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Domestic violence is a shady sinner. Smiles on the outside hide the inner rage.

It can be a brilliant disguise, but the reveal is quite disturbing. It includes the battered faces of women and men, and of dogs and cats used as collateral damage, a cowards card of threatening the life of a pet if the victim leaves.

We can add Orlando City midfielder Will Johnson to the unsettling DV conversation, after his arrest on a domestic battery charge early Wednesday morning.

Johnson is accused by his wife Caroline Childs Johnson of tackling her and wrapping both of his arms completely around her waist during an argument. The couple can now add this incident to their pressing legal issues, which includes divorce.

The courts will decide Johnsons guilt or innocence, as the Social Media Mob gathers on both sides with pitchforks and computers in hand.

Fortunately, the vast majority of comments have focused on the current dumpster fire that is Orlando City, a team that now has more arrests (2) than victories (1) since June.

But Team Shaming is rare. Victim Shaming has been the go-to response when it comes to domestic violence. Youve heard it before: She deserved it you know, because she was a bad girl. Excuse me while I puke.

Weve seen it play out recently in the Ezekiel Elliott case, where Elliotts legal eagles are claiming that Tiffany Thompson harassed him, hacked into his email with the intent of sharing untruthful things to hurt his image and threatened to blackmail Elliott with sex tapes of the two of them.

Elliott, a star with the Dallas Cowboys. is fighting the NFLs six-game suspension through the courts, hoping to circumvent the NFLs punishment.

And that leads us to the conundrum with this issue. Professional leagues lose control in the courts, where there are more precise standards of justice.

But league officials in the NFL, MLS or elsewhere need not feel powerless.

There is always what you know, and what you can prove. If you are sure you have a domestic abuser on your roster, cut him (or her). Team owners need to stop using the legal system as cover to protect cowards who hit women.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has been particularly vile, enabling players like Greg Hardy and Elliott. Cincinnati Bengals owner Mike Brown has a corner of misfits in his locker room, including rookie Joe Mixon, who punched a woman in the face in college.

Well pause here for the reality check. Im not stupid enough to think this will happen anytime soon, but wouldnt it be a hoot if sports leagues starting developing a backbone against abusers?

The NFL could easily adopt a standard that holds teams more accountable for taking in a bad egg. If you draft a player linked to domestic violence or other serious crimes, it will cost you an additional draft pick. Put a premium of taking players with shady characters.

Already on your squad? Cut him loose. If a team picks him up off waivers, that team will lose draft picks as well.

The courts can adjudicate the legal standard of guilt or innocence, but should that make everyone else stupid? The prosecution calls O.J. Simpson, Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman to the stand, your honor.

I think we have to have a different definition of due process, said Carol Wick, former CEO of Harbor House, a domestic violence shelter in Central Florida. The league can their have own definition of violence involving conduct. As long as it is tied to the criminal justice system you are going to forever have a lack of accountability.

The Cowboys definitely have a problem with Elliott, who admits to a party-boy lifestyle, never a good look when you are trying to paint yourself as a victim.

Orlando City may have a problem with Johnson, who is under suspension by the MLS. But it does anyone no good if Johnson is allowed to slide through legal channels if there is strong suspicion that he is an abuser.

Do you want a domestic abuser to stain the brand?

Unfortunately when it comes to professional sports, we know the answer. Dont ask, dont tell, play on.

gdiaz@orlandosentinel.com; @georgediaz on Twitter

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Sports leagues often enable abusers by allowing courts to have final say - Orlando Sentinel

The controversy over President Trumps slow-motion shutdown of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative has spawned a surreal side debate over the age of the 800,000 participants protected by the program.

CNN And MSNBC Claim DACA-Recipients Are Children blares the headline of a story in the conservative Daily Caller.

Sure enough, in video clips from those networks featured on The Daily Caller website, cable-TV guests including former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa refer to the so-called Dreamers as these kids. In another clip, Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) calls them Americas children.

But The Daily Caller cant be fooled. It reports: While DACA recipients were illegally brought to the United States by their parents when they were children, the minimum age to apply for the program is 15 years old. In fact, the majority of the applicants were over the age of 20 based on 2014 data from the U.S. government. Some have estimated that the average age of Dreamers is 25 or 26 years old hardly children.

The Daily Caller isnt alone in uncovering this amazing secret. After telling reporters on Tuesday that he had great heart for these folks were talking about, President Trump made a point of noting that people think in terms of children but theyre really young adults.

