cultural marxism

see PC

see anti-commie 1-3 socialist

see devil term

see CRT

no merri

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term was sorta fading for  WHILE?  3 23 common w/o"cultural " prefix , dropped when/why?

cpac once has legit policy presented?

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it’s baaaaaa--cccckkk

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an states n? 5 25

Why are right-wingers so scared of ideas?

Are their minds so weak that mere exposure to certain books will infect them with what Elon Musk calls “the woke mind virus”?

They don’t want you inoculated against measles, but they’re doing their damnedest to inoculate Americans against knowledge.

Novels upset them; poetry upsets them; science upsets them; history upsets them; art upsets them; questioning of authority upsets them.

Universities really, really upset them — all that interrogating norms; all that challenging orthodoxy; all that critical inquiry.

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To that end, Donald Trump’s going to war with Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, even Penn, his alma mater.

Ron DeSantis beat him to it: The governor’s been trying for years to regulate speech, impose restrictions on what teachers can teach, and decree which books the state of Florida finds “acceptable.”

While he’s had some success in K-12, enabling Moms for Liberty and their ilk in their book-banning crusade and threatening educators with dire consequences if they mention the existence of gay and trans people, some judges, unsurprisingly partial to the First Amendment, have slapped him down.

DeSantis, nothing if not energetic in his rage, is now determined to shield our precious college students from Dangerous Thoughts.

Choose the administrators. Choose the presidents. Control the universities.

The University of Florida needs a new dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences — with 40 majors and more than 10,000 students, it’s the largest college at UF.

They got as far as interviewing four highly qualified candidates: two mathematicians — UF’s own Kevin P. Knudson and Maggy Tomova, dean of UCF’s College of Science; Ryan Schroeder, dean of Georgia Southern’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences; and Robert Brinkmann, a professor of Geology and dean of Liberal Arts and Science at Northern Illinois University.

‘Radical DEI progressives’

But two weeks ago, the governor blew up the search. Demanded UF stop it.

Seems the finalists, admired scholars and seasoned leaders, are crypto-Marxist, Trump-hating eggheads bent on destroying America.

An anonymous social media account calling itself “Commies on Campus” ran shrieking to Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’ communications director, calling all four “ radical DEI progressives.”

The Commies posted slick, selectively edited videos of candidate interviews, slamming Brinkmann for stating the obvious: “We have people in charge of things in our country that don’t have any business being in charge of those things,” and Knudson for being proud that as head of UF’s Honors Program “we were able to increase the number of African American and Hispanic students in the program.”

As if that’s somehow shameful.

Kent Fuchs, UF’s invertebrate of an interim president, sent out a memo pretending “terminating the search” was the only thing to do, what with the university also in the middle of hiring a permanent president.

Fuchs has never said no to DeSantis.

He does as he’s told, facilitating the hiring of our data-challenged surgeon general at UF’s medical school and trying to stop professorsfrom testifying on voting rights.

Academic freedom doesn’t matter; the professors’ expertise might pose a “conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida.”

As if serving the interests of the executive branch should somehow be the mission of a university.

UF remains a distinguished institution, though slipping in national rankings of public universities. It was No. 5 a couple of years ago but is now No. 7.

Still pretty good, especially given DeSantis’ obsessive attacks on higher education in the state.

But allowing some trifling X account to dictate policy at Florida’s flagship university won’t exactly burnish UF’s reputation.

All-purpose insult

Whoever the “Commies on Campus” may be, they weren’t paying attention in political science class.

They call anything they don’t like “communist:” LGBTQ, feminism, secularism, programs for the poor, addressing the climate crisis, taxing the rich, giving anyone without one of those useful White Man Cards a fair shot in life.

“Communist” is MAGA’s all-purpose insult.

Read a book, kids: While real live commies like the ones in North Korea, Cuba, or China may think religion is the opiate of the masses and rich folks (except the leaders of these countries) shouldn’t exist, they’re not keen on stuff like feminism, they persecute gay people, and they sure as hell don’t favor DEI.

Ask the Uighurs.

Yet DeSantis, a man educated beyond his intelligence, takes what these nameless chuckleheads say at face value.

There are in fact a number of well-regarded Marxist scholars at American universities. Yale, the governor’s alma mater, has a reading group studying Marxism and Cultural Theory.

Nevertheless, DeSantis emerged from the Red Menace of New Haven untainted.

He’s also unimpeded by understanding what universities are supposed to do.

An academic’s job is to research everything from the Roman Republic to astrophysics to Norse sagas to gene structure to the ideology of slavery to economic and political systems, which requires reading across the spectrum from “Das Kapital” to “ The Road to Serfdom“ and presenting their data and knowledge to students.

We call this “education.”

It’s embarrassing how MAGAs deem Hungarian (or Putinist) authoritarianism OK, even admirable, while “communist” is the gravest of insults and socialism is a mortal sin.

Perhaps they’re unaware socialism is viewed favorably by around 36%of Americans.

That’s almost the same number who say they strongly support Donald Trump.

Ideas are not viruses

The point is, ideas are not viruses: Mere exposure to communist thought doesn’t turn you into a communist, any more than reading James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” makes you gay, any more than reading “The Wealth of Nations” ensures you’ll become a rabid capitalist.

But MAGAs don’t do high-level thinking: It makes their heads hurt. They simply react.

Loudly. Ignorantly. Irrationally.

Commies on Campus now has a new project: trying to influence who will become the new president of the University of Florida.

UF has announced a finalist.

One finalist. Chosen in secret.

He is Dr. Santa Ono, a Canadian American immunologist.

The Commies say he’s some kind of woke monster who, as president of the University of Michigan, created “THE LARGEST #DEI EMPIRE in the country.”

Their evidence? Christopher Rufo, the febrile New College trustee last heard claiming immigrants were eating cats and dogs, calls Ono “left-wing” and points to a 2023 commencement address in which he made the unimpeachable statement, “The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time.”

Florida gubernatorial candidate and Trump acolyte U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, never losing a chance to ingratiate himself with MAGA voters, demands UF “ go back to the drawing board.”

Donalds’ hair is on fire because Ono once said, “Racism is one of America’s original sins.”

Deep breath, people: 1. Both of Ono’s statements are perfectly true; and 2. Rufo, Donalds, and the Commies need to update their intel.

Ono has changed his tune. No longer a champion of diversity, he’s now singing from the DeSantis Hymnal, declaring himself in “total alignment” with the governor’s anti-woke crusade.

“I have the same views as this governor,” Ono said.

Bend the knee

During his three years at Michigan (the shortest tenure of any president in the university’s history), Ono initially won praise for prioritizing sustainability and anti-racist projects. Students say he was personable and accessible.

Then Trump happened, and, like too many university administrators, he bent the knee, shutting UM’s DEI office, cracking down on student protest, and creating, as one faculty member said, “ a surveillance state.”

Seems he deployed plainclothes officers police to trail and photograph people on UM’s campus.

No wonder DeSantis likes this guy.

Santa is a real scholar, a proper scientist, with academic and administrative qualifications that could have been a great fit at UF. He’s streets ahead of DeSantis’ last hand-picked president, the empty, in-over-his-head Ben Sasse, whose one discernable talent was spendingother people’s money.

In a Trump-free world, Ono might have become the leader who could protect the institution. He might have pushed back against the governor’s determination to reduce Florida’s universities to football factories with libraries curated by the likes of Christopher Rufo and courses insisting on the divine greatness of America.

Alas, Ono has made clear that’s not him, not anymore.

This is what you get when one incurious, anti-intellectual, and perpetually angry man chooses university presidents in secret.

This is what you get when there’s only one finalist.

Yes, the trustees officially make the job offer, but there’s no chance they’d hire someone DeSantis didn’t like.

This is the reality of higher ed in Florida today.

FIU has one finalist for president. No shock that it’s DeSantis’ former lieutenant governor and Interim President Jeannette Nuñez.

In its presidential search, FAU announced three finalists. Maybe this would be a real contest?

Two had Ph.Ds. and solid higher ed experience. One was a Republican political hack.

You can guess who got the gig.

A ‘plant’ at FAMU?

Florida A&M, still in the process of choosing a president, has four finalists.

Promising, right?

There were initially three on the shortlist, all with extensive university experience. Then a fourth candidate, a woman with ties to top Republicans, appeared.

She’s Marva Johnson, a communications company executive, appointed by then-Gov. Rick Scott to the Florida Board of Education and chosen by Ron DeSantis for the Florida Scholars Academy Board of Trustees.

Commies on Campus have not yet weighed in on this one.

FAMU alumni say she’d be a terrible choice, calling her “ a plant” and likening her to a Trojan Horse hostile to the university’s mission.

But what the alumni want, and what the university wants, probably won’t matter.

What DeSantis wants matters.

As everyone in the unfree state of Florida knows, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE. SUPPORT

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

===

mma

April 17, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): A world on fire as President Trump continues to hammer in every different vertical and take on the institutions of this country to make sure that they are — that the DEI wokeness, anti-American, neo-Marxist — I don't know what we're going to call it, is wringed from them. It's really magnificent. He's breaking the big law firms that run the country. He is breaking these big universities, the Ivy Leagues.

I'm just waiting to go to the Bannon pivot to the public ivies, which is essential, to get to the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

And the way he's doing this is cutting off everyone from the public trough. All the pigs feed. What, $9 billion to Harvard, all these people getting billions and billions of your taxpayer money. And guess what taxpayers, middle class, working class taxpayers, they've had it, not interested.

I also think that they got to de-em— It's not about anti-Semitism. That's a big — that's a part of it. In some cases, a big part of it. That's not the reason.

The reason is that these are radically — radical progressive, neo-Marxist faculties and administrations and we have to purge that. Or just go do it — if you want to do it privately, finance it privately, go for it. Harvard, you got $52 billion. I don't even think that counts the business school and the other colleges. I think that's just Harvard College and the university. I don't think the individual — I think the business schools got a $10 billion. I'm not sure they just rolled that up and that's what it is. I think it's bigger. I think Harvard may have $100 billion. And only 1 year ago, 2 years ago, they started using it for letting kids that couldn't afford to go there, go there.

Cut them off. They're not so tough. Law firms are not so tough when you cut them off the federal, off your tax dollars, when you cut it off from the trough. You want to drain the swamps, start by taking the pig trough and draining that. They're not, they're not, they're not so big. They're not big shots anymore.

//

1. ### Steve Bannon and guest argue rising bond yields mean “tough times ahead” if Trump doesn't secure trade deals and “get government spending down”

04/10/25 2:52 PM EDT

2. ### Steve Bannon suggests the Trump administration “immediately revoke” all Chinese student visas

04/10/25 11:36 AM EDT

3. ### Steve Bannon: Trump “loves his charts. Those are like the tablets that Moses brought down.”

04/03/25

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===

no lnx

Alternet

The devastating truth about the GOP's war on education

Thom Hartmann December 31, 2024

“Those who control the present, control the past; and those who

control the past control the future.” —George Orwell, 1984

From outlawing the polio vaccine to ignoring the scientific consensus on gender dysphoria to refusing to wear masks in hospitals to trying to strip evolution and science from our schools, stupid has become fashionable in today’s GOP.

When Republican politicians want to score points, they criticize their opponents as having had “elite” educations; the GOP’s war against Ivy League colleges was particularly evident during the student protests of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Congressional Republican inquisitors voices' dripped with scorn and contempt as they grilled university presidents.

It wasn’t always this way.

I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled.

That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system:

“With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead, invest it in the right places--and do all this, not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women!”

In less than a year Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured piles of money into our public schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids.

I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959: by the time I left elementary school I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I’d had two years of foreign language and two years of experimental music instruction. IQ tests were all the rage: mine was 141 and my best friend, Terry, was 142, something he never let me forget.

Most all of those programs died over the following decades as a result of Reagan’s war on public education, which began with his bringing private religious school moguls like Jerry Falwell and bigots like Bill Bennett into the White House.

