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It’s an election year.
People want to get attention.
So you see sometimes some really hot button issues that get a lot of attention and kind of make the news.
Homeowners insurance expected to be a big item in the legislative session.
I would like to welcome you to the era of synthetic reality.
Online scams are getting more sophisticated.
Here’s what you need to know.
There were men who were taken and executed in mass righting a 150 year old wrong.
Don’t ever think that you’re less because of a situation that you’re in.
Our next young hero.
We begin tonight with a new statewide poll that ranks crime as the top concern for most Louisiana voters.
In a year when we elect a new governor.
The poll also shows attitudes are changing among voters about how society should treat people with nonviolent convictions.
Though it is surging, homicides in New Orleans and Lafayette grabbing most of the crime headlines.
Here’s a look at some other top headlines from around the state.
A federal Court of Appeals judge dismissed a lawsuit that challenged how the Biden administration calculates greenhouse gas damages.
Louisiana shelved lawsuit was the latest in a slew of defeats for other red states looking to challenge Biden’s cost of carbon policy.
The current policy uses a damage cost estimate of about $51 per ton of carbon dioxide.
It’s possible that that number could increase in the near future.
Louisiana plaintiffs who filed the suit argue that the policy could cause economic harm and drive up the state’s energy costs.
But the judge ruled that there was not significant evidence to support that claim.
The Comite River Diversion canal will cost two times more than expected.
The project is now estimated to cost about $907 million.
The Army Corps of Engineers said inflated costs of labor, materials and design changes contributed to the increased price tag.
Construction costs were originally estimated in 2017.
Corps officials say the inflation costs won’t stop the construction that’s already underway.
But the final pieces of the canal will not have the budget to be built.
Louisiana builders are constructing a 260 foot long Echo Edison in terrible parish.
The wind power ship will be a floating house for one technician to work offshore.
It will also be a storage unit for tools and a housing unit for roughly 60 workers at a time.
It’s been commissioned by Danish firm Orsted and Eversource, which is an energy provider in the Northeast.
The ship is expected to be finished next year and after it’s done, it’ll travel to New York to serve three wind farms.
April 10th, we can look forward to the start of this year’s session of the Louisiana legislature.
The governor’s address will kick it off and LPB we’ll bring you live coverage beginning at 1 p.m.. Barry Erwin, president of Council for a Better Louisiana, will be here with me to present that to you.
Barry, thanks for coming in today for a little preview of this.
What is it like a session with a lame duck governor?
He’s on his way out and this is a fiscal session.
Does that introduce anything unusual?
It makes it a little different for sure.
And then the added complication, if you want to call it that, is it’s also an election year.
So you put all that together sometimes you get fireworks.
That might spice it up and it.
Probably will spice it up in some ways because it’s an election year, people want to get attention.
So you see sometimes some really hot button issues that get a lot of attention and kind of make the news.
But a lot of times you don’t see a lot of substantive things happen.
So there’s a lot of smoke, but there’s not always.
Fire, right?
Because no one wants to really rock the boat if they’re running for something.
Exactly.
That can come back and haunt them.
Play it safe.
You know, to the degree you can, don’t get into trouble.
What is the governor’s role in the final months of of his tenure as governor?
Well, you know, I think he’s going to be promoting, as he has almost every year, some of the issues that have been close to him in terms of things like minimum wage, pay equity and those types of things.
But those have never gone anywhere and they probably won’t again.
I think the thing this time this year is the fact that we have so much money, both from the federal dollars that have come in from pandemic, but also state dollars that have come in at numbers that people just did not expect.
So it’s not going to be like having to worry about budget cuts, but it is going to have to be about like, how do you get it spent?
Does it go into the areas you target?
Do you get a teacher pay raise the way the governor wants, or is the legislature going to weigh in with another idea?
So we’ll see.
Yeah.
And we also have a couple of interesting things happening, especially with the sell of hemp and Representative Clay Schexnaydre blaming the health department for allowing him hemp that gets you high to be sold in stores Yeah, I mean, you can always count on the legislature to give you some surprise issues.
And this is definitely a surprise issue.
Basically, what happened is that the speaker helped pass a really pass some legislation last year that would legalize the sale of hemp use.
You know, in small quantities of CBD in there so that it wouldn’t get too high.
But it could be used as kind of a, you know, natural remedy and that type of thing, told everybody it’s all good.
And then come to find out that a lot of stores were stocking higher levels of this and people were getting high.
And so now there’s been some backlash and and correction is in order.
And what we’re talking about, like thousands of convenience stores making money, they definitely don’t want that off the shelves.
No, they figured this out somewhat early on and obviously by the sales and you heard some of the testimony of people saying, you know, this is a big deal if you change this because we’re making a lot of money off of this.
Fentanyl is also a big, big topic with Representative Stefanski.
