American Politics Thread V: We're Just Biden Our Time ...

[Corrian]

Here's a possibly more accurate representation of that poll that says people don't approve of CRT. Its more like the majority have no opinion.

[Corrian]

Americans reject critical race theory 58% to 38%

Not quite.
The YouGov poll doesn't actually show 58% of Americans are unfavourable to CRT. It's a filtered question: only asked to those who say they know what CRT is. (Who do we think those people are?)

If you calculate among all respondents, you get different numbers-roughly 15% favourable, 23% unfavourable-and 62% who don't have an opinion because they don't claim to know what it is.

Oh you beat me.

[Stellar Colonies]

Give me a bit
I have a…second CRT effortpost on the way

my fucking internet died aghhhhhhhhhhhh

okay
uh
it'll be up tomorrow i guess


in the meantime, have some outrage
Andrew Yang: "Yes, mentally ill people have rights, but you know who else has rights? We do!" "The people and families of the city, we have the right to walk the streets and not fear for our safety because a mentally ill person is going to lash out

There was a brief window of time when I wondered if Yang's run would help strengthen opposition towards infant circumcision and finally get the ball rolling on ending it, mostly because I'd never known of him before I heard about that.

That not really happening would've been a disappointment if I had considered it likely for him to stand by that position, him not doing dumb things on the side, and/or go far with injecting it into the mainstream (difficult when so many people seemingly try to smear opposition to slicing into little boys as solely being "anti-Semitic", "Islamophobic", "against US culture", etc.), which I did not.

[Page]

Give me a bit
I have a…second CRT effortpost on the way

my fucking internet died aghhhhhhhhhhhh

okay
uh
it'll be up tomorrow i guess


in the meantime, have some outrage
Andrew Yang: "Yes, mentally ill people have rights, but you know who else has rights? We do!" "The people and families of the city, we have the right to walk the streets and not fear for our safety because a mentally ill person is going to lash out

Yang is like a guy you meet at a party who does something nice for you, so you invite him into your social circle and then find he's a scumbag and suffer from him knowing you for years.

The original nice thing was the UBI (which wasn't even proper UBI, nowhere near enough to live off) but now we see just how jack-booted this guy is. He only cares about poor and marginalized folks in the sense of, what do we do so rich guys like me don't have to look at them anymore?

[Azalfia]

Any new news from those Libertarian Party folks? Or any major third party?

[Washington Resistance Army]

Drought conditions could worsen California wildfires, which are already 5 times worse than this time last year.

It's fun watching the world die : )

[Azalfia]

Drought conditions could worsen California wildfires, which are already 5 times worse than this time last year.

It's fun watching the world die : )

Yeah we fucked up. Y'all ready for a orange sky?

[Kowani]

So we've noticed-I hope-the recent flood of bills coming from the Republican party prohibiting either "critical race theory" or...almost any sort of talking about racism (or other social issues) in schools. Because the people writing these things don't know what it is, almost all of these bills are extremely vague and carry large degrees of waffling, in order to encompass "any idea we don't like." I've said this before, but it's relevant, so it's worth repeating. They don’t know what CRT is, but they don’t need to because their people don’t either. They could just as easily rail against teaching the Standard Theory in physics. The point was to turn an academic school of thought into a catch-all phrase that conjures everything people fear. And we've seen these panics before. The one I reference is the Satanic Panic starting in the 1980's because it's the best and most well known example. But there are others. "equity policies", "diversity training", intersectionality" "ethnic studies" which are more relevant, because the underlying motivation is the same. This is an old script, one where the name of the bogeyman changes but the basic storyline is always the same: sinister, alien forces are trying to corrupt children.

With that said, I'm going to introduce you to someone. Remember this name, because 9 times out of 10, anytime you see anything about education and race (or CRT in general) that paints an unflattering picture...it's this guy. Christopher Rufo, currently working at the Manhattan Institute. (Which is, to be clear, a billionaire propaganda outlet, a theme we will be returning to). Now let us be clear. Rufo is, by his own admission, a propaganda artist. (also, he lies about this stuff all the time)

“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions,” wrote Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”

But the full quote was even more illuminating.

