#currie — Public Fediverse posts

On Twitter, #PamBondi also has a statement on #LindseyHalligan and her departure. But it has little basis in truth or the #law so let's #fisk it.

> During her 120-day tenure as Interim United States Attorney for the Eastern District of #Virginia

- Judge Currie expressly ruled that Lindsey Halligan was never lawfully appointed as U.S. Attorney at all.
- Her actions were therefore void ab initio — not merely defective, not expired, but never authorized.
- You cannot have a “120-day tenure” in an office you never legally held.

Also, it's a bit weird that NOW you say "interim" which Halligan was not using the filings.

> Lindsey Halligan served with the utmost distinction and an unwavering commitment to the rule of law.

Directly contradicted by multiple federal judges.
- Judge #Currie: held that #Halligan ignored statutory limits, bypassed Congress, and acted without constitutional authority.
- Judge #Novak: described her filing as “containing a level of vitriol more appropriate for a cable news talk show” and emphasized that she ignored every lawful avenue to resolve the issue.

Serving “with distinction” does not include:
- Acting without legal authority
- Continuing to sign filings with a title a federal judge ruled invalid
- Filing briefs that do not answer the court’s question
- Treating binding judicial rulings as optional

> By prosecuting the most serious offenders including violent criminal illegal aliens, murderers, and child abusers,

Misleading at best; likely false as a justification.

This is credit-laundering: attributing the ordinary work of career prosecutors to an unlawfully appointed political figure with no prosecutorial experience.

The Carolina pale crawler tale that got my attention

A creepy tale from North Carolina is making the rounds on social media and causing a huge stir in the paranormal community. Remarkably, this one comes with details, a genuine 911 distress call, and police reports. This isn’t your average ghost tale. It is considerably weirder. Trying to debunk it would be a lost cause.

I started hearing bits of this story in the past few days. It was described as the story of a cryptid that jumped in a truck. It seemed outrageous. Considering how difficult it is to find reliable sources online these days, the Carolina Case Files YouTube channel has a real life presenter who was really at the location and had really gathered the pieces. They delivered a solid report. Their video (necessary viewing) is linked below, but here is the story:

A young man driving a pickup truck was travelling on Route 210 north near Currie, NC just before 11 PM on July 31, 2021. While still moving, he places a call to Pender County 911 to report that he saw what appeared to be a man on the roadside, bleeding from the head. The witness, clearly upset, reported seeing red streaks on the torso, with the man just staring at the driver as he passed.

A half a minute later, as the dispatcher continued to talk to the driver, there was an audible thump on his end. He swore and yelled that something was in the bed of the truck. Then he screamed, “It’s not human, it’s not human!” and he accelerated. The dispatcher continued to ask for information as he tells her he slammed on the brakes, knocking the thing over the hood and onto the road.

He took off down the road again. The dispatcher tried to get him to say what he thought the thing was, but he couldn’t. He rejected her idea that it might have been a turkey, insisting that it didn’t have feathers but was pale, light-colored. He continued on, admitting to the dispatcher he was too shaken and freaked out to stop, until he got to a store on Route 421 several minutes later. During the call, he ticked off landmarks to indicate where he was. He waited several minutes at the store for the arrival of police and an EMT crew.

The officers had him take them to the spot where he saw the bleeding man and had the encounter with the mystery thing in the truck. There was nothing found. The truck, however, apparently had scratch marks on the roof.

Story known for years

The story has just spread widely on social media, showing up on websites and social media, even though it took place in 2021. The incident was known in the area, spread by friends of the driver or the responders. However, the witness didn’t want to tell this story; he wanted to forget it. Carolina Case Files followed up on the details and tracked him down, convincing him to recollect what happened. They posted the video below on September 13, 2025 including interviews with the witness and the sheriff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acK1v75u6CM

The witness, still wishing to remain anonymous and referred to as “T”, recounts the story with additional detail about the first encounter – what has been interpreted as a Civil War ghost soldier near the Moore’s Creek Battlefield – and the subsequent truck incident. The two entities are assumed to not be related. Paranormalists, however, contend that there is a history of spooky encounters in this area making it a window area.

The driver states that he could see the thing in the truck when he turned on the bed lights. Its head was at the back window. He described it as having a white face with sunken eyes and skin stretched over the skull. After it was ejected from the truck, he saw it stand up on the road. He says it had an excessively thin “scrawny” long body, like a human but stretched out, about 7-feet tall.

Comparing the official record with the story, some inconsistencies emerged. Carolina Case Files made a follow-up video noting an error they made in the time stamp of the call, and explaining that in the 4 years that had passed, the witness no longer had the photo evidence because he wanted to move past this incident forever. The host, Rusty Martin, assured the audience that this was definitely a recorded incident, just as described. No hoaxing. They had obtained the 911 recording and police reports through regular investigative channels. They also recreated the trip along the same route while playing the extended version of the call. The timeline matched. The police apparently had used a drone to search for reported entities but found nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqbKXep5LTk

BroBible, a site I normally refuse to link to because it’s ad-heavy clickbait, actually did a decent summary of the case here.

“And all I see is this just this super scrawny long body just fly over my truck in a ball, rolling,” T recalls. “As I’m swerving to the left, I see it stand up. And it is easily taller than that truck. I’m 5′ 10”. The truck is about 2 inches taller than I am. And this thing was easily, like, maybe 7 feet. And, as I pass it, I look in my mirror, and I see it bolt to the left into the woods.”

“It looked like somebody took a normal human and stretched them out, starting with the limbs,” he says. “Abnormally long legs and arms. And it just took off into the woods.”

The Rake

It’s one thing to claim to see a roadside ghost – one of many thousands of similar experiences reported worldwide. I have nothing to say about that other than it’s interesting. But the truck entity is really intriguing. If not for the recording, I’d have a hard time imagining anything like the second part of this account really occurred. We can speculate all day about what reasonably might have happened. That’s not the point. The point is the story is being interpreted as an encounter with a pale crawler, a rake, a shrink-wrapped humanoid monster. And people are eating it up.

I’m not going to dance around the fact that rakes are made up monsters. There is a whole genre of hairless elongated humanoids including Slenderman, gray aliens, the “tall man”, etc. Its name comes from its rake-like claws. We know the rake is fiction. It was created in 2005 when writers on 4chan collaborated to create a monster. And it caught on. It became a pop cryptid, usually supernatural, always menacing. It’s a form that people seem to “see” a lot, just like the hairy man. Stories, art and videos are shared everyday about the array of pale crawlers. That form fits this story exactly.

I don’t know what this driver saw, and we likely will never know. This tale does not make the rake real. Could a deer or another animal have run into his truck? Was he already so upset that he misinterpreted the awful incident that followed the first? How can we account for his description of the monster’s face and height? We can’t. We can only speculate. I won’t do that.

This story has legs; it will inject megawatts of energy into the haunted lore of this area. There is little value in making the effort to “explain” it because most people don’t want an explanation. They want the story. This gripping, amazing account is what it is: a real life paranormal tale.

Post Script 28-Sept-2025: I hear a lot of people commenting that this is a hoax. That’s always a possibility. If it is a hoax, it involves several people over a long time. The evidence at least shows that this story was circulated as early as December 2024. So Carolina Case Files would have had to make up a series of facts and make it match with existing times and places. And the Sheriff would be lying. That’s a big deal. Police reports aren’t available online, and likely because the person wished to remain anonymous, that report it’s floating around for everyone to see. If additional evidence were to show up that disputes the claims – such as local residents reporting it was a manufactured tale, or that some aspect of the interview video were faked – then the likely conclusion shifts.

Sometimes the skeptic looks ridiculous by saying “it’s a hoax!”, accusing someone of making it up when the hoax would involve a considerable number of people whose reputation would be on the line. That’s why I don’t see hoax as an obvious answer here. I think something happened to this guy; we just don’t know, and may never know, what that was.

7-Oct-2025: Now the story has made it to several other sources and even Snopes has checked into it. As usual, it takes a week or so to rise to wider coverage. So, yeah, all you doubters, the caller didn’t hoax this, as I stated above.

29-Oct-2025: Check out the Skeptoid episode that covers this story.

#Currie #ghost #humanoid #ItSNotHuman #MooreSCreek #NorthCarolina #PaleCrawler #PenderCounty #Route210 #theRake #truckAttack

https://sharonahill.com/?p=10391

In the months after Roe fell, their efforts would reach beyond the outlines of that one document.

A.D.F. lawyers would get involved in the two high-profile Supreme Court cases,
argued before the justices this spring,
that could define post-Roe abortion access for American women;

they focused on🔹 the legality of medication that is the most common method of abortion 🔹
and on 🔹emergency care for pregnant women who face grave medical complications🔹 in states where abortion is banned.

But all that was to come.

Onstage that night, Fitch beamed.

For so many decades, Roe had seemed indestructible,

the backdrop to the lives of three generations of American women
and their families.

Soon it would be a relic of an earlier time.