I talked with him last week and this is the hardest you could get in terms of a bill that he helped to pass which would make it the death penalty for someone who’s involved with something that leads to a death or injury with fentanyl.
Yeah, I mean, obviously this is a very big issue in our state and people are very concerned about it.
I think there are some questions, though, that some others are going to have.
We’ve passed some criminal justice reforms which are meant to, you know, not keep everybody in jail forever, but, you know, to allow after some period of time that people might get out and basically save money for the state.
So those two things are going to be sort of competing issues.
But the Fentanyl issue is a huge one, not just here but across the country.
And with an election year especially and Representative Stefanski running for attorney general, you’re certainly going to see a lot of debate on this.
He sure will.
Counsel for a better Louisiana.
What will be the thing that you guys are looking at the most?
Well, I think we will be looking a lot at the money aspect of it.
One of the things that’s been good about this legislature here compared to years past when we saw people not learning lessons, is that when we had a lot of money coming in in the past, we kind of squandered it and did things that got us into budget problems later.
The good news is, I think, is that they have targeted a lot of these dollars knowing they’re not going to be there forever into areas that are kind of nonrecurring.
So that means if you run out of that money, well, you fix the problem, but you may not be able to fix another one in the future, but it doesn’t bust your budget.
So we’ll be watching closely to make sure they kind of stay on that path of kind of fiscal responsibility for sure.
They seem to have so far at this point.
They have.
And it’s encouraging because, you know, sometimes people say the legislature doesn’t learn from its mistakes.
And that’s true a lot of the time.
But I think in this case where you had a bunch of legislators that were kind of burned on having to deal with years and years of budget cuts, they don’t want to pass that legacy on to other people or have to deal with it themselves.
Well, Barry, there won’t be a shortage of things to talk about after we hear the governor’s address, which typically doesn’t set off fireworks or anything.
But there will be things to discuss will be here on Monday.
So absolutely glad to be here.
And it’s always.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Sure is.
Thanks for being here today.
Glad to be here.
In 1873, a hotly contested governor’s race led to a bloody eruption of racial violence that would change the way America’s federal government addressed hate crimes.
History would call this incident the Colfax Riot, but Colfax residents and historians feel the name doesn’t accurately describe what happened two descendants from both sides of the aisle.
A coming together to change the name from riot to massacre.
post-Civil War America was a period of significant transformation, also called the Reconstruction Era.
The country was trying to integrate former slaves into a white society, and it wasn’t going smoothly.
In 1873, Colfax, Louisiana, tensions were high.
A disputed gubernatorial election between a Democrat and a Republican erupted in violence.
It left anywhere from 60 to 150 African-Americans dead and three white men dead as well.
The Supreme Court wouldn’t charge the 97 white men responsible.
Limiting the legal consequences for hate crimes in the future.
The incident was recorded as a Colfax riot with little context as to what actually happened.
A marker was put up in front of the Grant Parish courthouse in the fifties.
It had two sentences that mark up there is a lie.
I remember those words distinctly as a little boy.
Hearing that that that sign was a lie.
I read about the marker for the picture of the marker, and that led me on a journey to try to get the marker taken down.
That was when I was working at the LSU Med School.
Avery Hamilton and Dean Woods are an unlikely team.
Both are descendants of a history they were never taught.
Growing up here, I knew it as the Colfax ride because that’s what they.
The marker that was put up in 1951, said Colfax Riot.
And as I grew up, there was no no one ever really discussed the marker here.
Black It was.
It was if it was spoken of in Colfax at all.
I knew nothing about the massacre in school or in my family and my father and grandfather and great grandfather, all from Montgomery, which is about 20 miles north of here and north of Colfax.
So I didn’t know anything about it growing up.
And so about four years ago, I read the book Red River by Lalita Tademy which was a fictionalized account of the massacre.
Old family records and newspaper clippings revealed that they were both related to participants of the incident.
Avery is linked to Jesse McKinney, a former slave whose death galvanized the violence.
Jesse McKinney was my great, great, great grandfather.
Dean Woods is a great, great grandson to Bedford Woods, who was a 21 year old Confederate soldier who aided in the murders.
And Bedford didn’t die until 1933.
So he he my father knew him longer than he did his own father.
And but I never heard his name.
Both men say that the word riot, which is mentioned in countless newspaper articles and media outlets, isn’t a fair description.
To them, it was a massacre.
Both of you, at one point said Colfax Riot.
And now whenever I look at the signs that that are coming up now, all the new information, it’s Colfax massacre.
Why is it important to make that distinction?
When you look throughout black, the African-American history, particularly during the Reconstruction era, those times after the Civil War and every instance where there was a some conflict with blacks, they always characterized it as a riot.
The guy that sort of got all the whites together to put down the riot was what was telling people around the around the area that there was a riot going on in Colfax and that they needed what they needed help.