And did this work? yeppppppppp
So first, let's take a look at media. Our good friends over at Fox News have so helpfully put this into the conservative ecosystem ...nearly 1,300 times in the past 3 and a half months

Oh, and that August bump? That was from when Chris Rufo went on Tucker Carlson to declare 'a one-man war against critical race theory in the federal government" and "public institutions".
And if we zoom in...it's a recent phenomenon, expanding almost exponentially.

Now Fox is not subtle about their propaganda (they don't really need to be.)

But if the thrust of this post was "Fox News is pumping out bullshit", I wouldn't have written all this. So let's continue!

It's also extremely popular on internet right-wing spaces.

And despite the existence of other, similar panics...none of them have had this sort of effect on public opinion.

But there's another sect we need to talk about here-political elites. Because...yeah, the GOP is having a fucking field day. It's at the local level-and as the pattern holds...it's a recent fucking explosion.

So let's talk CRT and important Republicans for a moment. Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen decided to ban "CRT programs" back in May (the definition of CRT, being, as it always is, vague and unhelpful). The Florida Board of Education banned it last Thursday. Texas banned talking about...well, racism in general, really. Arkansas is targeting "CRT" in state agencies (and I'm gonna be honest, if you thought the government of Arkansas was utilizing CRT in its agencies, you may be the mark for this con).

So now, we get into the last bit-the astroturfing and the manipulators.
If you throw a dart at a map of the US, you will hit a school where white parents are protesting the inclusion of CRT into the curriculum. Now it's important to note, this isn't actually happening anywhere. But they've been convinced it has. North Carolina. Indiana. Oregon. Georgia. Florida. Pennsylvania. California. Colorado. Wisconsin. Rhode Island. Ohio. Washington. South Carolina. Arizona. Michigan. The list goes...on, and on, and on.

Now, I called this astroturfing and manipulation. So let's take a look at one of the ways the first operates, with a case from Maine.
The stage was simple. A school district denounced White Supremacy after the murder of George Floyd. Symbolic, not really worthy of ruffling feathers, simple. Easy, done and dusted. Only the story doesn't end there. A parent, Shawn McBreairty, accused the district of teaching CRT (because they've been told that denouncing white supremacy is code for attacking white men) and in swooped No Left Turn in Education, a national group that supports parents as they fight lessons on systemic racism. And they turned a local conflict with the school board into a nationally coordinated movement with the backing of major conservative organizations and media outlets.

Conflicts like this are playing out in cities and towns across the country, amid the rise of at least 165 local and national groups that aim to disrupt lessons on race and gender, according to an NBC News analysis of media reports and organizations’ promotional materials. Reinforced by conservative think tanks, law firms and activist parents, these groups have found allies in families frustrated over Covid-19 restrictions in schools and have weaponized the right’s opposition to critical race theory, turning it into a political rallying point.

While the efforts vary, they share strategies of disruption, publicity and mobilization. The groups swarm school board meetings, inundate districts with time-consuming public records requests and file lawsuits and federal complaints alleging discrimination against white students. They have become media darlings in conservative circles and made the debate over critical race theory a national issue.

Virtually all school districts insist they are not teaching critical race theory, but many activists and parents have begun using it as a catch-all term to refer to what schools often call equity programs, teaching about racism or LGBTQ-inclusive policies. Now, conservative activists are setting their sights on ousting as many school board members as they can, and local Republican Parties have vowed to help, viewing the revolt against critical race theory as akin to the tea party wave from a decade ago.

Activists and parents have launched 50 recall efforts this year aimed at unseating 126 school board members, according to a new report from Ballotpedia, a website that tracks U.S. politics and elections. Most of those recalls — which already surpass the record for a single year — started as objections to Covid-19 restrictions, but five of the most recently launched campaigns, including a particularly contentious fight in Loudoun County, Virginia, include concerns about critical race theory.

And, in a new development this year, rather than targeting a single member, these efforts often target multiple members or entire school boards, according to Abbey Smith, a researcher at Ballotpedia. This data, which is limited to the 39 states that allow for recall of local elected officials, suggests that political discord at the local school level is at an all-time high. At least 50 other school districts from Washington to Florida have been the scenes of local unrest over the idea of critical race theory, according to an NBC News analysis of media reports.