“We’ve got tough times ahead,
but we’re ready,” Fitch told the audience.

“This has been certainly a God thing.
We’ve all been called.
We’ve all been waiting.”

Now, she said, they would not stop.

“Everyone in this room, you’re ready.”

(15/15)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

In the months after Roe fell, their efforts would reach beyond the outlines of that one document.

A.D.F. lawyers would get involved in the two high-profile Supreme Court cases,
argued before the justices this spring,
that could define post-Roe abortion access for American women;

they focused on🔹 the legality of medication that is the most common method of abortion 🔹
and on 🔹emergency care for pregnant women who face grave medical complications🔹 in states where abortion is banned.

But all that was to come.

Onstage that night, Fitch beamed.

For so many decades, Roe had seemed indestructible,

the backdrop to the lives of three generations of American women
and their families.

Soon it would be a relic of an earlier time.

“We’ve got tough times ahead,
but we’re ready,” Fitch told the audience.

“This has been certainly a God thing.
We’ve all been called.
We’ve all been waiting.”

Now, she said, they would not stop.

“Everyone in this room, you’re ready.”

(15/15)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

And now, amid the applause,
A.D.F. leaders looked ahead.

Their ultimate goal was sweeping change across America to preserve the values of conservative Christians.

A.D.F. was, after all, a “religious ministry,”
not just a legal network,
as Kristen Waggoner said in an interview.

Ending abortion was the first target, but A.D.F. had already begun planning for more.

According to an internal strategy document dated to May 2021,
A.D.F. leaders set out to achieve what they called
“generational wins,”

victories that,
like overturning Roe,
would change the law and the culture of America
for an entire generation.

The document, never before reported,
reveals secret details of the legal decisions A.D.F. hopes to challenge in the coming years.

A.D.F. lawyers would work to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in
🔸Employment Division v. Smith, 🔸
to “fully protect the free exercise of religion,”
the strategy document explained.

That decision, written by Scalia,
ruled that religious beliefs did not excuse disobeying laws.

They would pursue litigation to enforce free-speech rights on college campuses.

They would push legislation to protect the freedom of association there as well,
to eventually overturn a decision that Ginsburg wrote in
🔸Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. 🔸

The ruling allowed a public university not to recognize a Christian student group that excluded gay students.

In his dissent, Alito called the decision a “serious setback for freedom of expression.”

They would target 🔹L.G.B.T.Q. rights and protections 🔹
and “stop efforts to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected-class status in the law akin to race.”

They would “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality
that reflects God’s creative order.”

And they wanted the court to
🔹strengthen parental rights over state authority🔹
by having the court revisit the 2000 case 🔸Troxel v. Granville,🔸
which allowed the state to override a parent’s wishes in some circumstances.

A.D.F. would work to pass state legislation, similar to its approach on abortion,
that would prioritize parental rights in medical decisions for minors who say they are transgender,
to prevent parents from “being coerced into consenting to life-changing, ill-advised surgeries and procedures in the wake of gender dysphoria.”

It was an agenda that would inflame their liberal opponents and that not even everyone in the ballroom knew about.

(An A.D.F. official distanced the organization from the specific cases named in the document,
saying its legal strategies shift based on precedent and current events.)

(14/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

And now, amid the applause,
A.D.F. leaders looked ahead.

Their ultimate goal was sweeping change across America to preserve the values of conservative Christians.

A.D.F. was, after all, a “religious ministry,”
not just a legal network,
as Kristen Waggoner said in an interview.

Ending abortion was the first target, but A.D.F. had already begun planning for more.

According to an internal strategy document dated to May 2021,
A.D.F. leaders set out to achieve what they called
“generational wins,”

victories that,
like overturning Roe,
would change the law and the culture of America
for an entire generation.

The document, never before reported,
reveals secret details of the legal decisions A.D.F. hopes to challenge in the coming years.

A.D.F. lawyers would work to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in
🔸Employment Division v. Smith, 🔸
to “fully protect the free exercise of religion,”
the strategy document explained.

That decision, written by Scalia,
ruled that religious beliefs did not excuse disobeying laws.

They would pursue litigation to enforce free-speech rights on college campuses.

They would push legislation to protect the freedom of association there as well,
to eventually overturn a decision that Ginsburg wrote in
🔸Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. 🔸

The ruling allowed a public university not to recognize a Christian student group that excluded gay students.

In his dissent, Alito called the decision a “serious setback for freedom of expression.”

They would target 🔹L.G.B.T.Q. rights and protections 🔹
and “stop efforts to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected-class status in the law akin to race.”

They would “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality
that reflects God’s creative order.”

And they wanted the court to
🔹strengthen parental rights over state authority🔹
by having the court revisit the 2000 case 🔸Troxel v. Granville,🔸
which allowed the state to override a parent’s wishes in some circumstances.

A.D.F. would work to pass state legislation, similar to its approach on abortion,
that would prioritize parental rights in medical decisions for minors who say they are transgender,
to prevent parents from “being coerced into consenting to life-changing, ill-advised surgeries and procedures in the wake of gender dysphoria.”

It was an agenda that would inflame their liberal opponents and that not even everyone in the ballroom knew about.

(An A.D.F. official distanced the organization from the specific cases named in the document,
saying its legal strategies shift based on precedent and current events.)

(14/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

After Stewart argued the case at the Supreme Court in December 2021,
leaders of the anti-abortion movement gathered that evening
at the JW Marriott in Washington
for an invitation-only dinner banquet
sponsored by A.D.F.

Everyone from the network seemed to be there,
and A.D.F. gave out party favors of small wooden plaques
depicting a pregnant woman leaning against a Supreme Court column.

The mood was celebratory even though their ultimate victory wouldn’t come for another six months,
with the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that would overturn Roe.

Marjorie Dannenfelser was in the room.
As were local activists who pushed abortion bans through their statehouses.

Authors of the amicus briefs supporting Stewart’s case.
Becky Currie, who believed she had come up with the idea of the 15-week law in Mississippi.

Many participants knew only the small part they played,
not how the whole fit together.

Currie met Stewart briefly that night for the first time.

“He couldn’t pick me out of a crowd,” she said.

Onstage, Lynn Fitch, Scott Stewart and Erin Hawley sat proudly
as they described how they had gotten to this moment.

“First of all, to God be the glory,” Fitch began.

“We all prayed, worked so hard for this day.
It all came together because everyone here,
everyone that’s been involved across our country,
we’re believers,
and we knew this day would come,” she said.

“God selected this case. He was ready.
The justices were ready to hear what we were all going to be talking about.”

For those listening,
the people around them in that ballroom
and all they accomplished represented
a vision of the kingdom of God
coming on Earth,
as Jesus’ prayer taught in the Gospels.

Their work offered a vision of what a modern Christian empire looked like.

It did not involve violent crusaders or declaring an official state religion.

It was not clerics instituting a theocracy.

The anti-abortion movement had used the existing system to define the Constitution the way it saw fit.

A right was not being taken away from women,
the movement argued,
because it never should have existed in the first place.

Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg had said Roe,
rooted in a right to privacy,
wasn’t built on the strongest legal ground.

An argument explicitly based on a constitutional right to equal protection would have better protected it from challenges, she argued.

A.D.F.’s strategy on Dobbs reflected how it believed it could reshape America
and overtake majority opinion.

There’s a saying that law is downstream from culture,
said Greg Scott, a former longtime communications strategist for A.D.F.,
explaining the idea in an interview that a cause gains popular support first
and then the law formalizes those beliefs.

“I actually reject that,” he said.

“We are in this feedback loop and this ecosystem where frequently that is true.

But then at other times, the law does drive culture.”

(13/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

After Stewart argued the case at the Supreme Court in December 2021,
leaders of the anti-abortion movement gathered that evening
at the JW Marriott in Washington
for an invitation-only dinner banquet
sponsored by A.D.F.

Everyone from the network seemed to be there,
and A.D.F. gave out party favors of small wooden plaques
depicting a pregnant woman leaning against a Supreme Court column.

The mood was celebratory even though their ultimate victory wouldn’t come for another six months,
with the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that would overturn Roe.

Marjorie Dannenfelser was in the room.
As were local activists who pushed abortion bans through their statehouses.

Authors of the amicus briefs supporting Stewart’s case.
Becky Currie, who believed she had come up with the idea of the 15-week law in Mississippi.

Many participants knew only the small part they played,
not how the whole fit together.

Currie met Stewart briefly that night for the first time.

“He couldn’t pick me out of a crowd,” she said.

Onstage, Lynn Fitch, Scott Stewart and Erin Hawley sat proudly
as they described how they had gotten to this moment.

“First of all, to God be the glory,” Fitch began.

“We all prayed, worked so hard for this day.
It all came together because everyone here,
everyone that’s been involved across our country,
we’re believers,
and we knew this day would come,” she said.

“God selected this case. He was ready.
The justices were ready to hear what we were all going to be talking about.”

