critical race theory CRT
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primary on va gov win 11 21
2NDARY 621 SEE TWO STORY
merri ok
bit belated 621 wait to see if thing, // woke military/corps?
melding w/ anti-commie?
see censorship
see wedge culture war
see desantis thot police
see moral panic
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/ron-desantis-florida-real-history/
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woke math 5/22
fldoe-releases-math-textbook-reviews-00030503
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida’s Department of Education on Thursday released scores of documents shedding new light on why the agency rejected dozens of proposed math textbooks over what state leaders deemed “impermissible” content, including lessons on critical race theory.
The records, nearly 6,000 pages of book examinations, show that state reviewers flagged several traces of critical race theory and inklings of “social emotional learning” in proposed texts, two topics that have been explicitly targeted by the DeSantis administration. The slate of textbook denials gained national attention last month when state leaders, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, publicly blasted publishers for attempting to “indoctrinate” students.
At the time, many were left confused as to why the state would not accept dozens of math textbooks over issues like critical race theory, which are generally not part of the mathematics curriculum.
Ahead of the midterms and his reelection campaign, DeSantis has pushed measures limiting how race can be taught in classrooms and defended Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill, known by opponents as “Don’t Say Gay.” That bill bans teachers from leading classroom instructions on sexual orientation and gender identity for students in kindergarten through third grade.
DeSantis on Friday said the state will follow Florida standards and praised his education department for flagging the texts and sending them back to publishers to “take the nonsense out of the math books.”
“Two plus two equals four,” DeSantis said at an event in Ocala. “It’s not two plus two and let’s have a struggle session over that.”
The book reviews released Thursday illustrate that the Florida Department of Education asked its analysts a series of four questions on “special topics” that could ultimately disqualify a text from being adopted for use in classrooms across the state.
The state education department specifically sought to know if the books aligned with the state’s rule outlawing critical race theory, and if they included any snippets of “Culturally Responsive Teaching,” “Social Justice,” or social emotional learning, which aims to teach students how to manage their emotions and develop strong relationships with their peers. Florida’s Board of Education in 2021 passed a rule banning critical race theory along with The 1619 Project from The New York Times, claiming they are theories that “distort historical events.”
Critical race theory, an analytical framework developed by legal scholars, examines how race and racism have become ingrained in American law and institutions since slavery and Jim Crow.
In one example that caught the state’s attention, a reviewer noted that a high school statistics book included lessons on race that could violate the rule.
They pointed to pages that discussed “racial profiling in policing” and “discrimination in magnet school admission,” along with one instance in which the book mentioned there were “too many” white police officers in the NYPD compared with the racial makeup of the community.
This textbook, published by Pearson, was one of dozens renounced by the state. Another book from Pearson covering precalculus honors was dinged for a section that asked students what algebra can help tell about “racial bias.”
Florida originally rejected 54 of the 132 proposed math textbooks, some 41 percent, submitted by publishers, the bulk of which were proposed for kindergarten through fifth grade. Some 28 of the math textbooks — or 21 percent — were left off the adoption list due to “prohibited topics” including critical race theory, according to the state education department.
This decision initially left schools across Florida with only one textbook option for standard K-5 math. But the state has since adopted additional publishers after they tweaked their proposals.
To that end, two publishers seeking to provide K-5 math books were flagged by reviewers for broaching lessons on social emotional learning, according to the documents.
One second-grade book from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was penalized on its alignment to state standards because “attempts at multicultural teaching” were evident in its text. The example given was “types of housing for different groups of people.”
Similarly, a McGraw Hill LLC book for fifth graders was rated as “very poor” for its social emotional learning lessons. The reviewer noted that one question “asks students to think about social and emotional learning competencies, including relationship skills and social awareness.”
Another book on Florida’s “not recommended” list, a Mathematics for College Liberal Arts text, was allegedly “biased” on climate change and emphasized that “racism is embedded in American society dependent on age,” according to one reviewer.
This book, a Pearson publication for high school students, contained exercises based on “an argument” between former Vice President Al Gore and conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh in which, the reviewer wrote, “You can tell the author favors Al Gore and dislikes Rush Limbaugh based on questions.”
This book includes a bar graph “measuring racial prejudice, by age,” an example previously cited by the FLDOE.
“Based solely on the Critical Race Theory elements, this book should not be considered for adoption,” according to the reviewer, who also criticized the author for “talking about a climate crisis as if it’s a proven fact.”
Textbook publishers, including McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, have indicated they are appealing the state’s decision against adopting the books.
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TEACHER she says she might retire b/c of
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White-power terrorist has a point?
From NBC News:
Two days after a white gunman opened fire and killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store, teacher Elizabeth Close began her high school ethnic studies class in Austin, Texas, by reminding her students about a new state law that requires her to provide balanced perspectives on 'widely debated and currently controversial issues.'
Close told her students that under the law, one of several recently implemented across the country that limit the ways teachers can discuss racism and current events, she was obligated to inform them that there’s more than one way to view Saturday’s mass shooting.
On one hand, she explained that authorities are investigating the killings as a racially motivated hate crime carried out by an 18-year-old who reportedly wrote of his belief in a conspiracy theory that white Americans are being 'replaced' by people of color through immigration, interracial marriage and integration.
'But I’m also supposed to tell you that that’s just one perspective,' Close recalled telling her students. 'Another perspective is that this young man was out defending the world — or his kind — from being taken over.'
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“The real issue”
When I write about religion, good or bad, someone somewhere explains “the real issue.” Get rid of religion. Get rid of the issue.
I don’t know what planet these people live on. It’s not Earth. Religion, good or bad, has been part of human affairs since humans organized themselves enough to warrant use of the term “human affairs.”
There once was a certain renegade cache, a certain poise and swagger, to being anti-religious. That fad peaked in the early aughts with the late Christopher Hitchens and his copycats. It wasn’t a set of beliefs, he said. Religion was a mental illness verging on totalitarianism. Standing against religion wasn’t offensive. Hitchens made it seem noble.
This is what people allude to when they explain “the real issue.”
Even if I agreed that religion is the problem, anti-religion isn’t going to solve it. Hitchens never spoke for a majority of people. He knew that. That fact was the reason his atheism got attention at all. It ran against the grain of the majority, especially white evangelical Protestants.
Atheism may be the opposite of theism in the abstract. Not in this world, though. The opposite of conservative religion – especially authoritarian religion, like white evangelicalism – is liberal religion.
Liberal religion makes room for all the other religions. It tolerates other traditions. It makes common cause. God contains multitudes. Liberal religion also wants a wall between church and state, because a state religion is the worst thing a liberal religion would ever face.
It’s conservative religion – especially authoritarian religion, like white evangelicalism – that longs to tear down that wall. It longs to replace moral systems competing for the attention of people who have not yet questioned authoritarian religion. It longs to replace freedom of and from religion with their own view of the “Christian moral order.”
Atheism or agnosticism or “none” can’t fight that.
Liberal religion, whatever that might be, can.
It always has.
...
“To sacrifice for us”
Republican Kandiss Taylor is running for Georgia governor:
The First Amendment, which is the right to worship Jesus freely – that’s why we have a country. That’s why we have Georgia.
Our founding fathers came here and destroyed American Indians’ homes. Their land – they took it. Look at what they went through, the Native Americans, to sacrifice for us – to have the freedom we have today.
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6 22 an tom b raw story
With Republicans believing they will reclaim both houses of Congress in the November midterms --with the House the most likely going from a Democratic majority to a GOP majority -- the Washington Examiner is reporting that conservatives hope to make rule changes that will keep President Joe Biden from using a key presidential tool to effect change.
According to the Examiner's Haisten Willis, Republicans are not only being encouraged to limit Biden's ability to implement executive orders, but they are also getting help from the far-right lobbying group Heritage Action with proposed rule changes.
The day after Biden addressed executive orders in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, telling the late-night host, "I have issued executive orders within the power of the presidency to be able to deal with everything having to do with guns, gun ownership… all of the things that are within my power. But what I don’t want to do, and I’m not being facetious, I don’t want to emulate Trump’s abuse of the constitution and constitutional authority," the Examiner is reporting Republicans hope to derail any attempts he does make to use them.
The Examiner report states, "Biden has already attempted many unilateral actions through executive orders or executive branch agencies," before adding, "In preparation for this and to fight current executive proposals, conservatives are sharpening their advocacy tools to make sure their voices are heard within the White House. Many of the proposed rule changes require a public comment process, during which they can be slowed down or even defeated by popular backlash."
According to Heritage Action's Executive Director Jessica Anderson, "What I hear so much while I’m on the road is: ‘What can we do to impact the Bidenregime?’ There’s a lot of frustration where people feel like they’re calling a member of Congress and nothing happens because Republicans don’t have control.”
According to the Examiner's Willis, demanding a pause for public comments has previously worked well for conservatives, with the report pointing out that "Heritage Action's first big push came last summer when the Department of Education proposed plans to fund grants for programs based oncritical race theory. Heritage pushed a toolkit and sent activists to the Federal Register. More than 35,000 public commentswere sent in on the proposed rule ahead of the deadline, and the Education Department later walked back its plans."
According to Anderson, "By us engaging more forcefully and strategically in their rulemaking process, we'll be in the position to point out when the Biden administration is trying to circumvent and prevent Americans from weighing in."
She then added, "We should have been doing this a long time ago."
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chris rufo crt bs big banner ad on alternet?] 4 22 marxist origin; been there a while?
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4 22
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is under fire for banning 41 percent of all math books in grades K-12, including a whopping 71 percent of books in grades K-5.
DeSantis’ Dept. of Education announced in a press release, “Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students.” The DeSantis administration does not appear to have published a list of banned books or specific reasons each book was banned, nor did they provide examples. They also did not explain how or why the supposed “indoctrination” materials were initially approved, how long they have been in use, or what negative outcomes they have produced, if any.
“The news of the banned textbooks comes after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that makes it easier for parents to challenge books and instructional materials they don’t approve of,” Florida Politics reports. Supporters of the legislation says it gives parents more involvement in their children’s education, but opponents argue it opens the door to massive book bans. To note, Florida has third largest number of school book ban incidents in the country.”
Some say banning the books is just another way to reward GOP donors, by spending millions to buy new books.
The news has some in Florida and across the country angered and frustrated.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Florida Republican leaders are preparing to ban Algebra from high schools,” Florida native State Rep. Anna Eskamani (D) said, mocking DeSantis and the GOP in a sarcastic tweet. “They object to the subliminal use of [brackets] as an indoctrination to the concept of inclusion, they don’t like the equal sign, and they hate solving problems!”
Florida State Rep. Carlos G. Smith (D) says Desantis “is hysterically pulling math books outta FL schools claiming they ‘indoctrinate’ kids with CRT. This isn’t just crazy right-wing pandering— next they’ll spend MILLIONS of tax dollars forcing schools to buy math books from GOP campaign donors.”
He also accuses DeSantis of turning classrooms into “political battlefields,” and says the Florida Dept. of Education “won’t tell us” what books they banned “or what they say” because “it’s a lie.”...
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an 3 22
'TV terrorist' Donald Trump blasted for telling followers they 'must lay down their very lives' to defend against CRT
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 13, 2022
Donald Trump is calling on his followers to “lay down their very lives” to defend the United States against critical race theory. The disgraced former president delivered that dangerous call to arms at his “Save America” rally Saturday night in Florence, South Carolina.
“Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival,” Trump told his MAGA supporters. So-called critical race theory is not something that is taught in K-12 grades, it is a college-level interdisciplinary means to examine social and institutional constructs surrounding race.
“We have no choice,” Trump continued, a claim he often makes when speaking falsely.
That’s when he laid the groundwork for weaponizing his followers in the racist battle inside his mind that one day may erupt in physical war on our streets.
“The fate of any nation depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down – and they must do this – lay down their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and communists and socialists to teach our children to hate America there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom.”
“Calling for political violence to stop the teaching of accurate history in our schools is what fascism looks like,” commented Indivisible’s Sarah Dohl.
“Trump doesn’t want a political party. He wants an army. He’s a TV terrorist yes. But he’s also a real fascist,” wrote Condé Nast Legal Affairs Editor Luke Zaleski. “Attacking the Capitol, waiting, calling it off, then telling them he loved them after they terrorized the country and got his message across was a kind of a hint, folks.”
Zaleski later added: “Trump is a traitor and political mob boss.”
Civil-rights lawyer Subodh Chandra described Trump’s remarks as a “call to a violent race war. Over nothing but the teaching of our actual history. (CRT is not taught in public schools.)”
“Donald Trump,” said Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, “who seems to be in the running for 2024, tells a nation awash in guns to kill or be killed in order to stop anyone from ‘hating our country.'”
“Scenes from a slow civil war,” observed Vanity Fair contributing editor Jeff Sharlet, who exposed the international right-wing Christian fundamentalist theocratic organization known as The Family.
“What does this mean?” asked Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy professor Don Moynihan. “If you are a teacher in a state you probably feel less and less safe by the extremist nature of this rhetoric.”
“Encouraging his fanboys to commit political violence again. Why is he still at large?” asked Salon’s Bob Cesca.
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All over the United States, Republicans in state legislatures have been pushing bills and laws that forbid the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools. Proponents of such laws argue that they are promoting “transparency,” but in a biting op-ed published by the Daily Beast on Valentine’s Day 2022, journalist Jonathan Friedman argues that their goal isn’t “transparency,” but rather, “intimidating teachers.”
“Just as opposition has mounted to Republican proposals to enforce gag orders on teachers and ban books from schools, right-wingers have shifted tactics, adopting a new policy objective under the spurious umbrella of ‘transparency,’” Friedman warns. “Don’t be fooled by the neutral-sounding language. By any other name, this is an effort to monitor teachers that echoes the worst urges of McCarthyism and feels like Orwell’s Big Brother brought to life.”
Friedman continues, “Transparency is a good thing in a democracy. It’s important that citizens, organizations and journalists have opportunities to file open records requests, to investigate corruption in school boards, or to examine curricular documents at a state or school board level. But what’s being advanced is a radical form of teacher surveillance that would place enormous burdens on educators and chip away at the freedom to learn, teach, and share ideas and perspectives. Constraining educators in this way will only harm students in the process.”
The journalist goes on to lay out some reasons why it is “deeply disingenuous” for Republicans pushing anti-CRT laws to claim that their primary motivation is “transparency.”
“Backers of these bills have claimed that they are simply advancing ‘parents’ rights,’ helping parents and taxpayers know what’s taught in schools, or supporting teachers’ planning,” Friedman notes. “But everyone knows that this ‘transparency’ movement comes at the tail-end of a year-long campaign in which many conservative activists and Republican legislators have introduced educational gag orders to prohibit discussions of so-called ‘divisive concepts’ in schools, playing into a national panic over critical race theory.”
Ty Masterson, Republican leader of the Kansas State Senate, has described critical race theory as an “ideological worldview that embeds itself in all types of curriculum,” saying that his goal is “curriculum transparency.” But in fact, critical race theory isn’t even being taught in K-12 schools in Kansas or any other state in the U.S.
CRT, a field of academic study that is offered at some colleges and universities, argues that the racism of the past affects U.S. institutions in the present. And isn’t something that one finds in public grammar schools, middle schools or high schools, although many Republicans are acting like it is.
“Regardless of how benign some of these bills seem on the surface, this censorious intent lies just below,” Friedman observes. “These are proposals that come out of an authoritarian playbook: ways for the state to monitor and inspect teachers’ day-to-day work with unprecedented precision, and with punitive measures attached. The aim is clearly to intimidate teachers, to make them second-guess everything they say, to politicize and police what they do.”