Prominent Republican political figures are rushing in to support the parent activists, hoping that these local battles will mobilize conservative voters in next year’s midterms and beyond. The push comes as President Joe Biden and Democrats have benefited from popular economic legislation but show some vulnerability on culturally divisive issues. As former Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it on his podcast in May: “The path to save the nation is very simple — it’s going to go through the school boards.”

and let's be clear-while there are parents with opposition to these sort of things, it's being used by a national network of reactionaries and conmen to fight a battle that won't galvanize the opposition.

So let's take a quick look at the origin of No Left Turn, shall we?

The origin of one of the largest groups targeting school boards can be traced back to last June, when many educators began looking for ways to teach students about the protests following George Floyd’s murder, and reposition how American history is taught.

When the Gladwyne Elementary School in the suburbs of Philadelphia decided to teach students about the concepts of racism, privilege and justice during the last week of classes, Elana Yaron Fishbein, a mother of two students in the school, sprang into action. Fishbein, a former social worker, sent a letter to the superintendent calling the lessons a “plan to indoctrinate the children into the 'woke’ culture.” She said the superintendent never responded, though the district later said that the lesson plans were age-appropriate and did not shame students and that parents were allowed to opt out. Fishbein said other white parents in the district attacked her on Facebook when she shared her letter.

So Fishbein moved her children to private school and started a group to advocate against anti-racist teaching. She called it No Left Turn in Education.

“The schools have been hijacked,” she said in an interview. “Our kids are captive audiences. And they think they can do whatever they want with our kids.”

Fishbein’s endeavor received a significant boost in September, when she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox News show. By the next day, No Left Turn’s Facebook page had shot up from fewer than 200 followers to over 30,000. The group now has 30 chapters in 23 states, a rapid expansion Fishbein credits to Carlson’s show.

“He launched our movements — he doesn't know it, but he did,” Fishbein said.

She said her nonprofit group, which is volunteer-driven and relies on small donations to cover promotional materials and legal fees, now fields requests from groups of parents, ranging from 50 people to more than 1,000, asking to get involved under No Left Turn’s umbrella. These local chapters are the “boots on the ground,” she said, confronting school administrators at board meetings and through records requests.

and again...in swoop large, moneyed organizations.

The case garnered media attention on the right, and slowly, O’Brien said, more conservative advocacy groups became interested in these cases. He started SchoolhouseRights.org as a project of the International Organization for the Family, a conservative nonprofit group, to raise funds to take on more cases like Clark’s.

“Some people are treating it like a gold rush,” O’Brien said. “This is a new area where people think they can either become famous or make money on the issue, and they’re probably right.”

O’Brien later joined a coalition of attorneys focused on this cause, organized by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

(the IOF, by the way, was explicitly founded to oppose and repeal gay marriage rights around the world). And if you recognize the name "Rufo", good job, you were paying attention. We'll come back to him.

And finally, it reached the upper echelons of conservative activism-the big corporate money spaces.

Throughout the winter, organizations like the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which produces model bills on Republican causes, held webinars that warned about the threat of teaching critical race theory. Fishbein said she took part in a private briefing hosted by the Heritage Foundation in May that featured lawmakers from Idaho, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Texas and other states to discuss model legislation to block critical race theory. Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Oklahoma and Tennessee have already advanced some form of a restriction, and 15 states have legislation pending. The Heritage Foundation declined to comment.

As you might expect, if you don't already know...yeah, these are both dark-money machines and corporate influence peddlers.

The second form of astrotufing is the more classic one-actors pretending to be who they aren't. This time, we go to New York-where we find wealthy, well-connected conservative lobbyists Charlyce Bozzello and Christy Petriccione masquerading as local, concerned parents-and getting a publication, the New York Post, to amplify their lies. (And we'll come back to the Post, too, because...Rufo.)

And now, we get to other portion I mentioned: manipulation. So let's look at one of nationwide organizations helping coordinate all this.

The 1776 Project PAC has been in operation for approximately two weeks. It has not yet tapped any of the school-board candidates it hopes to run in its crusade against the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in American schools, a cascading source of cultural panic on the right.

The group has, nevertheless, raised more than $55,000, its president claims. As in-person school-board meetings return across America, some of these oft-sleepy gatherings have grown crowded and contentious, with parents decrying what they claim is an insidious new teaching method. More than anything else, this novel threat is evidenced, they say, by racial sensitivity measures or history classes that highlight racial inequities.