For those listening,
the people around them in that ballroom
and all they accomplished represented
a vision of the kingdom of God
coming on Earth,
as Jesus’ prayer taught in the Gospels.

Their work offered a vision of what a modern Christian empire looked like.

It did not involve violent crusaders or declaring an official state religion.

It was not clerics instituting a theocracy.

The anti-abortion movement had used the existing system to define the Constitution the way it saw fit.

A right was not being taken away from women,
the movement argued,
because it never should have existed in the first place.

Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg had said Roe,
rooted in a right to privacy,
wasn’t built on the strongest legal ground.

An argument explicitly based on a constitutional right to equal protection would have better protected it from challenges, she argued.

A.D.F.’s strategy on Dobbs reflected how it believed it could reshape America
and overtake majority opinion.

There’s a saying that law is downstream from culture,
said Greg Scott, a former longtime communications strategist for A.D.F.,
explaining the idea in an interview that a cause gains popular support first
and then the law formalizes those beliefs.

“I actually reject that,” he said.

“We are in this feedback loop and this ecosystem where frequently that is true.

But then at other times, the law does drive culture.”

(13/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Stewart’s thinking reflected the shifts that had overtaken the anti-abortion movement and the conservative legal project
during the Trump administration.

For four years, they had gone bigger and bolder than what previously felt possible.

Courts blocked many of their state abortion bans. But the efforts themselves had further opened the window of possibilities.

To overturn Roe, conservatives had to directly ask the court to do so.

A.D.F. might have been skittish about making the request, but Fitch and Stewart were not.

While the anti-abortion views of the movement’s leaders still represented a distinct minority of the country,
they had built an elite legal and ideological ecosystem of activists, organizations, lawmakers and pro bono lawyers around their cause.

Their policy arms churned out legal arguments and medical studies.

Their lawyers argued their cases, and their judges ruled on them,
all fostered by the bench that Leo built.

And their allied lawmakers pushed their agenda in statehouses and Congress.

Yet despite their overwhelming success, many on the left continued to underestimate them. It was their greatest strength.

Behind closed doors, Fitch’s team drew up a nine-slide blueprint, marked “Confidential”:
a 12-month political and public-relations strategy in the run-up to the expected court decision on Dobbs in June 2022.

“Strategy to maximize impact at SCOTUS,” it began.

The whole operation was surprisingly low-budget,
estimated as up to $231,000,
to be paid out of the attorney general’s office and Fitch’s political fund,
according to the private document.

When Stewart filed the new brief for Mississippi that July,
his argument was a full-scale assault on a precedent that had defined American life for nearly half a century,
in plain language.

“Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” he wrote.

“The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text,
structure, history,
or tradition.”

That same month, Stewart attended a reunion of Thomas’s law clerks hosted at a West Virginia resort by the justice
— before whom he would soon argue his case.

If Stewart won, Roe would fall.

At least 13 states already had trigger bans on the books,
making them certain to move quickly to ban abortion,
with very limited exceptions.

And at least a dozen more states were likely to follow quickly with their own restrictions.

A victory by Mississippi could make abortion illegal in about half the country.

(12/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Stewart’s thinking reflected the shifts that had overtaken the anti-abortion movement and the conservative legal project
during the Trump administration.

For four years, they had gone bigger and bolder than what previously felt possible.

Courts blocked many of their state abortion bans. But the efforts themselves had further opened the window of possibilities.

To overturn Roe, conservatives had to directly ask the court to do so.

A.D.F. might have been skittish about making the request, but Fitch and Stewart were not.

While the anti-abortion views of the movement’s leaders still represented a distinct minority of the country,
they had built an elite legal and ideological ecosystem of activists, organizations, lawmakers and pro bono lawyers around their cause.

Their policy arms churned out legal arguments and medical studies.

Their lawyers argued their cases, and their judges ruled on them,
all fostered by the bench that Leo built.

And their allied lawmakers pushed their agenda in statehouses and Congress.

Yet despite their overwhelming success, many on the left continued to underestimate them. It was their greatest strength.

Behind closed doors, Fitch’s team drew up a nine-slide blueprint, marked “Confidential”:
a 12-month political and public-relations strategy in the run-up to the expected court decision on Dobbs in June 2022.

“Strategy to maximize impact at SCOTUS,” it began.

The whole operation was surprisingly low-budget,
estimated as up to $231,000,
to be paid out of the attorney general’s office and Fitch’s political fund,
according to the private document.

When Stewart filed the new brief for Mississippi that July,
his argument was a full-scale assault on a precedent that had defined American life for nearly half a century,
in plain language.

“Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” he wrote.

“The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text,
structure, history,
or tradition.”

That same month, Stewart attended a reunion of Thomas’s law clerks hosted at a West Virginia resort by the justice
— before whom he would soon argue his case.

If Stewart won, Roe would fall.

At least 13 states already had trigger bans on the books,
making them certain to move quickly to ban abortion,
with very limited exceptions.

And at least a dozen more states were likely to follow quickly with their own restrictions.

A victory by Mississippi could make abortion illegal in about half the country.

(12/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Squeezed around a long table,
A.D.F. lawyers lined up on one side
and the Mississippi team on the other.

This private meeting,
one kept secret from the press,
top politicians and even other allies in the anti-abortion coalition,
would signify a pivotal turning point in the strategy of their movement.

This account of the meeting is based on interviews with multiple participants and people familiar with the discussion.

The A.D.F. lawyers outlined their thinking.

Priority No. 1, they argued, was to get the Supreme Court to
remove the viability line established in Roe as the limit for when states could ban abortion.

Removing that limit
— about 24 weeks
— would open the door to all kinds of restrictions being upheld by lower courts.

It would be a huge victory for their cause.

It was a backdoor way of gutting Roe,
invalidating the central principle of the original decision,
without requiring the justices to take the thornier step of overturning 50 years of precedent.

Stewart disagreed.

The lawmakers of Mississippi had enacted a law,
and that law was fundamentally incompatible with Roe, he argued.

“The people of Mississippi are pro-life,” he told the room,
according to Erin Hawley.

“They enacted this law. It is my duty to defend it to the best of my ability, and the right thing to do is to ask the court to overrule Roe.”

The only effective strategy, Stewart said,
according to participants,
was to target the very heart of it all:
the right to abortion that the court had found via
💥a right to privacy 💥
that it decided was protected by the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution in 1973.

The best argument was that Roe was wrong, he decided.

Some of the A.D.F. lawyers bristled.

Stewart’s plan felt risky and aggressive.

If the court wanted to use this case to overturn Roe, it could,
the A.D.F. team argued.

But to ask for that explicitly could be pushing too far too fast,
even for this new court.

A defeat would be devastating,
potentially even going so far as to reaffirm abortion rights in some way
and create another precedent to fight.

There was a lot to consider.

It wasn’t totally clear that they had five votes to fully overturn Roe right now.

Certainly, it was the best court they had faced in a long time.

But the 6-3 conservative majority was still new,
and the country was still reeling from the contentious Supreme Court battles of the Trump era.

And looming over the conversation was the reality that
Stewart had never argued a case at the Supreme Court.

By this point, A.D.F. lawyers had argued and won 12 Supreme Court cases.

The A.D.F. lawyers’ message was clear:
The safest path to victory was their plan.

They should simply ask the court to uphold their 15-week law.

Fitch’s team was grateful for A.D.F.’s help.
But to them, this had the feel of a power grab
— a bunch of Washington lawyers coming down to Jackson to take over once there was a chance to make history.

This was Fitch’s case.

She had chosen Stewart, and Stewart was determined.

Mississippi would forge its own path.

“Like everything else, you get four attorneys in a room, you’re going to get 10 opinions,”
Kevin Theriot, an A.D.F. lawyer, said later in an interview,
adding that he was on the phone for part of the meeting.

“It’s not that our original strategy went out the window.
It was just that instead of making
‘You should overturn Roe’ the second argument,
they made it the first argument.”

(11/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Squeezed around a long table,
A.D.F. lawyers lined up on one side
and the Mississippi team on the other.

This private meeting,
one kept secret from the press,
top politicians and even other allies in the anti-abortion coalition,
would signify a pivotal turning point in the strategy of their movement.

This account of the meeting is based on interviews with multiple participants and people familiar with the discussion.

The A.D.F. lawyers outlined their thinking.

Priority No. 1, they argued, was to get the Supreme Court to
remove the viability line established in Roe as the limit for when states could ban abortion.

Removing that limit
— about 24 weeks
— would open the door to all kinds of restrictions being upheld by lower courts.

It would be a huge victory for their cause.

It was a backdoor way of gutting Roe,
invalidating the central principle of the original decision,
without requiring the justices to take the thornier step of overturning 50 years of precedent.

Stewart disagreed.

The lawmakers of Mississippi had enacted a law,
and that law was fundamentally incompatible with Roe, he argued.

“The people of Mississippi are pro-life,” he told the room,
according to Erin Hawley.

