theconversation | Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, wants a “national divorce.” In her view, another Civil War is inevitable unless red and blue states form separate countries.
But all this secession talk misses a key point that every troubled
couple knows. Just as there are ways to withdraw from a marriage before
any formal divorce, there are also ways to exit a nation before
officially seceding.
“Cal-exit,” a plan for California to leave the union after 2016, was the most acute recent attempt at secession.
And separatist acts have reshaped life and law in many states. Since 2012, 21 states have legalized marijuana, which is federally illegal. Sanctuary cities and states have emerged since 2016 to combat aggressive federal immigration laws and policies. Some prosecutors and judges refuse to prosecute women and medical providers for newly illegal abortions in some states.
Estimates vary, but some Americans are increasingly opting out of
hypermodern, hyperpolarized life entirely. “Intentional communities,”
rural, sustainable, cooperative communes like East Wind in the Ozarks, are, as The New York Times reported in 2020, proliferating “across the country.”
In many ways, America is already broken apart. When secession is
portrayed in its strictest sense, as a group of people declaring
independence and taking a portion of a nation as they depart, the
discussion is myopic, and current acts of exit hide in plain sight. When
it comes to secession, the question is not just “What if?” but “What
now?”
Scott Adams was trying to use this opportunity to demonstrate that the concern about racism in the US is a veneer: it’s about virtue signalling but not actually helping people get out of the social trap they find themselves in due to bad education. And he was demonstrating that people are happy to trash freedom of speech to maintain this virtue signalling.
I’m still a loooong way from knowing what exactly Scott Adams set out to accomplish. Since his self-immolation, he’s tweeted that “the media is racist” and in the process gotten Elon Musk on board.
This doesn’t seem like a particularly controversial claim.
In addition to the fact that black folks didn’t cancel Adams, I believe we can also rather safely conclude that he doesn’t have any black friends. He doesn’t know any of the handful of black folks who live in the segregated California town he’s lived in for the past 30 years.
A little unguarded time in the company of true friends would’ve innoculated him against his original egregious miscalculation. Conversation with a B or C-list black public intellectual friend would’ve been a better rebound than conversation with manosphere D-lister Hotep Jesus.
What transpired between Gonzalo Lira and Hotep Jesus was painful to listen to, and, it shed no further light on the mystery of Scott Adam’s self-immolation. Jimmy Dore does a nice job roasting the breadth and depth of Adam’s misfire.
bloomberg | Elon Musk called the media racist after a cartoonist he regularly
engages with on Twitter faced blowback for encouraging White Americans
to avoid Black people.
While discussing a Rasmussen Reports poll
in which almost half of Black respondents disagreed or were unsure
about the statement that it’s OK to be White, Scott Adams, creator of
the long-running Dilbert comic strip, said during his YouTube show last
week that his best advice for White Americans “is to get the hell away
from Black people.”
Newspaper publishers, including Gannett Co.’s USA Today Network, denounced the comments and said they’ll no longer publish Adams’ cartoons, which satirize office culture.
Musk waded into the controversy, first by responding to Adams, who quote-tweeted
a Washington Post columnist encouraged by the newspaper dropping
Dilbert. “What exactly are they complaining about?” Musk asked in a post
he later deleted.
When another account on the social network Musk owns spoke out against coverage of Adams, Musk replied: “The media is racist.”
“For a *very* long time, US media was racist against
non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians,” Musk
said in another post. “Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.”
Musk unsettled many Black users of Twitter Inc. last
year by repeatedly saying past management had gone too far in
moderating content on the platform, and had infringed on free speech as a
result. Shortly after taking over the company, he made fun
of #StayWoke t-shirts he found at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters
that dated back to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Tesla Inc. is facing a lawsuit
by the California Civil Rights Department that accuses the company of
engaging in a pattern of racial harassment and bias at its
electric-vehicle factory. Tesla published a blog post responding to the allegations before the agency filed suit in February 2022.
In June, the US Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission issued a cause finding against Tesla that closely parallels
California’s allegations, according to the company. Tesla said last month that it was in the process of setting up a mandatory mediation with the federal agency.
WaPo | In
the early hours of Friday morning, an assailant broke into Ms. Pelosi’s
San Francisco home and attacked her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a
hammer. Mr. Pelosi was admitted into the hospital with “significant” injuries but is expected to make a full recovery. The Wall Street Journal reported that the suspected assailant
— who is in custody — had “espoused extreme right-wing views on social
media, including conspiracy theories about covid-19.” According to
initial reports, he yelled out “Where’s Nancy?” during the attack — an
eerie echo of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, when rioters screamed, “Where are you, Nancy? We’re looking for you!”
While
the attacker’s motives and mental state remain to be determined, the
imperative to safeguard members of Congress, other senior officials and
their familiesfrom such wanton violence could hardly be clearer.
The danger is neither new nor one that is confined to a single party. In 2011, a gunman grievously wounded Gabrielle Giffords,
then a Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, as she met constituents
outside a Tucson-area Safeway. He then turned on bystanders and hit 18
more people, killing six. A half-dozen years later, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) was shot at a congressional baseball practice by a man carrying a list of several Republican lawmakers in his pocket.
