qualified, professional, and competent. At the very least, you might think she’d have some capacity to control herself in public. But last week, it became clear to everyone that Peterson lacks every single one of those characteristics. She apparently got into a fight outside a nightclub and hit a police officer, and it was all recorded on the officer’s body camera. Watch:
Try to imagine arriving here in a time machine from 30 years ago and watching that video. You would assume that the woman in the video is an unemployed welfare recipient. When you found out that this is the kind of person who becomes a judge in the year 2024, you would be shocked. And then you’d get back in your time machine, go back to your own time, and do everything in your power to warn the public about the cursed future you’re heading into. But nobody would believe you. The sad reality is that voters in Douglas County picked this candidate as the best one in a competitive primary. And then, throughout her several years in office, no one decided she was unqualified in any way.
That all finally changed this week, when the Supreme Court of Georgia removed Christina Peterson from the bench. But they didn’t remove her because she hit a police officer in that body camera footage. They removed her because of more than four dozen ethics complaints that, in the words of the court, demonstrated her “flagrant disregard for the law, court rules, and judicial conduct rules.”
And this is quite a rap sheet we’re talking about here. The most egregious incident took place in August 2021. I’m going to describe it in some detail, because it’s actually hard to believe that such a low-level judge would engage in such obvious, flagrant misconduct. And the fact that this woman did engage in this conduct — and held onto her job for several years — tells us a lot about how the “justice system” works in Atlanta, and nationwide.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
According to the Georgia Supreme Court, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Thailand filed a petition to amend her marriage-license application. She wanted to correct the name she had listed as her father’s name on the form. Basically, five years earlier, she had originally listed her uncle’s name because her father wasn’t involved in her life at the time. And now she wanted to fix that, because “she was completing emigration documents for her mother and believed she should correct the application so that it would not be inconsistent with her birth certificate.” To support this application, this petitioner “attached a copy of her birth certificate, which had been translated from Thai into English.” There was even a note on the copy that it was a translation, as opposed to an official document.
Hearing all of this, you might conclude that this is not exactly the court case of the century. But in response to this filing, Christina Peterson went to war. She wasn’t going to let this marriage-license application (from five years ago) get amended without a fight. So she summoned this woman to her court. She didn’t advise her of her right to have a lawyer or anything. She just demanded that this woman show up. And when the woman showed up, Christina Peterson told her that the copy of the birth certificate was, “fictitious,” “fraudulent,” and “forged.” She declared that the petitioner was in “blatant disregard for the laws of the State of Georgia” and sentenced her to the maximum possible punishment for contempt — 20 days in jail. This is a criminal offense. But, in the alternative, the judge allowed this petitioner the option of serving two days in jail and paying a $500 fine. That’s ultimately what the woman had to do. She couldn’t alert her children or arrange childcare services or anything. She just went straight to jail.
Anyway, the ethics panel in Georgia looked into this. They concluded that nothing Christina Peterson did made any sense. They said that the judge “predetermined” that the petitioner committed criminal contempt; “issued the notice of the hearing without informing the petitioner that the criminal contempt matter would be adjudicated; ambushed the petitioner at the hearing by alleging that she had committed a crime; summarily found the petitioner guilty and sentenced her; and then lied about her actions in her testimony before the Panel.”
There are a bunch of other violations in addition to this one. For instance, the panel found that the judge let a wedding party into the courthouse “without ensuring that the party underwent security screening by sheriff’s deputies.” And then she tried to cover it up. According to the Georgia Supreme Court, she, “falsely testified that after the division commander [of the courthouse] told her not to take the wedding party into the courthouse, the sheriff overrode that directive and granted her permission to enter the courthouse to perform the wedding ceremony.”
There was another incident in which a sheriff’s deputy who was supposed to escort the judge to the courtroom in May of 2021 didn’t get there on time. So the judge “pushed the panic button under her desk,” which is reserved for emergencies. Then the police swarmed into her office and she pretended to not understand what the panic button was for. And there are dozens of other instances like this.
They’re all comical examples of the most petty corruption imaginable — seemingly just for the sake of being petty and corrupt. It’s not even clear how this judge would personally gain from any of these abuses of power. Even the smallest amount of power can go to a person’s head, after all. I once worked for an assistant manager at a pizza restaurant whose 16 dollar an hour management position had turned him into a power mad tyrant. And now we have a lot of those kinds of people wearing judges robes, working in congress, etc.
This whole story tells us something about how easy it is for useless and corrupt halfwits to infest local governments — which matters for the rest of the country, as I outlined earlier. And incidents like this aren’t confined to Georgia.
A couple of years ago in Ohio, a judge named Tracie Hunter had to be dragged out of court after her conviction on corruption charges was upheld. Watch:
Tracie Hunter was another elected judge. In fact, she was the first woman judge *and* the first black judge ever to serve on Hamilton County’s Juvenile Court. She broke two glass ceilings at once, only to end up like this.
But don’t get too sentimental, because there’s a lot more where that came from. In fact, just this week, there was another unceremonious fall for yet another pathbreaking black civil servant. I’m talking of course about Jamaal Bowman, who famously pretended not to understand how fire alarms work so that he could delay a House vote. Bowman just lost his primary, as you might have heard. According to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wrote a teary-eyed tweet to mark the occasion, Bowman was, “Elected as the 1st Black Congressman for NY-16.”
Now, that’s not true, as it turns out. New York’s 16th Congressional District has had several other black representatives in its history. But more to the point, this was how Bowman and AOC tried to turn out the vote at a rally just before Bowman’s election defeat. This was a rally that wasn’t even in his district, by the way. Watch:
Watching that, you can understand why the school that Bowman “led” for a decade is doing about as well as LeBron James’ school. They have reading and math proficiency scores hovering below 30%. In any event, AOC and Bowman are prancing around like they see themselves as superstars. And fortunately for them, those videos are shot at a pretty close angle. But if you take a few steps back, this is what the rally actually looked like:
Hard to believe this rally crowd didn’t propel Jamaal Bowman to victory
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) June 26, 2024
No one’s even there. It’s a completely dead rally. And indeed, the reason no one was there is that Jamaal Bowman is very unpopular. But somehow, instead of making any effort to win over voters, both Bowman and AOC decided that the best course of action was just to run around on stage and scream.
At the local level, all over the country, we are ruled by people like this. These are people who make a mockery out of politics and the judicial system. They have no regard for any of it. They don’t even realize how absurd they look to everyone else because they’re not capable of shame. And yet somehow, at one point or another, all of these people I’ve mentioned managed to win competitive elections. And they’ve parlayed those wins, in some cases, into national influence. That’s why fleeing their jurisdictions isn’t enough anymore. Instead we must mock them at every opportunity and point out their corruption whenever possible. That worked, to an extent, with Jamaal Bowman. Now there’s a lot more imbeciles who need to meet the same fate.
“}]]