My first reaction to this argument was that it was bizarre as well as irrelevant: Was the implication that it would be OK to deport the Dreamers because they are in their 20s (maybe with acne scars, nose rings or tattoos) rather than winsome preteens squeezing stuffed animals?

But Trump and the Daily Caller were clutching at a kernel of truth: Those who were describing the Dreamers as kids were consciously or unconsciously seeking to capitalize on the natural sympathy people have for children, which is rooted not only in the fact that kids are cute and photogenic but also in assumptions about childhood innocence.

Of course, the Dreamers will always be innocent of entering the country illegally; that decision was made for them by their parents when the Dreamers were children. Theyll retain that original innocence when theyre in a retirement home.

Still, as a rhetorical matter, the Dreamers champions probably believe that it helps the cause with at least some people (grandparents?) to describe them as kids or children not just at the time of their arrival in the United States but in the present.

Maybe that explains why former Vice President Joe Biden finessed the time factor in his tweet supporting the Dreamers. Brought by parents, these children had no choice in coming here, Biden said. Now they'll be sent to countries they've never known. Cruel. Not America.

This isnt the first situation in which the label of child has been deployed to make someone who didnt literally qualify seem more sympathetic. During his summation at the trial of George Zimmerman in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the prosecutor said: Was that child not in fear when he was running from that defendant? Isn't that every child's worst nightmare, to be followed on the way home in the dark?

Of course, when the defendant in a case is 17 years old, a prosecutor is more likely to refer to him as a youth or young man.

Actually, the fact that the Dreamers are now young adults arguably makes their situation more poignant because its a reminder of how long they have lived in the United States and how wrenching it would be for them to be uprooted and returned to homelands they may not even remember.

Still, its easy to see why the Dreamers defenders might want to refer to them as children. Whats hard to accept is the attempt to expose this innocuous rhetorical impulse as a fraud on an unsuspecting public.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook

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The bizarre debate over whether 'Dreamers' are kids or adults - Los Angeles Times

League of the South member explains the rally and their beliefs on Southern Heritage. Brittany Crocker/ USA Today Network - Tennessee

A rebel flag was torn up and thrown toward protesters but landed at the feet of a police officer in the street dividing the two groups during a rally in Ft. Sanders Saturday, Aug. 26, 2017.(Photo: Michael Patrick/News Sentinel)Buy Photo

One of the most visible white nationalists at the recent Fort Sanders Confederate monument demonstration was, until until a few years ago, active in communist organizations, the Occupy movement and protests against racism.

Garon Archer, a native of Johnson City, was the protester on Aug. 26 who repeatedly screamed, "The Southern nation is a white nation."

He said he came to last Saturdays demonstration to represent the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist group that has said it considers mainstream U.S. culture corrupt and is rebelling against the politically correct and multicultural diversity in the South.

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Two weeks earlier, Archer was visible in "Democracy Now!" footage of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Clad in a baseball helmet andholding a shield, he attacked a counter-protester. At a similar rally in New Orleans, he was recorded screaming racial slurs at a black woman.

But just a few years ago, Archer appeared in a 2012 YouTube video of an Occupy movement demonstration in Florida, protesting for the arrest of George Zimmerman, who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. In the video, Archer who was himself 17 at the time chants slogans against racism and burns a Confederate flag bandanna.

A few months later, he appeared in Tampa for a rally against the Republican National Convention.

The Tampa Bay Times describedthe young activist:

'Garon Archer is in town to protest the Republicans, but he admits he doesn't know the rules.The 17-year-old Happy Valley High School senior from Johnson City, Tenn., carries a red banner attached to a wooden flagpole to the Coalition to March on the RNC gathering Monday morning at Perry Harvey Park.The pole, it turns out, is too long.The police won't let him in.So he breaks the pole himself to make it fit the designated length."I came from Johnson City, Tenn.," says the teenager, "to say no to the Republican agenda."Someday, he says, he hopes to be a union organizer.'

Then, in early 2014, Archerpenned an article for a Communist Party USA newsletter, At the time,he was the Tennessee leader of another communist group, "Party of Communists USA."

"We are duty bound to provide a challenge to the far-right agenda, be it republicans or democrats who are fostering it," he wrote in the newsletter. "We must build a strong and independent communist party. A party capable of leading the working class into a new phase of struggle against the increasingly vicious far-right agenda."

Archer said it was his growing discontent with economic decline that pushed him from one side of the political spectrum to the other beginning in 2015.

"I broke out of that mold and embraced social conservatism and nationalism along with populism," he said.