Repudiating Eisenhower’s embrace of public education, Reagan put Bennett in charge of the Department of Education, which Reagan had campaigned on shutting down altogether. Bennett is probably best known for defending his proclamation that:

“If you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Much like Bennett back in the day, the catch phrase among white supremacists and their fellow travelers today is that “Western Civilization” is either under attack or at risk because we teach history, tolerance, and critical thinking skills in our public schools, which are often racially integrated. The answer, Republicans will tell you, is to defund our public schools.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal share of total education spending in America was 12 percent; when he left office in disgrace in 1989 amid “Iran/Contra” rumors he’d cut a deal with the Iranians to keep the American hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, that share had collapsed to a mere 6 percent. (It’s 3 percent today.)

Reagan also wanted to amend the Constitution to allow mandatory school prayer, and unsuccessfully proposed a national tax credit — a sort of tax-system-based national voucher system — that parents could use to send their kids to religious schools like Falwell’s.

Reagan made anti-intellectualism a political weapon, repeatedly criticizing colleges and professors throughout his political career. When asked why he’d taken a meat-axe to higher education and was pricing college out of the reach of most Americans, he said that college students were “too liberal” and America “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”

Four days before the Kent State Massacre of May 5, 1970, Governor Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” adding, as The New York Timesnoted at the time, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”

Before Reagan became president, states paid 65 percent of the costs of colleges, and federal aid covered another 15 or so percent, leaving students to cover the remaining 20 percent with their tuition payments.

That’s how it works in many developed nations; in most northern European countries college is not only free, but the government pays students a stipend to cover books and rent.

Here in America, though, the numbers are pretty much reversed from pre-1980, with students now covering about 80 percent of the costs. Thus the need for student loans here in the USA.

Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold:

1. Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America,
2. Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians),
3. Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions,
4. End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and,
5. Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.”

“Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”

Instead, multiple Republican-controlled states are now actively gutting their public schools with statewide voucher programs, and instituting mandatory bible instruction or posting of the Ten Commandments. Book bans and panics around queer kids using bathrooms or playing sports are the new wedge issues.

There is no more powerful urge we humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money. So if you’re a politician looking for an issue to motivate voters, just tell them their children are under attack. It’s cynical, but effective.

In an interview for Semafor, Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid it out:

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

Just a few months ago, Donald Trump laid out his plan to deal with the “major problem” America is facing. That problem, he said, is:

“[W]e have ‘pink-haired communists teaching our kids.’”

Turning the Constitution upside down and arguing the Founders intended to protect teaching schoolchildren religion, Trump elaborated, arguing that mixing religion, politics, and education was the intention of that document:

“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it’s resembling an established new religion. We can’t let that happen. For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue intentional violations to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”

As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

George W. Bush followed the trend, bragging about his pathetic performance in college at Yale’s 2001 commencement:

“To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States!”

Similarly, JD Vance gave a speech in 2021 titled Universities Are The Enemy.

This isn’t the first time elected officials have used public education as a political weapon. In 1844, 25 people died and over 100 were severely injured in riots in Philadelphia over whether there should be daily Bible readings in that city’s schools. Two churches and several city blocks of homes were burned to the ground.

The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 didn’t provoke riots, but was a major event in the history of public education. Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of the crime of teaching evolution. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in passing laws making such instruction a crime that stood until the 1967 repeal of the Butler Act.

While Republicans across the country successfully rode a wave of white outrage about Critical Race Theory in November’s election, polls suggest the issue is really only meaningful to a fragment of the American electorate: an anti-science “Christian” subset of white Republican voters.

The annual PRRI American Values Survey found:

“Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past (92% vs. 5%).

“There are no substantial partisan differences, though Republicans favor excluding aspects of history slightly more (7%) than Democrats and Independents (both 4%). There are few differences across religious traditions or demographics. This consensus holds up across different levels of exposure to critical race theory: 92% of those who have heard a lot about critical race theory, 94% of those who have heard a little, and 93% of those who have heard nothing about it state that we should teach children the good and bad of history.”

Nonetheless, they note:

“[A] majority of Republicans (54%), compared with 27% of independents and only 7% of Democrats, believe that teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children.”

America spent $794.7 billion on primary education last year. For-profit private schools and megachurches that run schools look at that pile of money and drool. Republicans are committed to delivering as much of it to them as possible, regardless of the damage it does to our nation’s kids.

Their strategy for privatizing our public schools is pretty straightforward, and echoes the plan of action Republicans are using right now to replace real Medicare with the privatized Medicare Advantage scam.

First, they falsely claim that they’ll deliver a better product at a lower cost. In the education realm, we see this with Florida and several other Red states now offering vouchers that can be used at private or religious schools to every student in the state.

(Nearly 2,300 private schools in Florida accept vouchers, but “69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious, and nearly one-third are for-profit.”)

As more and more students use the vouchers to flee public schools, the public schools sink into deeper and deeper financial troubles. Those cut the quality of teaching and upkeep of the school buildings, causing even more students to use the vouchers.

Because the vouchers never cover the full cost of private school tuition (typically they pay for half to two-thirds), the truly poor can’t use them: the result is the public school system becomes ghettoized, leading to even more flight by middle- and upper-class (mostly white) people.

Once the public schools are dead and the state has transitioned entirely to private schools, the state will claim budget problems and begin to dial back the amounts available for vouchers. (The same will happen with Medicare Advantage once real Medicare is dead.)

This will widen the relationship between the educational and wealth divides; the racial and class cleavage will become so great that the state will have effectively gone back to a “separate but equal” educational system. Which, of course, is the GOP’s goal and has been since 1954.

Republicans are generally convinced — and surveys show they’re right — that when people have a good, well-rounded education they will vote for Democrats, who explicitly value science and egalitarian social values.

Thus, keeping our kids ignorant and destroying one of America’s largest unions, all while helping their education and religion industry friends get rich, is a complete win-win.

Much of this battle is playing out in state houses around the country, but there’s a huge and well-funded effort to take control of local school boards as well.

Driving this ethos with a constant flood of anti-intellectual, anti-science propaganda are an army of rightwing podcasters, YouTubers, hate radio hosts, and the billionaire-owned Fox “News” network (among others). They argue, essentially, that “stupid is the new smart.”

Barely coherent politicians like Tommy Tuberville and Marjorie Taylor Greene are their heroes. Donald Trump, who still refuses to release his grades, is their avatar. Bob Kennedy is their avenging angel. And people with college educations — and teachers/professors — are their enemies.

Bottom line: the Republican war on public education and science is real, and if we want to stop it we must get involved. Show up for your local school board meetings and, if you have the time and ability, run for a position on the board.

Lobby your state legislators and support pro-science and pro-education politicians. It’s time to make smart cool again!

Our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are literally at stake.

NOW READ: Poor Trump supporters are about to get a rude awakening — but we shouldn't be celebrating

===

12/11/2024 rww

by

Kyle Mantyla

• Laurie Cardoza-Moore is urging churches to "close the doors" on Candace Owens following her descent into antisemitism: "She has no substance beyond her repugnant, unfounded, and obsessive hate for God's Chosen People. There is no place for her anywhere in the Conservative Christian world."

• Tim Barton thinks that the election of Donald Trump was key to the not guilty verdict in the Daniel Penny trial.

• William Wolfe proclaims that "Penny’s acquittal sends a clear message: America is tired of being held hostage by fear, division, and the manipulation of racial narratives for political gain. The age of BLM, with its tactics of intimidation and its Marxist underpinnings, is fading. It’s over."

• Joe Waresak, president of the James Dobson Family Institute, declares that with Trump's election, "the Lord turned the page for America, and a new chapter is now before us."
• Finally, Christian nationalist Jesse Leon Rogers claims that Christians have a "cultural mandate" to "subdue and rule."

mma

right-wing media’s playbook for attacking Kamala Harris: A flood of misogyny and racism

Right-wing media spared no time in hurling racist and sexist attacks against the likely Democratic presidential candidate

WRITTEN BY PAYTON ARMSTRONG, CHARIS HOARD & EMMA MAE WEBER

PUBLISHED 07/23/24

Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential election and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, right-wing media have launched sexist and racist attacks at Harris to try to diminish her qualifications. They’ve claimed that she can’t be president because she doesn’t have biological children, labeled her “the ultimate diversity, equity, and inclusion candidate,” fixated on her laugh, claimed that she promotes "the occult,” and likened her to “Jezebel.”

• ## Biden suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Harris on July 21

• • In a statement released on July 21, Biden suspended his presidential campaign after weeks of calls to step down from top Democrats.Weeks after a poor debate performance and amid mounting pressure to step aside, Biden announced he would serve the remainder of his term, and he subsequently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination for president, thanking her for being an “extraordinary partner.” Bloomberg, [7/21/24; The Hill, 7/19/24]

• • Harris announced her official bid for the presidency hours after Biden's suspension, with multiple Democratic lawmakers expressing their support.Harris asserted in a statement that “my intention is to earn and win this nomination.” The Associated Press, [7/21/24]

• ## Right-wing media have attacked Harris over her race and gender for years

• • Right-wing media have lobbed racist and sexist attacks at Harris for years, calling her a “DEI hire” who “gets more favorable treatment because of her race and gender.” Right-wing figures have also referred to Harris as an example of ”why DEI doesn’t work" and claimed she “launched her political career in [the] bedroom.” Media Matters, [7/3/24, 7/11/24]

• ## Right-wing media sexualized Harris and diminished her accomplishments with sexist attacks

• • Infowars host Alex Jones called Harris a “fleshlight.” When speculating about a Hillary Clinton ticket, Jones said, “So don't think they won't try to push Kamala out and put her in, or have Kamala, who's dumber than a box of rocks, she's basically a fleshlight, put Hillary on as her VP. And boy if she does that, she’s gonna get JFK’d.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*, [7/22/24]

• • Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro said that Harris has “never earned anything,” claiming that she got “handed her original post in California state government because she was sleeping with Willie Brown.”Shapiro went on to claim that “she lucked into her job as attorney general of the state and then from there, she really lucked into her job as senator. … Then she proceeded to luck into her job as vice president. Earn and win the nomination. She’s not earning and winning anything. She’s inheriting it.” The Daily Wire, *The Ben Shapiro Show*, [7/21/24]

• • Right-wing influencer Dom Lucre shared a photo of Harris and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown with the caption, “How did Kamala Harris become our Vice President? I heard she has always been a suck up to wealthy Democrats.”In a similar post, Lucre also jeered, “Kamala Harris started her career on her knees how can we trust her to stand up for this country?” Twitter/X, [7/22/24, 7/22/24; The New York Times, 1/14/21]

• • Trump ally Roger Stone posted: “Kamala Harris campaign now selling official campaign kneepads.” Twitter/X, [7/21/24]

• • Rumble host and Trump ally Laura Loomer said that Harris “was once an escort and … she got her career started giving blow jobs to successful, rich, black men,” including Willie Brown and Montel Williams.In a now-unavailable post on X (formerly Twitter), Loomer said that Harris performed a sex act on Brown “while he was a married man in exchange for political power. Here she is ‘dating’’ @Montel_Williams in 2001, who appears to be holding hands with more than one woman at the same time on the red carpet.” The woman who Williams was holding hands with in 2001 was his daughter, and he was separated from his wife when he and Harris dated. The Wrap, [7/22/24; The Associated Press, 7/22/24]

• • OutKick host Clay Travis said Kamala Harris “got her start in politics by sex as a mistress of a married man.”He also attacked Kamala for not having kids, saying, “If you're a married woman with kids, if you're a grandma with kids, do you have any respect for the woman who is the mistress of the married man and never even became his second wife and had kids with him on her own?” OutKick, *OutKick The Show with Clay Travis*, [7/22/24]

• ## Right-wing media both called Harris the “DEI candidate” and questioned her Blackness