Since
those episodes, threats and intimidation against politicians have
continued to escalate amid the toxic rhetoric that has come to pass for
political discourse and against the backdrop of a deeply polarized
landscape. Earlier this month, the New York Times documented a surge in violent political speech since 2016; threats against members of Congress have reportedly increased more than tenfold, with nearly 10,000 reported incidents in 2021. A man was arrested in July for threatening to kill Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and just this week another man pleaded guilty to threatening to kill a congressman. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a senator or House member were killed,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told the Times.
It is not just legislators who are at risk: In June, a man accused of planning
to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh turned himself
in to police outside the conservative justice’s home. That incident spurred
Congress to pass a bill boosting protections for justices and their
families. As violent rhetoric mounts, security for lawmakers and their
families likely needs strengthening, too.
Whatever
else we learn about the attack on the Pelosis, it is incumbent on
politicians — regardless of party — to condemn anything resembling
political violence. On Friday morning, Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.) said he was “horrified and disgusted” by the reported assault, while Mr. Scalise
said that “violence has no place in this country.” Several others have
released similar statements. We hope lawmakers turn their outrage into
action by tamping down on political vitriol — and by considering new
investments in security for themselves, their families and other leaders
who appear to face more risk by the day.
slate | If
you were planning to spend Thursday stocking up on toilet paper in
advance of a seemingly imminent freight-railroad strike or lockout, you
woke up to welcome news. President Joe Biden has announced a tentative agreement
to avert the disruption and the body blow it would have caused the
economy and our supply chains. The deal isn’t final—workers will soon
vote on it—but, nonetheless, it’s a relief following a week of headlines
warning about the potential of $2 billion a day in economic loss, including disruptions to passenger trains, grain shipments, carmakers, and refiners.
What
was missing from these headlines? The actual reason for the conflict
between railroad workers and their employers. The potential strike or
lockout was not because of any dispute over pay, but because of inhumane attendance policies that currently mean railroad engineers and conductors are either working or “on call” 90 percent of the time.
When they’re on call, they can be summoned to work on two hours’ notice
or less, and then may be away from home for days at a time. Workers
report that they have no sick days, paid or unpaid. If they have to take
time off unexpectedly, even because of illness, they lose points in a
convoluted, points-based attendance system. That means workers are at
risk of being disciplined or fired for getting sick, going to a doctor’s
appointment or a family funeral, or for any other absence that can’t be
planned far in advance.
As railroad worker Hugh Sawyer told the American Prospect,
this meant that on his 65th birthday this year, he got home at 7:30 in
the morning after working 12 hours the day before, slept for five hours,
and then spent the day refreshing his computer to see if he was being
called back to work. Another worker, describing the onerous requirements
for scheduling off-time in advance, wrote on Facebook,
“How do you schedule a funeral in October if it’s only February?” He
also noted that he gets 30 days fully off for the entire year, no
weekends. And the wife of an engineer told Vice,
“They go to work sick, they miss funerals of loved ones, they miss
final goodbyes to parents on hospice, they miss holidays, birthdays, all
of it.”
As the unions put it in a statement on Sunday, “these policies are destroying the lives of our members.”
The unions initially pushed for paid sick leave, but later sought only
unpaid sick leave. Yes, really: They’ve had to fight in order not to be
punished for taking unexpected, urgently needed unpaid sick leave. It appears that the tentative agreement
between the parties would address these attendance and leave policies
by creating “voluntary assigned days off,” granting one additional paid
day off, allowing workers to attend medical appointments without
penalty, and creating exemptions from attendance policies for
hospitalizations and surgeries.
It
should not be controversial to say it, but: People should have sick
leave so they do not have to come to work when they get sick. They
should be able to take leave to attend doctors’ appointments or deal
with family emergencies without risking their jobs. Workers should also
have regular time off, not be on call almost every day of their lives.
This strike or lockout was threatened because of the railroad companies’
refusal, right up until the last minute, to accept these basic human
needs, and their willingness to bring an already weary country to the
brink of yet another economic disaster, all in the name of ever more
profits.
The
United States, unlike many countries, does not have a national law
guaranteeing sick leave; if we did, the railroads’ attendance systems
would be clearly illegal. The kind of point-based attendance systems
that railroads employ can still be considered unlawful retaliation
if workers lose points for taking leave that is legally protected, such
as for absences guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, the
Americans with Disabilities Act, or state or local sick-leave laws.
Apart from questions of legality, it is grossly irresponsible to punish
people for unexpected illnesses ever, and especially during a pandemic.
globalresearch |Maliciously smearing approximately half of the country as
existential terrorist-inclined threats to “the soul of the nation” is
nothing but the crudest Machiavellian means of dividing and ruling the
population.
The Unprecedentedly Dangerous Divider-In-Chief
US President Joe Biden’s nationally televised speech on Thursday that the official White House website
headlined as being about “the continued battle for the soul of the
nation” saw the incumbent become the most dangerous and divisive
American leader in history. Far from trying to cleanse and protect that
very same soul, he shamelessly spit on it by pitting his people against
one another as part of an obvious divide-and-rule plot ahead of the
neck-and-neck midterm elections that are only two months away.
