Little more than a week into his foray as Virginia’s governor, Glenn Youngkin (R) has injected statewide chaos into the education system after issuing an executive order that makes school mask mandates optional, Kerry Eleveld wrote at DailyKos (1/24).
The order, which was due to take effect Jan. 24, pitted parents against parents, parents against administrators, and drew a rash of lawsuits aiming to block it from being implemented.
The vast majority of Virginia school districts have required in-school masking throughout the pandemic. But virtually no one knew what to expect after most superintendents in the tony Virginia suburbs just outside the Beltway vowed to continue enforcing mask mandates, and the state’s lieutenant governor threatened on Fox News to yank funding from any non-compliant districts.
“The governor [is] throwing jet fuel on an already divisive culture clash in Virginia, and inviting lawsuits that will now consume much of his administration,” Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, told the Washington Post.
As some parents protested in support of mandates and others planned anti-mask walk-ins with their children, many school boards braced to enforce masking measures that would ensure the safety of their students.
“We advised our members to report students and staff who don’t want to wear their masks,” Kimberly Adams, board chair of the 4,000-strong Fairfax Education Association, told the Post. “Now it’s just a waiting game to see what happens.”
Arlington was one of six districts that signed on to a lawsuit brought by Fairfax County Public Schools seeking an immediate injunction to block Youngkin’s order from being implemented. Fairfax filed the legal challenge on grounds that the order violated the Virginia Constitution, which states: “The supervision of schools in each school division shall be vested in a school board.” State lawmakers also passed a law last summer mandating that schools adopt federal health guidelines to the “maximum extent practicable.” CDC guidelines currently recommend in-school masking in K-12 schools for everyone aged 2 and up.
According to a Post tally, school officials in at least 58 of the state’s some 130 districts vowed to defy Youngkin’s order and continue requiring masks.
Meanwhile, things escalated in some rural areas of the state as angry parents agitated for their districts to lift the mandates. One anti-masking mother in Page County threatened school officials if they failed to make mask-wearing optional.
“My children will not come to school on Monday with a mask on, that’s not happening,” Amelia King said at a Page County school board meeting last week. “And I will bring every single gun loaded and ready,” she said, adding, “I will see you Monday.” The board ultimately voted to follow Youngkin’s order and make masking optional.
Youngkin seemed to acknowledge that things were escalating out of control in a tweet over the weekend begging for people to stay calm and peaceful.
“While the legal process continues on the parental opt out of mask mandates for their children in schools, I urge everyone to love your neighbor, to listen to school principals, and to trust the legal process,” Youngkin tweeted Saturday (1/22).
That’s not the tweet of a governor who feels like they have a handle on things. That’s the tweet of a political novice who failed to anticipate the explosion before jumping on the pyre.
So much for Youngkin’s Midas touch and the GOP’s sure-fire education formula for the midterms. Youngkin just might end up being exhibit A in what suburban America can expect if they put Republicans in control in November: sheer chaos.
FLA. SCHOOL DISTRICT CANCELS HISTORY PROF’S LECTURE BECAUSE IT MIGHT BE LABELED ‘CRT.’ Florida’s “critical race theory” ban is working as intended: It caused the cancellation of a lecture on civil rights, but Florida officials get to act like that wasn’t the intent of the ban, Laura Clawson wrote at DailyKos (1/24).
J. Michael Butler, a history professor at Flagler College, was supposed to speak to Osceola County teachers on “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” making the case that the Civil Rights Movement neither began nor ended with Martin Luther King Jr., but extended for decades on either side of the 1950s and 1960s. School district officials canceled the event, though, as a direct result of moves by Florida Republicans, including a state Board of Education ban on teaching “theories that distort historical events,” including critical race theory (CRT), defined by the state board as teaching ”that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is also promoting a bill that would let parents sue schools if they don’t like what their kids are taught about race and decide to call it critical race theory.
”We needed an opportunity to review them prior to the training in light of the current conversations across our state and in our community about critical race theory,” Debra Pace, the superintendent of the Osceola County School District, wrote in an email to teachers planning to attend the event. School officials had only a summary of Butler’s presentation, and, Pace wrote, “I am mindful of the potential of negative distractions if we are not proactive in reviewing content and planning its presentation carefully.”
