Tea Party guy didn't buy minority complaints about justice system, but now that he's been in jail...

[Demovictory9]

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/21/kent-sorenson-was-a-tea-party-hero-then-he-lost-everything-220522


That feels like a life sentence ago. Sorenson has spent the last 10 months here at his second post, the minimum-security United States Penitentiary at Thomson (USP Thomson) in Thomson, Illinois, just over the border from his native Iowa and a four-hour drive from his home in the central part of the state. Today he’s getting out and going back—not home, exactly, but to a halfway house in Des Moines, where he’ll be able to look for work and enjoy long weekend furloughs with his wife, Shawnee, and their six children. As we wait in the parking lot for her husband to appear, the engine of their aging Toyota SUV straining to keep warm in the nine-degree chill, Shawnee tells me how brutal Kent’s incarceration had been on the kids. She is particularly worried about their two sons.

Shawnee takes the wheel instead, navigating toward Interstate-80 West, and her husband’s humor abruptly turns to melancholy. “I’m going to miss those men,” Sorenson says. It sounds trite, obligatory. And yet his eyes are moist. For the next 20 minutes, emotion chokes at his voice as he describes in detail the captive brotherhood forged with the sorts of criminals Sorenson would have once gladly banished from society without a second thought. Now he knows them, their struggles, their stories. There was Ricky, the self-described “pharmaceutical salesman” from Chicago who is doing 10 years for what should have been a petty drug crime—and whose son was shot during his imprisonment. There was Juan, who got suckered into entering a drug house by an undercover fed and was busted inside holding a stack of cash. And there was Chad, who became Sorenson’s best friend at USP Thomson, a Des Moines native who grew up in a meth house and is doing a 20-year stretch for a nonviolent drug crime he committed as a young man. Chad, who carries photos of his two children, ages 11 and 17, has already been locked up for nine years—and despite exemplary behavior and obvious rehabilitation, he won’t get out for at least another nine due to federal sentencing guidelines.


Sorenson emphasizes that he is not naïve. He understands that some people belong in prison, that not everyone’s story should be believed. But having spent the past year in two different institutions, learning about the lives of the inhabitants and the circumstances surrounding their detentions, he developed a burning animosity for the criminal justice system.

His melancholy soon turns to outrage. “There’s no rehabilitation happening in there. There’s no teaching, there’s no training,” he says. Worse, Sorenson adds, were the atrocious conditions: expired food, foul bathrooms, decrepit living quarters. Finally, there’s the underlying sickness plaguing the Bureau of Prisons, race relations—specifically, the entrenched, systemic approach of facilitating and fueling ethnic rivalries in service of the accepted notion that a divided community of inmates is incapable of uniting in the pursuit of a more humane environment.

This, at last, is when Sorenson’s outrage turns to guilt. It’s not that he could have done more from the inside; it’s that he should have done more from the outside, when he had the power, when he was a policymaker with authority and influence, before he became just another discarded member of society. Sorenson, the Republican state senator and Tea Party superstar with a clear path to Congress, had heard about disparities in sentencing. He had read about the statistical inequalities and crooked economics that are foundational to the American prison system. He had watched the demonstrators on television chanting about the devastation wreaked on the minority communities by mass incarceration. And he didn’t buy any of it. Sorenson was a conservative—not just any conservative, but a fiery, in-your-face ideologue who preached punitive justice and individual responsibility. He was a law-and-order dogmatist. And he was, if he’s being honest, “a little bit racist,” with no time for the “bullshit propaganda” being peddled by the likes of Black Lives Matter.

[tanyev]

1. Funny how many of them will believe the wildest conspiracy theories,

but won't believe things that are true until they personally experience it.

[hatrack]

2. Yeah, Kent - a little reality can really shift your opinions . . . .

[irisblue]

3. Until it affected me personally, it wasn't a real thing

Isn't that a descriptor of privilege?

[Hassin Bin Sober]

6. A descriptor off a republican

[denvine]

8. Bingo!

[NewJeffCT]

7. Yes

I believe it is.

I usually respond with the Venus Fly Trap explanation (from WKRP in Cincinnati) -

Have you ever been to Africa?

No

Then how do you know it's there?

