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The scriptural story of Bathsheba is a theme as old as mankind itself: lust, adultery, and death. The real-life story of one Bathsheba Spooner contains all those dark elements with an added twist, as this Bathsheba will face the gallows in Worcester for her part in the murder plot of her husband, Joshua.

Bringing this tragic historical story to light from the perspective of court documents is author Andrew Noone in his recently released publication titled, Bathsheba Spooner: A Revolutionary Murder Conspiracy.

The author spent no less than seven years researching the details of this murder-for-hire plot and then another seven writing the book. The result is a comprehensive look at the facts of the crime as well as a deep dive into the politics and laws that governed the land before, during, and after the Revolutionary period.

Spooners family tree is populated with familiar names such as Ruggles, White, Crocker, Howland, Bourne, and Cogswell to name a few. But it is Spooners father, Timothy Ruggles, whose presence in Rochester has been documented and ties the story back to the Tri-Town.

Noone said, In 1710, Timothy Ruggles parents moved from Roxbury to Rochester. A year later, Tim was born. In 1732, following his Harvard graduation, he returned, and by 1735 had established his law practice in town. He soon secured a seat in the General Court as Rochesters representative. In 1739, he married recently widowed Bathsheba Bourne Newcomb, and moved to Sandwich, where our Bathsheba would be born a few years later.

To open the pages of Noones book a little wider, we find that Bathsheba was named after her mother, born the last of seven children in the Ruggles clan. Their lives would have been spent in relative comfort given that the patriarch of the family was a professional versus a farmer. Ruggles was also a very staunch Torrey to the point that he was stripped of his position in the community and banished to live in Hardwick. He would later up-sticks with his family to Staten Island to be near other Torreys.

It is speculated that the young Bathsheba was given over in an arranged marriage to an older but well-healed gentleman, namely Joshua Spooner. She had been a widow of some means with older children, a possible attraction for Ruggles. But accounts also recorded that she was beautiful. By all accounting, if not heated with passion, the marriage was calm.

Yet Spooner would turn her affections towards a 17-year-old child in the community of Brookfield where the Spooners had settled, a lad named Ezra Ross. Spooner is said to have conspired with him to dispatch her husband, making way for them to legally be together. But the young man apparently did not have a murderers disposition.

Enter two British deserters, Private William Brooks and Sergeant James Buchanan. Offered money and rich clothing, enough to see them through for some time, these two characters in the plot are said to have done the deed. They beat Spooner at least to a senseless state and then, as was apparently suggested by the lady, thrown in a very deep well on his own property. One wonders at the rather ill-conceived plan, why put him in a place so easily found? That question may never be answered.

Throughout the dramatic story of the criminal activity, Noone has woven a rich fabric of the surrounding history of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras.

In discussing his approach with The Wanderer, Noone said, My chief motivation in choosing this story was to elaborate upon Worcester Countys most notorious saga as a means of sharing Worcesters crucial, too-often-ignored contribution to the Revolution. Worcester coined the term minuteman, witnessed the most significant anti-British action between the Boston Tea Party and Lexington-Concord, was very nearly the scene of the first battle, served as the site of Sam Adams and John Hancocks hideaway following the opening battles, and in Isaiah Thomas featured the most important Patriot printer of the Revolution.

Noone further elaborated, I wanted to place Bathsheba in the context of a socially and politically-driven set of families, whose heritage would be tragically marred by the actions of one descendant. Her father, the legal star of Rochester, fatefully pivoted on a dime in 1765, overnight becoming the scorned loyalist whose politics helped to shape his daughters miserable end.

Spooners hanging, along with those of the three men who participated in full or in part with the killing of her husband, speaks to the morals and laws of the day as well as the unevolved concepts of human psychology.

It is most likely and Noone notes this that, by todays standards, execution and possibly even a long jail sentence could have been avoided given Spooners questionable hold on reality. Further, and probably the most troubling aspect of her grim demise, it is the verified fact that Spooner was five-months pregnant at the time of the hanging. She was hanged, despite carrying a baby. This fact alone would have spared her life in the 21st century.

To learn more about Bathsheba Spooner and her notorious status as the first woman to be executed in post-revolutionary America, visit Noones website: http://www.bathshebaspooner.net. Noones book is available at all major book retailers.