“They enacted this law. It is my duty to defend it to the best of my ability, and the right thing to do is to ask the court to overrule Roe.”

The only effective strategy, Stewart said,
according to participants,
was to target the very heart of it all:
the right to abortion that the court had found via
💥a right to privacy 💥
that it decided was protected by the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution in 1973.

The best argument was that Roe was wrong, he decided.

Some of the A.D.F. lawyers bristled.

Stewart’s plan felt risky and aggressive.

If the court wanted to use this case to overturn Roe, it could,
the A.D.F. team argued.

But to ask for that explicitly could be pushing too far too fast,
even for this new court.

A defeat would be devastating,
potentially even going so far as to reaffirm abortion rights in some way
and create another precedent to fight.

There was a lot to consider.

It wasn’t totally clear that they had five votes to fully overturn Roe right now.

Certainly, it was the best court they had faced in a long time.

But the 6-3 conservative majority was still new,
and the country was still reeling from the contentious Supreme Court battles of the Trump era.

And looming over the conversation was the reality that
Stewart had never argued a case at the Supreme Court.

By this point, A.D.F. lawyers had argued and won 12 Supreme Court cases.

The A.D.F. lawyers’ message was clear:
The safest path to victory was their plan.

They should simply ask the court to uphold their 15-week law.

Fitch’s team was grateful for A.D.F.’s help.
But to them, this had the feel of a power grab
— a bunch of Washington lawyers coming down to Jackson to take over once there was a chance to make history.

This was Fitch’s case.

She had chosen Stewart, and Stewart was determined.

Mississippi would forge its own path.

“Like everything else, you get four attorneys in a room, you’re going to get 10 opinions,”
Kevin Theriot, an A.D.F. lawyer, said later in an interview,
adding that he was on the phone for part of the meeting.

“It’s not that our original strategy went out the window.
It was just that instead of making
‘You should overturn Roe’ the second argument,
they made it the first argument.”

(11/n)

#Waggoner #Hawley #Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

It was not a moment for compromise, Stewart reasoned,
according to people familiar with his thinking.

It was a lesson he had learned from Thomas,
his former boss and mentor,
who was known to hold the line without deviation.

He would be steadfast:
Roe and Casey were wrong and must be reversed.

Within weeks, in early June 2021,
A.D.F. lawyers were on flights to Jackson.

It was a crucial moment for the entire anti-abortion coalition.

But even after years of pushing for this singular goal,
the coalition was not a monolith.

Stewart wanted to openly ask the Supreme Court to
overturn Roe.

A.D.F. also wanted Roe overturned, of course
— its ultimate target was to ban abortion nationwide at conception
— but it favored a more limited, less risky approach,
lawyers at the organization recalled in a series of interviews.

And they saw the Dobbs case as their project.

Now they just had to make sure Stewart and Fitch didn’t jeopardize the plan that had been laid almost six years earlier with Tseytlin at the Mayflower Hotel.

The A.D.F. lawyers rode the old mirrored elevators of the Walter Sillers State Office Building in Jackson to the 12th floor
for a private meeting with Fitch and Stewart.

This could be the case of a generation, and A.D.F. wasn’t about to cede control.

A.D.F.’s incoming president,
Kristen #Waggoner,
brought a core team of top-notch attorneys and media experts,
including a new lawyer A.D.F. had hired:
Erin #Hawley, a graduate of Yale Law School.

She was married to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.

Overturning Roe was a joint mission for the Hawleys, who met as clerks for Chief Justice Roberts.

(10/n)

#Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

It was not a moment for compromise, Stewart reasoned,
according to people familiar with his thinking.

It was a lesson he had learned from Thomas,
his former boss and mentor,
who was known to hold the line without deviation.

He would be steadfast:
Roe and Casey were wrong and must be reversed.

Within weeks, in early June 2021,
A.D.F. lawyers were on flights to Jackson.

It was a crucial moment for the entire anti-abortion coalition.

But even after years of pushing for this singular goal,
the coalition was not a monolith.

Stewart wanted to openly ask the Supreme Court to
overturn Roe.

A.D.F. also wanted Roe overturned, of course
— its ultimate target was to ban abortion nationwide at conception
— but it favored a more limited, less risky approach,
lawyers at the organization recalled in a series of interviews.

And they saw the Dobbs case as their project.

Now they just had to make sure Stewart and Fitch didn’t jeopardize the plan that had been laid almost six years earlier with Tseytlin at the Mayflower Hotel.

The A.D.F. lawyers rode the old mirrored elevators of the Walter Sillers State Office Building in Jackson to the 12th floor
for a private meeting with Fitch and Stewart.

This could be the case of a generation, and A.D.F. wasn’t about to cede control.

A.D.F.’s incoming president,
Kristen #Waggoner,
brought a core team of top-notch attorneys and media experts,
including a new lawyer A.D.F. had hired:
Erin #Hawley, a graduate of Yale Law School.

She was married to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.

Overturning Roe was a joint mission for the Hawleys, who met as clerks for Chief Justice Roberts.

(10/n)

#Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Over the past decade and a half, the job of state solicitor general had become a coveted slot for ambitious young lawyers,
even a path to more prominent posts like judgeships.

For Stewart, the opportunity was ideal
— representing a Republican state when there was a Democratic president offered the potential for high-profile conflict.

And there was the lure of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health,
the Mississippi case named for its petitioner,
Thomas Dobbs
(whose name was on the case in his capacity as a state health officer),
which had been appealed up to the Supreme Court.

Dobbs could be Stewart’s first chance to argue a case before the justices.

Stewart had clerked for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain,
a pugnacious voice for right-wing judicial thought on the liberal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,
and for Clarence Thomas,
parlaying his conservative credentials into a post on Trump’s transition team,
assessing the legality of various potential policies.

When he got the job in Mississippi, a friend he had worked with at Gibson Dunn,
a law firm known in Washington as a conservative powerhouse,
reached out to congratulate him and share advice on becoming a new solicitor general.

It was Misha Tseytlin.

Now Fitch and Stewart watched the Supreme Court seem to ignore their case for months.

And like their opponents, they found the apparent indecision strange.

Everyone had a theory about why the justices were dragging their feet.

Maybe they would decide to not hear the case at all.

The silence broke one morning in May 2021.

Fitch was on her way to the airport after attending an event hosted by the Republican Attorneys General Association.

That weekend, the organization held an exclusive gathering at a private island on the secluded coast of southeast Georgia
nestled between the marsh and the sea.

There, corporate bigwigs schmoozed with top state law-enforcement leaders,
people like Fitch,
who would often determine the fate of their interests in America’s highest courts.

Now Fitch stared at the text from her chief of staff,
Michelle Williams,
trying to absorb the magnitude:
“We just got cert.”

The Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case that could strike at Roe.

The hopes of the conservative movement,
and the fears of those who supported abortion rights,
rested with Mississippi.

Stewart had to decide on a strategy.

Fitch’s petition for certiorari focused on upholding the Mississippi law
and mentioned the possibility of overturning Roe only in a footnote:
“If the Court determines that it cannot reconcile Roe and Casey with other precedents
or scientific advancements showing a compelling state interest in fetal life far earlier in pregnancy than those cases contemplate,
the Court should not retain erroneous precedent.”

Stewart knew that a lot of lawyers would encourage him to continue down that easier path,
to simply argue that Mississippi’s law should be upheld.

To not push for the complete overturn of Roe but to chip away
— as the movement had for so many decades
— and get the court to undo the viability standard.

But for Stewart, these circumstances were different from those in the past.

Trump had pushed their cause from the biggest bully pulpit in the land.

Conservatives now had a majority on the court that seemed to be on their side.

(9/n)

#Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Over the past decade and a half, the job of state solicitor general had become a coveted slot for ambitious young lawyers,
even a path to more prominent posts like judgeships.

For Stewart, the opportunity was ideal
— representing a Republican state when there was a Democratic president offered the potential for high-profile conflict.

And there was the lure of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health,
the Mississippi case named for its petitioner,
Thomas Dobbs
(whose name was on the case in his capacity as a state health officer),
which had been appealed up to the Supreme Court.

Dobbs could be Stewart’s first chance to argue a case before the justices.

Stewart had clerked for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain,
a pugnacious voice for right-wing judicial thought on the liberal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,
and for Clarence Thomas,
parlaying his conservative credentials into a post on Trump’s transition team,
assessing the legality of various potential policies.

When he got the job in Mississippi, a friend he had worked with at Gibson Dunn,
a law firm known in Washington as a conservative powerhouse,
reached out to congratulate him and share advice on becoming a new solicitor general.

It was Misha Tseytlin.

Now Fitch and Stewart watched the Supreme Court seem to ignore their case for months.

And like their opponents, they found the apparent indecision strange.

Everyone had a theory about why the justices were dragging their feet.

Maybe they would decide to not hear the case at all.

The silence broke one morning in May 2021.

Fitch was on her way to the airport after attending an event hosted by the Republican Attorneys General Association.