These critics say the schools are teaching “critical race theory,” an academic framework that encourages scholars to examine racial injustice on an institutional level. Nevermind that most of the schools are not teaching the method (with its roots in legal theory, it’s a little advanced for the elementary school set), nor that it can foster a better understanding of inequality. With an infusion of cable TV outrage fuel, state and local school boards are up in arms, with Florida this past week moving to ban swaths of racial education in the name of banning the allegedly dangerous theory.

Behind the scenes, a new crop of right-leaning political organizations has emerged to blast money at the moral panic. They’re funding school board candidates, and also—and perhaps most ominously—asking people to snitch on schools that dare to talk too much about race. The 1776 Project—its name an apparent jab at the Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” which highlighted America’s anti-Black history—aims to raise money for school board candidates who oppose “Critical Race Theory or Anti-Racism.” At present, PAC president Ryan Girdusky told The Daily Beast, the group is not backing any candidates. Instead, visitors to the group’s website are met with a popup prompting them to “report a school promoting critical race theory.”

Girdusky said he was “not sure” whether his group would publicize the reports it received, but that he didn’t think doing so would risk intimidation for teachers or other officials. “I’m not sure what privacy rights public schools have when it comes to the education that they have for children,” he said. “If a public school was teaching Creationism to their children, for example, I don’t think they would necessarily have the right of privacy to teach whatever they want to children.”

“There’s no website or public medium that has a list of schools that are promoting critical race theory,” he added. “So, given that all we have are news reports—place to place, county to county, and school board to school board—it’s good to get as much information as possible as to where critical race theory is being taught to children.”

In fact, in the newly hot world of anti-CRT fundraising, one such website had already emerged earlier this spring. Run by the new group “Parents Defending Education,” the organization’s website also encourages readers to report specific schools. Offending academies are also displayed on the site’s “IndoctriNation Map.”

In one representative example, the PDE site labels a Virginia school district with flags for “diversity counseling,” “political indoctrination,” “racial division,” and “sex and gender.”

The district “prioritizes Diversity, Equity and Opportunity,” the PDE dossier on the schools reads. “Racial affinity groups of staff met three times over the summer—the groups included one for Black staff, one for teachers of color, and one called the ‘allyship affinity group,’ described in part as a [sic] ‘a space to recognize and process the impact of privilege on White educators.’ [The district] has a program in which students can apply to become ‘equity ambassadors.’”

There's also the other invasive method being proposed-making teachers wear bodycameras to prevent them from teaching CRT (again, the school district isn't teaching this.)

And finally, Ron DeSantis, giving the game away-getting the "political apparatus" involved in school board races to oppose CRT (and also masks). Now there was also the usual invocation of "Marxism" involved here but I don't think I need to explain the inherent nonsense in the idea that black people needed Karl Marx to teach them about systems of oppression in a country that had legalized slavery and Jim Crow.
But national political parties...probably shouldn't be trying to wholesale replace local school boards. Education is inherently political, yes. But there's a problem when you get national political parties involved in local elections in order to decide curriculum.

And finally, we circle back around to our original propagandist, Rufo (who has now jumped onto the train of claiming the Frankfurt School engineered CRT to promote division between White and Black Americans so that they could overthrow White rule and install a Communist government)

So who is Christopher Rufo? Well, lots of things-but mostly, he's just very a well paid reactionary.
Paid by who? Well...it's the same fucking network that we've been running into time and time again. Now Rufo writes for 3 major outlets. The New York Post and The Manhattan Institute. Now both of these are corporate propaganda outlets. Take a look at the Manhattan Institute, with it's millions of dollars in corporate funding and position in the corporate-written legislation pipeline. Meanwhile, the NYP is part of the Murdoch Machine. But he doesn't just write there. He's also published at The Federalist...which, yeah, same problem.

CMD was first to confirm the FDRLST Media Foundation’s donors, which have also financed Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate groups. The new tax filing reveals more about the foundation’s revenue, expenses, and leadership.

In 2019, the FDRLST Media Foundation received donations totaling $799,000. CMD’s past reporting uncovered the sources for all but $100,000 of that amount. Billionaire businessman and right-wing political donor Richard Uihlein, who owns the shipping supply company Uline, gave $400,000 to the FDRLST Media Foundation through his family foundation, the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation. Conservative funding vehicle DonorsTrust contributed $249,000, and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation added $150,000.