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an salon 2 22
:{:{}:
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...There are also some less familiar pieces of evidence, such as the 50-person Christian choir singing about swords and taking possession of the land while the attack was underway. Multiple rioters recounted how God's hand or voice had urged them to enter the capital. One avowed white supremacist had convinced his parole officer to let him travel to Washington that week to hand out Bibles. And then there's the man who broke down Nancy Pelosi's office door, believing that "the crowd would tear her 'into little pieces,'" and later testified in court that God had been on Trump's side: "And if patriots have to kill 60 million of these communists, it's God's will."
Seidel also describes how the events of the previous two months — including the Million MAGA March in November, and the Jericho March events on Dec. 12 and Jan. 5 — served as test runs for Jan. 6 and a broader "permission structurethat gave the insurrectionists the moral and mental license that they needed," through the promise that they were doing the Lord's work.
There's an exhaustive list of such examples. Paula White, "faith adviser" to the Trump White House, recorded nightly prayer videos calling on God to smite Trump's enemies. The Proud Boys prayed in the street and were "hailed as God's warriors." Evangelical speaker Lance Wallnau told his massive following, "Fighting with Trump is fighting with God," and said that angels were looking for some "risk takers" and "wild cards that are gonna go start something up."
"They marched around government buildings in state capitals and in D.C., including the Capitol and the Supreme Court, blowing on shofars and claiming to know God's will," said Seidel. "Sometimes I wonder how could we possibly have been surprised by the violence that day."
More than a year later, said the panelists, Christian nationalists continue to march under slightly new banners, leading efforts to suppress voting rights through gerrymandering and new legislation that would require everything from lifetime disenfranchisement of convicted felons to Jim Crow-style civics tests for would-be voters. Jemar Tisby, president of the Black Christian organization The Witness and author of "The Color of Compromise," said Christian nationalism is also animating numerous state and local fights, including culture-war battles like the manufactured debate over critical race theory, as well as efforts to silence dissenting Christians.
"Even the religious voices within the church are being labeled as critical race theory, as too liberal or progressive to be trusted, and even the communist and Marxist labels are being used," said Tisby...
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/book-burners/
The moral panic currently sweeping America about Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been covered ad nauseum by the press and commentators across the political spectrum. That’s what typically happens with moral panics (more on that in a moment).
What nobody is talking about, though, is thewhyof this particular issue at this particular time. As a result, we’re mistaking thetoolfor thegoal.
Moral panics, when driven by politicians, are usually just tools. This CRT moral panic is a tool being used by a coalition of interests to achieve their own goals, none of which have anything to do with teaching or not-teaching the history of race in America.
Here’s how it works:
- Imagine you’re part of a group of libertarian billionaires who don’t believe in public education and who see any such sort of taxpayer-funded effort to improve “the underclasses” as an absurd waste of the tax dollars you “worked so hard to earn” and the “gummint” now wants to take away from you “at the barrel of a gun.”
- Imagine you’re a leader in the Republican Party who’s seeing the average age of the Fox audience — 70 — as a threat to your own political longevity because old white people don’t go into politics and you need 30- and 40-year-olds to learn their basic political skills locally (like on a school board) so you can groom and propel them up into state or federal politics.
- Imagine you’re a multimillionaire white evangelical preacher who’s looking for an issue you can use to more tightly bind your congregation — your donors — to you by portraying yourself as a crusader who’s going to save their children from a horrible fate.
- Imagine you’re a white supremacist militia leader who’s looking to expand his base by bringing in white middle-class adults and therefore you need an issue to get yourself into the headlines “taking on authorities” but that won’t also end with you going to jail.
- Imagine you’re a Republican politician who’s looking at a serious challenge in the upcoming primary elections and you need an issue that’ll be both popular and energizing for your base voters, even if the larger population doesn’t much care, because base voters are all you care about in the upcoming primary.
These are the goal-oriented “crisis actors” who’ve brought us the moral panic around Critical Race Theory that has now morphed into a book-banning frenzy.
It has deep roots.
- The movement to entirely privatize public education in America began in a big way after the 1954 Brown v Board Supreme Court decision that ended legal racial segregation in our public schools. Entire counties shut down their schools and a new industry of all-white “Christian academies” popped up all over the country.
- Talk radio in the 1970s (I was in the business then) was often dominated by arguments against unionized public schools funded by property taxes, with the mantra of “I understand about paying taxes for police and fire, but I don’t have kids so why should I pay?” or “My kids are grown now, why should I pay?”
- The Charter School industry evolved out of this with Reagan’s encouragement and in some parts of America now dominates the education scene. And a moral panic about CRT is made-to-order to take down what’s left of our taxpayer-funded unionized-teacher-run public schools.
- This is now big business. In Washington, DC, for example, there are now as many charter schools making profits for their investors as there are public schools. The continuing existence of free public education represents a lost profit opportunity.
As billionaire former Education Secretary Betsy DeVosrecently wrote for Fox “News,
” it appears she believes the best solution is just to kill off unionized public education because it can never be reformed:
“Because wokeness is the left’s religion, ‘banning’ critical race theory or the 1619 Project won’t fix the problem. The liberal education establishment will simply rename, rebrand, or repackage these insidious ideas to get around so-called bans.”
These are the very simple and easily identifiedgoalsof the Republican movement to “ban Critical Race Theory.”
Thetoolthey’re using is a new moral panic.
- If you’re old enough to remember the 1980s, you can recall when Tipper Gore and James Baker’s wife Susan were worried that song lyrics were going to corrupt a generation of Americans (tell that to Ari Melber). Or the McMartin pre-school satanic ritual abuse hysteria, that ran for much of the decade.
- In the 1990s, after a young British girl died of an ecstasy overdose, there was a moral panic around “Rave Culture,” and much of the multi-million-dollar advertising campaign that kicked it off was funded by alcohol companies that saw the upswing in drug use by young adults as a threat to their bottom lines.
- Since then we’ve seen national panics that just happened to politically or financially (or both) benefit Republican politicians ranging from Islamophobia to Trump’s Birther claims against Obama to Southern border caravans to the “bathroom hysteria” directed against trans schoolchildren just a few years ago.
In this context, we can understand how a disparate group of billionaires,
Republican politicians, televangelists, media outlets and white supremacist militias might find common cause around a new and exciting moral panic.
Thus, today’s Critical Race Theory hysteria.
Each group wins something substantial — particularly the billionaires and Republicans, as is usually the case — and the only losers are Black people and schoolkids. And, of course, objective real history, which is just a throwaway casualty to the people funding and promoting the hysteria.
Because “history” and schoolkids don’t vote, and Republicans have figured out how to make it very, very hard for Black voters to overcome everything from being purged off voting rolls to having to stand in line for hours to being given “provisional ballots” that are never counted.
By December of 2024 — and maybe December of this year — the elections will be over and the whole freak-out around reinventing American history will have gone away, the same way nobody today is seriously working to push “bathroom bills” in state legislatures.
But don’t worry: it’ll be replaced by a brand new Republican moral panic that targets another convenient and vulnerable group.
Will it be Hispanics (race)? Sikhs (religion)? Lesbians (gender/sexuality)?
You can bet that today’s version of Newt Gingrich/Frank Luntz is focus-grouping it right now
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1/22
some state just banned CRT in college?!
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trms 27th
It was last fall when local Republicans' efforts to ban books started to look like a national trend. A county in Virginia removed LGBTQIA fiction from school libraries. Around the same time, a Kansas school district started pulling several well-known novels from school libraries, including "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood and a Pulitzer Prize winning play from August Wilson.
It was against this backdrop that a Republican state legislator in Texas put together a list of 850 books he believed might make students feel uncomfortable — and then asked schools which of the titles are available to students.
Nora Pelizzari, a spokesperson for the National Coalition Against Censorship, soon after told The Washington Post, "What has taken us aback this year is the intensity with which school libraries are under attack.... [T]his feels like a more overarching attempt to purge schools of materials that people disagree with. It feels different than what we've seen in recent years."
The campaign clearly isn't fading. NBC News reported overnight:
A Tennessee school board voted to remove "Maus," a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from the district's curriculum after officials objected to eight instances of profanity and an image of a nude woman. The McMinn County Board of Education's Jan. 10 vote to remove the novel, published by cartoonist Art Spiegelman about his Jewish parents' experiences in Nazi concentration camps, was 10-0, according to meeting minutes.
The fact that the unanimous vote to remove the celebrated work about the Holocaust came shortly before Holocaust Remembrance Day made matters just a bit worse.
It'd be easier to overlook stories like these if they were far and few between, but that's simply not the case. Axios reported last week, "School districts from Pennsylvania to Wyoming are bowing to pressure from some conservative groups to review — then purge from public school libraries — books about LGBTQ issues and people of color. "
the article quoted Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, saying, "I've worked for this office for 20 years, and we've never had this volume of challenges come in such a short time."
NBC News reported a week earlier that dozens of Black authors are finding their works "are being pulled from school libraries under the pretext that they're teaching critical race theory.... Most of the books that are targeted for bans don't teach critical race theory but are written by and about people of color."
As we've discussed, these fights are not altogether new. Conservative activists have launched all kinds of related efforts for generations, targeting books they deemed morally and socially unworthy for one reason or another.
But there's evidence that the renewed book-banning campaign is intensifying, even as many on the right complain about "cancel culture
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an 1 22
gutfeld fox News host accuses Democrats of using public schools to push ‘race warfare’ and ‘revolution’
Influential Fox News host Greg Gutfeld is accusing Democrats of engaging in "an insidious transfer of power" by using America's public school system to indoctrinate children...
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an me 1 22
proposed education bill in Virginia has received sharp criticism for the misinterpretation of basic historical facts surrounding former President Abraham Lincoln's debate with the late Illinois Sen. Steven Douglas.
According to Slate, the controversy centers on a bill pre-filled by Rep. Wren Williams (R-Va.). As the Republican war on Critical Race Theory (CRT) continues, the latest piece of suggested legislation in Virginia "proposed a new standard for regulating high-school social studies curricula in the state, including a requirement that students learn about 'the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.'”
However, Slate senior writer Christina Cauterucci has highlighted the glaring problem with that so-called historical fact. The “Lincoln-Douglas debates” over the continuance of slavery were not between the late president and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but rather the late Illinois senator.
"This was a clear misunderstanding of the 1858 “Lincoln-Douglas debates,” in which Steven Douglas, a then-sitting senator from Illinois—not Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist—faced off against Abraham Lincoln on the issue of slavery," Cauterucci emphasized.
While the historical blunder will likely be corrected before the bill becomes a debated topic of discussion next week, Cauterucci is shedding light on the bigger picture and the problem it poses.
"The bill also includes deliberate attempts to censor teachers and reshape the facts of U.S. history to flatter white men—the sorts of provisions Republican lawmakers have been advancing in state legislatures across the country in a manufactured panic over the supposed teaching of critical race theory," Cauterucci wrote. "(In November, Virginia ousted its Democratic governor in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin, who made the issue a pillar of his campaign.)"
She also noted how the bill would also serve as a legislative mechanism to advance Republicans' attack on critical race theory as it would censor teachers from speaking truth in classrooms.
"The Virginia bill would prohibit instructors from teaching that the U.S. is 'systemically racist or sexist' or that 'the ideology of equity of outcomes is superior to the ideology of equality…of opportunities.' It would also ban school boards from hiring anyone 'with the job title of equity director or diversity director or a substantially similar title.'”
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CRT
https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/madness-oklahoma-bill-would-empower-parents-to-remove-books-from-school-libraries/
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/freedomworks-hopes-anti-critical-race-theory-organizing-will-bring-massive-right-wing-gains-in-2022/
freedomWorks, one of the many right-wing groups taking part in the dishonest campaign against critical race theory, is fomenting opposition to teaching about systemic racism in an effort to mobilize conservative voters to turn out in 2022 midterms and take over school boards.
The day after Thanksgiving, FreedomWorks President Adam Brandon wrote in a fundraising email that opposition to critical race theory “could be the key to making MASSIVE political gain in 2022.” He claimed that “the Left” is out to “indoctrinate children with CRT – so our kids will start hating our country and our God-given freedoms as much as the Left does.”
FreedomWorks’ Noah Wall followed up with an email a couple days later claiming that “The radical Left has proven that they are willing to do whatever it takes to brainwash future generations to transform America into a socialist nation.”
Brandon’s email touted FreedomWorks’ efforts to recruit and train school board candidates. He claimed that since the group had launched its BEST (Building Education for Students Together) initiative, it had hosted grassroots events reaching 3,700 activists, trained more than 300 activists to run for the school board, encouraged 150 of its Candidate Academy graduates to commit to filing paperwork to run for school board seats, and created partnerships with many of the other right-wing groups rallying activists to take over school boards.
Just a few days later, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah lent his name to a Dec. 1 FreedomWorks fundraising email that focused on other supposed threats from “the Left’s socialist wish list” such as a $15 minimum wage and statehood for the District of Columbia. Lee’s brief note introduced a longer message from Brandon, who asked for money to fight “the swamp” and elect right-wing candidates in 2022. “Whether it’s AOC’s so called ‘Green New Deal,’ Washington D.C. Statehood, Supreme Court packing—or the Democrats’ schemes to seize TOTAL control of our election system—America is facing a GRAVE THREAT.”
FreedomWorks is associated with the State Policy Network, a collection of think tanks and advocacy groups that promote right-wing policies at the state level. Brandon is a member of Council for National Policy, a secretive and influential network of right-wing and far-right activists.
Tags: Adam Brandon, Mike Lee. Noah Wall, Critical Race Theory, Election 2022 School Boards Council for National Policy Freedom Works FreedomWorks State Policy Network
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wow literally strict fr
an 11 21
after Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin won Virginia's gubernatorial race Tuesday, the GOP appears eager to take his bigotry-infused "education" strategy nationwide. "The Republican swings in Virginia and New Jersey show the efficacy of a new model of conservative politics: appealing to suburban voters by promising greater parental control of schools," the Washington Post reports Thursday morning. It's a clever strategy.
If the public knew what the GOP demands actually were — banning classic books like Toni Morrison's "Beloved" or "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood — most parents would not be on board. Few people want to be a Nazi book burner! But the GOP is repackaging this deeply fascist love of censorship in a friendlier frame of "parental rights." They got lucky that the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, blundered in the campaign's closing weeks when he said, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach," instead of mounting a robust defense of free speech and teaching the truth about slavery and segregation in history classes.
So what, exactly, are kids learning?
Republicans use scare terms like "critical race theory," and liberals try to draw attention to the lists of books Republicans are trying to ban, mainly for suggesting racism is bad or that LGBTQ people exist. It's extremely important for the left to focus on how this supposed fight over "education" is really a proxy fight over the right's rejection of equality for LGBTQ people and people of color.
But there's another aspect to this fight that has been less discussed: How the GOP war on schools is instigated, organized, and funded by right-wing religious groups whose true agenda is opposing the rights of children.
Conservatives, especially the Christian right, have long taken a dim view of raising kids who can think for themselves. Their view is children should be "trained" to be obedient and submissive. Under the guise of "parents' rights," the Christian right is mainstreaming their hostility to the very idea that children have a right to an education. In this case, the right of a child to have a proper education that teaches critical thinking and intellectual curiosity.