That weekend, the organization held an exclusive gathering at a private island on the secluded coast of southeast Georgia
nestled between the marsh and the sea.

There, corporate bigwigs schmoozed with top state law-enforcement leaders,
people like Fitch,
who would often determine the fate of their interests in America’s highest courts.

Now Fitch stared at the text from her chief of staff,
Michelle Williams,
trying to absorb the magnitude:
“We just got cert.”

The Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case that could strike at Roe.

The hopes of the conservative movement,
and the fears of those who supported abortion rights,
rested with Mississippi.

Stewart had to decide on a strategy.

Fitch’s petition for certiorari focused on upholding the Mississippi law
and mentioned the possibility of overturning Roe only in a footnote:
“If the Court determines that it cannot reconcile Roe and Casey with other precedents
or scientific advancements showing a compelling state interest in fetal life far earlier in pregnancy than those cases contemplate,
the Court should not retain erroneous precedent.”

Stewart knew that a lot of lawyers would encourage him to continue down that easier path,
to simply argue that Mississippi’s law should be upheld.

To not push for the complete overturn of Roe but to chip away
— as the movement had for so many decades
— and get the court to undo the viability standard.

But for Stewart, these circumstances were different from those in the past.

Trump had pushed their cause from the biggest bully pulpit in the land.

Conservatives now had a majority on the court that seemed to be on their side.

(9/n)

#Barrett #Stewart #Fitch #Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Trump introduced Amy Coney #Barrett as his nominee in the Rose Garden, in the same place where Bill Clinton introduced Ginsburg in 1993.

Back then, Dannenfelser was 27 and dreaming of carving out a more powerful place for conservative anti-abortion women in Washington.

That was half a lifetime ago. Now, at 54, she and those women sat in the Rose Garden watching Barrett,
a Catholic mother of seven whom Trump had said he had been “saving” to succeed Ginsburg,
become the avatar of the culture they wanted to usher in for America.

Barrett was both Christian supermom and high-powered legal scholar,
elite and outsider,
a combination of the more secular conservative Federalist Society credentials
and the beliefs of the emerging Christian legal movement.

This new iteration of conservative feminism didn’t argue that women’s gains should be rolled back
or that women should not be professionally ambitious.

But it wanted those advances not to come at the expense of ideals of motherhood,
Christian morality
and the centrality of human life at conception.

Seven days before the 2020 presidential election,
Leonard Leo tuned in from his home in Maine to watch his close friend
Clarence Thomas swear in Barrett to the court.

Watching her raise her right hand felt like the culmination of the entire project.

It was, he said in an interview,
“exhilarating.”

Trump had become the most successful anti-abortion president America had ever known.

His administration transformed the judiciary.

With his speech to the March for Life in 2020
— the first time a sitting president attended
— and graphic comments in his 2019 State of the Union address about how abortion providers “execute a baby,”
he changed political expectations and red lines for Republican presidents.

What Trump and his Republican allies had done was to change the country
by leveraging political force to conquer the courts.

Trump had promised conservative Christians that
“Christianity will have power.”

And now that vision was at the center of a Republican Party they had remade.

Scott #Stewart had never set foot in Mississippi.

But Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election thrust the young lawyer from the Department of Justice onto the job market,
and Lynn #Fitch, Mississippi’s attorney general, had reached out.

She needed a new solicitor general to lead the state’s biggest cases.

Fitch’s team found Stewart’s name tucked into a pile of résumés from the Republican Attorneys General Association,
a group that had received more than $13 million from Leo’s network of organizations
and whose executive director used to work for the Federalist Society.

(8/n)

#Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Trump introduced Amy Coney #Barrett as his nominee in the Rose Garden, in the same place where Bill Clinton introduced Ginsburg in 1993.

Back then, Dannenfelser was 27 and dreaming of carving out a more powerful place for conservative anti-abortion women in Washington.

That was half a lifetime ago. Now, at 54, she and those women sat in the Rose Garden watching Barrett,
a Catholic mother of seven whom Trump had said he had been “saving” to succeed Ginsburg,
become the avatar of the culture they wanted to usher in for America.

Barrett was both Christian supermom and high-powered legal scholar,
elite and outsider,
a combination of the more secular conservative Federalist Society credentials
and the beliefs of the emerging Christian legal movement.

This new iteration of conservative feminism didn’t argue that women’s gains should be rolled back
or that women should not be professionally ambitious.

But it wanted those advances not to come at the expense of ideals of motherhood,
Christian morality
and the centrality of human life at conception.

Seven days before the 2020 presidential election,
Leonard Leo tuned in from his home in Maine to watch his close friend
Clarence Thomas swear in Barrett to the court.

Watching her raise her right hand felt like the culmination of the entire project.

It was, he said in an interview,
“exhilarating.”

Trump had become the most successful anti-abortion president America had ever known.

His administration transformed the judiciary.

With his speech to the March for Life in 2020
— the first time a sitting president attended
— and graphic comments in his 2019 State of the Union address about how abortion providers “execute a baby,”
he changed political expectations and red lines for Republican presidents.

What Trump and his Republican allies had done was to change the country
by leveraging political force to conquer the courts.

Trump had promised conservative Christians that
“Christianity will have power.”

And now that vision was at the center of a Republican Party they had remade.

Scott #Stewart had never set foot in Mississippi.

But Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election thrust the young lawyer from the Department of Justice onto the job market,
and Lynn #Fitch, Mississippi’s attorney general, had reached out.

She needed a new solicitor general to lead the state’s biggest cases.

Fitch’s team found Stewart’s name tucked into a pile of résumés from the Republican Attorneys General Association,
a group that had received more than $13 million from Leo’s network of organizations
and whose executive director used to work for the Federalist Society.

(8/n)

#Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

But even as Currie proudly championed the bill, she would not know the full story behind it until after Roe fell more than five years later.

In an interview, she explained that she thought her vision for a 15-week cutoff,
rooted in her foundational story of the beating fetal heart,
had driven the plan.

No one had told her that A.D.F. had coordinated its strategy with Taylor before their meeting,
or that 15 weeks was part of its specific legal plan to undermine Roe, she said.

Or that Tseytlin had brainstormed this possibility at Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society cocktail hour
and advanced it at an upscale California resort alongside Republican leaders and attorneys.

When Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi signed the bill into law, with Currie smiling next to him,
it became the tightest restriction on abortion in the nation.

It made no exceptions for rape or incest, just a narrow provision to preserve the life of the woman or in cases of “severe” fetal abnormality.

Less than an hour later, Jackson Women’s Health Organization
— the Pink House
— filed a lawsuit through their attorneys at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The Pink House performed abortions only until 16 weeks of pregnancy,
the center’s lawyers wrote,
and had done just 78 abortions when the fetus was identified as being 15 weeks or older in 2017.

Going after that small fraction, of course, was exactly the plan.

Not too early in pregnancy and not too late,
but exactly the line that might compel the Supreme Court to wade back into the subject of abortion.

“We were seeking to be incremental and strategic,” Taylor said.

Christian activists, he said, were learning to control their “moral passion” so as not to lose sight of their long-term goal.

There were still so many unknowns.

For the law to serve its intended purpose, anti-abortion activists needed a majority on the Supreme Court.

A.D.F. attorneys and their allies like Tseytlin had designed the legislation to target Kennedy,
but what they couldn’t foresee was that Kennedy would retire that summer,
allowing Trump to fill a second seat,
this time with Brett #Kavanaugh.

Now conservatives had a 5-4 split on the Supreme Court,
with Kavanaugh joining Roberts, Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

And there was more to come.

“As a Christian,” Currie said, “sometimes you don’t know God’s plan, and he kind of makes things happen.”

In her Virginia office just across the Potomac River from Washington,
Marjorie Dannenfelser, of the Susan B. Anthony List
(now known as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America)
and the A.D.F. board,
had a detailed map drawn on a wall-size whiteboard.

From a distance, it looked like the kind used by political campaigns to track polling and turnout, swing districts and congressional votes.

But this one was color-coded to indicate states where Republicans held both the state legislature and the governor’s mansion
and was partitioned by circuit-court-of-appeals jurisdiction.

By early 2019, Republicans held complete control of state governments in 22 states,
giving them total power over abortion legislation.

Some 20 cases, with different legal strategies to gut Roe and Casey, were in litigation in lower courts.

A magenta triangle meant the state had passed a
“heartbeat bill,”
generally a ban that started around six weeks;
a green square signified a “pain-capable” abortion law,
typically a 20-week ban.

Red stars showed the federal appeals courts where judges nominated by Republicans outnumbered those nominated by Democrats
— of the 11 on the board, they controlled seven.

It was a map of how all the laws were moving up toward the ultimate court that mattered.

And now, on Sept. 18, 2020,
with the news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death,
Dannenfelser and her compatriots could capture another majority.

The kind of Supreme Court supermajority that could take down Roe.

(7/n)

#Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

But even as Currie proudly championed the bill, she would not know the full story behind it until after Roe fell more than five years later.

