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Ted Bundy's crimes were described by the judge presiding over his trial as "extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile," a phrase that was later adopted by a movie about the serial killer starring Zac Efron.

However, the same judge also delivered a lesser publicized set of words that many still find profoundly troubling today.

"Extremely wicked, shockingly vile, and evil" only goes a short way to capture Bundy's atrocities. He exploited the fact that he was handsome and charismatic to win the trust of his umpteen victims, all young, beautiful girls, before knocking them unconscious and taking them to secluded locations to rape and kill them.

He was so brazen that he would openly approach his victims, often in broad daylight, by feigning injury or disability, and even impersonating an authority figure. Once he had them in his control, he would promise to release them if they didn't kick up a fuss, only to later kill them in cold blood.

He would sometimes revisit his secondary crime scenes, grooming and performing sexual acts with the corpses until decomposition and destruction made any further interactions impossible. He also decapitated at least 12 of his victims and kept some of their severed heads as trophies.

So, as one can imagine, when he was finally caught a third time in February 1978 his first two incarcerations in Colorado saw him engineer dramatic escapes and then commit further assaults in Florida after the horrific Chi Omega murders and his last victim 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, women across the country breathed a sigh of relief.

His highly publicized trial was covered by 250 reporters from five continents and was the first-ever to be televised nationally in the United States, something Bundy took glee in and saw as an opportunity to further promote his cult of personality.

Despite having four court-appointed attorneys on his side, Bundy routinely ignored their advice and took the defense into his hands, promptly making the trial into a sort of spectacle where he could show off the lawyer he always thought he could be.

However, his case was always doomed. Eyewitness testimony and a plethora of physical evidence meant the jury took less than seven hours to convict him of two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted first-degree murder, two counts of burglary and recommended the death penalty.

Imposing the death sentence, Trial judge Edward Cowart delivered the words that have now almost been immortalized in pop culture.

"The court finds that both of these killings were indeed heinous, atrocious and cruel," he told Bundy. "And that they were extremely wicked, shockingly evil, vile and the product of a design to inflict a high degree of pain and utter indifference to human life."

However, his comments following that, as Bundy prepared to leave the courtroom, left many flabbergasted because it felt as though Cowart was almost sympathizing with the serial killer.

"Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely," he said. "I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity, I think, as I've experienced in this courtroom."

"You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. I don't feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Take care of yourself."

Amazon Studios' 'Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer,' which premiered on January 31, criticized Cowart's handling of the case, with many taking issue with his kind words to a man who was responsible for the deaths of at least 30 women.

Reporters who were at the trial swear that they distinctly and categorically remember Cowart's words to Bundy after he was sentenced to death because of how taken aback they were by it.

"That he would say that to him with no concern for what these women actually experienced, it's almost like a homage to him," said Jane Caputi, a feminist scholar. "And that's a scary, scary thing."

'Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer' has attempted to reframe Bundy's crimes from a female perspective, including those of his longtime girlfriend and her daughter, and highlighted how his psychological hatred of women seemingly collided with the feminist movement and culture wars of the 70s.

The docuseries can be streamed on Amazon Prime.

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Ted Bundy was so charming that even the judge who gave him death sentence complimented him - MEAWW

U.S. Attorney General William Barr clapped back at leftwing hysteria over his support of the First Amendment Tuesday in an interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan on Sirius XM.

I feel today religion is being driven out of the marketplace of ideas and theres a organized militant secular effort to drive religion out of our lives, Barr told Dolan. To me the problem today is not that religious people are trying to impose their views on nonreligious people, its the opposite its that militant secularists are trying to impose their values on religious people and theyre not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith.

Since developing similar ideas in depth in several public talks, Barr has been the subject of a series of hit pieces in publications including The New York Times and The New Yorker. Its not just his full-throated defense of the natural right to obey ones conscience above ones government that gets their goat. Barrs concern for the rule of law, fair play, and due process especially about Russian collusion and impeachment have also brought out the knives.