Debunking Biden’s False Belief In Equality & Democracy
The first part that stands out is Biden emphasizing how the location
of his speech, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall where the Declaration of
Independence was made and the Constitution signed, reinforces the
mutually complementary concepts of equality and democracy connected with
those two documents. He doesn’t truly believe in either of those though
as proven by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemning all minority views as “extremist” earlier that same day.
Nevertheless, he pretended that he’s a true believer in them in order
to artificially manufacture the basis upon which to contrast himself
with former US President Donald Trump. Biden claimed that his predecessor and those who still support his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement supposedly “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Falsely framing them as existential threats so close to the midterms is obviously aimed at manipulating voters’ perceptions.
Applying The “Rules For Radicals” Against The MAGA Movement
This crude tactic would be condemned by the American Government if it
was employed by any Global South leader irrespective of whether it’s
baseless like in Biden’s case or genuinely backed up by facts. Biden
then channeled the infamous Saul Alinksy’s “Rules For Radicals”,
specifically the thirteenth rule to “Pick the target, freeze it,
personalize it, and polarize it”, when claiming that “the Republican
Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and
the MAGA Republicans”.
By adding that “that is a threat to this country”, the incumbent
ominously implied that the full authority of the state will be brought
down to bear on those who are even simply suspected of being remotely
connected to the former president or his movement on faux national
security pretexts. He then instantly reverted to gaslighting once again
just like he earlier did by unconvincingly claiming that he supports the
Founding Fathers’ vision of equality and democracy by contrasting
Democrats and MAGA on false bases.
Who Really Employs Political Violence & Election Conspiracy Theories?
The same man who represents the party that frenziedly fanned the flames of the joint Antifa- and BLM-ledHybrid War of Terror on America all throughout summer 2020, whose countless antagonists were manipulated into functioning as “useful idiots” of the anti-MAGA faction of the US “deep state”
(permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies),
counterfactually claimed that it’s Trump and his supporters who divided
the country through the use of violence for political ends.
Biden also insulted Americans’ intelligence by gaslighting that it’s
only some MAGA folks who’ve ever rejected the outcome of a presidential
election when most Democrats refused to recognize the legitimacy of
Trump’s victory in 2016. Not only that, but their anti-MAGA “deep state”
puppeteers literally concocted the Russiagate conspiracy theory that
they laundered through allied congressional representatives, law
enforcement, media, and NGOs to discredit the entirety of his four years
in office.
amgreatness | Rep. Adam Schiff tucked an amendment into the National Defense Authorization Act
that would prohibit any evidence collected in violation of the Posse
Comitatus Act from being used in investigations. Why?
But if the military engaged in any
civilian law enforcement activity, including surveillance or
intelligence collection, before or during January 6, it would represent
an egregious violation of the military’s code of conduct and federal
law. Under the Posse Comitatus Act,
military personnel cannot be used as local cops or investigators:
“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized
by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the
Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a
posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under
this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” (Certain
exclusions, such as the president’s invocation of the Insurrection Act
and any use of the National Guard, apply.)
The law is both vague and specific at
the same time—which brings us to Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
Irrefutably the least trustworthy member of Congress, Schiff tucked an amendment
into the massive National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit
any evidence collected in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act from
being used in a number of proceedings, including criminal trials and
congressional investigations.
The amendment’s timing, like everything else related to the infamous Russian collusion huckster, evidence forger, and nude photo seeker
(to name a few of Schiff’s special talents), is highly suspect. Why
would Schiff need to outlaw evidence collected unlawfully? Why is Schiff
relying on this relatively arcane statute passed during Reconstruction
that is rarely, if ever, enforced?
“No one has ever been convicted of violating PCA to my knowledge,” Dr. Jeffrey Addicott, a 20-year member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and director of the Warrior Defense Project at St. Mary’s College, told American Greatness last week.
What is Adam Schiff, on behalf of the
Biden regime and Trump foes in the U.S. military, including Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, trying to hide?
It is not a coincidence that Schiff
introduced the amendment just a few months before a predicted Republican
landslide in November, which will give control of Congress back to the
GOP. House Minority Leader and presumptive Speaker of the House Kevin
McCarthy is planning to conduct multiple investigations into the Biden
regime next year including of the deadly and distrasrous withdrawal from
Afghanistan; the Daily Caller reported
this week that Republican lawmakers are “flooding the Biden
administration with ‘hundreds of preservation notices’ asking that
relevant documents be preserved.”
But one can easily see how Schiff’s
amendment could be used as legislative cover to prevent production of
any materials from Biden’s Department of Defense. After all, according
to a 2018 congressional analysis
of Posse Comitatus, “compliance [of the act] is ordinarily the result
of military self-restraint.” So, too, is enforcement: “The act is a
criminal statute under which there has been but a handful of known
prosecutions,” the same report explained.
theconservativetreehouse | The FISA court identified and quantified
tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the
FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons
with contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw
results without redacting the information and shared it with an unknown
number of entities.
The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and
surveillance operation. When the DOJ use of the IRS for political
information on their opposition became problematic, the Obama
administration needed another tool. It was in 2012 when they switched
to using the FBI databases for targeted search queries.