In an interview, she explained that she thought her vision for a 15-week cutoff,
rooted in her foundational story of the beating fetal heart,
had driven the plan.

No one had told her that A.D.F. had coordinated its strategy with Taylor before their meeting,
or that 15 weeks was part of its specific legal plan to undermine Roe, she said.

Or that Tseytlin had brainstormed this possibility at Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society cocktail hour
and advanced it at an upscale California resort alongside Republican leaders and attorneys.

When Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi signed the bill into law, with Currie smiling next to him,
it became the tightest restriction on abortion in the nation.

It made no exceptions for rape or incest, just a narrow provision to preserve the life of the woman or in cases of “severe” fetal abnormality.

Less than an hour later, Jackson Women’s Health Organization
— the Pink House
— filed a lawsuit through their attorneys at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The Pink House performed abortions only until 16 weeks of pregnancy,
the center’s lawyers wrote,
and had done just 78 abortions when the fetus was identified as being 15 weeks or older in 2017.

Going after that small fraction, of course, was exactly the plan.

Not too early in pregnancy and not too late,
but exactly the line that might compel the Supreme Court to wade back into the subject of abortion.

“We were seeking to be incremental and strategic,” Taylor said.

Christian activists, he said, were learning to control their “moral passion” so as not to lose sight of their long-term goal.

There were still so many unknowns.

For the law to serve its intended purpose, anti-abortion activists needed a majority on the Supreme Court.

A.D.F. attorneys and their allies like Tseytlin had designed the legislation to target Kennedy,
but what they couldn’t foresee was that Kennedy would retire that summer,
allowing Trump to fill a second seat,
this time with Brett #Kavanaugh.

Now conservatives had a 5-4 split on the Supreme Court,
with Kavanaugh joining Roberts, Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

And there was more to come.

“As a Christian,” Currie said, “sometimes you don’t know God’s plan, and he kind of makes things happen.”

In her Virginia office just across the Potomac River from Washington,
Marjorie Dannenfelser, of the Susan B. Anthony List
(now known as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America)
and the A.D.F. board,
had a detailed map drawn on a wall-size whiteboard.

From a distance, it looked like the kind used by political campaigns to track polling and turnout, swing districts and congressional votes.

But this one was color-coded to indicate states where Republicans held both the state legislature and the governor’s mansion
and was partitioned by circuit-court-of-appeals jurisdiction.

By early 2019, Republicans held complete control of state governments in 22 states,
giving them total power over abortion legislation.

Some 20 cases, with different legal strategies to gut Roe and Casey, were in litigation in lower courts.

A magenta triangle meant the state had passed a
“heartbeat bill,”
generally a ban that started around six weeks;
a green square signified a “pain-capable” abortion law,
typically a 20-week ban.

Red stars showed the federal appeals courts where judges nominated by Republicans outnumbered those nominated by Democrats
— of the 11 on the board, they controlled seven.

It was a map of how all the laws were moving up toward the ultimate court that mattered.

And now, on Sept. 18, 2020,
with the news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death,
Dannenfelser and her compatriots could capture another majority.

The kind of Supreme Court supermajority that could take down Roe.

(7/n)

#Currie #Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Taylor knew a 15-week ban would criminalize only about 3 percent of the roughly 2,600 abortions that were performed in Mississippi that year.

But stopping procedures was not the point.

A.D.F.’s primary goal was to write bills as a litigation strategy,
not draft laws that would make for the strongest public policy
or end the greatest number of abortions.

The Mississippi bill was a legal tool to provoke a Supreme Court challenge to Roe
— and set in motion a much larger plan to eventually end all abortion in America.

Some lawmakers in Mississippi worried that they would be sued if the bill passed
and did not want to be saddled with the exorbitant cost such litigation could bring.

But A.D.F. had a plan for that too,
offering to have its lawyers defend the law at no cost to the state.

This free legal counsel was a selling point for Taylor when he lobbied the legislators to take up the bill.

And Taylor had an important ally in the statehouse whom he knew he could count on to push an anti-abortion bill:
Representative Becky #Currie, a nurse, an observant Christian and at the time a
three-term legislator who was one of the state’s most ardent advocates for the cause.

“I’ve been pro-life since I was 18 and pregnant,” she said in an interview.

“The more we worked on the bill, it just felt anointed.
You just know when it was right.”

She sponsored and introduced the bill A.D.F. wanted, called the
"Gestational Age Act," in early 2018.

Currie’s experience as a nurse shaped her political views.

She often told the story of an incident in the hospital as a young nurse when a pregnant woman came in and delivered far too early.

The details varied in her telling
— sometimes the premature infant was a girl, at others a boy,
sometimes it was 15 weeks, at others 14.

But what Currie remembered most was that she waited until the heart stopped
so she could put the remains in a plastic container to send to the lab.

What Currie felt she understood about what happened was that the fetus “wanted to live.”

“I just never got over that,” she remembered.

Currie was exactly the kind of woman anti-abortion activists in Washington had strategized to make the face of their movement.

A single mother, Currie had decided against having an abortion but still fulfilled her dream of becoming a nurse and then a politician.

She could speak personally and authentically about the subject and her faith.

Across the country, Republican women made up less than 10 percent of state legislators from 2008 to 2017,
but they were significantly overrepresented as sponsors of anti-abortion bills.

Of the more than 1,600 anti-abortion bills introduced during that period in state legislatures,
nearly half had a female Republican co-sponsor,
and a third had a female Republican as the primary sponsor.

It became more complicated for Democrats to paint abortion opponents as anti-woman when women were leading the charge.

(6/n)
#Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

Taylor knew a 15-week ban would criminalize only about 3 percent of the roughly 2,600 abortions that were performed in Mississippi that year.

But stopping procedures was not the point.

A.D.F.’s primary goal was to write bills as a litigation strategy,
not draft laws that would make for the strongest public policy
or end the greatest number of abortions.

The Mississippi bill was a legal tool to provoke a Supreme Court challenge to Roe
— and set in motion a much larger plan to eventually end all abortion in America.

Some lawmakers in Mississippi worried that they would be sued if the bill passed
and did not want to be saddled with the exorbitant cost such litigation could bring.

But A.D.F. had a plan for that too,
offering to have its lawyers defend the law at no cost to the state.

This free legal counsel was a selling point for Taylor when he lobbied the legislators to take up the bill.

And Taylor had an important ally in the statehouse whom he knew he could count on to push an anti-abortion bill:
Representative Becky #Currie, a nurse, an observant Christian and at the time a
three-term legislator who was one of the state’s most ardent advocates for the cause.

“I’ve been pro-life since I was 18 and pregnant,” she said in an interview.

“The more we worked on the bill, it just felt anointed.
You just know when it was right.”

She sponsored and introduced the bill A.D.F. wanted, called the
"Gestational Age Act," in early 2018.

Currie’s experience as a nurse shaped her political views.

She often told the story of an incident in the hospital as a young nurse when a pregnant woman came in and delivered far too early.

The details varied in her telling
— sometimes the premature infant was a girl, at others a boy,
sometimes it was 15 weeks, at others 14.

But what Currie remembered most was that she waited until the heart stopped
so she could put the remains in a plastic container to send to the lab.

What Currie felt she understood about what happened was that the fetus “wanted to live.”

“I just never got over that,” she remembered.

Currie was exactly the kind of woman anti-abortion activists in Washington had strategized to make the face of their movement.

A single mother, Currie had decided against having an abortion but still fulfilled her dream of becoming a nurse and then a politician.

She could speak personally and authentically about the subject and her faith.

Across the country, Republican women made up less than 10 percent of state legislators from 2008 to 2017,
but they were significantly overrepresented as sponsors of anti-abortion bills.

Of the more than 1,600 anti-abortion bills introduced during that period in state legislatures,
nearly half had a female Republican co-sponsor,
and a third had a female Republican as the primary sponsor.

It became more complicated for Democrats to paint abortion opponents as anti-woman when women were leading the charge.

(6/n)
#Taylor #Fiedorek #Burke #Dannenfelser #AllianceDefendingFreedom #fedsoc #FederalistSociety #viability #Roberts #Kennedy #Alito #Leonard #Leo #Misha #Tseytlin

I can live with this. Time for final assembly.
#jeep #currie #dana60

This axle is gonna kill me. Here's two photos -- 1st one I took during gear setup with a setup race. 2nd one was tonight after my final-assembly races/bearings were installed. The race added maybe 0.001" of depth, but the ring gear has almost 0.005" of radial run-out. :( Tomorrow, I'll tear it down and do another setup with a 0.006" pinion depth shim and call it.
#jeep #gears #currie #rockjock2 #dana60

Blackburns, BISFs, Orlits and Whitson-Fairhursts. The thread about pre-fabricated, permanent, post-war housing in Edinburgh

This thread is a bit of an A-to-Z of the different types of permanent, prefabricated, post-war housing built in Edinburgh between 1945-1950.