By Marilou Newell

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Rochester's Connection to Bathsheba Spooner - Wanderer

The media pile-on atop Sen. Ted Cruz (RTexas) for his comments Wednesday characterizing mock Nazi salutes at school board meetings as First Amendmentprotected speech is not, unfortunately, an aberrational event when it comes to news coverage this fall of parents publicly registering their discontent with various contentious K-12 policies.

Not a day goes by without the media comparing raucous school board meetings to the January 6 Capitol Hill riots, attributing the increase in parental outrage to racism and/or manipulation by cynical puppet masters, conducting laughably one-sided fact-checks, using the phrase "Republicans seize" unironically, and taking at face value education-establishment claims that all curricular and organizational changes made in the name of racial equity are merely about being more accurate in the teaching of history.

Sometimes most or even all of these boxes can get checked off in a single article or broadcast segment. Such as on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Wednesday night, when, after a minutes-long, head-shaking lecture from Cooper about how "facts are facts," CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin came on to provide this tendentious explanation for why school board politics have become heated enough to animate GOP senators and change the trajectory of next week's Virginia gubernatorial election.

"It's really important to remember why we are talking about school boards at all: because it's about white supremacy, and that's on the rise in the Republican Party," Toobin charged. "The reason school boards are controversial is that some school boards have dared to teach that, you know, civil rights and African American rights have not been so great in this country over the centuries, like when we had slavery and when we had Jim Crow. And that has so outraged the Republican Partytelling the truth about race in Americathat they feel the way to win elections and to win the governorship in Virginia, is to demonize these school boards for daring to tell the truth about race in America. And that's really the core of what's going on here."

The progressive journalist Zaid Jilani, who lives in northern Virginia and teaches part time there, retorted on an episode of The Fifth Column podcast Wednesday that Toobin's vision bore no resemblance to what he's experienced on the ground.

"Those debates actually have been happening for a number of months, before this all became like a national thing," Jilani said. "There were debates about some of the selective high schools, andshould they use testing to get people in, should it be a holistic process. There were debates about curriculum, there were debates about COVID and masking. And I don't think at any point in those debates did any white supremacists show up. I didn't see anyone in a Klan hood."

There is something revealingly incongruous about a news organization that in one breath conducts hair-splitting fact-checks deferring to the government's of view ("In fact, there's no mention of 'parents'at all in the memo, none," Cooper said triumphantly Wednesday, about the controversial October 4 Justice Department directive to have federal agents be on the lookout for antischool board violence), then in the next being content to nod along when a colleague accuses citizen participants in democracy and a major political party of being primarily motivated by white supremacy.

Since this issue is not going away anytime soon, particularly if Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin upsets Virginia power pol Terry McAuliffe in the governor's race next week, it's worth being on the lookout for recurrent media framing devices that distort the depiction of an important set of debates. (K-12 instruction amounts to about 20 percent of all state and local government spending, don't forget.) The point is not to be steered toward my admittedly idiosyncratic school policy preferences, but rather to become via pattern recognition a more discerning consumer of news.

Here are two of the most common ways the media warp school board politics.

1) Exaggerating the incidence of violence.

On October 22, in an article picked up widely and also adapted by the Associated Press, Minnesota Public Radio made this alarming assertion: "Violent school board meetings and threats toward school board members [in Minnesota] over these issues have caused dozens of board leaders to quit their positions." Do note the serial pluralization.

Were there really multiple acts of violence, and multiple threats, causing "dozens" of board members to quit, in a state known for its niceness? The 757-word article did not explicitly list any; there was one hyperlink to a June piece that mentioned "someone had recently threatened on a community Facebook page to rush the podium" at one meeting, but no such bum-rush took place.

I was able to find one violent incident in Minnesota, from late September, when two members of the public who were on opposite sides of a school masking policy debate got into a brief scuffle that was broken up by a police officer.

What seems to be happening much more than citizen-on-official violence, or credible threats thereof, is a recurring reaction of bewilderment on the part of the (often volunteer) school board members in the face of vein-throbbing parental outrage and doubtlessly some pretty bizarro vox-populi rants. Some board members are spooked, some don't consider the emotional conflict worth the hassle, and some, like Mankato, Minnesota, School Board Chair Jodi Sapp, think the way out of the mess is to declare that this "is not a meeting that belongs to the public," and then require any citizen speaker to state his or her name and home address into a microphone:

There have been indeed acts of personal violence and physical intimidation at school board meetings this summer and fall. But how many?