The Southern people have a right to be the majority group in their own homeland, and measures must be taken to combat the demographic decline of indigenous Southerners, he said. Anything less is genocide.

Archer added that he doesn't consider Native Americans, whom he's proud whites "conquered," to be "indigenous southerners."

As a teenager in the Tri-Cities, Archer joined Occupy Johnson City with a passion for righting wrongs but seemed to display a penchant for violence that unnerved some other members of the group.

"He always wanted to talk about need for armed self-defense in a situation that didn't really call for it, said Dennis Prater, who was then an adjunct instructor at ETSU. He met Archer when whe was still in high school and they were in Occupy Johnson City together. "Around 2014, he started getting kind of obsessed with (Soviet revolutionary Joseph) Stalin and this North Korean ethnic separatist group. He was making a lot of ice-pick jokes, a reference to Soviet Marxist leader Leon Trotsky, who opposed Stalin and was assassinated with an ice ax at Stalins direction.

Another Occupy Johnson City member, Heidi Davis, said Archer ramped up his calls to incite violence shortly after the Trayvon Martin demonstration. It was around that time, she said, he began to pull away from the group.

Counter-protestors chant during a protest for the removal of a Confederate monument in Fort Sanders along 17th Street in Knoxville, Tennessee on Saturday, August 26, 2017.(Photo: Calvin Mattheis, Knoxville News Sentinel)

"We told him we wouldn't feed into it, she said. "We tried to talk to him about his actions and tried to curb him becoming radicalized, but it didn't work."

Archer eventually stopped coming to group meetings at all.

Occupy Johnson City members later learned Archer was running an Appalachian white nationalist web page. That eventually led him to the white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party and League of the South, which Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a Neo-Confederate hate group.

Archer's cousin Shannon said hes puzzled by his family member's newfound ideology.

"He's always been really into the government thing, Shannon Archer said. But this is erratic, like all of the sudden, so I don't know.

The white nationalists seem to be OK with him being violent," Davis said, "and we weren't. I don't think he actually cares about the politics he is spouting."

Nina Fefferman, an associate professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, has studied how social behaviors in grassroots organizations can make members susceptible to radicalization.

"It's not clear how each specific person would make that transition," she said, but studies suggest that when groups of people who support each other in increasingly radical beliefs are also being constantly confronted with an opposing viewpoint, the groups are more likely to become radical.

"You have kind of a perfect storm of escalating radicalization," Fefferman said.

Fefferman said that trying to convince an opposition group that its beliefs are wrong may be counterproductive.

The view on 17th Street in Fort Sanders 20 minutes before the demonstration began contained almost all counter protesters.(Photo: Rachel Ohm/News Sentinel)

"Theoretically, if both sides actually kind of left each other alone, you'd end up with societies that were utterly incapable of dealing with each other, but not exactly radicalized against each other," she said. "So, instead of arguing to change someone's mind, it is more beneficial to argue to say that the beliefs are not something that your society can tolerate.

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Outspoken East Tennessee white nationalist at Fort Sanders rally once active in Occupy, communist groups - Knoxville News Sentinel

A cover-up, did I hear someone say?

A game of passing the buck and obfuscation is going on in the controversy surrounding the severe beating with a steel pipe of Whitby teen Dafonte Miller by off-duty Toronto police officer Michael Theriault and his brother, Christian.

On August 16, at a press conference held at Queens Park by a coalition of community groups and activists,Millers lawyer, Julian Falconer, announced the filing of a formal complaint on behalf of his client with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD) alleging that Toronto and Durham police tried to conceal the attack.

The complaint alleges the police forces blindly accepted the brothers accounts of what happened and that Theriaults father, John, a detective with the Toronto Police Services Professional Standards unit, made the call not to contact the provinces Special Investigations Unit (SIU), the independent civilian agency that investigates serious incidents involving police.

I was part of the group at the press conference, which included Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, acting executive director of Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and Renu Mandhane, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, calling on the Attorney General to immediately implement recommendations made by Justice Michael Tulloch on police oversight to the province in March. Tullochs report recommends clarity around language related to notification of the SIU as well as the police duty to co-operate in SIU investigations. Three decades after the units creation following the shooting deaths of a number of Black men by Toronto police, were somehow still debating the issue.

The attack on Miller, which Falconer has described as gratuitous, brutal and unprovoked Miller will need to have an eye surgically removed was reported to the SIU by Falconer four months after the fact. And only then after charges laid against Miller after the incident were withdrawn by the Crown.

