Latest news with #Kloster
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
High school baseball: Beaver River comes through in clutch against South Jefferson
May 1—ADAMS — Credit Karter Kloster and the Beaver River baseball team for once again staying even-keeled while under pressure. The Beavers generated timely pitching, clutch hitting as well as standout defense in its latest victory. Advertisement Kloster pitched two-plus innings of relief to record the win and also delivered a key hit down the stretch as Beaver River outlasted South Jefferson, 7-5, on Wednesday to win a Frontier League "A-B" Division game. "A couple mistakes on both sides kind of gave us some runs and gave them some runs in that fifth inning and it was a battle," Beaver River coach Brandon DeLong said. "But I think we grinded, we were a little resilient and it paid off." Kloster and starting pitcher Kade Schneider combined on a four-hitter for the Beavers, who remain unbeaten on the season at 6-0, including 3-0 in the league. "He did awesome for those first four innings and then he got in a little trouble in the fifth," DeLong said of Schneider. "He pounded the zone, which was huge, and that's something we preach to him and preach to a lot of guys. And then Karter came in and pitched great." Advertisement "We're starting off pretty hot and we know we can get better," Schneider said, "So we're hoping we can keep on getting better and keep the hot streak going." Defense set the tone for Beaver River on the day as center fielder Brit Dicob made a diving catch to deny Ryker Pennock of a hit in the second inning. Earlier, catcher Kayne Lyndaker threw out Billy Winchester at third base on a double-steal attempt in the bottom of the first inning. "Beaver River is a good team, they're well coached," South Jefferson coach Kyle Peters said. "They're a fundamentally strong team, they play great defense. Brit Dicob had that nice stab there in center field and I think that really got them going." Beaver River struck for two runs in the third inning as Lyndaker reached on a bunt single, placing the ball right in front of home plate, to load the bases. Advertisement Schneider then walked to drive in the first run and Kloster followed with an RBI groundout. After South Jefferson drew within 2-1 in the bottom of the inning when Winchester reached on a fielder's choice and later scored on a broken rundown play between first and second base, the Beavers responded with three more runs in the fourth. Ethan Moshier singled to right-center field to drive in a pair of runs and Lyndaker singled in a run. "We know they're good, they have some good hitters," Schneider said of South Jefferson. "But our middle lineup stepped up the last two times we played them and it feels good beating them." Advertisement The Spartans came back to tie the game with four runs in the fifth inning on a pair of sacrifice flyouts by Winchester and Drew Peters and RBI singles from Pennock and Russell Hazard. Beaver River answered quickly with two decisive runs in the sixth inning on two-out RBI singles from Kloster and Dicob to reclaim the lead. "Karter's only a sophomore, but he has a lot of composure out there and stays steady," DeLong said. "Huge, they kind of got the momentum there for a little bit scoring four runs and then we knew we had to get the bats going," Schneider said. "So it feels good that we can stay resilient and just fight." Advertisement Kloster pitched 2 1/3 innings of scoreless relief, allowing one hit while striking out two and walking none to close the door on South Jefferson. "I felt pretty good, pretty confident," Kloster said. "I like pitching in those situations, it's fun." "He's been our closer for the majority of the year so far and he's been doing a really good job of just bearing down, throwing strikes and letting the defense work," Schneider said of Kloster. Schneider allowed five runs, with only one of them earned in 5 2/3 innings of work, striking out six and walking six. "I felt good through the first couple innings and kind of slowed down at the end," Schneider said. "We have guys, we have a lot of arms, so I know if I slow down, then somebody can come in and finish it off." Advertisement "It was sure a battle against their lineup, everybody can hit," Schneider said. "I would say mixing up speeds, they're really good at hitting the fastball, so mixing in curve balls and changeups, just trying to hit spots." Although they rallied to tie the score late in the game, it proved to be a rough day for the Spartans (2-5, 2-3), who committed five errors on the day. "This time it was a comedy of errors that has become our season," Peters said. "These errors, not taking things seriously ... It's a different group of kids. The kids are working, but not as hard as we could be. A lot of undisciplined at bats and undisciplined defense. We battled pretty well, but we know we have to be better." This is the second straight season that Beaver River, a Class C school, opted to play up in the league's "A-B" Division to ultimately prepare for the postseason. Advertisement Beaver River also swept South Jefferson in division play after defeating the Spartans, 6-4, on April 17 in Beaver Falls, in the Beavers' previous game. "When we played them before break, that was the first time we've beaten them in three years, since the last time we won sectionals, so we had little bit of a lull with them," DeLong said. "They beat up on us pretty good last year, so getting that first one was great, but coming into this one we knew it was going to be a little more of a battle and it was." South Jefferson had also hoped to be playing on its new turf field this season, but it hasn't been officially cleared to be utilized so far this year. Beaver River will continue league play within the division when it plays at Watertown at 5 p.m. today at the Alex T. Duffy Fairgrounds. "This is one of the best teams all around through the lineup, so it feels good that everyone's hitting and hopefully it can stay that way," Schneider said.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