This information from Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz had the potential to
be extremely explosive. However, the absence of any follow-up
reporting, or even debunking from the traditional guardians of the DC
swamp is weird. What’s going on?
I wrote about these suspicions in depth throughout 2017, 2018 and eventually summarized in 2019:
theconservativetreehouse |I am going to explain how the Intelligence Branch works: (1) to
control every other branch of government; (2) how it functions as an
entirely independent branch of government with no oversight; (3) how and
why it was created to be independent from oversight; (4) what is the
current mission of the IC Branch, and most importantly (5) who operates
it.
The Intelligence Branch is an independent functioning branch of
government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the
Executive Branch as most would think. To understand the Intelligence
Branch, we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about
three coequal branches of government and replace that outlook with the
modern system that created itself.
The Intelligence Branch functions much like the State Dept, through a
unique set of public-private partnerships that support it. Big Tech
industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that
functioning, almost like an NGO. However, the process is much more
important than most think. In this problematic perspective of a corrupt
system of government, the process is the flaw – not the outcome.
There are people making decisions inside this little known,
unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every
facet of our lives.
None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were
elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not
know how the system works. I assert this position affirmatively because I
have talked to House and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff
for multiple House & Senate committee seats. They are not malicious
people; however, they are genuinely clueless of things that happen
outside their silo. That is part of the purpose of me explaining it,
with examples, in full detail with sunlight.
Time | While people of color, individually and as groups, have been helped
by affirmative action in the subsequent years, data and studies suggest
women — white women in particular — have benefited disproportionately. According to one study,
in 1995, 6 million women, the majority of whom were white, had jobs
they wouldn’t have otherwise held but for affirmative action.
Another study
shows that women made greater gains in employment at companies that do
business with the federal government, which are therefore subject to
federal affirmative-action requirements, than in other companies — with
female employment rising 15.2% at federal contractors but only 2.2%
elsewhere. And the women working for federal-contractor companies also
held higher positions and were paid better.
Even in the private sector, the advancements of white women eclipse those of people of color. After IBM established
its own affirmative-action program, the numbers of women in management
positions more than tripled in less than 10 years. Data from subsequent
years show that the number of executives of color at IBM also grew, but not nearly at the same rate.
wikipedia | As chairman of the United States House Committee on Rules starting in 1954,[5]
Smith controlled the flow of legislation in the House. An opponent of
racial integration, Smith used his power as chairman of the Rules
Committee to keep much civil rights legislation from coming to a vote on
the House floor.
He was a signatory to the 1956 Southern Manifesto that opposed the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education
(1954). A friend described him as someone who "had a real feeling of
kindness toward the black people he knew, but he did not respect the
race."[6]
When the Civil Rights Act of 1957
came before Smith's committee, Smith said, "The Southern people have
never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal
intelligence and education and social attainments as the whole people of
the South."[7] Others noted him as an apologist for slavery who used the Ancient Greeks and Romans in its defense.[6]
Speaker Sam Rayburn tried to reduce his power in 1961, with only limited success.
Smith delayed passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
One of Rayburn's reforms was the "Twenty-One Day Rule" that required a
bill to be sent to the floor within 21 days. Under pressure, Smith
released the bill.
Two days before the vote, Smith offered an amendment to insert "sex" after the word "religion" as a protected class of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Congressional Record
shows Smith made serious arguments, voicing concerns that white women
would suffer greater discrimination without a protection for gender.[8] Reformers, who knew Smith was hostile to civil rights for blacks, assumed that he was doing so to defeat the whole bill.[9][10]
In 1968, Leo Kanowitz wrote that, within the context of the anti-civil
rights coalition making "every effort to block" the passage of Title
VII, "it is abundantly clear that a principal motive in introducing
["sex"] was to prevent passage of the basic legislation being considered
by Congress, rather than solicitude for women's employment rights."[11] Kanowitz notes that Representative Edith Green,
who was one of the few female legislators in the House at that time,
held that view that legislation against sex discrimination in employment
"would not have received one hundred votes," indicating that it would
have been defeated handedly.
In 1964, the burning national issue was civil rights for blacks.
Activists argued that it was "the Negro's hour" and that adding women's
rights to the bill could hurt its chance of being passed. However,
opponents voted for the Smith amendment. The National Woman's Party (NWP) had used Smith to include sex as a protected category and so achieved their main goal.[12]
The prohibition of sex discrimination was added on the floor by
Smith. While Smith strongly opposed civil rights laws for blacks, he
supported such laws for women. Smith's amendment passed by a vote of 168
to 133.[10][13][14]
Smith expected that Republicans,
who had included equal rights for women in their party's platform since
1940, would probably vote for the amendment. Some historians speculate
that Smith, in addition to helping women, was trying to embarrass Northern Democrats, who opposed civil rights for women since labor unions opposed the clause.[8]
therealnews | So 64 years ago, Brown vs. Board of Education found that separate and
unequal education systems for African Americans was unconstitutional.
