Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet:
Homeschooling Nazis
I wish that title were a droll euphemism for some awful policy, but I mean it literally. HuffPo’s Christopher Mathias reports: “The Saxons said they launched the “Dissident Homeschool” channel on Telegram after years of searching for and developing “Nazi-approved material” for their own home-schooled children — material they were eager to share.
The Dissident Homeschool channel — which now has nearly 2,500 subscribers — is replete with this material, including ready-made lesson plans authored by the Saxons on various subjects, like Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee (a “grand role model for young, white men”) and Martin Luther King Jr. (“the antithesis of our civilization and our people”).
There are copywork assignments available for parents to print out, so that their children can learn cursive by writing out quotes from Adolf Hitler. There are recommended reading lists with bits of advice like “do not give them Jewish media content,” and there are tips for ensuring that home-schooling parents are in “full compliance with the law” so that “the state” doesn’t interfere.”
Mathias puts this movement into the larger context of radicalized right-wing politics. We should consider how conservative politicians’ efforts to take over school boards, ban books, create voucher programs, and help to foster these homeschoolers.
“Meanwhile major right-wing figures are increasingly promoting home schooling as a way to save children from alleged “wokeness” — or liberal ideas about race and gender — in public and private schools. As extreme as the Dissident Homeschool channel is, the propaganda it shares targeting the American education system is just a more explicit and crass articulation of talking points made by Fox News hosts or by major figures in the Republican Party.”
And before I move on from this subject, I want to reiterate that Robert E. Lee was a traitor to our nation.
There were 8 full bird Colonels from Virginia in the United States Army in 1860.
6 did not commit treason.
1 resigned, took a commission in the Virginia Militia, then resigned that when Virginia provided the militia to the Confederate Army.
The other was Robert E. Lee.
— Dagger John 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@theSloopJohnM) 5:31 PM ∙ Jan 14, 2023
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Erasing LGBTQ People from Michigan Schools
Popular Information’s Judd Legum exposes radical conservatives’ efforts to erase LGBTQ people from Michigan schools by overloading districts with misleading requests to opt their children out of sex education requirements.
“A newly-formed conservative group is launching a brazen plan to remake Michigan public schools — using aggressive legal action to effectively mandate the erasure of LGBTQ people.
The effort, organized by the Great Schools Initiative (GSI), seeks to exploit a Michigan statute that allows parents to opt their children out of sex education. Michigan law allows schools to offer courses in sex education. The nature of this instruction is quite traditional, and by law must “stress that abstinence from sex is a responsible and effective method of preventing unplanned or out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease and is a positive lifestyle for unmarried young people.”
Legum explains that the people behind this effort are not hiding their motivations here. The question is whether the school districts and Michigan officials can effectively counter this horrible effort, given how previous conservative legislators wrote the state’s permissive laws in this area.
Far-Right Group Connected to Evangelicals Grows
The Guardian’s Peter Stone reports: “A far-right project that has helped spread Donald Trump’s false claims about voting fraud in 2020, and misinformation about Covid vaccines, is trying to expand its mission, while facing new criticism from scholars and religious leaders about its incendiary political and Christian nationalist messages.
ReAwaken America, a project of the Oklahoma-based entrepreneur Clay Clark, has hosted numerous revival-style political events across the US after receiving tens of thousands of dollars in initial funds in 2021 from millionaire Patrick Byrne, and become a key vehicle for pushing election denialism and falsehoods about Covid vaccines.
ReAwaken America also boasts close ties to retired Lt Gen Michael Flynn, who in December 2020 met with Trump, Byrne and others at the White House to plot ways to reverse Trump’s election loss. The meeting happened shortly after Trump pardoned Flynn, who was convicted for lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador before serving briefly as Trump’s national security adviser.”
The key element of this group is its ties to the Christian evangelical movement.
“Christian nationalism has deep roots in American history and has gained traction at different points,” said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. “The ReAwaken America Tour taps into the unholy well of Christian nationalism to sow doubt about the US election system and the safety of Covid vaccines while equating allegiance to Trumpism with allegiance to God.”
She added: “Clay Clark and others who run this tour are using the name of Jesus, holy scripture and worship music to promote a partisan political agenda and personal business interests.”
I once again ask how religious organizations can participate in these activities while keeping their tax-exempt status. The article explains that there has been a backlash within the Christian community, but I fear it isn’t large enough to make a difference as we start the 2024 presidential election cycle.
Abortion, Every Day
Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. The story that most caught my attention involves a 29-year-old Georgia woman who gave birth two months ago and wanted to get an IUD.
But, as Valenti writes: “Conservatives keep telling us they’re not coming for birth control, yet they don’t do much to hide what a total and complete lie that is. Last week, I spoke to a Georgia woman whose health insurance denied her coverage for an IUD because of the “sanctity of life.”
DeSantis and Destroy Florida Schools Until Voters Stop Him
The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols argues that Florida voters are responsible for stopping Governor Ron DeSantis’ efforts to destroy the state’s schools and universities.
Elections have consequences. DeSantis has every right to appoint radical conservatives to boards. He has every right to work with the legislature to restrict the school curriculum to own the libs.