In translation, “Florida policy has us intimidated into wanting to second-guess a history professor’s history presentation to teachers, because it might include something someone would describe as critical race theory.” And it’s absolutely likely that a presentation showing the enduring relevance of civil rights activism would trigger some racists who are intent on denying the existence of racism. After all, we’re talking about a movement that has targeted children’s books about specific events in the Civil Rights Movement as being too extreme.
But a DeSantis spokeswoman insisted that this isn’t what the CRT ban was intended to do.
“Critical Race Theory and factual history are two different things. The endless attempts to gaslight Americans by conflating the two are as ineffective as they are tiresome,” she emailed NBC News. “So just to be clear, mixing up ‘teaching history’ with ‘teaching CRT’ is dishonest.”
Well, yeah. It is. But you know who’s doing exactly that in law after law and speech after speech, rebranding “critical race theory” as “anything that could make the most fragile of white people anxious”? Republicans. Like Ron DeSantis. One person’s “theories that distort historical events” can be another person’s carefully documented historical research showing that the stories we’ve always been told about history are inaccurate or leave out important parts of the story.
The CRT ban “makes it so that any topic that falls under the rubric can be labeled as potentially critical race theory,” Butler, the historian whose presentation was canceled, said. “And the end result is that any teacher training any educational program can be canceled, postponed, stonewalled so that it never happens.”
At least one local official agreed. “School districts in Florida are in a precarious position as we navigate the anti-CRT administrative order which has little guidance yet promises to have strong consequences if not implemented,” Osceola County school board member Terry Castillo said in a statement, noting that “school boards have been punished for going against the governor’s orders regarding mask mandates.”
Anti-CRT policies are “about putting the fear of God into teachers and administrators,” Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist tracking such policies, told Greg Sargent. “Teachers are going to avoid discussing certain topics altogether—topics related to race, sex, and American history that as a society we might want to discuss.
In Florida, that’s exactly what’s happening.
REPUBLICANS PREPARE NEW ‘CONTRACT ON AMERICA’ WITH ASSISTANCE OF NEWT GINGRICH. Few people in modern political history have done as much damage to our democracy as Newt Gingrich. As the prototypical, ideological Republican “bomb-thrower” who came of age during the Reagan “revolution” in the 1980s and joined the House Republican leadership in the 1990s, Gingrich ushered in an era of hyperpartisan viciousness and crass, unrelenting political rancor that finally reached its apotheosis in a GOP now firmly under the thumb of Donald Trump, Dartagnan noted at DailyKos (1/22).
As a co-author of the Republican Party’s infamous 1994 Contract with America (a revenue-gutting, deregulatory attack on government programs recast by President Bill Clinton as a Contract on America), Gingrich established the standard legislative template for all future attempts by conservatives at governance (actually “non-governance”) while in the process turning the “government shutdown” deficit-scolding and brinksmanship into routine tactics for Republicans whenever a Democrat occupies the Oval Office.
Gingrich is notable for creating a smear lexicon that he encouraged Republicans to adopt in which Democrats were routinely labeled with such pejoratives as “sick,” “decay,” “corrupt”and “traitors,” while Republicans were urged to self-describe their proposals with noble-sounding words like “caring,” “principled” and “common-sense.” He was a primary motivating force behind the churlish, politically driven impeachment of President Clinton. Facing a broadly based public backlash against both his party’s policies and his own abrasive personality, Gingrich was forced to resign as House speaker in 1998 and left Congress altogether the following year, spending his time as an erstwhile pundit on the conservative media circuit and regurgitating his ideas in high-priced speeches and insular, right-wing think tanks.
When relatively hapless Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy needed help in preparing his minions for the 2022 elections, Gingrich was a natural choice. As reported by Jeff Stein and Laura Meckler for the the Washington Post:
Newt Gingrich, whose “Contract with America” in 1994 is linked with the GOP takeover of Congress in that midterm cycle, said he has been advising House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) on a set of policy items for Republicans to take to voters ahead of the November elections. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.) and other members of House Republican leadership are also involved in the project, which is not expected to launch until the spring or summer.
As McCarthy himself told Breitbart last week, his Gingrich-inspired project for the midterms already has a working title: “We’ll come out with a Commitment to America … We’ve been working on policy.”
Gingrich, R-Ga., for suggesting that members of the panel may be jailed if Democrats lose the House in the midterms.