You argue that many Virginians initially actually accepted this
decision, but a public campaign was launched to sway public opinion
against it. Can you talk about that? You start off the first chapter of
your book with this history, talking about how students and teachers in
Virginia, led by students, weren’t organized to be part of Brown. And
then the public response against it.
NANCY MACLEAN:Yeah, in the state of Virginia
in 1951 there was an extraordinarily inspiring event that is really, in
a way, a precursor to some of what we’re seeing now with the teachers
strikes, and student and teacher mobilizations for good public
education. In that strike in 1951 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, a
young woman named Barbara Rose Johns joined with her favorite teacher,
and the two of them worked together, kind of strategized for a strike, a
student strike, to demand a better high school for the black children
of Prince Edward County. At that point many of the students were taking
classes in tar paper shacks. They did not have indoor plumbing, in many
cases, while the white school was the extraordinary state of the art
facility. And so the 200 students in this high school went out on a 100
percent solid students strike for a better high school.
It was an incredibly inspiring event with the support of over
90 percent of their parents, the local black clergy, and NAACP. And what
they wanted was a chance to learn, to grow, to have the same
opportunities as other children in their cohort and their era and their
community. And they only went back to school when the NAACP agreed to
take their course. I’m sorry, to take their case against discrimination
to the courts. And at that point the students went back to school, and
this case from Prince Edward County became one of the five eventually
folded into Brown vs. Board of Education.
Fast forward a bit, and after the Brown decision was issued by
the court, Virginia’s extremely conservative white elite began in 1955
and ’56 to do everything it could to undermine the success of that
decision, and to deny black children and communities the constitutional
rights that had just been recognized by the court. The way that they did
this was through a program called massive resistance, and they led the
program of massive resistance and goaded the wider white South onto it.
And one element of that massive resistance was state-funded tuition
grants, what we today would call vouchers, to enable white parents to
pull their children from public schools to private schools that would be
beyond the reach of the Federal Court’s ruling that segregation was
unconstitutional.
So that’s actually how I got into this story, and it was a
story that led me to the surprising discovery that essentially the
entire American right, and particularly of interest, this free market
fundamentalist right that was just beginning to get organized in those
years, supported these tax-funded school vouchers. And even, in many
cases, supported the school closures in Prince Edward County to prevent
the Brown decision from being implemented.
So that was fascinating to me. And I discovered that Milton
Friedman, the Chicago school free market economist, had issued his first
manifesto for such vouchers in 1955 in the full knowledge of how it
could be used by the white segregationists of the South. And then I also
stumbled onto a report by this James McGill Buchanan that we were
discussing earlier, who essentially tried to pull the segregationist
chestnuts out of the fire in early 1959, when a massive mobilization of
moderate white parents had come together to try to save the schools from
these school closures, and the bleeding of these tax monies out to
private schools. And after the courts had ruled against school closures
of schools that were planning to desegregate in Virginia. So that’s how
Buchanan got on my radar. But what I realized was that this was a much
deeper story about the right’s radical antipathy to public education
precisely because it was public.
And here I think it’s important to point out that when this
was happening in the late 1950s, American schools were the envy of the
developed world. We lead the world in the efficacy of our public
education system. Our schools were a model for the wider world. And yet
this right was attacking public education even then. And as important,
teachers were not organized then. There were no recognized teachers
unions. There was no collective bargaining structure for teachers in
those years. The right was attacking public education as a monopoly,
saying that it denied choice, all the kinds of things that they say now
against public education, and they were doing this at a time when
teachers had no collective power.
So the antipathy that we see on the right toward teachers
unions today, toward public education, is not really because of any
failing on their part. It is ideological. It is dogmatic. It is an
antipathy to public education precisely because it is public.
politico | In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County,
Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new
whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status,
arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being
considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in
the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in
motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In
1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students
enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the
following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the
treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a
preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies”
tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government
was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President
Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new
policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United
States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which
forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools
were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and
therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations
to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible
contributions.
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially
white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican
Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties,
vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy
Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely
stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he
could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would
constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal
behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives]
in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated
throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the
mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will
have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed
that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited.
“The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just
waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority
acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard
around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own
account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique
evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal
Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to
get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,”
Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially
as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation
academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School,
inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some
states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor
than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in
Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its
first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain
whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school
responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial
segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly
sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in
terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.
For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their
educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of
course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how
to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The
Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own
way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob
Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a
part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an
attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the
student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans.
The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial
dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated
interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of
warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax
exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally,
Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger,
longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview,
the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school
community about what could happen with government interference” in the
affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue
that got us all involved.”
newstatesman | The tendency to treat political struggles and disagreements as forms
of conspiracy is not only a polarising feature of the current moment,
but also, paradoxically, a stabilising one. American political
development over the past several decades has not merely been divided
into opposing camps, around, for example, questions of race and gender
equality, reproductive rights, or gun ownership; it has also been locked
into a dynamic of partisan competition that encourages threat
inflation, yielding important contributions from both parties to
expansively coercive institutions, in the name of collective security.