A particularly unhinged and error-riddled 10,000-word New Yorker article by David Rohde may have made one accurate assessment: Barr is the most feared, criticized, and effective member of Trumps Cabinet. There is certainly some relationship between the lefts fear and the rights effectiveness, and thus the neutering attempts. As Sohrab Amari noted, Barr has been ridiculously labeled an extremist Catholic associated with a secretive, ultra-orthodox Catholic sect.

Of course, the point of flak like this is to polarize the target and thus make him ineffective through clouds of mistrust. A parallel effort has been underway much longer against the nations first freedom: the duty to obey God before men. Thus in her own attack article against Barr last month in The New York Times, Katherine Stewart put the words religious liberty and religious freedom in scare quotes, even though these are longstanding natural rights that enjoy U.S. legal protection for very good reasons that include staunching bigotry. The ignorant scare quotes are becoming common in even outlets that style themselves objective news sources.

[I]t is illuminating to review how Mr. Barr has directed his Justice Department on matters concerning the First Amendment clause forbidding the establishment of a state religion, Stewart writes:

In Maryland, the department rushed to defend taxpayer funding for a religious school that says same-sex marriage is wrong. In Maine, it is defending parents suing over a state law that bans religious schools from obtaining taxpayer funding to promote their own sectarian doctrines.

In these and other cases, Mr. Barr has embraced wholesale the religious liberty rhetoric of todays Christian nationalist movement. When religious nationalists invoke religious freedom, it is typically code for religious privilege. The freedom they have in mind is the freedom of people of certain conservative and authoritarian varieties of religion to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power.

Stewart makes an error of omission in her description of the First Amendment. The clause concerning religion reads, in full: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. A full quotation undoes her conclusion that the Constitution prohibits religious people from equal access to public funds. That is not only historically and legally inaccurate, its obviously textually inaccurate from any unbiased persons plain reading.

In other words, shes doing exactly what Barr says shes doing, while pretending that she is not. Stewart is making a secular effort to drive religion out of our lives and trying to impose her values on religious people while not accommodating the freedom of religion of people of faith. Her values say that only pagans people with atheist, pantheist, syncretist, or agnostic religious beliefs may fully access public goods. People with theistic religious beliefs may not. This is not equality or tolerance it is prejudice.

Mr. Barrs constitutional interpretation is simply window dressing on his commitment to religious authoritarianism, writes Stewart, smugly. No, maam: Your constitutional interpretation is simply window dressing on your commitment to religious authoritarianism. Barr acknowledges himself not free to do whatever he wants i.s. be an authoritarian by binding himself to a religion that checks his worst impulses and dictates the right way to treat other people, which includes respecting their sometimes very differing consciences.

The secularists Stewart represents just refuse to acknowledge that their religious beliefs are in fact religious beliefs, and of a far creepier and deadlier kind than Christians. What is, for example, the belief that human beings can have the female mind embedded in a male body, if not a religious belief? In a materialistic religious view, how is it even possible to have a gendered mind? Is gender solely a product of chemicals? If not, what else could it be for people who do not admit to a nonmaterial realm?

Further, what is more cultish than forcing people to believe through social pressure, law, and other means that a man is a woman is a man is a woman? What is more totalitarian than to force people to pretend that males and females are interchangeable inside the relationship whose major function in society is to spend half a livetime cultivating happy, competent citizens starting at conception?

Or what is, for another example, the belief that it is possible to fix the world by applying government pressure? That is not a belief that can be wholly validated by research or experience. In fact, research and experience both indicate that central planning usually makes life even more nasty, brutish, and short.

So what is this unfounded, undocumented, unprovable faith in government power to correct human psyches and behavior if not a religious (metaphysical) belief? It is also an unprovable and metaphysical belief about what a human is a thing that can be corrected by politics and whose error is not intrinsic to itself. Again, these are all metaphysical, religious beliefs with no empirical basis or possibility of being fully empirically proven.