Theriault has since been charged with one count each of aggravated assault, assault with a weapon, and public mischief for his part in the beating and then (allegedly) lying about what happened to Durham police when they were called by Miller (and reportedly two other witnesses) to the scene.

Toronto Police chief Mark Saunders has decided to bring in the Waterloo Regional Police Service to conduct a review of Toronto polices handling of the incident and why the SIU wasnt called as per provincial protocol. The Toronto Police Services Board has chosen to hide behind Saunders's reviewrather than demand a public accounting by the chief.

Board chair Andy Pringle has claimed the decision to call in Waterloo police was based on the fact there were different versions of why the incident was not reported to the SIU.But its doubtful senior officers who may have had a hand in this scandal will be disciplined.

Some 15 officers of the Durham Regional Police Service attended the scene. A Toronto police officer was also reportedly present.Durham police claim that they informed the Toronto Police Service that it was their responsibility to notify the SIU.Whatever. The matter remained under wraps and Theriault carried on as a police officer as if nothing had happened.

No information has been forthcoming, for example, as to whether Professional Standards asked any questions, interviewed Theriault, put him on suspension or re-assigned him to administrative duties, pending an investigation.

What is known about the incident bears close resemblance to an act of vigilantism like what happened to Trayvon Martin in Sandford, Florida, on February 26, 2012, and sparked protests across the U.S.

Martin, a Black teenager on holidays, was walking down the street in an affluent, gated community where he was visiting relatives. George Zimmerman, the areas neighbourhood watch coordinator, became suspicious of this stranger and challenged him. He also called the local police.

But instead of waiting for police to arrive he tackled Martin and, in the struggle that followed, shot and killed the 17-year-old.Though Zimmerman was acquitted, the fact remains that a Black youth was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He paid with his life.

Miller was walking with friends in a neighbourhood in Ajax in December 2016 when he was confronted by Theriault and his brother at approximately 3 am.

Conflicting media reports suggest the Theriaults confronted Miller about change allegedly stolen from their fathers car.Theriault reportedly identified himself as a police officer more than once during the incident.

Did the Durham cops who eventually arrived on the scene conduct a full investigation of the incident?Or did they decide that Theriault had acted in accordance with the law that Stephen Harper enacted in 2012 after what happened to David Chen, the owner of Lucky Moose Food Mart in Torontos Chinatown?

In 2010, Chen had caught and tied up a man he suspected of repeat shoplifting and tossed him in a delivery van while waiting for the police. Following its investigation, Toronto police charged Chen with kidnapping.

This caused a national furor and resulted in the law that came into effect in June 2012, empowering private citizens to arrest a suspect when caught within a reasonable time after an alleged crime.

It would be ironic if the Chen law was officer Theriaults justification for his action.

While the Chen law allows people to take reasonable actions to protect themselves, their family and their property, it isup to a judge to decide if the individuals action was reasonable in the circumstances.

Durham policecharged Miller, suggesting they concluded that officer Theriault was justified in assaulting Miller.

This is strange. Chen was charged. So was Toronto restaurant owner Naveen Polapady, who went after someone with a broom handle in August 2011. Polapady accused the man of repeatedly trying to steal from his restaurant and claimed that he got no help from the police despite repeated reports.

Another issue: after Durham police informed Toronto police, which is not disputed or denied, what action did it take on officer Theriaults treatment of Miller?

Saunders has strenuously denied that there was any cover-up. In which case, this was either gross incompetence or the fraternity of the blue line acting like the three proverbial monkeys who saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil about a brother officers conduct.

The basic, undisputed fact established by the SIU investigation is that the Theriaults actions merit criminal charges.

Theriault was off-duty and, as a Toronto cop, out of his jurisdiction.

If Miller had, indeed, been suspected of theft, the right course would have been to call the police just as the Toronto police told David Chen and Naveen Polapady. As a police officer, Michael Theriault would have known this well.

You would have expected that both police service boards Durham and Toronto would have taken a dim view of this.

That expectation would be in keeping with the report of a previous independent review on behalf of the police chief the review of former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci into police interactions with people in crisis. In that report, Iacobucci spoke at length about the kind of people who should be working for the police service.

The police service claims it has implemented the Iacobucci report. Its kid-glove treatment of Theriault makes you doubt that.

No one has said how quickly Waterloo polices review will be conducted or whether its scope will include not only the conduct of Theriault but also those who first heard about his actions and apparently did nothing about it.

