Should GOP crime be legal? Executive Editor Grady Judd owes me a meeting to discuss
Should GOP crime be legal? Executive Editor Grady Judd owes me a meeting to discuss
The sheriff met with the CCDF about jailing librarians. So I want a meeting about the CCDF, whose candidates claim they committed multiple crimes after hiring a criminal campaign manager.
This is a local Election Day take, aimed at local readers. But again, you might want to follow along if you’re not from here. Polk County Florida Sheriff Grady Judd is a quasi-famous character and his collapse into crime-excusing absurdity and raw vanity is interesting and important, as is the way law enforcement actions have replaced news reporting.
Elected sheriffs and prosecutors are the executive editors of the new press landscape — in Florida and elsewhere. That’s an important lesson of recent election cycles and life in the post-local newspaper era.
Law enforcement organizations have their own media shops; and their investigations and arrests and press conferences generally dictate what understaffed traditional media shows the public. That means law enforcement leaders dictate the course of public narrative and elections.
Law enforcement leaders, especially those who are elected, decide which corruption and crime gets acknowledged in a community — and, more importantly, which gets excused or ignored.
Any productive, law-abiding, idealistic, open-minded person who cares about protecting public spaces and fighting corruption today should not waste time pressuring media. Media has no real power. You need to pressure and confront your law enforcement leaders, especially the elected ones. Because in Florida, most likely, they are deeply, deeply, deeply biased against you.
That’s certainly the case in Polk County, where showboating Polk Sheriff Judd and weak State Attorney Brian Haas have shown themselves to have a deep, unshakeable right-wing crank bias.
How deep? They’ve effectively legalized and normalized open election crime (including a felony) and freely associating with arch criminals during this election season. Full background below.
And here:
They are the reason — despite my best efforts — that a large portion of Polk County will go the polls today not knowing that one candidate in the always low information School Board race, Jill Sessions, is objectively pro-criminal and defrauding churches.
Judd and Haas have failed completely as civic leaders and have surrendered any responsibility for providing basic civic guardrails. For all his faults, Haas’ predecessor as state attorney, Jerry Hill, took the civic guardrail role seriously. And he provided a clear precedent for Judd and Haas to follow in this situation, which they have ignored. You can be assured they would not have ignored it if I was in Jill Sessions’ place, which I would never be because I’m not a gross grifter who would hire a criminal.
That’s bias far more powerful than anything media does.
This political corruption of local law enforcement leadership is Polk County’s most far-reaching local election story ever, in my opinion. Any half-assed, post-election, band-aid action won’t change that corruption an iota.
Judd and Haas got Jill Sessions and Ron DeSantis to the election in Polk without having to address and account for the criminality they paid for and/or endorsed. That was obviously their goal. Congratulations.
The sheriff of criminals and book banners; not your sheriff
If you’re a right wing crank backed by Ron DeSantis or Steve Maxwell, you can commit any election crime you want (probably any crime at all) — or hire any criminal you want to get you close to our children — and Grady Judd will stay meek and quiet as church mouse.
But try to read a book that represents gay kids positively or writes viscerally about slavery … then you’re Grady Judd’s enemy.
That is how much Grady Judd hates the “libs” (who are just normal, open-minded people, regardless of party) in his county — how much he hates you. Grady Judd will choose self-confessed criminality and its supporters over you. (I don’t think Brian Haas is a true lib hater; but he’s afraid of Grady and DeSantis. In some ways, that makes him worse.)
You must understand that reality about Judd if you’re a normal open-minded, non-crank Polk County parent who likes to read — or have your children read. It’s not hyperbole. If you don’t think Grady Judd hates you and everything you value and wants to dominate you and your children, just read this recent letter to a constituent disgusted by his behavior.
And then note how much the CCDF “representatives” Grady met with treated him like the armed media/executive editor/political operative figure he is. Give the CCDFers credit for understanding him with a low-level predator’s cunning — and then working him quite successfully.
A lot to unpack in that, isn’t there? We’ll come back to it in a follow-up article, including:
His claim to protect children while giving a complete Rick Nolte’s gross, creepy love of “T.I.T.S. that needed to be more developed” and his 11 self-declared crimes, including a felony.
His laughably incorrect, vainglorious political analysis.