It is quite simply a lie to say that atheism is not a religious belief. It cannot be empirically documented that there is no God. For one thing, nobody has visited the outermost reaches of the universe in an attempt to find Him, assuming that is a way He could be found. It is simply an assumption, a religious assumption, that an atheist makes.

And thats fine. Christians arent the ones who have a problem with people making religious assumptions. The secular, pagan, atheist types are the ones who claim religious assumptions are evil. They do so because they erroneously believe they are free from such assumptions. But in truth, no one is.

It has been long convenient for secularists to insist that it is possible for government to be neutral about religion by imposing their religion on everyone. But this is a falsehood, and its falsity is ever more obvious in todays culture wars, which are increasingly divided according to whether one believes in a deity and, by extension, an objective standard outside oneself or not. The culture war is in fact a religious war between relativism and orthodoxy, between the belief that truth is subjective and the belief that truth is objective, knowable, independent of ones opinions about it, and merits reverence.

This is very clear when one reads the attacks on Barr or on any orthodox position or person. Barr is just a representative of the half of America that believes in natural rights, in a written Constitution that restrains the government, and a God whose universe is explicable, orderly, and undergirds the whole shebang. Those who embrace a living Constitution, on the contrary, despise external rules, order, and anything else that might work to limit their passions, which they sometimes style politics. These are the two polar opposite metaphysical positions that drive our culture clash.

Far worse than the rule of law is the rule of the powerful over the weak. Far worse than the law of God are the so-called laws of men. On one side is freedom. On the other is totalitarianism. It is no irony that the real totalitarians project the label their position deserves onto opponents as a smear.

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Barr: The People Trying To 'Impose Their Values' Are 'Militant Secularists' - The Federalist

A participant lies on a giant Transgender Pride Flag during the Equality March, organized by the LGBT community in Kiev, Ukraine June 23, 2019. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

South Dakotas House State Affairs Committee voted 85 yesterday to consider a bill the Vulnerable Child Protection Act that would make it a misdemeanor for doctors to chemically or surgically interfere with a gender-confused childs sexual development. The bill which can be read here will drop on the House floor Monday.

The Washington Posts report on the decision would give the impression that this is nothing more than the usual culture wars nonsense, a Here-We-Go-Again of bigoted conservatives versus progressives and professionals. Representative Fred Deutsch (R.), the bills co-sponsor, has framed the bill as homegrown but said he consulted with conservative groups such as the Liberty Counsel and the Kelsey Coalition as he was drafting it, the Post reporters wrote, inaccurately. Indeed, the Kelsey Coalitions website clearly indicates that they are a non-partisan, unfunded, volunteer-run organization with a singular mission to promote policies and laws to protect young people who identify as transgender. The Post has since corrected this, though they have not as of this writing acknowledged the error.

Later on, the Post reporters home in on Deutschs seemingly suspicious emotional state:

During the debate, Deutschs voice became extremely shaky as he said, Come on, can you wait till youre 16? Think about what you knew when you were that age.

Its lawmakers role to interject. We need to be the adult in the room, he said.

While contrasting this with the dispassionate presence of the people in lab coats:

House Minority Leader Jamie Smith (D) retorted that doctors and parents were already involved in decisions about gender transitioning, saying, Is it possible there are other adults in the room?

At the hearing, about 24 people in white lab coats wore pins that read, Every child counts, and said they were opposed to the bill. Representatives from the South Dakota State Medical Association and Sanford Health testified that the bill goes against best practices.

Later, the Post reporters conclude that the debate mirrored the nations culture wars, with Republican and Democratic lawmakers disputing not just medical facts, but also morality, parenting and the role of doctors in American life, before giving the final word to a mother of a child who has transitioned her child, and who says the bill is just designed to create more divide.