• • Daily Wire host Matt Walsh said Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee would be “a poetic way for us to end this year of reckoning with the madness of DEI.” Walsh then went on to call Harris “sort of Black,” saying she “lacks the IQ and the competence to lead this country” and claiming she has “never earned anything through her own merit.” The Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [7/22/24]

• • OutKick host Clay Travis claimed that Harris “failed her way up” and is “the ultimate diversity, equity, and inclusion candidate.” Travis also asserted that ”we just saw what DEI does, at the Secret Service; it nearly gets the president killed," in reference to the attempted assassination on former President Donald Trump last week. Outkick, *Outkick The Show with Clay Travis*, [7/21/24; Media Matters, 7/15/24]

• • Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk said Harris was chosen because of “the same criteria of DEI that got Trump shot.”Kirk also said, “You could not have a better example of the worst aspects of the country or the Democrat party. But now — that's where she is. She is a DEI candidate.” Real America’s Voice, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [7/22/24]

• • Fixating on Harris’ race and gender, Fox contributor Tammy Bruce warned that the fear of being called racist or sexist will be weaponized by the Democratic Party, claiming their approach is like domestic violence.Bruce said Democrats will turn to “more identity politics. There will be more accusations. There will be accusations that if you don't like Kamala — we’ve already heard it — you are a sexist and you are a racist and you’re everything else. … It’s a way to control you. Where it’s dangerous to speak up, dangerous to contradict the masters of the universe out there, where you will do as you are told or you will be punished. It is very similar to the nature of domestic violence. It is domestic violence writ large.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/22/24]

• • Right-wing personality Rob Smith, who has been a Turning Point USA contributor, called Harris the “DEI soon-to-be nominee for President.”Twitter/X, [7/22/24; Fox News, accessed 7/22/24]

• • Newsmax host Sebastian Gorka said that Harris “very well might be the first DEI president.”Gorka added that Harris “is literally a DEI hire, a woman who laughs about little yellow school buses and Venn diagrams, who cackles like an insane woman.” Newsmax, *Newsmax broadcast*, [7/21/24]

• • On Newsmax, guest Chris Kohls mispronounced Harris’ first name and questioned, “Is she Black? Is she Indian? Nobody knows.”Host Sebastian Gorka replied that it’s not racist to mispronounce Harris’ name if we “work out how her slave-owning Jamaican ancestors pronounced that name.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight,* [7/22/24]

• • Newsmax guest Joel Gilbert said Harris “has no common experiences with Black Americans.”Gilbert, author of a book that speculates Michelle Obama will run for president, continued, ”She doesn't even bring the African American vote that they've hemorrhaged to Donald Trump because she's not African American. Her mother is from India. Her father's from Jamaica. She grew up in Canada, and she married a white Jewish guy." Newsmax, *Greg Kelly Reports*, [7/21/24]

• • YourVoice America's Bill Mitchell: “Kamala Harris never ran as a black woman until 2020.” Twitter/X, [7/22/24]

• ## Right-wing media also claimed that Harris can’t be president because she has no biological children

• • Article III Project senior counsel Will Chamberlain asserted that the “really simple, underdiscussed reason why Kamala Harris shouldn’t be President” is because she has “no children.”(While Harris has no biological children, she became the stepmother of Cole and Ella Emhoff when she married second gentleman Doug Emhoff in 2014.) Twitter/X, [7/21/24; Today, 7/19/24]

• • Laura Loomer said: “A woman who has no biological children of her own should not be allowed to make decisions in the White House for your children.”Loomer also attacked Harris' passion for reproductive justice, jeering “Republicans need to … ask why a woman with no kids of her own and just a scarred up uterus is so obsessed with wanting to kill your babies." Twitter/X, [7/22/24]

• • While listing reasons why Harris shouldn’t be president, OutKick’s Clay Travis noted that Harris “doesn't have any kids of her own.”He also called Harris a “side chick” who “got her start in politics by banging Willie Brown” and said he doesn’t think Harris will “really motivate Black voters very well, particularly Black men.” OutKick, OutKick The Show with Clay Travis, [7/21/24]

• ## Right-wing media fixated on Harris’ laugh, saying she sounds like a “giggling idiot” and a “hyena”

• • Fox host Sean Hannity said Harris is facing a “likability crisis” and voters “detest” Harris because of her laugh. He then characterized Harris as “your giggling vice president.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/21/24]

• • Fox analyst Brit Hume said that “you can argue a great many Americans think Harris is a giggling idiot, there’s no doubt about that.” Fox News, *Fox News Live*, [7/21/24]

• • Roger Stone posted an attack ad from Make America Great Again Inc.and wrote, “Lying, hyena-laughing Kamala.”Twitter, [7/21/24]

• ## Right-wing media launched other bizarre attacks, including likening Harris to “Jezebel” and accusing her of promoting “the occult”

• • Right-wing commentator and self-described prophet Lance Wallnau said that Harris “represents something which I believe is probably the amalgam of the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary because she'll bring a racial component and she's younger.”Twitter/X, [7/22/24; Rolling Stone, 9/29/22]

• • Right-wing pundit James Lindsay claimed that Harris’ repetition of the statement “to see what can be, unburdened by what has been” is “occult” and “it's a Marxist and Luciferian incantation.”Twitter/X, [7/21/24]

• • On her radio show, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis endorsed Lindsay’s analysis, declaring that Harris “is advancing not just cultural Marxism, but paganism and the occult.”Ellis complained that “this is who is going to be likely the Democrat nominee. … If we are going to genuinely claim being a Christian nation and advancing policy that is based in and rooted in a biblical worldview or if we are going to elect someone in November that is specifically, intentionally, and obviously pushing for a Luciferian incantation and the occult.” American Family Radio, *Jenna Ellis in the Morning*, [7/22/24]

---

an 2 24

florida public school students start learning about communism in 7th grade. That’s too late for some Republicans in the Florida House, who want teachers to instruct students as young as kindergarteners on concepts such as “cultural Marxism.” But what is it?

The House bill moving in the Legislature doesn’t provide a definition for the term, raising questions about how little kids could understand cultural Marxism.

The Senate version of the bill doesn’t include cultural Marxism in its legislation.

Nevertheless, HB 1349, passed in a House committee on Feb. 1. The bill analysis says that starting in the 2026-27 school year, the history of communism must be included in instruction in grades K-12 in Florida’s public schools. (Currently, there are no standards for the history of communism from kindergarten to 6th grade.) The legislation would include “the philosophy and lineages of Communist thought, including cultural Marxism.”

The bill involves a task force — the governor would appoint the members — to come up with age-appropriate curriculum and academic standards for K-12 instruction of the history of communism and its dangers. The task force would report its findings no later than July 1, 2025, and it “must also make recommendations to the Legislature regarding the creation of a Florida Museum of Communist History,” according to the legislative staff analysis.

The House proposal, from Republican Reps. Chuck Brannan and James Buchanan, gained enough support last week to move forward in the Legislature. But Democrats criticized the inclusion of cultural Marxism as one of the things students will learn about. Brannan represents North Florida counties and a part of Alachua, and Buchanan represents part of Sarasota.

From terrorist manifesto to K-12 curricula

Democratic lawmakers pointed to far-right groups’ usage of cultural Marxism in relation to antisemitic beliefs.

“If you look up the term cultural Marxism, what comes up is the term cultural Marxism refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory, so that’s also concerning to me,” Palm Beach Democratic Rep. Katherine Waldron said during the Choice and Innovation subcommittee meeting last week. “I’m all for kids learning about government and political systems. But I would be against this very specific terminology in training or in trying to educate them on this.”

Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow with ADL’s Center on Extremism, said in a statement to Florida Phoenix that antisemites also use the term to reinforce their longstanding antisemitic trope that communism is “Jewish.”

“‘Cultural Marxism’ is a term, typically used by right-wing ideologues, to attack an array of ideas and concepts they oppose, including multiculturalism, globalism, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights, among others. The term often functions as an antisemitic dog whistle or codeword,” Mayo wrote in the statement.

“Promoters of the term often invoke a conspiracy theory that falsely claims such progressive ideas originated with the so-called Frankfurt School, a leftist intellectual collective active in Germany between the two World Wars. Exploiting the fact that a number of the Frankfurt School intellectuals were Jewish, antisemitic versions of this conspiracy theory link the Frankfurt School, and thus ‘cultural Marxism’ itself, to Jews, claiming that Jews seek to subvert and weaken Western (and Christian) society by imposing their left-wing and politically correct (or ‘woke’) views.”

Over the years, cultural Marxism has gone from being linked with the far-right through terrorists’ manifestos to seeping into the vocabulary of mainstream politicians, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has said he views wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism.

“Most of the most violent, the deadliest acts of hate, perpetrated against Jewish people especially in the United States in the last 10 to 15 years have been by far-right extremists. We don’t have cultural Marxists shooting up synagogues. If it were the case, then we should talk about it, but it isn’t,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “You have white supremacists, anti-government extremists who are embracing antisemitism. Of course, antisemitism is on the far-left as well. There has been a rapid, marked increase in antisemitic rhetoric coming out of the far-left as well.”

The terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 and another who killed a woman in the attack at the California Chabad of Poway synagogue in 2019 left manifestos denouncing cultural Marxism’s effect on Europe and blaming Jews for coming up with it, respectively.

Groups like the Proud Boys have also used cultural Marxism as a catch-all term for anyone they view as an enemy, Lewis said.

“What we’ve seen in recent years has been an intentional effort, by far-right extremists to launder antisemitism, launder white supremacy, launder anti-LGBTQ narratives and hate speech against everyone who’s not effectively in this in-group, which is largely white, largely Christian,” he said.

Dangers of communism

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a 45-page report in 2022 about how cultural Marxism threatens the U.S. In it, the think tank states cultural Marxists have infiltrated the country through college campuses and public schools. They also credit DeSantis for showing a path to dismantle cultural Marxism.

“Today’s cultural Marxists believe that the reason economic, social, cultural, academic, and health outcomes (to name just a few) show persistent racial disparities is because of a pervasive, systemic racism that can only be eliminated by smashing the system itself,” the report states.

Subcommittee chair Republican Rep. Alex Rizo of Miami-Dade, last week defended the bill, stating that students don’t learn enough about communism.

“When we talk about antisemitism I equate antisemitism a lot with communism. … I love that this bill will come up with some sort of curriculum to start teaching what communism really does other than an economic theory that was brought up by Marx and Engels, two philosophers, and I use that term very loosely, in the 19th century. Because we do have curriculum in almost every single grade level K through 12 that talks about the sins of slavery, that talks about the horrors of the Holocaust, but does not yet really address the over 100 million people who were victimized, murdered, displaced in about 100 years worth of communism in our society,” he said.

The Florida Department of Education standards related to communism include the evaluation of economic systems in seventh grade and the identification of political ideologies (communism and totalitarianism) that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy in high school.

Lawmakers also discussed last week how the material would be taught in an age-appropriate manner to younger students. Republican Rep. Thad Altman of Brevard said his wife, a first-grade teacher at a Catholic school, teaches kids through hands-on simulations.

“I think these kids understand capitalism and communism more than a lot of college students, especially if they go to an Ivy League,” he said.

Other things students would learn about through the House bill or analysis include atrocities committed in foreign countries under the guidance of communism, the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, the communist policies of Cuba, and the spread of communist ideologies throughout Latin America.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter

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Top Oklahoma education official Ryan Walters cheers conspiracy theorist while appearing on her show | Media Matters for America

Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters praised conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine during a nearly 25-minute interview on the December 19, 2023, edition of her show. Walters and Lorraine also spread a conspiracy theory about supposed Marxist infiltration in Oklahoma public schools, and Walters touted his efforts “to ensure that we're running the left wing out” in order “to put folks that share our conservative values in this agency.”

