#conservative attack on education

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

6.8: Fighting the Far Right's Attack on Public Education with Dr Sam Myovitch

Across the USA, the far right candidates have been getting themselves elected to local and county school boards. Their goals include financially choking public schools by diverting government funds toward charter schools, often religious in orientation. Tune in to hear what Dr Sam Myovich, retired history teacher turned school board candidate campaign field coordinator, has to say about what’s at stake, the far right’s deployment of fascist tactics in their fight to destroy public education, and what we ordinary citizens can do to fight back against them, save our schools, and protect our very democracy itself.

[dreamytfw]

"Dean Winchester is a feminist!"

I can almost guarantee you that man thinks feminists burn bras and can't get laid.

[gingaswag]

I can't be the only one who thinks it was kinda really fucked up actually how tons of tf2 fans here decided to dogpile a child for not being educated on LGBT history right

[silvermoon424]

https://x.com/SkylerforNY/status/1868725620777345519

^^^ I hate billionaires so damn much.

We DESPERATELY need to start educating Americans on the difference between for-profit businesses and government public services, I'm so fucking serious. The government should not be run like a business!!!

It's actually vile how the USPS- one of the few government services that's actually good- is constantly under attack by Republicans and their billionaire overlords and mouthbreathing conservative voters justify it because "well, the USPS loses a lot of money." You know what burns tons of money for a way worse outcome than the USPS? The fucking US military, but you never catch these bootlickers arguing that we should drop fewer bombs on brown people overseas.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

so the language of the additions on this post was very consciously influenced by my experiences living in countries with laws and cultures dominated by Islam and Buddhism, respectively.

Yes I grew up in an oppressively Christian culture, but Western Christianity is not solely or even necessarily singularly oppressive, and is certainly not the only religious structure that leverages shame in a dangerous way. And we do the world at large a disservice by acting like other major global religious institutions are harmless simply because they aren't Christian. Religious trauma comes in many forms, foreign and familiar.

not to be anti-religious but i do wonder if teaching children that they are innately flawed and sinful is, perhaps, not a healthy worldvi

[liberalsarecool]

Here's Trump's next target — according to the tyrant's playbook | by Robert Reich

Trump is following Putin’s, Xi’s, and Orban’s playbook. First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you.

Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with.

Intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.)

Then focus on independent sources of information: the media and the universities. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews.

Then go after the universities.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to punish any university that permits “illegal” protests. On Friday he cancelled hundreds of millions in grants and contracts with Columbia University.

This is an extension of Republican tactics before Trump’s second term. Prior to Trump appointing her ambassador to the United Nations, former Representative Elise Stefanik (Harvard class of 2006) browbeat presidents of elite universities over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several presidents being fired.

Senator Josh Hawley (Stanford class of 2002 and Yale Law class of 2006) called the student demonstrations signs of “moral rot” at the universities.

But antisemitism was just a pretext.

JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has termed university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Victor Orban’s method for ending “left-wing domination of universities.”

I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

Trump is also targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on university campuses.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

But of all Trump’s and Republicans’ moves against higher education, the most destructive is the cancelation of research grants and contracts. The destruction is hardly confined to Columbia and other suspected left-wing bastions.

Research universities depend on funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Trump reportedly aims to slash the budget of the National Science Foundation by up to two-thirds. And he’s instructed the National Institutes of Health to no longer honor negotiated rates for “indirect costs” on grants that it administers — money that universities use for laboratory space and research equipment.

In defiance of court orders, Trump has largely maintained a freeze on NIH funding.

As a result, many of America’s great research universities have stopped hiring and are cutting Ph.D. programs — in some cases rescinding offers to accepted students.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Trump’s moves are consistent with the tyrant’s playbook, but they’re also jeopardizing America’s national security and competitiveness.

Trump speaks of putting America First, but his attack on the nation’s great research universities is ensuring that the U.S. comes in second — to China.

Although America has long been the global leader in scientific output, China is now surging ahead. Even before Trump’s cuts in research funding, China was projected to match U.S. research spending within five years.

China has already surpassed the U.S. as the top producer of highly cited papers and international patent applications. It now awards more science and engineering Ph.D.s than the U.S.

Tyrants close universities. Fascists burn books. Trump is destroying America’s most important asset — its innovative mind.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

[ellipsus-writes]

Ellipsus Digest: April 2

Each week (or so), we'll highlight the relevant (and sometimes rage-inducing) news adjacent to writing and freedom of expression. This week:

Meta trained on pirated books—and writers are not having it

ICYMI: Meta has forever earned a spot as the archetype for Shadowy Corporate Baddie in speculative fiction by training its LLMs on pirated books from LibGen. You're pissed, we're pissed—here's what you can do:

The Author’s Guild of America—longtime champions of authors’ rights and probably very tired of cleaning up this kind of mess (see its high-profile ongoing lawsuits, and January’s campaign to credit human authors over “AI-authored” work)—has released a new summary of what’s going on. They’ve also provided a plug-and-play template for contacting AI companies directly, because right now, “sincerely, a furious novelist” just doesn’t feel like enough.