From the early Cold War, US partisanship revolved around which party was
better prepared to fight communism, leading to covert actions, proxy
wars and full-scale military invasions, culminating in a disastrous,
immoral war in Vietnam. By the 1970s, this morphed into a question of
which party was tougher on crime – a policy orientation that delivered a
regime of mass incarceration unprecedented in world history. The attacks of 9/11
raised the question of which party would keep the American “homeland”
safe from foreign predators, leading to two more decades of fruitless
war in the Middle East and west Asia, and a deportation delirium that
has swept up millions. What if the banal revelation at the end of the US
wars on communism, crime and terror is simply that Americans are their
own worst enemies?
The spectre of civil war might be better
understood as a metaphor for waning confidence in the (liberal) US
empire. The breakdown of the “rules-based international order” as a
regulative ideal is part of an attrition of what Raymond Geuss has called the “sheltered internal space of… Homo liberalis”
fashioned during the post-1945 golden age of American pluralism, rising
affluence, increasing tolerance and expanding civil rights. The “Great
Society”, the name that was given to the effort to institute social
democratic liberalism inside the US, and the civil rights revolution
that made the country a formal multi-racial democracy for the first time
in its history, was its high watermark. With the war in Vietnam raging,
and the protests of impoverished black residents and rising crime
roiling American cities, however, President Lyndon Johnson concluded
that the US now faced a “war within our own boundaries”, before abdicating instead of pursuing a second full term. Americans have been talking about civil war ever since.
Why did the NGO borg pivot to niche identities? Because the cause of substantive black equality is so much harder than declaring the gender binary defunct through acts of bureaucratic stipulation and language change
In these same years, a conception of politics as civil war by other
means captured the imagination of the modern US right on its ascent to
power. The politician and GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater
laid down the gauntlet in the 1960s with a famous declaration that “extremism in defence of liberty is no vice”.
Ronald Reagan was his successful heir, rising to the presidency while
declaring himself a “state’s righter” against an overweening federal
government. Shrinking the welfare state would go hand in hand with
expanding the carceral state: “running up the battle flag”, as Reagan
put it, against a feral, drug-abusing, black “underclass”. In 1994,
forging the first GOP majority in both the House of Representatives and
the Senate in four decades, Newt Gingrich made these inner war analogies
explicit. Our politics is a “war [that] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars”, he argued. “While
we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the
ballot box, not on the battlefield, nonetheless, it is a true civil war.” Trump’s “American carnage” was something of a belated echo.
The modern GOP has avidly fought Gingrich’s version of civil war at
the ballot box and in the courts, leveraging counter-majoritarian
institutions and using the individual states as laboratories for
reactionary politics: advancing model legislation against public
regulations; periodically mobbing local school boards; gerrymandering
congressional districts; undermining public unions; funnelling federal
spending on health, welfare and police via block grants to maximise
state discretion; defending a right of foetal personhood that trumps a
woman’s right to bodily autonomy; making it more difficult to register
to vote and to cast a vote; stimulating white revanchism and moral
outrage against expressions of public disorder and anti-normative
behaviour at every opportunity.
In the process, they successfully captured the commanding heights of
the judiciary, and have now successfully rolled back landmark,
50-year-old national civil rights gains: striking down federal
voting-rights protections, ending a national right to abortion and
overturning legal protections for criminal suspects in police custody.
Winning two of the last five national presidential elections with a
minority of the popular vote, and deploying the Senate filibuster during
periods in the congressional minority, the GOP has pursued civil war by
other means as a well-honed and effective strategy.
In the face of this challenge, it is difficult to judge the
Democratic Party as anything more than a feckless, mildly recalcitrant
partner. Over the past 40 years, it has alternatively sought to ratify,
in gentler tones, GOP-driven projects and demands to lower corporate
taxes, get tough on crime, end welfare as we know it, expand the ambit
of deportation and sustain open-ended military authorisations. It has
sought to placate vulnerable constituents with forms of symbolic
recognition and modest regulatory action, often undergirded by weak
executive authority and moral sentiment. It is the undeniably saner and
more constructive of the two electoral options Americans are forced to
choose between. But it also operates an effective pincer movement
against alternatives further to the left that seek to transform skewed
imbalances in the power of capital and labour, police authority and
public safety. When constituents choose to fight, for example, against
police abuse, or for labour rights, Democrats are missing in action, or
else warning against unpopular opinions that will awaken the monster on
the right. Forever counselling that we choose the lesser evil, they have
instead grown habituated to living with the fox inside the chicken
coop.
omna tigray | It has been over a month since the Ethiopian government declared what
it claimed to be a “humanitarian truce,” promising to facilitate
humanitarian access to Tigray. However, since this declaration, less
than 4 percent of the trucks required to address the man-made famine in
Tigray have been allowed to enter the region. The irregular and
piecemeal humanitarian convoys that have been allowed into the region
are severely inadequate in addressing the humanitarian catastrophe that
has been caused by the Ethiopian government’s 10 months-long siege.
Despite the Ethiopian government’s proclaimed commitment to facilitate
humanitarian deliveries to Tigray, aid workers, including Michael
Dunford of the World Food Programme (WFP), report negotiating with
regional authorities for the safe passage of aid convoys. That
humanitarian organizations have to negotiate access with regional
leaders rather than the federal government indicates that the federal
government is either unable or unwilling to exercise control over
regional authorities.
