new civil rights movement badash
belated, neglected here but linked
lots in AN 11 22
merri ok
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badash 1 24 an
noted conservative author and former professor of national security affairs is laying waste to the media narrative that Donald Trump’s MAGA followers are America’s “forgotten” people, concluding instead that they, just like their leader, are in it for revenge.
“Trump wants payback,” writes The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, “so do millions of voters who have no one to blame for their sense of humiliation but themselves.”
“Trump and his right-wing media courtiers—who tend to the anger of the older, white middle class the way florists lovingly raise orchids—fed the GOP base a continual stream of rage, especially as Trump started to pile up electoral defeats,” writes Nichols, who has a PhD from Georgetown and taught for 25 years at the U.S. Naval War College. “These voters now want to get even with their fellow citizens not for what’s been done to Trump but for what they feel has been done to them. They were certain that 2016 would finally bring them the recognition and respect they craved. Instead, Trump set them up for a steady diet of ego-bruising rebukes from other voters.”
Nichols also points to a piece by another writer at The Atlantic, McKay Coppins, who “attended a Trump rally in Iowa earlier this month, where he spoke with a nice lady named Kris.”
READ MORE: Trump Complains It Was ‘Ridiculous’ He Had ‘Follow the Laws’ and Leave Office
Kris is “a 71-year-old retired nurse in orthopedic sneakers,” Coppins wrote. She “was smiley and spoke in a sweet, grandmotherly voice as she told me how she’d watched dozens of Trump rallies, streaming them on Rumble or FrankSpeech, a platform launched by the right-wing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell.”
Asked if Trump should still be president, Kris told Coppins, “By all means.”
“And I think behind the scenes he maybe is doing a little more than what we know about,” Kris said.
Asked, “What do you mean?” Kris said, “Military-wise.”
“The military is supposed to be for the people, against tyrannical governments,” she explained. “I hope he’s guiding the military to be able to step in and do what they need to do. Because right now, I’d say government’s very tyrannical.”
Coppins added: “If the Democrats try to steal the election again in 2024, she told me, the Trump-sympathetic elements of the military might need to seize control.”
Nichols asks, “What can turn an ordinary person—a father, the pleasant older lady who lives down the street—into the family powder keg, or even a deluded seditionist who hopes the U.S. military will seize control of the country?”
He says, the “usual answer, when Trump ran the first time, was that these were ‘forgotten’ voters, people ‘left behind’ by globalization and a leftist political culture, who were hurling out a giant primal yawp of opposition.”
Nichols blames the media and politicians for that false narrative that has driven so much of American politics since Trump came down the escalator in June of 2015.
“These were never empirically sustainable explanations, but empathetic reporters and deeply concerned politicians went on listening tours to diners and gas stations anyway. When ordinary Americans would say shocking, indecent, and un-American things, their flummoxed interlocutors remained steadfast in the belief that more listening and more empathetic nodding would put things right in a few years.”
READ MORE: Brown Bags and Ballots: Viral Videos Capture Chaotic Iowa Caucus System
He also chastises MAGA voters for the “alternate reality” they’ve constructed to explain the strings of losses they’ve had to endure, “including the 2018 Democratic-wave election, Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and the ‘red wave’ that never happened in 2022.”
Antiracism educator Tim Wise responded to Nichol’s piece, writing: “Exactly correct. The media refuses to admit it but the MAGA faithful are mean, vengeful people. Not decent, misunderstood, and ‘left behind’ people, but folks who are not decent.”
Condé Nast Legal Affairs Editor Luke Zaleski, unrelated to Nichol’s piece in The Atlantic, on Wednesday delivered a (possibly tongue-in-cheek) take on MAGA’s alternate reality.
“This is the actual story republicans are going with,” Zaleski wrote. “Trump built the wall and gave us world peace and then Democrats and China (Trump’s pal Xi) made up a phony virus that doesn’t make you sick—and trump caught it and made a beautiful vaccine that kills you and he saved us—before Joe stole the election and trump had to start an insurrection that didn’t happen that Nancy did just so they could make it look like trump did it even though he told the attackers he loved them and would pardon them and Obama secretly runs everything and the CIA and FBI do too and George soros and they started the war Putin started and are behind the Hamas attack as well and trump will stop it all in 24 hours.”