No strangers to spilling the tea, the UK’s Society of Authors is also stepping up with its roundup of actions to raise awareness and fight back against the unlicensed scraping of creative work. (If you’re across the pond, we also recommend checking out the Creative Rights in AI Coalition campaign—it’s doing solid work to stop the extraction economy from feeding on artists’ work.)

Museums and libraries: fodder for the new culture war

Not to be outdone by Florida school boards and That Aunt's Facebook feed, MAGA’s nascent cultural revolution has turned its attention to museums and libraries. A new executive order (in that big boi font) is targeting funding for any program daring to tell a “divisive narrative” or acknowledge “improper ideology” (translation: anything involving actual history).

The first target is D.C.’s own Smithsonian. The newly restructured federal board has set its sights on “cleansing” the Institution’s 21 museums of “divisive, race-centered ideology.” (couch-enthusiast J.D. Vance snagged himself a board seat.) (Oh, and they’ve appointed a Trump-aligned lawyer to vet museum content.) The second seems to be the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a 70-person department (now placed on administrative leave) in charge of institutional funding. As we wrote last week, this isn’t isolated—far-right influence overmuseums and libraries means this kind of ideological takeover will seep into every corner of the country’s cultural life.

Meanwhile, the GOP is (once again) trying to defund PBS for its “Communist agenda.” It’s part of a larger crusade that’s banned picture books with LGBTQ+ characters, erased anti-racist history, and treated educators like enemies—all in the name of “protecting the children,” of course.

NaNoWriMo is no more; long live NaNo

When we initially signed on as sponsors in 2024, we really, really hoped NaNoWriMo could pull it together—but its support for generative AI and dismissiveness toward its own audience prompted us to withdraw our sponsorship, and many Wrimos to leave an institution that helped cultivate creativity and community for a near-quarter century. Now it seems NaNo has shuttered permanently, leaving the community confused, if not betrayed. But when an organization treats its community poorly and fumbles its ethics, people notice. (You can watch the official explainer here.)

Still, writers are resilient, and the rise of many independent writing groups and community-led challenges proves that creatives will always find spaces to connect and write—and the desire to write 50k words in the month of November isn’t going anywhere. Just maybe... somewhere better.

The continued attack on campus speech

The Trump administration continues its campaign against universities for perceived anti-conservative bias, gutting federal research budgets, and pressuring schools to abandon any trace of DEI (or, as we wrote on the blog, extremely common and important words). In short: If a school won’t conform to MAGA ideology, it doesn’t deserve federal money—or academic freedom.

Higher education is being pressured to excise entire frameworks and language in an effort to avoid becoming the next target of partisan outrage. Across the U.S., universities are bracing for politically motivated budget cuts, especially in departments tied to research, diversity, or anything remotely inclusive. Conservative watchdogs have made it their mission to root out “woke depravity”—one school confirmed it received emails offering payment in exchange for students to act as informants, or ghostwrite articles to “expose the liberal bias that occurs on college campuses across the nation.”

In a country where op-eds in student newspapers are grounds for deportation, what part of “free speech” is actually free?

We now live in knockoff Miyazaki hellscape

If you’ve been online lately (sorry), you’ve probably seen a flood of vaguely whimsical, oddly sterile, faux-hand-drawn illustrations popping up everywhere. That’s because OpenAI just launched a new image generator—and CEO Sam Altman couldn’t wait to brag that it was so popular their servers started “melting.” (Apparently, melting the climate is fine too, despite Miyazaki’s lifelong environmental themes.) (Nausicaa is our favorite at Ellipsus.)

This might be OpenAI’s attempt to “honor” Hayao Miyazaki, who once declared that AI-generated animation was “an insult to life itself.” Meanwhile, the meme lifecycle went into warp speed, since AI doesn't require actual human creativity—speed-running from personal exploration, to corporate slop, to 9/11 memes, to a supremely cruel take from The White House.

“People are going to create some really amazing stuff and some stuff that may offend people,” Altman said in a post on X. “What we'd like to aim for is that the tool doesn't create offensive stuff unless you want it to, in which case within reason it does.”

Still, the people must meme. And while cottagecore fox girls are fine, we suggest skipping straight to the truly cursed (and far more creative) J.D. Vance memes instead.

Let us know if you find something other writers should know about, (or join our Discord and share it there!)

- The Ellipsus Team xo

[reasonsforhope]

Article

"Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Sunday that his government planned to cut student loans for around three million Australians by 20%, wiping off around A$16 billion ($10 billion) in debts.

