Ohio Pastor Opens Church To Homeless. Gets Arrested. So much of what’s wrong with our state of affairs wrapped up in one story:
While our society leaves far too many out in the cold, Rev. Chris Avell of Dad’s Place in tiny Bryan, Ohio in 53 miles southwest of Toledo finds himself in legal hot water.
The pastor’s supposed crime: taking in the homeless.
Avell is accused of violating the law when he opened the doors to his church 24 hours a day for those who need a place to escape the elements.
That he was arraigned Jan. 11— Avell plead not guilty — on 18 zoning violations speaks volumes about adhering to policies even when doing so is utterly ridiculous and harmful.
It speaks even more about our collective neglect of the needy. That very thing was on my mind as I laid warm in my bed thinking about the case as temperatures outside dropped below freezing on a recent night.
I thought about those struggling to find safe housing in Columbus when I read the inhumane rationale from Bryan city officials for the charges against Avell: the city’s engineer received complaints about people living in the church which in zoned for business, a designation that prohibits residential usage on the first floor.
Because cruelty is the point,
WHY WON’T THE MEDIA REPORT ON TRUMP’S COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENTS? Oh, sure, we get the occasional report on his slip-ups, but a man who can barely pass (if he passed) a test to determine dementia is unfit to be President. An example:
“No one ever reports the crowds, you know. By the way, they never report the crowd on Jan. 6, you know. Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley. Do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything. Deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things. Like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people.”
OK, one more:
“I think it was 35, 30 questions,” the former president said in Portsmouth, N.H., of the test, which he said involved a few animal identification queries. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that — a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ Okay. And that goes on for three or four [questions] and then it gets harder and harder and harder.”
The only problem: The creator of the test in question, called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, said it has never included the specific combination of animals described by Trump in any of its versions over the years.
In fact, Ziad Nasreddine, the Canadian neurologist who invented the test, said the assessment — intended primarily to test for signs of dementia or other cognitive decline — has never once included a drawing of a whale.
I have a question: Why is he subjected to so many tests measuring cognitive decline if his doctors don’t suspect he’s in cognitive decline?
Debunking Debanking. Trying to make sense of Trump’s garbled take on the latest MAGAt theory making the rounds:
Observers have been saying for a while now that once Trump had to start appearing in public, his apparent cognitive decline would surprise those who haven’t been paying attention.
That certainly seemed to be true on Wednesday, January 17, when he told a New Hampshire audience: “We’re…going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you from your—you know, your political beliefs, what they do. They want to debank you, and we’re going to debank—think of this. They want to take away your rights. They want to take away your country. The things they’re doing. All electric cars.”
His statement looks like word salad if you’re not steeped in MAGA world, but there are two stories behind Trump’s torrent of words. The first is that Trump always blurts out whatever is uppermost in his mind, suggesting he is worried by the fact that large banks will no longer lend to him.
The second story behind his statement, though, is much larger than Trump.
Since 2023, right-wing organizations, backed by Republican state attorneys general, have argued that banks are discriminating against them on religious and political grounds. In March 2023, JPMorgan Chase closed an account opened by the National Committee for Religious Freedom after the organization did not provide information the bank needed to comply with regulatory requirements. Immediately, Republican officials claimed religious discrimination and demanded the bank explain its position on issues important to the right wing. JPMorgan Chase denied discrimination, noting that it serves 50,000 accounts with religious affiliations and saying, “We have never and would never exit a client relationship due to their political or religious affiliation.”
But the attack on banks stuck among MAGA Republicans, especially as other financial platforms like PayPal, Venmo, and GoFundMe have declined to accept business from right-wing figures who spout hate speech, thus cutting off their ability to raise money from their followers.
The attempt to create distrust of large financial institutions is part of a larger attempt to destabilize the institutions of democracy. Trump is the figurehead for that attempt, but it is larger than him, and it will outlast him.
What do you want to talk about?