Lorraine is a former Infowars host and failed congressional candidate with a long record of spreading outlandish conspiracy theories, including Pizzagate and the QAnon conspiracy theory. (In recent posts, Lorraine said that “Q is the greatest Psyop ever told” and “we’ve been played.”) She also attended the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and has proposed that we “arm our children” to stop school shootings. Her streaming show, Shots Fired with DeAnna Lorraine, is part of the media network of white nationalist Stew Peters, who has spread extreme and violent rhetoric including calling for the deaths of LGBTQ people, journalists, Democratic politicians, and Catholic charity workers.

As Oklahoma’s state superintendent, Walters has pushed right-wing propaganda into public school curriculum and used far-right media programs to attack the state’s education system and teachers. Walters appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press days before his interview with Lorraine, arguing that he is responding to a “higher education push to drive left-wing, Marxist propaganda into classrooms.” Walters previously suggested that he has taken education policy advice from right-wing media personalities, including the anti-LGBTQ social media account Libs of TikTok and a BlazeTV pundit who disparages public schools as “Satan’s youth ministry.”

In the December 19 Shots Fired interview, Walters claimed that Oklahoma’s “education system has been run by Marxists for far too long” and the host agreed, suggesting there has been a communist plot since the 1950s to take over public education. Lorraine also compared the left to “cockroaches” after Walters claimed that “liberals embed themselves” in government agencies. He referred to the state superintendent’s office under his Democratic predecessor as “a captured entity,” and bragged to Lorraine: “I fired over 100 people from our agency in the first six months, and we are continuing to ensure that we're running the left wing out, and we're going to put folks that share our conservative values in this agency.”

Walters also claimed that George Soros — a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories — has “financed” school boards and “government bureaucratic apparatuses.”

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the December 19, 2023, edition of Stew Peters Network's Shots Fired with DeAnna Lorraine

DEANNA LORRAINE (HOST): Ryan Walters, I'm excited to talk about you and all of these great wins under your belt. You are just slaying the Marxist left back and forth. Welcome to Shots Fired, how are you?

RYAN WALTERS: (OKLAHOMA STATE SUPERINTENDENT): Look, I appreciate you having me on. I appreciate the work you're doing. And, you know, I mean, that's the thing in education — to get the education system back on track when it's been pulled so far to the left, we have got to operate with a sense of urgency. And so we're playing offense here in Oklahoma. We're going to be aggressive and we're just getting started. But I'm telling you, this education system has been run by Marxists for far too long. Parents know it, our taxpayers know it, and it's time to get going.

LORRAINE: Oh 100%. And some people somehow still believe that this is sort of some big conspiracy theory that the education systems have been hijacked by the Marxist left and, you know, this all sort of happened organically. No, it's not. It's literally in the communist goals. The 45 communist goals for America way back in the 1950s. They state that they want to hide, they're going to hijack the education systems and schools and transform them into Marxist, communist curriculum. So it's not a conspiracy and it's actually happened, and they've been very successful at it.

…

WALTERS: I think that's so important for your viewers to hear is that we are in a very red state, very red state. Every single one of our counties voted for Donald Trump twice, so we are a very red state. But let me tell you, we also have a teachers union who is very well-financed and continue to block legislation and push legislation at the state capital. They have captured a lot of Republican legislators who listen to them alone. And so we've had to fight back against some of them, some folks in our own party who have fought school choice, fought parents rights. We had a legislator that’s Republican that fought to keep pornography in the classroom. And so we have these pockets of influence the teachers union has. But I'm going to tell you, the other thing that's so important is now that I run the education agency is liberals embed themselves in these agencies. So you've seen this with the way —

LORRAINE: Like cockroaches.

WALTERS: George Soros has financed these district attorneys. They've done the same thing with school boards, and they've done the same thing with the government bureaucratic apparatuses. So when I got here, you know, we would pass laws and it wouldn't be enforced because again, my predecessor, a Democrat, loaded this agency up with a bunch of liberals that were never going to hold districts accountable. They were never going to push back on the teachers union. And frankly, this was a captured entity. I mean, the left had captured the state superintendent. So you can pass whatever laws you wanted, they were never going to be enforced on the schools. So it has been a dramatic shift. I fired over 100 people from our agency in the first six months, and we are continuing to ensure that we're running the left wing out, and we're going to put folks that share our conservative values in this agency. And we're going to continue to fight for parents, and we're going to continue to fight — it’s frankly common sense. We're going to keep fighting for common sense to come back to the classroom.

Lorraine and Walters ended the interview praising each other, with the host telling Walters, “You are on fire. I love what you’re up to. I love what you’re doing. Keep going at it because we need strong fighters like you to fight for our schools and our children.”

Walters replied with effusive praise, telling Lorraine, “I love your show, love what you’re doing,” and “I appreciate you fighting for conservative principles and values and your fight for our kids. So really appreciate the time on the show and thank you for the work you’re doing.”

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the December 19, 2023, edition of Stew Peters Network's Shots Fired with DeAnna Lorraine

LORRAINE: Ryan Walters, you are on fire. I love what you're up to. I love what you're doing. Keep going at it because we need strong fighters like you to fight for our schools and our children. Tell everybody again where they can find you and follow your awesome work and achievements.

WALTERS: Well, I appreciate that. I love your show, love what you're doing.

...

WALTERS: But look I appreciate the time. I appreciate you fighting for conservative principles and values and your fight for our kids. So really appreciate the time on the show and thank you for the work you're doing.

LORRAINE: Thank you so much, Ryan.

Walters promoted the interview on X (formerly Twitter) by reposting a link from Lorraine to the interview with the caption “OK Superintendent of Education is on FIRE slaying the Marxists!”

//

1. ### Oklahoma's top education official has a cozy relationship with BlazeTV host Steve Deace, who likens public schools to “Satan’s youth ministry”

10/06/23 12:18 PM EDT

2. ### Remarks from Oklahoma public schools superintendent mirror far-right extremist talking points on the Tulsa Race Massacre

07/12/23 12:06 PM EDT

3. ### Public schools are the latest target of the right’s con culture

09/07/23

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mma 1123

it’s baaaaaaaccccckkkk!

together at last/ again

Charlie Kirk blames "Jewish dollars" for funding "cultural marxist ideas" | Media Matters for America

https://www.alternet.org/**2022/08**/cpac-speakers/

According to a report from Rolling Stone, the speeches thus far at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas have been larded with "dark" threats of coming violence as the speakers brushed aside any discussion about the Jan 6 Capitol riot.

With Donald Trump --who instigated the Capitol insurrection -- taking the stage on Saturday, Tim Dickinson wrote that in many cases the speeches, "...menaced America with what seemed to be thinly veiled calls for violence."

Case in point, he notes, was a speech given by recently convicted former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon who proclaimed to the crowd, "We are at war."

"Repeating the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump,Bannoninsisted that Joe Biden is an 'illegitimate imposter.' Calling on Republicans to send 'shock troops' to Washington, Bannon promised the crowd they had an opportunity to 'shatter the Democratic party as a national political institution'." he wrote. "He alleged that the party has been overrun by 'radical, cultural Marxists' and 'groomers' who 'want to destroy the Republic.' Bannon insisted the GOP must pursue absolute victory over 'power-mad and lawless' Democrats, asserting: 'There can be no half measures anymore'."

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) doubled down on Bannon's heated rhetoric, exhorting the crowd with the claim, "It’s like the old Roman Colosseum where you slam on a breastplate and you grab a battle axe and you go fight the barbarians. As they say in the military world, it is a target-rich environment.”

"The rhetoric of revolution and frontline confrontation went hand-in-hand with other speakers and presenters who cast the American left as demonic, evil, and destructive — in other words the kind of enemies who deserve to be dealt with harshly," the report states before adding, "CPAC has long been a political circus, a relatively harmless sideshow. But its latest incarnation has become manifestly dangerous — more fascist than farce. It is holding up alleged perpetrators of political violence as martyrs. It is demonizing its domestic political opponents as diabolical 'enemies within.' And it is giving MAGA supporters a militaristic frame for their charge to the 'front lines' of America’s culture wars."

"In short it is playing with fire. But it’s the rest of us who may get burned." Rolling Stones' Dickinson concluded.

https://www.mediamatters.org/rachel-campos-duffy/fox-host-claims-teachers-are-all-licensed-through-these-marxist-teaching

8 23 mma

CAMPOS-DUFFY (FOX NEWS CO-HOST): It's interesting. This is actually a charter school which claims to be a classical education, and so they've had to do a big, you know, turn around on their point because the parents are really upset. They think, but this a great example -- first, I wanna talk about a couple things. The mom, so calm. I'm impressed. Like, I wouldn't be that calm. Like, you know me. I'm not gonna go in be that nice about it, but kind of very politely educated the teacher who is not very educated, doesn't understand American history, and tried to associate with racism or something like that. So that's one thing. Two, the boy. He's so polite. He's so well-mannered. There was a subsequent video where he comes back, he had just done some podcasts and, you know, sort of gave his point of view and said, you know, I've come back, a lot of kids are now -- he came back to school and other kids are putting don't tread on me patches all over their lockers and their backpacks, and he said, this the sad part, he said I made some new friends, kids that I didn't know before that are now supportive of me, but the teachers were so mean to me, some of the teachers. How disgusting is that? So that was really bothersome.This is a reminder that you are your child's first and most important teacher. That mother taught that son about what don't tread on me. The rattlesnake was the symbol of America because the rattlesnake, if you try to step on it, it's gonna bite you back, and so this is a symbol of standing up. That's what that boy was doing. He's so -- he's such a patriot, I thought, I think that Brian Kilmeade is gonna adopt him.

...

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Well, we see all these scores on how our kids are doing on these, you know, on these national tests and history's very bad. We need to give these tests to the teachers. 

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): I thought they did before they got their teaching certificate.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: No, because they all get licensed through these Marxist teaching schools that we have inside of all these universities. That's also why you have teachers that turn out like that, that have no idea about American history. They don't care about it. They get hired by a classical academy, a charter school where parents are supposedly pulling their kids out of public school to get a better education, and here's what they get. So just always be alert.

wiki manhat

2020s

During the early 2020s, City Journal has attracted widespread national attention for its role in elevating debates on critical race theory, LGBTQ+ topics in education, and similar issues in the United States.^[7][8][9] Contributor Christopher Rufo, in particular, has drawn attention for writing numerous pieces in the magazine that often focus on these matters. In articles published by City Journal, Rufo has accused Seattle's Office of Civil Rights of "endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism",^[7] highlighted Disney and Twitter workers who have been convicted of child sexual abuse,^[8] suggested that there were significant levels of "'grooming' in public schools",^[8] accused a California curriculum designer of wanting to make children "chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek",^[9] compared the diversity training conducted by the city of Seattle to "cult programming",^[9] and accused an Oregon school district of promoting revolutionary Marxist ideas.^[9]

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note gingrich gop memo, parrot bannon

an 7 23

from June 29-July 2, the far-right MAGA group Moms for Liberty held its annual summit in a city so Democratic that it hasn't had a Republican mayor since Bernard Samuel left office in January 1952: Philadelphia. The four-day event, held at the Philadelphia Marriott near Reading Terminal Market and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, was greeted by angry protesters who slammed the group for its campaign to exclude books by gay, lesbian and African-American authors from public schools.

Moms for Liberty (M4L) touts itself a "parental rights" group, but to critics, their real mission is to purge schools of as many Black and gay authors as possible.

In an article published by the Daily Beast on July 5, journalist Kate Briquelet offers an in-depth account of what she observed at the M4L gathering in Philly — where the speakers included Republican presidential hopefuls such as former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Far-right radio host Dennis Prager was also there.

READ MORE:'Shocking': Scholars condemn Philadelphia Museum for hosting Moms for Liberty event

Briquelet notes that while attending the summit, she didn't go out of her way to broadcast the fact that she was a Daily Beast reporter.