OPM's Top Lawyer Is A ‘Raging Misogynist' With A Plan To Break The Civil Service
The top lawyer at the Office of Personnel Management is a self-described 'raging misogynist' who for years has talked up a 'campaign' to purge the federal civil service and staff it with MAGA diehards, per a series of previously unreported appearances on right-wing podcasts. As envisioned, this campaign would intimidate federal employees into resigning or cow them into submission. Cabinet secretaries would devote all of their efforts to 'cleaning house,' clearing the way for partisan cronies to dominate the workings of the federal government, all orchestrated by Trump appointees who have spent the past several years marinating in and reproducing online cesspits. The remarks by Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at OPM, suggest a concerted, premeditated effort to both wreck the nonpartisan federal civil service and replace its remnants with workers easily under the President's control. Kloster revealed his aspirations for remaking the federal workforce in appearances on two podcast episodes hosted by Auron Macintyre in 2022 and 2024, and published a series of writings from 2021 through to the 2024 election on a Substack and Telegram channel reviewed by TPM. Throughout, Kloster, who served as acting general counsel at OPM in the last year of Trump's first term, described a 'government-wide' effort to 'clean house.' The comments prefigure what the country has seen for the past 10 days. In practice, that's meant asserting the ability to fire categories of civil servants through Schedule F, firing nonpartisan DOJ staff, pushing employees to retire early, and urging federal employees to report on others who support DEI. 'People need to understand that they need to clean house, so we need barn burners, people with backbone. It needs to be government-wide so that everyone has air cover,' he said in a June 2022 conversation with Macintyre on an episode titled 'Staffing the Regime' of the program, The Auron Macintyre Show. Two years later, he appeared with Macintyre again, in an episode titled 'Replacing the Deep State.' 'I think a concerted political effort can take control of the civil service per se,' Kloster said, suggesting that the effort was intended to clear out existing career government workers and replace then with Trump loyalists. 'You need a pipeline. You need a lot of replacements,' he said. 'You're going to get a lot of flack for it.' With Macintyre, himself an online provocateur, Kloster occasionally used internet-magnified threats, at one point joking about moving federal employees to Alaska. But he was clearly conversant in the ideas and language of the new right: He discussed how seizing the federal service could help 'win on the other two elements of the cathedral,' a concept used by anti-democratic influencer Curtis Yarvin to describe society's opinion-forming institutions. At other points, Kloster referenced Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard Law Professor who has argued for dramatically expanded presidential power guided by Christian teachings. Kloster is not the only new hire at OPM. The new administration has reportedly stacked it with Elon Musk-linked appointees more committed to a DOGE vision of the federal workforce. One deputy counsel, Clayton Cromer, has experience working for a white shoe law firm and in the Austin AI and tech scene, TPM has learned. It's not clear what he and other appointees bring to the table in terms of personnel law. Kloster himself embodies the MAGA contradictions: as POGO and HuffPost reported, he's a self-described 'raging misogynist' who clearly enjoyed getting a rise out of people online. As reported, Kloster was also subject to a temporary domestic violence-related restraining order in Maryland, which was dismissed several days after issuance pursuant to an agreement. His first job out of law school was working for FIRE, defending sexual assault cases; TPM reviewed a 'Rules for Radical Patriots' guide that Kloster published which included calls for business owners to 'only hire or support people who want to preserve my community.' At the same time, he has publicly expressed a clear vision of how to destroy the federal workforce's nonpartisan identity and bring it under Trump's direct sway. 'It's not just the case that we have evidence that the experts get things wrong. I think that as a theoretical matter, the very notion of expertise and independence makes no sense,' he told the Yale Law School Federalist Society's podcast in 2022. 'So I very much rely more on structure and incentive and political control and unity between the technology and the people that are using the technology.' OPM declined to comment. Kloster did not return an emailed request for comment. After Trump left office in 2021, the MAGA movement was cut somewhat adrift. Though Trump and his supporters proclaimed at the time both that they had actually won the election and that the first term had been a success, that was belied by complaints from former administration officials. They echoed Trump's complaints about the 'deep state,' scapegoating federal employees and turncoat political appointees for the administration's failures. Kloster reflected on this in a June 2022 interview with Macintyre, recalling how, in 2016, he laughed as former never-Trumpers scrambled and begged for administration jobs. 