These donations make it clear that some of the most deep-pocketed right-wing donors see The Federalist as a means to advance their pro-corporate, socially conservative agendas.

In 2019, the FDRLST Media Foundation gave $150,000 to FDRLST Media, LLC, the company that publishes The Federalist, leaving $640,000 in the bank at the end of the year.

The FDRLST Media Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit formed in 2018 with a mission “to support journalism on policy and cultural issues in the public interest” and “to train and educate aspiring journalists.” That year, it took in less than $50,000 and thus was not required to file a public tax form, so the 2019 Form 990 obtained by CMD is its first public tax filing.

The three known donors to the FDRLST Media Foundation also fund the nonprofit behind the news site RealClearPolitics. The Real Clear Foundation has been around for a number of years and took in close to $3.8 million in 2019, roughly $500,000 more than the year before.

CMD previously reported on the foundation’s donors, most or all of whom are right-wing foundations and political megadonors. From 2015-19, the Real Clear Foundation received $5.1 million from DonorsTrust, $850,000 from the Ed Uihlein Foundation, and $450,000 from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation. Other Real Clear Foundation donors include the Charles Koch Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

RealClear recently teamed up with the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing think tanks that shares these same donors and is closely tied to the pay-for-play business lobbying group the American Legislative Exchange Council. The three known donors to the FDRLST Media Foundation are all linked to domestic extremists.

DonorsTrust, the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement,” is a donor-advised fund sponsor that Republican billionaires such as Charles Koch, Robert Mercer, and the DeVos family use to donate millions of dollars to conservative causes. When they contribute through DonorsTrust, their identities are shielded from the public.

In 2019, DonorsTrust gave $1.5 million to the foundation behind white nationalist hate group VDARE, the largest known donation to a white nationalist group in the U.S. It also gave $10,500 to the New Century Foundation, which funds Jared Taylor’s white nationalist magazine, American Renaissance. In addition, DonorsTrust regularly funds anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ hate groups, having poured over $3 million into these organizations in 2018, as CMD reported.

At DonorsTrust, its board of directors determines the nonprofits that are eligible for its charity, so the group’s leaders approved these extremist groups.

Uihlein is one of the Republican Party’s most prolific political donors, having given $65 million to conservative outside spending groups, including the pro-Trump America First Action, in the 2020 elections. He is the primary funder of the PAC of the Tea Party Patriots, which participated in the “March to Save America” that culminated in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Through his foundation, investor and Manhattan Institute trustee Thomas W. Smith has given six- or seven-figure amounts to dozens of right-wing organizations, media operations, and free market academic programs, including the Daily Caller News Foundation, Koch’s Freedom Partners Institute, George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, and Turning Point USA. Smith also gave a smaller amount to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an anti-Muslim hate group.

In addition to shared funders, RealClear and The Federalist have overlapping executives and board members.

A 2017 SEC filing revealed that John McIntyre, co-founder and CEO of RealClearPolitics, was a director of FDRLST Media, LLC. Jenn McIntyre was listed as a director and executive, and The Federalist’s founders, Sean Davis and Ben Domenech, were executives. The filing located FDRLST Media at the same Chicago address as RealClearPolitics.

Records from the Washington, D.C. secretary of state have listed David DesRosiers, the publisher of Real Clear Politics and the former executive vice president of the Manhattan Institute, as a director of the FDRLST Media Foundation.

In 2019, The Federalist’s senior editor Mollie Hemingway was president of the foundation. Her husband, Mark, was secretary, and RealClearPolitics senior politics editor Nicholas Nordseth was treasurer.

Davis and Domenech have ties to other publications and think tanks in the same right-wing media sphere as RealClear and The Federalist. Davis was previously chief financial officer of The Daily Caller. Domenech, who is married to Meghan McCain, co-founded RedState and was previously a managing editor for health care policy at the Heartland Institute, a climate denial “think tank” funded by GOP megadonors such as Koch, Mercer, and Uihlein, as well as DonorsTrust and and its sister fund, Donors Capital Fund.