Nichols writes: “Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.
Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”
As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.
Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.
But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.”
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The Cost of Fighting for Better Pay and Benefits
From November 14-December 23, 2022, 36,000 graduate student workers and 12,000 other academic employees at the University of California participated in the largest higher-education strike in history.
As a result, graduate students earned increases in pay and benefits. That was a start, but much more is required to ensure these students can afford to live in California. The fact that the University of California treated these graduate students so poorly does not reflect well on generations of leaders and legislators who failed to force the issue before the strike.
Now the other part of the cost comes due. The University of California is clawing back any wages paid during the strike. It is required to take back the money, but the union claims the University is handling it poorly.
EdSource’s Mikhail Zinshteyn provides the details: “But unions representing the striking workers allege that how the UC is going about this is all wrong. Rafael Jaime, president of the UAW 2865, the union of 19,000 teaching assistants, tutors and instructors, said the UC is violating state labor law by unilaterally docking pay without first allowing workers to review how much the university plans to claw back.
The UC is “well within their right to recover any money that was incorrectly paid out to workers who are on strike,” Jaime said in an interview Friday. “But there needs to be a fair process to make sure that workers aren’t left with additional hardships.”
Lawyers representing the three unions that struck last year filed an unfair labor practice charge against the UC on Thursday with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board. Core to the complaint is that the UC will deduct pay “without getting employee consent or first notifying employees of the actual deduction amounts before money was withheld from their paychecks,” the complaint read. “No other options were given to employees to ‘correct’ the payroll or otherwise review the University’s calculations before amounts would be withheld.”
State and federal law seem to require the university to take back money paid out to the graduate students and other faculty who participated in the strike. But they need to be fair about it. And administrators should be held accountable for the fact a strike was necessary for the graduate students to get these modest improvements.
Restoring Workers’ Freedoms
The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson explains why the Federal Trade Commission’s decision to start a process to ban companies from using noncompete agreements is so crucial to efforts to protect workers.
Meyerson writes, “The other freedom workers have lost is even more elemental, and fundamental: the right to leave one job to take another. A large number of American workers are compelled to sign noncompete agreements, with which their employers forbid them from taking a job at a rival firm or leaving their job to start a business of their own in the same field. In recent decades, emboldened by the courts’ attitude—ranging from indifference to hostility to worker rights—employers have expanded this practice from the relatively small number of professional workers privy to proprietary trade secrets to any workers who may at some point want to move from the burger joint they’re working at to the burger joint across the street.
Which is one reason why the Biden-appointed majority on the Federal Trade Commission announced in January that it was beginning a process to abolish noncompete agreements. “Economic liberty, not just political liberty, is at the heart of the American experiment,” FTC Chair Lina Khan wrote in a New York Times op-ed, explaining the proposal. “You’re not really free if you don’t have the right to switch jobs or choose what to do with your labor. But millions of American workers can’t fully exercise that choice because of a provision that bosses put into their contracts: a noncompete clause.”
With the House of Representatives in Republican control, more Congressional action is unlikely in the next two years. So it falls to President Biden and his executive branch agencies appointees to address these power imbalances.
Welcoming the NWSL to the Bay Area
The Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Toonkel and Rachel Bachman shared that the National Women’s Soccer League plans to expand to the Bay Area, Boston, and Utah.
The price of the Bay Area and Boston franchises is reportedly $50 million—a considerable increase reacting to the growth experienced by the NWSL in recent years.
Toonkel and Bachman write, “The addition of three teams—more than what NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman had previously signaled she expected in the near-term—will bring the league to 15 teams. The franchise fees reflect growing interest in the decade-old league despite its recent off-field turmoil involving abuse allegations that an investigation found had been ignored for years by league executives.
As recently as 2020, when Los Angeles and San Diego groups made deals to join the league, franchise fees were $2 million-$5 million. The strength of those teams’ launches in 2022 helped propel interest in expansion, and spurred initial interest from dozens of interested parties, according to the league.”
I am quite excited by this news and look forward to rooting for the Bay Area team as the NWSL announces the details.
Quick Pitches
Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky reports about how we narrowly avoided a calamity in Earth’s orbit: “An old rocket body and military satellite—large pieces of space junk dating back to the Soviet Union—nearly smashed into each other on Friday morning, in an uncomfortable near-miss that would’ve resulted in thousands of pieces of debris had they collided.”
NPR’s Ayana Archie reports: “Consumers are suing Sazerac Company, Inc., the makers of Fireball whiskey, for fraud and misrepresentation, as the mini bottles of the alcoholic beverage don’t actually contain whiskey.” Yeah, I’m not looking to consume a mixture of malt beverage and wine.
I’ve become such a weather wimp and traitor to my Yooper heritage that I now wear gloves when the temperature is above freezing.
I do not want to say it is freezing cold outside, but my fingers are blue.
— Grover (@Grover) 2:03 PM ∙ Jan 31, 2022
The simulation is glitching again.
Y’all, we’ve discovered a new kind of number!
— Phil (I have a SubStack link in bio) Plait (@BadAstronomer) 5:09 AM ∙ Jan 31, 2023
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