"My mission was to blend in and get the full experience of this ideological sisterhood, one that came with a swag bag holding a Trump air freshener, comic book on the Pilgrims' journey aboard the Mayflower, and 'awake not woke' sticker with a passage of scripture," Briquelet explains. "Throughout the summit, once people asked where I was from and whether I was with a M4L chapter, they didn't dig much further. Only one person, a fellow infiltrator, asked about my profession."

Briquelet reports that DeSantis railed against "wokeness" during his speech, while Trump promised to "liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and pervertswho have infested our educational system" if elected president in 2024.

Trump told the crowd, "On Day 1, I will sign a new executive order tocut federal fundingfor any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children…. For any public schools that are engaged in these militant and country-destroying practices, I will instruct the DOJ to pursue them as violators of the establishment clause, of the free exercise clause, of our constitution.:...

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reboot of 2020 red bait fail? boost post chicomm balloon?

https://www.alternet.org/trump-biden-marxist-equity-squad/

// restitution?

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proxy for pinko prof? strict fr?

mma 3 23

As the Biden administration defends the president’s policy of canceling up to $20,000 of student debt for millions of Americans against a Republican-backed challenge before the Supreme Court, some right-wing commentators are going beyond their old arguments against the policy to make truly outrageous claims about it.

When President Joe Biden first announced his administration’s plan in August to address the very real problem of student debt doubling in the past decade, which affects tens of millions of Americans, conservatives tried arguing that the policy was unfair, would raise inflation, would favor the rich, and had no legal basis.

But when arguments about the policy reached the Supreme Court yesterday, some right-wing media figures went far beyond their previous opposition to the policy and levied some egregious new attacks:

• Fox News host Mark Levin called Biden’s student loan cancellation policy “a fascistic act by an out-of-control man” who is “cheered by the Marxists in the country.”
• OutKick founder Clay Travis: “This was a transparent political attempt by Joe Biden to rig in his favor the 2022 election.”
• Travis again portrayed the student debt cancellation policy as a voter turnout scheme: Biden “wanted to drive up young voters’ turnout as much as he could.”
• Fox contributor Liz Peek: “You can't just dole out $400 billion to get votes, which is basically what this is all about.”
• Media Research Center’s Stephanie Hamill said “it’s almost like a bribery” of voters.
• Newsmax host Rob Schmitt said it’s a “vote-buying scheme” to get people “on the narcotic of social welfare.”
• Schmitt later portrayed student debt cancellation as Biden wanting “to dump hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't have on 8-balls, Jack Daniels, and flights to Mexico.”
• Fox contributor Marc Thiessen claimed student debt cancellation is “an act of stolen valor,” and that Biden is “turning millions of Americans into people who are engaged in stolen valor.”
• Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk used student debt cancellation to attack college education in general, claiming he might not be so opposed if colleges were “producing fruit that loved America.” Instead, he said, they’re the “Wuhan Institute of Virology equivalent of idea pathogens in our country” and asked, “Is this a alleged money laundering scheme to pay off colleges for their Marxist indoctrination?”
• Kirk also wrote on Twitter that “college is a scam!”

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sieg heil

left-leaning media outlets have villainized Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, painting his recent moves in the Sunshine State’s education system as a hostile takeover from the Right. So Matthew Spalding, a professor at Hillsdale College whom DeSantis recently appointed to the New College of Florida’s board of trustees, decided to set the record straight.

“DeSantis Allies Plot the Hostile Takeover of a Liberal College,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in The New York Times. Goldberg referred to Hillsdale College as “the template for this reimagined New College” and noted that the conservative Hillsdale—based in southern Michigan—worked with then-President Donald Trump to create a patriotic education curriculum.

“DeSantis moves to turn a progressive Fla. college into a conservative one,” runs the headline on Valerie Strauss’s **Washington Post**story. The subheadline: “His administration says he aims to make it a ‘Hillsdale of the South.’” Strauss brands Hillsdale a “bastion of far-right conservatism.”

“A Tiny Christian College in Michigan Is Infiltrating Florida’s Schools” runs the headline on Mary Harris’ Slate story.

The New Republic‘s Jack McCordick also slammed DeSantis’ appointment of Spalding, writing that Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute “eagerly hitched their wagons to Trump” and are “home to some of the country’s most notorious coup plotters and insurrectionists.”

McCordick suggested that Spalding’s appointment by DeSantis represents a threat to the “uniquely proactive nature of the New College’s student body.” He quoted alumnus Derek Black, who credited that student body with his conversion from a “white nationalist activist,” implying that the governor’s new appointments might enable white nationalism to emerge at the school.

These media outlets eagerly cited remarks from Christopher Rufo, a Manhattan Institute scholar best known for combating critical race theory and homelessness. DeSantis also named Rufo to New College’s board. In remarks to The New York Times, Rufo said he aimed toreverse a Marxist “march through the institutions.”

“If we can take this high-risk, high-reward gambit and turn it into a victory, we’re going to see conservative state legislators starting to reconquer public institutions all over the United States,” Rufo told the Times.

The media outlets also cited James Uthmeier, DeSantis’ chief of staff, who told the Daily Caller: “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college … more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”

“Florida is where woke goes to die,” DeSantis said in his victory speech following his nearly 20-point reelection victory in November.

The Republican governor has taken aim at critical race theory, a framework that claims to find “systemic racism” in American institutions and that critics say leads educators to treat white students as oppressors and treat black students and other minorities as oppressed. DeSantis also has opposed transgender ideology and signed a bill protecting parental rights in education and preventing institutionalized instruction of LGBT lessons in kindergarten through third grade.

Spalding, vice president of Washington operations and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale’s satellite campus in the nation’s capital, did not address DeSantis’ program but insisted that the political controversy is “overwrought.”

Spalding, a former director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation, parent organization of The Daily Signal, also said he doesn’t aim to turn New College into a carbon copy of Hillsdale College. Rather, he told The Daily Signal, he intends to champion liberal arts and classical education at the historic Florida institution.

“The political controversy surrounding recent appointments to the board of New College of Florida is overwrought,” Spalding said in a written statement provided to The Daily Signal. “I am honored by the appointment and look forward to engaging in reform to achieve educational excellence.”

“As a professor, dean, and vice president at asuccessful liberal arts college, my focus is on the work at hand: restoring New College’s ‘distinctive mission’ as the ‘residential liberal arts honors college’ of Florida,” Spalding said. “I appreciate the complimentary nods to Hillsdale College, but we are not going to serve New College’s mission by remaking it into a carbon copy of another institution.”

“In the liberal arts, the college—which means a partnership, one between students and faculty—works together and comes into conversation with great thinkersand writers who’ve asked timeless questions about human purpose, about the good and justice, and how to live well,” he added. “The very aim of liberal arts education is to liberate the mind from current fads and popular ideologies by inviting students to address these questions in pursuit of the truth about what it means to be fully human. That pursuit transcends contemporary politics.”

Getting “such an education teaches one how to think, not what to think,” Spalding added. “The surging enrollment at my home institution and others like it shows that students hunger for such serious academic inquiry.”

The author of this article, Tyler O’Neil, is a Hillsdale College alumnus.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

booktv wackos

NOVEMBER 6, 2021

LAST AIRED JANUARY 16, 2022

Race Crazy - BLM, 1619, and the Progressive Racism Movement

Seeking Educational Excellence (SEE) executive director Charles Love argued that Black Lives Matter and the 1619 Project are a danger to the future of American democracy. AM560 Radio’s “The…

680 VIEWS

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

LAST AIRED MARCH 5, 2022

BLM

Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez took a critical look at the Black Lives Matter movement and its leaders. He argued that they are Marxists who want to dismantle the…

===

3/22 wt

biden sotu boos on trump cut 1% had ad: The Marxist Roots of CRT

The meaning and threat of critical race theory. How to oppose and defeat it

hillsdale

===

===

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 structure that 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.

===

an 621

f:{ranklin Graham urges school boards to fight the ':(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:godless socialist agenda' of CRT

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

Evangelical and anti-LGBTQ activist Franklin Graham is urging Americans to "pray for the Christians" who are fighting what he calls a "godless socialist agenda," an agenda he says now...

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?

===

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.....

===

===

// antifa concept?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/republicans-fact-free/

The right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, has lately been making a fetish of something called "critical race theory" (CRT). This has prompted academics to defend it. It's not a radical political ideology, they say. It's merely a form of critical inquiry. It is not the boogeyman it's being made out to be. There's nothing to fear.

I understand the need to defend critical race theory. Colleges and universities are beset on one hand by Republican fascists accusing scholars of indoctrinating students, on the other by anti-left liberals accusing the same of hostility toward freedom of speech. Meanwhile, administrations act more like corporations that privilege efficiency over research and teaching. It's enough to think CRT is an appropriate hill to die on.

This, however, overlooks the larger dynamic at work. The more you defend CRT as an ideologically neutral mode of seeing and thinking about the world, the more the propagandists are going to do what they do best, which is terrifying the ignorant. More importantly, CRT defenders are not seeing the true nature of their opponents. From the authoritarian perspective, modes of seeing and thinking about the world are never ideologically neutral because once you learn to see and think about the world on your own, you don't need authoritarian leaders to tell you what to see and think.

I risk making them seem like cartoons. I risk making people who treasure "traditional" and "conservative" and "Judeo-Christian" values look like they yippy-skippied over the Enlightenment on their way from the Spanish Inquisition to the 21st-century America. But it's worth the risk given that most respectable white people, in my opinion, tend to overestimate the societal effects of liberal arts education. Critical thinking is so uncontroversial among respectable white people as to be barely worth mentioning. The authoritarians, however, see it quite clearly for what it is—an existential threat.

This is why the particulars of critical race theory don't matter.1 (You don't care about the particulars when you're fighting for survival!) This is also why explaining those particulars to people who seem to fear them won't change their minds if you don't also take into account that explaining the particulars of critical race theory can itself be seen as intolerable aggression. What most of them fear is loss of social control. What most fear is loss of authority. Where you see an individual merely muddling through life the best she can, coming to the best conclusions she can, most of them see an individual whose ideological aggression is so monstrous as to justify any response.

Respectable white people look at the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, and marvel at the fact that Americans consuming its propaganda inhabit a fact-free world. I think what they misunderstand is lying isn't a bug. It's a feature. Facts are available to individuals to see and think about on their own, free and independent of authorities licensed to say what individuals see and think. Facts, therefore, are aligned politically with perceived enemies. A rationalresponse to facts is nonstop lying. So "alternate facts" are not a result of authoritarian politics. They are a first principle.

Critical race theory is not a political ideology, but it may as well be to the world of the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale. It might as well be because anything that teaches individuals to see and think about facts independent and free of groupthink compromises the integrity of the authoritarian's grip on the group. Case in point is Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney. The Republican believes the former president tried bringing down the republic. She is factually correct. For the "crime" of seeing and thinking about the world on her own, she's now being punished. The House Republicans are poised to purge her from the House conference leadership. The Republicans are not individualists. They are collectivists enforcing groupthink.

Respectable white people marvel at the fact that Americans consuming right-wing propaganda inhabit a fact-free world. As a consequence, they do not take it seriously. People who insist on inhabiting a fact-free world are not just ignorant—not when democracy depends on the ability of individuals to associate and organize themselves for the purpose of self-rule. When huge numbers of people inhabit a fact-free world, and collectivist leaders police the integrity of that groupthink, they threaten not only democracy's ability to function minimally, but its survival. Liz Cheney is now being reassimilated into the collective. Democracy itself faces the very same fate. Do not marvel at these people and their fact-free world. Regard them as the danger they are.