The move builds on May's budget, which attacked cost of living pressures in Australia and gave debt relief for students, as well as more investment to make medicines cheaper, and a boost to a rent assistance programme.

"This will help everyone with a student debt right now, whilst we work hard to deliver a better deal for every student in the years ahead," Albanese said in a statement announcing the cut to student loans for tertiary education.

The changes would mean the average graduate with a loan of A$27,600 would have A$5,520 wiped, the government said, adding that they would take effect from June 1, 2025.

The government said it already planned to cut the amount that Australians with a student debt have to repay per year and raise the threshold to start repayments.

If reelected at the next general election, due in 2025, Labor would also legislate to guarantee 100,000 free places each year at the country's Technical and Further Education institutes, Albanese said.

"This is a time for building, building better education for all," he said in a speech to supporters in South Australia state capital Adelaide.

Cost of living pressures, stoked by stubbornly high inflation, have a special resonance with a federal election looming and the centre-left Labor government now polling behind their conservative opponents.

(US$1 = 1.5246 Australian dollars)

-via Reuters, November 2, 2024

[once-upon-a-time-the-end]

Attacks on universities and students might not seem like the biggest issue but I'll remind everyone that student protest and activism has always been pivotal in shifting the narratives against the people in power and has always been a target by establishment politics. Student organising, especially after kent state, was one of the pivotal lightning rods that helped end the vietnam draft and turned the public against the war--and the war hawks never forgot that. So frankly it's not surprising they want to attack colleges and universities as being "too liberal" and even claiming censorship of conservative views in education bc they know their views don't stand up to even an ounce of scrutiny

[mariacallous]

Most of the time, as the senior rabbi of Temple Beth-El in San Antonio, Rabbi Mara Nathan’s focus is on Jewish families. But this week, she’s finding herself thinking about Christian ones, too.

That’s because Texas is poised to adopt a public school curriculum that refers to Jesus as “the Messiah,” asks kindergartners to study the Sermon on the Mount and presents the Crusades in a positive light.

The curriculum, Nathan said, “gives Christian children the sense that their family’s religion is the only true religion, which is not appropriate for public school education, at the very least.”

Nathan is among the many Texans raising concerns about the proposed reading curriculum as it nears final approval. Earlier this week, the Texas State Board of Education narrowly voted to proceed with the curriculum, called Bluebonnet Learning. A final vote is set for Friday.

The critics, who include Jewish parents and organizations as well as interfaith and education advocacy groups, say Bluebonnet — which will be optional but which schools would be paid to adopt — inappropriately centers on Christian theology and ideas. They have been lobbying for revisions since it was first proposed in May, offering detailed feedback.

“The first round of the curriculum that we saw honestly had a lot of offensive content in it, and was proselytizing, and did not represent Jewish people well,” said Lisa Epstein, the director of San Antonio’s Jewish Community Relations Council.

Now those critics say most of their specific suggestions have been accepted but they remain concerned.

“Looking at the revision, we still feel that the curriculum is not balanced and it introduces a lot of Christian concepts at a very young age, like resurrection and the blood of Christ and the Messiah, when kids are just really too young to understand and they don’t really have a grasp yet completely of their own religion,” she added. Epstein, who testified at a hearing on the proposal in Austin on Monday, has a child in high school and two others who graduated from Texas public schools.

The Texas vote comes as advocates of inserting Christianity into public education are ascendant across the country. Political conservatives are in power at the national level and the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has demonstrated openness to blurring church-state separation.

President-elect Donald Trump has signaled support for numerous initiatives to reintroduce Christian doctrine into public schools, from supporting school prayer to endorsing legislation that would require public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. (One such measure in Louisiana was recently blocked by a federal judge.)

In Texas, Bluebonnet’s advocates say the curriculum would elevate students’ learning while also exposing them to essential elements of cultural literacy. They note that the curriculum includes references to a wide range of cultures, including ancient religions, and that the religious references make up only a small fraction of the material.

“They’ll elevate the quality of education being offered to all Texas students by giving them a well-rounded understanding of important texts and their impact on the world,” Megan Benton, a strategic policy associate at Texas Values, which says its mission is “to stand for biblical, Judeo-Christian values,” said during the hearing on Monday, Education Week reported. Texas Values called criticism of the proposed curriculum an “attack on the Bible.”

The Texas Education Authority solicited the proposed curriculum, which would join a menu of approved options, as part of a pandemic-era effort that waived some transparency laws, meaning that its authors are not fully known. But The 74, an education news organization, reported this week that a publishing company co-founded by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee contributed content to the curriculum.

Trump tapped Huckabee, a pastor and evangelical favorite, last week to become his ambassador to Israel.

For some in Texas and beyond, Bluebonnet represents a concrete example of how the national climate could ripple out into local changes.