So the you know, we need all these white supremacists or whatever to come in and help us.
But this information isn’t well known.
There are newspaper articles from 1873 through the eighties that call it a riot and even dubbed three white men who were killed heroes.
Dean and Avery want the public to understand every aspect of the story.
So now the two are working together to do that, starting with the marker on May 15th, 2021.
We had a big group here, and Avery, my brother, owns a construction business, and he came and took it down and we videoed it and and we all clapped when it came down.
And Avery wasn’t there because he was not doing a funeral that day, but his wife was there, Constance.
And and so we she kind of told me what was going on with Avery.
And so the next day I got the chance to talk to Avery and we began our journey to work on the memorial.
The memorial is the next step.
Dean and Avery work to get the full story of the Colfax massacre in writing on a big memorial.
It’s not the exact location of the incident, but it’s directly in the heart of the town.
As descendants.
I mean, what do you hope to gain from putting this up?
What do you guys want the public to know?
We want we want the public to know the truth first of all.
And we want to memorialize the men that were massacred.
There’s there was nothing put up in memory of the men who were simply trying to live out their new newly given rights.
This isn’t about blame, by the way.
This is about reconciliation.
Absolutely.
And the nobody here did anything and nobody who’’’s alive today that I was doing anything back then.
And so but we just want folks to to know the truth.
And coming from the most unlikely pair.
Yes.
If you’d like to see the unveiling of the memorial, there will be a special ceremony in Colfax next Thursday, On April 13th at 11 a.m.
The governor will be there to see the big reveal.
So you think you’ve found a new love online?
Could be, but warning it could be anything but.
We reported last year how romance scammers used my pictures and their deception to perpetrate lies on dating sites and social media.
Now we’re going to show you how the latest technology is being used.
Here’s my conversation with Anna Rowe from catchthecatfish.com There is new information out there, though.
Just brand new information that people are using in these scams, especially the romance scams, using artificial intelligence.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I’ve been around for a while now, but we are just seeing in the last sort of six weeks, the scammers have made use of deepfake technology in this respect.
And we’ve seen an evolution of the old style fake video call, which was a saved video that was played on a laptop while the phone camera was held to it, to this new software where they’re able to feed the software with the pictures or videos and voices of the people that they want to scam with.
And then on a video call, the victim will actually see that person because the images are transposed onto the face of the scammer.
So every single movement that they make, they can make to answer questions exactly the same as you and I are here now.
And it would absolutely appear as if that victim is on a video call with you.
We have several examples of practices happening, but also we have an example of one involving actor Morgan Freeman.
And he asks a very interesting question.
Is it the ability to capture, process and make sense of the information our senses receive?
If you can see and taste or smell something, does that make it real or is it simply the ability to feel?
I would like to welcome you to the terror of synthetic reality.
So what did we just see there?
So what were you were saying?
There was a demonstration of how exactly the Deepfake technology works.
So the guy on the bottom of the screen had said the software with pictures of Morgan Freeman and his voice and the characteristics.
Now, the artificial intelligence had taken on those the face and the voice and the characteristics of Morgan Freeman.
So as the guy at the bottom of the screen moves and talks, the image at the top appears to be Morgan Freeman, mimicking exactly what the guy at the bottom is doing.
And that’s actually what he’s saying is very, very true.
Because if someone feels something as they see it, it’s really much more intensified.
And you’ve done so much work with.
Yeah, they help people recover from this.
So you’ll see on some of the other videos now that the and the scammers are sitting practicing with the technology and you can see them turning their heads to make the image so then do exactly the same.
And then unfortunately, what I am now seeing in the last few weeks in the scammer groups is them using that technology with victims.
I cannot wait to see.
Maybe.
Yeah.
So scammers have always and they will do for quite some time used things that they could for Max, which is like the skeleton of the story that they’re going to use with some copy and paste paragraphs that they would, you know, because their English isn’t always great.
And if they do go off script, if you like, and they’re using that their own education of English, often we would see mistakes in that.
I know in the scammer groups I have seen them being advised to use things like Grammarly, which would correct some of that grammar, but not to the degree that again, artificial intelligence is now being used with apps like Chat GPT which are chatbot.
I was going to ask what is Chat GPT, What is that?
Yeah.
So there are chatbots out there that people would know already.
There is a computer talking, but chat GPT is where the scammer can then questions into it and it will type a very, very human response that they can then lift and send to victims.
Many more dating sites for elderly and so we encourage elderly anybody but anyone who’s not maybe as tech savvy as a millennial to educate themselves and to go to your website because catchthecatfish.com has great information you have from the start.
You continue to keep up with it and you’ve got the very latest.
So that’s the place to go and I thank you again so much.
Good to talk to you always.
Yeah.
And you.
Lovely to speak to you.
Take care.
Thanks.
Bye.