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===

devil term replaces cultural marxism? cf 1491 2 stories:

earth day

Laura Ingraham mocks young climate activists

On the April 22 edition of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham focused her monologue on “the big climate con.” Ingraham’s “con” list included misleading arguments against the benefits of climate action like job creation; attempts to discredit the role of -- and the need for -- global cooperation in dealing with the crisis; and false claims that the scientific warnings on climate are not sound or well understood. Her final point was targeted at young activists who are calling for urgent and bold action -- and she took specific aim at Greta Thunberg and a Mexican climate justice activist named Xiye Bastida.

Ingraham suggested that today’s youths are being “indoctrinated into critical climate theory just like critical race theory.” Not to be outdone by Carlson, Ingraham introduced the clip of Bastida talking about the role of justice in developing climate solutions like this: “What happens when you mix open-borders madness, critical race theory, and climate paranoia all together in one big bowl? You get this." vid]

ingraham’s callous attacks on climate and youth activists are not new. She received significant blowback in 2019 for comments she made about Thunberg and in 2018 for mocking Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg.

The biggest problem with Fox’s “War on Earth Day'' is that it is not limited to once a year. Daily Fox assaults erode public acceptance of climate science and the need for urgent and bold action on climate change. Far from being a news outlet, the outlet is a key cog in the right-wing disinformation machine and climate obstruction is one of its main goals. mma 521

==

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https://www.foxnews.com/us/victor-davis-hanson-street-violence-rioting-us

no lnx

victor Davis Hanson predicts street violence will continue until 'we start indicting people'

Rioters must be told 'you do that again and you're not going to like it,' Hanson tells Tucker Carlson

By Angelica Stabile | Fox News

VDH: Maoist revolution will collapse when once we start indicting anarchists

'It doesn’t have popular support,' says Victor Davis Hanson explaining how Hollywood and the media are fueling the cultural revelation

The far-left demonstrations seen in U.S. cities this summer are part of a “cultural Maoist” movement that has the approval of Democratic officials, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson told “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Thursday.

Hanson explained to host Tucker Carlsonthat protesters and rioters are acting out their personal angst and agendas against the U.S. and have “redefined traditional Marxism” into identity politics.

“We saw it with Maxine Waters, who said, ‘Get in their face at gas stations and follow them into department stores.’ We saw them when they kicked Sarah Sanders [out] from a restaurant," Hanson said. "We saw it when they swarmed the house of Mitch McConnell. And no one said anything because they were saying to us, 'This isn't a political revolution and this is a cultural Maoist revolution.”

DR. ALVEDA KING RESPONDS TO ONGOING UNREST: 'FIGHTING OVER SKIN COLOR IS NOT MAKING SENSE'

With the unrest peaking during an election year, Hanson said, Democrats are using presidential nominee Joe Biden as a metaphorical “hot air balloon” to carry them over the finish line in November.

“They pumped him up and he's just going to drift over to Election Day, collapse, and then they've got their carriage and the whole agenda where they want it,” he said. “And we didn't deter it. We didn't stop it. We didn't say, 'No more,' because we were afraid of being canceled out.”

However, Hanson argued, the rioters will continue to cause disruptions until there are consequences for them -- until they are told, “you do that again and you’re not going to like it."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

“When we start talking like that and we start indicting people who break the law, you'll find that it's sort of like a glass menagerie,” he said. “It'll just collapse because it doesn't have popular support ... People are just scared. And I think if they raise up and they say, 'No more,’ it will dissipate.”

===

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/roger-stone/roger-stone-antifa-and-black-lives-matter-thugs-are-going-be-clubbing-people-suburbs

Roger Stone: Antifa and Black Lives Matter “thugs” are going to be “clubbing” people in the suburbs to suppress voting

09/18/20 4:25 PM EDT

roger Stone continues to lay the groundwork for Trump to declare martial law

09/18/20 1:26 PM EDT

https://www.mediamatters.org/roger-stone/roger-stone-continues-lay-groundwork-trump-declare-martial-law

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/warning-left-wing-coup-trumpist-media-prep-their-audience-election-unrest

no lnx many

Warning of a left-wing coup, Trumpist media prep their audience for election unrest

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 09/18/20 10:25 AM EDT

Trump

Molly Butler / Media Matters

Nearly 5 million people were watching on Tuesday night as a Fox News host who claims that white supremacy is a hoax and a former speechwriter for President Donald Trump who was fired for speaking at a white nationalist conference spun out a wild-eyed conspiracy theory portraying mail-in voting as a sinister Democratic cabal’s coup attempt.

Tucker Carlson opened the segment by telling his viewers that Democrats were promoting mail-in voting not as a way to boost safe turnout during a pandemic, but because “they want the uncertainty over the outcome of the election, so they can manipulate the results.” His guest, Revolver News’ Darren Beattie, then explained that “a very specific type of coup called the color revolution” is “unfolding before our eyes.”

A color revolution, Beattie explained, is “a regime change model favored by many in our national security apparatus, particularly against Eastern European countries to overthrow target regimes that they don't like.” (They were actually peaceful protests that toppled despots in places previously dominated by the Soviet Union.) And now, he claimed, that model is being applied to the United States, with “color revolution professionals” deliberately generating election fraud in order “to use lawfare in order to overturn the 2020 election.”

Right-wing media figures generally push a baseline level of apocalyptic rhetoric about the purported predations of progressives. But Trumpist media have reached a dangerous fever pitch over the last week or so, even by that standard. With polls showing Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden following the party conventions and the election only weeks away, commentators like Carlson are preparing their audiences to treat a Trump defeat as a left-wing coup -- and encouraging the president toward an authoritarian response.

Their deranged statements are fed by -- and fuel -- the president’s own unhinged remarks. Trump has portrayed himself as “saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.” He describes his political opposition as supporters of “angry mobs,” “far-left fascism,” and “left-wing cultural revolution” so dangerous that he has even endorsed extrajudicial executions. And all the while, he’s been openly claiming that he could not possibly lose a fairly held election, and that any defeat would be the result of a Democratic election fraud conspiracy.

Carlson’s show is the most prominent vehicle fearmongering about a Democratic coup, but it is not the only one. A new special from The Blaze TV’s Glenn Beck is titled “CIVIL WAR: The Way America Could End in 2020,” and it details how “the Left is grooming us for an Eastern European-style color revolution this election.” His complex plot sprawls over three chalkboards and features mail-in voting as a vector for “something dangerous happening in November if we don’t act now.” (Beck praised Carlson during the program for the way he has been “putting the puzzle pieces together.”) The Trumpist publication The Federalist has offered up a similar “coup” theory.

The right-wing “coup” talk is the natural result of their demagoguery and dehumanization of the political opposition. Months ago, Trumpist media figures began warning that civilization itself was on the ballot in the fall, with Trump standing as the only thing preventing the left from making America “unrecognizable.” That type of rhetoric has only escalated, producing ever-more-inflammatory claims about what Trump’s defeat might mean to the safety and security of his supporters.

Over the last week or so alone:

Carlson described Black Lives Matter as “poison” that “we have to fight” because “if we’re going to survive as a country, we must defeat this.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Bill McGurn explained that he bought a gun in case “100 or 200 people bent on violence” show up in his suburb.

Fox’s Laura Ingraham and the pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan baselessly attributed the massive western wildfires to left-wing arsonists, blasting false rumors circulating on social media to millions of viewers and listeners.

Fox contributor Dan Bongino claimed that “we're watching the greatest nation in the history of sentient beings collapse in front of our face.”

Fox host Sean Hannity said that U.S. cities have become “war zones” and that there is a “war on police now.”

And Charlie Kirk, a frequent Fox guest and head of the Trumpist youth group Turning Point USA, warned on his podcast that if Trump loses, leftists seeking “bloodthirsty revenge” will “come for us all. They will come for your children.”

Some are taking their hatred of the left to lawless, authoritarian conclusions.

Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of the president, said during an appearance earlier this month on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars network that if Trump were to lose (illegitimately as a result of voter fraud, of course), he should try to retain power by having federal agents seize purportedly tainted ballots, using martial law or the Insurrection Act to carry out widespread arrests, and nationalizing state police forces.

Fox’s Mark Levin, meanwhile, has also urged Trump to consider invoking the Insurrection Act -- but he argued that it would be needed if he wins. “He will have to use it to put down the enemy,” Levin explained on his radio show last week.

“The enemy is antifa, the enemy is Black Lives Matter, and the enemy is anybody that is going to use rioting, arson, looting, violence against our country to try to overthrow our country,” he added. “Those are traitors. That's treasonous.”

Extremist violent rhetoric is nothing new for right-wing media. Glenn Beck made it a staple of Fox News during President Barack Obama’s first term. Before the midterm elections, Fox warned its audience members that they needed to vote for Republicans to protect themselves from being killed by Democratic mobs.

But this sort of demagoguery can come with a heavy price. Beck’s rhetoric inspired an attempted domestic terror attack against one of his regular targets that ended with a firefight with law enforcement. And in the days before the 2018 midterm elections, a Trump superfan sent bombs to leftist leaders whom Fox commentators had attacked.

There’s still six weeks to go before the election. How will this spate of violent rhetoric end?

IN THIS ARTICLE

Voter Fraud and Suppression

Voter Suppression

Related

Fox News fuels Trump’s dangerous Portland “law and order” strategy

07/21/20 3:52 PM EDT

Desperate Trumpists say civilization is on the ballot as Biden lead grows

06/24/20 11:06 AM EDT

How Tucker Carlson became the Fox host Trump listens to the most

07/08/20

------

===

gohmert dispenses with cultural bit:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/louie-gohmert-is-a-dangerous-fool-just-like-the-president-he-so-admires/

no lnx

Michael Winship / Common Dreams August 2, 2020

A few years ago, while I was president of the Writers Guild of America, East, several union members and I went down to Washington to hold a midday briefing on Capitol Hill about net neutrality.

We were in the House Judiciary Committee hearing room in the Rayburn office building. To lure an audience, on a table at the back, we provided a pile of free paper bag lunches for the small crowd. As usual with this sort of event, most of the people who showed up were hungry young congressional staffers but at one point, a colleague poked me in the ribs, pointed and said, “Look—an actual congressman is grabbing a couple of our lunches!”

“Doesn’t count,” I replied. “It’s Louie Gohmert.”

Yes, Louie Gohmert, the man the Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt described just this week as “America’s dumbest and craziest congressman.” The man who claimed the Obama White House had been infiltrated by “many Muslim Brotherhood members” and once tried to nominate as Speaker of the House a man who had just been beaten for reelection. The man who once declared that same-sex marriage caused Noah’s flood and that Charlottesville was a “false flag” operation, with people posing as KKK and Black Lives Matter protesters bused in to make trouble. The man who outed the alleged whistleblower during the impeachment proceedings and voted against a Federal anti-lynching law. And on and on…

In the latest chapter of the ongoing saga of East Texas US Rep. Gohmert holding onto his title as the biggest blockhead in Congress (admittedly, there are a lot of contenders), it was revealed that Gohmert tested positive for COVID-19 after weeks of walking around the capitol and congressional offices without a mask. His condition was caught when he was prescreened by the White House as he was getting ready to fly to West Texas with Donald Trump on Air Force One. Who knows how long he’d been walking the halls and corridors spreading contagion along with his own innate cheer and charm?

Previously, he had claimed that he didn’t needed to wear a mask because he was being tested on a regular basis. The day before his diagnosis was announced, he was sitting maskless at the House Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General William Barr and at one point was seen leaving a nearby men’s room with Barr. There was minimal social distancing and Barr wasn’t wearing a mask, either.

Upon receiving word of Gohmert’s positive test, the following occurred:

Rather than call and immediately self-quarantine, he went to his office to personally inform the staff of his status. It’s uncertain as to whether he was wearing a mask.

A Gohmert aide tweeted Jake Sherman at Politico, “When you write your story, can you include the fact that Louie requires full staff to be in the office, including three interns, so that ‘we could be an example to America on how to open up safely.’ When probing the office, you might want to ask how often people were berated for wearing masks.” Gohmert denied the beratement accusation.