“A lot of things, we think they’re outside of our community, or outside of our scope, like we hear these things, but are they really going to impact us?” said a Jewish assistant principal in the Richardson Independent School District north of Dallas who asked to remain anonymous. “But I think now that it’s becoming a potential reality, a friend was asking me, would Richardson adopt this? Is this something that is really going to happen in our community?”

While the Supreme Court has ruled that public schools can teach about religion, they cannot prioritize one religion over another in that instruction. So Bluebonnet’s inclusion of Christian and Bible stories in lesson plans drew scrutiny from the start — which grew after the Texas Tribune reported that a panel required to vet all curriculum proposals included Christian proponents of incorporating religion in public education.

In September, The Texas Education Authority’s curriculum review board published hundreds of pages of emails from members of the public along with whether the critiques had resulted in changes. Some did, the board noted, but many others were rejected.

A coalition of Jewish groups submitted 37 requested changes to the initial curriculum proposal. Epstein said the San Antonio JCRC had specifically objected to language in some lessons that evoked “antisemitic tropes” and textual inaccuracies in referencing the story of Queen Esther, as well as offensive references to the Crusades and language that explained the birth of Jesus as the messiah.

One passage had invited students to imagine “if you were a Crusader,” Epstein said, referring to the Christian knights of the Middle Ages who sought to conquer the Holy Land, massacred communities of Jews and are venerated by some on the Christian right.

In the case of the Esther lesson, the original curriculum had recreated an aspect of the Purim story in which Haman drew lots to determine when to kill Jews in the Persian Empire — as a way to teach probability. Nathan called that particular lesson “subversively antisemitic.”

“In ancient Persia [drawing lots] was a way of helping someone make a decision, and the game was called Purim,” the initial text read. “Ask students to choose a number from 1 to 6. Roll a die and ask the students to raise their hand if their number was rolled.”

“This is shocking, offensive and just plain wrong,” Sharyn Vane, a Jewish parent of two Texas public school graduates, said at a September hearing, according to the New York Times. “Do we ask elementary students to pretend to be Hitler?” (Historical simulations have widely been rejected by educators for all grades.)

Both of the lessons were revised after feedback from Jewish groups and others, but Epstein and Nathan said the changes were not adequate. A new prompt asks students to describe “the journey of a Crusader” in the third-person, but it still sanitizes the murder of many Jews and Christians during the Christian quest to conquer Jerusalem, Epstein charged.

And while the Purim lots activity was dropped, Epstein noted that a specific lesson plan about Esther — a beloved figure among evangelical Christians — also includes a reference to God, which the Megillah, the Jewish text telling the Purim story, famously does not do. She said that inaccuracy was not addressed in the revisions.

In a statement, San Antonio’s Jewish federation, under which the JCRC operates, also acknowledged the changes that were made after its feedback but expressed concern over what it called “an almost solely Christian-based” perspective with “inaccuracies” and content that is inappropriate for elementary school students.

“We are not against teaching a broad range of religious beliefs to children in an age-appropriate way that clearly distinguishes between ‘beliefs’ and ‘facts,’ and gives appropriate time and respect to acknowledging many different religions,” the federation said. “Public schools should be places where children of all religious backgrounds feel welcomed and accepted.”

The newer version of the curriculum also did not address the federation’s concerns about language referring to Jesus as “the Messiah,” written with a capital “M,” and references to “the Bible,” rather than “the Christian Bible” specifically, as the federation had urged the curriculum’s creators to adopt.

The Austin branch of the Anti-Defamation League, which was also involved in the efforts, also applauded the revisions that had been made thus far but said it still “reject[s] the current version of the proposed curriculum.”

“We agree that students should learn the historical contributions of various religious traditions, but ADL’s analysis of the originally proposed curriculum found that a narrow view of Christianity was overwhelmingly emphasized, there were few mentions of other faiths and the curriculum baselessly credited Christianity with improved societal morality,” the group said in a statement. “Although improvements have been made, the materials still appear to cross the line into teaching religion instead of teaching about religion.”

Criticism to the curriculum goes far beyond the Jewish community. Texas AFT, the state’s outpost of the American Federation of Teachers, a leading teachers’ union, also opposes the proposal. “Texas AFT believes that not only do these materials violate the separation of church and state and the academic freedom of our classroom, but also the sanctity of the teaching profession,” the union said in a statement.

Some Republicans on the Texas Board of Education expressed reservations about the curriculum’s quality and age-appropriateness, separate from its religious content.

And nonpartisan and interfaith groups like Texas Impact and Texas Freedom Network have also been involved in efforts to oppose the curriculum, as has the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. Epstein said a Sikh parent also testified at one of the hearings, asking for her faith’s traditions to be incorporated into lesson plans to provide more religious perspectives.