In the aftermath of WW2, hundreds of thousands of temporary, prefabricated houses were built across the UK, as part of a national crash-building programme to ease urban slum dwelling, replace war losses and provide housing for men returning from war until the construction of permanent housing could catch up with demand. In Edinburgh, some 4,000 temporary prefabs were built, of four types; AIROHs, ARCONs, Tarrans and Uni-SECOs. But prefab housing wasn’t just temporary, it was also for permanent construction. It was hoped that by mass-manufacturing standard designs of modern houses in factories, they could be rapidly built with limited skilled labour.

A is for Aluminium

Some of the first permanent prefab houses ordered for Edinburgh were of the Permanent Aluminium or Blackburn Mk.II design. These were based on the AIROH (Air Industry Research Organisation for Housing) single-storey, temporary, aluminium cottages – of which some 54,000 were built – but with thicker walls and insulation, designed to last 60 years instead of the AIROH‘s ten. These were developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment, and to make use of a glut of scrap aluminium from surplus aircraft. This material has its advantages; it is light, strong, does not rust or readily corrode and – initially – readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter aircraft like a Typhoon give you all the aluminium for a house. The Blackburn Aircraft Company of Dumbarton got on board.

They have been described as an “airplane in house form“; manufactured in sections on an aircraft production line, in sections that could be transported by road, and assembled quickly on site by unskilled labour. They came pre-fitted with standard kitchens and bathrooms, all of which just needed connected together on site on a simple brick or concrete plinth. The problem for aluminium houses of all types was that the price of the material soon rebounded and they became very expensive to produce, but they filled a gap and were not the worst of the temporary prefabs by any stretch.

Edinburgh purchased 166 permanent Blackburn Aluminium Houses; 145 for the Craigour Scheme in Moredun and 21 for Muirhouse.

These houses are quite easy to identify, as they are small, detached cottages with 3 regularly-sized windows and an offset front door. The shallow-pitched roof has a small brick chimney stack and was originally aluminium sheeting. There were 3 overlapping joints on the façade where the 4 prefabricated modules were joined together. These houses were quite popular, they sit on large plots and have big gardens. They are detached and the frames have not been subject to corrosion. Many have been insulated, re-clad, re-roofed and even extended. Some have been demolished and new houses built on their plots.

B is for BISF

These houses were named after their manufacturer and designer, the British Iron and Steel Federation. The house is of a conventional, semi-detached design, but uses a steel frame with steel window and door surrounds and Critall-Hope steel framed windows. The lower storey was clad in render applied to a steel lath and the upper storey had steel sheeting formed to look like timber. Interior partitions were plasterboard or wooden fibreboard and insulation was glass fibre. Most have been stripped back to their frames, re-insulated and re-clad with pebble-dash, and given modern plastic double glazing units. The fibreboard walls were prone to damp and fire and most were replaced with plasterboard during refurbishments.

In Edinburgh, c. 300 of these houses were built in Southhouse / Buirdiehouse (1947) and Moredun / Fernieside (1949) Schemes and most (if not all) remain to this day. They are somewhat unusual in that they were always intended to be permanent, and have not suffered from the usual structural degradation and corrosion that have plagued other non-standard houses. As such they are one of the few prefab designs that have never been designated as defective (which means you can get a mortgage on one).

Useful identification features for BISF houses are that they are always semi-detached; they have a single, squat, central chimney on a pitched roof; the re-clad houses often have a mix of brick and pebble-dash cladding; the main ground floor window extends almost to floor level; and they lack the heavy reinforced concrete door and window surrounds of the concrete houses.

B is for Blackburn Orlit

These houses were a collaboration between the Blackburn Aircraft Company in Dumbarton and the Orlit Construction Company (see under O). They were designed in 1949 and used an improved, simplified version of the Orlit reinforced concrete frame and wall panel system, combined with the lightweight aluminium roof structure and pre-fabricated internal partitions covered in plasterboard, by Blackburn. Kitchens and bathrooms were also prefabricated “pods” produced by the Scottish Myton Company, based on experience with the Tarran temporary prefab houses. Four houses were built as a prototype in Clydebank in 1949, followed by 214 in 1950-51 on the Saughton Mains Scheme in Edinburgh, as semi-detached and terraces. Around 1,300 were built in total across Scotland.

These houses have the usual heavy, PRC door and window surrounds of Orlit houses and the irregularly-spaced concrete “quoins” on the corners. The ground floor front room window is deep (deeper than standard Orlits), but has often been in-filled with a shallower window. They have a shallow-pitched, gabled Blackburn roof (the roofs of Scotcon Orlits and those added to earlier Orlits are “hipped”) and lack the usual Orlit narrow, first-floor window over the front door. Instead they have 3 windows squeezed into the façade upstairs.

B is for Blackburn Mk.IV

Another collaboration between Blackburn and Orlit. These houses were of a more traditional construction, with walls constructed out of pre-cast “no fines” concrete blocks on a concrete slab foundation and Crittal steel-framed windows. I assume given Blackburn‘s involvement there were aluminium internal components used. You will find these in Edinburgh at the West Mains Scheme in Blackford,where 134 were built in 1951 as 4-in-a-block terraces. Nearly all have now been re-rendered, hiding their original concrete blockwork structure. Because they lack the Orlit‘s PRC frame and steel joints, they have not been classed as defective.

Identification features are the blockwork walls (where you can see them); the lack of the heavy, PRC door and window surrounds of most Orlit houses; the door surround has as small concession to detail (usually absent from such houses) with a moulding line around it; the central bay windows at ground floor level originally had a copper-sheathed roof.

B is for Blackburn Permanent

Also known as the Blackburn Mk.III, as the name suggests, this was a permanent house making use of Blackburn’s prefabricated internal partitioning and shallow-pitched aluminium roof structure, which was originally covered in aluminium sheeting. The form was basically the same as the Blackburn-Orlit house, but without the heavy PRC window and door frames and walls are traditional blockwork. Edinburgh built these as semi-detached and 4-in-a-block terraces, at Moredun in 1949 and the then Midlothian County Council as semi-detached houses in Currie in 1950.

Identification features are the shallow roof pitch, squat chimneys, and the strip of 4 windows with brick infill on the first floor. Again there is a very deep sitting room window. These houses are usually harled or pebbledashed.

O is for Orlit

The Orlit System was developed by the Czech architect Erwin Katona, a Jewish refugee who had come to London in the late 1930s. He developed a modular, pre-cast reinforced concrete (PRC) system of construction that could be built in a factory and rapidly assembled on site with limited and unskilled labour. PRC columns and beams slotted together to form the structure, in-filled with an interlocking system of concrete tiles. Floors and roofs were of concrete channels. The roof could be a flat concrete slab covered in bitumen paper or a traditional wooden, pitched structure with tiles. Windows were Critall steel-framed, set within PRC concrete frames of standard sizes. The Orlit System could build a range of buildings, from single-storey cottages and municipal buildings to tenement flats. Usually they were semi-detached houses though.

The System was meant to be for permanent houses, with a 60 year lifespan, but was unfortunately riddled with flaws and weaknesses. Over time, PRC deteriorates, particularly at construction joints and junctions between components, with a gradual reduction in structural effectiveness. It suffers from inadequate thermal insulation, as well as thermal bridging – making houses cold and prone to condensation on the walls. As early as 1949, people in Edinburgh were writing to the newspapers to complain about the flaws in brand new Orlit houses. The original Type 1 system was replaced with the Type 2 to try and remedy the deficiencies. By 1950, they had abandoned the pre-cast frame system almost entirely (except for the window surrounds) and moved on to modular concrete block construction, which eliminated the structural weaknesses at least! All Orlit houses built to the original Type 1 or 2 systems have been designated defective.

Orlits were popular with Scottish local authorities and set up a subsidiary – the Scottish Orlit Company – with its headquarters and factory in Sighthill. Around 6,000 were built across Scotland, of which half have been subsequently demolished. Edinburgh built around 668, 410 of which have been demolished. These were a mix of the usual 2-storey semis and tenement flats; all of the latter were built at Bingham and were demolished in 1985. 134 semis were built at Saughton Mains (in 1948) and 80 at Southhouse / Burdiehouse (in 1947), all of which remain. This post does not cover the later 1950s-built Orlits at Ratho Craigpark, Oxgangs Farm and Gilmerton Dykes.

The Orlit System evolved over time, and has a large amount of variety available due to the flexibility of the system, however the best things to look for are the heavy outlines of the pre-cast concrete window surrounds, the narrow windows over the front door and to the side, and the bulky outline of the original concrete flat roof slab to which the later hipped roofs were added to remedy the deficient nature of the structure. I believe all Orlit System houses built in Edinburgh were originally flat roofed.