While the federal government and regional authorities continue to
obstruct aid delivery, the man-made famine in Tigray grows more severe.
Previously, the number of trucks of food that needed to enter Tigray was
around 600 a week. In April 2022, a United Nations (UN) official
reported that about 2,000 trucks of food are needed every week to meet
the region’s needs. Without consistent and unhindered humanitarian
deliveries, the scale of the need will continue to increase.
Additionally, farmers’ lack of access to essential agricultural supplies
like seeds and fertilizers means that many will miss the planting
season, leading to poor harvest and a food crisis that will affect the
region for years to come.
The severe food shortage also affects the ability of healthcare
professionals to assist patients in the region. Healthcare professionals
at Ayder Referral Hospital reported in April 2022 that Ayder Hospital,
one of the last functioning hospitals in Tigray, has begun discharging
patients after its food supplies ran out. After completely depleting
their food supplies, doctors revealed that they have had to send
hundreds of patients home, including infants, children, and people
waiting for cancer treatment. In addition to the severe food shortage,
the Ethiopian government’s siege has also prevented medicine and medical
supplies from reaching the region, leaving doctors unable to provide
medical care.
As well as the brutal siege on Tigray, several areas in Tigray remain
under the occupation of brutal invading Eritrean forces and Amhara
regional forces, including Northern and Western Tigray. In these areas,
these forces continue to commit atrocities, among them, forced
displacement and weaponized starvation in Irob district in northeastern
Tigray, and campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Western Tigray, which
comprises of mass arrest, torture, extrajudicial killings, massacres,
weaponized rape, and forced displacement. On April 6, 2022, a joint
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International report on atrocities
committed in Western Tigray detailed the events that have taken place
since November 2020 and labeled them as ethnic cleansing. The Amhara
forces’ illegal occupation of Western Tigray is arguably the largest
barrier to facilitating peace.
Furthermore, the federal government is engaged in or unable to reign
in the numerous conflicts and unrest across the country that threaten to
further destabilize Ethiopia and the broader East Africa region. The
government is currently waging a military offensive against the Oromo
Liberation Army (OLA) in Oromia, while clashes between the government
and armed groups have been reported in the Benishangul Gumuz, Gambella,
Somali, and Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Regions
(SNNPR). The federal government and militias operating across regional
borders have killed hundreds of people, destroyed entire villages, and
deeply traumatized communities across the country. This growing
political instability comes as swaths of Oromia and Somali regions face a
severe drought that threatens hundreds of thousands of people’s lives.
Overall, Ethiopia’s political and humanitarian conditions are
extremely fragile. With Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s administration
unwilling and unable to address and willfully fueling the multitude of
complex issues that plague the country, the situation is sure to
deteriorate quickly, jeopardizing regional and global security.
foreignpolicy | The United States is pulling the plug on its drone operations in
southern Ethiopia as demands on its fleet of unmanned aircraft expand
elsewhere across the continent with the rise of the Islamic State in
Libya, and extremist militants in Nigeria, Mali, Chad and Cameroon.
Since 2011, the U.S. had been using the air base in Arba Minch, 250
miles south of the capital, to launch surveillance drones aimed at
groups in East Africa with links to al Qaeda. U.S. personnel primarily
focused on al-Shabab, a Somali group which has waged deadly terrorist
attacks across East Africa.
Pentagon officials remained tightlipped on Monday about the reasons
behind the move. Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza, a Defense Department
spokeswoman, said the U.S. and Ethiopia agreed that the continued
presence of the drone base was “not required at this time.”
Some experts say the fight against
Shabab was going well enough that the Pentagon’s Africa Command, or
Africom, had the opportunity to redistribute its scarce resources
elsewhere.
“Shabab remains virulent, but as a significant terrorist threat with
high profile leaders in range for drone attacks, much less so,” said
Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.
Other
groups, by contrast, are rapidly gaining strength — and presenting far
more tempting targets for the Pentagon and its drone operators.
In recent months, the Islamic State has consolidated its power in Libya, allowing it to easily move
into the port city of Surt, and now control an estimated 150 miles of
territory along the country’s Mediterranean coast. Its presence has
reportedly forced the U.S. to focus on gathering intelligence there in
order to better monitor militant movements in North Africa.
The continued strength of Boko Haram —
the extremist group terrorizing northeastern Nigeria and parts of
Cameroon, Chad, and Niger — has also forced Washington to dedicate more
resources in the Lake Chad region as well. Since 2009, Boko Haram has
killed more than 10,000 people and by last year the group controlled an
area the size of Belgium. After the militants were forced out of some of
their Nigerian strongholds by a multinational African task force last
spring, they switched to more asymmetrical tactics and increased suicide
bombings and cross border raids. In September, President Barack Obama
pledged $45 million to help countries in the Lake Chad region beat back
the group. And in October, the U.S. sent a fleet of surveillance drones and 300 troops to Cameroon.
Those pressures have forced Africom to reevaluate where it allocates resources, say experts.