In its notorious but still successful letter of September 29 requesting "immediate" federal law enforcement assistance "to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are susceptible to acts of violence," the National School Board Association (NSBA) mentioned and linked to 20 discrete incidents, using such summative language as "attacks against school board members and educators," and "acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials."

How many of the 20 incidents included a physical altercation? The bulk of them (I count 13) were meetings disrupted by shouting or defiance of mask policies. As best as I can reckon, the NSBA letter contained two references to people coming to blows: a guy in Illinois punching the school official who was escorting him out, and the now-infamous (and still-disputed) case in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the father of a girl who had been sexually assaulted in a school bathroom went berserk after hearing the superintendent say that, "To my knowledge, we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms."

The Loudoun County arrest in particular has stoked local, state, and national outrage, with all the wild-eyed truth bending that comes with it. (The NSBA letter misportrayed the incident as being tied to discussion of "critical race theory andequity issues"; conservatives have since inaccurately blamed the attack on the school's transgender bathroom policies.) And the personalized vitriol directed at Loudoun officials has been particularly vile, worthy of heightened law enforcement attention. Still, a violent reaction from a lone father distraught over his daughter's assault seems a poor fit for a national trend story.

There have been other acts of violence not listed in the NSBA letterthere were reportedly multiple fights in a Missouri parking lot after a September meeting on masking, for example. But the fact that we're still counting on one hand, maybe two, the number of times people at our near testy school board meetings this year have thrown hands, in a country of 14,000 or so school boards, suggests a far more modest contextual presentation of the conflicts than we have seen in the press.

"GOP Demands Justice Department Back Off Threat To Protect School Board Members From Violent Mobs," ran the headline this week at Above the Law. Such lopsided hyperbole, and contempt for swaths of the citizenry, has (along with restrictive blue-state educational COVID-19 policies) driven at least a half-dozen school-opening advocates I follow on Twitter away from a Democratic Party they've spent their lives voting for. And it may yet push voters in Democratic Virginia to vote Republican for governor.

2) Claiming that parental outrage is a contrived, ginned-up "culture war" untethered from real-world concerns.

"Fox News can't get enough of these congressional hearings in which GOP lawmakers bashAG Merrick Garlandover manufactured controversies," wrote CNN Senior Media Reporter Oliver Darcy this week in the Reliable Sources newsletter.

"Fox News helped amplify (if not create) a furor at school board meetings several months ago," wrote Washington Post columnist Philip Bump last week. "Over the summer, this had the (intended) effect of establishing a tea-party-like movement from the base upone that, like the tea party a decade ago, was carefully cultivated and tended.It's an issue that was formed fromthe sheer energy of the culture warmore than anything else."

I do not recall Fox having such pull in San Francisco and New York City. Yet both cosmopolitan capitals have been the site of intense school board politicsnot for months, but for years. Three of the seven board members of the San Francisco Unified School District are facing a recall vote this coming February, with backers of the effort (per Ballotpedia's write-up) "frustrated that schools in the district remained closed for nearly a year in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic," and also "upset that the board had spent time voting to rename 44 buildings in the district rather than focusing on opening schools."

From 20092020, Ballotpedia counted between 18 and 38 school board recalls per year, targeting between 46 and 91 members. In 2021 those numbers have more than doubled84 recalls aiming at 215 officials. Now close your eyes and think real hard: What other motivations might recallers have besides the enjoyment of responding "How high?" when Fox News yells "Jump!"?

"The combination of extended Covid-related school closures; mask mandates; an increasingly extreme race- and gender-focused curriculum; and the removal of tests, honors classes and merit-based admissions has created a bumper crop of engagedand, in many cases, enragedparents rightfully concerned about what is happening in their children's schools," wrote Manhattan-based school activist and City Council candidate Maud Maron, a "lifelong liberal," over at Bari Weiss' Substack on October 11.

During the 19+ months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly since the fall of 2020, the United States, particularly in its biggest cities, has been a global outlier when it comes to keeping schools closed, masking children, and (soon enough) mandating vaccines for 5-year-olds. These comparatively extreme policies, driven largely by the strength of teachers unions in parts of America's decentralized schooling system, have understandably motivated some parents to get more involved in the decision-making process.

And one of the things that they discover there is that the education establishment, particularly but not only in big cities, has only accelerated recent trends of junking Gifted & Talented programs, removing selective entrance exams, constructing "controlled choice" admission systems, and centering curricula around "anti-racist" themes, all in the name of "equity." These choices are divisive in the most placid of times, which a pandemic is decidedly not.