I could go on and on about this sort of thing. For example, “Parents Defending Education", which I mentioned earlier, and claims to be a "grassroots network"...is run by a former CATO Institute manager and a Fordham Institute Fellow (the latter of which is funded by such illustrious public institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Mike Bloomberg, and Exxon Mobil)

I hate that this is the second time doing I'm this sort of thing in under a week.
But what we find here is a unique, concerted, and well-financed effort to prevent...really, education about racism. The movement leaders don't know what CRT is, the legislators don't know what it is, and the parents (those of them that are actually parents and not astroturfed opposition) certainly don't know. What we have is a network of wealthy, reactionary oligarchs who have created a culture war panic about an event that was not happening wholesale out of cloth in a matter of months, got a national political party to take legislative action based on that delusion, to the point where the President of the United States was operating on this.

[Thermodolia]

Basically, you're going to jam it down American's throats whether they like it or not.

Well, we jammed integration down a lot of Americans' throats and they didn't like it. So why not jam a modified CRT based more on facts concerning what systemic racism is rather than narratives? In time, it can be modified.

Sure a modified, well thought out, and facts based system would be far better and would probably see most people not complain to much about it because there’s burgers to grill.

[Thermodolia]

Give me a bit
I have a…second CRT effortpost on the way

my fucking internet died aghhhhhhhhhhhh

okay
uh
it'll be up tomorrow i guess


in the meantime, have some outrage
Andrew Yang: "Yes, mentally ill people have rights, but you know who else has rights? We do!" "The people and families of the city, we have the right to walk the streets and not fear for our safety because a mentally ill person is going to lash out

What in the fuck? Just because I have PTSD doesn’t mean I’m going to kill a bitch!

---

So apparently Andrew Yang thinks mentally ill people make new York suck and thinks the rights of mentally healthy people are more important.

I hate this man so very much. He should leave New York and never return.

Sometimes I wonder if he’s trying to self sabotage his campaign

---

DOJ threatens action against Missouri for implementing a law that effectively nullifies federal gun restrictions

Bring it on fed boi

[Washington Resistance Army]

Earth is now trapping an unprecedented amount of heat, says NASA.

Millions of Americans are still behind on rent as the eviction deadline nears and most have still not gotten any help.

Lotsa good news in the world today.

[Blargoblarg]

Give me a bit
I have a…second CRT effortpost on the way

my fucking internet died aghhhhhhhhhhhh

okay
uh
it'll be up tomorrow i guess


in the meantime, have some outrage
Andrew Yang: "Yes, mentally ill people have rights, but you know who else has rights? We do!" "The people and families of the city, we have the right to walk the streets and not fear for our safety because a mentally ill person is going to lash out

The more Yang talks, the more I see that the only good idea he had was UBI. On pretty much everything else, he sucks.

[Gravlen]

I haven't even had time to figure out what CRT is and why everyone is outraged about it.

As with Cancel Culture, which in February was the "number one issue in America" according to the GOP, it's whatever you want it to be.

[Gravlen]

Because a lot of right-wingers don’t like it being pointed out that systemic racism exists.

It’s not just right wingers. Nearly 60% of the nation has a problem with it.

Around 20% has an unfavorable view of their own perception of what Critical Race Theory is. Even your own tweet thread said as much, though they buried it down in a later post in the thread.

[Page]

You can dispute aspects of CRT but if you remove it altogether you have a big gaping hole.

Much like we still have not established a theory of everything in physics, we rely on both general relativity and quantum mechanics and they both must remain until reconciled. Just throw one of them out and half of your problems are unsolvable.

Similarly, without CRT, there is no way to account for the state of our current society. The sociology that conservatives accept doesn't have answers for why racism and oppression persist any more than general relativity has answers about how elementary particles interact.

But this isn't new. Conservatives like holes, they want there to be unfilled holes because if you have a hole and no way to fill it, there is nothing left to do but say "shut up and don't ask any more questions."

[Borderlands of Rojava]

Drought conditions could worsen California wildfires, which are already 5 times worse than this time last year.

It's fun watching the world die : )

Yeah we fucked up. Y'all ready for a orange sky?

I remember last year when that shit happened.

[Borderlands of Rojava]

I haven't even had time to figure out what CRT is and why everyone is outraged about it.

As with Cancel Culture, which in February was the "number one issue in America" according to the GOP, it's whatever you want it to be.

There's cancel culture and then theres "why are people calling me racist? All i said was maybe if black people weren't so fucking lazy, they'd actually get somewhere for the first time in 300 years."