Nathan said that when she testified against the proposal at a September hearing, her allies were diverse.

“Some of the people who were against it were not Jewish, and just were [against] the way that the curriculum was being put together pedagogically,” she said. “But there were both Jewish and non-Jewish people there, and also some Christian folks who were there who were opposed to such an overtly Christian curriculum.”

Marian Neleson, who has a 14-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son in the Frisco Independent School District, said it has never been easy to be a Jewish family in her area.

“There’s always concerns as a parent when there’s just a handful of other Jewish children in a majority Christian school,” said Neleson, who is active in her local interfaith alliance. “From how the school celebrates, how they do their calendars. Do they remember that there is a Jewish holiday, and then they schedule major school functions on High Holy Days?”

Now, she’s worried that her own district could face pressure to adopt the new curriculum, if it is approved.

“These kind of curriculums are promoting one interpretation, one religion’s view, and I feel like that’s not very respectful of people who come from different backgrounds and different faiths and different religions,” Neleson said. She added, “I do think that the Frisco school district particularly does try to be inclusive and try to recognize the diversity of the community, but I know that there’s always pressure from groups who are trying to promote one agenda in the schools.”

The Richardson assistant principal said she saw in the financial incentive to adopt the curriculum — districts that do so will get up to $60 per student — an inappropriate assertion of support by the state. Many Texas districts are cash-strapped after legislators declined to substantially increase school funding last year.

“There is such a push in education for high-quality instructional materials,” said the assistant principal, who has three elementary school-aged children. “They’re pushing this so hard, and even potentially putting up funding for it if you adopt it, but it’s not a truly high-quality curriculum.”

In a Facebook post after Tuesday’s preliminary vote, Vane encouraged parents to reach out to members of the state’s education board to urge them to oppose the curriculum. “It’s not over yet,” she wrote.

Nathan said she’s not sure how much opponents of the curriculum can do if it’s approved, but she stressed the importance of local advocacy — especially since the curriculum is not required.

“I think reaching out to your local school board and communicating with local teachers in your community is going to be key,” she said. “If this occurs, what do I need to do in my local school district to make sure that there’s programming that balances the perspective?”

But she signaled that the intensity of the proposed curriculum would undercut any counter-programming by representatives of other faiths.

“It’s not presented as, ‘Here’s what Christians believe,’” Nathan said about Bluebonnet. “It’s presented as, ‘Here is the truth.’ There’s a difference.”

[coke-hearted]

so trump is now making it a law that there are only 2 genders, took down the GOVERMENTS OWN WEBSITE about reproductive rights, and pardoned 1,600 criminals who stormed the Capitol on January 6th and erased the whole situation. i am geanuienly terrified. i am a woman, but how could a man take away so many non-binary and trans peoples rights? what have they ever done to you? how could you believe you have the right or that it is ok to take away someones identity. with the rise of rape crime rising dramatically with over 2 million woman being raped every year, what will so many women do without access to abortions and birth control? and god forbid, if i needed to get an abortion because of this my family can't afford to go fly out of country and get it somewhere else. the awful people who thought it was ok to attack and storm the Capitol "in trumps name" seeing them get pardoned for their crimes by "their savior" can and definitely will do this again. this is promoting violence. this is opening the door to people finding it ok to do this because the man who brainwashed them into this sick state of mind said its ok. trump can slap an american flag on anything and call it patriotic. when people see the flag they believe it is patriotic. its not. the flag is a picture. a symbol. an evil man holding up the american flag is NOT patriotic. a piece of cloth does not define us. america is about freedom, values, and strength as a community that is free. america is supposed to be free. our freedom to be who we want to be, go where we want, and say what we want should NOT be taken away by one man. donald trump is nothing but a small, insecure, little boy. but he is not dumb. he is evil. he found a way to brainwash the lower iq conservative group into believing that holding up the flag meant he was going to save america. he's going to save himself and his billionaire friends. that's it. and the amount of men who have told me that i "don't understand what i'm talking about," or that "i'm not educated," is fucking disgusting. every woman, and every good people left have been fucking failed. america is going down.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The tax sharks are back and they’re coming for your home

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TODAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

One of my weirder and more rewarding hobbies is collecting definitions of "conservativism," and one of the jewels of that collection comes from Corey Robin's must-read book The Reactionary Mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reactionary_Mind

Robin's definition of conservativism has enormous explanatory power and I'm always finding fresh ways in which it clarifies my understand of events in the world: a conservative is someone who believes that a minority of people were born to rule, and that everyone else was born to follow their rules, and that the world is in harmony when the born rulers are in charge.

This definition unifies the otherwise very odd grab-bag of ideologies that we identify with conservativism: a Christian Dominionist believes in the rule of Christians over others; a "men's rights advocate" thinks men should rule over women; a US imperialist thinks America should rule over the world; a white nationalist thinks white people should rule over racialized people; a libertarian believes in bosses dominating workers and a Hindu nationalist believes in Hindu domination over Muslims.