Read Nichols’ entire piece here.
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an 1 23
eastman the far-right attorney, disgraced former law professor, former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and current chairman of the anti-LGBTQ National Organization For Marriage (NOM) is facing eleven counts of alleged ethics violations, and disbarment, by California state bar regulators. Among the allegations, “intentional acts of moral turpitude, dishonesty, or corruption.”
As The New York Times reported last fall, “after the November election, Mr. Eastman wrote the memo for which he is now best known, laying out steps that Vice President Mike Pence could take to keep Mr. Trump in power — measures Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have likened to a blueprint for a coup.”
So has the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, which late last month referred Eastman – in the same breath as Donald Trump – to the Dept. of Justice for possible prosecution on criminal charges, including obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
\u201c"We believe that the evidence described by my colleagues today and assembled throughout our hearings warrants a criminal referral of former President Donald J. Trump, John Eastman, and others..." \u2014 @RepRaskin #January6thCommitteeHearings\u201d
— Defend Democracy Project (@Defend Democracy Project) 1671477014
On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported California state bar regulators “say they will seek to strip” Eastman of his law license.
“The Notice of Disciplinary Charges alleges that Mr. Eastman violated this duty in furtherance of an attempt to usurp the will of the American people and overturn election results for the highest office in the land — an egregious and unprecedented attack on our democracy — for which he must be held accountable,” the State Bar of California’s Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona said in a statement. “Eastman has not been charged with any crimes to date.”
“The 11 charges arise from allegations that Eastman engaged in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states,” the State Bar of California’s statement adds.
Law & Crime’s Adam Klasfeld further explains that Cardona “intends to seek Eastman’s disbarment for alleged violations of Business and Professions Code section 6106, which punishes making false and misleading statements that constitute acts of ‘moral turpitude, dishonesty, and corruption.'”
Last week The New York Times described Eastman as “a chief architect of Donald Trump’s effort to reverse his election loss,” but it is his fellow Republican attorneys who delivered the judgment on his skills.
“Many White House lawyers expressed contempt for Mr. Eastman, portraying him as an academic with little grasp of the real world,” The Times reported. “Greg Jacob, the legal counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence, characterized Mr. Eastman’s legal advice as ‘gravely, gravely irresponsible,’ calling him the ‘serpent in the ear’ of Mr. Trump. Eric Herschmann, a Trump White House lawyer, recounted ‘chewing out’ Mr. Eastman. Pat A. Cipollone, the chief White House counsel, is described calling Mr. Eastman’s ideas ‘nutty.'”
It wasn’t just Republican attorneys in the Trump White House.
During the January 6 insurrection, Eastman, certainly no silent architect, stood at the same podium Donald Trump would speak at, and delivered a fiery speech alongside Rudy Giuliani. Six days later his colleagues at Chapman University demanded his firing[vid?]
the disbarment may be the least of Eastman’s self-inflicted woes.
“He has been drawn into the criminal investigation into election interference in Atlanta, which is nearing a decision on potential indictments,” according to The Times, also adding that the “F.B.I. seized his iPhone.”
Watch the videos above or at this link.
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an 11 22
The Arizona Republican Party’s nominee for governor, Kari Lake, is telling supporters there’s no reason for schools to spend so much time teaching science, math, and history. If elected she would recreate public schools into factories producing young adults who can immediately enter the workforce without the benefit of understanding basic information necessary in a democratic society. In North Carolina, the dominionist Lt. Governor wants to ban the teaching of science and history in elementary schools. And a Fox News host this week claimed that social studies – classes that teach history, culture, geography, political science, philosophy, and psychology – is a fake subject, “made up by progressives.”
That Fox News host is Pete Hegseth, who Donald Trump, when he was president, wanted to nominate to head the Veterans Administration. Hegseth may be best-known, however, for once bragging on Fox News that he hadn’t washed his hands in over a decade.