However, Jane Wheeler, a lesbian lawyer, and president of Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics (ReIME), a diverse group of multi-specialist clinicians and interdisciplinary scholars in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, endocrinology, sociology and the law, told me by email that no one is interested in culture wars except for lobby organizations,

There are groups now with real medical and ethical concerns about puberty blockers. These groups like Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics, The Kelsey Coalition, 4thWaveNow, GCCAN, Gender Health Query and SEGM are not radical feminist groups, religious or right-wing. The public has a right to know they exist, what they are saying and why.

There is a genuine conversation about media strategy to be had among those who oppose the medicalization of gender-confused children. Obviously, the broader the coalition the better. This means involving transgender adults, gays and lesbians, political liberals, doctors, scientists, formerly transgender teenagers (also known as detransitioners) and communicating the left-liberal resistance movements victories in the United Kingdom, which will help to discredit the tediously glib and inaccurate Republicans pounce narrative.

The South Dakota bill may or may not pass. But in any case, those who gave evidence signaled the beginning of a commonsense and, crucially, victim-led movement. One can only hope that more and more hearings like this will occur across the United States, creating a public record which, one way or another, will force the media to seriously engage.

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No WaPo, the South Dakota Transgender Bill Is Not about the Culture Wars - National Review

Conservatives and culture warriors in Brazil have expressed delight after one of the countrys most celebrated research institutes announced plans to host a Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan week later this year.

But critics view the event as yet another attempt by the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro to impose conservative and Christian influences on the countrys top academic and cultural institutions.

In May, the Rui Barbosa House Foundation a research centre that receives government funding will host a string of exhibitions and lectures about the rightwing 1980s icons.

Letcia Dornelles, a former journalist and telenovela writer, who was chosen to head the foundation in October last year, said the events will provide an overview of Thatcher and Reagans influences on current conservative world leaders.

Thatcher and Reagan are idols of many Brazilians and current politicians, she said.

The initiative is in partnership with Brazils foreign office, which has swung to the right under Bolsonaro, forming close ties with conservative leaders such Donald Trump and Victor Orbn. The foreign minister, Ernesto Arajo who believes climate change is a Marxist plot will participate.

Admiration for Thatcher and Reagan runs deep within the Bolsonaro government.

In a speech in the White House gardens last year, Bolsonaro quoted Reagan and said he was a great admirer of the former president and B-movie star.

The economy minister, Paulo Guedes, trained in free market fundamentals at the Chicago School of Economics the seedbed for Reagan and Thatchers economic policies and worked at the University of Chile during Augusto Pinochets dictatorship in the 1980s.

In an interview with the Financial Times last year, he described Chiles neoliberal reforms as a wonderful transformation, and added: Thatcher, Reagan, they understood that.

Bolsonaros politician sons meanwhile have been photographed with Thatcher and Reagan memorabilia such as T-shirts, coffee mugs and model figures.

Charles Gomes, a legal scholar and senior researcher with a focus on migration at Rui Barbosa House, cast doubt on the Thatcher and Reagan weeks academic value.

The event isnt based on anyones academic work, it appears to be pure propaganda, he said.

Critics have accused Bolsonaros government of ideological interference in several sectors often to their detriment from arts and education to foreign and indigenous policy.

Bolsonaros son Carlos was one of the first public figures to show support for Thatcher and Reagan week, along with former volleyball player turned conservative activist Ana Paula Henkel.

The former culture secretary Roberto Alvim also publicly endorsed the event before he was fired earlier this month after paraphrasing the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Regina Duarte, an actress best known for her roles in Brazilian telenovelas and her outspoken opposition to Brazils leftist Workers party, is tipped to takeover.

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Thatcher and Reagan week is latest skirmish in Bolsonaro's culture wars - The Guardian

Theres a good chance you have an opinion on the Star Wars sequel trilogy, or the prequel trilogy. You may favor one, hate another. Enjoyed The Last Jedi but hated The Rise of Skywalker. Maybe you love one and hate the other. Maybe you wish Colin Trevorrows leaked script was real.