'But the joke was on us because pretty quickly these grifters and people that were super anti-Trump and never Trump very quickly came back in and were able to get these positions,' he said. It's unusual for OPM or its staff to receive any public attention in an administration. Nominally independent, it mainly works as the human resources and employee benefits manager for the federal workforce. But the segment of Trumpers who took the President's complaint that the real problem was his lack of total control over the nonpartisan civil service set their sights on OPM as a vehicle to strip protections from federal workers and, potentially, replace them with people who are ideologically simpatico. To Kloster, that means empowering the President to hire and fire any employee at will. 'Without that, you have nothing,' he said in 2022. 'Imagine, again, Biden or Trump issuing a hundred executive orders and people just don't listen to him. If he wasn't able to remove people, he could have four years of him sitting in a box and the machine would run itself.' Kloster described a campaign to enact this in a 2024 interview with Macintyre, saying that it would mean appointing cabinet secretaries who had the willpower and coordination to prioritize an assault on the civil service. 'The number one thing that you want government-wide is an understanding that personnel is difficult and will get you a lot of blowback, so you need to have the willingness to see it through,' he said. 'You hear the refrain, I can either spend my time working on policy or I can spend my time cleaning house and I can't do both. And I think that needs to be broken. People need to understand that they need to clean house, so we need barn burners, people with backbone, it needs to be government wide so that everyone has air cover.' Later in the interview, Macintyre brought up the example of Louis XIV, and his decision to move the French nobility to 'Versailles just so he could make sure to maintain control,' complaining that having federal employees in D.C. reenacts that situation. Kloster replied with a joke about 'reassignments to Alaska,' before expressing a hope for a 'shock and awe campaign bigger than any particular policy with respect to the civil service or any issue under Trump.' 'I think the main thing is shock and awe,' he added. The issue for Trump in 2025 is the same as it was during the first term: what he's trying to do is against the law. It's also counterproductive on it's own terms. You can try to gut the civil service in order to bring it under control, but that leaves you with little left to enact your policies. 'There's an effort both to dismantle, but also to occupy or to seize control of the administrative state,' Blake Emerson, a professor of law and political science at UCLA, told TPM. 'And those two goals don't necessarily align, and this is where we might get some friction.' In the 2022 Yale Law federalist society chapter appearance, Kloster recognized some of these tradeoffs. 'It goes all the way to the top. So what may have been lacking in the last administration was a president who didn't want to get involved. I mean, with Trump, everything was personal,' he said. 'If Trump had died during his four years in office, who knows what would've happened because everything really did go to him. And the last person in the room with him might always win the argument or whatever. There are all these critiques, but it was him. He was the institution.'
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
New White House lawyer described himself as a "raging misogynist," praised Nazi theorist
Andrew Kloster, the newly-appointed general counsel for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government's human resources agency, is a self-described "raging misogynist" who said that "slaves owe us reparations" and "consent is probably modern society's most pernicious fetish," according to a report from the Project on Government Oversight. During President Donald Trump's first term, Kloster served as associate director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and deputy general counsel at the OPM. He is also an active member of the Federalist Society, a right-wing legal network that in turn lauds him as a "fixture in the conservative movement." As the OPM's chief lawyer, he will have wide-ranging responsibility over Trump's plans to strip protections from professional civil servants, with the apparent goal of firing some of them to make an example and installing political loyalists in their place. The OPM has already issued a slew of memos issuing orders to that effect, in addition to implementing a total hiring freeze and banning pro-diversity practices, threatening "adverse consequences" for those who do not report attempts to conceal such practices by their colleagues. Shortly after his appointment as general counsel at the OPM, the POGO compiled records of sexist and racist remarks he made online, but did not publish the one part of their query that Kloster said was "false" when reached for comment. But according to POGO, the man now in charge of the federal government's H.R. department did not specifically deny a slew of other comments that were published. In a response to a 2012 post on The Volokh Conspiracy legal blog about laws prohibiting sex with animals, Kloster wrote that "consent is probably modern society's most pernicious fetish." In February 2023, about six months after he was served a temporary restraining order for domestic violence — in a case that was dismissed days later after an agreement — he tweeted that "I need a woman who looks like she got punched." Two days later, he said that he's a "100% women respecter precisely because I'm a raging misogynist ... I'm so kind you'll want to kill yourself and die, which is the goal." After