Taking crime’s side against crime victims makes Judd/Haas the CCDF’s biggest campaign contributors, by far
But for now, let’s be clear: Grady Judd did not endorse Kay Fields for School Board, despite what he may have quietly let her put on her campaign mailers or material.
Rampant criminality has swarmed all the CCDF campaigns since June. That’s when the CCDF brought arch-criminal James Dunn (convicted felon, church-cheater, six shady PPP loans) here to run the campaigns for Fields’ opponent Terry Clark and for his fellow crank Jill Sessions. (Here’s a top 10 list of CCDF-adjacent criminality in these School Board races that doesn’t even cover it all).
No criminal or criminal-adjacent CCDFer could have survived the summer without the full moral and legal public protection of Judd and Haas. Full stop.
By refusing to do their jobs morally or legally according to clear Polk County precedent, Judd and Haas gave massive, unofficial in-kind donations to the CCDF. They enabled and legitimized the menagerie of cranks and criminals and developing “T.I.T.S.” lovers trying to take over and grift your School Board and kids and tax money.
Keeping them alive as a slate through moral and legal (so far) protection from what’s in plain sight is an endorsement worth hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars — millions, maybe. That’s because legitimizing an openly criminal approach to politics and civic power is priceless, Grady and Brian.
Angry old white guy claims black woman’s victory. Bad people want to beat good people. Film at 11.
Nothing Grady Judd passive-aggressively did for Kay Fields remotely compares to the massive, open-ended campaign service Judd and Haas performed for her opponent, Terry Clark, and the other CCDF crank candidates.
And yet, Kay beat Grady — and his crank protection — all the same.
Perhaps it’s time to understand that Kay Fields is just very good at winning School Board elections, as I know personally, having opposed her in 2018. You can consider that a good thing or a bad thing. (It’s complicated.) But it’s a thing. Angry, deteriorating old white men shouldn’t claim credit for black women’s victories.
It’s also extraordinary that Lisa Miller — good person, devoted mother, patriot, and great School Board member — has an excellent chance of winning today, considering how grotesquely Polk’s elected law enforcement has stacked the deck against her, against your children, and against decency in favor of the CCDF cranks and developing T.I.T.S. lovers.
Lisa is literally the victim of a campaign crime. Someone sent out illegal, unlabeled campaign texts openly libeling Lisa and her husband. Rather than aggressively, publicly denouncing and investigating this crime, Judd and Haas have sat by quietly and impotently.
They’ve decided to root against crime victims because … reasons?
On top of that, a few soulless corporations (including “Friends of Tampa General Hospital, WTF”) who let PAC grifter Anthony Pedicini think he’s important spent a bunch of their customers’ money on anti-Lisa Miller School Board lies, too. Word has it, gunsick Uvalde Man Neil Combee is the conduit for that. Neil and I will chat about that after the election.
The continued rise of the Lakeland/Polk County Decency Coalition
If you find all the gross effort directed at Lisa Miller strange; you shouldn’t. It’s a measure of how powerful our county’s growing movement for decency and development of children remains. Dirtbaggery cannot abide powerful decency. And the Decency Coalition is powerful (but not dominant or even a clear majority outside Lakeland yet) — and growing moreso.
Do you think the Lakeland mayor and primary results happened by accident? Nope.
Do you think my readership is growing by accident? Nope.
We’ve built slowly, methodically, and honestly because we have no other choice. We don’t have soulless corporations willing to fund lies and short cuts. Indeed, we oppose lying strongly. That’s a tactical handicap.
And we have no help (and often active opposition) from traditional power, economic development organizations, parties, or the compromised elected law enforcement leaders here, who often tolerate or engage in lying.
Yet, our decency coalition had great success in the Lakeland mayor’s election, smashing honorary CCDFer Saga Stevin, and again in the 2022 primary, as I’ve discussed. It had already delivered me and Sarah Fortney and Lisa Miller in 2016 and 2018 to try to save your local public education system from state (and local) grifters and bad leadership. (I’ll assess that progress in a later article; but the local leadership is much, much better than it was 2016. State leadership is much worse.)
When decency has success it demands the vile attention of the worst people, of the biggest, deepest-pocketed dirtbags in Florida, of the useless grifters like Pedicini and all the other Pedicinis (they are many and interchangeable) who think the public good and politics are just degenerate high school.