"We should call this controversy what it isa scare campaign cooked up by G.O.P. operatives" and others to "limit our students' education and understanding of historical and current events," American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten told The New York Times last week.

Well, no. As I have been writing about for two years now, the equity-based policy changes, and the way some education officials have bulldozed the concerns of affected parents, was already beginning to alienate families away from public schooling before the onset of the pandemic. Combined with the aforementioned COVID-19 restrictions, these radical alterations are fueling a K-12 exodus.

Sometimes media outlets cover these topics with nuance and detail. Other times they spend an inordinate amount of time fact-checking the semantic difference between the academic term critical race theory and the co-opting of the term by conservative activists as a negative political branding exercise. (A branding exercise, to be sure, that has led to bad policy results, such as a Texas Republican lawmaker this week compiling a list of 850 books that"might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.")

As I can testify from grisly firsthand experience, there are kooks at just about any public meeting (it takes one to know one), and those who are being motivated by the apocalyptic likes of Tucker Carlson are likely to have a heightened sense of crazy. But it's a category error to characterize most participants at school board gatherings as being driven there by national media. These politics, and relationships, are local.

So when former President Barack Obama sneers that, "We don't have time to be wasted on these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage, the right-wing media's peddles to juice their ratings," as he did by McAuliffe's side on Saturday, it's an insult to every last one of us who has dragged ass out to the local school meeting because we care about policies affecting our kids.

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Journalist Butchery of School Board Protests Upending Politics in Virginia and Elsewhere - Reason

Ever since the Unite the Right rally, in 2017, Virginias politics have been in flux. Is the state, like Charlottesville, a place under threat from reactionaries, or is it, also like Charlottesville, a place that has fought them back? This past week, two developments have pointed toward some resolution: a civil trial against the rallys organizers began, and the city of Charlottesville released six proposals to take ownership of the Confederate monuments that drew the extremists in the first place. The Statuary Park at Gettysburg proposed displaying the monuments alongside other Civil War statues, though it didnt want the bases (too expensive) and suggested that the city help it apply for a grant to cover the transportation costs. A man named Frederick Gierisch, from Utopia, Texas, sent a handwritten letter volunteering to display them on his ranch, noting (according to an excellent report from Erin OHare of Charlottesville Tomorrow) that I dont believe the left will be happy until all history is destroyed which is a shame because it is our history whether good or bad. The lone local proposal came from Charlottesvilles Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which proposed to melt down the statues into bronze ingots, hold the ingots in reserve for six months of community engagement, and then allow artists to create a new work to be gifted back to the city. There was something politically ingenious about the proposal, which synthesizes the radical call to destroy the statues and more moderate discomfort with the idea. Were not forgetting history, were saying that these monuments were an inadequate statement about our values, a prominent local activist and University of Virginia professor named Jalane Schmidt, who helped conceive the plan, told Charlottesville Tomorrow.

A third event, coming next week, will more immediately define Virginia: the election of the states governor, after an increasingly tight race between the former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe and a first-time Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin. The previous gubernatorial election, in 2017, featured Corey Stewart, a cartoonish right-winger who lives in a restored plantation and campaigned on the preservation of Confederate heritage; Ed Gillespie, the former chair of the Republican National Committee; and Ralph Northam, a subdued pediatric neurologist who ran as a moderate Democrat and won, only to be immediately undermined, when conservatives found that Northam had included on his page in his medical-school yearbook a photo of two men, one in blackface and the other in K.K.K. robes. (Northam apologized for appearing in the photo, without specifying which of the two men was him.) This year, the characters are insiders: McAuliffe came to prominence as a backslapping old Bill Clinton fund-raiser and confidant. Youngkin is a former co-C.E.O. of the Carlyle Group, the Washington private-equity firm, who initially appeared to be a pre-Trump type of candidate. The better-known McAuliffe was initially favored (Joe Biden won Virginia last fall by nearly ten per cent), but throughout the past month the polls tightened: several showed Youngkin within the margin of error, or tied, and one (from Fox News) had the Republican leading by eight percentage points. The outcome seems to hinge less on the candidates than on the depth of a conservative backlash to progressive cultural politics.

