Latest news with #Mohler
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New OSDE chief of staff paid nearly $50K in first month, still listed as active employee for Florida company
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — The Oklahoma State Department of Education was unable to explain to News 4 why it paid State Superintendent Ryan Walters' newly-hired chief of staff nearly $50,000 during his first month on the job, despite a Florida company also listing him as an active, full-time employee. The records show OSDE Chief of Staff Jon 'Matt' Mohler received two paychecks with vastly different hourly payrates during his first month on the job — totaling nearly $48,000. According to Oklahoma state payroll records, the state paid Mohler two paychecks in February. One check, on Feb. 28, was for $15,833.33, at a pay rate of around $98.96 per hour. The other check, on Feb. 12, was for $31,884.06, at a pay rate of around $398.55 per hour. The payroll system classified both payments as 'regular pay.' The chief of staff role had been vacant since last year, when News 4 reported the department's previous chief of staff and entire legal team resigned. On Friday, an OSDE spokesperson confirmed to News 4 State Superintendent Ryan Walters hired Mohler as chief of staff in February. Records: State paid former OSDE spokesperson more than $75k in final paycheck It's not clear whether Mohler's role at OSDE is his only full-time job. As of Friday, Mohler's LinkedIn profile did not mention his role as OSDE's Chief of Staff. It says he works in Tallahassee, Florida, as an external affairs and special projects manager for Florida Power and Light. His profile says he has worked in the role from Feb. 2021 until 'present.' News 4 called Florida Power and Light's media hotline on Friday in an attempt to reach Mohler. The staff member who answered the phone did not work for the media relations department. They told News 4 they could not find Mohler's contact information in their company directory and asked for News 4's contact information so they could reach back out with a more definitive answer as to whether Mohler still works for the company. As of Monday, nobody from Florida Power and Light has reached back out to News 4. However, also as of Monday, Mohler was still listed on Florida Power and Light's website as an active employee, complete with a headshot and full biography. Mohler's LinkedIn account also says he previously worked for Front Line Strategies, a political consulting firm, from 2007 until 2024. OK School Standards with 2020 election theories 'going to take effect' OSDE Chief Policy Advisor Matt Langston, who Oklahoma Watch reported received a nearly $40,000 bonus this year, also previously worked for Front Line Strategies. As of Friday, Mohler was listed online as a current board member for United Way of North Central Florida (UWNCF). His profile on UWNCF's website lists 'Florida Power and Light' beneath his name. UWNCF shared a statement from Mohler in a Facebook post on Jan. 27. 'I look forward to working hard alongside fellow board members, volunteers, and staff to continue to make North Central Florida a healthy and happy place to live, work, and raise a family,' Mohler said in the statement. Mohler also previously served on the board of a Florida charter school – Tallahassee Classical School. Mohler was on the school's board in 2023 when multiple Florida news outlets reported the board's chairman forced a principal to resign because a parent complained a lesson involving Michelangelo's 'The David' statue was 'pornographic' – gaining national headlines. Publicly-available voter registration records show Mohler was still actively registered to vote in Florida as of Friday. On Friday, News 4 reached out to an OSDE spokesperson and asked if Mohler has been working for the department in-person—as a recent executive order from Governor Stitt required for all state employees—or, if he is working remotely. The spokesperson told News 4 Mohler has been working for OSDE in-person since February, but could not say anything more. News 4 asked the spokesperson why Mohler received the additional paycheck at a seemingly-inflated hourly rate in February. The spokesperson told News 4 they were 'unsure' why Mohler received the nearly $32,000 payment. When News 4 asked the spokesperson if they could ask Walters or Mohler for the reason and get back to News 4 with it, the spokesperson said they would be 'unable to say more.' 'Oklahomans have a right to know where this money is coming from and what it's paying for and why,' said Tim Gilpin, a former Oklahoma State Board of Education member and former Assistant Oklahoma Attorney General. Gilpin said, if he were still in office, payments like the ones OSDE recently gave Mohler and Langston would certainly raise red flags. 'Large sums of money going out to current and former employees would raise suspicion.' Gilpin said. 'And you would certainly ask Mr. Walters for a detailed explanation. But that's going to have to come from either a process from the state attorney general's office or the state legislature authorizing a review or investigation of it.' Last week, News 4 uncovered records showing OSDE paid its former spokesperson Dan Isett more than $76,000 in his final paycheck when he separated from the department in February. At the time of that report, multiple Republican and Democratic state lawmakers called for an investigation. 'It is appalling to see a payout this size, effectively creating a golden parachute for somebody who's separated from an agency for unknown reasons,' State Rep. Andy Fugate (D-Del City) told News 4 last week. 