“Africom remains under-resourced and our entire drone program,
although it’s grown tremendously over the years, is facing a wide array
of demands,” said Pham.
Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa
program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, said that the U.S. military is likely facing pressure to
tackle other African threats, and is trying to consolidate its bases in
the region.
“It may be that with a base in Djibouti there’s just not the need for as many positions in East Africa as before,” she said.
medium |The
West’s Horn of Africa experts have been meeting with a TPLF leader and
TPLF/OLF supporters in secret, even as its governments claim to be
impartial — TPLF’s Berhane Gebre-Christos speaks as TPLF member,
proposed head of “transitional government” (limo/Uber drivers) and
Washington-based Ethio-American diaspora.
Donald Yamamoto, recently the U.S. Ambassador to Somalia who just retired this year, to TPLF official Berhane Gebre-Christos:
“Abiy
is not listening… Obasanjo has not been extraordinary helpful or very
active, and so are there any other opportunities that you see?”
Vicki Huddleston,
former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs
and US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa to Berhane
Gebre-Christos:
“I couldn’t agree more that you know, Abiy should step down, there should be an all-inclusive transition government.”
Former
ambassadors and current diplomats for the United States, Britain and EU
had a Zoom meeting this past Sunday with an official for the TPLF in
what amounts to a green light from the West for the terrorist group’s
attempts to overthrow the democratically elected Ethiopian government.
And there’s evidence to prove it: a phone-cam video of the two-hour
meeting.
The
Western powers — Britain, the EU and especially the United States —
have been posturing for months that they have not taken sides in the
conflict and are pushing negotiations only in the interests of peace.
But the Zoom talk rips away the façade, revealing a chummy circle of
foreign policy elite, both retired and still active who mostly know each
other and are in sympathy with TPLF objectives. They include Donald
Yamamoto, one of the U.S. government’s most senior Africa experts who
just retired this year as the American ambassador to Somalia, and
Spain’s diplomat Carmen de la Peña.
Former
EU ambassador to Ethiopia Tim Clarke admitted that all of the
attendants “maintain contacts with our former employees. Just the other
day I was talking to the existing EU ambassador to Ethiopia.”
NC | There’s a simple lesson here: Tigrayans are the bulk of
combat power in the Highlands of the Horn. You’d think that would lead
to the conclusion that you shouldn’t mess with Tigray unless you’re
ready to get in a long, nasty war, even when the conventional military
wisdom is that the Tigrayans don’t have a chance. They weren’t supposed
to have a chance against the Europeans in 1896, either–or the Ethiopian
Derg in the 1980s. If you’re running a war-nerd bookmaking business, put
a sign on the window: “No bets on wars in Tigray.”
One reason we all underestimated Tigray is that no one
outside TPLF circles seems to have admitted to themselves how much of
the combat power of both Eritrean and Ethiopian forces came from ethnic
Tigrayans. Admitting that would be politically unwise, especially in
Ethiopia. Officially, Ethiopia is a federal, multi-ethnic state in which
all ethnic groups are equal. But that’s a polite fiction. The Ethiopian
state is the product of 19th-c. conquests by the “Habesha,” which is
what the Highland Orthodox peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara, call
themselves. Ethiopia was created by Habesha armies pushing south and
east, absorbing Somali, Afar, Oromo, Sidamo, and dozens of other peoples
who became Ethiopian citizens, but had very little share in ruling the
country.
The real struggle for power was always between the two
Habesha peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara. Since Menelik II moved the capital
southward to Shewa, the Amhara seemed like the stronger of the two
groups. Amhara are a much bigger group, for starters. Tigrayans are only
about 6% of the population, Amhara about 26%.
But after the Eritrean/Tigrayan insurgents destroyed the
Derg in the late 20th c., it was the Tigrayans of the TPLF who really
ruled Ethiopia. Their domination was so clear that the TPLF tried to
minimize their power, dutifully talking about their multi-ethnic
coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). No one was fooled; it was the TPLF who had the power in Ethiopia.
The TPLF leader Meles Zenawi was
the ultimate power in the country all through the first two decades of
this century. Zenawi knew that the TPLF was so much better organized
than the other members of the EPRDF coalition that he and his fellow
Tigrayans could let the EPRDF make a show of ethnic equality while
keeping Tigrayan control. Henri IV went through the motions of
converting to Catholicism in return for the throne with the line “Paris
is worth a mass or two,” and Zenawi seems to have decided “Addis and the
whole GDP is worth letting those weaker militias from other ethnic
groups share the credit.”
Zenawi’s PR campaign worked so well that Ethiopians forgot
the hard truth that it was the Tigrayans who had the real combat power.
The Tigrayans’ only rival in terms of military power was the
Eritrean army (EDF.) The “Eritrean” label made people forget that the
EDF is also dominated by ethnic Tigrayans. Tigrinya-speakers are the majority in Eritrea, not only the dominant but the biggest ethnic group.
That has never stopped Eritrean Tigrayans from killing other
Tigrayans. That shouldn’t be a surprise — when have people of the same
ethnic group ever fretted about killing each other? — but it does
underline what seems like the dominant fact at the moment: The Tigrayans
are the most formidable people in the Horn.
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