That fight has been centered in Loudoun County, the far suburbs of D.C., where Democratic officials have come under sustained pressure from a former Trump Administration official named Ian Prior, who leads a local political-action committee called Fight for Schools. Prior has challenged the school-division leadership over two recent culture-war touchstones: the teaching of critical race theory and the provisions made for transgender students in public schools, eventually championing a very murky allegation of sexual assault on school grounds. Prior himself has become a regular on Fox News, which has often featured stories about these events. And, in the final phase of the gubernatorial campaign, Youngkin took up the cause, calling for the resignation of several school-board officials in Loudoun County and arguing that activists have seized control of Virginias schools. The tactic worked: Youngkin drew even in the polls, and Axios reported that McAuliffes campaign was bordering on panic. The Washington Post reported that the National Republican Senatorial Committee intended to emphasize education issues like these in 2022. Former Vice-President Mike Pence scheduled a last-minute rally in the Virginia suburbs of D.C. to address educational freedom. (That phrase carried an ironic twist: Republicans like Pence who had long used the terminology of freedom to argue that local decisions should not be challenged at the state or federal level were now arguing exactly the opposite.) Ian Serotkin, a member of the Loudoun County school board who was supported by the local Democratic Party, told me ruefully, I think its the second coming of the Tea Party.

The political-organizing campaign conducted in Loudoun County by Prior and the other conservative activists has been skillful. According to Serotkin, it began last spring, amid general conservative fears about the teaching of critical race theory in schools, when members of the public began to ask the school board whether anything like this was happening in Loudoun County. Several members of the school board, Serotkin among them, belonged to a Facebook group called Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County (the sort of identification that became much more common after Charlottesville). After conservative activists discovered that some members of that group had been making a list of the names of people asking questions about C.R.T., they launched recall campaigns against the school-board members who belonged to it. (One member resigned; the other four, including Serotkin, face recall petitions.) Loudoun County school-board meetings grew louder and more contentious, especially as the board considered a measure that would allow transgender students access to activities and facilities that match their gender identity. At a meeting in June, a fight broke out; police arrested two conservative activists and broke up the meeting, declaring it an unlawful assembly.

Prior, who had served as deputy director of public affairs in the Trump Justice Department, was good on TV and good with a sound bite. In the spring, he told Fox News that hed been targeted by a chardonnay Antifa for pushing the case against critical race theory, and then that an army of moms was leading the conservative campaign in Loudoun County. In August, he claimed on the network that more than a thousand Loudoun County students had transferred to private schools since 2020 because of the school boards progressive agenda. (The decline has been more general than he suggested; public-school enrollment dropped by three per cent nationally in 2020, a change that was generally attributed to the pandemic, not politics.) At a press conference this fall, Prior argued that conservatives were being belittled in the county, in a way that might have invited sympathy from Fox News viewers. Weve been met with silence, mockery, claims of engaging in dog-whistle politics, and attacked as racists, bigots, facistspretty much anything that ends with -ist. In August, as Priors campaign was mounting, a forty-eight-year-old man named Scott Smith, who had been arrested at the June school-board meeting, claimed that his daughter had been raped in a girls bathroom at Stone Bridge High School by a boy wearing a skirt. (The boy was eventually found guilty of sexual assault by a juvenile-court judge.) Some of the politically relevant facts of the case remain unclearwhether the trans-access policy, which had not yet been adopted, had anything to do with the attack, or what the assailants gender identity isbut it served a particular purpose, emphasizing that there was an acute danger in liberal leadership of public schools.

Youngkin had spoken about Loudoun County before, but after the Stone Bridge story broke he really jumped in, calling for the resignation of the county schools superintendent and the entire school board. Meanwhile, the Youngkin campaign was airing an ad in which a Fairfax County mother named Laura Murphy, positioned before a fireplace, recalls her son showing her his reading assignment with some of the most explicit material I could imagine. Murphy said that she showed the assignment to conservative lawmakers, who passed a bill asking schools to alert parents when potentially offensive material was being assigned in class. There was an ironic note here, in that conservatives were blaming McAuliffe for denying them a trigger warning. There was also a telling one, when it turned out the text to which Murphy objected was Toni Morrisons Beloved.

There was a burning intensity the last four years for people to vote, McAuliffe told the Washington Post, a little more than a week before the election, lamenting the challenge he faced in turning out Democrats. It was Trump, Trump, Trump. People lived with it constantly. It infuriated and disgusted so many people. Its not there in the same intensity.