As journalist Talia Lavin writes in her recent deep dive into the history of corporal punishment in evangelical circles, the movement of "biblical parenting" started in 1970, when Christian right activist James Dobson published his book "Dare to Discipline," which advanced a belief in "the enforced submission of children to absolute authority." Soon there was a cottage industry of similar books, all of which promoted "the complete subjection of the child's will," usually through relentlessly beating kids (which is minimized through the cutesy word "spanking"). Children, in the Christian right view, are not to be educated — they are to be "trained." This philosophy of child-rearing was accompanied by a movement to impose their anti-child ideology on society and government. Unfortunately, this particular political goal of the Christian right gets far less coverage than their war on reproductive rights, their anti-LGBTQ activism, or their white supremacy. This lack of attention may, in fact, be a reason they've been wildly successful. As Lavin notes, hitting children "is outlawed completely in63 countries," but "legal in all fifty states." Laws allowing parents to take kids out of school to be "home schooled" are notoriously lax, and there's been a great deal of headway in redirecting kids out of schools and into religious "charter schools" that embrace the training-not-education approach. Donald Trump's Education Secretary was Betsy DeVos, a far-right fundamentalist who has spent decades trying to destroy the public education system. It's why the U.S. is the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
It should be unsurprising, then, that the religious right groups who have long opposed children's rights are behind this newly sprung nationwide attack on public schools.
Religious right stalwarts like the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation have been central to planning and unhatching this scheme to use the scare term "critical race theory" to stir up outrage at schools for teaching the truth about racism in history and literature classes. Also central to the effort, as reported by NBC News, is the International Organization for the Family, which has, like the Family Research Council, been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Under its original name, the World Congress of Families, the International Organization for the Family promoted not just a deeply authoritarian and patriarchal view of the family, but also white nationalism. As explained at the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Through its ideology of the so-called "natural family," WCF promotes a strict view of family, one based exclusively on the marriage of one heterosexual man to one heterosexual woman and their biological children, to the exclusion of many different types of families. Closely tied to this ideology is an adherence to strict binary gender roles, in which men serve as the heads of households and women as their helpmates and the bearer of children. Only this type of family, they contend, can quell the "demographic winter," the idea that European populations, especially, are in decline because of homosexuality, abortion, feminism, women in the workplace, and a variety of other things that deviate from the "natural family."
There's no way to really untangle all these different far-right views from each other. Forcing children into submission and preventing them from developing critical thinking skills is seen as crucial for raising them to be compliant adults who will unquestioningly adopt this patriarchal and racist view of family formation and purpose. One can see why schools teaching the book "Beloved" was flagged by far-right activists as a threat. Not only does the book humanize the victims of white supremacy, it also raises important questions about the rights of children and the meaning of self-determination. Indeed, even the concept of "raising questions" alarms the Christian right. In their view, children are not to think for themselves but to passively accept the instructions of elders.
Unfortunately, one reason the Christian right has a lot of success smuggling their radical views into mainstream politics is they, as happened in Virginia, often reframe it as a matter of "parental rights."
Most parents reject the religious right's extremist views on extinguishing a child's autonomy, to be clear. But most parents believe that they should have some control over their child's life, including over their education, health care, and disciplinary matters. They aren't even really wrong about this. Children's rights are always in contention with the need to keep children safe and to socialize them properly. Knowing the exact right mix of autonomy and discipline is a nuanced and tough question. The problem, however, is the reframing this as a matter of "parents' rights" distracts from the real issue, which is the war being waged on children'srights.
Children have a right to learn the truth about American history and to learn critical thinking skills. Children have a right to be exposed to great works of literature and art, and to expand their horizons. Children have a right to a robust health education, which includes information about sexuality and sexual orientation so that they can grow into healthy adults, instead of being hobbled with shame for having normal human impulses. All this chitter-chatter about "parents' rights" — by design — is hiding the fact that many of these rights of children are under very real threat right now
Failure to understand the deeply radical nature of the Christian right ideology fueling this school board movement leaves Democrats unequipped to fight back. We saw this with the McAuliffe campaign, which fumbled early on with the "parents' rights" framing, and only too late in the campaign realized they could reframe the matter — correctly, mind you — as a deeply racist attempt to censor books. Democrats need to highlight how profoundly anti-child the GOP attack on school boards is and defend both the right of children to learn and the right of educators to teach.
Most people don't want kids to grow up without learning to think for themselves. Democrats can win this fight — but first, they must understand what they're truly up against.
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color blind means racism does not exist, esp systemic, CRT dog whistle ~ affirmative action
https://www.mediamatters.org/five/foxs-jesse-watters-praises-glenn-youngkin-claiming-hes-bringing-back-martin-luther-kings
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a niche for anyone who has procreated?
https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/professional-conservatives-find-path-victory-ginned-outrage-over-critical-race
Born in a constellation of right-wing think tanks, the outrage against “critical race theory” spent over a year in the metastasizing embrace of right-wing media, churning up hatred against discussions of race in schools.
As this deceptive marketing reached a fever pitch, there was an explosion in Facebook groups being formed or shifting their focus to opposing critical race theory in schools. These groups were a nexus for supporters to organize in-person disruptions at school board meetings.
This astroturfed frenzy against supposed CRT in schools led to threats and harassment against school board members nationwide, and, in Virginia, helped propel Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s mansion.
Assigning national importance to a statewide election can be reckless; anti-CRT outrage did not prevail everywhere in the 2021 election. But for the effort and money that conservative activists and media put into defining the Virginia gubernatorial race with critical race theory, it is clear that these charlatans will attempt to export the Virginia playbook nationally in 2022 and beyond[twt.]
as Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who helped launch the campaign, has explained, the goal is to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category” so that people “read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” Other right-wing institutions and groups, like the Heritage Foundation, joined in the fray with events, activist toolkits, model legislation, and pushes for bans made in concert with lawmakers.
From there, advocacy groups use this think tank framework to generate local outrage against critical race theory.[IT'S A FRANCHISE MODEL?! MLM?] According to an NBC News analysis, there are now “at least 165 local and national groups that aim to disrupt lessons on race and gender,” and several of the most prominent ones are headed by Republican activists and strategists. These groups cram local controversies into the CRT framework established by Rufo and others, disrupt school board meetings, and place spokespeople in media appearances -- sometimes professional spokespeople, who are instead described as local parents.
The noise and attention from these professionally operated, think tank-inspired groups then generates coverage from an obsequious and obsessive right-wing media, champing at the bit for any angle that will hurt Democrats and help Republicans. Empowered by the outrage suddenly all over TV -- to the tune of hundreds of Fox mentions per month, plus loads more from OAN and Newsmax -- GOP politicians find incentive to take legislative action to drastically limit the teaching of civil rights, sometimes even banning books altogether. [AND WORDS]
This feedback loop is a concerted strategy whose first trial run was the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election. It is not a grassroots movement, it is not a natural response to alleged left-wing excesses, and it is not about what is best for children. It is a top-down attempt by professional political operatives to morph political landscapes to suit their racially regressive needs. And, at least in Virginia, it seems to have worked. [twt.]
as Rufo promised, the professional outrage against critical race theory has only just begun. As the next election looms, critical race theory (or similardog whistles like “parents’ rights”) will suddenly get thousands of TV mentions again, and professional GOP operatives will again call themselves mere concerned parents. Think tankers may even publicly discuss their exact plans again, because they know it won’t cause any harm; enough of the mainstream media will still cover these anti-CRT outrages as grassroots “education” issues, instead of what they are: a think tank astroturf project.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/amid-public-debate-about-facebook-and-its-harms-company-has-spent-millions-misleading-ads
no lnx many
doc
Fox’s local Virginia “parent” is a former Trump administration staffer — with connections to Republican campaigns and Fox News
Ian Prior served with a top Youngkin staffer and two current Fox staffers in the same Trump DOJ press office
WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD
PUBLISHED 10/28/21
Fox News has avidly promoted former Trump administration officials as seemingly being just concerned local parents in the network’s coverage of the upcoming Virginia gubernatorial election. And in the case of one guest who has frequently appeared or been cited by the network’s hosts, his political connections go far and wide through both political campaigns and even Fox News itself.
Ian Prior is one of many Republican activists, political staffers, and Trump administration alumni who have appeared on Fox News as part of its campaign against “critical race theory.” The network has used the term as a “catch-all” phrase for any right-wing culture war grievances, especially over racial diversity and civil rights, in an effort to mobilize Republican voters for this year’s Virginia elections and the midterms next year.
Prior now leads Fight for Schools, a political action committee launched this year to support “common sense candidates” who oppose “critical race theory.” In addition to his many years in communications for Republican campaigns, he has his own political communications consulting firm and political newsletter.He also worked in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2018, as deputy director of public affairs at the Justice Department under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
And the world of both conservative media and Republican political operatives is a small one indeed. During Prior’s time as deputy director of the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs under Sessions, his coworkers in public affairs included media affairs coordinator Devin O’Malley — who is now the campaign spokesman for Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin. In addition, two other colleagues were media affairs specialist Kerri Kupec, who this year became Fox News’ Washington, D.C., editor after serving the rest of former President Donald Trump’s term at DOJ under both Sessions and his successor, Bill Barr; and press assistant Kelly Laco, who is now a news and politics editor for Fox News digital content — and who has quoted Prior in at least one article. (The article noted Prior’s DOJ experience, but not the fact that he and Laco were former colleagues.)
screen grab
On Wednesday’s edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy read a statement from Prior, responding to former President Barack Obama’s recent campaign rally for former Virginia governor and current Democratic nominee Terry McAullife — while presenting Prior as simply a concerned local parent who has come to prominence recently.
“Ian Prior, who’s been on this program, he’s one of the parents who’s very concerned about what's going on out in Loudoun County,” Doocysaid, before reading a statement that concluded with the accusation: “It is clear that all the star power coming in for Terry McAuliffe is reading off the same deceptive page of sheet music with talking points designed to deceive people as to what’s really happening in Virginia public schools.”
Co-host Brian Kilmeade then added: “This is real, this is organic, this is not scripted. These are people standing up, Democrats and Republicans standing up for what's happening in their schools.”
Video file
CitationFrom the October 27, 2021, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends
The problem is, that wasn’t how Doocy and Kilmeade described Prior even just last week. On the October 19 edition of the show, the Fox & Friends crew highlighted Virginia’s gubernatorial race — and mentioned some of Prior’s other political credentials
“Here’s the thing, what’s going on in Virginia right now, you know, we’ve had Ian Prior on. He used to be at the DOJ during the Trump administration.”
“They messed with the wrong parent,” Kilmeade responded with a smile.
“He’s on the leading edge of the CRT thing out in Loudoun County,” Doocy added. “And he says it’s not just Republicans, it’s Democrats, it’s independents — there are a lot of parents who are very interested in what their kids are being taught in schools.”
Video file
Citation From the October 19, 2021, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends
Kilmeade later hosted Prior on Monday night’s edition of Fox News Primetime in response to the Obama rally with McAuliffe, but at no time did the program acknowledge Prior’s background in the Trump administration. Instead, he was simply introduced as a “Loudon County parent,” with the chyron also referring to him as “Fight for Schools executive director.” (Kilmeade also made some brief references to Prior’s legal background, remarking that “you tried the cases, you know the legal system,” but no further details were given.)
Video file
Citation From the October 25, 2021, edition of Fox News Primetime
Prior also appeared last Thursday with Fox News host Sean Hannity,during which his background as a Trump administration staffer was also not disclosed. By contrast, Prior had also appeared twice this month on The Story with Martha MacCallum, during which both MacCallum and guest anchor Trace Gallagher cited his experience in the Trump administration. (Though earlier this year, MacCallum had also failed to disclose Prior’s background.)
So it appears that as the Virginia election gets closer, Prior has become less and less of a former Trump DOJ official and more of being just a concerned local parent whose attacks on Democrats are “organic” and “not scripted.”
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an 11 21
how the critical race theory hysteria may be a death blow for affirmative action
Ebony Slaughter-Johnson
Independent Media Institute
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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/critical-race-theory-invades-school-boards-help-conservative-groups-n1270794
no lnx nbc
Critical race theory battle invades school boards — with help from conservative groups
U.S. NEWS
Critical race theory battle invades school boards — with help from conservative groups
In towns nationwide, well-connected conservative activists, and Fox News, have ramped up the tension in fights over race and equity in schools.
Prominent Republican political figures are rushing in to support the anti-critical race theory parent activists, hoping that these local battles will mobilize conservative voters in next year’s midterms and beyond.Matt Williams / for NBC News
June 15, 2021
By Tyler Kingkade, Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins
A booby-trapped billboard. A list of demands. A conservative media frenzy.
Jeff Porter, superintendent of a wealthy suburban school district in Maine, had no idea that his community was about to become part of a national battle when in the summer of 2020 a father began accusing the district of trying to “indoctrinate” his children by teaching critical race theory.
To Porter, the issue was straightforward: The district had denounced white supremacy in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police, but did not teach critical race theory, the academic study of racism’s pervasive impact.
Conservative dark money groups disrupt critical race theory debate
JUNE 15, 2021
But the parent, Shawn McBreairty, grew increasingly disgruntled and soon connected with No Left Turn in Education, a rapidly growing national group that supports parents as they fight against lessons on systemic racism. That action turned a heated conflict with the school board into one that soon drew national attention, mobilized by a new, increasingly coordinated movement with the backing of major conservative organizations and media outlets.
It’s a movement that has amped up grassroots parental organizing around the country, bringing the lens and stakes of national politics — along with the playbook of seasoned GOP activists — to school boards.
Jeff Porter, a school superintendent in suburban Maine, said his district has been "almost held hostage" by a national battle over critical race theory.
Jeff Porter, a school superintendent in suburban Maine, said his district has been "almost held hostage" by a national battle over critical race theory.Ryan David Brown / for NBC News
“I was very naïve at the beginning of the year,” Porter said. “I thought it was a concerned parent who had taken it a little too far. I didn't understand this until recently, but these were tactics from national organizations to discredit the entire district.”
McBreairty became Maine’s chapter leader for No Left Turn last summer. He has since put up a billboard-size sign of a school board member’s face on his lawn and said it was surrounded by rat traps to prevent theft. “This is a war with the left,” McBreairty said in an email to NBC News, “and in war, tactics and strategy can become blurry.” The fight has only escalated, and it shows no sign of slowing.
Political signs in Cumberland]
A sign calling for the ouster of Jeff Porter, superintendent of schools, across from his district's administrative office in Cumberland, Maine. Shawn Patrick Ouellette / Portland Press Herald via Getty Images]
Conflicts like this are playing out in cities and towns across the country, amid the rise of at least 165 local and national groups that aim to disrupt lessons on race and gender, according to an NBC News analysis of media reports and organizations’ promotional materials. Reinforced by conservative think tanks, law firms and activist parents, these groups have found allies in families frustrated over Covid-19 restrictions in schools and have weaponized the right’s opposition to critical race theory, turning it into a political rallying point.
While the efforts vary, they share strategies of disruption, publicity and mobilization. The groups swarm school board meetings, inundate districts with time-consuming public records requests and file lawsuits and federal complaints alleging discrimination against white students. They have become media darlings in conservative circles and made the debate over critical race theory a national issue.
Virtually all school districts insist they are not teaching critical race theory, but many activists and parents have begun using it as a catch-all term to refer to what schools often call equity programs, teaching about racism or LGBTQ-inclusive policies.
"I didn't understand this until recently, but these were tactics from national organizations to discredit the entire district."
SUPERINTENDENT JEFF PORTER
Now, conservative activists are setting their sights on ousting as many school board members as they can, and local Republican Parties have vowed to help, viewing the revolt against critical race theory as akin to the tea party wave from a decade ago.
Activists and parents have launched 50 recall efforts this year aimed at unseating 126 school board members, according to a new report from Ballotpedia, a website that tracks U.S. politics and elections. Most of those recalls — which already surpass the record for a single year — started as objections to Covid-19 restrictions, but five of the most recently launched campaigns, including a particularly contentious fight in Loudoun County, Virginia, include concerns about critical race theory.
And, in a new development this year, rather than targeting a single member, these efforts often target multiple members or entire school boards, according to Abbey Smith, a researcher at Ballotpedia.