Fans of the Star Wars universe remain heavily divided, experts say. In fact, there are several different factions to explain fans opinions on the film. There are Last Jedi fans who hate Rise of Skywalker. But there are also J.J. Abrams loyalists who love The Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker but dislike The Last Jedi. Some hate the sequel trilogy in totality. Some only like the original trilogy or the prequel trilogy.

And each faction is starting to try to claim that they have the right way of interpreting Star Wars and that seems to be part of where the problems coming in, along with more reactionary, both progressive and conservative approaches to the content as well, which is becoming evident across our lives these days, said CarrieLynn Reinhard, an associate professor for Dominican University.

This Star Wars divide comes at a time of high political divide in the United States, too. The political polarization of 2020 doesnt help the Star Wars fandom division, either, said Ashley Hinck, an assistant professor for the communication department at Xavier University.

I would say, yes, there are lots of factions in Star Wars fandom, and that there are lots of factions in our politics right now. And that can make it hard to find common ground that can make it hard to create, to do kind of collective action as a group as a community, Hinck said.

Fandom, after all, is a community. Star Wars fans are a community. Marvel fans are a community. Name a product out there and theres a group to celebrate it.

So what causes fans to turn their backs? What causes fans to create polarization and divide? And can creators do anything to stop it?

Behind Star Wars toxic fandom

Theres a disturbance in the force. Many believe the first three Star Wars movies are the best. Now theres a divide between the prequel and sequel series.

Fans fight online over their opinions. Think pieces flourish. Twitter threads sprawl. Nothing is calm. People say the film is terrible when really it just wasnt for them. Or maybe they call it a masterpiece, even though they really just liked it. Words like hate, garbage and trash linger as fans attack each other.

Star Wars fandom can be super fun and super awesome, but it can also have these really toxic corners, said Hinck. And I think most fans in the Star Wars fandom recognize that and know how to navigate that and kind of warn newcomers about that. So like anything, there are positive and maybe negative challenges.

Jim Jones and A. Ron Hubbard, hosts of the movie and television podcast Bald Move, commented on the divisions in a recent episode reviewing The Rise of Skywalker. They said in an interview with the Deseret News that the breakdown is complicated.

One factor, Jones said, was diversity. Some fans havent supported the recent films because of the way they flipped the script on what makes a Star Wars film.

Thats probably a lot of why Star Wars fandom is kind of being torn apart is because youve got some Star Wars fans that grew up and they are for inclusion and diversity and then Star Wars fans that have kind of gotten on board and, you know ... kind of have chips on their shoulders about all this. So its not just whether this is a good or bad Star Wars, Hubbard said. Its like ... Why do we have a black Stormtrooper falling in love with an Asian woman and a female Jedi?

But Star Wars has so much content, some of which has been universally praised. The Disney Plus series The Mandalorian seems to unite the fans. Baby Yoda is everywhere in pop culture. The Clone Wars animated show has a 92% fan rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Star Wars Rebels similarly has positive reviews with a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and an 82% from the audience.

Theres still something that unites our fans, Hinck said. Theres still some kind of common love of Star Wars. Its just a question of how thats captured in things like The Mandalorian.

The Mandalorian has the qualities of the original trilogy that connect people together, Hinck said. Even in a time of toxicity, its a connector between fandoms.

Hubbard of Bald Move agreed, comparing The Mandalorian to a star quarterback and the sequel trilogy of the Skywalker Saga to a losing team.

Hubbard said The Mandalorian is a really exciting personality on the team that gets a lot of good locker room quotes or generates a lot of positive community feeling because theyve donated a lot of money to the childrens hospital.

He added: You got a 4-12 football team but the star quarterback is really charismatic and a good guy and gives good quotes. That is The Mandalorian. The Mandalorian is a bright spot in an otherwise losing season. And thats why people are really clinging to.

Understanding what works for The Mandalorian may help Star Wars in the future. The show hits on nostalgia and references plenty of easter eggs. It reminds fans of a time when Star Wars wasnt so divisive.

For recent Star Wars projects, many fans thought there was some kind of departure from the original trilogy, Hinck said. And a heavy portion of the fan community sees that as an unbreakable rule.