Gingrich said in an interview with Fox News Sunday (1/23) that Republicans would seek to take revenge on “mean” and “nasty” members of the committee investigating the Capitol attack.
“You’re going to have a Republican majority in the House and a Republican majority in the Senate. And all of these people who have been so tough and so mean and so nasty are going to be delivered subpoenas,” Gingrich predicted, accusing the panel of “running over the law” and “pursuing innocent people” with document requests. “It’s basically a lynch mob,” he said.
“I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down,” Gingrich added. “And the wolves are going to find out they are now sheep and they’re the ones who are going to face a real risk of, I think, jail for the kind of laws they’re breaking.”
Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Dan Bishop, R-N.C., among others, have also floated Republican revenge fantasies targeting the Biden administration after the Jan. 6 committee issued contempt referrals to the Justice Department against former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon. Igor Derysh noted at Salon (1/24). Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even suggested that a Republican House majority might move to impeach President Joe Biden whether it’s “justified or not.” (There is effectively no possibility that such an impeachment would result in conviction in the Senate: No matter how many seats Republicans win this year, they’ll be well short of the required 67.)
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the vice-chair of the Jan. 6 committee, called out Gingrich’s remarks on Twitter.
“A former Speaker of the House is threatening jail time for members of Congress who are investigating the violent Jan. 6 attack on our Capitol and our Constitution,” she wrote. “This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., one of the Democrats on the committee, called Gingrich’s remarks “bizarre.”
“I think Newt has really lost it,” she told CNN. “You know, it leaves me speechless. I mean, unless he is assuming that the government does get overthrown and there’s no system of justice.”
SWAT TEAM OF WINGNUT LEGAL APPARATUS WILL TRY NEW SUPREME COURT ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. More grim business was added to the agenda across the street from Congress Jan. 24. The Supreme Court added affirmative action to a docket that already looks like a rundown of a week’s worth of Hannity, Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (1/24). From the New York Times:
The court has repeatedly upheld similar programs, most recently in 2016. But recent changes in the court’s membership have made it more conservative, and the challenged programs are almost certain to meet skepticism.
The case against Harvard accused it of discriminating against Asian American students by using a subjective standard to gauge traits like likability, courage and kindness and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions.
Lawyers for Harvard said that the challengers had relied on a flawed statistical analysis and denied that the university discriminated against Asian American applicants. More generally, they said that race-conscious admissions policies are lawful.
The calculus is an easy one, Pierce noted: “minus Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, plus Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, equals Anything Can Happen Day. And the entire anti-affirmative-action SWAT team of the wingnut legal apparatus is lined up behind this one.”
“Under established precedent, to achieve the educational benefits that flow from student-body diversity,” lawyers for Harvard wrote in a brief urging the justices to deny review, “universities may consider race as one factor among many in a full, individualized evaluation of each applicant’s background, experiences and potential contributions to campus life.”
In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs made more familiar arguments, saying the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The university responded that its admissions policies fostered educational diversity and were lawful under longstanding Supreme Court precedents.
Both cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a legal entrepreneur who has organized many lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies and voting rights laws, several of which have reached the Supreme Court.
“Big fish. Small barrel,” Pierce noted.
UNION MEMBERSHIP DROPPED IN 2021. Union membership as a percentage of all US workers dropped from 10.8% to 10.3% in 2021, returning to its 2019 level. The bump in 2020 is instructive, since it came because, in the mass job loss of the pandemic, more nonunion workers lost their jobs, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (1/22). But the lousy numbers for union membership are also important to understand in the context of popular opinion and US labor law. Because public approval of unions is at its highest point since 1965, according to a 2021 Gallup survey.
The AFL-CIO pointed to the latter factor in responding to the new numbers. “In 2021, workers forcefully rejected low-wage, thankless jobs after a year of being called essential,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement. “In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clearer now than ever that our labor laws are designed to make joining a union as difficult as possible. Across this country, workers are organizing for a voice on the job and millions of Americans are standing in solidarity with union members on strike. If everyone who wanted to join a union was able to do so, membership would skyrocket. The PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act are how we get there.”
US OLIGARCHS POURED $1.2 BILLION INTO 2020 ELECTIONS. Marking the 12th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United decision, the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness on Jan. 21 published a report showing that US billionaires dumped a staggering $1.2 billion into the 2020 elections—a 39-fold increase compared to 2010, Jake Johnson reported at CommonDreams (1/21).