Related NEWS In a diversifying Virginia suburb, a fight over equity in schools spirals out of control]
This data, which is limited to the 39 states that allow for recall of local elected officials, suggests that political discord at the local school level is at an all-time high. At least 50 other school districts from Washington to Florida have been the scenes of local unrest over the idea of critical race theory, according to an NBC News analysis of media reports.
Prominent Republican political figures are rushing in to support the parent activists, hoping that these local battles will mobilize conservative voters in next year’s midterms and beyond. The push comes as President Joe Biden and Democrats have benefited from popular economic legislation but show some vulnerability on culturally divisive issues. As former Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it on his podcast in May: “The path to save the nation is very simple — it’s going to go through the school boards.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said this month that he will get the “political apparatus involved so we can make sure there’s not a single school board member who supports critical race theory.” Political action committees have been set up dedicated to the cause.
The clashes at school board meetings and online are partly anchored in “real differences” in parents’ opinions on Covid-19, race and America’s future, said Jeffrey Henig, director of the politics and education program at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
“But it's being exploited by actors at the national level,” he said, “who see it as an opportunity to reshuffle the politics of the standard educational reform debate.”
A movement is launched
The origin of one of the largest groups targeting school boards can be traced back to last June, when many educators began looking for ways to teach students about the protests following George Floyd’s murder, and reposition how American history is taught.
When the Gladwyne Elementary School in the suburbs of Philadelphia decided to teach students about the concepts of racism, privilege and justice during the last week of classes, Elana Yaron Fishbein, a mother of two students in the school, sprang into action.
Fishbein, a former social worker, sent a letter to the superintendent calling the lessons a “plan to indoctrinate the children into the 'woke’ culture.” She said the superintendent never responded, though the district later said that the lesson plans were age-appropriate and did not shame students and that parents were allowed to opt out. Fishbein said other white parents in the district attacked her on Facebook when she shared her letter.
So Fishbein moved her children to private school and started a group to advocate against anti-racist teaching. She called it No Left Turn in Education.
“The schools have been hijacked,” she said in an interview. “Our kids are captive audiences. And they think they can do whatever they want with our kids.”
Fishbein’s endeavor received a significant boost in September, when she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox News show. By the next day, No Left Turn’s Facebook page had shot up from fewer than 200 followers to over 30,000. The group now has 30 chapters in 23 states, a rapid expansion Fishbein credits to Carlson’s show.
“He launched our movements — he doesn't know it, but he did,” Fishbein said.
She said her nonprofit group, which is volunteer-driven and relies on small donations to cover promotional materials and legal fees, now fields requests from groups of parents, ranging from 50 people to more than 1,000, asking to get involved under No Left Turn’s umbrella. These local chapters are the “boots on the ground,” she said, confronting school administrators at board meetings and through records requests.
“We want to know, what are you teaching? What are you doing?” Fishbein said. “And it's exactly what I got: a lack of transparency. They don't want to answer.”
[Elana Yaron Fishbein, founder of No Left Turn in Education.
Among the many people who reached out to Fishbein after her Tucker Carlson appearance were Jonathan O’Brien, a personal injury lawyer in New York who wanted to help, and Gabrielle Clark, a mother in Las Vegas who was upset that her biracial son had received a D-minus after refusing to participate in a mandatory sociology class where the teacher labeled certain identities as “oppressive.”
Fishbein connected them, and with O’Brien’s representation, Clark sued her son’s charter school in December, arguing it was a violation of her son’s privacy and free speech rights that the sociology teacher had asked students to disclose any disabilities, as well as their religious and sexual identities.
The charter school conceded in court filings that it did not let Clark’s son drop the class, but said no one had to disclose their identities and that his poor grade was due to his refusal to complete assignments. After the suit was filed, administrators agreed to expunge his grade for the class. The charter school’s CEO called the suit an “ill-intentioned” attack by activists on “any conversation about racism or slavery that paints aspects of our country’s past in a negative light.” The litigation is ongoing, and the district has asked that it be dismissed.
"Some people are treating it like a gold rush."
The case garnered media attention on the right, and slowly, O’Brien said, more conservative advocacy groups became interested in these cases. He started SchoolhouseRights.org as a project of the International Organization for the Family, a conservative nonprofit group, to raise funds to take on more cases like Clark’s.
“Some people are treating it like a gold rush,” O’Brien said. “This is a new area where people think they can either become famous or make money on the issue, and they’re probably right.”
O’Brien later joined a coalition of attorneys focused on this cause, organized byChristopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
Rufo, who said he was in touch with then-President Donald Trump’s staff before he issued an executive order last September banning critical race theory’s use by federal agencies, promised in a March tweet to make critical race theory “toxic” in the public imagination. Rufo declined an interview request.
“The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
Shared connections, shared strategies
The growth of school board-focused groups has coincided with a broader conservative effort to make critical race theory a national referendum on the discussion of race in America.
Throughout the winter, organizations like the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which produces model bills on Republican causes, held webinars that warned about the threat of teaching critical race theory.
Fishbein said she took part in a private briefing hosted by the Heritage Foundation in Maythat featured lawmakers from Idaho, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Texas and other states to discuss model legislation to block critical race theory. Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Oklahoma and Tennessee have already advanced some form of a restriction, and 15 states have legislation pending. The Heritage Foundation declined to comment.
"Maybe they don’t know how to get it in the right hands, but we do."
As lawmakers proposed legislation targeting critical race theory this spring, more activist organizations similar to No Left Turn sprouted up, their memberships ballooning with exposure on conservative TV and streaming programs. Each group followed a similar pattern of providing toolkits for activism, teaching people how to file open-records requests and offering to help parents publicize what’s happening in their school districts.
“Maybe they don’t know how to get it in the right hands, but we do,” Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, said in March. “We know a lot of reporters, and we’re happy to share those things.”
Neily, who lives in the Washington metro area, started Parents Defending Education as a nonprofit group at the beginning of the year. She also runsSpeech First, a nonprofit group that has sued universities over systems to combat racism that the group believes violate free speech rights, and she had previously worked at conservative groups such as the Cato Institute and FreedomWorks.
Parents Defending Education aims to teach parents how to become activists, Neily has said, but the group is also playing an active role. It has filed civil rights complaints against schools in Massachusetts for creating an affinity space for students of color after a string of attacks on Asians, and against districts in Minnesota, Missouri and Ohio where administrators pledged to dismantle racism in their schools. She said during a webinar last month that she wants school administrators who take these steps to “know there will be consequences.”
Neily did not answer emailed requests for comment and hung up when reached by phone.
Though the political action committees and nonprofit groups will eventually disclose financial information, in most cases this hasn’t happened yet, so it’s unclear how much money this fight has drawn. Southlake Families PAC, organized around a school board battle in a wealthy Dallas-Fort Worth suburb, raised more than $215,000 as of April 21, according to finance reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission. That doesn't include more than $100,000 raised by two PAC-backed school board candidates who successfully ran on a platform of stopping the district's Cultural Competence Action Plan.
[Related NEWS
Opponents of Texas school diversity plan win big in bitterly divided town]
There’s no shortage of free publicity for the cause. The conservative focus on critical race theory is pervading right-wing news publications, likeFox News and Breitbart, which covered the issue in as many as 750 articles per week in May, according to Dominik Stecula, a political science professor at Colorado State University.
The topic is also the focus of “consistent discussion” in local GOP Facebook groups,where 2 percent of all Facebook posts from local parties mentioned critical race theory in May, climbing to 3.6 percent so far in June, according to Kevin Reuning, an assistant professor of political science at Miami University, who tracks political Facebook posts. That’s about the same as the share of posts mentioning antifa in the groups following the U.S. Capitol riot, when conservative groups were falsely blaming the far-left collection of orchestrating the Jan. 6 attack.
As a result of this movement, school boards are now facing an influx of lawsuits and records requests that can cost money and time that are in short supply, as well as public meetings that have become a sounding board for a variety of far-right causes.
“The thing that disturbs me the most about politicizing school boards is there is no mention of kids. It’s not community centered, it’s centered on political thought and theory and things that don't connect to education,” said Sonja McKenzie, a member of the board of directors of the National School Boards Action Center, which advocates for public education. “The things that have been politicized — reopening schools, mask wearing, critical race theory — a lot of these are above and beyond the purview of what you do as school boards.”
In Nevada, Washoe County’s school board halted in-person meetings in April, after residents filled a large auditorium and lobbed insults and threats of violence during the public comment portion. Meetings opened to the public again in May, in a small office where only a few speakers can be present at a time.
Undeterred, hundreds of conservative activists and local residents, many without children in the district, according to their public testimony, waited in the Reno sun until their names were called to speak out against critical race theory and the board’s recent adoption of a student-led anti-discrimination resolution.
“This is an opportunity for what I feel like I've been screaming from the rooftops about,” said Karen England, executive director for Nevada Family Alliance, a conservative nonprofit group known for its efforts to end Drag Queen Story Hour at local libraries. The group recently proposed placing body cameras on teachers to ensure they aren’t teaching critical race theory.
During the most recent meeting, which lasted 11 hours, speakers railed at school board members, calling them Marxists, racists, Nazis and child abusers, among other epithets.
Explaining the controversy behind critical race theory
JUNE 11, 202105:15
Kristen De Haan, the mother of a senior in a district high school, said she attends the meetings in support of an expanded social justice curriculum and LGBTQ-inclusive sex education.
“I don’t always agree with the board by any stretch of the imagination,” De Haan, who is white, said. “But listening to the anger, and what truly feels like hatred, and Martin Luther King being taken out of context over and over again, it’s really hard. I definitely get glares when I go up and speak. It's uncomfortable, but I feel it's important to be out there.”
Other school boards face less explosive — but in some ways just as disruptive — pushback by parents.
In South Kingstown, Rhode Island, the parent of an incoming kindergartener submitted over 200 public records requests in two months, seeking copies of middle and high school curricula, lists of all books related to gender available in the library and 10 years worth of harassment complaints and emails. The district said it would take 300 hours to compile all of the records requested.
Timothy Ryan, executive director of the Rhode Island School Superintendents' Association, called the onslaught of records requests an effort “to shut the system down.”
“I believe their intent is really to have the public lose confidence in public education,” he said. “There was the ‘war on Christmas,’ and now everybody is teaching critical race theory. I think you'd be hard pressed to find five people in the state who could even define that.”
'Just the tip of the iceberg’
Back in Cumberland, Maine, the situation has escalated. After McBreairty became even more certain the school was pushing critical race theory, he filed a public records request that revealed the school had paid over $12,000 to a nonprofit called Community Change Inc. for diversity and equity training for the school’s staff.
McBreairty then filed at least 53 more records requests, according to the school district’s superintendent, and said on a GoFundMe page that Maine’s freedom of information law is “your most powerful weapon.” Fishbein said No Left Turn paid for some of McBreairty's court costs and records requests.
On May 26, McBreairty sent an email to Porter, the superintendent, and the school board with links to coverage of his crusade, plus a list of demands, including that Porter publicly apologize for a letter denouncing white supremacy sent by the equity committee a year ago. McBreairty copied a producer for Fox News and two Daily Wire reporters.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg on media coming your way and national support aligned with our cause to fight CRT,” he wrote. The next day, McBreairty appeared on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
A representative for Fox News declined to comment.
But McBreairty’s efforts have run into problems with authorities. Last week, McBreairty was charged by the local police department with “improper influence,” after he allegedly threatened to release a recording between himself and the deceased father of school board chair Tyler McGinley if McGinley didn’t resign.
“My hope is that this summons is a reality check on his behavior,” said McGinley, who is unclear if the recording truly exists. “I wanted to make sure that if the harassment was going to continue to happen, it wouldn’t happen to other people.”
When asked about the recording that led to the charge, McBreairty didn’t deny that he’d threatened to release it. He said in a text message that he had “more info on Tyler [McGinley] that would provide a lot of context as to why MSAD51 is teaching Critical Race Theory doctrines.” The charge is pending with the district attorney.
Ann Maksymowicz, the school board member whose face appeared on McBreairty's booby-trapped billboard, said the media attention has been overwhelming. The critical race theory debate became a central issue of last week’s school board race, with Maksymowicz facing calls to resign. Instead, she won re-election.
Porter said he was “surprised by how much hate can be generated by a small group of people in the community” who he says have equated equity initiatives with critical race theory.
“For people who are not in agreement, they're using the word ‘equity’ and saying, ‘There you are, you're teaching CRT!’ And then equity becomes a horrible thing that we're doing,” Porter said.
“I feel like the district in some ways has gotten used — almost held hostage — by this national ideology or national movement, that says we're all teaching CRT, and we're all trying to indoctrinate kids.”
Porter said the battle is far from over. It “is kind of a black cloud hanging over the district,” he said.
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nh register
Opinion: Dark money behind school board conflicts
Christine Palm and Frank Hanley Santoro
Oct. 4, 2021
A woman carrying a sign protesting the teaching of critical race theory arrives at a Board of Education meeting at Central Middle School in Greenwich, Conn., on Thursday June 17, 2021. Members of the group Greenwich Patriots came out to the meeting to urge people to attend and speak at public comment to protest masking, vaccinations for students and critical race theory..
Schools are the latest battleground in the culture wars. Protests over issues such as critical race theory, masks and vaccines have cropped up all over the state, including in the towns of Guilford, New Canaan, Glastonbury, Haddam, Cheshire, Bristol and Fairfield. The protesters often characterize themselves as concerned parents. This may be partially true, but it is not the whole story. If you dig deep enough, you will find a web of dark money fueling political operatives in so-called “astroturf” groups — those that purport to be grassroots but are in fact formed and funded by hidden corporate and political sponsors. Their agenda has little to do with improving public education.
Protesters have a right to state their opinions (even suicidal ones in the case of vaccine opposition). But as the right-wing agenda increasingly infiltrates small towns, members of local school boards might find themselves portrayed as purveyors of an “increasingly hostile” threat to the community “rooted in Marxism” who will “stop at nothing” as they are “trying to socially replace you.” Those are words from the websites of the Center For Renewing America and its Citizens Renewing America Toolkit.
In fact, hostility against board of education members has gotten so ugly that the National School Boards Association this past week asked President Biden for help from federal law enforcement agencies.In reality, most of these folks are hardworking volunteers who are far more concerned with balancing a budget than they are with a radical agenda — be it on the left or the right. And yet, recently in Haddam, police had to escort board members to their cars following a contentious meeting in which anti-maskers shouted through a bullhorn and drowned out much of the proceedings.
Clearly, something is afoot. Why is this happening suddenly and simultaneously in so many different places around the state (and indeed the country)? Why is the pattern so similar? Why does it seem peculiar to affluent Connecticut towns? Why do some protests turn disruptive? Why pick on CRT, which schools don’t even teach (it’s a post-secondary pedagogical tool)? This doesn’t sound like something that just happened to occur to parents at a local bake sale.
The explanation may lie with Steve Bannon. According to Bannon, “This is the Tea Party to the 10th power,” and “The path to save the nation is very simple. It’s going to go through the school boards.” Before he was pardoned by Trump, Bannon was the guy arrested at sea off Westbrook on a Chinese billionaire’s yacht for allegedly siphoning over a million dollars from a “We Build the Wall” scheme. According to news reports, he was also accused by an ex-wife of objecting to the Archer School in Los Angeles for his daughters because, she said, he “didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.”
The phenomenon may also be explained byNicole Neily — the president of Parents Defending Education, whose targets include several Connecticut towns. PDE describes itself as a “grassroots” organization, and Neily once was quoted as saying, “We’re all working moms.” But according to several sources including Sourcewatch, Neily is a veteran operative of the Koch network. She’s not alone. Other astroturf operatives include Russ Vought, a former Trump official whose group publishes the “Toolkit” for taking over school boards; Christopher Rufo, whose anti-CRT activism earned him an invitation to the Trump White House; and Keri Rodriques, who was reportedly paid $388,000 in 2017 and 2018 for her advocacy work. Anti-CRT activity seems a profitable cottage industry for the apparatchiks of MAGA world.