Theres some kind of violation of something that fans value, she said.

Hinck said fans have values within their community. Fans turn when companies disrespect those values.

Can you kill a fandom?

That said, its hard to totally end a fan base, no matter how bad the content is.

With the hardcore fan bases ... its really hard to kill it dead, Hubbard said.

Jones, his podcast co-host, said the same.

If you love Batman, if you love Superman, if you love Aquaman, where do you go to service that in a cinematic form? You have to go to the movies, and if these are characters you love, youre going to go see those movies, whether theyre good or bad, he said.

He added, Theres always the hope that the next one will be better. Even if youve been disappointed five times in a row which I have with DC theres always the hope that this character I love, when they come back ... theyll hit on the right formula that will satisfy me and all the other fans.

Hubbard agreed: Even if this isnt like the Batman I wanted, its a shard of a Batman that someone has affection for. And they can cling to that, you know?

Fans have enough lore and examples of content to fall back on. You may see a Batman on screen that was, at some point, seen in the comics. So its hard to totally hate on a product because it has existed before.

Theres almost no flavor of Batman that the public has wholly just spat out of its mouth. And thats just the general public, let alone the hardcore fan base, Hubbard said.

A sign of the culture wars?

The divide over Rise of Skywalker isnt isolated. It exists in other fandoms. And the constant divide could be related to the culture wars.

In Avengers: Endgame, there is a scene where the female Marvel heroes gather in formation. They battle together to bring the Infinity Gauntlet across the battlefield. Some fans celebrated the moment. Others said it was pandering.

The battle scene and the divide it caused between fans may be a reflection of the culture wars, according to the Bald Move podcast hosts.

Its like everything else in our culture right now, Hubbard said. People count whos winning and whos losing along those lines. Thats a bummer too.

The moment was a tally mark in the culture war, Hubbard said. I mean thats pretty dumb but thats where were at right now where like no one can win. If someone wins, someone else has to lose.

Finding a solution

Toxic fandom has played out on her Twitter feed in the wake of Rise of Skywalker, according to Reinhold, the professor. Shes seen people argue with each other over what they like and what they hate. She still sees it even weeks after the release of Rise of Skywalker.

But she sees a solution: understand how youre interacting with someone and move on.

Sometimes it is best to not engage with someone whos just not listening to you and is just yelling at you, and not to place the blame for such action necessarily on that as if it was a trait of them, but look at it as a situational asset, she said.

Reconsider how youre talking to someone. Understand what youre saying to someone. Only then can you better yourself, she said.

So maybe theres something happening at that time at that place, online or in social media, thats causing problems. And, hey, maybe Ill try again another time to talk about these things, she said.

Theres a lot of different approaches that we can take to work on this. And the reason why I think its important to do all of that is because the same processes and actions that we see happening in these fandoms are the same that we see happening with interreligious strife or political polarization disagreements, things like that.

So the really positive thing is, I think, if you can work on it in one of these areas, I think you can get better in the other areas as well.

But we cant discount fans. Fans are going to get riled up over major changes or disagreements.

And nerd culture those who enjoy science fiction flicks and comic books is a source of fandom. Star Wars fans react the way Patriots fans react to a pick six from Tom Brady. Or how Los Angeles Lakers fans react to a bad play from LeBron James.

Nerd culture is like any other fandom, Hubbard said. Think about the intensity of the rivals in sports culture. ... This is nothing new. When your team has a bad year, when Star Wars has a bad year, youre going to talk about how heads should roll. The complaints dont really stop until you start winning again.

Youre talking about what alien and or what superhero or what, you know, fictional character is out on top and its almost exactly the same phenomenon.

Its fandom. It is short for fanatic. Sometimes we forget that, but theres a lot of truth to it.

Correction: This article previously attributed Jim Jones quotes to Aaron Hubbard and Hubbards quotes to Jones. The names have been swapped back.

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Is Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker reception part of culture war? - Deseret News