“Germs are not a real thing,” Hegseth said. “I can’t see them, therefore they’re not real.”
“Everything about the confines of my classroom was created by progressives 100 years ago,” Hegseth told a live audience this week. “You mentioned the rows. You mentioned that approach – the bell ringing.God being removed of course, lunch breaks, lunch breaks, different subjects, Social Studies.”
That’s when Hegseth got agitated.
“The idea we’re not going to study civics, history, philosophy, theology, we’re going to create psychology and social studies and split it all up as if we can dissect human nature and through ascientific method which they’ve invented.”.
“That’s right, create more perfectible human beings by controlling how they think and what they think, all created by progressives.”
Hegseth thinks taxpayer-funded public schools should teach everything through the “lens” of God, or, more specifically, his God
“Did you take social studies? I took social studies. The progressives made it up it – it’s, it’s a made-up conglomerate of subjects meant to silo the way that we think as opposed to basing all of wisdom in God’s wisdom, in His word, and it all makes sense, looking at it through that lens.”
[twt]
social Studies, of course, includes civics and history, and philosophy. In fact, the National Council for the Social Studies offers a definition for social studies:
“Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities topromote civic competence,” which Hegseth appears to object to.
“Within the school program, social studies provides coordinated, systematic study drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as well as appropriate content from the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences.”
“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
Hegseth is not alone in wanting to reduce what children learn.
Republican Kari Lake, Arizona’s GOP nominee for governor and a former TV news reporter whose entire education was in public schools, now thinks school children don’t need to learn as much as they are currently when it comes to science, math, and history.
“I believe we are at a prime opportunity to completely re-envision how our government schools are run, because everyone’s eyes are open,” Lake told supporters at an event while campaigning with far-right white Christian nationalist U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).
“And who says we have to have this many hours of science, this many of math and history? We can change that up,” said Lake about an entire state’s public school system that already has been “ranked worst across the 50 United States of America,” according to a report in Arizona’s KGUN 9 News.
“What does it mean to have a high school diploma? It should mean that you know some of the basics, and you also have some ability to go out and make a living. Our schools have our kids for 13 years from K through 12 and at the end of 13 years, we should have some competent adults going into the world who can make a living because there are jobs out there.”
[twt vid patriot takes]
notice how Lake doesn’t say, “public schools,” but“government schools,” a term many on the right use to demonize public schools, expanding their belief that anything the government does is wrong, bad, or a waste of tax dollars.
Lake also sounds like she’s suggesting high school graduates are not able to get jobs because they have spent too much time learning about science, math, and history.
Then there’s far right Christian dominionist Republican Lt. Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson, who is another extremist attacking education.
Robinson made national headlines after calling LGBTQ people “filth.”
In August MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones wrote that Robinson “may well be the most bigoted official in the United States with the least name recognition.”
Calling him “a full-on extremist,” Jones writes that Robinson And “reportedly has a new, ludicrous belief to share with the masses: Science and history shouldn’t be taught to students until they reach sixth grade.”
“First through fifth grades ‘don’t need to be teaching social studies,’ he wrote, according to local NBC affiliate WRAL-TV, which obtained an advanced copy of his upcoming book,” Jones adds, reporting that Robinson wrote: “We don’t need to be teaching science. We surely don’t need to be talking about equity and social justice.”
There’s more to Robinson’s extremist ideas on education.
Get rid of it. Or, specifically, Jones writes, Robinson has ” called for the elimination of the state’s board of education.”
“Robinson said flatly what most fact-averse conservatives won’t admit about their education crusade,” Jones continues. “They fear accurate history lessons that could inevitably lead to discussions about systemic disparities. And they fear discussions about science, which may undermine the fundamentalist Christian beliefs at the heart of the conservative movement.”
Jones sums up this entire approach to public education from the right.
“Robinson’s reported ideas about education showcase the logical endpoint of the Republican Party’s assault on lessons about social inequality: an eagerness to keep children stupid.”