[Kowani]

American Internet worse than previously thought

The Biden administration Thursday unveiled a new mapping tool that shows much greater gaps in use of high-speed internet service across the U.S. than the government's previous maps reported. [...] The new, zoomable map draws on a wider pool of data than existing maps by the Federal Communications Commission, which relied exclusively on industry-provided data that overstated broadband penetration. The map raises questions about the gap between internet availability and actual usage, with usage reports indicating wide swaths of the country are not making a home broadband connection.

The new "Indicators of Broadband Need" map, developed by the White House and the telecommunications branch of the Commerce Department, pulls together different data sets from Ookla, M-Lab, Microsoft, the Federal Communications Commission and the Census Bureau.
The overlapping data points are meant to paint a picture of the areas that need more, better broadband. The map also includes data on places that reported a lack of connection by computer, smartphone or tablet and information on broadband usage in high-poverty communities.
"What it tells you is there's a lot of places in the United States that aren't using the internet at broadband speeds," a White House official told Axios, estimating that means tens of millions of people.[...] The map shows the gulf between the data set the FCC has used to map broadband availability and where Americans actually report using the internet.

The FCC relies on data supplied by internet service providers about where they could offer service.
Companies can report that a census block is served even if only one household has internet service — which leads to maps that overstates access. "There's a large gap between what the carriers are saying is on offer to be used and what's actually being used," the White House official told Axios.

Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced a broadband mapping task force earlier this year to improve the agency's data collection and mapping tools.

The FCC uses its maps to allocate billions of dollars of subsidies for broadband deployment.
The administration effort is not meant to replace those maps or guide broadband funding grants, the White House says. "To ensure that every household has the internet access necessary for success in the digital age, we need better ways to accurately measure where high-speed service has reached Americans and where it has not,” Rosenworcel said in a statement.

The new map project is "a welcome new tool that provides valuable insight into the state of broadband across the country," she said.

check the map out yourself here

[Kilobugya]

So if I resume the last posts, California is burning (as an appetizer for what's to come climate-wise), Internet infrastructure is even worse than thought, but what's soooooo important is preventing teachers from speaking about racism, a few celebrities getting ignored when they say stupid things and preventing a non-existing voter fraud ? The GOP really nailed the priorities, I'm impressed.

[Kilobugya]

Progressive view "progress" by the number of citizens on welfare and dependent on government.

Ridiculous. Real progressives look at objectively measurable indicators like life expectancy, HDI, child mortality rate, Gini coefficient, poverty rate, ...

[Spirit of Hope]

Biden ends Trump administration initiative that sought to kick three million people off food stamps, a proposal that would have deprived nearly one million children of free school meals

President Biden put an end to a Trump administration initiative that sought to kick three million people off food stamps, a proposal that would have deprived nearly one million children of free school meals.

The previous administration and Republicans pushed for the change in 2019, claiming some Americans were taking advantage of a “loophole” that permits those with incomes higher than the poverty rate to gain entry into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But while the pandemic began to hit the nation hard last year, sending unemployment claims to record heights, Trump still wanted to toss the hungry off of the program’s rolls. His efforts, however, were blocked by a U.S. district court ruling. The Department of Agriculture said in a statement on Wednesday, that their decision to end the Trump administration’s proposal came after receiving nearly 158,000 comments expressing concerns the initiative could “potentially jeopardize food security for children, veterans, individuals with disabilities, and the elderly.” “The Department agrees with the issues raised by many commenters and no longer believes that the limitations the proposed rule would have put on categorical eligibility are appropriate,” the USDA said.

Progressive view "progress" by the number of citizens on welfare and dependent on government. Conservatives cite progress based on the number of citizens working private sector jobs (the ones that pay taxes, not consume taxes) and independent.

This is critical in understanding wny progressivism, Nazism, Marxism and socialism fail.

Kicking people off food assistance doesn't make them not hungry. Every progressive I know would be thrilled if everyone had a good private sector job, but since that isn't the case currently we think it is a good idea to give food to people who are having a hard time getting food.

[Borderlands of Rojava]

You can dispute aspects of CRT but if you remove it altogether you have a big gaping hole.

Much like we still have not established a theory of everything in physics, we rely on both general relativity and quantum mechanics and they both must remain until reconciled. Just throw one of them out and half of your problems are unsolvable.