These people all disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that some people are ordained to rule, and that any "artificial" attempt to overturn the "natural" order throws society into chaos. This is the entire basis of the panic over DEI, and the brainless reflex to blame the Francis Scott Key bridge disaster on the possibility that someone had been unjustly promoted to ship's captain due to their membership in a disfavored racial group or gender.

This definition is also useful because it cleanly cleaves progressives from conservatives. If conservatives think there's a natural order in which the few dominate the many, progressivism is a belief in pluralism and inclusion, the idea that disparate perspectives and experiences all have something to contribute to society. Progressives see a world in which only a small number of people rise to public life, rarified professions, and cultural prominence and assume that this is terrible waste of the talents and contributions of people whose accidents of birth keep them from participating in the same way.

This is why progressives are committed to class mobility, broad access to education, and active programs to bring traditionally underrepresented groups into arenas that once excluded them. The "some are born to rule, and most to be ruled over" conservative credo rejects this as not just wrong, but dangerous, the kind of thing that leads to bridges being demolished by cargo ships.

The progressive reforms from the New Deal until the Reagan revolution were a series of efforts to broaden participation in every part of society by successively broader groups of people. A movement that started with inclusive housing and education for white men and votes for white women grew to encompass universal suffrage, racial struggles for equality, workplace protections for a widening group of people, rights for people with disabilities, truth and reconciliation with indigenous people and so on.

The conservative project of the past 40 years has been to reverse this: to return the great majority of us to the status of desperate, forelock-tugging plebs who know our places. Hence the return of child labor, the tradwife movement, and of course the attacks on labor unions and voting rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

Arguably the most potent symbol of this struggle is the fight over homes. The New Deal offered (some) working people a twofold path to prosperity: subsidized home-ownership and strong labor protections. This insulated (mostly white) workers from the two most potent threats to working peoples' lives and wellbeing: the cruel boss and the greedy landlord.

But the neoliberal era dispensed with labor rights, leaving the descendants of those lucky workers with just one tool for securing their American dream: home-ownership. As wages stagnated, your home – so essential to your ability to simply live – became your most important asset first, and a home second. So long as property values rose – and property taxes didn't – your home could be the backstop for debt-fueled consumption that filled the gap left by stagnating wages. Liquidating your family home might someday provide for your retirement, your kids' college loans and your emergency medical bills.

For conservatives who want to restore Gilded Age class rule, this was a very canny move. It pitted lucky workers with homes against their unlucky brethren – the more housing supply there was, the less your house was worth. The more protections tenants had, the less your house was worth. The more equitably municipal services (like schools) were distributed, the less your house was worth:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

And now that the long game is over, they're coming for your house. It started with the foreclosure epidemic after the 2008 financial crisis, first under GW Bush, but then in earnest under Obama, who accepted the advice of his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who insisted that homeowners should be liquidated to "foam the runways" for the crashing banks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

Then there are scams like "We Buy Ugly Houses," a nationwide mass-fraud outfit that steals houses out from under elderly, vulnerable and desperate people:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The more we lose our houses, the more single-family homes Wall Street gets to snap up and convert into slum properties, aslosh with a toxic stew of black mold, junk fees and eviction threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Now there's a new way for finance barons the steal our houses out from under us – or rather, a very old way that had lain dormant since the last time child labor was legal – "tax lien investing."

Across the country, counties and cities have programs that allow investment funds to buy up overdue tax-bills from homeowners in financial hardship. These "investors" are entitled to be paid the missing property taxes, and if the homeowner can't afford to make that payment, the "investor" gets to kick them out of their homes and take possession of them, for a tiny fraction of their value.

As Andrew Kahrl writes for The American Prospect, tax lien investing was common in the 19th century, until the fundamental ugliness of the business made it unattractive even to the robber barons of the day:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-04-26-investing-in-distress-tax-liens/

The "tax sharks" of Chicago and New York were deemed "too merciless" by their peers. One exec who got out of the business compared it to "picking pennies off a dead man’s eyes." The very idea of outsourcing municipal tax collection to merciless debt-hounds fell aroused public ire.

Today – as the conservative project to restore the "natural" order of the ruled and the ruled-over builds momentum – tax lien investing is attracting some of America's most rapacious investors – and they're making a killing. In Chicago, Alden Capital just spent a measly $1.75m to acquire the tax liens on 600 family homes in Cook County. They now get to charge escalating fees and penalties and usurious interest to those unlucky homeowners. Any homeowner that can't pay loses their home.

The first targets for tax-lien investing are the people who were the last people to benefit from the New Deal and its successors: Black and Latino families, elderly and disabled people and others who got the smallest share of America's experiment in shared prosperity are the first to lose the small slice of the American dream that they were grudgingly given.