'I will point out that we have just impaneled a special investigative committee to take a look at what's going on in Department of Mental Health and substance abuse. We should be doing the same kind of thing with what has been happening at State Department of Education.' 'I do think the taxpayers deserve an answer as far as what happened here, why the money was spent this way,' State Rep. Daniel Pae (R-Lawton) told News 4 last week. 'As the legislative branch, it is our responsibility to provide oversight and accountability to all the state agencies. I know there's a conversation on looking at what specific budget requests each agency has brought forth, where the expenditures are. And so I think this can be part of that conversation.' News 4 has submitted multiple open records requests to OSDE for documents such as employment agreements, paystubs and severance agreements for Mohler, Isett, Langston and others who have received significant payouts. As of Monday, nobody at OSDE had responded to News 4's requests. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
MAGA's war on empathy exposes misogynist fears
The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner is famous in people-who-read circles for his ability to get maloevent and/or stupid people in leadership to humiliate themselves in his interviews. Lucky for him, the right provides an endless supply of people who are egotistic as they are ignorant, meaning he will never go without subjects who don't bother to learn this history before agreeing to go on the record with him. The latest deserving victim is Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went from denouncing Donald Trump as a "predator" in 2016 to being one of Trump's loudest Christian right defenders. Chotiner drew Mohler, a supposed follower of Jesus Christ, to admit he now condemns empathy. Mohler sneered that empathy is "an artificial virtue," calling empathy "destructive and manipulative." "Empathy means never having to say no," Mohler insisted, attacking the straw-iest of strawmen. Much was made in the media, for good reason, of billionaire Elon Musk's crusade against empathy, an emotion he describes as "suicidal" and the "fundamental weakness of Western civilization." Musk is an atheist, but in this attitude, he is increasingly joined by the Christian right, as Julia Carrie Wong documented at the Guardian this week. A growing chorus of evangelical leaders has taken to calling empathy "sinful," "toxic," and "satanic." Right-wing Catholics are going there, too, with Vice President JD Vance rejecting Jesus's exhortations to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger, drawing a rebuke from the Pope. The political impetus behind this overt assault on what was once considered a baseline virtue is obvious enough. All these people follow Trump, a man who is incapable of empathy, so much so that many high-profile psychologists have argued that he should be considered a sociopath, despite not consenting to a formal diagnosis. Trump has eclipsed Jesus himself as the object of worship on the Christian right, as evidenced by the hosts of "Girls Gone Bible" invoking Trump's name as if he were God in their rewrite of the Lord's Prayer. At his inauguration ball, a "worship painter" even replicated Trump's image while the crowd sang "amen" over and over, underscoring this shift in the de facto theology of these "Christians."So yeah, Trump's sociopathy now outranks the empathy of Jesus in MAGA eyes. But there's another angle to this, as well: This is about the MAGA right's unhinged obsession with gender and escalating hatred of women. Empathy is seen as a "feminine" emotion by both the atheistic techbro right and the Christian nationalist right. Both firmly agree that femininity is the root of all evil. One doesn't have to speculate, either, to see this aspect of the war on empathy. Plenty of MAGA leaders will say the misogynist part out loud. When the Episcopalian Rev. Mariann Budde spoke out about Trump's cruelty during an inauguration service, Blaze Media's Allie Beth Stuckey tweeted that this is "to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy." Stuckey has repeatedly argued that women cannot be pastors and that it's "arrogance" for women to believe otherwise. She also wrote "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion." Pastor Joe Rigney, author of "The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits," also lambasted Budde for daring to speak back to Trump. He wrote that she displayed "the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy" that was "enabled by the feminist denial of the complementary design and callings of men and women." He's fine with women having empathy inside the home, for family members. But, in leadership roles, "empathy is a liability, not an asset." He's also called it "pathological feminine empathy" to defend LGBTQ people and immigrants. The "sin of empathy" talk got even louder this week when Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the only conservative on the Supreme Court to agree with the three liberal justices that Trump has no right to send innocent Venezuelan immigrants to a torture prison in El Salvador. The four justices who dissented against Trump are women, so William Wolfe, former aide to Al Mohler, used it as evidence that women cannot be trusted with power. "Illegal alien criminals don't need to be 'mothered' by the women on the Supreme Court," he screeched on X. (Wolfe is lying, it must be said. Reports show many, probably most of the men who were disappeared had legal asylum status.) He then called them the "Four Horsewomen of Suicidal Empathy." As journalist and lawyer Jill Filipovic noted in her newsletter, "Coney Barrett signing onto part of the dissent in the Supreme Court decision