S is for Scotcon Orlit

Scotcon (from Scottish Construction Company) were a subsidiary of the Scottish Orlit Company, formed expressly to undertake local authority housebuilding in Scotland. While much of their work was prefabricated tower blocks, they also built on the standard Orlit system. 296 Scotcon Orlit houses were built in Edinburgh in 1950-51, a mixture of semi-detached houses and 3-storey tenements. 126 have since been demolished, but 170 remain; in the Niddrie Marischal Scheme (tenements and semis); at Saughton Mains (only 3 semis, perhaps built as demonstration models given their proximity to the Scottish Orlit Co. factory at Sighthill); Dunsmuir Court in Corstorphine (tenements) and at Easter Drylaw (tenements).

Because they use the Orlit system of PRC beams and columns, with pre-cast interlocking concrete block walls and PRC window and door surrounds, they are designated defective. They have traditional timber-framed, pitched roofs.

Scotcon Orlits look like other Orlits, with the heavy PRC window surrounds, but that of the ground floor front room is much deeper. They have the trademark narrow window over the front door, and (where they haven’t been covered up with pebbledash), irregular concrete “quoins”. The “hipped” roofs were built as pitched timber and tile structures, so they lack the heavy slab of the early Orlits built with flat roofs (to which a pitched structure was later added).

The tenements can be recognised by the heavy PRC window surrounds, with the usual wide and deep front-room window, and narrow windows over the front door. All the Scotcon Orlit tenements in Edinburgh are 6-in-a-block. The ground floor houses have their own entrance doors to the side.

S is for Swedish Timber House

The Swedish government sold 5,000 flat-pack timber houses of a standard design to to the British Government after WW2. Half went to Scotland, particularly for rural housing, and the first 350 arrived as early as October 1945. Similar houses had been built in Glasgow in 1937 by the Swedish Government to demonstrate them to Scottish local authorities. 100 were gifted to Edinburgh Corporation by Sweden as a gesture of post-war good will, with 50 each erected in West Pilton and Sighthill under the supervision of Swedish foremen, as a mix of semi-detached and 4-in-a-block terraces. An additional handful were built by the SSHA at their Sighthill Demonstration Site.

Because they are of traditional timber construction with pitched, slate roofs, they have never been designated defective. Most have been externally insulated, and re-clad with harl or render, but some retain their original timber cladding.

The original tongue-and-groove timber cladding of thin strips, with those of the first floor overlapping the ground floor, are the best identification feature. They have a large front room window on the ground floor and a small canopy over the door. Most of those that still retain their timber cladding have been treated with dark brown or red preservatives, but originally they were brightly painted in cream. The roof is tiled and well pitched, with a single, central chimney to the front.

W is for Whitson-Fairhurst

These houses are named after their designers, W. A. Fairhurst and Melville, Dundas & Whitson Ltd. They were of a modular, prefabricated concrete system built by the Scottish Housing Group, a post-war conglomerate of housing builders who had pooled their resources to meet government and local authority contracts for mass construction. They use a system of PRC columns and beams to form the structure of the house, which are in-filled with an outer skin of brick and an inner skin of breeze blocks. Window surrounds and door frames are relatively heavy PRC structures. A traditional timber roof structure was covered in concrete roof tiles and they were harled or pebbledashed. 3,400 Whitson-Fairhurst houses were built in Scotland,. In Edinburgh they were only built in the Southhouse / Burdiehouse Scheme, where 100 semi-detached houses were built. They are designated defective.

At first glance they could be confused for an Orlit house, with heavy PRC window surrounds. The biggest difference is that the roof is of the gable-type (when seen from the front, the sides of the house are flat all the way to the top of the roof), not “hipped” as in Orlits (when seen from the front, the sides of the roof are pitched towards the top) The front window is much deeper and they lack the Orlit‘s signature narrow window above the front door.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

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The thread about Leith’s lost “Eagle Buildings” and what connects them to the building of the Forth Bridge

This thread was originally written and published in September 2020.

I saw a photo tweeted by the excellent Scran resource and was struck by the coincidence that I had looked the place up only a few days before when I had come across some other photos of it on Flickr.

https://twitter.com/Scranlife/status/1308652327373606912?s=20&t=RiEzrm-6XhDoBt2_yhUtig

The Eagle Buildings were at 5 Tower Street in Leith, next to the Sailor’s Home (now Malmaison Hotel).

Here they are in 1992, when it was being used as a workshop and store by a shopfitter. The photographer suggests demolition was in 1997.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cagiva1994/14016906377/

Most of that “sandstone” front was mock and was actually a showcase of the Portland cement wares of its occupants, Currie & Co. Ltd, Building-Trade Merchants in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leith and across the Scottish central belt.

Currie & Co, Ltd. had been incorporated in April 1898 by the merger of two similar building supply and cement merchant businesses owned by John Patrick Currie:

• Currie & Co. of Glasgow, founded in 1873, headquartered in Wellington Street. Subsidiary companies included the North British Asphalt Company, the North British Coal and Firewood Company and the Eagle Portland Cement Co. This is the eagle connection; it was a brand to sell cement.
• Joseph A. Currie & Co. of Edinburgh and Leith, founded in 1875 and headquartered in Bernard Street in Leith. This business had been bought in 1893 by John Patrick on the death of his brother Joseph Allan at the age of only 42.

This 1911 advert reveals that they had a lineage going back to the late 18th century through A. M. Ross & Sons, slate merchants in Glasgow.

The headquarters had moved from Glasgow to 19 Rose Street in Edinburgh around this time, that building too was called the Eagle Buildings and it remains so to this day. If you crane your neck and look up as you pass, you’ll see an eagle watching over you high above in its “eerie”.

Joseph Allan Currie was born in Cupar, Fife, in 1851. At the age of only 21 he was appointed manager of the Waltham Abbey Gas Works in London. He returned north and settled in Leith two years later, bringing with him a new trade of Portland cement merchant. Cement was not manufactured in Scotland at the time, but was imported from the Medway. Leith was therefore the perfect base for such a venture. Joseph Allan added plaster of Paris, pavement stone, lime, fireclay and earthenware to this business, becoming a successful builders merchant, growing the business to become one of the largest in Scotland. In 1894 his company was reported as being the largest suppliers of roofing felt in the region; an increasingly popular product due to the increasing cost of roofing slate and timber.

His obituary described him as having “indefatigable energy, strong personality and business tact“. Joseph was remarkable as being the sole suppliers of Portland cement for both the Forth Bridge works and the ill-fated first Tay Bridge.

The construction of the Forth Bridge required some 20,000 tons of Portland cement, which was manufactured on the River Medway and was brought by sea to South Queensferry. Here it was transferred to an old hulk that Currie had purchased called the Hougomont; a ship that had been built in Burma as a convict transport for Australia. The Hougomont could store 1,200 tons of cement, which had to be stored for a certain number of days before it was used. When smallpox broke out amongst the workers in 1886, the Hougomont was moved to Port Edgar and used as an isolation hospital, helping the outbreak to be quickly dealt with.

John Patrick Currie – born 1848 – continued to run the business and became the largest Scottish building merchant and cement distributor, Scottish agents for I. C. Johnson & Co. Isaac Charles Johnson and his business partner had painstakingly reverse-engineered existing cement products, improved them and then produced a different product that they were careful to make sure was not subject to existing patents.

An 1894 description of the company in a trade publication states:

The commodities which Messrs. Currie & Co. deal in principally are: Portland cement, Scotch and Irish limes, pavement, freestone, crushed granite, Arran sand, slates, fireclay goods, barytes, umber, plaster of Paris, whiting, &c. In all these lines Messrs. Currie & Co. hold large stocks, and are ready to meet any demands with promptitude. Their standing is accepted as a guarantee of quality, and they spare no effort to maintain their high reputation for reliable material. The business in every department receives the direct personal attention of its founder and sole proprietor, Mr. John P. Currie, a gentleman whose commercial capabilities are well demonstrated in the success that has attended this influential concern. The business in which Mr. Currie is now so actively engaged derives its support from a thoroughly representative and increasing connection, and continues to develop.

Rivers of the North – Their Cities and their Commerce.

It seems that the Curries named nearly all their properties Eagle Buildings, with at least 3 in Glasgow.

John Patrick died at home in Edinburgh in March 1919 at the age of 71. After his death, the company seems to have moved its headquarters to another Eagle Buildings, this time in Dock Street, Dundee. By this time it was an agent for the Cement Marketing Company, which would eventually rename itself after its most famous product; Blue Circle Portland Cement. The company was still trading in 1953, after which the trail in newspaper archives goes cold.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Gregory #Currie über #Gilgamesh & #Metakognition

Anhand der #Erzählstruktur des #Gilgamesch #Epos als #ältester #überlieferter #schriftlicher #Dichtung lässt sich ein #Wandel von #Erzählweise #nachvollziehen. Der #Erzählung #fehlt ein #Denken der #Charaktere über #Intentionen bzgl. #Beziehung #Gilgamesch und #Enkidu;

#Erzählweise #medialer #Primärdifferenzierung #Sprache: #Möglichkeit der #Exklusivität von #Reflexion in #Bezug auf #mediale #Primärdifferenzierung

https://youtu.be/qzp9JlrFKTA