Welcome to thug left, Bossier juror Parks

For an elected official who labels herself a Republican and calls herself ideologically conservative, Bossier Parish Police Juror Julianna Parks sure acts like she’s a leftist Democrat.

Typically, not a lot of earth-shattering topics come up at Police Jury meetings, so it’s difficult to build up notoriety over the debate and votes that come along with that. The Jury as a whole has had a problem disregarding its following of the law, but that has been a collective failure. Until this year, whatever controversy on her own Parks stirred up came from comments at local Republican Party meetings and through social media that came only to tempests in teapots.

That went onto steroids when her political ally GOP Bossier City Councilor David Montgomery appointed her to the city’s Charter Review Commission, a thinly-disguised – which she eventually publicly would admit – vehicle by which to try to stop a petition for strict term limits on councilors and the mayor that would prevent long-serving councilors like Montgomery from running for reelection next spring. Connected as well to the powerful in city politics as her husband Santi is city judge, she became the most vocal advocate against strict limits, which last month was the subject of a petition process successfully completed to bypass the Council that legally should place the matter on the ballot Dec. 7.

Throughout months of Commission debate and what of that spilled over on social media, Parks would advance a peculiar view of the law. At an attempted meeting that failed to launch because a quorum could not be reached, she publicly advocated an expansive theory of government power that when a government wanted to act in a certain fashion and there was the slightest interpretation legally that it was not prohibited from doing so, regardless that vast evidence may exist that it could not arrogate that power, then it should unless stopped from doing so in a court of law. This was congruent with the direction of the Police Jury on certain issues such as its takeover of the parish’s library board which she defended in public.

She also throughout displayed an extraordinary thin-skinned nature to any criticism at all – even manufacturing offense when expedient. As an example, after a February Bossier Watch narrowcast/podcast, which occurs almost every Tuesday, spent part of an episode critiquing her arguments and behavior at a Commission meeting prompting one frequent social media commenter to take a dig at Parks’ complaint that Tuesday meetings were inconvenient for her (begging the question of why she would have accepted the appointment). Within hours, Parks seized upon an obscure slang reference of which the show hosts and commenter, operator of the news/entertainment website SOBO Live Wes Merriott, said they were unaware of, and related it to the post in a message she relayed to supposedly personally close social media adherents, where she defined herself as a victim by alleging the remark insulted all of womanhood and asked that recipients boycott the show for allowing its dissemination (regardless of the impossibility of real-time policing of posted commentary).

This became public knowledge only because the communication went out to a nonpublic mailing list on Facebook – its entirely open to the public stream is extremely sparse and anodyne – and at least one recipient leaked the information to the wider world. That would happen again recently in a more insidious and hideous fashion.

On Jul. 29, the Commission met for what would be the final time in an abrogated meeting that featured a shouting match between Parks and another commissioner. In an e-mail message sent by Merriott, who obtained various apparently leaked screenshots and corroborating testimony, he described what transpired after:

On July 30th, 2024, Kyle Schuldt, a Bossier City resident, Banker for Citizens Bank and Trust, and US Army National Guard reservist, sent a private email to Bossier Parish Police Juror Julianna Parks, expressing his displeasure with her performance on the Bossier City Charter Review Commission. He stated:

‘Urgent

Good afternoon, mam [sic],

Can you please carry your over dramatic, useless, lackie [sic] self out of this city? You are the physical embodiment of all that is wrong with this country. You use your positions of power in "public service" for personal gain. Shame on you. The tide is going to be turning against folks like you.

 The only good thing about you is that you aren't intelligent enough to think for yourself so you are the pawn for someone else.’Upon receiving this email, Ms. Parks posted the email to her public Facebook page, inviting disparaging comments and encouraging retribution, claiming it wasn't a "sound argument" and later implied Mr. Schuldt was mentally ill:

In the comments, friends of Ms. Parks began to identify the sender via a social media post where Mr. Schuldt appeared with members of Shreveport Fire Department in one of his Civic Roles …. Mr. Schuldt was also identified as a member of the Bossier Chamber of Commerce Diplomats program, and commenters identified that and tagged the Chamber, demanding action ….

Within hours, Mr. Schuldt was called to the carpet at Citizen's Bank and Trust, and terminated, citing he no longer "matched the culture" of the bank.

In the same hour, he received a voicemail that he was being dismissed from the Bossier Chamber of Commerce Diplomats at the direction of [President] Lisa Johnson ….

This story is notable because Mr. Schuldt addressed his comments to Ms. Julianna Parks in a private email, and did not make any public comments or statements on social media. It was Ms. Parks, whom is an attorney, elected Police Juror, and Charter Review Commissioner who posted his email publicly, seemingly to incite reprisals against him.

Interestingly, Phillip Rodgers, a fellow police juror alongside Ms. Parks, is a member of the board of directors of Citizens Bank and Trust ….

The Diplomats are described by the Chamber as “volunteers of the Bossier Chamber and serve as our walking-talking billboards for the Chamber as well as for your business. You will see them supporting businesses at ribbon cuttings, anniversaries and Chamber events as well as popping in to check on you and your business!” Arguably, antagonizing even privately a local elected official, no matter how thin-skinned, could be interpreted as interfering with the Chamber’s mission and merit suspension, although undoubtedly Parks’ publicizing that communication put the Chamber in a difficult spot that could have been avoided had she not done that. Notably, the Chamber receives money from local governments for various projects.

But Schuldt’s losing his job over this, whether Rodgers intervened (who has been known to throw his weight around when it comes to matters he feels personally invested in) in that, is beyond the pale. It’s inconceivable in publicizing the note to her, the criticism in which is par for the course for elected officials (and opinion writers!), that Parks didn’t know this could be an outcome, if not actively intended for something like it to happen.

In particular, this incident demonstrates how Parks seamlessly adopts attitudes and tactics of the political left. As part of her attack on Schuldt, at least one of her postings falls back on her common theme that opposition to her signifies “hate” of some kind, which the left typically will use to describe all those who disagree with its policy preferences and actions, no matter how intellectually powerful and evidence-driven those counterarguments may be, as an attempt to distract from and to delegitimize that opposition.

This incident also highlighted her penchant for trying to silence political opposition, in claiming victimhood status. Whether this displays a high degree of narcissism – taking everything personally which perhaps suggests elected office in a democracy is not for her – or political calculation, that also shares the left’s ethos from trying to keep inconvenient facts out of the way to making opponents appear shameful enough to impact negatively their lives, and by using social media to do it.

(And her mounting record of vindictiveness indicates she could go further still. Throughout decades of writing opinion pieces, from college newspapers to national publications, numerous times I have had public figures who felt aggrieved by what I write launch pressure campaigns with my employers to try to censure me in some fashion, all spectacularly unsuccessful. Here’s hoping my superiors don’t have to sit through her haranguing because of this post.)

How Parks feels about setting in motion the ruining of somebody’s working life over her pique she will have to reconcile with whatever higher power, if any, she may believe in. But just as importantly for whatever political ambitions, if any, she may harbor is how voters feel about her temperament and judgment as an elected official revealed especially through this incident, as well as others. Although, who knows, it all worked out for false police officer personation convict Democrat, now state Rep., Steven Jackson ….