Dark money is hard to ferret out because astroturf groups do not disclose their funders. But some information can be found. Among the sources are MassPoliticsProfs.org, the blog of Diane Ravitch, UnKochMyCampus.org, and a book called “Outside Money in School Board Elections.” Google searches also help. Our information is based largely on these sources.
A picture emerges of a shadowy and labyrinthine network of astroturf groups funded by big money. Funders include the Koch network, Turning Points USA, the DeVos Family Foundation, the Ed Uihlein Foundation, Donors’ Trust, and the Heritage Foundation. Some astroturf groups are local (Connecticut Parents Union). Most are national. Many have happy names like Citizens for Renewing America, the Center for Renewing America, Free to Learn, National Parents Union, Massachusetts Parents United, No Left Turn in Education, Moms for Liberty, and Fight for Schools. Some encourage their readers to report incidents (i.e., spy on teachers).One group calling itself School Board Watchlist models disruptive behavior on its website.
Our point is not necessarily to question the sincerity of the self-appointed disrupters, misguided though they are. But we believe they are pawns in a darker power grab of which they are probably unaware. The next time you hear that public schools are a threat to freedom, it’s good idea to follow the money.
Christine Palm is the state representative for the 36th Connecticut General Assembly District. Frank Hanley Santoro is a former assistant U.S. attorney.
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text? textbook law req teaching other side of holocaust?
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Conservative pundit recently expressed concern about Republicans in Arizona, Texas, and Florida as he detailed what he describes as the "race to the bottom" to "see who can be the most MAGA."
On Friday, October 15, Charlie Sykes, founder of the conservative website The Bulwark, appeared on MSNBC where he specifically criticized the "absolutely batshit crazy" Republicans in Texas. "I know that Republicans in Texas have been conservative for a long time but there was a time when conservative Republicans in Texas were not absolutely batshit crazy," Sykes said to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace.
He went on to compare the differences he sees between Texas Republicans of the past and present. He also highlighted common behaviors he's seeing in Republicans across three states: Texas, Florida, and Arizona.
Sykes' remarks came amid a discussion about Texas law requiring teachers to develop that offers "opposing perspectives on historical events," HuffPost reports. In fact, a school administrator was recently criticized for insisting educators "should 'make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one' with alternative viewpoints."
"Texas Republicans used to be respectable," Sykes continued. "And now we are almost in this competition … between Florida, Arizona, and Texas to see who can be the most MAGA, who can play the most hair-on-fire culture war games, because that seems to be this race to the bottom that we're talking about here."
Sykes, however, insisted that it is "easy to beat up on the administrator" but "the focus ought to be on the law and the fact that the teachers are terrified. They don't know what's going to happen."
"What is the other side of the Holocaust?" Sykes later asked. "Are you going to assign fourth-graders 'Mein Kampf'? Are you going to make them listen to Seb Gorka's radio show? I just don't know what she actually had in mind. But again, this is exactly what you get when you have politicians playing culture war and then trying to ram that into badly thought out draconian legislation."
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renta tom eco-niche?
an 10 21
no lnx
Now that former President Donald Trump's reign is over, the members of his administration have been forced to take their careers in different directions. So, where are the members of the Trump administration now? According to The Intelligencer, many are doing an array of different things; some of which are synonymous with the questionable activities that long-haunted the Trump administration.
Here's where the top Trump White House officials are now:
1. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is still trying to distance himself from the kidnapping of Julian Assange. According to Pompeo, he had nothing to do with it.
Pompeo is adamantly denying any involvement in the plot to kidnap Assange. A report published by Yahoo! News back in September, suggested that Pompeo was livid when he learned Assange divulged U.S. national-security secrets. In fact, the report also claimed that he participated in discussions with members of the Trump administration on how to get retribution.
However, Pompeo is still suggesting the reports are not true. "There's pieces of it that are true," Pompeo said during an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show. "We tried to protect American information from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, absolutely, yes … We're not permitted by U.S. law to conduct assassinations. We never acted in a way that was inconsistent with that."
2. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has been milking his access to the Secret Service.
Thanks to Trump's order extending the use of the Secret Service to members of his administration, Mnuchin has used the professional perk to his benefit. The publication reports that in his first six months out of office, Mnuchin has racked up the highest Secret Service tab. The Washington Post detailed how Mnuchin managed to rack up more than $150,000 in Secret Service expenses.
The receipts showed that agents spent $114,000 over the six months to rent rooms at a W Hotel in Los Angeles, where Mnuchin has a home. They also followed Mnuchin on three trips to the Middle East, where Mnuchin is reportedly seeking to raise money from sovereign wealth funds for a new venture called Liberty Strategic Capital…
Mnuchin's travels with the Secret Service weren't all business, however. Over the six months, the records show three separate trips to Cabo San Lucas — the Mexican resort, where Mnuchin had also vacationed during Trump's presidency.
To guard Mnuchin during those three trips, the records show, the Secret Service paid $56,000 for hotel rooms and $2,000 to rent golf carts.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Mnuchin is planning to use the $2.5 billion he has raised traveling so he can invest in technology and cybersecurity investments, along with "new forms of content." It remains unclear what Mnuchin specifically describes as "new forms of content" but "many big tech companies are pushing virtual- and augmented-reality hardware and content products and digital gaming."
3. Wilbur Ross is reportedly fantasizing about putting "Trump condos on the moon."
Back in February after the Trump administration transitioned out of the White House, Ross spoke with Bloomberg and shared his upcoming post-government plans; which involve "Trump condos on the moon."
On this particular afternoon, he's sitting in the living room of his 80-year-old home filled with Magrittes and Picassos, sipping a cappuccino, dressed in cashmere sweater, slacks and velvet slippers embroidered with octopuses.
Ironically, it's while ensconced in this paradise of earthly delights that Ross is gearing up to invest in space, among other possibilities. He sees opportunity in extraterrestrial tourism, manufacturing, research and habitation.
Habitation? When asked whether space would be a gold-plated real estate opportunity for Trump, Ross didn't disagree.
"Why not Trump condos on the moon?" he quipped back.
Ross' remarks came just months after the U.S. Commerce Department's inspector general released a scathing report about the former Trump official's behavior. According to The Washington Post, the IG's report "concluded that Ross had made many inaccurate statements to federal officials about his assets before taking office, though he did not willfully violate conflict-of-interest laws."
4. Ben Carson is launching a venture similar to Boy Scouts of America.
After departing Washington, D.C., Ben Carson —the former Housing and Urban Development Secretary— launched an organization called the American Cornerstone Institute.Carson's new think tank reportedly places an emphasis on discovering "commonsense solutions to some of our nation's biggest problems."
The American Cornerstone Institute
youtu.be
Carson has also created the Little Patriots program, which is described as a partisan organization for children. Speaking to The Washington Post, Carson explained the organization's initiative. "It will be something like the Boy Scouts," Carson told the publication. "But heavily exposed to the real history of America.
"You probably notice when ISIS goes into a place, they destroy the history, they destroy the monuments," Carson explained. "History is what gives you identity."
5. Elaine Chao contributed to calls for Kroger to be boycotted.
Chao —wife of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and former transportation secretary— worked for several of the country's top corporations prior to her role with the Trump administration. But Intelligencer reports that "she and other Trump Cabinet alums were having a hard time finding cushy landing spots after exiting the administration. 'The feedback was 'It's too soon,' said one of the headhunters involved in an unsuccessful effort to find companies willing to work with Chao."
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Despite her struggles to re-enter the corporate world, Chao was appointed to Kroger's board of directors. But given her history of abusing her power and position with the government, social media users quickly expressed outrage and urged Kroger to drop the former Trump cabinet member from its board.
6. Alex Azar is reportedly conspiring against his former colleagues.
Former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is at odds with many of his former colleagues. In fact, several of them including —former FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Robert Redfield, former Medicare chief Seema Verma, and former White House COVID coordinator Deborah Birx— have reportedly joined forces to prepare their statements regarding the Trump administration's handling of COVID-19.
According to Politico, they've done so out of caution and concern about Azar possibly using them as "scapegoats" to clear themselves.
"I know the way this goes — everyone has a different perspective," Hahn said in an interview. "I wanted to tell what it was that happened and why it happened and the perspective that we had."
In calls and text messages, members of the group have swapped notes, compared recollections, and sent updates on media requests and interview opportunities, four people with knowledge of the matter said …
And in a nod to their individual battles with Azar, some have jokingly referred to the group in private as "AAA," or Alex Azar Anonymous, according to a person in direct contact with multiple members.
From the looks of it, many Trump administration officials are still conducting shady business as they did while in office.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/grover-norquist-parents-are-being-forced-home-school-kids-and-not-reenter
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rww 921
right-wing groups continue to resist honest teaching about racism in American history and the country’s institutions while inflaming and mobilizing right-wing voters with wild claims and dire warnings about the march of “critical race theory.” The Heritage Foundation, a mammoth right-wing think tank and marketing operation, has packaged its anti-critical race theory material into an eBook entitled “Knowing Critical Race Theory When You See It and Fighting It When You Can.” The 18-page “eBook” is little more than a glorified pamphlet that builds on Heritage Action’s “toolkit” for opposing critical race theory.
Critical race theory is an academic approach to the study of systemic racism. Since last summer, right-wing activists and organizations have sounded alarms about the supposed threat of critical race theory to white people and to the future of the United States itself. Right-wing groups are using such manufactured fears to drive conservative voters to the polls in school board races and in future elections.
The new Heritage Foundation eBook is being promoted via Facebook ads claiming that critical race theory “is invading our K-12 schools, workplaces, state and federal governments, and even the military.”
If you missed this invasion, Heritage says, it’s because you didn’t recognize it. “There’s a good chance that you—and your children—have encountered it,” the Facebook ad claims. “And there’s an even better chance that you didn’t realize it.”
The Heritage Foundation eBook claims that it can help people identify when critical race theory is being stealthily employed. One way to identify critical race theory, according to the Heritage Foundation, is to watch for curricula or training sessions “that teach that racism is systemic and structural” and “demand that Americans work to dismantle laws, traditions, norms, institutions, and free-market enterprise—the entire American system itself.”
The eBook quotes as an example of “CRT at work” this statement from a Michigan State University professor: “It’s important to try to help youth understand how bias and oppression are institutional, structural and systemic, and not simply interpersonal.”
Heritage contrasts that statement with a section labeled “THE FACTS,” which states, “Racial discrimination is illegal in America,” and suggests that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 cleared things up on that front. “There is not evidence to suggest that our social order is oppressive and dangerous,” the eBook declares. In reality, the well-documented impact of systemic racism is evident in disparities that exist in “every facet of America life, including employment, wealth, education, home ownership, healthcare, and incarceration,” in the words of a Business Insider article published last year.
Heritage also highlights the concept of“white privilege” and warns its readers about the supposed threat of any “curricula or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program that compels students or employees to accept their white privilege and/or work to abandon it.”
Another warning sign, according to the Heritage Foundation, is any reference to “equity,” which the Heritage eBook claims has become the “functional opposite” of “equality.” Here’s how Heritage explains the dangers of equity, using language that echoes rhetoric used by right-wing activists opposed to progressive taxation: “Attempts by government officials to take the fruits of your achievements and give them to those who did not earn it will hurt those whose rewards are diminished as well as the intended beneficiaries.” According to Heritage, “This betrays the idea that the American dream belongs to all of us, and everyone should have the same opportunity to pursue success.”
Among the action steps recommended in the section on how to stop critical race theory are to “engage” with local school boards and to report examples of critical race theory trainings to the Heritage Foundation’s “news” service, to anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo, or to Parents Defending Education, a group launched earlier this year that is promoted by right-wing media. Readers are also urged to become a “Heritage Action Sentinel,” a member of what Heritage Action describes as “a grassroots army of committed conservative activists who are the front line against the liberal agenda.”
Melody Clarke, a senior regional coordinator for Heritage Action, spoke at a Tuesday evening protest organized by the Alliance Defending Freedomand other right-wing groups outside the Loudoun County school board meeting. Clarke promoted saveourschools.com, a Heritage Action website that urges people to report evidence of critical race theory in schools, including “pictures of books, handouts, assignments, etc.”
Tags: Melody ClarkeCritical Race TheoryPublic EducationSchool BoardsHeritage ActionHeritage Foundation
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/michele-bachmann-is-hosting-a-9-11-event-to-save-the-history-from-critical-race-theory/
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/turning-point-usa-targets-school-boards-over-evil-mask-requirements-and-radical-training-on-bias-and-inequality/
turning Point USA, an organization that trains and mobilizes right-wing college students, launched a project targeting public school boards on August 15, the Documented newsletter reported. TPUSA’s “School Board Watchlist” urges right-wing activists to submit anonymous tips about “radical and false ideologies endorsed by school boards and pushed in the classroom.”
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The project, like the larger right-wing attack on public schools and school boards, opposes initiatives that teach students about systemic racism in U.S. history and institutions, programs that promote the full inclusion of LGBTQ students, or steps taken to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Among the group’s complaints about “Leftist, racist, and anti-American propaganda” are districts “renaming schools and sports teams because of their ‘racist’ namesakes” and “continuing to use COVID as an excuse to maintain online learning and enforce abusive mask policies.”
“SBWL finds and exposes school board leadership that supports anti-American, radical, hateful, immoral, and racist teachings in their districts, such as Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, sexual/gender ideology, and more,” declares the School Board Watchlist website.
Given the School Board Watchlist’s heated rhetoric about “blatant indoctrination” with radical ideologies, it is notable how little it takes to get a school district put on the “watchlist” and subject to being targeted in TPUSA’s “battle to reclaim our schools—and our nation’s future—by holding school district leadership accountable for their actions and the dangerousagendas they push in classrooms.”
In the case of Norman, Oklahoma, public schools—labeled one of the “most radical districts” by TPUSA—the offenses included a school board member’s heated rhetoric—later apologized for—in defense of mask mandates and the district offering trainings on unconscious bias and systemic inequality.
A report on Albuquerque, New Mexico, public schools notes that students are required to wear masks indoors and that one of the district’s high schools will award a ”Homecoming Court” rather than prom king or queen.
While the School Board Watchlist is described as a project of Turning Point USA, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, TPUSA President Charlie Kirk has also publicly vowed to involve Turning Point Action, the group’s political arm, in school board races.
On Tuesday, Kirk
with religious-right activist pastor Jack Hibbs at a “Freedom Night in America” broadcast from Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona. Kirk used part of his time to slam Scottsdale Unified School District school board members for voting to require students to wear masks for the start of the new school year. He claimed that wearing masks harms children’s emotional and spiritual development. “God gave us a face for a reason,” he said.
Kirk showed video of his smug and combative remarks from a recent school board meeting at which he told school board members that he is a new resident of Scottsdale but felt like he was living in San Francisco “because of all of you and your self-righteous measures that you’re putting to abuse the children of this wonderful state.”
“Your time is soon up,” he told school board members. “The people of this state and this school district are rising up. There are recall measures in place. You have awoke a sleeping giant. I hope you enjoy your masked, short-term future here while it still lasts.”
Kirk told attendees at the Dream City Church event that he was happy with how many church members had turned out to the school board meeting. “Evil,” he said, does not like to be called out.
Kirk said Turning Point Action would do everything it could to gather signatures for the recall effort, which targets four of the five Scottsdale school board members.