at issue here had nothing to do with empathy," but was based on a "cold, rational reading of the Constitution." It's the men who appear to have let their emotions — whether it's unjustified fear of immigrants or an unwillingness to cross Trump — interfere with rational decision-making. On the secular side of MAGA, the claims are just as unfounded, but possibly even grosser. As Wong notes, Musk gets his ideas about "suicidal empathy" from Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor who pretends to be an expert in biology as cover for his baseless gender essentialism and racism against immigrants. Saad likes to tell the story of Karsten Nordal Hauken, a Norwegian man who Saad mocks for calling himself "feminist and anti-racist." Hauken was raped by a Somali immigrant a few years ago and went public about the complex emotions he felt when his rapist was deported. "I felt a relief and joy that he was going away forever," Hauken wrote. "But I also got a strong sense of guilt and responsibility. I was the reason why he should not be left in Norway, but rather to face a very uncertain future in Somalia." Hauken has become a punching bag on the right, which has clung only to the word "guilt," while ignoring that Hauken wasn't opposed to punishing his rapist. He just had complex emotions about treating an immigrant more harshly than a native-born Norwegian. Saad excused making fun of a rape victim by saying it was necessary to prove his point about "suicidal empathy." But really, what he's doing is reiterating the misogynist fears driving the right-wing war on empathy. After all, the MAGA movement can hardly be considered anti-rape. They back Trump, who was found liable by a civil jury for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll. Saad is using Hauken's experience to signal not disapproval of rape, but of empathy. It's a fable about how empathy makes you a woman, which is what makes you eligible for rape in the grim Trumpian landscape. For years, there have been endless rounds of media hand-wringing about the loneliness epidemic among men, which is unfairly implied to be the fault of women. Rhetoric like this, however, is far more to blame. Men who buy this message that empathy is stupid, suicidal, and effeminate — which is supposedly the worst thing you can be — are going to struggle to make friends and maintain romantic relationships. Empathy is a basic skill people need to get along with other people. Yes, most empathy-haters will offer some throat-clearing about how the feeling has its place, even for men. But that caveat is drowned out by the hyperbolic and highly gendered language that frames empathy as emasculating. And, of course, by the continued hero-worship of Trump, a man who has likely never felt a pang of feeling for a fellow human being in his life.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Yahoo
Check your cameras: Cedar Park, Leander police looking for attempted kidnapping suspect
The Brief Residents in the Carriage Hill subdivision are being asked to check their cameras for footage of an attempted kidnapping suspect. Police are asking residents to check camera footage from April 1 and April 2, specifically in the area near and around Hawk Drive. Leander police say a man attempted to kidnap a four-year-old child from the Lakeline Apartments on April 2. CEDAR PARK, Texas - Police are still looking for a suspect in an attempted kidnapping from earlier this month and are asking residents in the area to check their cameras. What we know Cedar Park police are asking residents in the Carriage Hills subdivision to check their security camera footage from April 1 and April 2 for any sightings of a man suspected in an attempted kidnapping. Police are focusing specifically on the area near and around Hawk Drive. Cedar Park police say that a resident reported seeing someone matching the suspect's description around 11 p.m. on April 1, roaming the neighborhood. The backstory The incident happened on April 2, at the Lakeline Apartments at 3000 N. Lakeline Boulevard, involving a four-year-old child. "Very, very uncommon," said Lt. Mike Mohler with the Leander Police Department earlier this month. "In the 25 years that I've been with Leander, almost 25 years that I've been with Leander, it's the first." The child is safe and was not injured, and no weapons were involved. What we know Leander police have released a description of the suspect: White male Approximately 5'9" Thin build Short dark curly hair Last seen wearing a black long-sleeved T-shirt and light-colored shorts; no shoes Lt. Mohler said they were not able to locate the suspect via drones or K9s, so he's turning to the public for help identifying him. The suspect fled the scene on foot southbound from the apartment complex and is still at large. What you can do Anyone with any information that might help identify the suspect or with any footage to share is urged to call Sgt. Aaron George at 512-528-2839 or email them at ageorge@ Leander police are also advising the public to: Stay Alert: Always be aware of your surroundings, especially in unfamiliar areas. Travel in Groups: There's safety in numbers—avoid walking alone at night or in secluded places. Trust Your Instincts: If a situation feels off, remove yourself as quickly as possible. Share Your Whereabouts: Let a friend or family member know where you're going and when to expect you back. Avoid Distractions: Limit phone use while walking so you can stay aware of people around you. Residents can report any suspicious behavior to the police immediately at 512-528-2800. The Source Information in this report comes from Facebook posts from Cedar Park and Leander police and previous reporting by FOX 7 Austin.