The change in the White House has presented a challenge for Youngkin as well: he needs the support both of a conservative base that adores Trump and moderate voters who abhor him. Youngkin navigated the problem by avoiding the topic of the former President or, when it couldnt be avoided, dodging it, at one point declining to say whether he would have voted to certify the results of the 2020 electionand then, the following day, saying that he would have. In October, a Richmond-area radio host staged a rally in support of Youngkins candidacy, at which attendees pledged allegiance to a flag that was said to have been carried at the Capitol during the January 6th insurrection. Youngkin, distancing himself, claimed that the rally was weird and wrong. The education issue gave a board-room Republican Youngkin a talking point with Trump-like appeal, without Trump himself. In its own way, it was as ingenious a political solution as the Charlottesville ingots.

Ten days before the election, Barack Obama arrived in Richmond, where he addressed a crowd of about two thousand at Virginia Commonwealth University. Theres a mood out there, the former President said, meaning among conservatives. We see it. Theres a politics of meanness and division and conflict, of tribalism and cynicism. He went on to depict Youngkin as if it were the Obama-Romney campaign all over again: You cant run ads telling me youre a regular old hoops-playing, dishwashing, fleece-wearing guy, but quietly cultivate support from those who seek to tear down our democracy. Either he actually believes in the same conspiracy theories that resulted in a mob, or he doesnt believe it, but hes willing to go along with itto say or do anything to get elected.

But politics have changed since 2012. Elections are more ideological now, and candidates are less in control. Virginias politics lately have not only been shaped by figures like McAuliffe and Youngkin but by Ian Prior and Jalane Schmidt. Obama was right to see opportunism and deceit in the Republican campaign to spook moderate voters about supposed radicalism in suburban schools. But its also the case that progressives are proposing some things that are genuinely new: to change the way that gender, race, and history are understood and taught. The monuments finally came downthe question now is what happens next.

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The Virginia Governors Race Will Be the Latest Verdict in the Culture Wars - The New Yorker

Overwatchs Sombra already has some amazing cosmetics, but this Mad Hatter outfit for Mexicos most wanted is the Halloween Terror skin we never knew we needed.

While Overwatchs extensive cast of misfits encompasses characters from all walks of life, Mexicos finest hacker, Sombra, has become a fan favorite.

The subject of many an interesting skin concept, weve even seen the queen of all things digital rep New Yorks Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs iconic tax the rich Met Gala dress.

Trading in her brief stint in politics for something a lot less serious, this new skin idea from designer Luca Albrecht transforms Sombra into Alice In Wonderlands Mad Hatter and its just in time for Halloween.

Inspired by the Mad Hatter from Lewis Carrolls 19th Century fairytale Alice in Wonderland, Sombra has traded in her cyberpunk-style armor for an eclectic Victorian-inspired outfit.

Donning a navy blue tailcoat with a violet collar, she sports a bright pink bow around her neck with a golden stopwatch necklace. In the middle of her back another clock is attached to her coat, while a rainbow strap loops around her body to tie the mismatch of colors together.

Instead of leggings shes gone for the iconic striped socks often associated with genderbent Hatter cosplays, with deep blue thigh-high lace-up boots rounding out the look.

Its adorable little top hat is the icing on this beautiful teacake, though, with orange and green feathers sprouting out from the base and the signature playing card tucked gently into the buckle that holds everything in place.

Mad Hatter Sombra skin concept from Overwatch

Overwatch fans are certainly hoping to be invited to this tea party, as Lucas idea has been greeted with a wave of positivity.

No I dont think you understand. Imobsessed, writes one fan, while others pointed out that it would go well with Ashes Mardi Gras skin.

While Sombras never late for a very important date, she never compromises her style. Perhaps if you look through the looking glass youll be able to catch this Mad Hatter even when shes in stealth, but otherwise watch out Wonderlands inhabitants arent always the friendliest.

Originally posted here:
Mad Hatter Sombra skin idea is the Halloween Terror look Overwatch needs - Dexerto

In the immediate months and years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, surveys revealed a surge in patriotism among Americans of all stripes. But that trend has steadily decreased in the 20 years since, and a clear partisan gap has emerged, with far fewer Democrats and independents identifying themselves as proudly patriotic than Republicans.

As patriotism and wrapping oneself in the American flag has come to be more identified with being a right-leaning conservative or Republican, media coverage of "patriotism" has taken a negative turn as well.

"Weve seen on multiple occasions major news outlets share their feelings and opinions in making patriotic symbols and demonstrations a divisive political issue," Fox News contributor Joe Concha said. "The New YorkTimesjust this summer had a writer named Mara Gaywho declared that she found it disturbing there were so manyflagsshe had to witness on lawns and trucks. Disturbing."