This is the very definition of "structural racism." Redlining meant that families of color were shut out of the federal loan guarantees that benefited white workers. Rather than building intergenerational wealth, these families were forced to rent (building some other family's intergenerational wealth), and had a harder time saving for downpayments. That meant that they went into homeownership with "nontraditional" or "nonconforming" mortgages with higher interest rates and penalties, which made them more vulnerable to economic volatility, and thus more likely to fall behind on their taxes. Now that they're delinquent on their property taxes, they're in hock to a private equity fund that's charging them even more to live in their family home, and the second they fail to pay, they'll be evicted, rendered homeless and dispossessed of all the equity they built in their (former) home.

It's very on-brand for Alden Capital to be destroying the lives of Chicagoans. Alden is most notorious for buying up and destroying America's most beloved newspapers. It was Alden who bought up the Chicago Tribune, gutted its workforce, sold off its iconic downtown tower, and moved its few remaining reporters to an outer suburban, windowless brick building "the size of a Chipotle":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Before the ghastly hotel baroness Leona Helmsley went to prison for tax evasion, she famously said, "We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes." Helmsley wasn't wrong – she was just a little ahead of schedule. As Propublica's IRS Files taught us, America's 400 richest people pay less tax than you do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/13/for-the-little-people/#leona-helmsley-2022

When billionaires don't pay their taxes, they get to buy sports franchises. When poor people don't pay their taxes, billionaires get to steal their houses after paying the local government an insultingly small amount of money.

It's all going according to plan. We weren't meant to have houses, or job security, or retirement funds. We weren't meant to go to university, or even high school, and our kids were always supposed to be in harness at a local meat-packer or fast food kitchen, not wasting time with their high school chess club or sports team. They don't need high school: that's for the people who were born to rule. They – we – were meant to be ruled over.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/26/taxes-are-for-the-little-people/#alden-capital

[coldalbion]

Not Flirting

This is NOT FLIRTING.

The very fact that the media say "flirting" is indicative of the fact that the cultural ideas we have around value, improvement, morality, ability and functionality are *rooted* in a a framework which is ableist and eugenic in nature.

Fundamentally, the idea that there are "good genes" and "bad genes" is saying there are "good" forms of embodymindedness and "bad" forms, and that we should remove or reduce the bad and increase the good.

This is biopolitics which is at the root of 19th, 20th and 21st century processes and horrors, and is not *just* racist, but is one of the major ORIGINS of racism as it manifests today, as well as a wellspring of sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, colonialism and capitalism.

We are enmeshed in the world eugenics and its proponents thought up, and wrought. It is so prevalent beneath the surface of how we relate to the world in terms of growth, progress, science etc, that we are like fish swimming in it.

This IS NOT JUST TRUMP. This is the ongoing pandemic, the manfacture of debility in marginalised populations for the benefit of those at the levers of power. This is the dismissal of Appalachian lives and folks in rural areas as low-intelligence inbred hicks who "should have known"/"should have moved" in the face of hurricanes. This the way standardised testing structures education on pass fail and grade curves. On and on, with countless more manifestations and iterations.

**We live in a eugenicised society.**

One that frames who should be improved, and how, on the basis of trajectories which begin by evalulating a being on how much it conforms to a certain set of criteria. We never ask where those criteria come from. We never consider that the liberal humanist agenda might also create folks who *don't fit*, in order to mark those who do.

We should. We should ask ourselves where "the human" even comes from.

[ID :A screenshot from The Guardian's liveblog coverage of the US Election, which reads: "Flirting with eugenics, Trump says: ‘We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now’ In an interview earlier today with conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt, Donald Trump used terminology associated with eugenics to attack migrants. The remark came as the former president discussed the alleged harm done by new arrivals to the United States, saying many were “murderers”. “Now, a murderer, it’s in their genes,” Trump continued. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” It was language similar to the beliefs of eugenics, which emerged in the late 19th century and held that human ills could be combatted through selective breeding. The theory is today regarded as both inaccurate and racist."]

[silvermoon424]

I have a serious question for you. In my country, we grew up watching american shows, movies and cartoons, and in every single one of them the republicans were depicted as evil and greedy. Americans made those shows, so you do know republicans are evil. Why do you keep voting for evil people that is known for being evil?

Imo it comes down to this:

Lack of education:

The state of education- particularly public education- in the US is abysmal, and Republicans constantly demonize college, teachers, and education as a whole. There's a reason why highly educated people tend to be left-leaning, and the GOP knows this; it's why they've been attacking education for decades.