The Police Services Act Regulation 267/10 states that a chief of police shall cause an investigation to be conducted forthwith into any incident with respect to which the SIU has been notified. And, further, that the chief shall report his or her findings and any action taken or recommended to be taken to the board within 30 days after the SIU director advises the chief of police that he or she has reported the results of the SIUs investigation to the Attorney General.

Its been almost two months since the SIU announced the laying of charges against Theriault on July 17.

Its not hard to understand why many in the community lack confidence that anything will come from the injection of another force to conduct a review.

Alok Mukherjee served as chair of the Toronto Police Services Board from 2005 to 2015. He is a distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University.

news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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Was police beating of Black teen Dafonte Miller an act of vigilantism? - NOW Magazine

The opening scene of the new season of American Horror Story, appropriately subtitled Cult, is set on US election night, in November of 2016. A diverse group of liberals (including a lesbian couple, an Asian-American couple, and a black woman) watch MSNBC, nervously awaiting the results. Meanwhile, a Cheeto-munching young, white alt-right type, alone on his couch in another home, stares at Fox News.

When the race is called for Donald Trump, the liberals are in shock: I wont believe anything until I hear Rachel Maddow say it, shes the only one I trust, one deadpans.

Meanwhile, the far-right man celebrates by humping his TV to chants of USA, USA.

In February, American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy revealed that the new season of his anthology series on FX would be about the 2016 US presidential election. Since then, Murphy and FX have been cagey about how much, exactly, the show will deal with the contentious election.

After the first three episodes, its clear that the answer is: a lot.

American Horror Story: Cult is perhaps the least subtle political satire ever made, but thats probably the point. In post-Trump America, theres no time for subtlety. The story, as Murphys series often do, becomes progressively more ridiculous. A cult of homicidal people in clown masks wreak havoc across an affluent Michigan suburb. A gerbil explodes in the microwave. The phrase, a lesbian George Zimmerman, is uttered.

But beneath the over-the-top antics and the shows rote home invasion and psychological thriller tropes, is an engaging meditation on fearhow it plays tricks on the mind, how it pits human beings against one another, how it wins elections.

Cult is the only season of the show so far that doesnt feature some kind of supernatural element. All the horror is steeped in real-life fears, ones that have been brought further into the light, for many, since Trump became president of the United States: emboldened racists, attacks on minorities, and the deterioration of human decency.

It doesnt feature Trump or Hillary Clinton as characters, but it might as well. A right-wing man, strengthened by Trumps victory, decides to run for city council on a platform of inciting fear. Played by American Horror Story regular Evan Peters, he answers the question, What if the Joker from Batman was also a white nationalist? His philosophy is that fear is a good thing, that it sets us free, shows us who we really are (or who we yearn to be). Hes unhinged, but also charismatic, and quickly attracts a team of damaged souls as his groupies.

But Cult isnt just a parody of the racist and xenophobic contingent of Americans who have felt emboldened by Trumps victory. The show is also critical of oversensitive, egotistical liberal Americans, ones who might display an exterior of compassion and inclusivity but are part of the problem thats dividing the country further into political cults.

Sarah Paulson, another American Horror Story veteran, plays one half of the shows stereotypical progressive couplelesbians who refuse to allow their young son to give his pet a cisnormative name. Shes a guilt-ridden Jill Stein voter whos deeply triggered by Trumps win and begins to succumb to her various anxieties and phobias (one of which is, of course, a fear of clowns). Go to hell Huffington Post, fuck you Nate Silver, she says, before she starts going crazy.

Her psychologists advice for dealing with the anxiety brought on by Trump is to check out of the world and into your life, but the demonic clown cultboth real and imaginarymakes that difficult. Therapy is tough when The Purge is happening outside of your home every night.

Whats unique about Murphys show, apart from its signature campy style, is its timing. Its not satirizing long-past history, its satirizing this precise moment in time, what Americans are living through right now.

Saturday Night Live and other sketch and talk shows parse and mock the latest news. But unlike American Horror Story, those shows traffic in caricature, skewering politicians, government leaders, and public figures. Murphys show targets the vanities and self-deceptions of the rest of usshowing how were all complicit in the horror that is modern American politics.

The show works best when its doing that: turning the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election into a personal horror story. Cult is not what American Horror Fans might be used to, but its the scariest nightmare Murphy has conjured up yet.

American Horror Story: Cult premieres Sept. 5 on FX.

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The new 'American Horror Story' is a disturbing satire of liberal fears in Trump's America - Quartz