"The same New YorkTimesthat not too long ago askedif the Star Spangled Banner and National Anthem were racist. The same New YorkTimesthat is defending Olympian Gwen Berry - who turned away from the National Anthem in calling the playing of it a set up.' This is not the paper of record. Its an extension of the DNC,'" he added, likening the paper to the party that tends to trend lower in American pride than its Republican counterparts.

SYRACUSE ASSISTANT PROFESSOR DISTURBED BY HOW MANY WHITE PUNDITS STILL TALK ABOUT 9/11

Gwendolyn Berry, left, looks away as DeAnna Price and Brooke Andersen stand for the national anthem after the finals of the women's hammer throw at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials Saturday, June 26, 2021, in Eugene, Ore. Price won, Andersen was second and Berry finished third. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) (AP)

Last year, a record low of 63 percent of Americans reported being "extremely" or "very proud" to be Americans. There was a slight uptick to 69 percent when asked the question by Gallup this year, but still far from the 92 percent who reported that answer in 2002.

For Democrats, the answer's often been tied to who is president. Trends showed less pride in being Americans while George W. Bush and Donald Trump were president, and more pride when Barack Obama and Joe Biden were in office. Republican patriotism has stayed relatively high over the past 20 years.

"One year after the Sept. 11 attacks, 93 percent of Democrats and 99 percent of Republicans said they were either "extremely" or "very" proud to be Americans," data site FiveThirtyEight reported in July 2018. "The GOP number stayed comfortably in the 90s for the duration of George W. Bushs presidency, but by January 2007, amid an unpopular war in Iraq that sparked no small amount of liberal dissent, the share of Democrats who were 'extremely' or 'very' proud to be Americans had shrunk to 74 percent."

March 23, 2011: U.S. troops stand guard outside a local journalists' union office in Basra, Iraq. (AP)

Political commentator Drew Holden said that U.S. involvement in the Middle East and differences over the controversial Patriot Act, which provided the U.S. government with sweeping anti-terrorism surveillance powers after 9/11, contributed to the polarization over patriotism and national pride.

"I think that definitelyplayed into this polarization. Post 9/11, patriotism became associated, by the media and both parties, with support for foreign wars in Afghanistan and eventually and to a lesser degree Iraq," he said. "I think that poisoned the well in a lot of ways. As soon as you've gotten a political cause tied to patriotism in the public square, it cheapens the term, and allows people to play fast and loose with the definition."

NASCAR HONORS 9/11 HEROES AND VICTIMS: MOST PATRIOTIC SPORTING ORGANIZATION IN THE WORLD

"Patriotism is the latest victim of America's politicization and polarization crisis. But should it surpriseus that patriotism wanes when outlets like CNN associatethe word with January 6th rioters and white supremacists?" Holden added. "By normalizing these outlandish perspectives, the media has helped create a narrative that uncontroversial views and displays of patriotism are adjacent to something evil, which is going to have a downstream impact on American culture more broadly."

From the George W. Bush administration that marked the 2000s to the Tea Party movement in 2010 to Trump's nationalistic politics taking control of the GOP since 2015, patriotism has been increasingly viewed as more of a conservative attribute than a nonpartisan one. And liberal media coverage has at times reflected that tension.

Dec. 5, 2015: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Davenport, Iowa. (AP)

9/11 FIRST RESPONDERS CYCLING FROM NEW YORK TO VIRGINIA FOR SUICIDE PREVENTION

CNN's John Avlon asked in a 2013 opinion piece how the word "patriot" had become a dirty word. He ultimately placed blame on conservative activist groups, such as those associated with the Tea Party movement, referring to themselves as "the real patriots," who, he said, were seeking to defend a traditional way of life from liberals, Democrats, other demographics and then-President Barack Obama.

A 2020 piece by Slate Magazine called for liberalism to be made "great again" by liberals around the world taking back patriotism from "right-wing authoritarians," who it argued had claimed it as their own.