Treating politics as team sports:

Most people do not actually know what the politicians they vote for advocate; they just vote for them because they have an "R" or a "D" next to their name. Imo this is the biggest problem with Republican voters; the idea of voting for a Democrat is so unthinkable to them that a pedophile Nazi (Roy Moore) almost got reelected in Alabama a few years back, just because he was running as the Republican candidate.

Propaganda and socialism being demonized:

What's infuriating about a lot of Republican voters is that they do agree with leftists on a lot of topics, but they've been conditioned to have a kneejerk reaction to terms like "socialism," "capitalism," etc. I've talked to a lot of conservatives and got them to agree with me on concepts like work reform, healthcare reform, environmental protection, taxing billionaires, etc just by avoiding leftist terminology. In my experience, the average conservative very much agrees with left-wing ideas; you just have to present them as "common sense" and "bipartisan."

"Owning the libs"

A lot of conservatives (especially younger ones) are so fucking spiteful towards liberals and leftists that they're willing to tank our entire country just to "trigger" us. They love Trump for pissing people off; they love how he says and does awful, offensive things that "own the libs." The world could end in a nuclear apocalypse and they'd be lying in a cave slowly dying of radiation poisoning thinking "at least we got to trigger the libs, that was so funny."

As a final note, the movies and shows you're referring to were likely made in Hollywood; Hollywood- and the entertainment industry + the arts as a whole- are very liberal. It's not a conspiracy or anything, it's just that artists and creatives tend to be left-leaning. So yes, Americans made media depicting Republicans as evil, but it's very unlikely they're Republican voters themselves.

Republicans have actually attacked Hollywood for decades, claiming they're "biased" and "woke" or whatever. Some conservative media outlets (like the Daily Wire) have tried to start their own media empires, but so far they're total failures because explicitly conservative art is usually dogshit lmao.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The rise of the MAGA right in the United States has sparked some startling changes in attitudes towards press freedom and freedom of expression. Although many on the right, including Musk, have styled themselves as valiant defenders of free speech, their actions expose them as opposite: only willing to defend speech they find agreeable, while hostile towards and desperate to clamp down on criticism or opposing views. Musk, for example, has directed that “cisgender” be blocklisted on Twitter as a “slur”, and posts by most accounts that contain the word are automatically hidden from view (unlike posts containing the long list of slurs he has apparently deemed acceptable). He has brought SLAPP lawsuits against critics, including one dismissed by a federal judge as clearly intended to “punish [the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate] for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp. [Twitter] — and perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism.” He spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter, ostensibly over concerns that conservative voices were being unfairly silenced, but really so that he could be the one to dictate which speech was and was not allowed on the platform. Similar attacks on speech are becoming only more common throughout the American right, with president-elect Trump’s longstanding hostility to the media escalating at a rapid clip. In recent months, Trump has suggested he wouldn’t mind if reporters were shot, threatened to jail journalists, editors, and publishers who refuse to reveal confidential sources, threatened to investigate or pull broadcasting licenses for news organizations that reported on him unflatteringly, and filed SLAPP suits of his own against news publications and pollsters. This hostility to information sources outside their control extends far beyond the media. Right-wing groups have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books from schools and libraries, particularly those discussing race, gender, or LGBT topics. They’ve pushed legislation like the “Kids Online Safety Act” that, while framed as protecting children, would require platforms to restrict access to information deemed “harmful” or “inappropriate for minors”, which is likely to include resources for LGBT youth and information about reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare, sexual education, or mental health. And they’ve supported state-level laws requiring internet platforms to implement age restrictions that threaten privacy and are vulnerable to weaponization against content deemed “obscene”. The common thread connecting these efforts is not protecting children or promoting “family values,” but controlling what information people can access.

2 January 2025

[dark-rx]

The sad part is, what poor conservatives don't realize is they have been brainwashed to fight poor liberals by rich conservatives. The longer the rich can keep the poor fighting against themselves, the longer they retain power.

For 40 years, rich conservatives have been subsidizing conservative media like talk radio and Fox News. They started out pretending to be "fair and balanced" and moved in the last 10 years to the narrative that they are the only source of truth. This free media has been often played in the background of blue collar workplaces. They replay the same lies again, and again. When you tell a lie long enough, people believe it as truth.

So, when we see conservatives who are making completely absurd claims like "Vaccines don't work" and "Windmills cause cancer" it is because of the natural progression of making the lies bigger, more preposterous, and divisive. The entire purpose of attacking education and painting it is evil is so only their "facts" have merit. It is the same method used by organized religion to attack science when they disprove any tenets of faith.

Now that rich conservatives have convinced poor conservatives to make politics their entire identity, they have instilled a long-term bulwark against the poor coalescing with the middle class against the rich.

Ultimately this will fail. Ultimately, this will end with an uprising which will see all the upper class violently overthrown. It is how it ends every time in history. The only question is how long the poor will choose to serve the rich before this happens.