Our next Young Hero has battled homelessness and poverty for most of her early life, but she doesn’t let this stop her from moving forward.
Instead, she uses it as motivation to create a better future.
I’m proud to introduce you to Lindsay McKinney.
Home and security is a concern the average child won’t have to worry about.
It affects 2.1 million children each year.
But it was Lindsey McKinney’s reality for a bit of her childhood.
It made me feel less of a person.
It made me feel like I was never able to accomplish everything.
Made me feel like I don’t know.
It just made me so different from everyone else.
Homelessness was an unexpected roadblock in Lindsey’s life.
She was born in Chicago and lived there with her grandparents up until her fifth grade year.
That’s when tragedy struck, in Chicago.
It’s like I had everything.
But once I lost my grandparents, it was just me and my mom.
We had to deal with financial burdens and it was hard on the both of us, especially because I was just getting out of like grammar school and I had to go to middle school in Baton Rouge.
Lindsey and her mom stayed with family members and in shelters.
Then balance of her life sought to take a toll on her mental health.
When I would go to school, all my friends like they would have somewhere to go.
But like, leave school, like it would just be me and my mom.
And we would have to struggle with trying to find somewhere to go.
So it was hard trying to deal with that.
But the imbalance was temporary.
Eventually, her mom would find work with the state of Louisiana and things would slowly begin to turn around.
The home and security that was originally a source of shame became a motivation.
A motivation to do well and work hard, but also to volunteer.
And in the beginning, I was embarrassed about it.
I was afraid that other people would think of me differently or judging me.
But in reality, it just shows how mature I am and that I’m strong enough that I can get through challenges and I can overcome challenges.
Lindsay became more involved in several after school activities that required giving back to the community.
She volunteered at the Baton Rouge Food Bank, where she helped give away water to the less fortunate.
She’s volunteered at Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital and helped clean up the Sweet Olive Cemetery.
I went to the children’s Hospital here in Louisiana, in Baton Rouge.
And for Christmas, I organized different toys for the sick kids who weren’t able to go home to their families for Christmas.
Also, some of the things that I did my freshman year was I cleaned out the graveyard at Sweet Olive Graveyard, and I just made it prettier.
Of course, these are just a few of her accomplishments.
She’s done much more.
She’s a member of the Beta Club, treasurer of the student council and Student of the Year at Franciscan High School.
The faculty have taken notice.
You know, Lindsay is an impressive young lady.
You know, she she kind of racks up these accolades and is real, real steady in her demeanor.
You know, she kind of carries herself with a little bit of a confidence and put yourself out there.
And so to see that she’s been rewarded or been awarded is, you know, no surprise.
Becoming a Louisiana young hero was just the icing on the cake.
And I feel good because, like I was one out of I guess it’s seven people in the entire state.
So I felt like what I was when I was going to say was going to impact other people.
Lindsay plans to study at LSU, majoring in finance.
But more than anything, she hopes to inspire other kids who’ve been in her shoes.
I want to say that even though I have went through this and is very vulnerable, I feel like what I’m saying right now is powerful and I hope that encourages other people and gives people hope when we’re in the same situation.
I am and also want to say that you’re worth it, you’re valuable, and don’t ever think that you’re less because of a situation that you’re in.
LPB’’’s Louisiana Young Heroes program is presented this year with the generous support of Amerihealth Caritas Louisiana Community Coffee, East Baton Rouge Parish Library, the U.S. Army Baton Rouge Recruiting Battalion Demco and Hotel Indigo.
Well, what a week for LSU women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey and her team roar through the Final Four.
They won the national championship 102 to 85 over Iowa, and they came home to fans wanting more They had a parade.
They had two ceremonies inside the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
And it gave the fans a little more time with their team.
I came home.
To put a championship banner.
Up there.
Now.
There is no way I would have ever told you we were going to do this in two years.
No coach can ever put a timetable on championships.
I am blessed.
I am blessed that I had the opportunity to come back home.
I am blessed that these young ladies chose to come play for us.
We didn’t have a ring to sell.
We had Kim Mulkey to sell, and that was about it.
And these guys, these guys came.
You guys started filling up this PMAC Before any championship, you came for games and it snowballed.
And it kept getting better.
And better and better.
Thank you for being here.
I know we’re going to have many of these celebrations to come.
I heard a parade.
I don’t care.
Celebrate good times.
Come on.
They had a great time, that is for sure.
Yes, she’s definitely set the bar high for all LSU coaches to come.
Yes, indeed.
And everyone, that’s our show for this week.
Remember, you can watch anything.
LPB any time, wherever you are with our LPB PBS app.
You can catch LPB news and public affairs shows as well as other Louisiana programs you’ve come to enjoy over the years.
And please like us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for everyone here at Louisiana Public Broadcasting.
I’m Andre Moreau and I’m Kara St Cyr.
Until next time, that’s The State We’re In.