The trend of discomfort with American flags and signs of patriotism continued in 2021 at major outlets. Sports writer William Rhoden said on "CBS This Morning" last month that he had enjoyed covering the Olympics during his long career but felt differently now, pointing to how many "American flags" he saw at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

TOPSHOT - Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as they push barricades to storm the US Capitol in Washington D.C on January 6, 2021. - Demonstrators breeched security and entered the Capitol as Congress debated the 2020 presidential election Electoral Vote Certification. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP) (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

"I love the opening ceremonies, march of countries. Then I realized, you know, man, particularly after these last four years, I had it wrong. Nationalism is not good. We've seen the rise of White nationalism. Nationalism is not good," he said. "And also, this whole idea I keep thinking back on the Capitol riots, and I saw a lot of, you know, U.S. flags."

"So now when I see the flag and the flag raised, what what America am I living in? You know, are the ones that don't think, you know, we should be here?" he went on, referring to him and other African Americans.

For liberal outlets like the New York Times, the American flag can be perceived as a hijacked symbol of problematic nationalism or avid Trump support.

In a piece published in July, author Sarah Maslin Nir quoted individuals who found the flag has become so politicized that they now think twice about flying it outside their homes or businesses. Some people, for instance, have been hiding their patriotic pride in Old Glory after Trump's supporters, and conservatives in general, "have embraced the flag so fervently."

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"What was once a unifying symbol there is a star on it for each state, after all is now alienating to some, its stripes now fault lines between people who kneel while The Star-Spangled Banner plays and those for whom not pledging allegiance is an affront," Nir wrote.

Left-wing editorial board member Mara Gay went viral a month before that when she told MSNBC she was "disturbed" by the sight of "dozens of American flags" during a trip to Long Island, New York.

"I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing Essentially the message was clear. This is my country. This is not your country. I own this," Gay said.

In 2016, amid the run up to Trump's successful bid for the presidency, resistance to patriotism extended beyond media and into the world of sports as NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the playing of the National Anthem prior to some pre-season games.

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color," Kaepernick said following one of the games. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

FILE - In this Sept. 12, 2016, file photo, San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid (35) and quarterback Colin Kaepernick (7) kneel during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Los Angeles Rams in Santa Clara, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

Some members of the media got behind Kaepernick throughout the controversy that spanned multiple years and began to justify his narrative behind not standing in honor of the National Anthem.

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ESPN's The Undefeated quickly jumped to support Kaepernick, claiming his protest was just as American as the flag, and that he, like all Black people, had "a right and responsibility" to fight against his history of oppression.

ESPN "SportsCenter" anchor Jemele Hill, a staunch defender of Kaepernick, was suspended the year following the start of his protests for violating the network's social media policy when she responded on Twitter to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who said that players who disrespected the flag wouldn't play for his team. In her tweet, she called on fans who disagreed with Jones to boycott the team's advertisers.

Jemele Hill said she deserved ESPN's suspension after her controversial tweets against President Trump and the NFL controversy. (AP)

The Guardian published an opinion piece two years following the start of Kaepernick's protest, after the controversial player was no longer on an NFL team, with writer Mychal Denzel Smith claiming that although the protest might be "unpatriotic," it was "just fine."

"His protest does not need to be recast as patriotic, as patriotism is not a higher virtue than justice," Smith wrote.

Some argue the seemingly growing divide over patriotism primarily aligns with the political divide between Republicans and Democrats, and the latter moving further away from the outward display of pride in being American.

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"The Democrats are embarrassed by the United States. Their coastal elitism cant bear the thought of American exceptionalism. I never thought I would see loving your country as such a controversial idea," Fox News contributor and former Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz said.

"As the Democrats run away from the American Flag and a patriotic belief in our country, they do so as the minority. Its as if they are campaigning for the Republicans. Ive never seen wrapping yourself in the red, white, and blue as bad politics, but I think it shows how radical the Democrats have become recently," he added.

UNITED STATES - JUNE 15: Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, conducts a news conference in the Capitol to unveil the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act, that will provide "clear rules for the use of electronically-obtained location data, also known as geolocation data." Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., teamed up with Chaffetz to draft the bill.(Photo By Tom Williams/Roll Call)

Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who is no stranger to the media's negative approach to patriotism and flaming of partisan politics, saw patriotism and patriotic symbols as things that actually unite Americans and predicted that attempts to divide on the issue wouldn't ultimately succeed.

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"The radical left has taken symbols of national unity and turned them into divisive flash points," she said. "The left continues to attack the very symbols that unite us as a country. The good news, however, is that the American people are much wiser than the small number of far-leftists that seek to divide us."

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany speaks during a briefing at the White House in Washington, Friday, Nov. 20, 2020. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

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Media push narrative that patriotism is 'adjacent to something evil,' analysts say - Fox News