Fortunately, we can go toe-to-toe and trade blows with these dirtbags, who can never afford to lose. We can afford to lose, and do sometimes, because the problems we tackle and the decency we strive are hard and will always be there for us to pursue. That’s the advantage of not having to live life as Anthony Pedicini (or the 1000s of other Pedicinis lined up to take his place.) We can play a very different game.
So the decency blows will keep coming, dirtbags, whoever wins an obscure School Board election that you’ve decided to make important.
Dear lying, soft-on-crime Sheriff Judd: give me the same meeting you gave the CCDFers
Even all that law enforcement, corporate, and institutional support for the grifters and CCDF-affiliated criminality wasn’t enough support for Grady Judd.
As revealed in his constituent letter, the “sheriff” gave a meeting to a bunch of criminal-supporting CCDF book banners to discuss whether he should handcuff your sweet school librarian. Then he negotiated with these criminal-loving cranks in private, out of the Sunshine, to dictate what your child can read. Key excerpt from his letter:
I specifically met with CCDF representatives and rejected their desire for a criminal investigation [into Polk schools library books.] I told them it was best handled by the school superintendent. The representatives clearly told me they would stand down if parents had the decision-making authority over their children’s access to such material. Superintendent Heid and I agree to an Opt in/Opt Out policy that would take the political issue off the table before the School Board elections — they chose not to follow my advice.
Note the cowardice of doing all that in private — and how only the politics matters to this cheap politician.
Note also that the sheriff is lying.
He advocated for an Opt-In, to take away your child’s access to whatever book he and the CCDF grifters don’t like unless you give explicit parental permission. The School Board, by contrast chose an Opt-Out, giving the CCDF grifters the right to opt-out of a book they don’t like rather than keeping it from your child. There is no such thing as an “Opt in/Opt out” policy option. That’s a lie. It’s an either/or, not a both/and. The sheriff got mad about Opt-out and threw a hissy fit.
Now, imagine a different meeting, one with Billy Townsend. Unlike reading a book, giving yourself $5200 in a cash campaign contribution, as Rick Nolte says in writing, that he did, is literally a crime — a felony. I’d like to point this out to Grady in person.
And then imagine this Grady quote, written in an imaginary letter to a constituent, afterward:
I specifically met with Billy Townsend and rejected his desire for a criminal investigation into the 10 elections misdemeanors and one felony that School Board Member-elect Rick “T.I.T.S.” Nolte claims in writing to have committed. I rejected Billy’s request for investigation into how CCDF candidates came to hire arch-criminal campaign manager James Dunn and how criminal texts were used to lie about incumbent School Board Member Lisa Miller. I told Billy all of that was best handled by literally anybody but me because I hate Beloved and people who read it. Who does he think I am, sheriff? I mean, I’m just a cheap, uniformed flunkie of Jesus DeSantis. Jesus endorsed T.I.T.S. ; and I have kneel before that.
I don’t want a negotiation, sheriff. I want you to tell me to my face that GOP crime should be legal so I can quote you and provide clarity to your subjects.
I just want you to look me in the eye, as a “gentleman,” and tell me why you and Haas have ignored Rick Nolte’s self-declared felony. And I want to personally hand you a copy of Rick Nolte’s “T.I.T.S. needed to be more developed” manifesto and hear you tell me “I have spent a great deal of time protecting children from child predatory conduct.” So I can laugh in your face.
You’re not a real sheriff, sheriff.
You’re just a crime-coddling alt-right news editor failing to protect your “red county” from its 70 percent murder rate spike or the rampant criminality of the CCDFers with anything but “moon pie” jokes and book bans.
I want the same editorial meeting the CCDFers got so you can tell me exactly why you’re not going to cover the CCDFers — so I can quote it, as the alternative media in this community.
I’ll be emailing you and Scott and Carrie with meeting request. Please schedule it or tell me why I don’t get one, so I can quote that, too.
Notice that Judd thinks that his advice is vastly superior to that of the citizens who actually read the books and recommended their retention- advice that the school board took., thus satisfying school board policy. When did a sheriff become the boss of Everything and the superior elected official? Didn't see that change in the FL Constitution.
No such thing as election fraud. You're about to run afoul of the Democrat Party by insinuating that. Stop being an election denier.