Similarly, without CRT, there is no way to account for the state of our current society. The sociology that conservatives accept doesn't have answers for why racism and oppression persist any more than general relativity has answers about how elementary particles interact.

But this isn't new. Conservatives like holes, they want there to be unfilled holes because if you have a hole and no way to fill it, there is nothing left to do but say "shut up and don't ask any more questions."

Many American right wingers don't want a more equitable society. They're so used to white supremacy that the thought of a society that isn't built on racial supremacy automatically equals white genocide in their minds.

[Borderlands of Rojava]

Biden ends Trump administration initiative that sought to kick three million people off food stamps, a proposal that would have deprived nearly one million children of free school meals

President Biden put an end to a Trump administration initiative that sought to kick three million people off food stamps, a proposal that would have deprived nearly one million children of free school meals.

The previous administration and Republicans pushed for the change in 2019, claiming some Americans were taking advantage of a “loophole” that permits those with incomes higher than the poverty rate to gain entry into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But while the pandemic began to hit the nation hard last year, sending unemployment claims to record heights, Trump still wanted to toss the hungry off of the program’s rolls. His efforts, however, were blocked by a U.S. district court ruling. The Department of Agriculture said in a statement on Wednesday, that their decision to end the Trump administration’s proposal came after receiving nearly 158,000 comments expressing concerns the initiative could “potentially jeopardize food security for children, veterans, individuals with disabilities, and the elderly.” “The Department agrees with the issues raised by many commenters and no longer believes that the limitations the proposed rule would have put on categorical eligibility are appropriate,” the USDA said.

Progressives view "progress" by the number of citizens on welfare and dependent on government. Conservatives cite progress based on the number of citizens working private sector jobs and independent. One society is solvent the other will fail. In no small part, that's why Americans are abandoning leftist hellholes across America for Red states.

This is critical in understanding wny progressivism, Nazism, Marxism and socialism fail.

Yeah you know what happens when you boot people off welfare? They starve, so I think by default you literally have a worse worldview than all four of the ideologies you listed, EVEN INCLUDING Nazism.

[Borderlands of Rojava]

This is exceptionally ignorant. North Korea has had active missile and nuclear programs since the late stages of the Cold War, and their biggest leap in WMD technology happened while Trump was in office and they tested a hydrogen device. Not to mention the casual usage of a bioweapon to assassinate someone in public under his watch too. The DPRK hasn't been checked by any administration because it cannot be checked, for better or worse Pyongyang figured out that we're full of shit and that they shouldn't come to the table unless it's to extort us.

North Korea tested a H-bomb less than a year after Obama left office and before the rapprochement with Trump. It is ignorant or intellectually dishonest to blame Trump for something that was in the operational phase when Obama was POTUS. To rationalize an equivalence of North Korea actions during Obama:

~ Nuke yield advances tenfold
~ ICBM range increases 0-1000's km
~ Bombing of South Korea
~ Sinking of South Korean ship

To Trump's watch:

~ Diplomacy
~ North Korea stands down

Moreover.Trump gave Kim nothing. The same dynamic played out with Russia vis-a-vis Obama and Trump policies too.

Tfw Trump engages Kim on equal footing and gives him all the attention and praise he wanted, but somehow he gave him nothing.

Yeah explain to me how the president of the United States actively praising Kim is him giving Kim nothing, or even better just admit you voted for Kim Jong Un's boyfriend and actually are a friend of not only socialism, but the worst variant of Socialism on earth.

[The Rich Port]

Progressive view "progress" by the number of citizens on welfare and dependent on government. Conservatives cite progress based on the number of citizens working private sector jobs (the ones that pay taxes, not consume taxes) and independent.

This is critical in understanding wny progressivism, Nazism, Marxism and socialism fail.

Kicking people off food assistance doesn't make them not hungry. Every progressive I know would be thrilled if everyone had a good private sector job, but since that isn't the case currently we think it is a good idea to give food to people who are having a hard time getting food.

Especially considering, eventually someone is going to be stuck with a shit job, no amount of "job makers" or advanced technology is going to change that.

That's just how scarcity works in general and specifically job scarcity.

But people at the top always imagine they'll be at the top forever or they can always change the government to always suit their own needs, even if it means destroying the republic in the process.