Over the course of the 2020 election cycle, ATF found, America’s 661 billionaires contributed nearly $1 out of every $10 spent attempting to influence the outcome and determine who sets policy for the nation.
Nearly a third of the billionaire campaign funding in 2020 came from the mega-rich couple Sheldon and Miriam Adelson—former President Donald Trump’s top donors—and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who doled out $152.5 million during the 2020 election cycle, not including the $1.1 billion he spent on his own short-lived Democratic White House bid.
Democratic businessman Tom Steyer, his wife Kathryn Taylor, and Republican hedge fund manager Ken Griffin also spent big in 2020, collectively donating over $400 million.
Frank Clemente, ATF’s executive director, said in a statement that the findings lay bare the “disastrous” consequences of the high court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which toppled longstanding campaign finance restrictions and opened the floodgates to unlimited election spending by corporations and rich individuals.
And the reason billionaires have so much cash to give to political campaigns, Clemente stressed, is that they’ve been able to accumulate vast fortunes without any real threat of higher taxes. ATF estimated in a separate report out earlier this week that the 10 richest US billionaires have added $1 billion to their combined wealth every day of the pandemic.
“Weak taxation of the wealthy combined with anemic regulation of campaign fundraising have handed America’s billionaires outsized political influence to go along with their huge economic clout,” said Clemente.
According to ATF’s analysis, the distribution of billionaire cash between Republican and Democratic candidates was pretty evenly split in 2020, with 55% of the total going to GOP campaigns.
CORRECTION: The article, “Republicans are arrayed against democracy,” by Roger Bybee in the 1/1-15/22 TPP, misstated the number of votes in three key states that could have turned around the presidential election. Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million, but redistribution of just 43,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin could have resulted in a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, which would have caused the election to be decided by a vote of House delegations, where Donald Trump would have had the advantage.
STUDY OF FAR-RIGHT EXTREMISTS WITH MILITARY BACKGROUNDS SUGGESTS PENTAGON FACES UPHILL BATTlE. One of the primary reasons that far-right groups like the Oath Keepers pose such a grave threat to American democracy is that they specifically recruit military and law enforcement service members and veterans into their organization—meaning that people who by training and nature are skilled at handling weapons and materials and are knowledgeable about engagement tactics, are being radicalized into their seditionist extremism, the kind we saw on display at the Jan. 6 insurrection, David Neiwert reported at DailyKos (1/19).
New statistics demonstrate that the problem is growing sharply worse. A recently released study of the military background of violent right-wing extremists found that the number of identifiable domestic extremists with previous or ongoing affiliations in the armed forces has grown fourfold in the past decade, with a particularly steep increase since 2017.
Concern about the presence of extremist elements within the ranks of the military became acute after the insurrection, when it emerged that nearly one in five of the people indicted for their actions that day were either military veterans or currently active members. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promptly ordered an internal assessment of the extent of far-right influence within the armed forces, which he then followed up by ordering anti-extremist training for the troops, provoking the wrath of right-wing pundits and the same extremist groups (such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys) targeted by the orders.
Surveying data from between 1990 and November 2021, the new study—titled “Extremism in the Ranks and After,” produced by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START)—identified at least 458 people with military backgrounds who had been involved in criminal acts motivated by political, economic, social, or religious goals.
Prior to 2010, there were only about seven such criminal extremists per year identified in the database used by the researchers, the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS). In the decade since, that average has jumped to 28.5 per year.
The study notes that the bulk of that increase is attributable to the sharp spike seen in recent years—particularly in 2017, 2020, and 2021. “Each of these years were marked by issues that mobilized comparatively large numbers of US extremists,” the study noted.
The 2021 numbers were skewed by the unusually high numbers of federal defendants charged in the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol. But even without those numbers, the study found an average of 17.7 people a year since 2010 with military backgrounds included in the PIRUS database.
The study found that about 60% of the identified violent extremists had plotted acts of violence, but only about 35% of them were successful. Some 3.8% had engaged in spontaneous acts. Half of the crimes targeted the federal government, military, or law enforcement, while 30% of the identified extremists were unrepentant in their white supremacist, nationalist, and xenophobic views.
“These individuals were affiliated with no fewer than 50 extremist groups, including local skinhead gangs and several national white supremacist organizations,” the study said.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2022
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