[Perseus]

9. And that is the danger with the situation we are living with this administration

I know people from Venezuela who would said "It can't happen here", and it did, the same is happening in the USA, little by little everything gets turned the way of a very corrupt dictatorship, people don't see it coming so the doubt that "It CAN happen here", and then when it happens it is late because to fight against it is not easy.

Watch out for military support of the administration, when that happens you will know that it is very close to fully happening here. The administration will corrupt the military, at all levels, and anyone who thinks that the military cannot be corrupted has not read history. Anyone who thinks that because a politician has a flag on their lapel is a patriot is not fully watching their actions.

People need to wake up, safeguards for the coming election seem weak at best, the GOP will cheat, the Russians will help them cheat, and I don't see enough form Democrats to prevent any of it from happening. I am hoping that Democrats are in stealth mode, that they are doing a lot and not showing it to anyone to prevent the enemy from learning their security tactics, I hope that is what is happening.

[BumRushDaShow]

10. But it some cases it CAN and DOES affect them

and they STILL don't get it and STILL don't care. See Steve Scalise.

[mn9driver]

15. This happens over and over again with Republicans.

Until they are personally affected, they don’t give a shit. Then, all of a sudden it hits them personally and ONLY then do they get it.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

[wcast]

4. This paragraph highlights how politicians keep the masses in line.

"Sorenson was blindsided by the remark. Quizzing Hanson further, he discovered that the officer wasn’t just describing efforts to head off a physical confrontation with inmates, but also efforts to preemptively undermine any coordinated push for better conditions and better treatment. The biggest concern for prison officials, Sorenson began to realize, wasn’t riots or violence; it was the airing of dirty laundry, tales of neglect and suppression that could make their way to the public. What Hanson was saying, Sorenson recalls, is that by obsessing over petty beefs and turf wars, the prison’s warring racial tribes could not make a coherent, organized case for reform."

It works in both prison and the world at large.

[dalton99a]

5. +1

[flibbitygiblets]

11. +2

[Frequency Kenneth]

12. Old right-wing saying: "A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged"

To which the comeback is, "a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested!"

[Javaman]

13. the ills of society are never a problem for repukes until it happens to them, then it's SERIOUS nt

[catbyte]

14. It's good that the bagger saw the light, but it's just another example of "empathy-free

until it happens to me." I'm so sick of it.

[dlk]

16. There's Nothing Like an Actual Frame of Reference to Foster Understanding

[Demovictory9]

19. exactly

[SCantiGOP]

17. Great story

Well worth the 1/2 hour to read it.

[Hortensis]

18. This does illustrate hard-core RWers can have potential for decency

and enlightenment, compared to those without. It's been studied many times, and most really can be awakened and enraged by injustice when it's somehow brought home to them. Bad leaders have deliberately separated them so far from the truth that for many some kind of personal experience is required to break the hold these imposed beliefs and loyalties have on them.

These "most" are not to be confused, of course, with the intractable minority who'd interpret even extreme experiences to reinforce all their most dysfunctional beliefs, or have little effect once safe again. Likely a good majority of the residual 24% of registered voters who are still Republicans would be this type. Most are authoritarians and we're seeing how profoundly they commit to their leaders' beliefs.

[tblue37]

20. What is ironic is that he started running for office because he was enraged that the Democratic

Officeholders wouldn't stand against same sex marriage. Now he says he realizes it's none of his business, and if his religious faith is real, it won be threatened by same sex marriage. Since he considers his involvement in politics to be what ruined his life, that means that ultimately his opposition to same sex marriage was at least indirectly at the root of his ruined life.

[Hortensis]

21. Well, at least he understands ruin. So many others have been

corrupted and degraded from the people they could have been to what they are.

[Uncle Joe]

22. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread Demovictory.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

23. Kent Sorenson Was a Tea Party Hero. Then He Lost Everything.

This, by @TimAlberta, is simply spectacular work. Watch as imprisonment awakens a man to his common humanity with fellow inmates, and feel common humanity with him, even if his views are far removed from yours.

Link to tweet

Kent Sorenson Was a Tea Party Hero. Then He Lost Everything.

By TIM ALBERTA September 21, 2018