Subsequently, Sherman tweeted, “Ive gotten a flood of emails from republican staffers who say they too are being forced to come to the hill without a mask now.” (sic)

In a video, Gohmert idiotically argued that wearing a mask – assuming he ever was wearing one —  might have made him sick. “I can’t help but wonder if by keeping a mask on,” he said, “keeping it in place — if I might’ve got some germ, some of the virus, on the mask and breathed it in.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy accidentally referred to Gohmert as “Congressman COVID.”

As per The Washington Post, on Wednesday night, Gohmert “told Fox News host Sean Hannity he and his doctor already had agreed on a treatment: hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug pushed by President Trump and his allies despite warnings from the Food and Drug Administration and medical experts that it isn’t effective as a coronavirus treatment and could carry significant health risks. ‘My doctor and I are all in.'”

This all would be funny in a sardonic, blackly humorous sort of way if not for the fact that Gohmert consistently has spread misinformation about the virus, and hails from a state where the governor and other elected Republican officials were in denial about COVID, reopened too early and as of this writing have 436,402 confirmed coronavirus cases and 7,107 deaths.

And then there’s this: last Sunday, competing demonstrations were held at a public square in downtown Tyler, Texas, part of Gohmert’s district. One was a pro-police protest—with MAGA hats, Trump 2020 signs and tee shirts and at least one Confederate flag—the other a smaller counterprotest in support of Gohmert’s Democratic opponent for the House and against the presence of anonymous Federal law enforcement in Portland, Oregon.

Earlier in the week, Esquire‘s Charlie Pierce gave a heads up as to what happened next. Here’s part of an account, as reported by a local news site, The Gilmer Mirror:

Armed supporters of Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Tyler) brutally beat and assaulted Ryan Miller, the campaign manager for Gohmert’s opponent, Hank Gilbert (D-Tyler) around 2:30 PM CST Sunday during a peaceful rally organized to protest the unconstitutional occupation of Portland, Oregon on the courthouse square in downtown Tyler.

Miller was attacked by at least four protesters, some of whom were armed, and sustained blows to the head and other parts of his body, as well as a large gash under his eye. The incident occurred as officers from the Tyler Police Department drove around the square idly, waving at the Blue Lives Matter counter-protesters who had come to support Gilbert’s opponent.

Gohmert’s supporters disrupted the rally by shouting, ‘Louie! Louie! Louie!’ repeatedly, including while Miller was being brutally attacked.

A police report has been filed with Tyler police, who showed up on the square after the violence was well-underway.

Tyler police say their investigation is ongoing. But when Louie Gohmert was asked about the incident, he refused to condemn the attack and characteristically, turned the situation on its head. He responded (in part), “[W]hat came to my mind is the violence Democrat leaders paid to create at Trump campaign events in 2016, followed by Democrats then claiming Donald Trump incited violence. They created the mess, then blamed candidate Trump. There are Democrats and Marxists doing the same thing this year, as well.

… It is unfortunate that extremists wanted to bring the violent protests and riots we’ve seen around the country to our peaceable area here in East Texas. …The goal of the Marxist groups is to destroy this great nation through violence and intimidation, which calls into question why anyone of sound mind would want to support and replicate these violent activities in Tyler. That comes from either terrible judgment or an intent to use Bolshevik or Mao tactics.

Contrast that inflammatory lying nonsense and all his other bloviating rhetoric with the final words left us on Thursday by another congressman, the late John Lewis, laid to rest in Atlanta with bouquets of righteous eloquence from friends and colleagues, among them House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Presidents Bush, Clinton and Obama.

“Democracy is not a state,” Rep. Lewis wrote in his farewell. “It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself… In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”

We can make fun of Louie Gohmert; he’s an easy target. But for all the buffoonery, he’s a very dangerous fellow, an enabler of Donald Trump and the forces that seek to undermine and destroy everything that John Lewis and the speakers at his funeral represent, especially true freedom and patriotism, unity and equal justice under the law.

You can go ahead and laugh at Louie Gohmert but remember, he represents the views of far too many of our fellow Americans—and he’s probably heading for re-election to his eighth term in the House.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-administration-insisted-this-democratic-congressman-hold-hearings-in-person-now-he-has-19

no lnx

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/yale-philosopher-and-author-of-how-fascism-works-explains-why-the-pandemic-offers-trump-a-dangerous-opportunity-to-rule-by-decree/

an 520 cdv stanley

...It is obvious that the Trump administration was going to move from stopping “illegal immigration” by nonwhite people and other stigmatized groups to then finding a way to stop legal immigration. Now Trump and Miller are using the coronavirus as an excuse to do just that. That Trump announced such a change on Hitler’s birthday should have been much bigger news. That the news media did not pick up on that date and the announcement, quite frankly, is shocking to me.

Who is Trump’s real audience? What other ways is he signaling his intent to them?

This goes back to the philosopher Carl Schmitt. The friend-enemy distinction is at the heart of fascist ideology.By summoning the logic of the friend-enemy distinction during a war or other type of dire emergency, then all actions by the leader or ruler are justified. The truth does not matter when you are fighting an enemy. There is no democratic way of dealing with the enemy or resolving the crisis or emergency. Science is not a solution. One must use any means available, be it fair or not fair. That’s what the friend-enemy distinction does. Again, it is Social Darwinism. Kill or be killed.

The anti-lockdown “protests” have featured armed right-wing paramilitaries and militias. What is their role in failing democracies and the emergence of fascism and authoritarianism?

Fascism involves the typed of paramilitary forces we have seen in Michigan and elsewhere during Trump’s time in office, and before as well. Trump has constantly called for his supporters to use force against their and his “enemies.” Trump is trying to organize armed paramilitary groups on his behalf if there is a contested 2020 presidential election or some other outcome he does not like.

Trump’s paramilitary forces are making violent threats against Democratic elected officials and other lawmakers. The armed militia that tried to take over the Michigan state capitol building by blocking the governor’s door is an example of such a threat.

Right now, we are seeing how many men with guns can be called out on to the street by Donald Trump and his administration. The United States military is controlled by civilians. But with Trump’s paramilitary forces and other armed groups, he can give them orders and then claim some type of plausible deniability. These types of armed militias and paramilitaries are given license to act by Donald Trump and other authoritarians.

The official leaders in a full-on authoritarian regime or failing democracy then deny responsibility for the violence. The history of fascism repeatedly shows that leaders such as Donald Trump inspire these militias and paramilitaries to act, and then Trump can say, “No, that violence and those groups have nothing to do with me. They’re not the government. Those are some random people on the street!”

What is the role of higher education in resisting fascism and authoritarianism, especially during this emergency?

One must locate the attack on colleges and universities within an international perspective. If you look at the other countries which are under the control of far-right leaders, such as Brazil, India or Hungary, they all have featured incredible attacks on universities and other sites of higher education and learning. Academic freedom has been overturned. Schools have been defunded. Universities and their professors, staff and students have been targets of right-wing violence. In these regimes, universities are being attacked for supposedly being hotbeds of left-wing ideology.

In the United States such attacks are being mainstreamed by the right wing, in terms of attacking colleges and universities by slurring them as sites of “cultural Marxism.”

In terms of dismantling resistance to fascism, how does that work?

If we cannot physically gather together it makes it harder to resist. Universities are sites of resistance, which is why they are always targeted by fascists and authoritarians. Universities are places for free speech, questioning the government and engaging with challenging ideas about the relationship between power and society.

What happens when there is an educational system which does not teach critical thinking and engaged citizenship? What types of citizens are being produced by such an educational system?

Those citizens will not be democratic, capable of understanding, nurturing, participating in and protecting a healthy democracy. Democratic citizens criticize the powerful. That is what they do.

The goal of these authoritarians and right-wingers in the United States is to reduce and replace critical thinking that is taught and learned in the humanities and social sciences with just a “great books” curriculum and job training. Any other type of education and thinking is to be vilified as “cultural Marxism.”

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gloves off 2020, drop culture bit?

wapo 220

By Paul Kane

February 26, 2020 at 1:27 PM EST

Sen. Rubio says Sanders is a Marxist, not a democratic socialist

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) continued to press his argument Wednesday that Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, isactually a Marxist— offering a preview of the kind of Republican attacks the senator from Vermont could face if he becomes the Democratic nominee.

“Bernie Sanders is actually not a socialist. His sympathies and ideas are Marxist,” Rubio said in a tweet, referring to the ideology named for 19th-century German philosopher Karl Marx.

Rubio attached a clip of an appearance on Fox News from Tuesday night in which he made that argument.

“This is Marxism, and Marxism is based on the belief that no person has any value as an individual, that your value is that you’re a member of a class,” Rubio told host Sean Hannity. “Second, Marxism is based on the belief that an employer and an employee, a worker and an owner, can’t both help each other and both be better off.”

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omg 1st guaido sotu and now:

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/cpac-to-feature-authoritarian-brazilian-politician-eduardo-bolsonaro/

Organizers of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference portray themselves as lovers of freedom, but among this year’s speakers will be Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s authoritarian President Jair Bolsonaro and the leader of a right-wing party in the Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies. In January, the Brazilian government filed criminal charges against American journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been a harsh critic of the Bolsonaro administration.

The American Conservative Union, the group that puts on CPAC, heralded the younger Bolsonaro. Tweeting last week about Eduardo Bolsonaro’s planned appearance, ACU chair Matt Schlapp wrote, “In 2019 ACU hosted several international CPAC events, one of which was #CPACbrazil, thanks to @BolsonaroSP. At #CPAC2020 he’ll share how our conservative movement inspires freedom-loving people across the globe & how the US & Brazil can work together to stop socialism.”

But Eduardo Bolsonaro seems keen to “stop socialism” with authoritarianism. Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is also the regional representative of former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s global right-wing group The Movement, warned recentlythat the government could resort to repression to deal with protests and leftists “via a new AI-5.” The Guardian’s Tom Phillips explained:

That was a reference to one of the most traumatic events in recent Brazilian history – December 1968’s Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5) – when Brazil’s military rulers moved to extinguish growing political unrest by indefinitely outlawing freedom of expression and assembly and closing congress.

“The AI-5 was an instrument intended to intimidate people … It allowed the dictatorship to repress all opposition and dissent,” the historians Lilia Schwarz and Heloisa M Starling wrote in their recent “biography” of Brazil.

Eduardo Bolsonaro’s comments reportedly shocked many Brazilians, but they aligned with previous statements made by his father, who also served in the legislature before being elected president in 2018 During his presidential campaign, the theme of which was “Brazil before everything, and God above all,” Jair Bolsonaro supported the torture carried out by the military dictatorship that ran the country from 1964 to 1985, and warned that under his regime, minorities would have to“bow to the majority … or disappear.”

Right Wing Watch noted last year, a week after Jair Bolsonaro’s inauguration, that he “didn’t waste much time issuing executive orders and taking other actions going after the people he had targeted in his campaign rhetoric: the LGBTQ community; indigenous people; descendants of former slaves; civil servants deemed not on board with Bolsonaro’s ideological agenda; nonprofit organizations; and the media.”

Just this week, Eduardo Bolsonaro launched a social media attack on filmmaker Petra Costa, whose documentary “The Edge of Democracy” has been nominated for an Academy Award, The Guardian reported. Eduardo Bolsonaro tweeted that Costa was a “scumbag” and a liar. He and other government officials are angry about the movie and an interview in which Costa criticized​ government policies encouraging the plunder of the Amazon region, a spike in police killings, ​the administration’s anti-gay actions and increased government censorship​.

In August 2018, months before the election that made his father president, Eduardo Bolsonaro met with Bannon and announced that Bannon would be offering suggestions on online strategy and data analysis for his father’s presidential campaign. He declared that he and Bannon would “join forces” against “cultural Marxism.”

Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign was backed by U.S. religious-right leaders, including former Rep. Michele Bachmann, who met with Eduardo Bolsonaro and recorded a video message to Brazilian Christians urging them to vote “only for a candidate for the president of Brazil who will support moving the Brazilian embassy ​[in Israel] to Jerusalem.” Trump-supporting “prophet” Cindy Jacobs and her husband Mike Jacobs declared that Jair Bolsonaro is establishing God’s kingdom in Brazil—turning it from a “goat nation” into a “sheep nation.” ​(There’s a biblical passage that refers to Jesus’s second coming when all the nations will be gathered before him and he, like a shepherd, will separate the sheep from the goats.)

The Times of Israel reported that, in a visit to Israel in December, Eduardo Bolsonaro portrayed the trip as a first step toward moving Brazil’s embassy to Jerusalem this year. He refused to endorse a two-state solution to peace and said he could imagine the government closing the Palestinian embassy in Brazil. While in Israel, Eduardo “reiterated his opposition to gay marriage,” saying in a television interview “that if he wedded his dog it would still not make them a family,” the Times of Israel reported.

The Bolsonaro government has been warmly embraced by the Trump administration as an ally in promoting “family values” around the world. At Jair Balsonaro’s inauguration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave the new president a hug.

Last summer Jair Bolsonaro announced plans to make Eduardo Bolsonaro the country’s ambassador to the U.S, touting Eduardo’s friendship with President Trump’s sons, but the plan was abandoned in the face of resistance to “such a blatant act of nepotism.” President Trump had supported the plan, saying, “I know his son, and that’s probably why they did it. I don’t think it’s nepotism.”

Tags: Eduardo Bolsonaro Jair Bolsonaro CPAC 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC

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http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/7/23/8287/32273

chip B

I

Another source of the conspiracy theory about "Cultural Marxism" is the international network of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. The LaRouchite Schiller Institute has an early (1992) article outlining the claim of a vast conspiracy of "Cultural Marxism"

Posts decying "Cultural Marxism"(kulturmarxisme in Breivik's posts) can be found all over the Internet. For example, the website http://culturalmarxism.orgpromotes a DVD featuring Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, G. Edward Griffin, Ted Baehr, and Edwin Vieira.

Breivik thought Cultural Marxists = multiculturalists = Islamization of Europe. This racist right-wing conspiracy theory is tied to the Islamophobic "Demographic Winter" thesis. In his online posts, Breivik considered himself a cultural conservative and condemned "Cultural Marxism."The idea of "Cultural Marxism" on the political right is an antisemitic conspiracy theory cliaming that a small group of Marxist Jews formed the Frankfurt School and set out to destroy Western Culture through a conspiracy to promote multiculturalism and collectivist economic theories.

In 1987, Paul Weyrich of the DC-based Free Congress Foundation commissioned a study, Cultural Conservatism: Toward A New National Agendawhich argued that cultural issues provided antiliberalism with a more unifying concept than economic conservatism. Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice followed in 1991. William “Bill” Lind spent years building the Center for Cultural Conservatism at Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation.

Speakers at the WCF warned of a Demographic Winter at the World Congress of Families meeting in Poland in 2007. See for example, John D. Mueller, "A Family-Friendly Fiscal Policy to Weather "Demographic Winter.'" Left unstated but clearly understood, is that it is White people who face a "Demographic Winter" as the population of Muslims, Arabs, and other "non-White" people increases in nations.

According to Breivik:

There must be more focus on multicultural doctrines (multiculturalism = kulturmarxisme) as it is this ideology that allows the political mechanisms that result in continued Islamization (Islamic demographic warfare). People must learn what multiculturalism...doctrines do with Europe: 

Systematic breakdown: 

European Christianity

European tradition

European Cultures

European (a national) identity

Sovereign States

Of course, it is known that kulturmarxistene [Cultural Marxists] and humanities in Europe think they are going to reform Islam but they will fail like all before them have done. We, for our part, the cultural conservatives and anti-Marxist liberal, must focus on the basic problem - multiculturalism (kulturmarxisme) and how to combat this...

William Lind promotes a form of “cultural conservatism” that has shifted into antisemitic conspiracism. Lind is an analyst and author at the Free Congress Foundation FCF founded by the late Christian Right strategist Paul Weyrich. FCF is a significant player in Inside-the-Beltway politics [Cite: Berlet, “Into the Mainstream.”]

As Joe Conason reports, "Lind …concocts theories about the Marxist Jews who have infected American culture”

Lind wrote an essay in 1999 suggesting that slavery did not damage race relations in the south as much as the federal government intervention during Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. Furthermore, according to Lind, if the Confederacy had won, "at least part of North America would still stand for Western culture, Christianity and an appreciation of the differences between ladies and gentlemen." Lind claims that the federal government now imposes an "official American state ideology" featuring the "cultural Marxism of Political Correctness" [Cite: Lind, “What If The South Had Won The Civil War?”].

Lind later explained to a Holocaust denial group that cultural Marxism was a conspiracy concocted by a handful of Jews in Germany at the Frankfurt School, according to Bill Berkowitz's article "Reframing the Enemy." on Cultural Marxism] for Intelligence Report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Weyrich provided office space for the late Laszlo Pasztorwho served as an advisor on Eastern Europe to Weyrich. The aging Pasztor was a member of the fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross Party in the 1940s at a time when it was collaborating with the Nazis to liquidate Jews at the direction of Gestapo administrator, and SS Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann [Cite: Russ Bellant, Holly Sklar, Chip Berlet]. As Holly Sklar and I wrote in 1990:

The U.S. government is working with former Arrow Cross official Laszlo Pasztor, a convicted Nazi collaborator. Having lost the battle to impose fascism on Europe, Pasztor immigrated to the U.S. He was following in the footsteps of thousands of Nazis and Nazi collaborators protected and recruited by the C.I.A. to resume the war on communism.

In the 1950's, Pasztor eventually joining the Republican Party's campaign ethnic outreach division. He recruited racists, neofascists and anti-Semites. Pasztor's political career flourished, and by 1987 he, was boasting of his frequent visits to the White House, State Department and Helsinki Commission. [Cite: Holly Sklar and Chip Berlet, “Harbinger of Democracy?: The N.E.D.’s Ex-Nazi Advisor,” The Nation, April 2, 1990.]

The ideological connection here is the idea that Marxism & communism threaten the very survival of Western Culture. Pasztor was a dedicated anti-communist after WWII, and was able to pass himself off as a patriot defending Hungary--and later the United States--from the pernicious plague of Marxism.

The trope of Cultural Marxism combines this view of political economy with a narrow view of Christian superiority and an ethnocentric White Nationalism. In both sectors--Christian superiority and ethnocentric White Nationalism--there is a great fear of Muslim immigration.

"Cultural Marxism," the Hoax Conspiracy Theory

The Frankfort School developed theories of "cultural criticism," and "The Culture Industry," but the term "Cultural Marxism" is a derogatory term developed by antisemitic conspiracy theorists.

There are a handful of Cultural Marxist sociologists around the world who use aspects of the Frankfurt School theories, Flowing out of several strains of sociology are sections that use Race/Gender/Class analysis and include a few Cultural Marxists. So the real Cultural Marxism is an analytical lens used primarily in academia, not a global conspiracy to destroy Western Culture.

So Breivik opposed "Cultural Marxism," the hoax conspiracy theory, but probably knew little of the actual "critical theories" of the Frankfort School, which are still used within sectors of modern sociology. See, for example, the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

Apocalyptic Christian Belief and Islamophobia

Among right-wing Christians who fear Muslims there are some that see Islam as the false religion of the Antichrist in the End Times in their idiosyncratic reading of Biblical prophecy.

This apocalyptic view is widespread in some areas. For example a poll found that 15% of Republicans in New Jersey though President Barack Obama might be the "Antichrist" who is Satan's chief henchman in the End Times. Another 14% were convinced Obama was the Antichrist.

As Robert C. Fuller observed in his classic Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession, the candidates for the starring roles vary over time in fundamentalist eschatological analysis. Some see Islam as the religion of the False Prophet, the theological sidekick to the Antichrist. After the terror attacks on 9/11/2001 there was an increase in the demonization of Muslims in some Christian evangelical circles, especially those in which apocalyptic conspiracy theories flourish.

For example, Hal Lindsey joined in the Islam-bashing in 2002 with The Everlasting Hatred: The Roots of Jihad. Speculation in conspiracy circles that Obama is secretly a Muslim, perhaps born in Kenya, add fuel to this bigoted fire.

Paul S. Boyer, author of When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, suggests that religious views about Biblical prophecy in the United States have “always had an enormous, if indirect and underrecognized, role [in] shaping public policy.” If the message of apocalyptic demonization is not clear, try reading one of the novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in their Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic novels which have sold more than 70 million copies.

Gershom Gorenberg blasts the authors because they:

"promote conspiracy theories; they demonize proponents of arms control, ecumenicalism, abortion rights and everyone else disliked by the Christian right; and they justify assassination as a political tool. Their anti-Jewishness is exceeded by their anti-Catholicism. Most basically, they reject the very idea of open, democratic debate. In the world of Left Behind, there exists a single truth, based on a purportedly literal reading of Scripture; anyone who disagrees with that truth is deceived or evil.”

The main villain of the Left Behind series of books, Gorenberg notes, is “Nicolae Carpathia, the man who turned the United Nations into a one-world government with himself as dictator,” on behalf of Satan. In fact, Carpathia is the dreaded Antichrist. According to Gorenberg:

Perhaps the most striking scene in the Left Behind series is the climax of book six, The Assassins [when] Carpathia is speaking at a mass rally in Jerusalem. Out in the crowd is [underground Christian resistance leader] Rayford Steele, armed with a high-tech handgun. He prays for God’s guidance, and finds himself firing what appears to be a fatal shot at Carpathia. Intentionally or not, this is an eerie rewrite of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination at a Tel Aviv peace rally in 1995—but the authors are on the side of the fanatic killer.”

All of these conspiracy theories and more swirl through the Tea Party movement and beyond. LaHaye, before his novels, wrote a series of books popular in the Christian Right in which he laid out the master plan of the conspiracy of liberal secular humanists. Big government and collectivism was part of the sinister plan.

Whether it is based on religious or secular themes, the idea of a vast longstanding conspiracy of Cultural Marxists to destroy Western Culture creates apocalyptic aggression, in which believers in the conspiracy theory decide to act first against the named enemies.

Important Links, Articles, Updates

Norway Terror Suspect Described as Far-Right Nationalist Islamophobe | Accuracy.Org. Has great links to several articles

@ChipBerlet: Media lost in Norway suspect's posts. Cultural Marxism (Jewish plot)+White Nationalism+Islamophobia+US Christian Right conspiracy theories (Chip's Tweet)

In Europe, Where's the Hate? | The Nation Really compelling article by Gary Younge in 2007. Predictive & sad.

Via IREHR: Norway terror suspect"Breivik appears to be a fan of the Tea Party's favorite Islamophobe, Pamela Geller"

This link will take you to a Google Translation page of Norway suspect Anders Behring Breivik's comments on Document.no

@MaxBlumenthal: Max Blumenthal: Screed blaming Muslims for attack by @jrubinblogger is still up, uncorrected by Washington Post

@MaxBlumenthal: Max BlumenthalPam Geller, who initially blamed the gov of Norway (and Muslims) for oslo attacks, is now insisting that Breivik is not her Fjordman

Bill Berkowitz: : Nightmare in Norway and the Threat of Fundamentalist Christian, Blonde, Blue-eyed Terrorists in Our Midst

David Neiwert: Norway terrorist Breivik was an ardent subscriber to theories of 'Cultural Marxism' | Crooks and Liars

Thanks to several colleagues for sending me tips and links, especially Julie Ingersoll, Devin Burghart, and Bill Berkowitz.

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[Note: Some sources questioned whether all the political posts circulated in Norway were by Breivik alone. I need to be cautious here, so I investigated and have not included material that is in dispute.]

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