a week, he re-emerged with a tweet that "slaves built america. Therefore,,, Slaves owe us reparations." Kloster also appeared to express admiration for German political theorist Carl Schmitt, a staunch Nazi and opponent of liberalism who helped Adolf Hitler consolidate legal and executive power over the entire state. "I do think Schmitt stands the test of time, every political crisis continues to just rhyme with his analysis of the conflict between liberalism and democracy," he wrote in a 2024 post that defended him from critiques by his American counterpart Leo Strauss, who like Schmitt was a proponent of reactionary thought. According to Steven Monacelli, a special investigative reporter for the Texas Observer, the email address Kloster used to sign up for his X (formerly Twitter) account appears in a leak for an escort review website. Kloster made the social media posts just as he began a stint as general counsel for former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida, who was recently investigated for child sex trafficking and statutory rape. During the 2020 election, he allegedly yelled at election workers and police while acting as an observer for the Wisconsin Republican Party — an accusation he rejects — and participated in a GOP-led effort to legally challenge the election results that ultimately found no evidence of voter fraud. Days after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, he responded to a tweet suggesting a 'civil war' was inevitable with hand clap emojis between the words 'Do it.' A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A New Trump Administration Lawyer Is A Self-Described 'Raging Misogynist'
Andrew Kloster, who once proclaimed online he is a 'raging misogynist,' is now the general counsel for the Office of Personnel Management, an entity that oversees more than 2 million civilian federal workers. Kloster described himself as a misogynist on X, formerly Twitter, in February 2023 when replying to a user who said, 'women love a sprinkle of misogyny in a man.' He wrote: 'I'm 100% women respecter precisely because I'm a raging misogynist. I'm so kind you'll want to kill yourself and die, which is the goal.' Kloster served as a deputy general counsel at the Office of Personnel Management during President Donald Trump's first term. His return to the agency was first reported Wednesday by public corruption watchdog Project On Government Oversight. Neither Kloster nor the OPM immediately returned a request for comment to HuffPost on Wednesday. Kloster slid into the role of general counsel just last week as a slew of hiring, firing and funding freeze memos and directivesfrom the new Trump administration started flowing in. As HuffPost reported Tuesday, federal workers are currently being targeted with questions by the Trump administration, including asking them to explain whether any of their grants, loans or other financial aid is being used to engage in DEI programs, support or promote abortion or if their services assist immigrants. In part of his responsibilities as general counsel, Kloster is tasked with helping to interpret and create rules that cover everything from how federal workers are protected in the workplace to how a government worker's personal political activities should be regulated. Before this return, Kloster was general counsel for the now-former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who came under federal and congressional investigation over alleged illicit activities. The Justice Department declined to press charges after a sex-trafficking investigation into the former lawmaker, but the House Ethics Committee issued a public report in December stating that it found 'substantial evidence' Gaetz paid for sex, had sex with a 17-year-old girl and purchased illegal drugs while serving in Congress. Gaetz has strongly denied all of these claims. The uber-conservative Federalist Society has Kloster listed as a contributor and describes him in a site biography as a 'long-time fixture of the conservative movement' before also lauding his credentials: Kloster served as an associate director to the White House Office of Presidential Personnel under the first Trump administration. Kloster, as The Associated Press reported in 2021, was a proponent of Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen in Wisconsin and was tapped to investigate the state's election processes. Kloster also was a legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, the same group that helped shape the second Trump administration's Project 2025 agenda. This week, metadata first reported by Citation Needed revealed the authors of at least two memos sent to federal workers mandating hiring and firing freezes and other disruptive directives were ghostwritten by onetime Heritage Foundation employees. (One of those authors was attorney Noah Peters; he once represented white nationalist Jared Taylor, the founder of the New Century Foundation, which is recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group that 'promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites.') As for Kloster, according to public district court records in Maryland from 2022, the new general counsel in charge of the federal government's human resources wing was once involved in a domestic violence dispute. Public records show he had a temporary restraining order requested against him that August with requests for several restrictions, including that he surrender firearms and stay away from certain residences and workplaces. A hearing on the temporary restraining order was held and the request was dismissed 'with stipulated temporary agreement.' An attorney who represented Kloster in that case did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
