The Foxwoods Session

The rule in question is Bylaw 2 §4G. It is one paragraph long, and it is linked below. An independent parliamentary opinion by James H. Slaughter — a past president of the American College of Parliamentary Lawyers — reads it to require ten votes of the entire Grand Board. Read the bylaw yourself. Then read his description of it. Decide which one is ambiguous.

The bylaws answer the vote question with a number. That is the whole point of a voting threshold. And the man speaking is the institution’s own lawyer — the one officer whose job, above everyone else’s, is to insist that the number in the rulebook is the number that counts. The bylaw required ten. The vote was eight. That difference is not a technicality. It is the rule.

Two things are true, and this record has said both from the start. The court did not put Archon Douglass back in office while the case is heard. And the court found — preliminarily, not finally — that he is likely to prevail on the merits of the vote question.

Here is what Foxwoods added: the second fact was read to the room by the General Counsel himself, in the same remarks where he said the people citing it were “bastardizing” the ruling. He confirmed the finding exists while condemning those who mention it.

And watch what he did with the Supreme Court. His citations are real, and they say what he says: nothing preliminary is final. This record agrees, and has said so from the first day. But both rulings came in the same court order. The finding that favors Archon Douglass, he told the room, is “fleeting,” “tentative,” rely on it “at your own peril.” The ruling that favors the fraternity — equally preliminary, from the same order — he announced as “The fraternity won.” One order. Two standards. By his own citations, nobody has won anything yet — and he applied the Supreme Court to exactly half of the page it was written on.

Do not take his summary, and do not take this page’s. The court’s own words are linked below.

Here is what happened. On April 9, the board removed a sitting officer with eight votes. Six weeks later, on May 21, the same board adopted a new reading of the bylaw — “two-thirds of members present and voting” — and used it to re-approve the removal, backdated to April 9. Two members left before that vote was taken. By counsel’s own account at Foxwoods, one of them texted afterward: “You know that vote’s not valid.”

Think about what the do-over admits. You do not go back and fix a vote that was already valid. If eight votes were enough on April 9, the May 21 ratification had no purpose. The board’s own second vote says the first one did not stand.

And a judge has already examined the do-over. In its findings of September 16, 2025, the court said the new reading “cannot apply” to the April 9 vote, and that the ratification “appears to have been equally improper.” Final judgment in the case has not yet been entered — but on the do-over itself, the only court to look at it has spoken, in those words. Read them yourself at the court record below.

And the two committee “rulings” he cited? Neither has ever been shown to the membership — no text, no date, no vote. Any delegate may ask for them.

The federal lawsuit is about intellectual property — trademark, name, likeness, confidential material. The book is Seize the Future: a copyrighted work, on sale to the public. At Foxwoods, the lawyer prosecuting that intellectual-property case held up the defendant’s book in front of 350 Archons, announced it would be “part of moving on the litigation,” read from its pages aloud into a recorded meeting, and said of the consequence: “I don’t give a damn.”

And here is why it matters. The General Counsel claims to be defending the intellectual property rights of the organization. Yet he told the entire room, in his own words, exactly how much those same rights of an individual member are worth to him: not a damn. Take the rights away, and what is left is what the room actually watched that morning — a federal case, paid for with the membership’s own dues, aimed at one member. Both documents are linked below. Put the statement and the lawsuit side by side and decide what the lawsuit is really for.

The no-contact directive issued from the chair on June 2 did not end with the broadcast. At Foxwoods, counsel extended it in his own voice: don’t talk, delete what reaches you, don’t pass it on. He told the room a temporary restraining order was being expedited in federal court — in his words, to “shut that down.” And he noted the fraternity’s own federal filing had just been re-filed under seal, to “keep it confidential.” The full timeline — the letters, the directive, the court applications — is laid out in the companion record.

Start with the first statement, because it can be checked. The vote of April 9 is in the minutes: 8 yes, 4 no. Four members — Kendrick, Hall, Welch, and Turner — voted no, by name, on a roll call. No vote of 13 to zero appears in the April 9 minutes, the May 21 minutes, or any other record of the Fraternity. The tally he gave the room does not exist.

He also told the room — twice — that “None of that has ever been disputed,” and that “There is no dispute that the facts are true.” Minutes earlier, at the same microphone, the General Counsel had described the defamation lawsuit — in his words, “he’s suing the organization for defamation of character because of some of the memos that went out from the national office.” The dispute is a court case. It had just been announced from the same stage, in the same session, by his own counsel. And the man saying “never disputed” is himself named, personally, in the defamation portion of that suit. He was not describing a dispute he had heard about. He is in it.

Now the third statement — the words he put in another man’s mouth. Archon Douglass’s answer is on the record, and it is flat: those words were never spoken. Not by him. Not by his father — a man who has been dead for twenty years, and who cannot answer for what was put in his mouth before a ballroom. What Tapscott offered the room was one man’s account of a two-man conversation, told about someone barred from that room — someone the membership had been directed not to contact and ask. No witness, no record, nothing behind it but the speaker’s own assurance: “That’s not hearsay.” You have now watched this same speaker, twice in the same remarks, state things a checkable record contradicts. That is the man asking you to take his word for a conversation nobody else heard.

And the claimed recording — “It is recorded that he went one by one and said, I did it” — note what has never happened in fifteen months: that recording has never been played for the membership, never quoted from, never produced. If it said what he claims, producing it would have ended the argument long ago. Add it to the list of documents any delegate may ask for.

A regional business meeting is the membership’s room. The words above were spoken by the man presiding over it, closing the governance question — for the weekend, and by his own declaration, for life. But there is one room no presiding officer can close: the floor of the Grand Boulé. That is where this question has belonged from the start, and where it will finally be held.