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word salad
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/trump-2656686160/
badash ncrm an
In an “exclusive” Fox News interview Donald Trump, the failed, disgraced, one-term twice impeachedformer president, suggests he’s read the legal filing from John Durham,a special counsel secretly installed in 2020 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr, who revealed the attorney’s status weeks before resigning from office, just before the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Trump referred to him as “Robert Durham”in a statement when the news of the filing broke, and now is suggesting that he has both read the legal filing and predicted its contents “a long time ago.”
The problem is Fox News and many other far-right-wing media outlets, have gotten it wrong, mostly wrong, or all wrong.
“Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to ‘infiltrate’ a White House server,” The New York Times reported Monday. “The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office.”
On Tuesday Trump told Fox News: “It looks like this is just the beginning, because, if you read the filing and have any understanding of what took place, and I called this a long time ago, you’re going to see a lot of other things happening,having to do with what, really, just is a continuation of the crime of the century.”
“This is such a big event, nobody’s seen anything like this.”
Because it didn’t happen, at least, not as Trump and his right-wing smokescreen allies claim.
“Who would think a thing like this is even possible?” Trump also told Fox News. “Durham is also coming up withthings far bigger than anybody thought possible—Nobody ever thought a thinglike this would be even discussed, let alone an act like this committed.”
“You have experts that do this, but they used experts to do it, and to think they could even think about doing that is not believable and, think—if they do it, foreign countries can do it,” Trump said.
“It is no different than Watergate, except a much more important location,” Trump said. “It is the same theft—just modern day.”
And the “best” lines from his interview: “This is treason at the highest level,” and, “It is not even believable.”
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an 721
fox News is furious at the latest storyline from Marvel's Captain America, with two guests declaring the comic book publisher has turned the hero who has fought fascism and Nazism since 1941 into "Captain Woke."
For those unaware, Captain America was created in the middle of World War II, just before America officially entered the war, as an instrument to help Americans in the fight against the Axis powers. He's been called a "patriotic supersoldier," his entire foundation is literally about fighting fascism and the far right, and his popularity over the decades has only increased.
Until today, when Fox News launched an assault on the American hero.
"Dean Cain slams Marvel for new 'woke' Captain America comic: Bashing USA is now 'the cool thing to do'," is the title of a Fox News article that claims "Marvel is facing backlash for its latest comic, 'The United States of Captain America,' which says the American dream isn't real."
Here's how Fox News presents a quote from the comic book:
"…The first American dream is the one that isn't real. It's one some people expect to just be handed to them… When the truth is, it never really existed in the first place… other cultures. Immigrants… We're at our best when we keep no one out. A good dream is shared. Shared radically. Shared with everyone. When something isn't shared, it can become the American lie."
Fox News adds, "Cain said wokeness is becoming pervasive, affecting the media, actors, and celebrities and indoctrinating children in schools."
Marvel is literally just saying America has to be actively reinvented every day, and to do that we need and should want immigrants to share in our dream.
To Fox News, that's wokeness and propaganda.
On cable, Fox News guest Michael Loftus ranted about Captain America.
"It's sad, really, it's so sad when Captain America is now like Captain Woke, or Captain Propaganda. Did I miss an issue where he was kidnapped by liberal arts professors and was forced to move to Portland?" Loftus lamented. "It's the absolute worst, and it's it's just more proof that the left is going to come after everything that real Americans hold near and dear, they're in, after baseball they tried to cancel apple pie. And now, Captain America. Maybe they'll change his outfit, maybe now instead of a shield, he'll be armed with a laptop, and they'll have exciting adventures where he sits in coffee shops and and tweets mean things, and he's an active fact checker on Facebook. It's horrible."
Loftus says Captain America "has a huge impact" on children, calling the declaration that America is a land of immigrants "pretty insidious," while complaining the left doesn't "want the right to have any heroes."
He went on to "cancel" Captain America, declaring him "dead," at least to him: "I'm done with Captain America. He's dead."...
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an 621
Ivanka and Jared are distancing themselves from Trump as he has 'frequent contact With Lindell: report
David Badash The New Civil Rights Move
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