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congrats --> TN tag
https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/this-tennessee-teacher-was-fired-for-teaching-a-ta-nehisi-coates-essay-were-not-challenging-our-students/
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yikes omg
https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/josh-hawley-love-america/
Sen. Hawley's Orwellian 'Love America Act' is part of the fascist campaign to rewrite history
no lx
Chauncey DeVega and Salon August 06, 2021
Donald Trump may no longer be president, but the American people are still stuck in a state of malignant normality that his presidency brought into being.
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Psychologist John Gartner describes such a state of being this way:
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Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else. So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society. This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.
In his role as national cheerleader and secular priest, President Biden is trying to provide moral leadership and healing for a traumatized nation, still shell-shocked by the Trump movement's continuing assault on democracy and society.
Biden's efforts have provided only short-term relief. The neofascist threat is escalating;Biden and the Democrats have shown themselves largely impotent against it. The coronavirus pandemic is now resurgent because of a new variant and Trump's followers' refusal to be vaccinated.
For these and many other reasons — most notably, extreme wealth and income inequality and the global climate crisis — America is becoming a dystopia.
The collective emotional state of many Americans, or at least those who are paying attention and still care, is frustration and unease.
Malignant normality creates a playground for fascism and other forms of right-wing maleficence. The Jim Crow Republicans and other elements of the white right are taking advantage of this broken America to escalate their attacks on free speech, reason, truth, reality, human and civil rights and multiracial democracy by weaponizing the nearly meaningless term "critical race theory." (Yes, the term has a real meaning in academic discourse, but not as bandied about by Republicans in 2021.)
For the likes of Sen. Josh Hawley, the notorious Missouri Republican, such a crisis is a dream opportunity. Last week, Hawley proposed a bill called the Love America Act of 2021, which would deny federal funding to schools that teach the real history of America and the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the country's origins. The key text of this document reads:
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RESTRICTION ON FEDERAL FUNDS FOR TEACHING THAT CERTAIN DOCUMENTS ARE PRODUCTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR RACISM — … [N]o Federal funds shall be provided to an educational agency or school that teaches that thePledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States is a product of white supremacy or racism.
Hawley's "Love America" bill is not a joke. It is a statement of shared principles and loyalty to an anti-democratic, racial-authoritarian movement that is winning victories all over the United States.
For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now mandating thoughtcrime surveys to determine the political beliefs of teachers and students in public colleges and universities.
Florida has also "banned" the teaching of "critical race theory" in public schools, and will permit — in practice, this may mean encourage — students to record classes without the knowledge or consent of their teachers. This potentialsurveillance is an obvious form of intimidation or threat against intellectual freedom, and specifically targeting teachers and other education professionals who are perceived as "liberal" and therefore "unfair" to conservatives.
The Republican-controlled Texas Senate has passed legislation overturning a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement be taught in public schools. That legislation would also remove a course requirement that the Ku Klux Klan should be condemned. As I wrote recently for Salon:
... the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Project and "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."
Tennessee has proposed fining school districts at least $1 million if a teacher "willingly violates" state laws against discussing racism, white privilege or sexism in class. Education Week reports, "Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel 'guilt or anguish' because of past actions committed by their race or sex." Similar forms of censorship will be imposed in Oklahoma, where "educators could have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked and schools could lose accreditation if an investigation finds evidence that they taught about racism and sexism in ways that violated the law." Parents in that state will be allowed "to inspect curriculum, instructional materials, classroom assignments, and lesson plans to 'ensure compliance.'"
These attacks on the teaching of actual history are an Orwellian attempt to control both the present and the future in order to remake America as an apartheid regime. Realpolitik is also in play here: Facing changing demographics and political unpopularity, Republicans seek to use a larger culture-war strategy to win elections and hold onto power by any means possible.
White supremacists and other right-wing ideologues, in the longer view, want to destroy public education and replace it with their own propaganda indoctrination program. One important element is "racial erasure," in which the truth about American history is replaced with fantasies of white innocence, white nobility and white supremacy.
As Clint Smith writes in the Atlantic, for many so-called conservatives, "history isn't the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth."
Perhaps most important, the right-wing moral panic over "critical race theory" is a way of to erase from public memory the struggle waged by Black Americans for centuries to defeat white supremacy in its various forms. To that point, chattel slavery and theJim Crow regime were America's native forms of fascism. Black people defeated those forces and in doing so saved American democracy from its own worst impulses. To erase the Black Freedom Struggle is to make the case that American fascism will be victorious and that resistance is futile.
It is also crucial to understand that America's state of malignant normality is not isolated or unique, but is part of a neofascist attack by the global right on multiracial and multiethnic democracy around the world. As de facto spokesman for the American white right, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has taken a pilgrimage to Hungary, now under the one-party rule of Viktor Orbán, who has become a role model for the Jim Crow Republican Party and the American neofascist movement.
Orbán has created a fake democracy in Hungary, where elections still occur and tepid opposition is permitted, but in practice he can remain in power indefinitely. He has silenced the free press, crushed any serious democratic opposition, encouraged political violence against his regime's "enemies" and attacked colleges, universities and other centers of learning. The obvious goal is to silence dissent and produce obedient and compliant citizens who do not seek to exercise critical thinking or speak back to power.
In an essay for Vox this week, Zack Beauchamp discusses the larger significance of Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest:
In his Monday monologue, Carlson told his listeners that they should pay attention to Hungary "if you care about Western civilization, and democracy, and family — and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions." He tweeted out a friendly photo with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and is confirmed to speak at a government-supported conference in Budapest on Saturday. ...
[R]ight-wing observers, typically social conservatives and nationalists, see Orbán's willingness to use state power against the LGBT community, academics, the press, and immigrants as an example of how conservatives can fight back against left-wing cultural power. They either deny Fidesz's authoritarian streak or, more chillingly, argue that it's necessary to defeat the left — a chilling move at a time when the GOP is waging war on American democracy, using tactics eerily reminiscent of the ones Fidesz successfully deployed against Hungary's democratic institutions.
Beauchamp observes that the "Republican turn against democracy" and the American right's growing interest in Orbán's Hungary, expressed with unusual frankness and eloquence by Rod Dreher of the American Conservative, "is in significant part fueled by the right's sense of leftist ascendancy — heightened by electoral defeats in 2008 and 2020 and strengthened by defeat in culture war battles like same-sex marriage":
This, ultimately, is what makes Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest so worrying. The Fox host's massive following gives him unusual power to set the terms of the conversation on the right; when he talks, Republicans from Trump on down listen. His bear hug embrace of Orbán could not only bring the Dreher view out into the open but also strengthen its influence over the GOP.
Republicans today aren't directly imitating Orbán; they have their own anti-democratic playbook, drawn from all-American sources. Carlson's active embrace of Hungary's strongman risks making that connection more direct, giving Republicans more ideas for how to seize control and a more powerful sense of justification in doing so.
For those who believed that Biden's election could clear the haze and wake the American people up from the living nightmare of the Trump regime, these last seven months have been increasingly painful. And now the pandemic's third wave arrives as a gut punch to them as well. Biden and other Democratic leaders still appear obsessed with "bipartisanship" and to this point have refused to act with the "urgency of now" to fight back against Republican attacks on Black and brown people's right to vote. Even under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice seems to be protecting Donald Trump instead of investigating and prosecuting him for his crimes against democracy. The overall effect is like being smothered.
Conditions are likely to get worse — perhaps much worse, with Republicans likely to recapture one or both houses of Congress in 2022 and Trump likely to return as a presidential candidate in 2024 — before they get better.
To survive and triumph over American neofascism Americans' well of endless optimism must be fortified with something more durable and realistic, such as the formula suggested by Italian philosopher and activistAntonio Gramsci: "optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect." In Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks,"he wrote: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
That is precisely where Americans find themselves now: The waking nightmare of the Age of Trump, from which we have not escaped, is one such "morbid symptom." Recognizing that truth may make it possible to return to full political and social consciousness, and begin the real work of repairing and rebuilding American democracy.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/texas-history-book/
cdv
In the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney proclaimed that Black people have "no rights that the white man is bound to respect." Today's Jim Crow Republican Party, and the white right more broadly, have taken the spirit of those words and updated them for the 21st century, effectively by arguing that "white people are not bound to respect historical truth or established facts — at least not as they pertain to Black and brown people in America".
As the next step in their war against multiracial democracy, the Republican Party and its allies have launched a moral panic about "critical race theory." Of course, their version of "critical race theory" is a type of racial bogeyman or psychological projection, a function of white racial paranoia about the "browning of America" and the threat of "white genocide."
Facts do not matter in the right-wing echo chamber. It is of no importance that the white right's version of "critical race theory" has nothing to do with the scholarly paradigm of the same name.
As the truism holds, history is written by the victors. To that end, in dozens of states across the country, the white right is engaging in an Orwellian campaign of rewriting school curricula to prevent the teaching of "critical race theory" -- which in practice means stopping any serious engagement with America's real and often uncomfortable history of racism and white supremacy.
For example, in Florida, a law was recently passed mandating a survey of students and faculty in public colleges and universities to determine their political beliefs. Of course, Florida has also banned the teaching of "critical race theory."
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, perhaps the single most influential voice on the white right, recently suggested that cameras should be placed in classrooms to ensure that no teachers will deploy "critical race theory" or other facts and arguments deemed to be "unpatriotic."
The Republican-controlled Texas Senate recently passed a bill eliminating a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement and other human rights struggles be taught in public schools. The bill also removed a condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan from course requirements as well.
As Yahoo News reports, the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Projectand "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."
This Republican legislation has been met with widespread outrage. But that reaction should just be the beginning. The next step involves doing the harder work of understanding why so many other (mostly white) Americans actually believe that "critical race theory" and the teaching of America's real history should be banned. Understanding these beliefs and motivations is essential to defeating American neofascism and its white supremacist social and political project.
Many Americans have been propagandized by their schools, news media, the internet, churches and other social institutions to believe in a large set of interlocking lies and myths about the country's past and present. To intervene against these lies often causes emotional pain and/or narcissistic injury to those who hold such beliefs.
This dynamic is especially powerful for those who are emotionally, psychologically, financially and politically invested in defending and protecting white privilege and white people's control over almost every aspect of American life. In that context, the personal truly is political: Whiteness, as a concept and a social force, has become linked at an individual level to the maintenance of white power.
How does this right-wing fantasy machine work? The Root has exhaustively documented how some of America's most widely used history textbooks misrepresent the real history of the color line and distort such topics as chattel slavery, the Civil War, the civil rights movement and social injustice more generally, through the use of what sociologist Joe Feagin has called the "white racial frame."
Michael Harriot offers this analysis:
So when Mitch McConnell and 38 Republican senators sent a letter to the secretary of education decrying the ghastly prospect of white students having to learn actual facts about slavery, it was not unexpected. For centuries, this country's schools have perpetuated a whitewashed version of history that either erases or reduces the story of Black America down to a B-plot in the American script. It's why they hate Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project and anything factual — because the white-centric interpretation of our national past is so commonly accepted, white people have convinced themselves that anything that varies from the Caucasian interpretation must be a lie. …
This is why they oppose expanding the historiography of our national story. American schools have never taught a version of history that wasn't racialized. But, apparently, it's perfectly fine if the racial narrative skews toward whiteness. They can't be opposed to learning a different historical perspective because they never learned history; they were spoonfed fiction in bite-sized morsels.
To be fair, it's understandable why they are so adamant about what they believe in.
Imagine you are a white man. Now imagine what it's like going through 12 years of school, four years of college, graduate school and an entire career that made you one of the most powerful people on the planet. Now imagine a group of Black journalists, led by a Black woman, told you that you don't know shit.
To that point, the right-wing echo chamber consistently repeats neo-Confederate "Lost Cause" myths, such as the oft-repeated lie that the Civil War was fought over "states' rights" rather than white-on-Black chattel slavery.
The right obsessively depicts the Democrats as "the party of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and slavery". This is a deliberate distortion of history because the pro-slavery, pro-segregation faction of the Democratic Party became solid Republicans after the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Right-wing propagandists also love to claim that Martin Luther King Jr. was a "Republican," or at least espoused Republican values. This is a ludicrous allegation: In contemporary terms King was a democratic socialist or progressive who opposed racism, poverty, military adventurism and injustice of all kinds. King would have viewed the modern-day conservative movement as a great force for evil in American society and the world.
Black conservative propagandists play an important role in the right-wing echo chamber, validating racist fantasies that slavery was a "gift" to Black people because it brought them to America. In this twisted perception of history, chattel slavery is understood as a "necessary evil" because it gave Black people Christianity and taught them the value of "hard work".
These same Black conservatives love to repeat the vicious lie that the Democratic Party is a type of "plantation." In reality, the plantations of the antebellum South were prison camps, charnel houses and places of torture, rape, suffering and death. Black conservative propagandists frequently announce that they are special and uniquely capable of "thinking for themselves," as compared to the vast majority of Black people who support the Democratic Party and are therefore deemed to be ignorant or uninformed.
The campaign against "critical race theory" — and against teaching America's real history — must be understood as part of a larger fascist strategy of attacking public schools and other institutions of learning with the aim of creating compliant followers and a public that is not equipped to participate in democracy — or to defend it.
This plan involves placing white supremacists, QAnon conspiracists, Trump supporters and other right-wing extremists — to the degree those categories of people can be separated — on local school boards and library advisory councils, banning "controversial" books, and the surveillance or intimidation of teachers deemed too "liberal" or suspected of "politicizing" the classroom, i.e., by refusing to teach right-wing dogma and other lies.
The fascist assault on education and critical thinking also involves think tanks, right-wing activists and advocacy groups, along with a network of wealthy funders committed to remaking American society to fit their racist, theocratic and plutocratic vision.
The Texas Republicans' attempt to literally whitewash the Ku Klux Klan out of American history is so ridiculous that it approaches parody. That doesn't make such historical erasure and distortion any less dangerous. Those dangers are further amplified by the crisis of democracy caused by the Jim Crow Republicans and ascendant neofascist movement.
As historian Timothy Snyder warned in a recent essay in the New York Times:
Democracy requires individual responsibility, which is impossible without critical history. It thrives in a spirit of self-awareness and self-correction. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is infantilizing: We should not have to feel any negative emotions; difficult subjects should be kept from us. Our memory laws amount to therapy, a talking cure. In the laws' portrayal of the world, the words of white people have the magic power to dissolve the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression. Racism is over when white people say so.
We start by saying we are not racists. Yes, that felt nice. And now we should make sure that no one says anything that might upset us. The fight against racism becomes the search for a language that makes white people feel good. The laws themselves model the desired rhetoric. We are just trying to be fair. We behave neutrally. We are innocent.
When viewed in the aggregate, these attacks on "critical race theory" and the teaching of America's real history echo some of the worst aspects of the country's past. In his book "Trouble in Mind", historian Leon Litwack details how history was taught during the Jim Crow reign of terror:
The history to which Black children were exposed in the classroom and the primers made a virtual gospel of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon institutions and ways of thinking and acting…. What little they learned of their own history consisted often of disparaging caricatures of Black people as the least civilized of the races — irresponsible, thoughtless, foolish, childlike people, satisfied with their lowly place in American life, incapable of self-control and self-direction. The history of Black people was a history of submission gladly endured and of services faithfully rendered. Transported from the darkness of heathen Africa to the civilized and Christian New World, grateful slaves found contentment and happiness…. The treatment of emancipation depicted Blacks passively waiting for Massa' Lincoln to strike off their shackles. And Reconstruction saw the enthronement of Black ignorance and inexperience, with the Ku Klux Klan in some account redeeming Anglo-Saxon civilization from alien rule. The history lessons taught in public schools were calculated to produce patriotic citizens, albeit with a distinctive southern bias.
The Jim Crow Republicans and the white right view this approach to American history as admirable, something to be resuscitated from the dustbin of the country's past.
In the self-serving stories told by the Ku Klux Klan, that terrorist organization had noble origins, represented "Christian values," did charity work and helped the poor, served the community by dealing with drunks and other miscreants, and protected "white families" as well as the "good Blacks". This is the fake history that the Jim Crow Republicans want to see taught to America's young people.
The neofascist movement understands that if it wins the battle over the teaching of the past, it can in turn control the future. In total, the right wing's moral panic over "critical race theory" resembles the kind of hearts-and-minds indoctrination favored by the great villains of history. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler and Goebbels would be proud to see their legacy continued.
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an 621
Remember this guy? In the stream of the QAnon loving Republicans today, you'd think they have just forgotten him. He denounced Trump (far too late), and got onboard with vaccines (too soon for the Qanon conspirators). If you want to know a lot about where the Republican party is right now, take a look at the people who go to work in the Republican infrastructure. They know what the base wants, and they will say whatever it takes to continue to be relevant. Enter Ned Ryun, former Bush speechwriter, son of Kansas congressman Jim Ryun, who was defeated by Democratic candidate Nancy Boyda in a bit of an upset, and now, a ridiculous puppet for outright bonkers ideas.[mlk ~ CRT...]
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/crt/
I think it's good that people who know what they are talking about when they talk about critical race theory (CRT) are coming forward to talk about it publicly. If MSNBC's Joy Reid wants to put a CRT expert on every night, more power to her. It's good for the health of the public square for knowledgeable people to speak about ideas and topics they are authorities in for the benefit of democracy and the common good.
But a republic that depends, for its future viability and therefore its freedom, on the quality of information available in the public square, there are limits to this behavior. The American public square does not privilege knowledge. It does not give the benefit of the doubt to truth-tellers. It takes pleasure in heat more than light, conflict more than understanding, and gross characterizations more than explicit fact. So when it comes to critical race theory, we need to do more than explain what it is and is not.
We need to go on the offensive.
Before I go on, let me remind you what all this anti-CRT stuff is about. First, it's not about CRT. Its critics, who include Republicans but also white anti-left liberals like Jonathan Chait(and, I suppose, Andrew Sullivan), don't care what critical race theory is. They don't care what anti-racism or wokeness or whatever is. All they "know" is that they already "know" everything they need to know, which is that CRT is either anti-white, from the perspective of GOP fascists, or that it's anti-liberal, from the perspective of white anti-left liberals who insist the politics of the 2020s is the same as the politics of the 1990s and who are otherwise drifting toward political irrelevance.
This anti-CRT stuff is a reaction to a breathtaking confluence of forces no one had witnessed before. I mean the merging of anti-fascists (anti-Trumpists) with reformers like advocates for Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder by white cop. Not only did those energies become the greatest voting coalition ever seen—one that defeated an incumbent president, something that has rarely happened in our history—but the merging of these political energies sparked a much-needed and healthy reckoning over the country's history of anti-Black racism. What happened last year (and during and after the election) was an amazing leap forward for this country. Whenever that happens in American history, there's usually a white backlash, though.
And that's what all this anti-CRT stuff is.
But it's more than that. The tell is what's happening in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia and others. In those states, Republican lawmakers are exploiting the former president's supporters, who say they believe he is still the rightful and legitimate president, to enact an agenda they wanted to enact but did not have the opportunity to enact it until the former president lost in what appeared to be, to the former president's supporters, a democracy escaping their ability to control it.
That antifascists (anti-Trumpists) merged with reformers like advocates for Black Lives Matter last spring and last fall to defeat an incumbent president, something that rarely happens in our history, is proof,to the former president's supporters, that election itself was illegitimate. Why? Because, to them, the Black Americans who constitute the foundation of the current president's base of power are illegitimate.
So when state Republican lawmakers (and the useful idiots among white anti-left liberals) allege that critical race theory is running amok in our public schools, colleges and universities—when they accuse institutions of learning of "indoctrinating" children, or even "brainwashing" them into hating white people—what they are really doing is fighting the great leap forward that we all witnessed last spring and last fall when white voters allied with Black voters to save the republic, an event that sparked a last-ditch attempt to cancel the will of the American people by way of insurrection.
This isn't how we go on the offensive though. We go on the offensive by accusing the Republicans of what is plain to see but many won't see because the former president is no longer on the scene, which is fascism. For some reason, Donald Trump's absence has meant all talk of GOP fascism is now déclassé, leaving white anti-left liberals like Chait, Sullivan and others enough room to continue their years' long crusade against anti-racism on college campuses, giving ideological cover to the full-on fascists in state governments who are now policing free speech, free thought and free inquiry.
That's the conclusion we must draw from Republican state laws written to "ban" critical race theory from classrooms and schools but written so vaguely as to cover virtually anything related to race, racism, whiteness, white supremacy, the history of slavery or even unkind interpretations of American history. In a very real sense, we are just a few small steps from "banning" ideas to burning books. It's not enough to just explain what critical race theory is, because while we're doing all this explaining, the republic's enemies are in the early stages of forming state and local thought police.
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chris hayes AA woman guest 6/23/21? laughs at it taking over unis, economics maybe ~ kochademia?
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trumpworld-is-attempting-to-capitalize-on-the-war-against-critical-race-theory/
ME
Allies and former aides of President Donald Trump have joined the war on critical race theory.
According to Politico, devout members of Trumpworld have dumped a substantial amount of money into the effort as they believe it could cause enough backlash to help them regain control of Congress.
In addition to the financial contributions, they have also began working with Congressional members to block the military from moving forward with plans for diversity training. Efforts are also being made to withhold federal funding for schools that choose to incorporate education on race theory.
In a recent interview, Trump's former adviser Steve Bannon discussed the fight against critical race theory and how he believes it could be beneficial for their party.
"This is the Tea Party to the 10th power," Bannon said. "This isn't Q, this is mainstream suburban moms — and a lot of these people aren't Trump voters."
Bannon went on to express confidence about critical race theory being a political driving force for Republicans in 2022.
"I look at this and say, 'Hey, this is how we are going to win.' I see 50 [House Republican] seats in 2022. Keep this up," Bannon said. "I think you're going to see a lot more emphasis from Trump on it and DeSantis and others. People who are serious in 2024 and beyond are going to focus on it."
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/loudoun-protest/
Loudoun County is an affluent suburb outside of Washington. Its public school board held a meeting last night. It was cut short. According to the Loudoun Times-Mirror, the board unanimously voted to end a period of public comment "after a capacity crowd descended into shouting and after numerous requests that attendees remain silent were not heeded." Loudoun County Sheriff's deputies cleared the meeting room. Some protesters were frog-marched out. Videos of the evening went viral on social media.
That's why I'm bothering telling you about what would otherwise be a local event of no consequence to national politics. I think what happened last night is something we're probably going to see more of in the weeks ahead. It has the feeling of a "Tea Party"-style "movement" in which "righteous" Americans "revolt" against the "infringement" of their liberties. It's premised on a garbage pile of lies, but lots of white people in this country are willing to believe them, because lies tell them what they want to believe. They see themselves as victims. They will prove it, though the proof is delusional.
By the time the press corps picks up the story, the truth will be lost and the reported "controversy" will be about what liberalism's enemies say liberals say, boxing out of "debate" almost entirely what liberals themselves say they say.
It all began when Virginia State Senator Dick Black blasted the board for a decision regarding a teacher at Leesburg Elementary School. That teacher is Byron "Tanner" Cross. Cross was put on administrative leave after remarks he made last month during a public comment period. During that period, Cross promised to disobey a proposed rule that would require teachers to recognize "students' preferred gender pronouns or names if they choose to not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth."
"If his comments were not protected speech, then free speech does not exist at all," Senator Black said before adding, that, "It's absurd and immoral for teachers to call boys girls, and girls boys." According to the Times-Mirror, he also accused to Loudoun County Public Schools of "teaching children to hate others because of their skin color." The crowd reportedly roared. It did not stop. That's when the board ended the meeting. That's when the handcuffs came out. That's when the videos went viral.
If the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, had its druthers, that's where things would stand—with images of righteous (read: white) Americans standing up for what they believe in for the sake of their children and their liberty. And to be honest, that's where things will stay for a lot of people, because most people are casual consumers of news, which is to say they have better things to do than pay attention to politics. But it doesn't take much to see all this is staged to look worse than it is.
First, telling the school board you promise to break a proposed rule is kinda sorta begging for a reprimand, and no, the US Constitution does not protect you against being reprimanded for promising to break a proposed rule.1 Second, and important to a revamped "Tea Party," is that the board has repeatedly denied Loudoun schools are "teaching children to hate others because of their skin color." But that fact can't compete with a belief, manufactured by a right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, that a critical race theory is hiding behind every bush and tree in America.
As I mentioned recently, critical race theory is a useful mode of intellectual inquiry whose precepts you don't really need to understand because the people making all the noise about critical race theory don't care about understanding them.2 They "know" everything they need to "know" about it, and what they "know" is that it's anti-white. It's not anti-white, but that fact falls on deaf ears same as the Loudoun County school's denial of teaching critical race theory falls on deaf ears. These people believe the garbage pile of lies being fed to them by a right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, because the lies tell them what they want to believe. Democracy is producing results without their OK. Democracy leaving them behind is tyranny.
None of this will do too much damage to public opinion as long as stays on Fox et al., but that's probably not going to happen. With a Democrat is in the White House, the Washington press corps has the incentive to start paying attention, and once it does, the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, will be, in effect, the sitting judge of who gets to say what when, where, why and how. By the time the press corps picks up the story, the truth will be almost entirely lost and the "controversy" will be about what liberalism's enemies say liberals say, boxing out of the "debate" almost entirely what liberals themselves say they say.Even as these people demand their freedom of speech, what they're also doing is shutting down speech. Two hundred and forty-nine people were scheduled to speak during last night's period of public comment. Thanks to just one raging idiot, only a sixth of them got to have their say.
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"woke" military aha last fed/gubmint institution to fall, once sacrosanct b/c manly, trad conservative and defend us from evil commies; god bless our troops almost secular so common?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/fox-news-2653517083/
gen milley vs gaetz "take their budget" [grn beret?]; i'm a wht guy want to understand rage; biggest 2 wars bloody ~ racist = nazi and csa/kkk? read mao and marx, not commie; attack on west pt curric?
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ron-desantis-2653505905/
Florida goes full fascist': Ron DeSantis sparks furious backlash with ‘authoritarian’ campus political surveys
Raw Story June 23, 2021
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation requiring Florida students, faculty, and staff to register their political views in surveys in an effort to promote "intellectual diversity" at colleges and universities, and the measure set off backlash across social media.
Critics decried the law, which DeSantis claims will promote freedom of speech, as a "thoroughly Orwellian" attempt to gain control over academic debate at institutions of higher learning.
Well, this is thoroughly Orwellian. ?? Faculty and students of Florida, you know what to do! Freep Mini-Trump's stup… https://t.co/N2nEE5UzuM
— Betty Cracker ?? (@Betty Cracker ??)1624454881.0
Well that's got to be unconstitutional: Florida students required to register political views with the state to pro… https://t.co/b1Bh8p98uN
— David Rothkopf (@David Rothkopf)1624455537.0
DeSantis wants to survey university students and staff, with the threat of budget cuts if he doesn't get his way???… https://t.co/IWfcM8nGhI
— Witty Librarian In a Mask (@Witty Librarian In a Mask)1624455089.0
Our new authoritarian overlords like @RonDeSantisFL (who is a smart version of Trump)are coming for the universiti… https://t.co/Wupp1WG0Y9
— Rachel Bitecofer ?????? (@Rachel Bitecofer ??????)1624450474.0
Florida is becoming too dangerous full of right wing extremists. Floridians are shooting each other every day whil… https://t.co/bTj5qSkwJq
— Natives&ImmigrantsAreUS (@Natives&ImmigrantsAreUS)1624454706.0
Fascist authoritarianism takes another step forward in Florida.https://t.co/aRnOdvOQvS
— Rusty Cannon (@Rusty Cannon) 1624454946.0
The Florida education “intellectual diversity,” survey is one question - it’s a picture of Reagan with the caption… https://t.co/a9WS5fdp0h
— Eldritch Millennial (@Eldritch Millennial)1624451688.0
@TeaPainUSA Since the survey is not anonymous and since results will not be aggregated without identifying informat… https://t.co/CGTr7rYUMt
— Mary Buggie-Hunt ?????????? (@Mary Buggie-Hunt ??????????) 1624454430.0
Also if you don’t think they’ll sell your survey answers connected to your ID to the highest bidders, well, perhaps… https://t.co/uKBiKSSf7U
— Heather Flyte (@Heather Flyte) 1624456751.0
@GinnyMcDonald8 I raised two smart-asses. If they were going to be in a Florida University, they would find great p… https://t.co/rTTgKo8nXJ
— Israel Jablonski (@Israel Jablonski) 1624454688.0
Defending liberalism from illiberal wokeness by *checks notes* administering ideological tests and threatening budg… https://t.co/FwnsHBe1KA
— Zack Beauchamp (@Zack Beauchamp) 1624455675.0
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/southern-baptist-convention/
ah
On Tuesday, June 15, some supporters of former President Donald Trump were bitterly disappointed when the Southern Baptist Convention chose the Rev. Ed Litton, an Alabama pastor, as its president and rejected some of the more extreme Trumpians who were competing for the position — including the Rev. Mike Stone, who was supported by the far-right Conservative Baptist Network. Journalist Molly Olmstead analyzes this development in an article published by Slate on June 17. As Olmstead sees it, Litton's narrow victory shows a move away from Trumpism among Baptists.
"The SBC has been going through something like an identity crisis this year," Olmsted explains. "Southern Baptists, like most White evangelicals, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, but in the run-up to the 2020 election, critics began to chafe at the frequently conspiracy theory-laden partisan politics within their churches. After last summer's racial unrest, many of the denomination's Black pastors — actively courted by a Convention uncomfortably aware of its overwhelming whiteness and deeply racist history — began to protest the SBC's unwillingness to recognize the extent of modern-day racism. At the same time, an organized group of Southern Baptists has pushed for a second conservative resurgence to correct what it sees as a loosening of the core Southern Baptist identity."
Baptists who believe that the Southern Baptist Convention should be MAGA through and through favored Stone, a Georgia-based pastor. But 52% of the vote went to Litton, who is White and politically conservative but believes that Baptists should have at least have a conversation about race. The Trumpians at the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention were pushing for things like an official position against critical race theory, which has become a boogieman in right-wing media. Critical race theory is a field of study that examines the history of racism in the U.S. and the ways in which racism of the past has an effect on institutions of the present.
"Critical race theory has been a contentious topic within the SBC for months longer than its more recent turn in the media spotlight," Olmstead observes. "When Donald Trump was nearing the end of his presidency this fall, he launched a sudden attack on the teaching of critical race theory, an academic approach to analyzing the systems that have created and perpetuated racial inequality. As the anti-CRT sentiments quietly percolated in certain circles thanks to the president's comments, the conservatives of the SBC seized on the issue."
Although many Baptists identify with the far-right White evangelical movement, some African-American Baptists are outspoken supporters of liberal and progressive causes — the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, for example. The far-right Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., the late founder of the Moral Majority and a one-time segregationist and supporter of Jim Crow laws, was a Baptist — but so was Dr. Martin Luther, King, Jr., a civil rights icon. There were heated debates among Baptists during the 1950s and 1960s, and there are still heated debates among Baptists in 2021.
Olmstead notes, "In November, well ahead of the Republican Party's current uproar over CRT, the seminary presidents put out a joint statement calling the framework 'incompatible' with the Baptist Faith and Message, the SBC's central doctrinal statement. Critical race theory, they argued, was counter to their faith because the Bible, which evangelicals view as the literal and unerring word of God, should be the only tool for addressing the evils of the world. These comments essentially reversed a previous position the SBC had taken back in 2019, when the convention passed a resolution allowing critical race theory and intersectionality to be used as analytical tools as long as they were second to scripture."
And in 2021, Olmstead adds, "most observers came out of the meeting with a sense that the delegates had put the brakes on the convention's careening path toward the right."
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no lnx
Fox’s anti-“critical race theory” parents are also GOP activists
One “everyday American” “parent” is a GOP consultant who worked for the RNC in 2020
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM TYLER MONROE
PUBLISHED 06/17/21 9:07 AM EDT
UPDATED 06/17/21 2:10 PM EDT
Nearly a dozen of the Fox News guests the network has presented as concerned parents or educators who oppose the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in schools also have day jobs as Republican strategists, conservative think-tankers, or right-wing media personalities, according to a Media Matters review.
Critical race theory is an academic legal framework which examines the systemic impact of racism in the United States. But “critical race theory,” like “cancel culture” and “political correctness” before it, also functions as an umbrella term the right-wing movement uses to turn its mostly white adherents’ racial anxiety into political energy.
In this case, a sophisticated, nationwide network of conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, media outlets, and GOP officials have seized on the term and, in the words of Christopher Rufo -- a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and a key player in the effort -- sought to render it “toxic” and apply to it “the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” Republicans have proposed or passed a slew of legislation restricting “critical race theory” and hope to use it as a core part of their political strategy in upcoming local, state, and federal elections.
Fox, the leading propaganda outlet for the GOP, plays a key role in this strategy. The network has mentioned “critical race theory” nearly 1,300 times over the past three and a half months. The purportedly sinister spread of “critical race theory” provides a perfect framework for Fox’s technique of highlighting local concerns to fuel the culture war. The network supercharges the individual, at times dubious, stories that filter up with the help of nationally backed local activists, other right-wing outlets, and social media. Fox has targeted the purported influence of “critical race theory” in corporate America, the military, and particularly schools, hosting parents, teachers, and other educators to talk about how they don’t want it taught in their communities.
In several of those cases, the locals Fox has highlighted are also Republican strategists, conservative think-tankers, or right-wing media figures -- ties the network has downplayed or ignored altogether. This trend is particularly notable when Fox covers “critical race theory” controversies in Northern Virginia, a bedroom community for Washington, D.C., in a state where GOP gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin has sought to make his opposition a central issue in the fall.
“The first test will be here in Virginia,” Fox chief Washington correspondent Mike Emanuel reported last month. “If this issue works in the governor's race in November, it will likely be part of the GOP campaign playbook in the midterm elections next year.”
Republican strategists have every right to advocate for their children and their communities, if not to manipulate nationwide education priorities. But since Fox has identified opposition to “critical race theory” as central to the party’s political strategy, the network has a responsibility to inform its viewers about exactly who it’s talking to.
Ian Prior
Fox has hosted Ian Prior at least 15 times to discuss various “critical race theory” stories, according to Media Matters’ database of weekday cable news guests. Fox hosts and anchors have given him various introductions including “Loudoun County parent”; a “father” who “has gone from concerned parent, like many of you, to legal activist”; and “a Loudoun County, Virginia, parent and founder of FightForSchools.com.”
Fight for Schools, which Prior leads, is a political action committee launched this year to support “common sense candidates” who oppose “critical race theory” in schools.
What Fox personalities tend not to mention is Prior’s long career as a Republican political operative. He worked in top communications roles during the 2016 election cycle for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Karl Rove-fronted super PAC American Crossroads, and the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC that works to elect Republican senators which was founded by allies of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. He then spent a year and a half as a top public affairs aide to Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
Prior currently runs his own political communications consulting firm, is co-founder of a political newsletter, and is a senior counsel and spokesperson for Unsilenced Majority, “a grassroots conservative advocacy organization opposed to cancel culture in all forms”helmed by other Republican and right-wing media figures.
Prior had made dozens of appearances on Fox to discuss a range of issues before becoming a regular anti-critical race theory guest on the network earlier this year.
Quisha King
Fox host Tammy Bruce identified Quisha King as an “everyday American,” “a Florida mom who took a bold stance against critical race theory” and as “that hero, the Northeast Florida co-chair of Moms for Liberty” during a June 11 appearance on Fox News Primetime; on-screen text also stressed her role as a “mom” and “parent.” Anchor John Roberts likewise described King as “one mom” who is “going viral” for criticizing “critical race theory” and noted her Moms for Liberty affiliation during a June 14 segment on the “straight news” program America Reports; on-screen text during the segment also described her as a “mom of two daughters.”
But King is also a Republican strategist. She was regional engagement coordinator for the Republican National Committee in 2020 according to her LinkedIn page, which states that she now runs her own political media consulting firm. On Twitter, she calls herself a “@gop 2021 Rising Star.”
On Fox, King said teachers unions “want to remake America” and are “trying to raise up a generation that believes everything that they're pushing; they're trying to raise little woke Marxists” through “critical race theory,” which she later added is actually “aligned with the KKK and true white supremacy.”
Patti Hidalgo Menders
On June 4, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt described Menders and two other guests who oppose the supposed teaching of “critical race theory” in their schools as “three parents from Loudoun County, Virginia,” and mentioned that she is “president of the Loudoun County Republican Women’s Club.”
Menders is also a Republican strategist. She is “Virginia State Strategist” for Majority Strategies, a GOP media consulting firm, according to her bio at the firm, which also calls her “the creator of the Loudoun Conservatives Care, a state PAC that fundraises for Republican candidates by organizing large scale events.” Majority Strategies bills itself as “the only firm to work with every official GOP presidential nominee since 2000” and counts Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and two past Speakers of the House among its current or former clients.
Lilet Vanetsyan
Fox anchor Dana Perino described Lilit Vanetsyan as “one of the teachers who was at that school board meeting” in Loudoun County, Virginia, and suggested she was part of a “grassroots movement” during a June 9 interview on America’s Newsroom. Bruce similarly identified Vanetsyan as a “Fairfax County teacher” when she was on the June 10 edition of Fox News Primetime.
Vanetsyan is also a right-wing media personality. She is affiliated with the Trumpist youth organization Turning Point USA and runs a “Teachers for Trump” Instagram account (which now largely posts about “critical race theory”). Vanetsyan was a reporter for the pro-Trump Right Side Broadcasting Network, according to a since-deleted bio on its website that calls her “a passionate educator who never hesitates to expose the public education system, the teacher unions, and the corrupt curriculum our children are spoon-fed.” That bio also says Vanetsyan’s goal is to open the “The Donald J. Trump School of Excellence” and quotes her saying, “If we want to change the world, we must start with the youth.”
On Fox, Vanetsyan described “critical race theory” as an attempt to “indoctrinate our children.”
Barry Bennett
On May 18, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade described Barry Bennett as an “Alexandra Little League parent and an informal adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign,” and on-screen text throughout the segment identified him as a “Virginia Little League Parent.”
Bennett, elsewhere described as a “senior adviser” to Trump’s 2016 campaign, is also “one of the most prominent lobbyists of the Trump era,” according to Politico. He co-founded Avenue Strategies with Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager, after Trump’s victory, billing the firm as “your sherpa through turbulent times” (Lewandowski left in 2017). After Trump’s 2020 defeat, Bennett shuttered the company, which had been “loaded with lobbyists who had ties to Trump and the Republican Party,” and founded Bennett Strategies, a government relations and political consulting firm.
Nicole Neily
Fox host Laura Ingraham introduced Nicole Neily as one of “two parents fighting against CRT in their schools” (Prior was Ingraham’s other guest) and as “president and founder” of the organization Parents Defending Education during the May 26 edition of her prime-time show.
Neily has spent her entire career working in and for libertarian and conservative political advocacy organizations and think tanks, including stints at FreedomWorks, the Cato Institute, the Independent Women’s Forum, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Policy, and Speech First, before launching Parents Defending Education in January.
Elizabeth Schultz
Fox “news side” anchor Dana Perino introduced Elizabeth Schultz for a May 20 America’s Newsroom interview by calling her a “former Fairfax County [Virginia] school board member.” On-screen text echoed that description and also noted her affiliation with the group Parents Defending Education.
Schultz is also a former Trump administration official. She became locally notorious during her tenure on the Fairfax County School Board for voting against “expanding the school system’s sex-education curriculum to include lessons on gender identity and transgender issues” and supporting armed teachers in classrooms. After losing a reelection bid in 2019, she became deputy director of the Office of Educational Technology at the Department of Education, according to her LinkedIn profile. In March, she joined Neily’s Parents Defending Education group as a senior fellow.
On Fox, Schultz alleged that “our education system is being weaponized by school boards” that are “using taxpayer money to embed things like critical race theory.” She plugged Parents Defending Education and its website and urged parents to “take back your schools.”
Carrie Lukas
Fox anchor Martha MacCallum introduced Carrie Lukas as a “a Virginia mom of five” on the April 27 edition of The Story. For much of the segment, on-screen text highlighted that she is a “VA mother,” “parent,” and a “Virginia mother of five,” though the chyron briefly acknowledged toward the end of the segment that she is also “Independent Women’s Forum President.” She was interviewed alongside her daughter, an eighth-grader.
Lukas has worked at the Independent Women’s Forum,a conservative think tank that says it works to “reduce government red tape and return resources and control to people,” since 2003, according to her LinkedIn profile. She is also a contributor to National Review and the author of Checking Progressive Privilege, a book arguing that conservatives are “marginalized and stereotyped” in U.S. culture. She previously worked as a policy analyst for congressional Republicans and at the libertarian Cato Institute.
On Fox, Lukas said that instead of trying to “improve equity,” Virginia should provide vouchers so that parents could use public funds to enroll their children in private schools.
Bridget Ziegler
Roberts introduced Bridget Ziegler as “the mother of three girls and a Sarasota County [Florida] school board member” on the June 10 edition of America Reports; on-screen text also described her as a “FL Mom” and a “Mother of 3 Girls.”
Ziegler is also a Republican activist. She is a precinct committeewoman for the Republican Party of Sarasota County and a member of seven different local GOP organizations, according to her school board candidate bio.
On Fox, Ziegler said she is “so appreciative” of Florida’s “great governor” Ron DeSantis for opposing the teaching of “critical race theory” in the state’s schools. That “is why we call it ‘Freedom Florida’ here,” she added, “because he’s working and fighting for families to make sure that our children are going to be great, successful people and not be felt guilty by the content of their skin, or felt that they can’t success because of the color of their skin, and that is exactly what this particular critical race theory or the anti-American issues that they are pumping into schoolhouses across America and in Florida [do].”
Deborah Flora
America’s Newsroom anchor Bill Hemmer introduced Deborah Flora on June 3 as a Colorado “mother of two” who is also “president and founder of Parents United America.” On-screen text also identified her as a “Douglas County School District mom.” Flora later described Parents United America as “not political; it’s nonpartisan. This isn’t left or right; it’s right and wrong.”
Flora is also a right-wing media personality and activist. She hosts The Deborah Flora Show, a right-wing radio program airing on Denver’s KNUS that brings on a variety of state and local Republican politicians and conservative activists. The station is owned by Salem Media Group, the right-wing radio giant that features hosts like Hugh Hewitt and Sebastian Gorka and reportedly pressured hosts to be more pro-Trump; former KNUS host Craig Silverman claimed in 2018 that his mic had been cut and he had been fired in the middle of his show for criticizing Trump (the station denied it). Flora is also “the Director of Public Policy for Salem Radio Denver.” She became a right-wing celebrity in 2006 when she produced and starred in the anti-abortion film A Distant Thunder and later reportedly hosted “the first Beverly Hills ‘Tea Party’ rally” with the actor Pat Boone.
On Fox, Flora said that “equity policy is the same as critical race theory” and that it “divides … innocent children into oppressors and oppressed” which “damages both.”
Joe Mobley
Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy introduced Joe Mobley on June 14 as a “father of three and U.S. Army vet” who had “rallied for education, not indoctrination” over the weekend in Loudoun County.
Mobley also hosts The Joe Mobley Show, a political self-help podcast that purports to teach conservative listeners how to respond to criticisms from liberals who engage in “massive misinformation campaigns” about them.
On Fox, Mobley agreed that “critical race theory” is racist, adding that its “singular purpose” is “to divide.”
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-anti-critical-race-theory-parents-are-also-gop-activists
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Over the years, left-wing author Noam Chomsky has been vehemently critical of both Democrats and Republicans, slamming the United States' two major political parties as servants of Wall Street, big business and the 1%. But during an interview with Truthout's C.J. Polychroniou published on June 16, Chomsky's criticism of the GOP went beyond his usual critiques of conservative economic policy. The Philadelphia-born Chomsky, now 92, argued that big chunks of the modern Republican Party have become "proto-fascist."
"The fascist symptoms are there, including extreme racism, violence, worship of the leader — sent by God, according to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — immersion in a world of 'alternative facts' and a frenzy of irrationality," Chomsky warned. "Also in other ways, such as the extraordinary efforts in Republican-run states to suppress teaching in schools that doesn't conform to their White supremacist doctrines."
The leader Chomsky was referring to was, of course, former President Donald Trump, who is viewed by many on the far right as America's president in exile even though he was decisively rejected in the 2020 presidential election. When Republican presidents were voted out of office in the past — Herbert Hoover in 1931, George H.W. Bush in 1992 — the GOP did not regard them as presidents in exile. But in 2021, many Republicans in Congress are afraid to say one word against Trump or even acknowledge that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Fox News and other right-wing media outlets have become obsessed with critical race theory, which studies the racism of the past and the effect it has on the United States' institutions today. Pro-Trump Republicans view critical race theory studies as an assault on white Americans in general, and Chomsky finds it disturbing that Trumpistas are violently opposed to even acknowledging that the United States has a history of racism.
"Legislation is being enacted to ban instruction in 'critical race theory,' the new demon, replacing communism and Islamic terror as the plague of the modern age," Chomsky explained. "'Critical race theory' is the scare-phrase used for the study of the systematic structural and cultural factors in the hideous 400-year history of slavery and enduring racist repression. Proper indoctrination in schools and universities must ban this heresy. What actually happened for 400 years and is very much alive today must be presented to students as a deviation from the real America, pure and innocent, much as in well-run totalitarian states."
When he was president, Trump even called for "patriotic education" — a phrase that, Trump's critics noted, sounded like it was right out of Mao Tse Tung's Communist China.
Chomsky told Polychroniou that he is "hesitant" to describe the GOP of 2021 as a "party" because "that might suggest that they have some interest in participating honestly in normal parliamentary politics."
"Attitudes among the voting base are truly ominous," the 92-year-old author warned. "Put aside the fact that a large majority of Trump voters believe that the elections were stolen. A majority also believe that 'the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it,' and 40% take a stronger stand: 'if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.' Not surprising, perhaps, when a quarter of Republicans are reported to believe that 'the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.'"
The conspiracy theory that the U.S. government has been infiltrated by "Satan-worshipping pedophiles" came from the QAnon cult, which far-right pro-Trump Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado have supported.
Chomsky, however, draws one distinction between the Trumpified GOP of 2021 and the 1930s fascism of Germany's Adolf Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini, a.k.a. Il Duce: the GOP of 2021, for all its faux populism, remains committed to economic "neoliberalism."
Indeed, some fascists of the past, including Spain's Francisco Franco, a.k.a. El Generalissimo, at least believed in having some type of social safety net; Trumpified Republicans don't.
Chomsky told Polychroniou, "The term 'neoliberal proto-fascism' captures well both the features of the current (Republican) Party and the distinction from the fascism of the past. The commitment to the most brutal form of neoliberalism is apparent in the legislative record, crucially the subordination of the Party to private capital, the inverse of classic fascism."
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